Peng Dehuai





Peng Dehuai (1898 - 1974) was a prominent Chinese Communist military leader.

Peng was exiled from his family home in Hunan province at the age of nine
and joined the army at sixteen. By the age of twenty-eight he was a
brigade-commander in the Kuomintang Army and had begun a flirtation with
radical politics. Peng was forced to flee Chiang Kai-shekÕs purge in 1927
and joined the Communist Party of China, partaking in the Long March.

During WWII Peng served as deputy commander-in-chief of the Communist forces
and coordinated the ill-fated Hundred Regiments Campaign. Peng went on to
serve with distinction behind Japanese lines in North China, and during the
late stages of the Chinese Civil War he led the 1st Field Army in its
conquest of Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai Provinces.

He was commander of Chinese forces during the Korean War. Although he was
defense minister of the People's Republic of China, a member of the
Politburo of the Communist Party of China and a marshal of the People's
Liberation Army he was disgraced in 1959 because he criticized Mao Zedong's
Great Leap Forward. He was rehabilitated in 1978 after his death.