Su Yu

Su Yu (; 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. 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 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

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.

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

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.