Chapter 146 The Volunteer Army has found a way to deal with the powerful firepower of the United States

On October 29, 1951, the autumn offensive of the United Nations Army had just ended. Peng Dehuai notified the various departments of the Volunteer Army that from November to the end of the year, there would be no more major counter-offensive campaigns across the board. What are you doing? Build the tunnel!Requirements: All defensive points must be built with high standards of tunnel fortifications.In this way, hundreds of thousands of volunteer soldiers were not fighting in the forward positions, but were digging tunnels happily with picks and hammers, clanging and clanging. An experience, a model, has become a common practice of the entire army through promotion.

This is also an effective working method of the Chinese Communist Party. This method has been tried and tested. The establishment of a special zone, and then spread the effective experience of the special zone to the whole country, and the reform and opening up has achieved great success in this way. The Volunteer Army units also require that the thickness of tunnel entrances generally reach 10 to 15 meters.In the later period, the thickness of the top of some tunnels reached 50 meters, and ordinary shells and bombs could not collapse. At least two exits were dug in each tunnel. According to the requirements of the Volunteer Army Command, the tunnels must be protected against seven elements: anti-aircraft, anti-gun, anti-virus (epidemic), anti-rain, moisture-proof, fire-proof, and cold-proof.

In these underground tunnels, there are all kinds of combat facilities such as shooting fortifications, traffic trenches, main roads, and branch roads. Even dormitories, dining rooms, toilets, and even auditoriums have been moved into huge mountains by the volunteers. Tunnels are not only defensive, but also offensive; tunnels are not only battlefields, but also garrisons. In this way, the tunnels built by the Volunteer Army adapted to the requirements of long-term troop deployment and long-term combat; in this way, after solving the problem of not being passively beaten, the Volunteer Army finally completely realized the transformation from mobile warfare to positional defense warfare.

By August 1952, the Volunteer Army was on the front line of the 38th parallel. The six armies of the first echelon had built 200 kilometers of tunnels, 650 kilometers of traffic trenches, and more than 10,000 bunkers.A support-point defense system with tunnel fortifications as the backbone has gradually formed in North Korea. There are countless real underground Great Walls! On the 250-kilometer front across the Korean Peninsula, the Volunteer Army has formed a strong positional defense system with tunnels as the backbone, 20 to 30 kilometers deep, and support points. According to later statistics, the tunnels dug by the volunteers were as long as 1,250 kilometers, which is equivalent to digging a large stone tunnel from the coastal city of Lianyungang in China to Xi'an, a famous city in the west.

"The various trenches and traffic trenches dug by the volunteers have a total length of 6,240 kilometers and 60 million cubic meters of earth and stone. The amount of work is equivalent to building a Great Wall!" With the basic completion of the tunnel fortifications, the defensive positions of the Volunteers have become increasingly stable. During the defensive operations in the summer and autumn of 1951, the Americans fired an average of 40 to 60 shells to kill one volunteer; by the second half of 1952, the US military had to fire 660 shells to kill one volunteer. Tunnel combat was a new creation of the Chinese army in the Korean War, and a form of defensive combat with Chinese characteristics was created.

Knowing that our army's tunnel combat method was innovative, Mao Zedong told Zhou En: "The problem on our side was whether we could fight at first, and whether we could defend later. Now it seems that they have all been solved. The solution is to drill holes." In fact, Americans don’t know that the prototype of tunnel warfare—the tunnel warfare of the Jizhong War of Resistance during China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression—was described by Zhou Enlai, led by a man named Harrison?Foreman was introduced to the world by the famous American author and journalist. "The tunnel is connected by many artificial holes to form a series of vertical or inverted U shapes. It is easy to defend yourself in it, as long as a softball bat is enough." Foreman used American-style imagination to praise the tunnel war. .

Interestingly, the emergence of tunnel warfare also occurred during the most difficult period of the Anti-Japanese War. Lu Zhengcao, then commander of the Jizhong People's Self-Defense Force, was an advocate of this special method of warfare.According to the memory of the old general, the Japanese army built blockhouses, artillery towers, and roads in the occupied areas, and the soldiers and civilians in the Jizhong base area "looked up at the watchtowers and stepped on the roads."How to protect yourself?There is no way to create a way, so the anti-Japanese soldiers and civilians created this special method of warfare.

Ya?Norman said in the article: "For most Americans, war is an epic struggle of tanks, planes, ships and artillery. But I return from a part of the world where ... they are The war is fought in tunnels full of trap doors and secret entrances." No one expected that within 10 years, the U.S. military also encountered the "tunnel warfare" of the Chinese People's Volunteers on the Korean battlefield. He was the commander of the Jizhong Military Region and used an article "Tunnel Struggle on the Jizhong Plain" Yang Chengwu, who had promoted the development of tunnel warfare, used this tactic on the battlefield to resist US aggression and aid Korea.On the mountainous Korean battlefield, the general once again used this tactic to deduce a magical chapter in the history of war.From small horseshoe-shaped tunnels to Y-shaped, H-shaped, and chicken-claw-shaped tunnels... Under his leadership, the tunnels have developed from combat bunkers to integrate operations, command, and troops. Composed of rooms, grain and ammunition depots, water storage tanks, anti-virus doors, etc., it is an underground fortification that can prevent, fight, and live.The whole earth became the armor of the volunteer army.

This is one of the great miracles in the history of world wars.Throughout the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, the Volunteers dug a total of 1,250 kilometers of tunnels, and various trenches and traffic trenches as long as 6,240 kilometers.Tunnel warfare enabled the Volunteers to complete the transformation from mobile defense with mobility to position-holding defense, and reduced the front-line defense troops.During the entire period of positional warfare, the Volunteer Army wiped out a total of 533,200 enemies, nearly three times the total number of enemies wiped out in the five campaigns, but the casualties were basically equal between the enemy and us during the mobile warfare period, and decreased to 2.7:1.At most, the "United Nations Army" suffered more than 5,000 casualties a day.In the battle of Shangganling that shocked the world, the small tunnel played an extremely critical role.