Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!

Luding Bridge

Mirror of English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | History of China | Bridges in China | Battles of China

Luding Bridge (Chinese: 泸定桥; Hanyu Pinyin: Luding Qiao) is a historical landmark in China where soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of the Chinese Workers and Peasants' Army secured a vital river crossing during the Long March. Without the bridge, the Red Army would probably have been destroyed. In the 19th century, the last army of the Taiping peasant rebels had been destroyed in the same area. There is an ongoing dispute about the battle or skirmish required to take the bridge.

1 Overview
2 Importance
3 Controversy
4 Sources
5 References

[edit]

Overview

Image:Luding bridge.jpg

Luding Bridge seen from the side of the city

Fleeing from pursuing Kuomintang forces, the communists found that there were not enough boats to cross the Dadu River (Sichuan province). They were forced to use Luding Bridge, a Qing dynasty chain bridge built in 1701. [1]. It consisted of thirteen heavy iron chains with a span of some 100 yards. Normally thick boards lashed over the chains made the road of the bridge.

On May 29, 1935, Lin Biao and communist army forces reached the bridge to discover that local warlords, allied with the Kuomintang, had removed most of the planks on the bridge. With the main Kuomintang army closing in on the Chinese Red Army, a small volunteer force were sent across the badly damaged bridge. Red Star Over China - which uses the old-style name, Tatu River - says it was a force of thirty men; other sources say twenty-two. Red Army sources agree that they crawled over the bare iron chains while under heavy machine-gun fire from the opposite side. Three were hit, fell and died but the rest came forward. Red Star Over China suggests that some of the warlord forces admired their foes and were not shooting to kill. And that at a late stage, "paraffin was thrown on the planking and it began to burn". But there were Red Army forces on both sides. The force guarding the bridge and Luding City were driven off; some surrendered.

According to Account by the late Will Downs, "At last one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late. More Reds were crawling into sight. (Kerosene) was thrown on the planking and it began to burn. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on the hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest."

[edit]

Importance

This skirmish may have saved the Red Army from a major defeat.

"'Victory was life' said P'eng Teh-huai (Peng Dehuai); 'defeat was certain death'." (Red Star Over China (1971 edition)).

The event raised morale for the troops, and was later used as a propaganda tool to highlight the courage of the communists. "For their distinguished bravery the heroes of An Jen Ch'ang [the seized ferry boat] and Liu Ting Chiao [the bridge] were awarded the Gold Star, the highest decoration in the Red Army of China." (Red Star Over China').

[edit]

Controversy

[edit]

Jung Chang

The British-Chinese writer Jung Chang and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, in their 2005 biography of Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story, write that there was no battle at Luding Bridge. Having interviewed eye-witnesses, including the owner of a nearby shop, they state that the Kuomintang did not sabotage the bridge, or contest the crossing. According to them, the Long March was exaggerated and used as propaganda. Currently, Chang & Halliday's is a rare account in denying that there was a battle at Luding Bridge. There are non-Chinese historians who have supported the Communist point-of-view: for example, Harrison E. Salisbury in The Long March: The Untold Story, Dick Wilson in The Long March 1935 : The Epic of Chinese Communism's Survival and Charlotte Salisbury in Long March Diary. While much academic research exists in support of the communist perspective, Deng Xiaoping, veteran of the incident and former CCP Chairman once suggested propaganda surrounding the incident is exaggerated.

[edit]

Brzezinski

In a speech given at Stanford University, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski related the following conversation with Deng Xiaoping:

"I even told them we went to Luding Bridge, which was the site of a special, important heroic battle in which the Red Forces were able to cross the river under very difficult and treacherous conditions. If they hadn’t they would have been wiped out. It was a great feat of arms to have crossed that bridge. At that point, Chairman Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn’t really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn’t that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.”

[edit]

Weaponry

Other sources that suggest the incident is exaggerated come from the memiors of Chinese Red Army Veterans that were released in the 1990's ^{[citation needed]}. Numerous surviving Chinese Red Army veterans recalled that the weapons used by the local warlords guarding the bridge is far inferior than what the Chinese Red Army had and despite the Chinese Red Army's morale and courage, the weaponry is probably just as equally important:

Realizing their dangerous situation, the Chinese Red Army sent their crack troop to seize the bridge, and the soldiers were armed with the best guns captured from the nationalists: the assault team members were all armed with submachine guns with an effective range of 300 - 400 meters while others were armed with the semi-automatic rifles with 800 meter effective range. In contrast, the local warlord's troop were armed only with bolt-action rifles so that their firepower is far less dense than what the Chinese Red Army could lay on them.

The more important factor was the bullets used. Chinese Red Army used the best quality bullets they captured (include a significant portion of foreign made bullets) while those used by the local warlord's troops were locally manufactured, which is far inferior in quality even when compared to other domestic Chinese arms factories such as those in eastern part of China. In addition, most of the bullets were decades old. When Red Army troops test fired the captured bullets after their victory, it was discovered that these bullets used by the local warlord's troops only had a maxmium range of around 100 meters: when fired from a rifle at standing position, most of the bullet would drop to the ground at 100 meters or so, and the effective range of these bullets was of course less than 100 meters, which is not enough to cover the span of the bridge. The machine gun used the same bullets so there was the same problem. This discovery was confirmed decades later when surviving members of the local warlords' troops were interviewed abroad. The local warlord's troop had neither the density of fire nor the rate of fire needed to suppress the Chinese Red Army, and in fact, they were the ones that were forced to take cover for most of the time during the battle, rarely firing any shots. The superior density of fire, rate of fire, and accuracy gave the Chinese Red Army the edge, in addition to morale and courage. The battle was one sided.

[edit]

Warlord politics

Another factor that contributed to the Chinese Red Army's victory was that the local warlords were much more worried about Chiang's plan to take over local control, than the Red Army's passing by.^{[citation needed]} Chiang's army followed the Red Army into the in the neighboring Guizhou province ostensively to help the local warlord Wang Jialie to fight the Red Army, but under the excuse of failing to stop the Red Army, Wang Jialie was removed by Chiang after the Red Army left the province. The local warlords knew that they could return and regain control of their territory after the Red Army had left, but if Chiang's army came, they would be removed for good. Therefore, despite the Chiang's advisors' accurate prediction of the need of at least three regiments (and possibly four or five) of local warlord's troop to stop a single Red Army regiment, the local warlord only deployed a single regiment at Luding Bridge, and his main force was deployed to block Chiang's two regiments sent to reinforce the defense of Luding Bridge. The defenders of Luding Bridge were well aware the political situation after witnessed the warlord's fall in the neighboring Guizhou province and obviously not willing to sacrifice their own lives for Chiang's potential takeover.

[edit]

Recent additions

Two westerners living in China investigated the matter while retracing the route of the Long March:

With the exception of Yang Chengwu, no source ever suggests that there were no casualties on Luding Bridge. The very first description of the battle, given by Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China in 1937, cited three deaths. The official number, inscribed on the bridge itself, is now four.^[1]

Yang Chengwu was the commander who led the actual attack.

Sun Shuyun, who was born in China and has made documentaries for the BBC, did her own retracing of the march. At Luding Bridge, a local blacksmith gave her the following account:

Only a squadron was at the other end. It was a rainy day. Their weapons were old and could only fire a few metres. They were no match for the Red Army, When they saw the soldiers coming, they panicked an fled - their officers had long abandoned them. There wasn't really much of a battle. Still, I take my hat off to the twenty-two soldiers who crawled on the chains. My father and I did it in the old days when we checked the bridge, but we were inside a basket. Those men were brave. They crossed very quickly..^[2]

The blacksmith also said that after they had crossed, the Red Army cut through four of the bridge's nine chains, making it unusable for months. This has not been mentioned in other accounts, but Sun Shuyun found another source and discovered that the idea came from Mao. She also suggests that the Red Army was indeed given an easy passage, but that this was done by local warlords in defiance of Chiang Kaishek:

It seems that one of the warlords, Liu Wenhui, was a key figure... When [Red Army commander] Zhu De and Liu Bocheng, his fellow Sichuanese, sent him money and a letter, asking for safe passage through his territory, including the Luding Bridge, he happily obliged... 'Chiang gives my army no ammunition or food, how can we fight tough battles?' he grumbled. He told his men to put up only half-hearted resistance, and to allow the Red Army through without much of a fight...

Liu kept his contact with the Communists ... In 1949 he mutinied, taking two other warlords with him over to the Communists... he was made Minister of Forestry, and then a minister in the Communist government. (Ibid.)

[edit]