Su Yu

Early Career and the New Fourth Army

Su Yu was born on 10 August 1907 in Huaihua, Hunan Province, into a middle-class family. He joined the Communist Youth League as a student and participated in the Yizhang Uprising in 1928. After years of guerrilla operations in southern Jiangxi during the "three-year guerrilla war," he served under Chen Yi in the New Fourth Army from 1938, commanding units in central China. He rapidly distinguished himself as an instinctive tactical commander — one who could read terrain, exploit timing, and coordinate large formations with unusual speed.

Mao's Assessment: The Greatest Battle Winner

Mao Zedong described Su Yu as "the greatest battle winner in our army" (我军最善打仗的将领), a verdict shared by many military historians. Su Yu possessed an ability rare among senior commanders: he operated most effectively at the operational level — the space between grand strategy and individual engagements — where battles are actually won and lost. His campaigns in Jiangsu and Shandong during 1946–47 demonstrated an ability to defeat numerically superior Nationalist forces through superior manoeuvre and concentration.

The Huaihai Campaign — Planning and Execution

Su Yu was the principal architect of the Huaihai Campaign (November 1948 – January 1949), which destroyed over 550,000 Nationalist troops and broke the back of Nationalist military power east of the interior. His initial operational proposal — submitted to Mao in September 1948 — was more limited in scope; Mao and the Central Military Commission expanded it into the decisive three-front battle that it became. During the campaign itself, Su Yu handled the tactical direction while Chen Yi coordinated logistics and political work. Western historians including Westad regard Huaihai as the battle that made Communist victory in the Civil War inevitable.

Crossing the Yangtze

As Deputy Commander of the Third Field Army under Chen Yi, Su Yu was the de facto operational planner of the Yangtze crossing in April 1949. He coordinated the assault across the central sector — the 500-kilometre front facing the Nationalist's strongest defences — directing the timing and sequencing of river crossings to maximise confusion and prevent the Nationalists from concentrating their forces. The central sector's forces were first across the river, collapsing the defensive line within 24 hours and opening the road to Nanjing.

Post-1949: Chief of the General Staff

In 1955, Su Yu was awarded the rank of General (大将) — the highest rank below Marshal — and served as Chief of the General Staff from 1954 to 1958. He led early planning for a potential PLA assault on Taiwan and oversaw the 1954–55 Yijiangshan Island Campaign, the first tri-service (land, sea, air) amphibious operation in PLA history. At the Central Military Commission's Enlarged Meeting held from 27 May to 22 July 1958, convened under the banner of opposing "dogmatism," Su Yu was singled out as a representative of "bourgeois individualism"; Peng Dehuai, then still Minister of National Defence and not yet purged himself, was among his principal critics — the campaign against Su Yu thus preceded, rather than followed, Peng's own downfall at the 1959 Lushan Conference. On 31 August 1958, the Politburo decided to remove Su Yu as Chief of the General Staff, reassigning him as Vice Minister of National Defence and Deputy President of the Academy of Military Sciences, away from frontline command.

Later Years and Rehabilitation

Su Yu spent much of the Cultural Revolution period in political limbo, neither prominently attacked nor rehabilitated. In October 1979 he formally submitted an appeal to the CCP Central Committee seeking to overturn the false charges levelled against him in 1958, but the request went unanswered for the remainder of his life; he died in Beijing on 5 February 1984. Full rehabilitation did not come until December 1994, when Central Military Commission Vice Chairmen Liu Huaqing and Zhang Zhen jointly published an article in People's Daily, "In Memory of Comrade Su Yu," stating explicitly that the 1958 criticism of him "was an error in history" — a full decade after his death. He had published his military memoirs during his lifetime, which became an important source for historians of the Civil War. Su Yu is widely regarded by military historians as the most gifted operational commander produced by the PLA, comparable in some analyses to figures such as Georgy Zhukov in the Soviet context.