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  • Moving the Enemy: Operational Art in the Chinese PLA’s Huai Hai Campaign
  • Harold M. Tanner
Moving the Enemy: Operational Art in the Chinese PLA’s Huai Hai Campaign. By Gary J. Bjorge. Leavenworth Paper No. 22. Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004. Maps. Figures. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Pp. viii, 253. Available at http://www.cgsc.army.mil/csi.

Between 6 November 1948 and 10 January 1949, Chinese Communist forces eliminated five Nationalist Armies totaling nearly half a million men in a campaign that involved well over a million combatants across front lines of around two hundred kilometers. This action, the Huai Hai Campaign, put the Communists in control of China's strategic Central Plains. Combined with other operations, the result was to eliminate the forces of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) north of the Yangzi and to so deplete his troop strength, while simultaneously increasing Communist strength, that the way was paved for Mao Zedong's armies to cross the Yangzi and sweep the Nationalists from the mainland.

Curiously, there has heretofore not been an English-language monograph on Huai Hai. Dr. Bjorge's concise and well-researched volume fills this gap in the literature. His goal is to study the Huai Hai Campaign "as an example of warfare at the operational level," focusing on "the planning and execution of large-scale operations by PLA commanders . . . to further validate the importance of operational art as a doctrinal concept . . . and also increase the reader's understanding of the professional knowledge and skill of the PLA officer corps" (p. 2).

To illustrate his point, the author constructs an analytical framework drawn from two sources: U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5 Operations and Sunzi's The Art of War. He presents the planning and implementation of Huai Hai as a concrete illustration of the principles of operational art as seen in those two sources and uses concepts from both works, but particularly concepts such as "moving the enemy," "deception," and "subduing the enemy without battle" from Sunzi. This succeeds both because Sunzi was a significant influence on the thinking of Chinese Communist and Nationalist leaders and because the principles outlined by Sunzi have universal applicability and thus his work "has been integrated into U.S. Army doctrine" (p. 6).

Dr. Bjorge begins with an introductory chapter on historical background and proceeds with chapters on Communist and Nationalist planning, the physical setting and comparison of forces, and the unfolding and significance of the campaign. The book includes fourteen maps on which the reader can [End Page 1305] easily locate places named in the text. The author has made good use of primary and secondary sources in Chinese to provide a detailed study of the Huai Hai Campaign as a concrete example of the operational art. But in doing so, has he changed or added to our understanding of the reasons for Nationalist defeat (or Communist victory)?

Our general understanding is that, aside from political, economic, and social weaknesses, Jiang's defeat was the result of: (a) the poor quality of Nationalist commanders, including Jiang; (b) over-centralized command; (c) unclear command structure, with Jiang often issuing orders personally, from afar; (d) factionalism; and (e) superior organization, command structure, generalship and unity on the Communist side. Bjorge's work does not change this picture. Nonetheless, by looking at a significant campaign in detail, he gives us concrete examples of decision-making on both the Nationalist and Communist sides and the immediate (and for the Nationalists, disastrous) results of those decisions. In doing so, he puts flesh on the bones of the true, but highly generalized statements about the military conflict in the English-language historiography of the period, most of which treats military operations as peripheral to the political, social, and economic struggles between the Communists and Nationalists. As part of the growing English-language literature on Chinese military history, this book will be useful not only to students of the operational art, but also to specialists and graduate students of modern Chinese history.

Harold M. Tanner
University of North Texas
Denton, Texas
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