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introduction
On January 25, 1927, the people of Wuhan specially cast an iron shield to commend the Fourth Army of the National Revolutionary Army for its brilliant achievements in the Northern Expedition.
However, the name of the "Iron Army" seems to have stopped at the peak of the Northern Expedition, and gradually died out during the Anti-Japanese War. Army Commander Zhang Fakui's repeated horizontal jumps are to blame.
(Iron Army)
If we want to say why the Fourth Army of the National Revolutionary Army, known as the "Iron Army," gradually fell to the altar after the Northern Expedition, and even gradually died out during the anti-Japanese period, the uncertainty and repeated horizontal jumps of army commander Zhang Fakui in the political arena had a certain impact on the demise of the Fourth Army.
In order to better understand this conclusion, let's first briefly get to know the Fourth Army of the National Revolutionary Army and its commander Zhang Fakui.
(Zhang Fakui)
1. The legend of the Fourth Army of the Northern Expeditionary Iron Army and the commander Zhang Fakui
The Fourth Army was established in July 1925 and was reorganized from the First Division of the Guangdong Army, with Li Jishen as its commander. The future army commander Zhang Fakui was only the commander of the 1st Independent Brigade of the Fourth Army at that time. In September, he was ordered to lead a brigade to the east to conquer Chen Jiongming and fight against Deng Benyin in the south. As a result, he was promoted to deputy commander of the 12th Division of the Fourth Army.
Soon, two months later, he was promoted to commander of the 12th Division, under the command of Ye Ting's 34th, Liao Peinan's 35th Regiment, and Huang Qixiang's 36th Regiment.
(叶挺)
In 1926, when the Northern Expedition began, Zhang Fakui took the 12th Division from Haibei to Guangzhou, and entered Hunan to cooperate with the Changsha plan to attack Sun Chuanfang and Wu Peifu. The Fourth Army was invincible in the Northern Expedition, won the great victories of Tingsi Bridge and Hesheng Bridge, conquered Wuchang, and won the title of "Iron Army". The Iron Army fought all the way from Hunan to Jiangxi, broke through Nanchang, and made great achievements, and Chairman Chiang sent them congratulatory telegrams many times.
At the end of 1926, Zhang Fakui served as the commander of the Fourth Army, and Huang Qixiang was the deputy commander.
In 1927, Ninghan was divided, Chen Mingshu of the 11th Army resigned as commander, and the 11th Army was also assigned to Zhang Fakui's Fourth Army, and the two armies defeated Zhang Xueliang's Feng army in the Second Northern Expedition.
(Commanders)
After the August 1 Nanchang Uprising, the original Fourth Army was split into the Red Fourth Army of the Communist Party of China, the First Division of the Fourth Army commanded by Zhang Fakui, the Eleventh Army of Chen Mingshu, and the Eighth Route Army of Li Jishen.
After the August 1st Uprising, due to Zhang Fakui's repeated horizontal jumps, Wang Jingwei was first committed to opposing Chiang, and then united with Chiang Kai-shek, and then joined hands with the Gui Army to send troops against Chiang in the Central Plains War. In this twist and turn, the Fourth Army suffered great damage and had to remain in Chiang's department, but it was marginalized and exploited.
(Nanchang Uprising Oil Painting)
During the anti-Japanese period, Zhang Fakui publicly announced that he would fight the Japanese army and protect the motherland. Participated in the Battle of Songhu and the Battle of Wuhan, Zhang Fakui also commanded the Battle of Guiliu and the Battle of Guangzhou, but at this time, the Fourth Army suffered heavy losses due to marginalization and downsizing, and the name of the "Iron Army" gradually faded.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Zhang Fakui was the supreme Chinese commander who accepted the surrender of Japan in the Guangzhou Theater, and in 1946 he became the director of the Guangzhou Xingyuan, and in March 1949, he became the commander-in-chief of the Kuomintang Army.
(Zhang Fakui in his later years)
Zhang Fakui's repeated horizontal jumps, one is between Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek, and the other is that he himself has the contradictory colors of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party.
2. Choose Wang or Jiang? If you can't decide, let's watch the situation change sideways!
On April 12, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched a coup d'état, a large-scale purging of the Communist Party, and the original unified Kuomintang split into Wang Jingwei's Wuhan faction and Chiang Kai-shek's Nanjing faction.
(Wang Jingwei)
Zhang Fakui was on the side, but he didn't want to get too involved in politics, he thought in his heart, "I'm a soldier, I'll fight well", and he only thought about the Northern Expedition, so he was also very angry that Chiang Kai-shek took his brother at the critical moment of the Northern Expedition, and the family first had infighting, which affected the progress of the Northern Expedition.
Then, Zhang Fakui's choice is easy to understand. Due to his single-minded Northern Expedition, he soon led the Fourth Army to start the Second Northern Expedition, won great victories at Shangcai and Dongxihongqiao, broke Zhang Xueliang's Feng army, and then went all the way to Zhengzhou, Henan.
Because he sided with Wang Jingwei and Wang Jingwei was committed to opposing Chiang, the Fourth Army's Northern Expedition was restrained, and Wang's plan of "Eastern Expedition against Chiang" was implemented instead, and then because of the twists and turns of the July 15 coup d'état and the Nanchang Uprising, it marched to Guangzhou.
On November 17, 1927, he initiated the "Zhang Huang Incident" in Guangzhou, and on the 28th, he launched the "Protect the Party" action that claimed to be against the Nanjing Special Committee and obeyed the Kuomintang Central Committee, mainly to fight against the Gui warlords and defend Guangzhou.
(Medal for the Fourth Army of the National Revolutionary Army)
On December 15, 1927, Zhang Fakui was dismissed from his post by the Nanjing government and was jointly attacked by Li Jishen and Huang Shaoxiong. On the 18th, he resigned by telegram and telegraphed Chiang Kai-shek to express his obedience, and was willing to make up for the future with the retinue of Kuomintang members, and handed over the troops to Miao Peinan to lead, so that the Fourth Army, which Zhang Fakui had painstakingly managed, entered Chiang Kai-shek's camp in its entirety.
In order to regain the troops, Zhang Fakui had to rejoin Chiang Kai-shek's camp. On December 21, he publicly expressed his approval of Chiang Wang's cooperation and support for Chiang Kai-shek's reappointment as commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army.
During this period of defection to Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Kai-shek always distrusted Zhang Fakui and only treated him as a pawn, and the Fourth Army was constantly marginalized, and Zhang Fakui gradually took back the Fourth Army (he was restored to the position of commander of the Fourth Army in May), but also served Chiang in the crusade against the Gui faction.
(Zhang Fakui)
Soon, Zhang Fakui decided to oppose Chiang again. In September 1929, seeing clearly Chiang Kai-shek's conspiracy to disarm the Fourth Army, on the 17th, with the support of Wang Jingwei, he sent an anti-Chiang telegram, and in the Central Plains War in 1930, he and Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi countered Chiang.
Since then, he has always tended to support Wang Jingwei, but due to the confluence of Ninghan and Han, he has been working under Chiang Kai-shek, and took the initiative to ask Ying to crusade against the Japanese army during the anti-Japanese period, but because Chiang Kai-shek did not trust Zhang Fakui, he suffered a downsizing, and the "Iron Army" was not the main anti-Japanese force, and it was not cherished and valued by Chiang Kai-shek, and other troops on the battlefield did not have effective support, and the strength of the Fourth Army was greatly frustrated.
And the support for Wang Jingwei came to an end in 1938. In 1938, Wang Jingwei was treason and pro-Japanese, and Zhang Fakui sternly criticized and criticized.
In general, since the confrontation between Ning and Han, Zhang Fakui has always been inclined to Wang Jingwei, but he had to join Chiang Kai-shek's camp due to changes in the current situation, but how many soldiers of the Fourth Army can see the pain and helplessness of the commander? Zhang Fakui's horizontal jump between Wang and Chiang gave the Fourth Army more unfirmness and vacillation.
(Zhang Fakui)
3. As a Kuomintang, I have approached many Communists, and what I do also has a bit of a Communist flavor?
Zhang Fakui is not only vacillating between Wang and Chiang, but in fact, he is also a contradiction in the face of the CCP:
Zhang Fakui's relationship with the Communist Party is not shallow, let's just say that the people around him are many Communist Party members or people who support the Chinese Communist Party: when he was still the commander of the 12th Division, Liao Qianwu, director of the Political Department of the 12th Division, was a Communist Party member;
During the same period, the 34th Regiment under his command was headed by Ye Ting, a member of the Communist Party of China, and the 34th Regiment later developed into Ye Ting's Independent Regiment, and more than half of the officers in the regiment were members of the Communist Party of China;
In June 1927, Zhang Fakui served as the commander-in-chief of the Second Front Army of the Fourth Group Army, under the jurisdiction of He Long's 20th Army, who joined the Communist Party of China after the Nanchang Uprising;
Huang Qixiang, the deputy commander of the army who went all the way with him, also has another identity: the leader of the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Party, and this party openly and vigorously supports the CCP's ideas; In addition to the officers, many soldiers were also members of the Chinese Communist Party.
(Huang Qixiang)
In his dealings with the CCP, Zhang Fakui very much recognized the CCP's strategy of managing the army, and many of his strategies for managing the army were also similar to those of the CCP: they all attached great importance to the power of the masses, respected the masses, and were also good at mobilizing the power of the masses, which was very different from the traditional Kuomintang officers. In addition, he also attaches great importance to propaganda like the CCP.
Therefore, during the April 12 coup, Zhang Fakui disgusted his own brothers, which had a layer of implication against Chiang Kai-shek's Qing Communists.
But you said that Zhang Fakui supported Wang Jingwei, but later Wang Jingwei also split up! Does that mean that Zhang is also very supportive?
Because of his sidelines, he agreed to the policy of splitting the Communist Party, but instead of directly slaughtering as Chiang Kai-shek, he "gifted" and accepted Communists in large numbers.
(Picture and text have nothing to do with the movie "The Great Cause of the Founding of the Army", Yu Haolei plays Zhang Fakui)
It is precisely because of this that the CCP has always had illusions about him and has been working to win over him. But before the Nanchang Uprising, when Deng Yanda talked to him with the Soviet adviser Tie Luoni, he openly stated his attitude: "My point of view is that we must support Mr. Wang (Jingwei). ”
But don't you think Zhang Fakui is very contradictory? On the one hand, he admired and studied the CCP, disgusted Chiang Kai-shek's Qing Communists, and did not effectively implement Wang Jingwei's division of the CCP, and on the other hand, he rejected the mobilization of the CCP. It is not so much that he unswervingly supports Wang Ching-wei, but that he blindly follows Wang, or that he cannot let go of his identity as a member of the Kuomintang.
In any case, Zhang Fakui's repeated horizontal jumps must have had an impact on the demise of the Fourth Army. Because he is the leader of the Fourth Army, the movement of the locomotive determines how the train goes, and if the locomotive moves around without a clear driving track, the body will be unstable and military discipline will be affected.
(Zhang Fakui)
Moreover, if Zhang Fakui had a little political ambition or means, would he also fight his way out in Wang Chiang's political storm?
However, what caused Zhang Fakui to jump repeatedly is, in the final analysis, the current situation. If Chiang Kai-shek had not launched a coup d'état, would the "Iron Army" of the Northern Expedition be even more "iron"? If Wang Jingwei did not advocate the eastward expedition against Chiang, would the Fourth Army, which had already attacked the Second Northern Expedition in Henan, go one step further? If Chiang Kai-shek could trust Zhang Fakui and the Fourth Army, would the Fourth Army not be marginalized, and would it have been able to make a resounding deed on the battlefield of resistance against Japan?
It seems that there are times when military people fall victim to politicians.
It is said that heroes are born in troubled times, and indeed, Zhang Fakui was killed from the troubled times of the Beiyang warlords. However, it seems that troubled times can also destroy heroes, and the turbulent political whirlpool still somewhat affected Zhang Fakui's loneliness and the gradual demise of the Fourth Army.
Resources:
GUAN Jiansheng. Journal of Shaoguan University(Natural Science Edition),1996,(01):56-66.