Su Yu

In this Chinese name, the family name is Su.

Senior General Su Yu
粟裕
Su Yu in his Senior General uniform (1955)
Personal details
Born	August 10, 1907 Huitong County, Hunan Province, Qing Empire
Died	February 5, 1984(1984-02-05) (aged 76) Beijing, China
Party	Chinese Communist Party
Awards	Order of Bayi (First Class Medal) Order of Independence and Freedom (First Class Medal) Order of Liberation (First Class Medal)
Nickname(s)	"The Zhukov of China" (中国的朱可夫) 502 (military call sign)
Military service
Allegiance	China
Branch/service	People's Liberation Army Ground Force
Years of service	1927–1984
Rank	Senior General of the People's Liberation Army
Commands	Deputy Commander, PLA Eastern China Field Army Chief of the General Staff, PLA General Staff Department
Battles/wars	Northern Expedition Chinese Civil War Long March Second Sino-Japanese War Hundred Regiments Offensive Sino-Indian War

Su Yu (Chinese: 粟裕; pinyin: Sù Yù; August 10, 1907 – February 5, 1984), courtesy name Yu (裕), was a Chinese general in the People's Liberation Army. He was considered by Mao Zedong to be among the best commanders of the PLA, only next to Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao and Liu Bocheng. Su Yu fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War and in the Chinese Civil War. He commanded the East China Field Army (renamed Third Field Army in 1949) during the Chinese Civil War. His most notable accomplishments were the Battle of Menglianggu, the Battle of Huaihai, the Yangtze River crossing, and the capture of Shanghai.

After the Chinese Communist Party victory in the civil war, he held important posts in the new People's Republic of China, including that of PLA Chief of General Staff (1954–1958).

Early life

Su Yu was born on 10 August 1907 in Fengmushujiao Village, Fulong Township, Huitong County, Hunan Province, to an ethnic Dong family. He was the third child among six siblings. Su's father was Su Zhouheng (粟周亨) and his mother was Liang Manmei (梁满妹). He began his education at a traditional private school in 1913, where he studied classical texts such as the Three Character Classic, Hundred Family Surnames, Doctrine of the Mean and Classic of Poetry. In 1918, banditry in rural Huitong forced his family to move to the county seat. Su Yu continued his education at the local Model Primary School and later at a higher primary school. Although he performed well academically, his father required him to manage the family accounts, which disrupted his studies and resulted in him repeating grades.

As a student, Su was influenced by growing opposition to the Beiyang warlord forces stationed in the area. In January 1924, he left home and moved to Changde, where he continued his education. In the spring of 1925, he was admitted to Hunan Provincial Second Normal School in Changde. There, he joined the Students' Association, which was associated with the Chinese Communist movement. During the Northern Expedition, he and other students secretly circulated communist literature and helped raise funds to acquire weapons and ammunition in support of the advancing National Revolutionary Army. In 1926, Su participated in student protests against the expulsion of Teng Daiyuan, an incident that became known as the "Second Normal School Incident.". He joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in November 1926 and became a member of the Chinese Communist Party the following year.

Military career

In 1927, following the April 12 incident, Su was transferred to Wuchang and assigned to the training unit of the 24th Division under Ye Ting. He received military training and later became a squad leader in the unit’s guard force. He participated in the Nanchang Uprising on 1 August 1927 and subsequently accompanied the communist forces southward. He took part in several battles in Jiangxi and Guangdong before joining Zhu De’s forces in southern Hunan, where he served as a company political instructor and participated in the Xiangnan Uprising and local land reform.

In April 1928, Su Yu reached Jinggangshan, where Zhu De’s forces joined Mao Zedong’s troops to form the Fourth Army of the Chinese Red Army. He subsequently held several company-level command and political positions. In 1929, he was tasked with protecting Mao while he conducted political investigations in western Fujian. By 1930, Su had risen to command a detachment of the 12th Red Army and participated in military operations against Nationalist forces, including the second attempt to capture Changsha.

Second Sino-Japanese War

After the breakout of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Su Yu was appointed Deputy Commander of the 2nd Detachment, and then in April 1938 commander of the Advanced Detachment of the New Fourth Army.

During the war, Su won the Cheqiao Campaign against the Japanese Army, where his troops won a victory in the first battle against the Japanese troops at Weigang. After this, he had some other campaigns in Central Jiangsu against the Japanese aggressors in Nanjing, Wuhu and Lishui.

During the war, Su Yu was the commander of the New Fourth Army's first division. He established himself as one of the Communist armed forces' most capable commanders, winning a series of skirmish campaigns against overwhelming enemies - the Kuomintang army, puppet regime forces and the Japanese army. By the end of the war, he was made Commander in Chief for the Communists' Central China's Military Region, covering a vast region in East Central China.

Chinese Civil War

Su Yu in Battle of Suzhong (Central Jiangsu)

During the Civil War, Su Yu started as the second in command of the Communists' East China Field Army, eventually becoming second in command of the Third Field Army by the end of the war.

Su Yu, holding map and wearing dark uniform, surveying the battlefield before the Menglianggu Campaign in 1947.

The successes of the battle persuaded Mao Zedong to change his military strategy of the Chinese Civil War, from traditional guerrilla style warfare to a more mobile and conventional approach. In July 1946, he led 30,000 Communist troops which triumphed over 120,000 American-armed Nationalist troops in seven different engagements, captured and killed 53,000 Kuomintang soldiers and stunned the country. The Central Jiangsu Campaign was the first of many of the brilliant campaigns that defined his legacy. He was also the commander of the PLA in the famous and much propagandized Menglianggu Campaign. In this campaign, the elite Nationalist Seventy-Fourth Division was completely destroyed after Su Yu succeeded in encircling the unit.

He was the major commander during the Huaihai Campaign (November 1948 to January 1949). It was at his suggestion on January 22, 1948, that the two armies of Liu Bocheng and Su followed a sudden-concentrate, sudden-disperse strategy that led to this decisive victory in late 1948, with the destruction of five Nationalist armies and the killing or capture of 550,000 Nationalist soldiers. Su's army alone destroyed four Nationalist armies, and was the decisive force in destroying the fifth.

After the establishment of the PRC

Hong Xuezhi, Xiao Hua, Su Yu, and Chen Geng wearing their new Type 55 dress uniforms in 1955 (left to right)

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, it was rumored that Su Yu was the commander that Mao wanted to lead the Chinese People's Volunteer Army into Korea, because of his experience of commanding a large number of troops. However, because of his illness (caused by shell fragments in the 1930s), neither Su nor Lin Biao (also rumored to be sick) was able to command the CPVA. In the end, Peng Dehuai was selected.

He was made a da jiang (Grand General) in 1955, one of ten men to receive this second-highest rank. He served in numerous positions, including Chief of the People's Liberation Army General Staff Department in the 1950s.

In 1980, China adopted a new Military Strategic Guideline that envisioned using a combined arms approach and positional warfare to defend against a potential invasion by the Soviet Union. In Su's analysis, positional defenses would be beneficial because the Soviet Union would be disinclined to use tactical nuclear weapons for fear of destroying spoils of war and making itself unable to use captured cities as forward bases. Su also contended that the Soviet Union would view the use of nuclear weapons as extremely costly, because "we also have nuclear weapons, if you attack we attack, there is danger that all will suffer great losses, so it cannot but have some hesitation." Su also expected that once nuclear weapons were used, escalation would be impossible to avoid, because "it is very hard for any limits to exist, so tactical scale could develop into strategic scale" use.

In his later years, he published The Memoirs of Su Yu (粟裕回忆录). He died in Beijing on February 5, 1984, at the age of 77. According to his last wish, his body was cremated and scattered to places he had fought in.

Family

Su Yu, Chu Qing, and their two sons Su Rongsheng and Su Hansheng in Shanghai, September 1949

Su Yu married Chu Qing (楚青) in February 1941. They had three children, all of whom joined the PLA. The eldest son Su Rongsheng (粟戎生) was born in 1942, followed by the second son Su Hansheng (粟寒生), and the youngest, a daughter Su Huining (粟惠宁), who married Chen Xiaolu (陈小鲁) in August 1975. Chen Xiaolu was the youngest son of Chen Yi who was Su Yu's direct superior during wartime. According to Su Rongsheng, Su Yu was an extremely strict father. When Su Rongsheng was only three years old, Su Yu forced him to learn how to swim by giving him only a piece of bamboo as a float, and pushed him into the water in front of his mother, and prohibited anyone from attempting to save Su Rongsheng. Su Yu's wife, Chu Qing was outraged and asked Su Yu angrily whether he was not worried about Su Rongsheng being drowned. But Su Yu answered that Su Rongsheng would have never learned how to swim any other way and besides, he was not being drowned. Aged 20, Su Rongsheng joined the PLA and remained in service for 45 years, rising from an ordinary soldier to a lieutenant general when he retired as the deputy commander-in-chief of Beijing Military District at age 65.

See also

• List of officers of the People's Liberation Army

Bibliography

• Su, Yu (2005). Sùyù Huíyìlù (Memoirs of Su Yu). 知识产权出版社.
• Ch'en, Jerome, et al. The Nationalist Era in China, 1927–1949. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1991.