A field commander who read the course of war
He left for the north after telling his wife, “A general may well die on the battlefield.”
Deng Hua was a People’s Liberation Army general who commanded large formations through the Communist revolution and the Chinese Civil War. In 1950 he organized and trained the Northeast Border Defense Army, preparing the force that would cross the Yalu, then supported the Korean War as Peng Dehuai’s first deputy commander. From 1952 he led the Chinese People’s Volunteers through major operations and the armistice phase. Implicated in Peng Dehuai’s downfall, he was dismissed, persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and rehabilitated in 1980.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1927Joined the Chinese Communist Party
- 1928–1937Red Army commander; took part in the Long March
- 1937–1945Commander in the Eighth Route Army and Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region
- 1947–1949Commander of the Northeast Field Army 7th Column and 15th Corps
- 1950Commander of the 13th Corps and coordinator of the Northeast Border Defense Army
- 1950–1952First deputy commander and first deputy political commissar of the Chinese People’s Volunteers
- 1952–1954Acting commander and political commissar, then commander, of the Chinese People’s Volunteers
- 1955–1959PLA general; commander of the Shenyang Military Region
Related historical events
- 1927–1936From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long MarchLong March participantHe took part in the Long March as a Red Army commander.
- 1937–1945The war with Japan and the second united frontEighth Route Army commanderHe served as a commander in the Eighth Route Army from 1937 to 1945.
- 1945–1949The Chinese Civil WarNortheast Field Army column commanderFrom 1947 to 1949, he commanded the Northeast Field Army’s 7th Column.
- 1950–1953The Korean WarDeputy commander of the PVAIn July 1950 he organized the Northeast Border Defense Army, and later as PVA deputy commander he led the crossing of the Yalu.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionGeneral persecuted during the Cultural RevolutionHe was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
1950: The Hainan Island Campaign and the First Large-Scale Amphibious Assault
In December 1949, after the Guangdong campaign and the capture of Guangzhou in October, Deng Hua was formally entrusted with command of the Battle of Hainan Island as commander of the 15th Corps. That same month Mao Zedong instructed the Fourth Field Army to take Qiongya with the 43rd and 40th Armies, warning that crossing the sea had no precedent in the army's experience: tides and winds had to be studied, and enough shipping gathered to carry at least one army in a single lift. He repeatedly invoked the failure at Kinmen a month earlier and told the planners to study it so as not to repeat it. From early 1950 Deng organized the requisition of boats, the mobilization of boatmen and fishermen and the training of crews on the Leizhou Peninsula, opposite the island.
The premise he and his staff worked from was a crossing of the Qiongzhou Strait in wooden sailing junks with no naval or air cover. After reconnaissance and trial voyages, they opted to give a portion of the boats engines for mobility, to land small forces covertly at night first, and then to throw the main force across. In March 1950 his corps' units crossed the strait by night in several waves and joined the Qiongya Column on the island: the first party rowed for nineteen hours after the wind dropped and got ashore on 6 March, another force fought Nationalist warships for more than two hours before landing at dawn, and one company, having covered the fleet and drifted off course, landed on an isolated shoal and was annihilated on 1 April. With a staging force established inside the island, Deng discarded the plan of converting large numbers of junks to engines and switched to a mass crossing in large sailing junks.
On the night of 16 April 1950 the first echelon of the 40th and 43rd Armies set out, and the second echelon followed on 23 April. Nationalist warships and aircraft blockaded the strait and sank transports, and most of the campaign's casualties on the communist side occurred during the crossing; once ashore, the landing forces took coastal strongpoints, moved inland and linked up with the guerrilla forces that had long held much of the interior. Haikou fell on 23 April, and the whole island was under control by 1 May, with Nationalist troops and refugees evacuated from the south. The Hainan communist movement, which had fought for more than two decades without outside support, described the campaign as the culmination of its own war; the campaigns' later accounts highlighted the 15th Corps and gave little attention to the island's communists. In July 1950 Deng Hua took up the assignment of forming the Northeast Border Defense Army.