This battle was extremely tragic, and the commander-in-chief rarely commented: This is the highest manifestation of heroism in our army!
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in a village named "Liu Laozhuang" in the northern region of Jiangsu Province, a company of the New Fourth Army fought an extremely fierce battle with twenty times the strength of the Japanese army. Because they were outnumbered, all 82 brave soldiers in the company, including company commanders and instructors, were martyred. Although from the perspective of the battle itself, this was not a victory worth showing off, Commander-in-Chief Zhu made such a rare evaluation: This is the highest manifestation of our army's heroism!
From November 1942 to April of the following year, the Japanese army launched a major "sweep" of the anti-Japanese base areas in northern Jiangsu, which was the longest, largest, and most intense, and under the heavy blows of the military and people of northern Jiangsu, the enemy "could not take care of each other from end to end" and was forced to retreat to Huaibei in mid-March 1943. The units of the 17th Division of the Japanese Army retreated through the Huaihai District, continued to "sweep" along the way, and concentrated their forces to encircle the organs of the New Fourth Army along the Liutang River in an attempt to destroy the Anti-Japanese Base Area in Huaihai.
At dawn on March 18, the fourth company of the second battalion and four companies of the 19th regiment of the 7th Brigade of the 3rd Division of the New Fourth Army stationed in Liu Laozhuang, northeast of Huaiyin, discovered the enemy situation from Huaiyin, and in order to ensure the safe transfer of the leading organs and the masses and to block the enemy's attack, the fourth company gave up the option of withdrawing in time and entered an "anti-Japanese ditch" in the fields in front of Zhuangqian and prepared to enter the battle.
The four companies faced an enemy nearly twenty times larger than ours, with cavalry and artillery. First the enemy cavalry engaged the New Fourth Army. After the four companies used platoon guns to knock down dozens of enemy horses that rushed in front, they prepared to withdraw along the trench. Unexpectedly, this was originally a dead end ditch, and it was surrounded by unobstructed open land. In the blink of an eye, the enemy's cavalry brigade had rushed to the front, and the possibility of forcibly breaking through was lost, and only the use of trenches to resist.
By this time, the four companies had been attacked on three sides. Instructor Li Yunpeng quickly mobilized for battle. Soon the enemy attacked with four or five times our strength, and was repelled by the sudden and fierce fire of four companies.
The enemy then pressed into the positions of the four companies with dense artillery and machine guns, covering the second attack of the infantry. The four companies calmly responded to the battle, and when the enemy group approached, the light and heavy machine guns opened their mouths in unison, and there was a corpse in front of the formation in an instant.
Unwilling to accept defeat, the enemy launched the third, fourth, and fifth consecutive attacks, all of which ended in disastrous defeats. In the fierce battle, company commander Bai Sicai's right arm was blown off, and he still insisted on commanding while fighting; instructor Li Yunpeng was wounded several times, like a bloody man, and still fought while agitating in the battlefield. The enemy found it difficult to succeed for a while, so he stopped the attack in the afternoon and planned a new offensive tactic.
The commanders of the fourth company took advantage of this gap in the battle to convene a cadre meeting to further mobilize the battlefield. At the same time, in spite of hunger, thirst and fatigue, they hurriedly repaired the fortifications, dug up bunkers, and were determined to fight the enemy's blood to the end and coexist and die in the same position.
Sure enough, the enemy used new tricks, concentrated all the artillery and grenadiers, and carried out a fierce bombardment of the positions of the New Fourth Army for four or five consecutive hours, in an attempt to "blow up the positions and human bodies."
The four companies defended a trench of several hundred meters, and under artillery fire they dug the collapsed trenches several times, repaired the flattened bunkers several times, and had to bandage each other and self-bandage from time to time.
By this time, the fourth company had suffered more than half of its casualties, and only about twenty people were left. They fought all day, grains of rice not entered, dripping water did not drink, and they were smoked by gun smoke and flying sand, their eyes were red and swollen, their noses were bleeding, their mouths were dry and their tongues were bitter, and their vocal cords were hoarse. But the Warriors have long since left it all to rest.
In the evening, the enemy's artillery fire gradually thinned down, which heralded a short battle. The commander of the White Company resolutely ordered that the bullets should be used intensively, all the excess guns should be dismantled, the documents should be burned, and all bayonets should be installed.
Then the enemy group moved toward the position. When the enemy approached the front, four companies fired the last burst of bullets, and then jumped out of the trench and rushed into the enemy position, one-on-two, two-on-three, one-on-ten, the sword light flashed, and the killing sound was tremendous. The knife was bent, smashed with the butt of the gun, bitten with the teeth... In the end, because they were outnumbered, all eighty-two warriors were martyred.
The enemy army found nothing when it came to cleaning up the battlefield, and could only return with more than a hundred dead bodies and more than two hundred wounded soldiers.
After the battle, the villagers built a three-foot-high cemetery out of mud and bricks.
Commander-in-Chief Zhu spoke highly of the battle in an article: "The battle of Liu Laozhuang, in which all eighty-two people of the Huaibei Quanlian Company were martyred, was the highest manifestation of the heroism of the commanders and fighters of our army. (On the Heroism of the New Fourth Army of the Eighth Route Army)
In 1955, the local government allocated funds to rebuild the cemetery and build a cemetery, and in March 1963, a major commemoration of the 20th anniversary was held. In 1964, the garden was expanded to cover an area of 80 acres, and a wall was built around it.
In 1992, Jiangsu Province and Huaiyin City allocated more than 300,000 yuan to rebuild the cemetery and build a new higher monument. Zhang Aiping, a revolutionary of the older generation, personally inscribed eight characters of "Monument to the Eighty-Two Heroic Martyrs".