The 1951 Spring Offensive, Part 1. (中国春季攻势 / 第五次战役 )

 

There have not been many articles on the blog lately, due to the fact that I had to get on with the literature for the next project. This time we have come to the next stage of the Korean War, which will take you through the 1951 Spring Offensive from preparation to its conclusion, which came much sooner than the Chinese leadership had originally planned.

The Chinese Spring Offensive took place from 22 to 29 April 1951, which was the most intensive and largest area operation of the entire Korean War. The PVA, together with the NKPA, launched its operation along the entire 38th parallel, deploying some 700,000 men in the aim of destroying 5 full divisions and 2 brigades of the US 1st Corps and retaking Seoul. The rapid successes achieved in the winter of 1950 could not be repeated here by the Chinese, and in this series of articles I will go into these reasons in as much detail as possible, but without giving you a totally dry and boring piece of material.

PREPARATIONS:

In 1950, the PVA was still not operating on the basis of a chain of command and associated doctrines that should have been the foundation of a modern warfare army. The biggest cancer in the chain of command during mobilization for the Korean War (as in other communist armies around the world) was that important positions were filled not by high quality people with expertise and experience, but by those who were put there by their superiors based on personal connections or political party preferences. Commanders liked to work with those they knew best, but for the troops sent south to Manchuria, the Chinese leadership wanted the best commanders to be at the top. Due to transfers and sometimes changes in job titles, a period of chaos ensued for the Chinese divisions stationed in the north and awaiting deployment.

Many contemporary sources also mention that the mobilisation itself was a much easier task than the demobilisation after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but the arrival of such a large number of recruits in the army presented PLA officers with a new challenge: to provide a sound justification and motivation to the new recruits from simple peasant families as to why they would have to fight on foreign soil against the most modern army in the world, the United States. The CCP leadership used three methods before the Chinese volunteers were sent to fight in Korea:

- First, members of the PVA teams underwent a kind of political training that lasted for 2 months. 50% of the soldiers were declared fit to serve in the conflict, although the majority were civil war veterans or party members, who usually volunteered to join the PVA to fight the Americans and defend their country. It is worth noting here that, however rarely mentioned, the Americans posed a real threat to China, with President Truman even considering the use of the atomic bomb, although this was later abandoned. The deliberate US bombing of Chinese settlements along the border was just the dot on the i which further confirmed to the leaders of the People's Republic of China that they had to act on the Korean situation. 30% of the troops were considered to be an "intermediate element" who would fight if ordered to do so, but apart from that, they did not care whether there was a war or not. The remaining 20% were classed as "of uncertain mental state", the ones who were specifically afraid of going into combat with US forces and called the Yalu River Bridge the Gates of Hell. They believed that getting involved in the Korean War would only be unnecessary interference in the affairs of others, and that involvement would draw unnecessary attention to China from the Americans.

- The second step was the training of soldiers and the modernisation of the technical support that could be given to them. In September 1950, the training of Chinese soldiers was divided into 2 phases:

1. The first phase included small group combat tactics, small arms training, tank and anti-aircraft weapons and the handling of various explosives.

2. The second phase looked at different operational tactics, an area of modern warfare at the time that even veterans of the Civil War found novel. Chinese soldiers who had fought alongside the Americans in Burma as members of the Expeditionary Force were often invited to these exercises, giving their leaders a relatively good idea of the character of the American soldiers and their fighting style.

The NEBDA (North East Border Defense Army) also made a good effort to standardize the firearms used in the PVA to try to eliminate the logistical nightmare that existed at the end of the Civil War (imagine how much fun it was to provide the necessary ammunition for dozens of pistols, rifles, machine guns, machine guns and heavy machine guns, and then I won't even mention the different locally manufactured versions of these weapons. Only the Mauser C96 pistol existed in 4 calibres at the time....). I mentioned this in an earlier article, but let's look at concrete examples of how it looked in practice: by mid-August, for example, all existing small arms in the 38th Army had been replaced by Japanese rifles and machine guns, while almost everyone in the 40th Army was using rifles, machine guns, submachine guns and other equipment looted from the Americans, sometimes from NRA soldiers during the Civil War.

Thanks to the systems implemented above, training was also standardised, so that the efficiency of soldiers in the use of their weapons was increased in the respective army groups. Unfortunately, automatic weapons were still in short supply (and the PLA/PVA did not have a large number of Soviet weapons at that time), so soldiers had to watch which of their comrades with these types of weapons fell in combat in order to pick up the dropped weapon. The effectiveness of the Chinese on the battlefield was quickly demonstrated in the first phase of the Korean War, and training played a key role in the PVA's success on the battlefield. The country's economy was entirely converted to war production, and during the war years the government provided 5.6 million tonnes of supplies to its troops fighting in Korea. Between 1950 and 1953, war spending accounted for 38% of China's total budget, and it was the first time in China's history that its armed forces were deployed in a foreign country.

Although the term "Chinese Volunteer Force" may deceptively convey the impression that only a small number of Chinese troops were deployed in Korea, the reality was that the entire Chinese army was mobilised, and this time they were preparing to take on the world's most modern and best-trained army in Korea.

Source I'm using for the article: Xiaobing Li: China's Battle for Korea