The Battle of Kinmen was a battle in which our army suffered great losses in the War of Liberation. In fact, before the Battle of Kinmen, our army could have avoided this serious loss, so why did our army eventually suffer defeat?
In 1949, the Third Field Army of the People's Liberation Army marched south, and Ye Fei led the ten corps of the people to first conquer Fuzhou, and then occupy Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, and the large army directly approached Jinxia.
On September 26, the Tenth Corps of the Third Field Army of the People's Liberation Army held a combat meeting in Quanzhou to discuss the xiamen and Kinmen operational plans. At the meeting, everyone put forward three schemes: "taking the same gold and building", "first building and then gold", and "first gold and then building". After repeated study, most of the participants held that the two islands of Xiamen and Kinmen are interdependent in each other and coexist in the same life and death, and that the enemies Tang Enbo and Liu Ruming, as well as Li Liangrong, the enemy who defended Kinmen, although they all made stubborn preparations for resisting according to Chiang Kai-shek's orders, they did not have the determination to hold firm, and they should take advantage of the enemy's morale to attack the two islands at the same time. Commander Ye Fei weighed it up again and again and decided to "take the same gold and xiamen."
On October 4, Commander Ye Fei issued an order: three divisions of the Thirty-first Army, two divisions of the Twenty-ninth Army and five divisions of the Twenty-ninth Army should capture Xiamen, and the Twenty-eighth Army, which had experienced actual combat training in sea navigation on the way south, would capture Kinmen.
On October 11, Ye Fei held another meeting according to The Three Wilds, and decided to change the battle plan from "taking the same gold and building" to "first taking the building and then the gold", and the task of the 28th Army to attack the gold remained unchanged. It marked the official launch of the Battle of Kinmen.
On October 17, just after the xiamen campaign was over, Ye Fei specially summoned Xiao Feng and Li Mancun, the leaders of the Twenty-eighth Army, and Ye Fei also briefed Xiao Feng and Li Mancun on the lessons learned from the Xiamen landing operation. First, the key to landing operations lies in first capturing and consolidating the beachhead positions, and then developing in depth after all the follow-up troops have landed and assembled; second, protecting ships is a serious problem. Special attention should be paid to enemy aircraft bombing ships, which only need to be evacuated, camouflaged, and concealed. It also demanded that the Twenty-eighth Army must seize the time to raise ships, to launch offensive battles, and to ensure that there are ships carrying 6 regiments.
The conversation lasted for two or three hours, and finally Ye Fei stressed: The battle of Kinmen should be sooner rather than later, and if it is too late, the enemy's strength in Kinmen will definitely increase, which will inevitably bring greater difficulties to the troops landing on the island, so it is required that the Twenty-eighth Army must strive to launch a landing and capture Kinmen in one fell swoop before Hu Lian's reinforcements have arrived at Kinmen.
However, the collection of ships was actually very difficult, and by noon on the 22nd, the Twenty-eighth Army had collected a total of 120 ships. Xiao Feng reported to the head of the corps that the battle was difficult to start. Due to the limitation of the number of ships, the "foremost" of the Twenty-eighth Army had to plan to land in the first echelon with 3 battalions as the first echelon, and then cross the second echelon after the ships carrying the first echelon landing, and then return half of the ships that night, and then cross two regiments.
On the morning of the 24th, the "foremost finger" of the Twenty-eighth Army once again held a combat meeting. Three division commanders and six regimental commanders of the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Armies, who were preparing to enter the war, spoke at the meeting. The chief of the reconnaissance section of the military department said that two of The two corps of Hu Lian's corps had already reached the Kinmen Sea, and one of the corps was sailing toward the Kinmen Sea.
Zhu Yunqian, commander of the Eighty-fifth Division, said that the 253rd Regiment still lacked 1 battalion of ships; Zhong Xianwen, commander of the 82nd Division, said that the boats recruited were many small boats and few large ships, and the sailors were from inland rivers in other places, were not familiar with sea navigation, were untrained, had poor coordination, and were not well dispatched; some boatmen were unreliable, and there was a possibility of escape at the sound of a gun; Liu Tianxiang, commander of the 251st Regiment, said: One-third of their regiment's sails have not been repaired and they cannot participate in the battle tonight. Everyone's speeches revealed a serious problem: the conditions for attacking gold are not ripe. Although Xiao Feng also had some concerns, he considered more that the head of the corps demanded "sooner rather than later" for the attack.
The instructions, bent on completing the task early, made the decision to launch a battle that night.
At about 2 o'clock on the 25th, the three regiments began to land successively. The first to land was the 244th Regiment, which began to make landfall at about 1:40 a.m. on the 25th, landing at the line from Housha and Langkou to Guanyinting Mountain. The 251st Regiment landed smoothly in the northwest north of Anqi and east of Lin. The 253rd Regiment landed on the northwest line from Guningtou Wushajiao to Lin Dun. Due to the tension of the ships, Zhong Xianwen, commander of the Eighty-second Division, did not land with the first echelon. After the former commander of the Twenty-eighth Army learned of this situation, he designated Liu Tianxiang, commander of the 251st Regiment, to take unified command of the troops on the island.
Except for the 244th Regiment, which suffered heavy casualties when they received the enemy, the rest of the troops landed relatively smoothly, and captured the first line of Guningtou, Lin ping, Qingtou, and Shuangniushan, and annihilated one of the enemy.' However, due to the confusion in formation during the voyage, the communication failed, the troops were scattered after landing, and they fought separately, and they did not consolidate the beachhead positions to open up the connection, that is, they plunged deep and deep, so under the continuous counterattack of the enemy's superior forces and chariots, they were broken by the enemy. The 244th Regiment lost first, and the 251st Regiment and the 253rd Regiment fought hard for two days and nights, with most of the casualties, and finally retreated to the Guningtou area. The situation was critical, but none of the ships of the first echelon ran aground after the tide receded and were damaged by enemy artillery fire, so that none of them returned to the north shore, so that the second echelon could not be reinforced. The Corps had urgently mobilized ships in the Xiamen area, but very few of them.
At that time, some people pointed out that the first echelon had obviously failed, such as the reinforcement of "adding oil" with a small number of troops, which would not help, it was better to concentrate on the force and send ships to withdraw the remnants of the first echelon as much as possible. However, the head of the corps was still eager to win at this time, believing that there was still a glimmer of hope for saving the situation, and resolutely ordered reinforcements. On the evening of the 25th, Sun Yunxiu, the regimental commander of the 246th Regiment, led 6 platoons of reinforcements, and landed at 2 o'clock on the 26th in the area north of Lin Bing, defeating the enemy's counterattack of 1 battalion, but in the end it was too small to help.
In the end, the battle was lost, our army suffered great losses, and almost all the landing troops were destroyed, but this did not affect the result of our army's final annihilation of the enemy, and in the end, our army gradually swept the southeast coast and liberated most of the islands.
Before the Battle of Kinmen began, General Su Yu had already made clear stipulations on the timing and conditions for launching a battle, pointing out that it was necessary to achieve "three no fights" :(1) Calculated by the 12,000 men of the 108th Division of the former enemy's Twenty-fifth Army, as long as the enemy was added to a regiment, it would not fight; (2) there was no ship carrying 6 regiments at a time; (3) it was required that 6,000 tried and tested shipwrights should be selected along the coast of northern Jiangsu or Shandong, and the shipwrights would not fight until they did not fight. Regrettably, the front-line commanders did not follow these 3 rules, and the battle was lost. This also shows from the opposite side that Su Yu does not fight a battle of uncertainty.
However, although the Kuomintang won the victory, there was nothing to be proud of, and the Kuomintang used the tactics of the Japanese adviser Nemoto Hiroshi (the backbone of the Showa warlords and the last Japanese commander in Mongolia), and this World War II war criminal, stained with the blood of the Chinese people, became the object of the Kuomintang's "kowtowing to Xie'en". When the Taiwan side commemorated the 60th anniversary of the "Battle of Guningtou," its "vice minister of national defense," Lieutenant General Huang Yibing, actually went to Japan to thank this descendant of Genbo.
Of course, it is not surprising to think of the face of He Yingqin who ran to Japan and said that the War of Resistance was a "brotherly wall."