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135 From the beginning, the Nationalist assault on Siping had been accompanied at the same time by an attack on the Communists at Benxi, an industrialcitysouthofShenyang.Aswenotedinchapter5,bothGeneral Du Yuming and his subordinate, General Zheng Dongguo, suggest (in their memoirs, written well after the fact) that Chiang Kai-shek and Xiong Shihui were responsible for the decision to fight the Communists on two fronts. When he returned to Manchuria in mid-April following his kidney surgery, Du Yuming had come to the conclusion that the Communist forces at Benxi were more vulnerable than those at Siping. Du then decided to set Siping to one side and to focus first on defeating —andideallydestroying—theCommunistforcesatBenxisothathe would then be able to transfer more troops north to capture Siping and press onward toward Changchun. The Communist leaders, for their part, realized full well that the fighting in the Northeast was not over. The public declarations of a great victoryatSipingwereaccompaniedbycontinuedplanningonthepartof the Communist Party Center, the Northeast Bureau, and Lin Biao, still commanding the Communists’ Northeast Democratic United Army from his headquarters at Lishu, north of Siping. Mao Zedong, now fully recovered from his own health problems and back in control of day-today business at the Party Center in Yan’an, told Lin Biao on 1 May that since Chiang Kai-shek still refused to accept proposals for a ceasefire 6 The Second Battle of Siping Phase Two—From Defense to Retreat, April–May 1946 136 The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China agreementintheNortheast,“[theNationalists]willcontinuetoadvance toward Changchun. Therefore, we must continue to fight at Siping and Benxi, to exhaust the enemy forces at these two places, to attrite their troop strength, to destroy their will to fight, and to cause them to greatly deplete the men, weapons, and ammunition that they have transferred over the past six months so that they don’t have time to replenish them, while, by taking Changchun and Harbin, we gain ample sources of men and materiel, and then we may be able to pursue peace on terms that are beneficial to us.”1 In short, Mao Zedong wanted Lin Biao to fight on both at Siping and Benxi, in hopes that further military setbacks would strengthen Zhou Enlai’s negotiating position at Chongqing and force Chiang Kaishek , finally, to agree to a ceasefire that would leave the Communists in control of northern Manchuria. Mao and the Party Center were still searchingforthatdecisive“lastbattle”thatwouldresolvethesituationin the Northeast, at least for a substantial period of time during which they could prepare for the next phase of the struggle. Chiang Kai-shek, too, was pursuing the “decisive battle” that would knock the Communists out of the equation—a battle that he still expected would take place at Siping. Du Yuming had decided that the road to victory at Siping lay through Benxi. And so we too must turn our attention southward, to the mountainous terrain in which the Nationalist troops had already tried twice, and failed, to displace one hundred thousand poorly armed but determined Communist fighters from Lin Biao’s Third Column and associated units. Sideshow: The Battle of Benxi (1 April–3 May 1946) Benxi is very different from Siping. Rather than lying on a plain and at a major railway junction, Benxi is nestled amid the mountains sixty-two kilometerssouthofShenyanginanareaflankedbythedeepandfast-running Taizi River. The plentiful iron and coal deposits in the mountains had made Benxi into a major industrial center—China’s “coal and steel capital.”Instrategicterms,BenxiposedasignificantthreattoShenyang. An unfriendly force in Benxi could either attack Shenyang directly or cut off the major transportation routes leading from Shenyang south to 18.226.169.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16:27 GMT) The Second Battle of Siping: Phase Two 137 the coast. Both these economic and strategic factors were on the minds of Xiong Shihui when he chose in late March to attack the Communists at both Siping and Benxi, and of Du Yuming when he decided to focus first on Benxi. Xiong Shihui tried twice to defeat the Communist forces at Benxi. In the first operation, beginning on 30 March, he threw two well-armed divisions (the Twenty-fifth and the Fourteenth) against the Communist defenders. Advancing through the mountains toward Benxi along two different vectors, both soon encountered stiff resistance from Communist fighters, who used the mountainous terrain to their advantage. The planned rendezvous of the two Nationalist divisions never happened, and the operation came to an end after two days.2 The second attempt...

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