Chapter 373 10. Ye Fei talked about the lessons and reasons of Kinmen’s defeat

The defeat in the Battle of Kinmen was "a major loss since the War of Liberation".6,000 people died heroically in two batches of PLA landing troops (more than 9,000 people in three regiments), and 3,000 people were captured.The Kuomintang army suffered more than 7,000 casualties.During the war, Chiang Ching-kuo flew from Taipei to Kinmen to "laojun", and he couldn't help lamenting the impression of the battlefield: "Overlooking the whole island, it is desolate to the eye", "corpses are everywhere, bloody and bloody". ("Jiang Jingguo's Self-Report", p. 298)

When reviewing the reasons for the defeat, Sanye pointed out that the defeat in the Battle of Kinmen was "not due to the strength or tenacity of the enemy, but due to the guiding ideology (heavy buildings but not heavy money), (belittle the enemy's impatience), lack of meticulous organizational work and technical Fully prepared, affected by climate change and geographical conditions, the follow-up troops could not continue to cross the sea and land, resulting in a huge disparity in numbers, and this tragic result." ("Political Work Instructions of the Political Department of the Third Field Army Concerning the Failure of the Battle of Kinmen")

Specifically, the main reasons are: First, the preparations were misguided. Ye Fei, the commander of the 10th Corps, recalled: "When it was later revealed that Jinmen had not yet been liberated, I was about to move the Corps headquarters to Xiamen. This was a mistake, because it affected the preparations for the liberation of Jinmen." The reason for this mistake is, "This is because they underestimated the Kinmen, and believed that the Kinmen has no fortifications." ("Memoirs of Ye Fei", PLA Press, 1988 edition, p. 598) Second, paralyze and underestimate the enemy.Due to the smooth progress of the battle in Fujian and the victory in the attack on Xiamen, subjectively, the thoughts and emotions of underestimating the enemy and paralyzing arise.

Third, lack of experience in crossing the sea and landing.Insufficient understanding of the transition from mainland operations to sea operations, and the difficulties of crossing the sea, and lack of experience in crossing the sea and landing, they only "attacked 30,000 enemies on Kinmen Island with 3 and a half regiments of 9,000 people. Besieged, the whole army is destroyed." ("Mao Zedong Military Anthology" Volume 6) Fourth, there is a lack of unified command of operations.Mao Zedong believed that "three regiments with different organizational systems participated in the battle of Jinmen, and there was no unified commander. The three regiment leaders fought independently." ("Mao Zedong Military Collection" Volume 6)

The lessons of the defeat in the Battle of Kinmen are extremely painful. It once again proved the famous sayings of Mao Zedong and Zhu De: "Despise the enemy in strategy, but be cautious in battle", and "Fight a weak enemy as a strong one." When Ye Fei summed up the lessons of the defeat in this battle, he said: First, there are not enough ships, and they can only carry 3 regiments at a time, and so few such precious ships were stranded on the beach after the first batch of landings, and all were lost, so that the subsequent second echelon could not land at all. Second, it violated the law of crossing the sea and landing operations.In cross-sea landing operations, no matter how strong your troops are, you must first capture and consolidate the landing beachhead, and then you can develop in depth... The 28th Army landed and first captured the Kinmen Guningtou beachhead, which is right; however, the first echelon The landing troops did not immediately build fortifications and consolidate the beachhead position. The second echelon had not yet arrived. They only controlled Guningtou with one battalion and then developed in depth.

Third, when the troops of the three regiments of the first echelon landed, there was not a division commander who accompanied the landing and unified command.From a macro point of view, the lesson of the failure of attacking Jinmen is that under the conditions of modern warfare, it is very difficult to carry out large-scale crossing and landing operations without sea and air control. ("Memoirs of Ye Fei", pp. 606-608)