On November 6, 1948, the largest battle in China's modern military history - the Huaihai Campaign broke out, to the end of the battle on January 10, 1949, a total of 66 days, the Kuomintang army mobilized Henan, Shandong, Jiangsu and other provinces of elite a total of 800,000 people, our army also concentrated the East China Field Army, the Central Plains Field Army two main forces a total of 600,000 people to fight. At that time, the combat area stretched from Haizhou in Jiangsu Province in the east, Shangqiu in Henan Province in the west, Huaihe River in Anhui Province in the south, and Lincheng in Shandong Province in the north, with a total area of tens of thousands of square kilometers.
The East China Field Army marched southward
The Huaihai Campaign affected several surrounding provinces
More than 500,000 migrant workers were mobilized to support
In order to maintain this decisive battle of the Great Corps, which has a bearing on China's future and destiny, on this vast battlefield that is more than 350 kilometers wide from east to west and more than 250 kilometers long from north to south, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has demanded that the Central Plains Bureau and the East China Bureau, together with the North China Bureau, make overall considerations, not only to solve the problem of supplying food, ammunition, and forage to the 1.3 million troops and civilian workers of the whole army during the three-month war period, but also to consider the transfer and treatment of 100,000 to 200,000 wounded soldiers during the battle, and still more to consider the food supply of hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang prisoners after the battle.
In order to accomplish this task, in addition to the logistics departments of the original military system, the Central Plains Transportation Command, the Henan-Anhui Soviet Logistics Command, the Western Henan Military Region Front Support Headquarters, the East China Front Branch Committee, the Central China Front Branch Headquarters, and the Hebei-Shandong-Henan War Logistics General Headquarters were established one after another, which were responsible for organizing and mobilizing the five provinces of Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, and Hebei to provide full support. According to the final statistics, a total of 5.43 million migrant workers were dispatched from these provinces, including 220,000 civilian workers with the army, 1.3 million migrant workers in the second line, and 3.9 million temporary migrant workers in the rear.
Supplies were delivered, and the wounded were transferred
With the assistance of more than 200,000 stretchers, 880,000 large and small vehicles, more than 8,500 boats of various types, and 257 vehicles, these more than 5 million migrant workers were organized into squads, squadrons, and brigades according to regions, and a total of 960 million catties of grain and other massive materials were transported to the front line. These hundreds of millions of grains and tens of thousands of clothes, hats, shoes, socks, pork, eggs, and so on were all collected by the vast number of migrant workers with backward means of transport, painstakingly collected from the vast villages scattered in various provinces, and then transported from hundreds of miles around the battlefield.
In addition to the arduous transportation of materials, these migrant workers also transferred back more than 110,000 wounded from the firing line, and they were organized into a carrying group with 500 pickers, 500 stretchers, and 3,600 migrant workers. It was they who braved the rain of bullets, endured the wind, snow, hunger and cold, crossed the river through ice, traveled long distances, and transported the wounded; Sometimes, when enemy planes strafe and bomb, they could not hide themselves, and the migrant workers often pounced on them and used their bodies to cover the wounded, and many of them sacrificed their lives with honor.
Du Yuming's capture marked the end of the Huaihai Campaign