Before the War of Resistance Against Japan, Chiang Kai-shek had carried out five encirclement and suppression of the Central Soviet Region, the first of which was in October 1930, when Lu Diping, chairman of the Kuomintang Jiangxi Province, raised 100,000 troops to encircle and suppress the Soviet area. Attempts were made to eliminate the Red Army within 3 to 6 months and to focus on the Central Soviet Zone. But under the command of Mao Zedong, the Kuomintang offensive was crushed. Unwilling to accept defeat, Chiang Kai-shek organized 18 divisions with a total of 200,000 troops in late March 1931 to carry out the second large-scale "encirclement and suppression" of the Central Soviet Region. From April 1, the Kuomintang under the command of He Yingqin began to attack the Central Soviet Region in four routes, and under the command of Mao Zedong, the Central Red Army concentrated its superior forces to break through each one by adopting the policy of enticing the enemy to penetrate deeper. He Yingqin's attack was completely crushed. In July 1931, Chiang Kai-shek had to personally serve as commander-in-chief, hired German, Japanese, and British military advisers, and raised 300,000 troops to the central base areas for the third "encirclement and suppression." Under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, the Central Red Army adopted the operational policy of "avoiding its main forces and fighting their weakness", winning three battles and three victories. In 80 days, the Red Army annihilated more than 30,000 enemy troops. Chiang Kai-shek's attack, which was completely crushed, chiang kai-shek himself said at the plenary session of the Kuomintang Central Committee that the Kuomintang's 300,000 yuan could not defeat the Zhumao Red Army by 30,000, and Chiang Kai-shek rebuked He Yingqin as a rice bucket. But it turned out that he was not much better than He Yingqin.
In December 1932, the Kuomintang once again mobilized nearly 400,000 troops to launch the fourth "encirclement and suppression" of the Central Soviet Region. At the end of January 1933, the uneasy Chiang Kai-shek personally went to Nanchang and once again served as the commander-in-chief of the "suppression of bandits" army in the Gansu-Guangdong-Fujian Border Region, commanding this "encirclement and suppression." However, due to the erroneous line of the Central Committee, Mao Zedong was excluded from the central leading organs and lost the command of the Red Army, but under the command of Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, he still won the great victory of the fourth anti-encirclement and suppression campaign.
In September 1933, Chiang Kai-shek, unwilling to accept defeat, mobilized about 1 million troops and began the fifth "encirclement and suppression" of the Central Soviet Region. However, at this time, Bogu served as the general secretary of the Central Committee, and the German Li De served as the general adviser of the Red Army, and Li De mistakenly replaced guerrilla warfare and mobile warfare with position warfare, so that the Central Red Army was completely in a passive position. After a year of bitter fighting, we have not won a victory against "encirclement and suppression." Finally, he was forced to hastily order the central leading organs and the main force of the Red Army to withdraw from the base area in October 1934. Began the world-famous 25,000-mile long march. The Red Army was furious at this. After the defeat in the Battle of Guangchang, it finally broke out.
In fact, at the time of the fourth anti-encirclement campaign, Mao Zedong had been dismissed from military power and lost his de facto leadership position, Mao Zedong was the chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic and had no power to speak of, and Bogu (Qin Bangxian), who was 27 years old at the time, was the general secretary of the party. Bogu, on the other hand, knew nothing about the military, so he simply entrusted military command to a German named Li De, Li De, whose original name was Otto Braun, was born in Munich, Germany. At the age of 28 he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the USSR. After graduating in the spring of 1932, he entered the Eastern Department of the Communist International and was sent by the General Staff of the Red Army to northeast China to collect Intelligence on the Japanese Army. In 1933 he entered the Central Soviet Region as a military adviser. Because of Bogu's trust, he was only an adviser, and his task was to "make military judgments and suggestions", but Bogu was completely delegating power, and in this way, Li De, who had no actual combat experience, became one of the members of the trio of the top military leaders of the Red Army (Bogu, Li De, Zhou Enlai).
Li De, a 34-year-old middle-aged man with only the simplest military training. Since he had the support of Bogu and naturally had the supreme command of the Red Army, li de arrived in the central Soviet area soon after, and in the Red Army, he had a nickname of "commander on the map", which means that Li De would not fight, that is, he would direct the operation on the military map, and Li De circled around the large map of the war room every day. While smoking, while using a red and blue pencil to sketch on the map, measuring the distance with a ruler, stipulating the marching route of the troops, he did not care where the mountains were or the river, anyway, according to the rapid marching speed calculated by the distance, he even had a machine gun, a mortar should be placed to be determined, he did not understand Chinese, it was translated sentence by sentence to Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, Liu Bocheng, such a corps commander listened, but Li De forgot that this was not in Germany nor in the Soviet Union. As everyone knows, the maps he used were all maps supplied by the Kuomintang troops captured by the Red Army, and many terrains were the approximate locations, which were not accurate in themselves. Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, and others sometimes went to the front line to survey the terrain, and Li De did not even go out of the war room.
Li De only trained as a school officer at the Military Academy of Vron in Moscow for four years. The study is "modern mechanized warfare". The biggest tragedy of Li De is that he did not learn Chinese guerrilla tactics, specifically, he did not integrate with the actual situation in China, he did not understand China, and he did not have any actual war experience. History is so accidental and strange that Chiang Kai-shek's general adviser in this encirclement and suppression war was also a German named Hans von Seckert. Unlike Li De's second knife, Hanseckt was a German general of the first class. During World War I he was Chief of Staff of the German Army. He was Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces. In 1933, he began serving as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. He gave Chiang Kai-shek three principled suggestions: First, the army is the foundation of the ruling power; second, the power of the army lies in the excellent quality; and third, the combat potential of the army lies in the education and cultivation of the officer corps. These three principles influenced Chiang Kai-shek throughout his life. More importantly, Seckert scrupulously adhered to the duty of an adviser, merely providing strategic principles and not interfering with Chiang Kai-shek's command, let alone asking about the specific details of the operation.
In this way, the Military Adviser of the Kuomintang, Seckert, and the Military Adviser of the Central Soviet Region, Li De, with Jiangxi in China as the last game, two Germans commanding the senior generals of the Communist Party and the Two Parties began a military game. But Seckert used the German army's rules of battle. Li De adopted the battle rules of the Soviet Red Army, and a regularized war was about to break out in the Battle of Guangchang. Guangchang is located in the north of the Nanning capital of Lichuan, Guangchang is the gate of the northern part of the Central Soviet Region, according to Mao Zedong's previous mode of operation is to abandon Guangchang, and even abandon the capital Ruijin at that time, to lure the enemy to go deep into the siege and annihilate it, now the military power of Li De naturally will not fight in the Guangchang Campaign according to Mao Zedong's way, Li De's tactics are to wait in strict line and stick to Guangchang. Seckert's order to the Nationalist army was that Guangchang must be taken. One must be taken, one must be defended, and a hot battle of emptiness is inevitably about to break out. The red army's operational orders are signed by: Bogu, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Zhu De, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Gu Zuolin, director of the General Political Department. Consultant Lee Tak. On the Kuomintang side: Chen Cheng is the commander-in-chief of the former enemy, and Luo Zhuoying is the deputy commander-in-chief. Secote is a consultant in Germany.
As a front-line general of the Red Army, Peng Dehuai, commander of the Third Red Army, repeatedly opposed this, repeatedly stating that Guangchang could not be defended, and that the tactical equipment of the enemy army must be estimated, and that even if there were relatively strong field fortifications without aircraft cannons, it would not be possible to defend Guangchang. Peng Dehuai's opinion was undoubtedly correct, and Bogu and Li De could not listen to it at all.
Just as Peng Dehuai said, Chiang Kai-shek's troops adopted a brand-new tactic of Seikot; thirty or forty planes first took turns bombing, and then used mountain artillery field artillery imported from Germany to continuously bombard the forward positions of the Red Army, and adopted a sequential advance, advancing only 1 to 2 kilometers a day, and advancing layer by layer. From April 10, the pace began. The area of Guangchang began to gradually shrink, and a soldier of the three corps named Tian Changjiang (the founding major general) said to Peng Dehuai with grievance: "Commander of the regiment, we have made a fortress in a week by regiment, and people have overturned it with one shot. We can't catch up with the exhaustion. Although the position was repeatedly reduced, Peng Dehuai still held on to Guangchang for 5 days. On the sixth day, Peng Dehuai came to the headquarters of the Red Army High Command, he put an old military uniform in his bag, made preparations for the end of the day, he expected that he might be expelled from the party, but for Peng Dehuai, he could not stand it, he had a stomach to talk to this German.
At that time, Teng Daiyuan, the political commissar of the Three Armies, fell ill and recuperated in Ruijin, and was represented by Yang Shangkun, director of the Political Department. When Li De and Bogu saw the angry Peng Dehuai, they originally wanted to arrange tomorrow's battle plan, but without saying a few words, Peng Dehuai, who was straight, could not hold back, bluntly said that Li De's command was wrong, reprimanded him for subjectivism and tactics on the map, and translated Wu Xiuquan's words into Russian to Li De, and Li De tightened his face and did not say a word. And Peng Dehuai was more and more excited the more he talked, the anger grew bigger and bigger, he even began to scold Li De, he pointed at Li De's nose, and scolded in a Hunan hometown dialect, "The cub sells Ye Tian's heart is not painful." Li De naturally couldn't understand this sentence, but Wu Xiuquan, as a translator, could not translate it for a while because he was a Hubei native. Yang Shangkun, who studied in Moscow, temporarily made an accurate translation, "The son sells his father's Tian Xin is not painful", (Who is the son?) Wu Xiuquan almost didn't laugh out loud after listening to this translation.
And this slightly insulting sentence was suddenly provoked by Li De, who roared and scolded Peng Dehuai: "Feudal feudal." He sarcastically said that this was revenge for the Central Military Commission's re-election and not continuing to elect him as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission; Peng Dehuai was already open-minded anyway, and when he heard this, he was even more angry and scolded Li De for being vulgar and shameless, saying that the Red Army would be buried in your hands, and this was the first time that Li De had entered the Central Soviet Region, or the first time he had been confronted in such a face-to-face confrontation, and he was also a fiery temper. If it had been in the past, he would have conducted military law against Peng Dehuai, but because of several defeats, he did not have the courage now. Although Li De did not dare to provoke Peng Dehuai, he took the opportunity to dismiss Teng Daiyuan from his post as political commissar of the Red Third Army, and under the bitter persuasion of Deng Ping and Yang Shangkun, Peng Dehuai did not go to Li De. But it must also be pointed out that Li De adopted Peng Dehuai's advice, Guangchang could not be defended, and Li De and Bogu ordered them to withdraw from the battle. At this time, the Red Army was already full of anger and complaints against Li De. At that time, in fact, one of the most widely circulated sentences of the Red Army was that Chairman Mao never fought in this way, and some Red Army soldiers said that we missed the first, second, and third anti-encirclement and suppression wars under Chairman Mao.
In those days when Guangchang was under fire, Mao Zedong, who had lost his military power, lived alone in Huichang County, south of Ruijin. Mao Zedong was chairman of the Chinese Soviet Government. But Bogu still felt that Mao Zedong was a nuisance, and he wanted Mao Zedong to go to Moscow to recuperate, but this proposal was strongly opposed by Zhou Enlai and flatly rejected by Mao Zedong. The subsequent defeat on the Xiangjiang River triggered strong dissatisfaction among the senior generals of the Red Army and the Politburo, and soon after the Battle of the Xiangjiang River, the Central Military Commission had to hold an emergency military conference, which was called the Passage Conference, which was held in one of the largest houses in a rural farm, and the family was holding a wedding ceremony. Mao Zedong attended the meeting as an observer, and Mao Zedong, who was not originally qualified to speak, broke the tranquility since the Fifth Anti-Encirclement and Suppression Conference. Expressing his opinion, he categorically denied Li De's proposal, that is, Li De's proposal that the Central Red Army and He Longxiaoke's divisions would meet, and proposed to march into Guizhou to attack Zunyi. This proposal was supported by Zhou Enlai, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao and other front-line generals, and Mao Zedong's proposal was also adopted by most people. From this point on, Reed had been isolated.
The Red Army moved into Guizhou at Mao's suggestion. Just after entering Guizhou Mao Zedong lost the only sweater on his body, that is, an old woman in her 60s took her little grandson out to beg for food, starved on the side of the road, shivering with cold, Mao Zedong did not say a word, took off the sweater on his body and gave it to the old lady, and also let the guards give the old woman two bags of dry food and a silver dollar, and the old woman and the little grandson were moved to kneel and thank. The Red Army thus occupied Liping County, Guizhou. An enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission was held in Liping County, and Mao Zedong and Li De once again had a fierce quarrel, Mao Zedong meant that the Central Red Army should abandon its northward advance, and Li De's idea of joining He Long and Xiao Ke and establishing a base area in western Hunan was a dead end and could not work at all. Mao Zedong proposed that the Central Red Army march westward into Guizhou, occupy Zunyi, the second largest city in Guizhou, and establish a new base area with Zunyi as the center. Then an enlarged political meeting was held to comprehensively sum up all the lessons learned since the five anti-encirclement and suppression campaigns. At this time, Mao Zedong's speech in the Politburo was already very important, and his opinions were immediately supported by Zhang Wentian and Wang Jiaxiang, members of the Politburo Standing Committee, but only General Secretary Bogu opposed it, and he still supported the plan drawn up by Li De. After a vote, Mao Zedong's opinion was adopted.
Afterwards, Zhou Enlai communicated with Li De, and Zhou Enlai's guard Fan Jinbiao recalled the incident vividly in 1978, Fan Jinbiao recalled: The premier (who has become accustomed to being called premier) criticized Li De, and the two quarreled very badly, so angry that Premier Zhou knocked off the horse lamp on the table, and even Zhou Enlai slapped the table with Li De, which shows what kind of anger Zhou Enlai has become. The first thing Mao Zedong did when he regained military power was to nominate Liu Bocheng as the new chief of the General Staff of the Red Army. It is worth mentioning here that Liu Bocheng and Li De were classmates of the Fulong Military Academy, but their abilities were very different, Liu Bocheng and Li De had serious differences in military operations, Liu Bocheng opposed Li De's fight in a foreign war without considering the actual situation, and Li De dismissed Liu Bocheng in a fit of anger and went to serve as the chief of staff of the Fifth Army. Now Li De is on the sidelines, Liu Bocheng is back as chief of the general staff, and Li Zhuoran and Li Fuchun are deputy directors of the General Political Department.
The Red Army moved quickly, and after entering Guizhou, it was even more overwhelming, conquering 11 counties in a row, and in 1934 it was a breakthrough in the wujiang river to take Zunyi. In the early morning of January 7, 1935, the whole city of Zunyi fell into the hands of the Red Army. The Zunyi Conference, the most historic in the history of the Communist Party of China, was held under such circumstances. The Sixth Plenary Session of the CPC Central Committee elected twelve members of the Politburo, including Wang Ming, Xiang Ying, Zhang Guotao, Ren Bishi, Kang Sheng, who was not in Zunyi, gu Zuolin, director of the General Political Department, who died of illness, and attended the Zunyi meeting:
Chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic: Mao Zedong
Commander-in-Chief of the Central Military Commission: Zhu De
Secretary of the Party Group of the Federation of Trade Unions, Political Commissar of Zunyi Garrison Headquarters: Chen Yun
Vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission, General Political Commissar of the Red Army: Zhou Enlai
Politburo Standing Committee Members: Zhang Wentian, Qin Bangxian.
Director of the General Political Department of the Red Army: Wang Jiaxiang
Director of the Political Protection Bureau of the Red Army: Deng Fa
Secretary of the Communist Youth League: Kaifeng
Deputy Director of the General Political Department of the Red Army: Li Fuchun
Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army: Liu Bocheng
Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China: Deng Xiaoping
Lin Biao, commander of the Second Army of the Red Army, Nie Rongzhen, political commissar of the First Army, Peng Dehuai, commander of the Third Army, Yang Shangkun, political commissar, Li Zhuoran, political commissar of the Fifth Army, and Liu Shaoqi, political commissar of the Eighth Army. Two people present: Li De and Wu Xiuquan (translator).
The final outcome of the Zunyi Conference was that the plenary session supported all the correct ideas of Comrade Mao Zedong, and 17 of the 20 participants supported Mao Zedong's views. The plenary session made four decisions, first, to add Comrade Mao Zedong as a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. Second, Li De was dismissed from his post as the supreme commander of the Central Military Commission and delegated to Lin Biao. Third, the restoration of supreme command power was controlled by Zhu Dezhou Enlai. Comrade Zhou Enlai was the ultimate decider of command. Fourth, Comrade Mao Zedong served as Zhou Enlai's military assistant. The biggest highlight and decision of the Zunyi meeting was the addition of Comrade Mao Zedong as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. Mao Zedong became the party's supreme leader. On March 12, 1935, Comrade Mao Zedong's leadership position in the Red Army and the Central Committee was officially confirmed.
I am clear water, the watchman of history, looking forward to your attention and comments.