Author: Fu Yiqun Source: "Party History"
Cai Wei (1907.4-1936.9), formerly known as Cai Zeyun, was a native of Ningde, Fujian. He joined the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in 1926. In 1930, he participated in the special radio training class of the Party Central Committee in Shanghai. In October 1930, he was sent by the Party Central Committee to the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Region to establish wireless communication work, and served as a staff officer of the General Staff Department of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Military Committee. In 1932, the first and second radio stations of the Red Fourth Front Army were built successively, and Cai Wei participated in the creation of the two radio stations and served as the director of the second station. Subsequently, he devoted himself to the arduous work of radio detection, mastered the rules of code breaking, and soon applied it on the battlefield and achieved results. In 1933, the Sichuan warlord Liu Xiang launched a six-way siege against the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet region, and the radio station led by Cai Wei showed its might, and the Red Army achieved brilliant results. Cai Wei has repeatedly performed miraculous feats on the "invisible front" and made special contributions. After the long march with the troops, on the long march, Cai Wei crossed the meadows over the snowy mountains, marched during the day, worked at night, and when the troops arrived in Minxian County, Gansu Province in 1936, the ruthless disease took his life at the age of 29.
Teenage years
Cai Wei was born in Jiaocheng, Ningde in April 1907. Cai Wei's father, Cai Zuxi, is a good reader of history and politics, and is determined to serve the country, especially fond of "Western learning" and has feelings of serving the country; Cai Wei's grandfather, Lin Lizhai, was a man and industrialist who built a tea refining factory and created jasmine tea in Fujian. Cai Wei was educated in a private school at an early age, and under the words and deeds of his elders, he showed sympathy for the weak and equal treatment from a young age.
From the Xinhai Revolution to the May Fourth Movement, Chinese society was in the midst of rapid upheaval. The young Cai Wei witnessed the social turmoil and revolution after the Xinhai Revolution, although the society was chaotic, new things were emerging one after another. The new things and new atmosphere brought excitement and excitement to the young Cai Wei, but also brought confusion and pain: why did he live in a deep house compound, but there were poor people lying in poor clothes on the street? Why do so many poor people gang up and rob the road? Why do students go on strike and businesses go on strike? …… This constantly rotating and changing real world made Cai Wei aware of social injustice, the difficulties of people's livelihood, and the understanding of justice and evil, and encouraged him to grow into a person who hates darkness, yearns for light, and has a sense of mission.
In the spring of 1922, 15-year-old Cai Wei came to Fuzhou, the provincial capital, with a little consciousness and ignorance, to receive modern education from Fuzhou Gezhi Middle School. In 1925, Cai Wei went to Shanghai to study at Huiling English College. At the end of that year, with the help of his uncle Lin Zhenhan, Cai Wei entered the Department of Sociology of Shanghai University. Entering Shanghai University, Cai Wei seemed to have come to a free world, and while he studied hard, he actively participated in the student movement in full swing. He had contacts and contacts with the Communist Youth League organizations and cadres of Tongji, Jinan, Soochow and other universities in Shanghai.
On May 30, 1926, during the commemoration of the first anniversary of the May Day Movement in Shanghai, Cai Wei was appointed by the Youth League to be responsible for the publicity and liaison of the Shanghai University march. During the event, Cai Wei fully demonstrated his ability and enjoyed the joy of participating in revolutionary activities. In order to expand the organization of the Communist Party of China and strengthen the strength of the Communist Party of China, in June 1926, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided that outstanding Communist Youth League members could directly become Communist Party members. As a result, Cai Wei and a group of Communist Youth League members became new members of the CCP organization at Shanghai University.
◆In 1911, Cai Wei took a group photo with his mother Lin Ying.
After joining the party, Cai Wei was appointed by the party organization to return to his hometown Ningde in December 1926 to carry out party activities. After the April 12 counter-revolutionary coup d'état in 1927, the Kuomintang military and police arrested people everywhere in Fuzhou, and Cai Wei was arrested on business trip to Fuzhou. But fortunately, his identity was not revealed, and his family spent a lot of silver dollars to clear the relationship, so he was released on bail after spending 4 months in prison. Immediately after his release from prison, he rushed to Shanghai to find a party organization and continue his revolutionary activities.
Formation of Soviet district radios
At the beginning of 1930, under the arrangement of the party organization, Cai Wei participated in the special radio training class of the Shanghai Party Central Committee in the name of studying at Tongji University in Shanghai, and began his radio career.
During the study period, Cai Wei worked very hard and quickly mastered the skills of newspaper and aircraft maintenance, and could collect 130-140 English letters per minute. At that time, the communication and liaison work of the newly established Red Fourth Front Army mainly relied on the transmission of infantry or cavalry, which was slow and unsafe, and was often intercepted by the enemy on the way, resulting in military passivity. In order to completely change this passive situation, the party Central Committee selected a group of backbone cadres from Shanghai to be responsible for preparing for the construction of the Red Army's wireless communication stations in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet region. Cai Wei was selected to serve as a staff officer of the General Staff Department of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Military Committee, responsible for preparing for the establishment of the Red Army's radio station. Before taking office, Cai Wei brought a letter to his family in Shanghai, in which he named his newborn son Cai Zhisheng, and this letter also became Cai Wei's last contact with his family. Because the radio industry is a hidden front, there is an iron discipline: the upper part does not sue the parents, and the lower does not sue the wife and children.
At the end of October 1931, Cai Wei came to the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet District. The sensitive Cai Wei heard that there was a batch of equipment and equipment collected in the battle, and Wang Zigang, a classmate in the training class, and others selected the useful ones, washed them, cleaned them up one by one, and fiddled with them one by one. After more than a month of collecting and assembling, a dilapidated generator was finally refurbished. On December 23, the Red Fourth Front Army defeated Huang'an, seized the radio station of the enemy's Zhao Guanying division, and transported it to the Laijiahe River in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui base area to be buried. When Cai Wei heard the news, he ran to Laijiahe, dug up the radio station, dismantled and cleaned it again, and quickly repaired the radio station. Later, in the Battle of Shanghuang, the Red Army annihilated a cavalry brigade of the enemy's Zhang Fang Division and captured a radio station. Cai Wei repaired it in the ancestral hall behind Zhongjiajia Village outside the south gate of Xinji Town, and the crisp and pleasant "tick tick" signal sounded, and in this way, the first red radio station in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet District was born.
◆ Transmitter (imitation).
After the establishment of the radio station, the radio-technical reconnaissance work of the Red Fourth Front soon showed great power in battle. The army has successively established contacts with the Central Revolutionary Base Areas, the Hunan and Jiangxi Revolutionary Base Areas, and the Western Hunan and Hubei Revolutionary Base Areas, thus fundamentally changing the situation in which the Red Fourth Front Army and the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Region are far away from the central government and fighting hard alone.
Cracking the "Book from Heaven"
From March to May 1932, the Red Fourth Front Army won a major victory in the Battle of Sujiabu, destroying more than 30,000 enemies and capturing 4 radio stations and a large number of radio equipment. As a result, the radio equipment of the Red Fourth Front Army was greatly improved, and it was soon expanded to two stations. The first is the backstage, which is in charge of Song Kanfu and Wang Zigang, and acts with the General Headquarters of the Red Fourth Front Army and the Military Commission. The second is the front desk, which is in charge of Cai Wei, who first followed the 73rd Division and then the Red 25th Army.
In January 1933, the main force of the Red Fourth Front Army opened up the Sichuan-Shaanxi base area, and the radio station of the Red Fourth Front Army was also stationed in Maoyu Town in northeast Sichuan. Cai Wei began to turn his main energies to listening to enemy radio stations and deciphering enemy codes. Cai Wei has many years of experience in fighting the enemy, coupled with a good mathematical foundation and solid basic English skills, which has greatly helped him in his deciphering work. At this time, Cai Wei was completely immersed in the kingdom of radio, meditating hard, and often didn't even bother to eat. In this way, Cai Wei first started with simple telegrams such as the time, place, and unit number in the enemy's masthead and tail code, and compared the information he had already mastered, and repeatedly compared it up and down, left and right, front and back, guessed and scrutinized word by word, and slowly read out a telegram. Then, according to the relationship between the character code and the character, through in-depth listening, tracking, comparison, judgment and bit by bit accumulation, we gradually figured out the law of the password used by the enemy's radio station. In the end, Cai Wei solved the key problem of the password and completely deciphered the enemy's first password "Tongmi".
◆ The former site of the telecommunications station of the Red Fourth Front Army.
With the experience of deciphering the first password, it is much easier to break the others. Later, as long as the enemy's radio station used "Tongmi" to send a telegram, they could pick up the microphone and read the contents of the telegram directly to the head of the Red Fourth Front Army. After that, Cai Wei, Song Kanfu, and Wang Zigang worked together to decipher the codes of the warlords of various factions in Sichuan, and opened up an important way to obtain the enemy's core intelligence. The radio communications of the Sichuan warlords were no longer "secret" to the Red Army. Cai Wei, Song Kanfu, and Wang Zigang were the "tinder" from Shanghai, known as the "Three Heroes of Intelligence" of the Red Fourth Front Army, and they jointly deciphered the "Book from Heaven" and left a glorious and legendary page in the history of the Red Fourth Front Army.
Technical reconnaissance "breaks" the Sichuan army
In October 1933, Chiang Kai-shek appointed Liu Xiang, the great warlord of Sichuan, as the "Commander-in-Chief of the Sichuan Suppression of Bandits". Liu Xiang declared that he would "eliminate the red bandits within March." He deployed the "Outline of Suppressing the Red Army" of the "Six-Way Siege", gathered about 200,000 troops from 111 regiments, and 18 planes to assist in the battle. On November 16, Liu Xiang ordered all sides to launch the first phase of the general offensive. At this time, Cai Wei led the second station to follow the former enemy headquarters on the Eastern Front, and the main task was to listen to and decipher the secret messages of various units of the Sichuan Army and inform the general headquarters of the Red Fourth Front Army of the enemy situation in a timely manner. At the same time that Liu Xiang ordered the general attack, Cai Wei deciphered the important telegram and reported it to the commander-in-chief Xu Xiangqian in a timely manner, and then closely monitored every move of the enemy army day and night, and the military information he intercepted and deciphered was timely and accurate, providing a basis for the correct decision-making of the Party Central Committee and the General Headquarters of the Red Fourth Front Army, and laying the foundation for a brilliant victory in the anti-"six-way siege." At the end of 1933, Cai Wei intercepted the intelligence that Wang Lingji, the former commander of the enemy's army, attempted to storm the dangerous peak of Bijia Mountain, our forward position. The General Headquarters of the Red Fourth Front Army quickly concentrated its forces and surrounded the enemy in a roundabout way, fighting a beautiful battle of annihilation.
◆Maoyu Town, Tongjiang County.
On March 3, 1934, Liu Xiang issued the second phase of the general offensive order. Cai Wei devoted all his energy to listening to enemy radio stations. However, he found that the telegrams were translated in gibberish words. It turned out that the passwords of Liu Xiang's various departments had changed, which brought problems to Cai Wei and others. As the head of the front desk, he must decipher Liu Xiang's new code as soon as possible, and the decipherment of the new code will take time. The situation on the battlefield is changing rapidly, and if the enemy's secret messages cannot be deciphered in time, he, the "eyes and ears" of the General Headquarters of the Red Army Front, will fail, and the Red Army soldiers will have to pay a heavy price with their lives.
At this time, hundreds of incomprehensible messages became the basic analysis materials in Cai Wei's hands. After repeated comparisons and several days and nights of hard thinking, Cai Wei finally found out that Liu Xiang's new password was encrypted on the basis of the old password. The master key was found, and almost all doors could be opened. Cai Wei soon detected the enemy's intelligence. Xu Xiangqian made a new military deployment based on the information provided by Cai Wei.
Later, the enemy's military deployment failed to escape Cai Wei's "clairvoyance". Through Xu Xiangqian's accurate command, the enemy was defeated in successive battles. In this way, Liu Xiang's second general offensive finally failed. In late April, Liu Xiang handed over command to Xu Shaozong, the newly appointed commander of the Third Division. Xu moved forward to Shiwochang and Wulong Pass, and fought fiercely with the enemy's Third Division for six days and nights, annihilating one brigade and one regiment of the enemy, totaling more than 4,000 people. Xu Bu was hit hard by this and had to retreat more than ten miles and turn to defense. Tongjiang, the capital of Sichuan and Shaanxi, was still in the hands of the Red Army. At this point, Liu Xiang's third attack failed again.
◆ TV series "Breaking the Secret".
"Living Bodhisattva" in the Red Army
In the anti-"six-way siege," the enemy, relying on its large number of troops and sophisticated weapons, frequently launched rampant attacks on our troops, and the battles often appeared to the extent of incandescent intensity, and the radio station was in a very critical situation for a time. Deputy commander-in-chief Wang Shusheng ordered Cai Wei to retreat many times, but he never stopped working, always stuck in front of the radio station and listened carefully, intercepted the enemy's Taiwan intelligence, and sometimes did not close his eyes for several days, monitoring the enemy's every move.
The Kuomintang invested a total of 200,000 troops in the "six-way siege", with the help of aircraft and artillery, while the Red Fourth Front Army first had only 15,000 poorly equipped troops, and later only 80,000. This surprised some commanders at the front, and they asked Chen Changhao, political commissar of the Red Fourth Front Army: "Where did you get such accurate information?" Chen Changhao replied wittily: "Me! There is a 'bodhisattva' enshrined in the room, and when the enemy is ready to attack, this 'bodhisattva' will tell me. Who this mysterious "Bodhisattva" is, everyone does not know for a while.
◆ Prince Gang
In August 1934, our army finally defeated Liu Xiang's "Six-Way Siege", annihilated 80,000 enemies, and achieved a brilliant victory. At the commendation meeting, Chen Changhao, on behalf of the headquarters of the Red Fourth Front Army, issued a commendation order to Cai Wei and rewarded 300 pieces of Dayang. At this time, everyone knew that this mysterious "Bodhisattva" turned out to be Cai Wei. Cai Wei gave all 300 pieces of Dayang to the comrades of Ertai, and also distributed them to the horsemen and men. He said: "The achievements of the radio station are the result of everyone's efforts, not me alone. ”
In 1986, the Third Department of the General Staff Department held a "Symposium on Radio Technical Reconnaissance of the Red Fourth Front Army" and pointed out: "At that time, we deciphered the codes used by the enemy army quite thoroughly, provided a steady stream of intelligence to the general headquarters, and knew the enemy situation well. In the course of the 'three-way siege' and 'six-way siege' launched by the Red Fourth Front Army to smash the enemy, as well as in the course of the Long March, every major action decision was based on technical reconnaissance information, and every major victory was achieved thanks to the technical reconnaissance personnel. Without the technical investigation work to provide accurate and reliable information, it will be very difficult to achieve victory in a situation where the enemy is strong and we are weak, and there is a huge disparity in strength. ”
It can be said that this is a very high evaluation, affirming the extraordinary achievements of Cai Wei and his comrades-in-arms.
Respond to the central government
At the beginning of 1935, the Central Red Army's Long March arrived in Guizhou, but it was intercepted and pursued by the enemy, and the situation was dangerous, and there was no time to listen to the enemy's radio broadcast. At this time, Cai Wei took the initiative to track the enemy radio station, detected the enemy situation in front and behind the Central Red Army, and then sent a report to the Central Red Army. However, the Central Red Army marched and fought during the day, and could not report until after camping at night. Therefore, Cai Wei puts on headphones at six or seven o'clock every night and waits for the other party's call sign, and often waits until midnight to receive and receive telegrams. In order to overcome fatigue and fatigue, he often washed his hair with cold water or smoked cigarettes to refresh himself, and the next day he had to listen to the transcription, identify, and rewrite as usual. After the Red Fourth Front Army joined forces with the Central Red Army, a comrade of the Central Red Army Radio said: "The information provided by the Red Fourth Front Army Radio was fast and accurate, and it played a certain role in helping the First Front Army to get rid of the enemy's encirclement, pursuit, and interception. After the end of the Long March, when Mao Zedong met Song Kanfu in Yan'an, he said: "You comrades of the Red Fourth Army Radio have worked hard and have merit!" When we were in difficulty, before and after the four crossings of Chishui, it was you who provided information that enabled us to overcome the difficulties relatively smoothly. ”
◆ Statue of Cai Weili.
In July 1935, shortly after joining forces with the Central Red Army, Cai Wei served as the director of the Second Bureau of the General Headquarters of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, responsible for intelligence reconnaissance. Although he is the supreme leader of the second bureau, he often spends all night listening to deciphering. The harsh war environment and long-term excessive selfless work have seriously damaged Cai Wei's health. In August 1936, he suffered from stomach problems, enteritis, and finally severe typhoid fever. Until his life was in danger, he was still lying on a stretcher and deciphered the secret messages between Ma Bufang, Zhu Shaoliang, Chiang Kai-shek and the Chongqing camp. On September 22, a ruthless illness took Cai Wei's young life at the age of 29.
Due to the particularity of underground work and technical investigation work, Cai Wei's deeds have been little known for a long time after the founding of New China. Cai Wei's old comrades-in-arms Song Kanfu, Wang Zigang, Xiao Quanfu, Chen Fuchu, Ma Wenbo, Li Yongyi, etc., searched for the martyrs' hometowns and their bereaved families in many ways. After several twists and turns, clues were found in Ningde, Fujian Province in March 1985. In May, the veteran comrades in Beijing entrusted Ma Wenbo to lead the comrades of the History Office of the Third Department of the General Staff Department to Ningde for on-the-spot investigation, and finally verified Cai Wei's hometown and relatives. In September, President Li Xiannian, Marshal Xu Xiangqian, and Comrade Wang Zhaoguo successively gave instructions. On November 4 of the same year, the Fujian Provincial People's Government officially recognized Comrade Cai Wei as a revolutionary martyr. In July 1986, Marshal Xu Xiangqian commemorated the 50th anniversary of the martyr Cai Wei's sacrifice with an inscription: "Unknown Hero Cai Wei. ”
◆ Xu Xiangqian Marshal inscription.
Comrade Cai Wei is a well-deserved "unsung hero" who has devoted his life's efforts to the revolutionary cause in obscurity, and can be called the "father of China's red radio waves". His extraordinary achievements and short and magical life constitute a gorgeous and colorful picture, which will be remembered through the ages and forever in the annals of history.
[Author: Fu Yiqun Source: "Party History"
Editor: Guo Xiaoli
Editor-in-charge: Chen Yanru
Editor: Xiang Dongmin]