Luding Bridge - The Battle at The Bridge

The Battle At The Bridge

With the main Kuomintang army closing in on the Chinese Red Army, it was decided to send a small volunteer force across the badly damaged bridge. After preparation, the volunteer force led by the company commander, Liao Dazhu (廖大珠), of the 2nd company, began their assault on the bridge at 4:00 p.m. under a covering barrage. While Red Star Over China, which uses the old-style name Tatu River, says there were thirty men in the force, it is now generally accepted that there were only twenty-two. Red Army sources agree that the members of the force crawled over the bare iron chains of the bridge while under heavy machine-gun fire from the opposite side.

Most of the assault team did not leave their names behind. Of the 22 assault team members, only four other than the team leader, Liao Dazhu (廖大珠), are known. The four whose names are known are: political commissar of the 2nd company Wang Haiyun (王海云), communist party secretary of the 2nd company (李友林), the communist party secretary of the 3rd company Li Jinshan (李金山), and the deputy squad commander of the 4th squad of the 2nd company Liu Zihua (刘梓华).

According to Red Star Over China, three were hit, fell, and died but the rest came forward, and Red Star Over China suggests that some of the warlord forces admired their foes and were not shooting to kill. The Regimental political commissar, Yang Chengwu, was the commander who led the actual attack. According to his memoirs and the recollections of the survivors of the twenty-two man assault team, there were no fatalities on the bridge itself, but several members of the force were wounded. However, in the ensuing battle to establish a bridgehead, two men were killed, and there were more fatalities in the subsequent battles to defend the bridgehead from the nationalists' counterattacks, which continued until the Red Army reinforcements arrived. At a late stage in the battles, "paraffin was thrown on the planking and it began to burn". Despite the presence of Red Army forces on both ends of the bridge, the force guarding the bridge and Luding City were driven off it, and some surrendered.

According to an account from the website of 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.

As a reward, every surviving member of the volunteer team was awarded a fountain-pen, a notebook, a pair of chopsticks, a Zhongshan suit, and an enamel bow, and this was significant at the time in terms of Chinese Red Army's standard: the reward was equivalent of at least half a decade's salary of an ordinary Chinese Red Army soldier. The political commissar of the 4th regiment, Yang Chengwu, also received the same reward.

Despite their rewards, none of the survivors lived to see the establishment of the People's Republic. The duty squad commander of the 4th squad of the 2nd company Liu Zihua (刘梓华) was killed in January 1949 when liberating Tianjin during the Pingjin Campaign, and the commander of the 2nd company, Liao Dazhu (廖大珠) was the last to die; he was killed in the battle to liberate Shanghai in May 1949. The commander of the 4th regiment, Wang Kaixiang (王开湘) did not survive either; after the Long March, the regimental commander was struck with malaria and he accidentally shot himself while under the convulsive effects of the disease. At the Luding Bridge memorial museum, specially built to commemorate the event, only four out of the 22 pillars had names engraved, while the rest were unnamed. For the pillar with the name of the deputy squad commander of the 4th squad of the 2nd company, Liu Zihua (刘梓华), his head statue was also engraved.