CCF Strategy and Tactics
CCF strategy was so rudimentary at first that its basic tenets could be summed up in a 16-word principle adopted by the Central Committee:
Enemy advancing, we retreat; enemy entrenched, we harass; enemy exhausted, we attack; enemy retreating, we pursue.[232]
[232] Mao, Strategic Problems, 31.
But as time went on, other principles were added. Mao favored a planned defensive-offensive as the only valid strategy against superior enemy numbers. He made it plain, however, that any withdrawal was to be merely temporary as the preliminary to advancing and striking at the first advantageous opportunity. And he reiterated that annihilation of the enemy must always be the final goal of strategy.[233]
[233] Ibid.
It was in the field of tactics that the essentially guerrilla character of the CCF was most fully revealed. Since Communist dialectics insisted that there was a correct (Marxist) and an incorrect (“petty bourgeois” or “opportunist” or “reactionary”) way of doing everything, CCF tactics were reduced to principles whenever possible.
A generation of warfare against material odds had established a pattern of attack which proved effective against armies possessing an advantage in arms and equipment. One Marine officer has aptly defined a Chinese attack as “assembly on the objective.”[234] The coolie in the CCF ranks had no superior in the world at making long approach marches by night and hiding by day, with as many as fifty men sharing a hut or cave and subsisting on a few handfuls of rice apiece. Night attacks were so much the rule that any exception came as a surprise. The advancing columns took such natural routes as draws or stream beds, deploying as soon as they met resistance. Combat groups then peeled off from the tactical columns, one at a time, and closed with rifles, submachine guns, and grenades.
[234] Bowser Comments, 23 Apr 56.
Once engaged and under fire, the attackers hit the ground. Rising at any lull, they came on until engaged again; but when fully committed, they did not relinquish the attack even when riddled with casualties. Other Chinese came forward to take their places, and the build-up continued until a penetration was made, usually on the front of one or two platoons. After consolidating the ground, the combat troops then crept or wriggled forward against the open flank of the next platoon position. Each step of the assault was executed with practiced stealth and boldness, and the results of several such penetrations on a battalion front could be devastating.[235]