China's relationship with Vietnam is hard to put into words. In the past, the relationship between China and Vietnam was very close, not only geographically connected, but also historically and culturally similar, and the two countries also supported each other in the face of aggression by foreign powers, especially after the establishment of the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Vietnam, the two countries formed a deep friendship.
However, after the end of the War of Resistance Against the United States, Vietnam regarded China, which had helped it, as its "number one enemy" and took revenge. Finally, in 1979, in order to protect the safety of the mainland's territory, people, and property, the mainland counterattacked Vietnam's constant intrusion and launched a war of self-defense against Vietnam.
In this self-defense counterattack, the generals of China and Vietnam were all famous generals in the military. Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had defeated the armies of France, Japan, the United States, and Cambodia, was regarded as the founder of the Vietnamese People's Army and Vietnam's most prominent military thinker. He is General Xu Shiyou, deputy chief of general staff of the mainland People's Liberation Army, commander of the Nanjing and Guangzhou Military Regions, and vice minister of national defense.
The tip of the needle is against the wheat, and the king does not see the king
When Wu Yuanjia learned that the general sent by China was Xu Shiyou, he just smiled and then said two words: "Interesting." The phrase "interesting" is not a disdain or disdain, but an expectation of a challenge.
At that time, Xu Shiyou was also 74 years old, a veteran general in command, and after being ordered to take over the command of the Eastern Front, he did not dare to underestimate the enemy, and after holding two operational meetings with senior officials of the legion, Xu Shiyou determined the operational policy in the direction of Guangxi as 24 words: the whole line is expanded, the synchronous advance, the shallow and the deep are deep, the division and encirclement, the steady and steady attack, and the annihilation of each one.
In mid-December, General Xu Shiyou took a special plane from the Guangzhou Military Region to Nanning to "fight his troops." During his stay in Nanning, Xu Shiyou often used hunting as a cover to survey the terrain, roads, bridges, reservoirs, and river dams, inspect the readiness of the participating units, understand the problems related to the operation, and set strict requirements for the combat units.
The Guangxi Theater is a subtropical mountain jungle with dense mountains, forests, and rivers. When Xu Shiyou was inspecting, he found that the mountains here were not only steep, there were many small caves, but also the forests were deep and dense, and the rivers were numerous and rapid, so he asked Zhou Deli, chief of staff, and Gong Gucheng, deputy chief of the Operations Department, whether the terrain over there was too complicated, and whether they could break through from the main road?
Gong Gucheng shook his head and said, no, it takes an hour to reach Gaoping from the main road, even if it is by car. If the enemy had predicted in advance that our army would attack from here, they would have set up ambushes and obstacles on both sides of the road. Moreover, the eastern section of the highway is a bridge, and once the Vietnamese army blows up the bridge, our army will be difficult to ride a tiger.
After discussion, they decided to attack from the rural dirt road south of Shui Kau, where the mountains and valleys were high and the terrain was difficult to detect.
Just in case, Xu Shiyou took people to inspect Jinji Mountain and Ningming, and decided that there were two remaining breakthroughs, and then they would form a two-wing outflanking situation with the troops who set out from the layout. However, Xu Shiyou was still not at ease, after returning to Nanning, he thought about how to give the Vietnamese army a surprise blow, which caught him off guard, and after careful consideration, Xu Shiyou decided to adopt the tactics of "killing chickens with knives" that he was best at.
Relying on this tactic, he annihilated the 110,000 Kuomintang defenders in 8 days in the Battle of Jinan, and also captured Wang Yaowu, the commander of the city defense. But this time is not that time, in the Battle of Jinan, Jinan City is a well-defended city, the defenders are also regular troops, even the climate is different, and the tactics are the most taboo uniformity and empiricism. Therefore, Xu Shiyou gave full consideration to the characteristics of this operation: First, it was a field operation, and second, the enemy's number was small, so it was more suitable to use powerful and superior forces and weapons to focus on the enemy's weak points and concentrate on assaults, so that the enemy would be powerless to resist and quickly annihilate the enemy army in a short period of time.
The Vietnamese army's Wu Yuanjia side adopted the combat strategy of great depth that he had always admired, and took Liangshan as the main battlefield and Gaoping as the reserve position.
The theory of large-depth operations was put forward by the Soviet Union, and this theory focuses on the two core theories of assault and pursuit, and when selecting the direction of the main assault, it always strives to select the location where the main assault will be carried out in the weak point of the enemy's defense, and concentrates the use of a large number of troops and weapons in the direction of the main assault. This strategy also played a great role in the Cambodian battlefield.
The generals of both China and Vietnam coincidentally chose similar strategies, so why did the Vietnamese army still suffer a big defeat in the end?
The difference lies in the fact that the Vietnamese army did not anticipate the direction of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's actions, while our army has never played its cards as the enemy envisioned. On the day when the war officially began, all the forward positions of the Vietnamese army were attacked by our army, and it was impossible to see where the main direction of our army's attack was.
In less than three hours, the battle reports of the victory of the Chinese People's Liberation Army came frequently: the northern group broke through the Molong defense line, the southern group broke through the layout defense line and seized the Shuikou Bridge, and the eastern group broke through the Tongdeng defense line and was fighting fiercely with the enemy...... When the troops formed a form of encirclement, Xu Shiyou immediately ordered to take Gaoping as the target and continue to advance.
However, a strange situation appeared, it was clear that our army was advancing quickly, but the number of enemies destroyed was very small. It turned out that the Vietnamese army finally discovered the opponent's tactics, and in order to delay time, it changed its strategy, changing its strategy from the original operational principle of "holding the border and winning on the front line" to making use of complex terrain, turning large units into small units, turning them into whole units, scattering and hiding, and maneuvering with the PLA.
The enemy changed and I changed, Xu Shiyou also immediately changed his tactics, the enemy is in the dark, I am in the light, at this time it is not appropriate to attack from the bottom up, but should be outwitted, so he finalized the tactics of night operation. As a result, the People's Liberation Army occupied the commanding heights on the mountain overnight, so as to cover the main force to pull the net and clear the net, and implement the strategy of fighting from top to bottom.
In less than three days, our army completely annihilated the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th regiments of the Vietnamese army, as well as the local armed forces, public security, and people's army...... At this time, General Wu Yuanjia was already powerless.
Xu Shiyou and Wu Yuanjia
Xu Shiyou was born in a poor peasant family, at the age of 8 he entered the Shaolin Temple to learn martial arts, learned martial arts for eight years, once returned to his hometown, but accidentally killed the young master of the landlord's family who deceived people too much, in order to escape had to run around, until later into Wu Peifu's army as a soldier.
In 1926, he joined the Wuchang National Revolutionary Army and became a member of the Communist Youth League, and in August of the following year, he transferred to the Communist Party. From the beginning of the Jute Uprising, all the way from the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression to the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, Xu Shiyou participated in various large and small battles, almost all of which had good records. Deng Xiaoping commented that he was a special person with a special character, special experience, and special contributions in his 60-year career as a horseman.
Before Mao Zedong died, he once told Mao Zedong that he still wanted to fight a war before he retired. And this self-defense counterattack against Vietnam was General Xu's last battle.
At the same time, it was also Wu Yuanjia's last battle, but Wu Yuanjia's battle was very unsuccessful, and he was even removed from his post on the night of the second day of the defeat.
Vo Nguyen Gia was a famous Vietnamese general who became famous for his 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu and was later named a "Famous Anti-American Monument" by the Western media. Wu Yuanjia also studied Mao Zedong's military thought and wrote military books on guerrilla warfare.
Unlike Hsu Shiyou, Vo Nguyen Gia was born into a rural landowning family in Vietnam, attended a school under French colonial rule from an early age, and showed an astonishing talent for literature. However, he seems to have been born with a rebellious element, not only joined the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party, but was arrested in the student movement against French colonial rule, and after being released from prison, he joined the Communist Party of Indochina, where he was pursued by the government. In Guangxi, he met Ho Chi Minh City, and after that, he followed him for the rest of his life, and the career of a generation of Vietnam's founding greats began as a horseman.
Wu Yuanjia's victory came at the cost of "casualties". In the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French army suffered heavy casualties, and the North Vietnamese army was four times that of the French army. But Wu Yuanjia believes that this is a necessary sacrifice, "Thousands of people die every minute in the world, and for the sake of the revolution and the reunification of the country, even if they are our compatriots, they are nothing." ”
"Grievance entanglement" between China and Vietnam
In fact, the Communist Party of Vietnam was originally developed by the Comintern in Indochina through the Chinese Communist Party, and President Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam was not only a member of the Chinese Communist Party, but also participated in the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. He was Sun Yat-sen's secretary before returning to Vietnam in the early 1930s to launch the Soviet movement. Since then, there have been two factions in Vietnam—the pro-Chinese faction represented by Ho Chi Minh City and the localist faction represented by Le Duan.
At the end of 1956, Le Duan replaced Ho Chi Minh as the general secretary of the Viet Cong, and Vo Nguyen Giap, as a close confidant of Ho Chi Minh, also competed with him for the post of general secretary, so he was naturally not treated by Le Duan. And Vu Yuanjia is a pragmatist, and whether he is pro-China or local depends on which is beneficial to Vietnam, so he is excluded by the localists. During the Sino-Vietnamese War, he was not in the military decision-making level, and the real power was held by generals such as Wen Jinyong and Le Zhongxun.
In the 60s, when Sino-Vietnamese relations were still close, the tweeters used for Vietnamese propaganda would broadcast the broadcasts of Beijing Radio for a fixed period of time every day, and the heroes of Vietnam's resistance to the United States were well known in Chinese...... At that time, Vietnam and China were the closest "brothers and comrades".
However, all of these things disappeared within a year, and there was even a massive anti-Chinese wave in Vietnam at the end of the 70s. There are three main reasons for this: first, Sino-Soviet relations have deteriorated, and the localists in power in Vietnam are pro-Soviet; Second, Nixon's visit to China dealt a huge blow to Sino-Vietnamese relations, and Vietnam's distrust of China reached its peak. Third, after the reunification of Vietnam, its strength was the strongest in the Indochina Peninsula, and it was an alliance with Laos, and it won a great victory in the battle of Cambodia, which gave Vietnam more ambitions.
After receiving the promised support of the Soviet Union, Vietnam had the audacity to launch a war on the Chinese border, but this unjust war of aggression was doomed to failure.
Resources:
"Red Napoleon" Wu Yuanjia "See the World"
"Xu Shiyou's Last Battle" Hu Jucheng
"The Grievances and Entanglements between China and Vietnam" Cheng Yinghong, Yuan Xunhui