Chapter 5 The Fifth Session

When did the fate of the Red Army and the fate of the Soviet Area be controlled by Li De, a foreigner? Reed's original name was Otto Braun, and German was his mother tongue.After retiring, he lived in East Berlin and died in the autumn of 1974.Li De was named after he was dispatched to China by the International Communist Organization. During Li De’s stay in China, he used many names. Otto Braun is the name on his passport, and Karl Wager, Waffle is his name when he published an article in the Red Army News, and Many aliases.Li De is his commonly used Chinese name, which means a German surnamed Li.

Li De was born on September 18, 1900 in Ismaning, a suburb of Munich, Germany. His father was an accountant and his mother was a teacher.His father died very early, when Li Decai was 6 years old, he was sent to a Catholic orphanage, where he received elementary education.He is very hardworking, has been doing well during his studies, and has won a scholarship.By 1913, a teacher's college in Munich admitted him exceptionally. In 1918, when the First World War was in full swing, he enlisted in the army and served on the front lines in Austria and Italy. At that time, he was still a private and was always at the forefront of the battle.Blood and fire made him mature quickly, and at the same time made him conceited.After World War I he returned to Munich, where he received his diploma from the Teachers College in the same year.

Li De started his revolutionary activities when he was in school. In 1917 he joined the Social Democratic Youth Opposition. In April 1919, he joined the Socialist Youth League, the predecessor of the German Communist Youth League. Elected to the Munich committee of the Liberal Socialist Youth League and was responsible for the secondary school student organization. At the age of 19, he participated in the battle to defend the Bavarian Soviet Republic. During the 29-day barricade, he held a Mauser gun and commanded the workers to fight bloody battles with counter-revolutionary armed soldiers. , performed exceptionally well.

After the failure of the Battle of Bavaria, he was arrested and imprisoned for three full months, and then he was released by mistake because of an accidental incident. In the autumn of 1919, he fled to Hamburg. From 1920 to 1921, he joined the Hamburg party organization.In the past two years, he read a large number of various treatises on military affairs, and also familiarized himself with the biographies of "Napoleon", "Suvorov", "Caesar", etc., but he dismissed the biographies of Eastern military strategists. .Therefore, he is ignorant about the history of the East, including customs and customs.After he came to China, he didn't understand Chinese history, let alone Chinese peasants, which led to the failure of his command. This kind of ending is not surprising to people today.

At the end of 1921, he was arrested and imprisoned again, and fell into the hands of opponents. This time, no one released him, but he himself united with the detainees in the prison, escaped together, and finally succeeded. At the beginning of 1924, he was transferred to the Central Committee to do intelligence work, engaged in special work against spies and fascist organizations. In 1924, he met the young woman Olga Benario and absorbed her into the work of the party.They became husband and wife.However, because of their special identities and jobs, their love was always short-lived. In the autumn of 1926, the couple were both arrested and put in Moabit Prison.Three months later, Olga was released, while Otto Braun was imprisoned until the spring of 1928.Life in prison enabled him to learn Russian and English. In April 1928, with the help of his comrades in arms and his wife Olga, he successfully escaped from prison again.After escaping from prison, he lived in hiding, and later the German Communist Party secretly sent him to the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union at that time, the October Revolution had already won, and the status of communism played a pivotal role in the world. It was the paradise yearned for by communists all over the world.At that time, Li De systematically studied the revolutionary experience and military science of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, and also received formal training. In the early 1930s, the attention of the international working class and the communist movement gradually turned to China. At that time, communists from all over the world did not engage in such a great mass armed movement like China, and the Communist International also supported Chinese Revolutionary Communist Movement.

In 1932, the Comintern Hospitality Committee sent Li De to China, and the Communist International organization selected him to come to China entirely because of Li De's unusual experience.The Comintern wanted the Chinese Revolution to be a repeat of the Russian Revolution, and urban uprisings were the basis for the victory of the October Revolution.Li De arrived in Harbin in the spring of 1932, then took a train to Dalian, and then took a ship to Shanghai. In autumn, he stayed in the old-fashioned Astor Hotel.About a month later, he moved into an American-style apartment.At that time, he could not speak a word of Chinese. Due to his ignorance of Chinese history, he only saw superficial phenomena of the situation of the Chinese revolution at that time, but his enthusiasm was high.He wants to paint his ideal future on the blank paper of China.Through his efforts, the Communist International provided a large amount of funds and instruments to the Red Rescue Society in Shanghai at that time through the Bank of Berlin.

As soon as Li De arrived in China, he quickly showed his German style of work, rigorous and diligent. He took Smedley's letter of introduction to Peiping, and through Smedley's introduction, he got to know Edgar Snow and Helen Snow again.The Snows were teaching at Yenching University at the time, and the couple didn't trust the pompous German very much, and Li De didn't trust them at the same time. When Li De arrived in China, the Communist underground organization in Shanghai had collapsed under Chiang Kai-shek's secret attack, and many Communists were shot to death.The White Terror made the Communist Party hardly have a place to stay in China at that time, only the Zhu and Mao Central Soviet Areas in southern Jiangxi were in a state of prosperity.The leadership of the Shanghai Party transferred from Shanghai to Ruijin, Jiangxi at the beginning of 1933.Li De arrived in Ruijin later. During his stay in Shanghai, he waited for Manfred Stern, another senior consultant sent by an international organization. His Russian alias was Fred.

Shanghai was the center of the Soviet Union's underground activities. The intelligence personnel of many international organizations were German or American, and the Americans were the most popular.Fred, who went by the pseudonym Kleber, rose to prominence during the Spanish Civil War. Like Reed, he served in the Australian and Hungarian armies in World War I, was captured by the Russians, and after joining the Bolsheviks he joined the Soviet Union Civil War, followed by going to the Frunze Military Academy. After Li De arrived in China, he knew that he supported the faction led by Nebogu of the Chinese Communist Party, which was composed of a group of Chinese youths who had studied in Moscow and firmly supported the Soviet line. Wang Ming was their leader.As soon as Li De arrived in China, he quickly gained the trust of Bogu and the Soviet supporters. He talked about Caesar, Tacitus, Napoleon to Bogu and others... and even talked about regular wars.As soon as Li De arrived in China, he quickly rejected Mao Zedong's guerrilla warfare. He believed that the Red Army's time was ripe and it was time to fight regular warfare, so he implemented his barricade tactics, which he summed up as "violent short-term assaults." This tactic did not effectively wipe out Chiang Kai-shek's troops. On the contrary, it allowed Chiang Kai-shek's troops to make progress and eat up the Soviet area bit by bit.

Bogu and others did not blindly admire Li De's political ideas and combat methods from the beginning, but their ideas coincided with each other to a certain extent, that is, they used the serious differences with Mao Zedong's thought as the point of communication. In that "independent house" surrounded by paddy fields, Li De and Bogu communicated quickly.Li De and Bo Gu agreed that Mao Zedong was just an ignorant countryman, that Marxism-Leninism could not emerge from the valleys, and it was impossible to build a Marxist society in backward counties.They all agreed that the Red Army needed large corps to fight big battles, and had the opportunity to capture big cities like Changsha and Fuzhou.In this coincident atmosphere, an atmosphere of rejection of Mao Zedong was formed.Finally, with the help of the International Communist Organization, they finally succeeded. Not only did they deprive Mao Zedong of his military power and party power, but they were still worried about Mao Zedong, who had only one title left.

When Li De came to China, he was only as a consultant. In fact, it was Bogu and others who handed over power to Li De, resulting in successive defeats of the Red Army.In "The Long March—The Unheard Story" written by Harrison Salisbury, there is such a description of the relationship between Li De and the Chinese commander. At first, Li De got the military commander Thanks to their extensive support, even Zhu De visited him in that "Li House" almost every day to ask him for advice.The other generals treated him in the same way, and Li De also got influential Luo Fu (who had worked as a newspaper editor in San Francisco's Chinatown and a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley) and Wang Jiaxiang, one of the wounded army chiefs. full support. There are also some army commanders, especially Peng Dehuai, the outspoken commander of the 3rd Army, who had a dispute with Li De very early on. Being ambiguous, he asked Li De for advice and listened carefully to his opinions, so later some people accused him of being a bit flattering sometimes. The attitude of a commander like Liu Bocheng is unquestionable. He openly questioned Li De, sometimes when he encountered some minor incidents—for example, once, Li De beat someone in Liu's army on the battlefield and withdrew them. That person's job—the two have disputes. Sometimes it was more serious matters. For example, one day Li De scolded Liu Bocheng, Chief of the General Staff, accusing him of ineffective command on the battlefield.Li De asked: "How could you have studied in Frunze? In my opinion, you are just a mediocre staff member. You wasted your time in the Soviet Union." The translator Wu Xiuquan did not take these curse words They were all translated, and he felt obliged to try to ease the relationship.But Liu Bocheng understood completely.Like Li De, he also studied at the Frunze Academy in Moscow. He has a high level of Russian and is a firm and somewhat pedantic general. Under the blind command of Bo Gu, Li De and others, the casualties of the Red Army continued to increase, with the loss of 2,000-3,000 people in each battle, and one county after another fell into the hands of the enemy, which caused complaints from many commanders.This was not the case when Mao Zedong was in command.Zhou Enlai once told Edgar Snow that the Red Army lost 60,000 people in the fifth campaign against encirclement and suppression.This has never happened in the past, the most serious is the Guangchang Battle from April 11th to 28th, 1934, 4000 people were killed and 20000 people were injured.This was the worst blow ever suffered by the Red Army.This cleared the way for Chiang Kai-shek to take Ruijin, only 50 miles away, sooner or later.In fact, the frontline headquarters of the Red Army had already been transferred to Ruijin before the battle was over. Peng Dehuai's 3rd Army always bears the brunt of the battle, and Peng is quite annoyed by this style of play.When Li De and Bo Gu came to the front to inspect and command the battle, Peng reported sadly that 1,000 men were lost on the first day of the battle, and a battalion sent to guard the "permanent" bunker was all killed.The bunker complex was built according to Li De's order. The bombing of the Kuomintang planes and artillery leveled the position, while the Red Army had neither aircraft nor artillery.Peng pointed out that this battle cannot be fought so hard. There was a fierce quarrel that night. Li De said that Peng should launch a counterattack, but Peng asked him how the army could counterattack without bullets?Peng was so excited that he almost shouted, saying that Li De's order was wrong from the beginning, and that the Red Army had not fought a good battle since the fifth anti-encirclement campaign (that is, during Li De's command)!He went on shouting: "You dogmatists are nothing but tactical experts on the map and on paper!" Peng Dehuai went on to say: "Thanks to the high awareness of the Red Army soldiers, otherwise the 1st and 3rd armies would have been wiped out by the entire army." Peng shouted: "Your plan has caused a lot of sacrifices, don't you feel guilty in your conscience? Don't you feel heartache?" Peng Dehuai compared Li De to a person who doesn't feel heartache like "a boy selling his father's land".The translator Wu Xiuquan translated Peng's words, but he couldn't understand the story of the descendants selling the land.General Yang Shangkun explained that this was a Hunanese statement, and Peng always used this to criticize Li De for casually sacrificing the lives of Red Army soldiers. Li De didn't get angry at that time, which surprised Peng. It turned out that Wu Xiuquan softened his wording during the translation. He asked General Yang Shangkun to translate it again. This time the expected effect was achieved. Li De understood it. Curse him, call him a "feudal head".Peng Dehuai responded politely, then packed his backpack, preparing to be transferred back to Ruijin, removed from his post as commander, interrogated, sentenced, prepared to lose his party membership, and even shot."I was ready for everything and I didn't care about anything," he recalls. To his amazement, nothing happened. From this point, it can be seen that Li De is not unreasonable. Because of Wang Ming's line, Mao Zedong and others were squeezed out, and Bogu was appointed as the person in charge of the temporary central government at this time.He was only twenty-four or five years old at that time, and he could not compare with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and others in terms of qualifications and level.History has its contingencies and inevitability. Wang Mingyuan was in the Soviet Union, and he wanted to find an incarnation of himself in China. In this way, Bogu was pushed to the fore. For Bogu himself, gaining such a high level of power made him feel both nervous and excited.He himself knew that both ability and qualifications were still lacking.When history pushed himself on such a stage, he tried every means to play this role well. The decision-making power for the fate of hundreds of thousands of Red Army fell into his hands at once, and he himself sometimes felt uneasy. Among the highest "three-person group", he had to rely heavily on Li De and Zhou Enlai.He has studied the books of Marxism-Leninism many times, but he has almost no practical experience in the military. Even the theory of combat has undergone short-term training at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. The "encirclement and suppression" by an army of 100,000 to a million is useless.However, Li De's sound military theory and Li De's unusual status made him quickly obey Li Deyan, thus creating a military adviser sent by the International Communist Organization to take charge of the fate of the Red Army.In the highest "group of three", even if Zhou Enlai had different opinions, it was also a situation of two votes to one vote. Therefore, it is difficult for Zhou Enlai to make a difference in decision-making besides executing orders and doing some specific work.After all, China is not Germany, let alone the Soviet Union. Li De's experience in barricade warfare and urban revolution seems to be weak in the Soviet area.It is not surprising that the Red Army started from the fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression" to the final defeat in the early stage of the Western Expedition. In the book "Red Star Shines Over China", Snow introduced Bogu in this way: Bo Gu is one of the most personable and interesting CCP leaders I have ever met, and the youngest member of the Politburo.He is tall and lanky.Indeed, he was always in a state of extreme excitement, his movements were hasty and uncoordinated, he often laughed nervously, his teeth protruded, and his eyes bulged, especially through the glasses with deep myopia, the eyeballs seemed to protrude outward.Sir Archibald Clarke called him a "monster".He likes to play tennis and poker. He always wears a very short cut, like a hard brush on the top of his head. He has a quick mind and may be even sharper than Zhou Enlai... In December 1926, more than 60 people led by Bogu boarded the train to Moscow from Vladivostok.When the train passed through Siberia, there were white grasslands and woods everywhere, severe cold and snow everywhere.At that time, his heart was hot. Whenever he thought of the red star over the Kremlin, he wanted to shout something. Finally, the group of them, relying on their perseverance, overcame the severe cold and hunger, and finally came to Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. At that time, most of the professors at Sun Yat-sen University were Trotskyites, and the first president, Karl Radek, was a supporter of the Trotskyites.Bogu thought that Radek was a great principal. After Bogu and his party arrived at the school, it happened that Radek was giving a lecture on the history of the Chinese revolutionary movement. He heard for the first time from Radek the ambitions of Tsarist Russian imperialism for China and the incompetence of the Qing government.Later, Radek was involved in the vortex of the power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, which caused Radek to lose his post as headmaster.Radek was replaced by the original vice-principal, Miff, who was only 26 years old at the time. During Miff's presidency, he established the Institute of Chinese Studies at the university.He dismissed the Trotskyist professor, and Bogut's enthusiasm soon won Mif's affection.Wang Ming also won Miff's respect. On April 12, 1927, after Chiang Kai-shek's counter-revolutionary coup, the Communist Party of China held the Fifth Congress in Wuhan on April 27. Miff attended the meeting with his student Wang Ming, who he valued, and did not return to the Soviet Union until August. Mif participated in the Fifth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and after staying in China for three months, he regarded himself as an expert on China issues. At the same time, he was reused by Stalin, and was promoted to Minister of the China Department of the Communist International, and he was entrusted with preparing for the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. At the Fifth National Congress, Chen Duxiu and his gang excluded Mao Zedong from the congress, and Chen Duxiu was elected secretary.At that time, no one recognized Mao Zedong's methods at all, and Bogu even believed that Marxism-Leninism could not emerge from the valleys, and Mao Zedong was nothing more than a peasant uprising leader like Li Zicheng.These Chinese students in the Soviet Union were strongly influenced by the victory of the Russian Revolution, and the international organizations controlled the politics and military affairs of the Soviet area.Without exception, these students studying in the Soviet Union were entrusted with important tasks after returning to the Soviet area. It is not surprising that Mao Zedong was later excluded. Bogu looked down on Mao Zedong's methods, but what he admired was Li De's copying of the victorious experience of the Russian Revolution. Thus, there was the failure of the Red Army's fifth counter-campaign against "encirclement and suppression" to the early stage of the Long March.