After the failure of the first four encirclement and suppression campaigns, in May 1933, Chiang Kai-shek sat in Nanchang and personally commanded 500,000 troops, and with the cooperation of aircraft and artillery, the soldiers divided into four roads (Jiang Dingwen on the East Road, Chen Jitang on the South Road, He Jian on the West Road, and Gu Zhutong on the North Road) to launch an unprecedented military "encirclement and suppression" of the Central Soviet Region.
In this way, both the enemy and us invariably hired German military advisers, but not an order of magnitude, and When Seckert was the chief of the general staff in the German army, Li De was just an ordinary soldier.
Relying on the superior strength and sophisticated weapons of the Kuomintang army, Seckert formulated an "iron barrel plan" in a vain attempt to completely "wipe out" the Central Red Army. The essence of the plan is to implement the fortress policy of "fighting steadily, step by step, repairing and building roads, and gradually advancing", and encircling the Central Soviet Area with iron walls.
Li De's anti-encirclement and suppression proposition is to "resist the enemy outside the gates of the country" and respond with the strategy of "fortress to fortress" and "short surprise attack". He forced the poorly equipped Red Army to fight regular wars, positional warfare, and fortress warfare with well-equipped enemies, and to engage in hard-to-hard attrition, a move that completely abandoned the successful experience of "luring the enemy to go deep and looking for fighters in the movement to annihilate the enemy" adopted by the red army in the previous four anti-encirclement and suppression campaigns, which was exactly in the arms of Chiang Kai-shek and Seckert.
Although Mao Zedong likened the tactics carried out by Li De to "calling The Flower Son and the Dragon Prince a magic weapon", and Peng Dehuai scolded Li De as "the heart of the cub selling the grandfather's field is not painful", none of this was helpful to this stubborn and self-absorbed foreign adviser, because Bogu, under the influence of Wang Ming's "Left" dogmatism, had completely excluded these Red Army leaders who were familiar with China's national conditions from the decision-making level, and handed over all military command to Li De, and gave him a high degree of support and trust, even excessive dependence. As a result, Li De, a military adviser who was originally determined by the Comintern to have "no command authority," suddenly became the supreme military commander-in-chief of the Central Red Army.
To this end, the Central Red Army gave up its good tactics of mobile warfare and guerrilla warfare, and was forced to carry out Li De's blind command, divide the troops, resist the whole line, fortify everywhere, and fight the enemy to the death. As a result, the enemy advanced step by step, the Red Army lost one after another, constantly lost troops and lost ground, and fell into difficulties. At the end of April 1934, Guangchang fell and the northern gate of the Soviet District was opened, and the situation became more severe.
In this passive situation, in order to preserve their strength, Li De and Bogu were forced to start considering the strategic shift of the Red Army. In early May 1934, after a collective discussion, the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee made a decision to withdraw the main force of the Central Red Army from the base areas, which was approved after consulting the Comintern. In order to plan the strategic transfer, the Provisional Central Committee set up a "three-person regiment" composed of Bogu, Li De, and Zhou Enlai, with Bogu as the political leader, Li De as the military, and Zhou Enlai as the organizer.
In preparation for the strategic transfer of the main Red Army, the Central Committee decided to send two troops to the north and west one in advance. The purpose of going north was to mobilize and contain the enemy and reduce the pressure on the central base areas; the purpose of the westward advance was to explore the way for the central Red Army's upcoming breakthrough and westward expedition.
Northbound troops: In early July 1934, Xun Huaizhou, Le Shaohua, and Su Yu led more than 6,000 people of the Red Seventh Army (known as the Anti-Japanese Advance Team to the North) from Ruijin to the north, broke through the layers of kuomintang encirclement, turned to the border areas of eastern Fujian, western Zhejiang, and Anhui, and entered the Fujian-Zhejiang Gansu region in late October, joined the Red 10th Army led by Fang Zhimin and Liu Yuxi, formed the Red Tenth Army, and then continued to carry out the mission north. At the end of 1934, in the Battle of Tanjiaqiao, he was severely damaged by the enemy Wang Yaowu's troops, and Xun Huaizhou was seriously wounded and died. In January 1935, the Red Tenth Army was again surrounded by heavy enemy troops at Huaiyu mountain in Jiangxi, Fang Zhimin and Liu Yuxi were captured, and after heroic righteousness, the chief of staff Su Yu led more than 800 people to break through successfully.
Westward Advance: In late July 1934, Ren Bishi, Xiao Ke, and Wang Zhen led more than 9,700 members of the Red Sixth Army to break through from the Xianggan base area to the central part of Hunan and march westward, and then to the four provinces of Xiang, Gansu, Gui, and Qian, breaking through the heavy blockade of the Kuomintang army, which lasted nearly 3 months, and at the end of October, they met the Red Second Army led by He Long and Guan Xiangying in Yinjiang County, Guizhou Province. The route of the Western Expedition of the Sixth Red Army basically coincided with the initial route of the follow-up Central Red Army's Long March, and played a pioneering role in exploring the way for the Central Red Army to implement a large-scale strategic transfer.
Although the soldiers of the northern and western expeditions were heroic, due to their weak strength, they were not enough to contain and disperse the strength of the Kuomintang army in large quantities, and they failed to fundamentally shake the "encirclement and suppression" deployment of the Kuomintang army in the Central Soviet Region, but on the contrary prompted Chiang Kai-shek to speed up the pace of the fifth encirclement and suppression and concentrate all the main forces to launch a more fierce attack on the central area of the Central Soviet Region.
By early September, the Central Soviet District, which once had 60,000 square kilometers of land, 30 counties, and a population of 3 million, had lost all its peripheral barriers, leaving only the narrow areas of Ruijin, Huichang, Yudu, Xingguo, Ningdu, Shicheng, Ninghua, Changting, and other counties.
Next Wednesday, I'll give you another description, so please wait.