Background
P’eng, whose real name was P’eng Hsiu-tao, was bom into a poor peasant family which lived in a small village in Nan-yang hsien, southwest Honan.
P’eng, whose real name was P’eng Hsiu-tao, was bom into a poor peasant family which lived in a small village in Nan-yang hsien, southwest Honan.
An uncle who had once served as secretary-general to the famous north China warlord Feng Yu-hsiang sent P'eng to a military school in Peking for the children of officials in Feng’s Northwest Army. While a student there he joined the Communist Youth League and took an active part in the school's League branch. His first involvement in revolutionary activity, according to one of his biographers, took place at the time of the May 30 Incident (1925), which sparked a series of strikes throughout the nation. The role that P’eng played is not known but two years later, in September 1927, he joined the CCP in Peking. His admission into the Party took place only a few weeks after the final break in the KMT-CCP alliance, and thus by definition he became a part of the Party underground in north China.
P'eng was in Tientsin in 1929, but by 1930 he had gone to Shanghai, and in February of that year, because of his previous training in a military school, he was sent to command a unit in the Fifth Column of the Eighth Red Army. This assignment coincided with the period when the Li Li-san leadership was preparing for major assaults in the industrial cities in the Yangtze Valley area. By the summer of that year the Eighth Army had been placed under P’eng Te- huai’s newly formed Third Army Corps, and then in July and again in September, the Eighth Army was one of the units which took part in the attacks on Changsha, the Hunan capital (see under PJeng Te-huai). The defeated Communist units retreated southward to their base on the Kiangsi-Fukien border, but by the end of 1930 they were faced with the first of the five KMT Annihilation Campaigns, which culminated in the evacuation of the base area and the Long March to Shensi.
P'eng presumably took part in all of the Annihilation Campaigns, but details are not available on his role (if any) in the first two. During the third campaign (mid-1931), he served as political commissar of the Second Division (of P'eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps) and fought in cooperation with Ch'en Ts units in southeast Kiangsi. In the next campaign (mid-1932 to early 1933) he was political commissar of the Fourth Division, which fought around I-himng Lo-an, and Lin-ch'uan in central Kiangsi. During the fifth and final campaign (late 1933-34), P’eng was back to his original post as political commissar of the Second Division, and he was concurrently political commissar of Ch’en I’s Kiangsi Military District. During the course of these battles, P’eng was wounded,and on one occasion his division commander, Kuo Ping- sheng, defected to the Nationalists, P'eng led the remaining division troops to safety and was subsequently awarded a decoration for this act of loyalty. P’eng spent most of these years in the field with his troops, but for a period in 1933 he headed a section for high-level cadres in the Red Army Academy (Hung-chiin ta-hsueh) on the outskirts of Juichin, the capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic.
When the Long March began in October 1934, P'eng was placed in command of the Fifth Division under P'eng Te-huai's Third Army Corps. However, because of the heavy losses suffered in the early stages of the march, Pang's division was lowered in designation to the 13th Regiment, which he commanded until the troops reached north Shensi in the fall of 1935. After the arrival of the Long March forces in Shensi, the Red Army underwent' a reorganization, the First and Third Army Corps were merged and designated the First Army Corps. All of the units which had originally been under P’eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps were combined into the First Division under the new command structure; the exception was P'eng Hsueh-feng's 13th Regiment, which was redesignated the Fourth Division. P'eng became the division political commissar, and in this capacity, in the early months of 1936, he participated in the Communists’ thrust across the Yellow River into Shansi. Ostensibly an ueastward march to engage Japanese troops in north China, the Communists in fact fought against the troops of the Shansi warlord-governor Yen Hsi-shan. However, after some initial successes (see under Liu Chih-tan), the Red Army was driven back across the Yellow River into Shensi. P'eng was then assigned for a brief period of study to the Red Army Academy, which had just re-opened (mid-1936) in north Shensi.
Immediately after war erupted, the Communists reorganized their units into the Eighth Route Army and moved eastward into Shansi to engage the Japanese. P'eng became head of the office (ts’an-mou-ch’u chang) directly subordinate to the Army s chief-of-staff, and concurrently head of the Eighth Route Army Staff Office (pan-shih-ch'u chang) in Shansi. The latter was initially located in Taiyuan, but when it fell to the Japanese in November 1937, P'eng went south to Lin-fen where, under the auspices of the Staff Office, he established and became commandant of a training school. The school ran a nine-week course to instruct young cadres, both men and women, in the arts of guerrilla warfare. Sixty per cent of the instruction was devoted to military tactics and techniques, and the remainder to political subjects. U.S. military observer Evans Carlson visited the school at the end of 1937 and interviewed P'eng, whom he found to be “dynamic.”
On August 8, 1938, P’eng published an article in Chieh-fang (Liberation), the leading Party organ in Yenan, on work behind enemy lines. In the following month he was given an opportunity to put some of these principles into practice when he was placed in charge of a guerrilla detachment that moved from Shansi into T'i-k’ang and Huai-yang hsien in east-central Honan to assist in the fighting against the Japanese. In Honan, P’eng’s force was augmented by disaffected students and peasants as well as by former KMT troops who had been defeated by the Japanese at Kaifeng in mid-1938. Moving east during the next year, by June 1939 P’eng’s unit became the Sixth Detachment of the New Fourth Army, whose forces were rapidly expanding. In 1940 the Sixth Detachment moved into northern Anhwei, establishing its headquarters at Ko-yang and increasing its size to about 6,400 men. P’eng’s work was praised by Mao Tse-tung, who in a May 1940 directive to the Southeast Party Bureau commented on the "determined struggle carried on by P'eng Hsueh-feng’s detachment north of the Huai river.” Before mid-1940, when Ch’en I’s New Fourth Army troops moved into north Kiangsu, P’eng’s Sixth Detachment was the most powerful Communist unit north of the Yangtze. It was further strengthened in August 1940 when it linked up with another force (led by Huang K’o-ch’eng) which had also originally been under the Eighth Route Army.