In 1934, the Kuomintang carried out the fifth "encirclement and suppression" against the Red Army and its base areas and the Red Army's counter-"encirclement and suppression". In a sense, its military command was a contest between two German military advisers on Chinese soil.In view of the lessons learned from the failures of the previous four "encirclement and suppression" campaigns, Chiang Kai-shek changed course and implemented the "encirclement and suppression" strategy of "strategic offensive, tactical defensive" based on the suggestion of the German military adviser von Sickert this time. The fortress tactics of step by step, building roads and building blockhouses while advancing, gradually encroached on the Central Soviet Area.

At the same time, as Sickert's opponent, Li De, a German military adviser to the Red Army, made a huge strategic mistake.With the huge disparity in the strength of the two sides, he formulated the fortress strategy and tactics of "resisting the enemy outside the country's gates". It is required to build blockhouses on the main roads of cities, towns, and villages in the south of Lichuan and north of Guangchang in Jiangxi, and divide troops to guard them, fortify everywhere, and fight for every inch of land. They also copied the dogma of European barricade warfare and ordered the Red Army to build fortress-style defenses. In terms of positions, the tactics of "fighting bunkers against bunkers" and "short assaults" were adopted to fight positional warfare against the overwhelmingly dominant Kuomintang army and fight for consumption.Li De's wrong command finally caused the Red Army to block east and west, and it was hard to deal with it. Although it fought hard, it suffered heavy casualties, the number of soldiers was dwindling, and the land was shrinking day by day. Finally, it had to abandon the Central Soviet Area, break through the encirclement and march westward, and carry out a strategic shift.The contest between the two Germans is indeed thought-provoking.

Von Sickert was born into a noble family in Prussia.During the First World War, he successively served as Chief of Staff of the Eleventh Mackensen Army Corps, the Archduke Karl's Corps, the Archduke Joseph Corps and the Supreme Commander of the Turkish Legion, the Chief of Staff of the German Army, and the German Delegation of the Paris Peace Conference after the war. military representative. From 1920 to 1926, he served as the commander-in-chief of the German Wehrmacht, and proposed and implemented a plan to establish a 100,000 "pocket army", thus laying the foundation for the re-emergence of the German army. In 1926, he was promoted to the first rank of general and soon retired.Later, he was ordered by Hitler to come to China to serve as Chiang Kai-shek's senior military adviser.The reason why Hitler chose him to help Chiang in China was not only because he had rich military experience, but more importantly, he was a follower of Hitler's fascist dictatorship, and he was an out-and-out Nazi, who could make Hitler's fascist dictatorship go away. Doctrine goes global.

As soon as von Sickert arrived in China, he sold Hitler's dictatorship to Chiang Kai-shek over and over again-the majority must not be allowed to decide the system, only the leader can make the decision.Leaders need advisors, but advisors are only for leaders to be more dictatorial.The absolute authority of the leader is necessary for the efficient and fast operation of the state apparatus, and this kind of authority can only be produced under a dictatorship.Major issues cannot be resolved with resolutions and majority votes, which will often make things messy, and the final decision still depends on the leader's personal will, which can only be resolved with iron blood...

Von Sickert's remarks undoubtedly had a great influence on Chiang Kai-shek. Of course, Chiang Kai-shek did not fully accept it. It is possible to rule the world by force, but it is not enough. Since the fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression" in the Central Soviet Area, what von Sickert never expected was that in the ranks of the Red Army, there was a German named Li De who was fighting him to the death.They coincidentally adopted the same tactic, but fought each other through two Chinese armies.As early as the barricade in Munich, the two had already contested.But at that time, the identities of the two people were different, Feng?Sickert was the commander-in-chief of the National Defense Forces commanding thousands of troops, while Li De was an inconspicuous soldier who participated in the uprising.After arriving in China, the two German consultants spared no effort to fight, Feng?Sickert commanded Jiang's army according to the combat doctrine of the German army, and Li De commanded the Red Army according to the doctrine of the Soviet army. As a result, Li De's military doctrine and tactics were defeated by Feng?A subordinate of Sickert's regularization tactics.Feng?Sickert saw the Red Army's base area retreating steadily under the siege of his fortress tactics, and had a short-term excitement, but Feng?Sickert did not have time to wait for the realization of his glorious dream, so he returned to China in 1935, and soon died of illness.

Li De was born on September 18, 1900 in Ismaning, a suburb of Munich, Germany. At the age of 19, he participated in the battle to defend the Bavarian Soviet Republic. During the 29-day barricade battle, he held a Mauser gun and commanded the workers' brothers to fight bloody battles with the counter-revolutionary armed soldiers.His combat experience on the Austrian and Italian fronts enabled him to perform exceptionally well in barricade battles. After the failure of the Bavarian Defense War, he fled to Hamburg in the autumn of 1919 and joined the Hamburg Communist Party from 1920 to 1921. At the beginning of 1921, he worked in the Military and Political Intelligence Office of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party.In the past two years, he read a large number of military treatises, and also familiarized himself with the biographies of Napoleon, Suvorov, Caesar, etc., but he dismissed the biographies of Eastern military strategists.Therefore, he is almost ignorant about the history of the East, including the customs.After he arrived in China, he did not understand China's national conditions at all, so it is not surprising that his command failed.Wu Xiuquan gave a rough description of Li De's style of carrying out combat command or the so-called personality characteristics.He clearly remembers, "Li De's arbitrariness replaced the collective leadership of the Military Commission, and even abandoned the successful experience of the Red Army's years of bloody battles. Li De hid in the house alone and directed the battle with maps. The maps at that time were some simple ones. The sketch had large errors and was not accurate enough, so Li De didn't ask, so his command was often very different from the actual situation on the front line. The distance on the map was only a hundred miles, and he didn't ask whether it was a mountain road or a flat road, or whether it was a mountain road or a flat road. Give the troops time to eat and rest, regardless of the enemy's situation, weather and natural conditions, etc., and only use the scale to measure the distance on the map to calculate the distance, and set the time for arrival and battle, and often leave no room. The actions of the commanders of the Red Army brought great difficulties, some of which were simply impossible to overcome, and often prevented the troops from going into battle on time, so that they were inevitably defeated. This was originally caused by Li De's blind command of subjectivism, but But he always reprimands and reprimands others, loses his temper and swears at others, and can’t listen to objections at all. Our staff who are in front of him are often angry with him.”From the perspective of a translator, Wu Xiuquan deeply felt that Li De's combat command of "only thinking, only thinking, and not reality" was "inevitable to suffer defeat".

During the time when Li De monopolized the command of the Red Army, Wu Liping, who was a staff officer of the Operations Section of the Red Army Headquarters, personally experienced Li De's so-called formal combat command procedures from the perspective of performing the staff function, specializing in reporting and issuing information from the lower levels.From Wu Liping's memories, it is not difficult for people to imagine concretely and vividly: in Ruijin, in the "independent house" specially prepared for him at the Red Army headquarters, whenever Li De received a telegram about the military situation, he would always surround him. Looking at the big map in his room, he paced around in circles, puffing cigarettes incessantly, while furrowing his brows and thinking hard.Sometimes I draw around on the map with a red and blue pencil, and sometimes I move the scale of the map to measure east and west.Then, he dictated his instructions with a serious expression, and Wu Xiuquan translated them into Chinese telegrams, and quickly handed them over to Zhou Enlai, vice chairman of the Central Revolutionary Military Commission, and forwarded them to Zhu De, Liu Bocheng, etc. of the Military Commission, or Bogu, Luo Fu, etc. of the Party Central Committee to sign the order for execution.Li De draws up the battle command plan, usually including where the sentry stands, where a mortar or a bunker is placed, and other details that can be flexibly determined by middle and lower commanders. Directly notify the relevant troops to calibrate according to the map.At that time, the Red Army used a map of 1:100,000, which was not drawn by field survey method but by interrogation method. There were many errors and large errors. Some even reversed the place names and the positions of the enemy and us, and even appeared "" There is an enemy among us, and there is an enemy among us".Therefore, Li De's "map command" often caused undue losses to the troops.In addition, Li De didn't understand the actual situation, and he often changed the order day and night, which made the frontline commanders have countless chests, tossing back and forth, at a loss, and in a hurry, which resulted in many favorable opportunities being missed.

Li De seldom leaves his special office - "independent house" to go to the front for field investigations and battlefield command. Instead, he simply checked whether his "regularized" orders like "imperial decree" had been "unconditionally" implemented and implemented on the front line.Therefore, day after day, the army concluded a rule, that is, every time Li De went to the front line, the commanders and fighters of the army would be unlucky.Once, Tang Tianji, director of the Political Department of the 14th Division of the Fifth Red Army Corps, went to inspect the position and saw a lonely bunker built on a hill.From the perspective of military common sense, such an independent and obvious target is the easiest to attract enemy artillery fire.In order to avoid being beaten and give full play to the fire support and cover function of the bunker, Tang Tianji instructed the troops to build fortifications at the riverside to facilitate concealment and firepower.The fortifications had just been built when Li De came. He took the positional arrangement and construction plans that had been drawn in the "independent house" and compared them on the spot. Rebuked: "Who asked to build fortifications by the river?" He immediately ordered the fortifications to be destroyed and Tang Tianji was removed from his post.

However, after the battle broke out, the enemy's artillery destroyed the bunker built on the top of the hill according to Li De's order with only one shot. Unfortunately, all the Red Army soldiers who guarded the bunker were killed. Peng Dehuai, as a famous general who is famous at home and abroad, also proved with irrefutable facts from the perspective of war command that Li De can only be regarded as a "tactician who works on the map" at best.But such a person was sent by the Communist International to China as a military adviser in 1932.Although he is a consultant, due to his special and prominent status, he has become the supreme leader of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and he alone has the final say on all major and minor matters.He was too blindly confident and insisted on going his own way, which caused irreparable and huge losses to the Chinese revolution.

The failure of the defense of Guangchang in the Red Army's fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression" showed that the contest between the two Germans finally decided the outcome. , "resist across the board" tactics bankrupt.From April 10 to 28, 1934, the 19th Red Army Corps and the 14th Defense Division fought fiercely with Chiang Kai-shek's 11 divisions in Guangchang for 18 days, ending with the loss of more than 5,500 people and the loss of Guangchang. The soldiers withdrew from Guangchang with tears and hatred.Guangchang is the northern gateway of the Central Soviet Area. Later, Huichang and Junmenling, the northern gates, also fell one after another. The enemy penetrated deep into the Soviet area. The Red Army's hope of defeating the Kuomintang's fifth "encirclement and suppression" on the inner line was completely shattered. The Chinese revolution was facing severe challenges. test.