On November 1, 1949, the marching horn for the liberation of the southwest sounded. Nearly 400,000 troops of the Third Corps and the Fifth Corps of the Second Field Army under his command crossed the Sichuan-Hunan and Hunan-Guizhou borders into Sichuan and Guizhou respectively. In order to prevent the two major military groups of Song Xiyao and Hu Zongnan from retreating into Yunnan through southern Sichuan and western Qianxi and bringing disaster to the future, Liu Deng repeatedly ordered the Fifth Corps to rapidly advance westward, carry out a great detour and encirclement of the enemy, and prevent the enemy's large corps from escaping.
As Liu Deng expected, Song Xifu and Hu Zongnan did discuss a plan to retreat to the Sino-Burmese border in Hanzhong in August, and Liu Deng ordered the Fifth Corps to march quickly is completely necessary. The troops of the People's Liberation Army marched so fast and fierce that they had no time to take care of the best stragglers.
In order to speed up the attack on Guiyang, the 138th Regiment of the 16th Army used more than 100 captured trucks to quickly advance westward, constantly surpassing the fleeing enemy along the way, and even if it encountered the enemy's scattered rout on the road, it did not care about it, and made those enemies stunned. The 138th Regiment marched at an astonishing speed, liberating Guiding at 12 noon on the 12th, arriving in Longli at 8 a.m. on the 13th, and attacking Guiyang at 2 p.m. on the 14th.
Gu Zhenglun, chairman of Guizhou Province and director of the Pacification Office, originally wanted to organize the commissioners and county magistrates of the appeasement area to take advantage of the steep and dangerous mountain terrain to fight guerrilla attacks and resist stubbornly, but who would have expected that these people could run faster than rabbits, and how could they still be seen?
Liu Bolong. After the People's Liberation Army entered Guiyang City, Liu Bolong, commander of the 89th Army of the Kuomintang, approached the 17th Army of the Fifth Corps of the Second Field Army through the maintenance meeting and asked to be reorganized in accordance with Chen Mingren's method. The Fifth Corps immediately telegraphed Liu Bolong to Tou Cheng about the matter of Liu Bolong's contact. Liu and Deng immediately replied to agree to Liu Bolong's conditions, but Liu Bolong's inaction was not secret, and Gu Zhenglun noticed that Gu Zhenglun asked Chiang Kai-shek to ambush and kill Liu Bolong on the grounds that he entrusted the affairs of Guizhou Province to Liu Bolong.
After Liu Bolong's death, the 89th Army was succeeded by Zhang Tao, commander of the 328th Division, who contacted Wang Boxun, deputy commander of the 19th Corps, Wang Jingyuan, commander of the 49th Army, Liu Hewu, commander of the 27th Division, and Tan Benliang, commissioner of Xingyi and commander of the pacification of southwest Guizhou, and others to declare an uprising on December 12, so that the main force of the enemy army in Guizhou was completely annihilated.
At the same time that the Fifth Corps marched into Guizhou, the two corps of the Third Corps and the eight divisions of the Fourth Field Army marched into Sichuan by multiple routes. They were "greeted" by the Song Xilian Division of the enemy army in eastern Sichuan, 6 divisions of 6 armies, local security teams and various miscellaneous armies, with a total of about 200,000 people.
Song Xilian. Song Xilian took advantage of the lofty mountains and mountains in the west and east of Sichuan, from Enshi to Qianjiang and Pengshui, and defended them layer by layer, in a vain attempt to confront the main force of the People's Liberation Army head-on. But *** was unwilling to touch his fist with Song Xilian, he said: "Song Xilian's 100,000 troops are like a fist stretched out to us." We don't touch his fists with each other, but first hit him hard in the armpit, and his outstretched fist will naturally retract. ”
** The reason for being so confident is that our army has a very powerful lurker within the enemy, and he is Liu Zongkuan, who is acting as the deputy chief of staff of the Kuomintang Southwest Military and Political Chief's Office. Even the Kuomintang's defensive operation plan for the southwest region was drawn up by Liu Zongkuan in the spring and summer of 1949, so all the enemy's deployments were under the control of the commander.
After the liberation, at a meeting of the Nanjing Military Academy, when introducing Liu Zongkuan to the senior generals, he said: "Comrade Liu Zongkuan made a major contribution to the liberation war, and in particular, the role played by the liberation of the southwest was better than that of 100,000 soldiers, which can be called the first merit!"”
Liu Zongkuan. Liu Zongkuan's battle plan deliberately ignored Youyang, Xiushan, Qianjiang, and Pengshui, which stretched out from Sichuan to Hubei and Hunan in the form of a peninsula at the junction of Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhou provinces, making it a three-way zone that was deliberately reserved for the PLA for surprise attacks.
At that time, Song Xilian did not care about the detailed scrutiny of this defense system, and the other generals were also busy with their own affairs, only Wang Lingji, chairman of Sichuan Province, saw this loophole, and Liu Zongkuan prevaricated on the grounds that those corps commanders were shrinking their forces and unwilling to expand the defense area, and said that they were remediating and handed over a territory to Wang Lingji's people to govern, and Wang Lingji was very satisfied with this.
What is the use of Wang Lingji being satisfied, Song Xilian Group will soon be "killed". When Song Xilian learned that the People's Liberation Army had crossed Youshui to capture Xiushan, he was immediately stunned, and he understood that if he didn't run quickly, he would soon be surrounded by the People's Liberation Army.
All Song Xilian and his corps commander could think of was to run faster, run farther, and the farther the better. In just 10 days, without a single hard battle with the PLA, most of the 6 armies were scattered, and only 2 armies remained.
On the evening of November 15, Song Xilian's troops arrived in Pengshui, and the various troops scrambled to cross each other, so Song Xilian had to personally command the troops to cross the river. Here, Song Xilian commanded the crossing of the river, and the soldiers on the river street lit a fire to keep warm, set fire to the people's grocery store, and ignited the firecrackers and kerosene in the store. The houses on River Street are bamboo and wood structures that have been submerged by tung oil one after another, and together with the northwest wind, the fire swept the entire stilted buildings of River Street into a sea of flames.
It's infuriating that these soldiers only take their own things and run away, and don't care if they don't catch fire at all, as if they have nothing to do with them. Song Xilian hurriedly ordered the army to put out the fire, but he saw a lot and shot little, and only a nearby company commander led people to put out the fire, which could not stop the spread of the fire at all. The fire burned more and more fiercely, and at this time there was fierce gunfire in the northeast, and the 76th Division, which was on guard on the east bank, reported to him with ** that a People's Liberation Army unit of more than 1,000 people had entered the Baojialou, which was more than 20 miles away from Pengshui, and exchanged fire with the defenders. Song Xilian then ordered the 2nd Army's Baggage Regiment to fight the fire with all its might, so that they could demolish some of the houses in the center of the street to prevent them from burning further south, and then Song Xilian hurriedly escaped the Wujiang River.
The fire burned for 12 hours, and on River Street, hundreds of stilted buildings and shops with bamboo and wood structures were all turned into piles of ashes, and miserable cries ...... everywhereSeeing such a tragic scene, Song Xilian knew that if it weren't for the corruption of military discipline in his troops, how could the common people suffer such a catastrophe.
He sighed and blamed himself: "Peng Shui is burned like this, how will the people hate us in the future and curse us ......."Chen Kefei, commander of the 20th Corps, said without shame: "War itself is a cruel thing. Then he made up for it: "The Kuomintang is exhausted." This is also a catastrophe in the change of dynasty. These words directly made Song Xilian angry and internally injured, and because of the inconvenience of the defeat, he was afraid of causing dissatisfaction among these generals, so he could only secretly feel sad.
Only Luo Wenshan, the supply commander of the Appeasement Office, said more appropriately: "Something like Peng Shui, as long as the troops are managed strictly, can be avoided!""In fact, this accident can not only be avoided, but even if it happens, if the army is disciplined and loyal to the people, it can be extinguished in time, and the approach of Cheng Shicai, the commander of the Red Army, is the right way.
In late February 1937, the 30th Army of the Red Army's West Route Army was besieged by the Kuomintang Army's Ma Bufang Department in Nijiayingzi, Linze County, Zhangye, and fought for 7 days and nights, outnumbered, and had to retreat to Sandaoliugou, 30 kilometers away. It was sparsely populated, and the Red Army could not raise much food, so it was in a situation of running out of ammunition and food. The Red Army set up a marching pot in the courtyard of a peasant household surnamed Zhang, and everyone boiled a pot of rice soup with rice grains scraped out of the rice bag.
Cheng Shicai. At this time, a shell from the enemy rushed straight into the courtyard and smashed on the wall of Zhang's backyard, and suddenly thick smoke rose, and the flames raged, jumping to the roof of Zhang's house. The Zhang family crawled out of the house like a burning man and shouted to everyone, "Help us!"Hurry!Hurry!There's also a ** doll in it!Everyone hurriedly looked for water, and the "waterlogged pond" that could get water to fight the fire had been tightly controlled by the horse bandits, and they could not get water for a while, and everyone did not know what to do for a while.
Use rice soup to fight the fire", Cheng Shicai shouted loudly, pointing to the pot of rice soup that had just been cooked. While speaking, the first pot of rice soup scooped from the pot was splashed towards the place where the fire was burning, and everyone scooped up the rice soup from the pot and splashed it on the fire. This bit of rice soup is a precious thing that can save the lives of the Red Army in times of crisis, and in order to save the lives of a single family, no Red Army hesitates. The fire was extinguished, the child was rescued, and a pot of rice soup was spilled. "Good man......The Zhang family knelt down in unison ......
It is precisely because the Red Army is strictly disciplined and puts the people first everywhere that it is deeply loved by the people. Guo Yuanheng, the abbot of Yulin Caves, donated 120 kilograms of yellow rice, 15 kilograms of sesame oil, 30 sheep, a mule, and a horse to Cheng Shicai's troops, solving their urgent need for food.
The two armies are also facing life and death, but their performance in the face of disasters is very different, although Song Xilian has also made efforts, but an army with bad discipline, what can they expect to do well?
The Song Xilian group was completely out of control, and the nearly 100,000 people of the 14th Corps under it were soon completely annihilated. The commander of the corps, Zhong Bin, fled into a forest and was overtaken by the soldiers of the 139th Company of the 416th Regiment of the 3rd Division. He took out two gold bars to bribe the soldiers who captured him and begged to let him go, of course it was useless, Zhong Bin had better be a prisoner honestly. At the end of his rope, Song Xilian planned to flee to the wild China-Myanmar border with the remaining more than 10,000 people to survive.
More than 10,000 remnants of Song Xilian were pursued by the People's Liberation Army all the way, and on December 19, they were besieged in Shaping, Dadu River, and Song Xilian attempted suicide. Afterwards, when he learned that the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which was equivalent to two reinforced battalions, had fled with tens of thousands of their troops, he couldn't help but sigh.
Song Xilian's group was completely annihilated, and the three corps of Hu Zongnan who remained in Sichuan also all revolted on the battlefield, and the remaining 60,000 troops of Hu Zongnan were also encircled and annihilated on the battlefield one after another. The liberation of Sichuan, Kang, Yunnan, and Guizhou took less than two months, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) 600,000 people killed, wounded, and captured nearly 900,000 Kuomintang troops, and 5,000 of its own troops, successfully completing the goal of Liu Deng to annihilate the two major military groups of Song Xifu and Hu Zongnan, avoiding them from escaping the hidden dangers brought by Sichuan and Guizhou, and writing a rich and colorful stroke for the liberation of the whole of China.