Campaign To Defend Siping

Campaign To Defend Siping

The Campaign to Defend Siping (四平保卫战) was a struggle between the Nationalists and the communists for the control of Siping during the Chinese Civil War in the post World War II era. The nationalists have combined this campaign with the Battle of Siping as part of the battle, but this was rather misleading since the strategies for both sides were totally different from the strategies in this campaign and unrelated to each other, furthermore, the commanders for both sides in this campaign were completely different from the Battle of Siping. More importantly, the nationalists in the Battle of Siping was in name only, because they were former nationalists (mostly warlords ostensively under nationalist reign) turned Japanese puppet regime forces who rejoined the nationalists after World War II, and the local bandits recruited by the nationalist administrators to fight off communists, since Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist regime simply did not have the resource to rapidly deploy his forces into the region. In fact, in the Battle of Siping, Chiang’s own force did not even participated in the fights. This campaign was characterized by the fact that the supreme commanders of both sides had overestimated their strength and set unrealistic goals that could doom their troops in the field, but in both cases, the brilliant frontline commanders on both sides had successfully averted the potential catastrophes by convincing their respective supreme commanders to change their original decisions.