Chengdu, July 23 (Xinhua) -- "The old forest is a barracks, and the thatch covers the body. The stone is used as a pillow, and I sleep soundly. Wild vegetables and snow boiled, the mouth is bitter and bright. Follow the Communist Party and turn around and seek liberation. This is the "Bashan Guerrilla Song" that has been passed down to this day.
A team song truly reproduced the harsh environment in which the Bashan guerrillas were at that time, and embodied the optimistic revolutionary spirit and firm ideals and beliefs of the guerrilla fighters.
From February 1935 to the spring of 1940, the Bashan guerrillas, far from the main force of the Red Army, under the successive leadership of Liu Zicai, Wu Sanbao, and Zhao Ming'en, were active in the vast forest sea at the junction of Sichuan and Shaanxi, and waged an extremely arduous struggle against the Kuomintang army and local militia groups for five years under extremely difficult conditions.
Strengthen your faith in the test of life and death
On December 18, 1932, the Red Fourth Front entered Sichuan from the mouth of the Tongjiang River and established the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base Area with Tong, Nan, and Ba (the whole territory of present-day Bazhong City) as the core. At its peak, the base area reached 42,000 square kilometers, and it had jurisdiction over more than 5 million people in more than 20 counties.
This is the junction of Sichuan and Shaanxi photographed by drone on August 23, 2016. On the left is Lianghekou Town, Tongjiang County, Bazhong City, Sichuan Province, and on the right is Yongle Town, Zhenba County, Hanzhong City, Shaanxi Province. On December 18, 1932, it was from here that the Red Fourth Front entered Sichuan and established the Sichuan-Shaanxi Revolutionary Base Area. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Liu Kun
In February 1935, after the study and decision of the Northwest Revolutionary Military Commission, the headquarters of the Red Fourth Front, and the Sichuan-Shaanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, the "Guerrilla Group of The Left-behind Positions in the Northern Sichuan Border Region" (commonly known as the "Bashan Guerrilla Group") was formed to go to Nanjiang Taoyuan (now Guangwushan Town, Nanjiang County) at the junction of Sichuan and Shaanxi to establish a guerrilla base area.
The Bashan guerrillas gave full play to the flexible and changeable tactical characteristics of guerrilla warfare, adopted the methods of camouflage raids and night raids and ambushes, and won victories with wisdom and surprise on many occasions. By the end of 1935, the guerrilla group had grown from more than 300 to more than 1,200 at the beginning of its founding. The successive victories of the Bashan guerrillas led to even more frenzied encirclement and suppression by the Kuomintang army, which was tested several times by life and death.
Li Zheng, director of the Bashan Guerrilla Memorial Hall, said: "When the guerrilla group was founded, it established a party branch. They hold organizational life meetings every ten days to educate Party members on revolutionary ideals and convictions and revolutionary firmness, and to carry out strict criticism and self-criticism. This is the fundamental reason why guerrillas who are fighting alone can get out of desperate situations again and again. ”
The people nurtured the Bashan guerrillas in desperate situations
The Bashan guerrillas are the guerrillas of the Bashan people.
Liu Zicai and Zhao Ming'en often carried a small notebook and traveled over the mountains to visit the poor and the poor, record the actual difficulties of the masses, and mobilize guerrilla fighters to try their best to help solve them.
In order to invigorate the social economy of the base areas, the Bashan guerrillas set up a number of markets in the base areas, adopted measures such as rewards, underwriting, and changing weights and measures to protect the interests of the masses; established "road protection classes" to arm and protect past merchants from bandit robbery, so that material exchanges between local people and merchants became more and more frequent.
This is the armband worn by the Red Guards formed by the guerrillas after the formation of the Soviet government. (Courtesy of bashan Guerrilla Memorial)
The series of measures taken by the Bashan guerrillas to serve the people in the base areas have won the support of the masses and have also made the entire base areas full of vitality.
In the winter of 1939, the Kuomintang army carried out a new round of brutal "liquidation and suppression" against the Bashan guerrillas, formulating three poisonous schemes of "clearing the wilderness through empty mountains, releasing water to catch fish, and building pillars and hoarding grain.", and the survival of the guerrillas was facing great challenges.
In times of crisis, the local people risked their lives, some delivering food to the guerrillas, some delivering information on the movements of the Kuomintang troops to the guerrillas, and some buying guns for the guerrillas...
The deep affection of the Bashan guerrillas and the masses whose blood is thicker than water is just as the folk songs that still circulate in Zhaipo, Taoyuan and other places today describe the songs sung by the people for the Red Army in those years: "Zhai'erpo, the road is deserted, and a pair of running rotten straw shoes is." As long as the Red Army continues to feed, even if it runs off the foot of the board. ”
Ideals and convictions support the determination to fight to the end
In February 1940, the guerrillas moved to the vicinity of Beiba Town in Zheng County, southwest Shaanxi Province, and engaged in a deadly struggle with an enemy dozens of times their own, and most of the fighters died heroically.
According to yang Jiandi's recollection of the scattered Red Army, it was snowing heavily that day, and he and more than twenty other people were surrounded by an enemy regiment after the old fir tree separated from Zhao Ming'en in order to cover Zhao Ming'en's breakthrough.
"We can't get out of it."
The enemy forced them to the cliffs of Bear's Head Rock, and the warriors fought back with a determined spirit, and after firing the last bullet, they destroyed their guns and flew off the cliff.
Yang Jiandi, who was 18 years old at the time, was one of the survivors of the cliff jumping warriors.
In March 1940, Zhao Ming'en broke through the siege and prepared to return to his hometown in Daxian County to revitalize the guerrillas, and marched to the Yangba Pig Trough Ditch in Nanjiang, where he was unfortunately killed by the traitor Yang Zhifang. After Liu Zicai broke through, under the pseudonym Chen Mechanic, under the cover of spinning and weaving, contacted the scattered guerrillas, unfortunately arrested in May 1940, and soon died heroically in Nanjiang County.
At this point, the Bashan guerrillas suffered a crushing defeat under the brutal suppression of the Kuomintang reactionaries.
Wang Zhixiong, deputy director of the Bazhong City Party History Office, said: "At that time, there was a sentence in the oath of joining the party that 'sacrificed the individual and worked hard for revolution', and the Bashan guerrillas were bent on the party, and no matter what difficulties and obstacles they encountered in the past 5 years, even if they fought to the last person, they all adhered to the task of 'supporting the Soviet area and staying in the position' entrusted by the organization, and they practiced their loyalty to the party with practical actions." ”
Wang Kaizhi, killed in April 1935 during the breakthrough of Jingou Forest in southern Shaanxi; Yao Zhengyuan, killed in battle in October 1937; Zhang Shaoxiang, heroically took up his righteousness in Nanjiang County on April 2, 1940... In the list of some members of the Bashan guerrillas, there are many unsung heroes, who can only use other names such as "Zhang Xiaowa", "Bear Black Baby", and "Pu Wa'er" to engrave their "names" forever on the bashan land.
Behind every name, there is a tragic story that can be sung and wept; each story is a heroic song that swings back to the intestines.
The hero's back is gone, but history will always remember it.