introduction
On September 25, 1949, the fifth day of the founding of New China, the peaceful liberation of Xinjiang, which accounted for one-sixth of China's land area, was of great significance, and it has been very important to this day.
When I entered Xinjiang in the past, the wind traveled thousands of miles from Jiuquan, mules and horses and camels traveled in March and were dangerous, and there was a shortage of cars and oil and mountains.
Looking at Xinjiang today, it has become the largest arable land area in the country and the third largest pastoral area in the country, and when 3.099 million poor people were lifted out of poverty last year, compared with the hardships and hardships of the corps when they first entered Xinjiang, it can be described as a judgment.
It is difficult to enter Xinjiang, and it is difficult to go to the blue sky
In August 1948, Lanzhou was liberated, opening the door to the desert smoke and the sunset of the Long River, the First Field Army advanced westward, and a corps led by Wang Zhen directly took Xining, Qinghai.
After the destruction of the Xining Ma Bufang clique, Wang Zhen led the Second Army to Xinjiang. The snow-capped Qilian Mountains, the strange soldiers and heroes through the west of the river, the corridor desert yellow sand rises, and the soldiers seize Xinjiang to receive the Jade Gate.
On October 12, accompanied by the verse "Snow covers Qilian, dark clouds cover the peaks, grassland autumn winds are crazy, and triumphant songs enter Xinjiang", Wang Zhen carried out the order formulated by Chairman Mao in March and led his troops from Jiuquan into Xinjiang.
The units responsible for the task of entering Xinjiang were the 2nd Army of the First Corps of the First Field Army, commander Guo Peng, and political commissar Wang Enmao, who were the foundation of Wang Zhen's 359 brigade.
The other was the 6th Army of the Second Corps, commander Luo Yuanfa, political commissar Zhang Xianyue, and the predecessors of the two divisions under their command were the Teaching Brigade of the Northwest Field Army and the New Fourth Brigade.
It can be seen that the troops under his command are not only experienced in hundreds of battles, but at least they are elite and strong generals.
On October 31, 1951, Wang Zhen, commander of the Xinjiang Military Region, spoke at the third meeting of the First National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
As early as before setting off, Wang Zhen had a deep understanding of the hardships of the Great Northwest. When crossing the Qilian Mountains, the torrential rains and hailstorms, lack of oxygen and heavy snow, they marched against the cold and lack of oxygen, more than a hundred people died on the road, and hundreds of people were frostbitten.
It should be known that the troops led by Wang Zhen when crossing the mountain were the 5th Division, and his predecessor was the famous 359th Brigade, which crossed the snowy mountains and crossed the meadows, and after the outbreak of the all-out War of Resistance, it was either on the way to the attack or on the road of the attack, all the way to the battlefields of Hebei and Shanxi. After returning to Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia in 1939, just after completing the large-scale production of Nanniwan, he went south to Guangdong alone, and then returned to the Central Plains to fight back to northern Shaanxi, and walked another 28,000 miles, which shows the strength of his marching ability.
It was such a unit that regarded the rapid march as a common thing, but suffered a big loss in the Qilian Mountains, which showed the harsh environment in the great northwest.
Therefore, when evaluating the road to Xinjiang, Peng Dehuai's telegram to the Central Military Commission had the following passage:
"From Pingliang to Dihua is 2,240 to 2,300 kilometers long, the walking day is counted at 25 kilometers, it takes sixty-six days, every four days there is a day off, a total of three months to reach Dihua, of which the east and west of the Orangutan Gorge is about 400 kilometers, there is no one to live, there is a shortage of firewood, water, grain, etc., all of which must be prepared for transportation." Between March and April, the wind season is in place, and there are often whirlwinds at Anxi to orangutan Gorge, the yellow whirlwind is slow and can be avoided, and the black whirlwind is fierce, if there is no preparation in advance, people can blow away. During the harsh winter from Jiuquan to Dihua, the temperature drops to minus 30 to 50, and non-leather hats, leather clothes, and felt boots are difficult to winter. ”
And the thousand mountain bird mentioned above flew to extinction, and the ten thousand paths disappeared. The north wind swept the white grass to the ground, and the snow flew in August. The area where the strong wind could blow camels and people away was recorded in the texts that recorded Xuanzang's visit to the Western Regions, and almost killed him in the eight hundred miles of the Silk Road- the "Quicksand River". You know, even in the 1990s, there were still high winds blowing over trains.
The above is just a section of Wang Zhen's dangerous journey into Xinjiang. The road to be taken by the troops led by Wang Zhen is more than 1,700 kilometers from Jiuquan to Urumqi, more than 2,300 kilometers to Ili, and more than 2,500 kilometers to Kashgar, involving the entire three major mountains and two basins of Xinjiang.
Carry the weight forward, and the mule and horse take on the heavy responsibility
The road was long and difficult, the Central Military Commission concentrated all the forces at its disposal to help, Siye supported a tank battalion, North China supported a car regiment, East China supported two car regiments, the central government leased 40 Li-2 transport aircraft from the Soviet Union, plus nearly a thousand cars assembled in the south, and Wang Zhen's corps, which was equipped with grain, winter clothes and other materials, set off from Xinjiang in a mighty way.
However, in the process of entering Xinjiang, Wang Zhen was not concerned about the cars on the road and the planes in the sky, but the mule and horse brigade walking in the desert step by step, and during that time he had to inquire about the location of the mule and horse brigade every day.
Before entering Xinjiang, Wang Zhen gathered all the heavy-loaded cattle of the cavalry and pack horses of the 2nd and 6th Armies together, formed a mule and horse brigade, and dispatched the cadres who could bear the most hardships to lead the team and marched on foot to the south and north of Xinjiang.
The reason why Wang Zhen values mules and horses so much is very simple, in his opinion, whether it is a car or an airplane, it is not as good as a mule, and in Wang Zhen's view, mules and horses are the capital for them to take root in Xinjiang.
Everyone knows here that the plane was borrowed from the Soviet Union and must be returned. The car is its own, but far from the water can not quench the near thirst, most of the cars are classic car engines, running slowly not to mention the cost of fuel. Therefore, whether it is a thousand cars seized by the Kuomintang, or the "wool carts" provided by the Soviet Union, or the Dodge trucks and Jemsy trucks left by the United States, there is one that is counted as one, not the old one can barely be used, and the broken one cannot be used. Moreover, Xinjiang's road is long and bumpy, and sending oil from the nearest Yumen oil mine to Urumqi costs half of the gasoline on the road.
Pictured, Peng Dehuai (center) inspects the army entering Xinjiang in Dihua
Now because of the North-South Derrick Project in the Tianshan Mountains, there is no shortage of oil and gas under the pipeline, and there is no worry about laying the railway on the railway, but at that time, it was a car that was less rotten and there was no oil.
And the fact is indeed what Wang Zhen predicted, the 2nd Army, which is mainly based on automobile transportation and has its destination in southern Xinjiang, has been in constant failure since its departure, either driving and breaking anchor, or driving without oil, seeing that the gap with other troops is getting wider and wider, and can only bid farewell to the car with the whole army, walk to Kashgar on foot, and cross the Pamir Plateau.
The 2,000 mule-horse troops arrived in Dihua in two months, and only the 2nd Army of 1,000 mules and horses walked for 3 months to see the outline of Kashgar, which shows how easy it is to use mules and horses compared with cars.
The reliability of mules and horses is far more than just transportation, and it plays a key role in both banditry and pioneering at key moments.
800,000 acres of land were opened, and 200,000 people solved the problem of 4 million people eating
Those who have lofty ideals turn out to be a broken cauldron and sink a boat One hundred and two Qin Chuan is finally Chu, and the bitter hearted people do not bear the salary and taste the three thousand Yue Jia can swallow Wu. Wang Zhen's army, which had waded thousands of miles through mountains and rivers, finally entered Xinjiang.
At this time, Wang Zhen's troops, together with the rebel troops, the ethnic units of the three districts, and government cadres, totaled 200,000 people. At that time, the total population of Xinjiang was only more than 4 million, and most of these 4 million people were hungry, and a few ate the last meal without eating.
When Wang Zhen saw that things had not yet been done, eating had become a big problem, and he immediately called on the troops to open up the land. Wang Zhen's order was: Everyone in the troops stationed in Xinjiang must participate in production, and no one can stand outside the production queue.
However, Xinjiang itself is irrigated agriculture, with backward farming technology, the main grain producing areas are in the south and Yili, and Dihua, where the corps is located, has few cultivators at all. At that time, the Kuomintang troops occupying Xinjiang also relied on grain transportation in the interior to stay.
In order to reverse the predicament, Wang Zhen issued a task to the whole corps to expand the scale of agricultural production and open up 600,000 mu of land under the premise of not fighting with the people for land.
It is necessary to solve the problem of water sources first, and it can be seen that there will always be a river around Xinjiang's big cities, and Dihua is no exception.
The river in Dihua was built in 1946 when Zhang Zhizhong was in charge of Xinjiang, but only the peace canal was built, so the river did not benefit the city, but caused floods every spring and dried up the riverbed in the autumn.
According to the calculations of engineers in the old government, to completely repair the river, at least 7,000 cubic meters of stone are needed, and these pieces of stone need at least 100 cars to go back and forth for a month from collection to transportation.
And Wang Zhen's corps don't say cars, even there are not many horses pulling cars, so in the eyes of others, this is an impossible task.
The engineer's feeling that it could not be completed was not unreasonable, but Luo Yuanfa, commander of the 6th Army, patted his chest and said, "This is easy to do, we can mobilize the troops to open the mountains and quarry stones." But the engineer shook his head after listening, "From the Three Yong Monument to pull stones to the construction site, such a large amount, the farthest is more than 30 kilometers, how to transport it?" ”
"It will snow soon, and you can use the soil method of xinjiang compatriots to transport it by climbing the plough." At this time, General Tao Zhiyue on the side thought about and decided on the method, which showed that the method was always more difficult than the difficulty.
The task of transporting the stone was handed over to the hands of the 49th Regiment, which was difficult for Ma Qiuqing, the chief of the quartermaster unit, to tie thousands of pairs of climbing plows a week, saying that many people were quickly completed, but the climbing plough made of wood alone was not strong at all and steel bars had to be installed at the bottom.
But the military order was like a mountain, Ma Qingqiu had to take people all over the mountain to look for it, and finally they found an iron house full of steel casting. After pulling a fellow villager to ask, knowing that this was the prison where the revolutionary martyrs were imprisoned, he himself also dismantled the prison without saying a word, and the problem of steel reinforcement was solved, and repairing the river was not a problem.
Pictured, Wang Zhen and Tao Zhiyue in 1954 in the reclamation area
On February 21, 1950, on the construction site of the Dihua River Beach, the troops stationed in Dihua went up to the commander Wang Zhen, the commander of the 6th Army, Luo Yuanfa, the commander of the 6th Army, Zhang Xianyue, the political commissar of the 17th Division, Cheng Yuechang, the commander of the 17th Division, and Yuan Xuekai, the political commissar of the division, Zhang Jianglin, the commander of the 49th Regiment, and Mu Boyan, the political commissar of the regiment, with more than 5,800 soldiers, dragged thousands of climbing plows filled with stone chips, and surged down in the bone-piercing frost wind.
Thousands of climbing plows slid down the mountain, the scene is not to say that there is no one after the coming, but there must be no ancients before, so it has attracted many old and young people in the city to watch. With the attention of a pair of eyes, and the labor of the sunrise and sunset, the canal was finally built, and the cold and clear water rushed from the channel, irrigating a large area of pioneering land north of Dihua.
200,000 troops were put into production and construction, and its pioneering land far exceeded Wang Zhen's expectations, and 800,000 mu of new cultivated land enabled Xinjiang to achieve most of its grain self-sufficiency, vegetables and sideline foods completely self-sufficient. Wang Zhen took the lead in pulling a climbing plow as a greeting gift from the People's Liberation Army to the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang.
After solving the grain problem, Wang Zhen was finally able to plan the next step, and the vigorous xinjiang bandit suppression operation began.
In 1950, the U.S. Consulate in Dihua instigated the local ethnic minority leaders, the tribal chief of the Tianshan Grassland in northern Xinjiang, Wu Siman, to launch a rebellion, and the 6th Army and the 17th Division that learned the news simultaneously dispatched infantry, cavalry, and armored vehicle units to jointly clear and suppress, and the mules and horses brought with them at this time were once again of great use.
Through the 49th Regiment in the general Gobi's pursuit of bandits, it can be found how difficult it is to suppress bandits in the grassland desert. A cavalry company of the regiment chased into the gobi, a five-hundred-mile general who was extremely short of water, in order to bite the hundreds of rebels in Wusman.
On the first day, after engaging the rebels, the two sides held each other, and the rebels, fearing the arrival of the main force of our army, fled to the depths of the Gobi.
The next day began to cut off the water, the whole company was still in hot pursuit, the horse was so thirsty that it no longer moved forward, and with the horse's hooves to plan the ground, the cavalry forced the warhorse forward, and the pursuit slowed down.
On the third day, the situation became serious, and war horses began to fall. Soon it was found that there were in front of them, and the folk proverb said, If the birds whirl, there will be water, and the whole team summoned up the spirit to rush to the front. There was indeed spring water, but it had been contaminated by rebels with dead horses, and flocks of green flies could not be drunk. At this time, the cavalry of the National Army passed by and distributed the drinking water that they did not carry to the cavalry company, each of which was only enough to moisten the throat, and some soldiers did not drink, and first fed them to their war horses.
On the fourth day, under extreme hunger and thirst, the warriors began to drink horse urine, but the horse urine could not receive much. The horses continued to appear and die, most of the horses could no longer be ridden, in order to maintain the physical strength of the horses, the cavalry unloaded the saddle on their backs, and later, the cavalry correspondent sent the regiment party committee order: kill the horses, take blood to save people. ”
Note: The General Gobi is located north of Qitai County in Xinjiang. Local chronicles record that a general of the Tang Dynasty led an army in the Gobi to pursue the Western Turk army, and because of hunger and thirst, he mistakenly used the mirage as a water source, and continued to chase, and finally suffered casualties. Later, a temple of generals was built in the local area to commemorate it. Now, the Jundong Coalfield, where the General Temple is located, is the largest coalfield in the world.
For the cavalry, the war horse is no different from its own second life, its own children, brothers, and saviors. Kill it day and night, no one can get his hands on it, and often the knife is stretched out and half of the warrior cries.
The orders were difficult to execute, and in the end they had to exchange their respective horses for completion. After they had killed a few skinny horses that were about to reach the end of their lives with their eyes closed, each of them had drunk some horse blood, and then gritted their teeth and continued to pursue.
When recalling the tragic pain of that year, Liu Shenggui, the leader of the reconnaissance team, said: "The urine is bitter, astringent, sour, spicy, and commotion, and the 'five tastes are complete', and the horse's blood is extremely fishy." ”
The night was cold and heavy, and the warriors, who still had a little horse blood in their mouths, finally found the rebels' camp and found the water source. The PLA troops were lurking, the signal had been sent to send, he only waited for the follow-up troops to arrive, in the early morning to eliminate all the more than 400 bandits.
On the other hand, those rebels, under the high tension of nerves, were already sleepy and tired, and they were not even vigilant sentries. They only wanted to take enough drinking water tomorrow to get out of the remaining Hundred Mile Gobi, but they did not expect that the People's Liberation Army, which was also sleepy and tired, would catch up.
Liu Shenggui recalls:
When he saw the water source, he couldn't wait to untie the teapot and pounce on it, and before he could touch the surface of the water, he was touched by a furry thing, which turned out to be his own mount, and was sticking his head into the water and drinking lifelessly. People and horses have reached the limit of thirst. ”
In 1951, the bandit leader Wu Siman was arrested in Gansu, and the xinjiang bandit suppression officially ended.
Cotton is a big deal
After the complete elimination of the bandits, Wang Zhen's heart did not relax, and for a long time after that, he did not look like a military cadre, but more like a village cadre.
Under his example, the troops changed from two sets of single military uniforms a year to one set, one set of cotton clothes a year to one set of three years, and even the pockets on the clothes were changed from four to two in order to save money and build the city.
When the July 1st Textile Factory was built, the conditions were so difficult that at night the warriors had to cut a pit in the ground and barely survive the night. Once, a regimental commander saw that his soldiers had passed too badly, ran to the military headquarters to complain, and when he entered the door, he raised his legs and ran, but what he did not expect was that Wang Zhen turned around and chased after him.
Wang Zhen grabbed him by the collar from behind and called him to stand still, helped him straighten out the collar badge, and told him: "Our troops have done a major thing that benefits the people of Xinjiang, if the seven textiles cannot be built, everyone's efforts will be in vain, do you know how big your responsibility is?" Dare to run, run to the edge of the sky and I will chase you back. Then the regimental commander bowed his head and followed the wrong child back to the construction site.
At the same time as the completion of Qifang, a large number of mines such as the Bayi Iron and Steel Factory and the October Tractor Factory also appeared, and these good factories that could make money and could be more efficient were all handed over to local management after a period of operation, and Wang Zhen also completed the start of Xinjiang's modern industry.
Cotton farmers in the northern Xinjiang region of Xinjiang harvest cotton
However, industrialization was only the beginning, and Wang Zhen, who came to Xinjiang, did a major thing that shocked the world, and he planted cotton in northern Xinjiang.
At that time, it was impossible to grow cotton north of 44 degrees north latitude, which was recognized by the world. Therefore, after entering Xinjiang, Wang Zhen found that only a small area south of the Tianshan Mountains was planted with cotton, and the yield was not mentioned.
At that time, Xinjiang's cotton output was less than 1% of the country's total output, and there were only a few hand-woven fabric factories in Xinjiang, and the local people wore inferior native cloth, which was not warm in winter and not breathable in summer.
But under these conditions, the 925 rebel forces broke with the norm and planted cotton in a place called XiaoJiao in the Manas River Valley, breaking the fixed concept of the whole world.
Tao Zhiyue, who was the commander of the 22nd Corps at the time, could not eat after hearing about this incident, and pulled the driver to say that he would go and see. Wang Zhen was even more pleased, and immediately found the Soviets to sign a planting contract. Today, thanks to the efforts of several generations of corps members, Xinjiang cotton has steadily ranked 80% of the country's output.
End
"Sacrifice youth for life, sacrifice life for children and grandchildren" This is not an empty phrase. The 2nd Army and 6th Army, which followed Wang Zhen into Xinjiang in 1954, have a long history. The veteran troops who have made great achievements in battle have all responded to the call, obeyed the overall situation, taken off their uniforms and all the local troops and changed them into production and construction corps, rooted in Xinjiang far from their homeland, and reclaimed the border.
The 359th Brigade remained in the south, the two first-class main forces of the Northwest Field Army, the Instruction Brigade, remained in the east, and the New Fourth Brigade remained in the north.