Tooth extraction! The enemy's so-called "standard fortifications" in Tianjin were conquered by our army

Source: People's Liberation Army Daily WeChat, People's Liberation Army News And Communication Center Rong Media

In January 1949, after successfully completing the task of encircling Tianjin, our division was ordered to be transferred to The area of Yang Liuqing and Wang Qingtuo to assemble and stand by. At that time, the urban area of Tianjin was complex, and the urban area was cut into several pieces by the Daqing River, Yongding River, Ziya River, Baihe River and Canal. Chen Changjie, commander of the tianjin enemy defense, vigorously increased the city defenses in the autumn of 1947, and dug a moat around the city that was ten meters wide and four or five meters deep. The inner side of the moat is connected to an earthen wall with a power grid, a bunker every twenty or thirty meters, and a group of bunkers outside the moat, with barbed wire, power grids and deer blocks, and tens of thousands of mines are buried around it. Villages within five miles of the city were burned down, creating a no-man's land. The bunker group in depth reaches the core fortification area, and Chen Changjie once boasted of "greater Tianjin fortressization".

The former commanded us to complete all preparations for the attack within ten days, and in the face of strong fortifications, our task was very arduous if we wanted to win. On January 2, 1949, the 135th Division adjusted its deployment from Yang Liuqing and Wang Qingtuo to the northeast of Tianjin and attacked the city at Sunjiazhuang, Dabizhuang, Xuzhuangzi and their northeast areas.

In accordance with Chairman Mao's principle of "concentrating absolute superiority in every battle, encircling the enemy on all sides, striving for total annihilation, and not letting the net slip through the net," the front-line command made arrangements for attacks on Tianjin's urban areas and decided to adopt the operational policy of advancing from east to west, cutting off the waist, and first dividing and then encircling and annihilating. At the same time, it was decided that the south side of Tianjin would be the direction of assist and the north side would be a feint attack. The Forty-fourth Army marched from the East Bureau and the Forty-fifth Army from the Minquan Gate, and the two armies broke through the defense of Tianjin side by side and fought westward, meeting the Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Armies at the Jintang Bridge or Jingang Bridge with the Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Armies fighting from west to east.

Located in the northeast of Tianjin, the Minquan Gate was one of the breakthrough points in the Tianjin Campaign. The army decided to carry out the main breakthrough with the 135th Division from the Civil Rights Gate. Beginning on January 3, the regiments of our division carried out preparations for the offensive battle separately. After repeatedly surveying the terrain around the Minquan Gate, the deployment of the enemy's defensive forces and firepower, the construction of fortifications in the depth of the front, and the setting of various obstacles, it was decided to send the 405th Regiment to the divisional artillery battalion, and first pull out the fanjiapu stronghold on the southeast side of the minquan gate.

Although the village of Fanjiapu is not large, it is only a few hundred meters away from the city wall of Tianjin, and most of the houses were demolished by the enemy. Using several brick kilns in the village, the enemy constructed a solid circular defensive support point, and in addition to the crisscrossing traffic trenches, trenches, bunkers of all sizes and dozens of fire points, the enemy also laid mines and anti-tank and infantry obstacles eighty meters wide. The strength of a battalion defending the enemy is all active in the underground shelter. They could be supported by artillery fire in the city, as well as cover by mortars, light and heavy machine guns, and all infantry fire in the area around the Civil Rights Gate, and the surrounding terrain was flat and open, and the enemy formed a crossed fire net area throughout the front, which the enemy called "model fortifications". To complete the task of pulling out Fan Jiabao, it is really like "pulling teeth out of the tiger's mouth".

On January 8, the 405th Regiment began to approach the enemy, with the first battalion taking the lead from the southeast, the second battalion and two companies assisting the enemy's well-defended northeast direction; all three battalions and regimental subordinate units were responsible for constructing the offensive starting position and soil work.

At 8:00 a.m. on January 10, at the prescribed time, after twenty minutes of shelling, the enemy's observation posts and bunkers were destroyed one by one. Taking advantage of the power of the artillery fire, the demolition team began to move, and Comrade Li Jiulong, a combat hero and a platoon leader, served as the leader of the demolition team, and in more than ten minutes, they carried out twenty-two consecutive explosions, blowing up the enemy's layers of obstacles more than fifty meters deep into a three-meter-wide passage. Just as the victory was being celebrated, it was suddenly discovered that there were two enemy dark fire points on both sides of the path. According to the scheduled time, the commando team was about to launch an attack, and at this extremely urgent moment, comrades Wang Jiuwei and Kong Charter of the demolition group took the initiative to request the task from the commander of Niu Haiquan Company, and under the cover of fire, they quickly eliminated the last two fire points.

At the same time as the breakthrough in the main offensive direction, the assist direction also triumphantly completed the breakthrough. The "exemplary fortifications" that the enemy boasted about were all destroyed after just over fifty minutes of fierce fighting, and none of the more than five hundred people in the two battalions of the seventy-sixth regiment of the twenty-sixth division of the defending enemy slipped through the net. Finally, the poisonous fang was removed from the tiger's mouth.

At 15:30 on January 10, the division ordered the 404th Regiment of the Second Echelon to enter the battle. A battalion broke into the breakthrough to support the 403rd Regiment in fighting the enemy counter-charge. At 16:00, the division decided to consolidate and expand the breakthrough point of the 403rd Regiment, and planned to attack and occupy Wang Kuochang and the Yangtze River Paper Mill. After three attacks, the enemy was completely annihilated at 2 o'clock on the 15th, and the so-called "standard fortifications" of Tianjin, which were 400 meters long in the Minquan Gate, were thus conquered by our army.

(This article is selected from "Spark of Fire", slightly abridged; "Spark of Fire" is a red classic written by Mao Zedong, written by Zhu De, and written with the blood and life of countless revolutionary predecessors, vividly reproducing the heroic and earth-shattering revolutionary story, carrying the genetic blood of our party and our army, and containing a great revolutionary spirit.) ）

(Produced by the People's Liberation Army Daily WeChat and the People's Liberation Army News Communication Center)