Expeditionary force monument

There used to be an expeditionary force monument on Matougang, Baiyun Mountain in northern Guangzhou. Today, the remaining memorial tower still stands beside Guangyuan East Road. Those four pillars seem to show the world that there are more than 20,000 loyal souls of anti-Japanese soldiers who died in India and Myanmar!

The whole story of monument construction:

The new army has an unwritten agreement: where the war hits, the cemetery will be built. 1945 at 6: 00 a.m. 1 1945, as soon as the surrender ceremony in Guangzhou was over, Sun Liren, commander of the new first army, and Li Hong, teacher of the new 38th division, walked out of the meeting place side by side and talked along the grass couch carpet temporarily laid in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou. Sun instructed Li Hong and others to immediately set about building a new cemetery for soldiers killed in India, Burma and Japan, so as to attract loyal souls and make them rest in peace.

Sun Liren flew in a military plane three times, circled over Guangzhou, and chose the site for the cemetery himself. Sun Liren explained the reason and process of his site selection: "Guangzhou is the birthplace of the revolution, and most of the national revolutionary martyrs' cemeteries are here. The expeditionary force suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and was buried in Chinese cemeteries in Myitkyina, bhamo and Namkham in northern Myanmar. They also followed the will, picked up the ashes and moved here. " Address of the cemetery: "Shahe is in front and Yunshan is behind. The northeast is the cemetery of soldiers killed in the First Division, the south is the cemetery of soldiers killed in the Battle of Songhu of the 19th Route Army, and the west is the tomb of seventy-two martyrs in Huanghuagang and the tomb of Mr. Liao. The martyrs were able to sleep with the revolutionary martyrs, and their loyalty was immortal. "

After the tomb site was selected, Sun Liren, who graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering of Purdue University in the United States, personally wrote the Monument to the First Army of India and Myanmar for the New Army Cemetery.

Liang Jiayou, the main translator of the 38th Division of the New First Army, recalled that the foundation stone was laid on 1945+654381October 5th. Sun Liren ordered 600 Japanese prisoners of war to "repay their blood with sweat" and "comfort the martyrs in Jiuquan". The Japanese prisoners of war who built the cemetery were honest and worked hard. An engineering company of the New First Army escorts 600 Japanese prisoners of war from Guangzhou prison camp to Shahe construction site every day. Soldiers of the engineering company stood around the construction site on guard. Japanese prisoners of war cook by themselves at noon. The engineering company left the construction site for the northeast in the middle of March of 1946. At that time, the earthwork of the cemetery was basically completed.

The former New First Army Cemetery is about 250 meters long from north to south and 300 meters wide from east to west, with a total area of about 75,000 square meters. It is a rectangular cemetery with high north and low south. The core building of the cemetery is the memorial tower. The memorial tower is 2 1 m high and its base is a square terrace with a side length of 45 meters. The east, west and north sides of the memorial tower are inlaid with marble inscriptions engraved with the names of more than 27,000 dead soldiers of the Indian-Burmese New Army. Each stone tablet is about 2 meters wide and 5 meters high. The front of the memorial tower is inlaid with a Liaoning bluestone tablet about 4 meters long and 0.5 meters wide, which is engraved with the Chinese characters "Memorial Tower of the First Army of India and Myanmar" 16 written by Sun Liren. Neat and square, penetrating the stone back.

At the southern end of the North-South Avenue in front of the monument, a cemetery gate with a span of 30 meters is composed of two gatehouses and a memorial arch. The design of the two gatehouses combines the concepts of the Arc de Triomphe and the military camp, which is simple and dignified. The design of the arch is unique, consisting of two square columns in two parts. On the two inner sides of the lower section of the square column, there is a sculpture of a new army soldier wearing a helmet and holding a submachine gun. Designers use abstract modern design concepts to sculpt soldiers into "two-stage"-upper body portraits; The legs are abstracted as stone pillars, which are integrated with the archway pillars at the entrance of the cemetery. The overall height of the sculpture relief is about 6 meters, of which the upper body is about 2 meters high and the abstract leg is about 4 meters high.

Bronze eagle on the memorial tower. It weighs 65,438+0,600 kilograms, is 8 feet high and 65,438+00 feet long. Made of copper after shooting the Japanese aggressors. Sun Liren, commander of the new army, once wrote: "The bronze eagle standing on the memorial tower weighs more than 1000 kilograms, and its copper material is melted by shells collected during the war." It is "a precious souvenir"

The upper section of the square column of the archway is a couplet, and the left couplet is "indomitable spirit"; The couplet on the right is "the soul of a hero lives forever". Two statues of soldiers are condensed on the square column under the joint, echoing each other. Right below the left-wing alliance is the words "The Army's Newly Edited First Army's Cemetery for the Dead in India and Burma", all inscribed by Sun Liren. Chiang Kai-shek only wrote four words for the cemetery of the new army: "respect, stay and care."

On the southeast side of Jigong Pavilion, after the inauguration ceremony, there is a war history room.

Now, the building flush with the original memorial tower is "Hengfu Hotel".

1950, the memorial tower of the Expeditionary Force was partially demolished, and the black marble and epitaph of the tower foundation facade during the Cultural Revolution were completely eradicated. In the middle of the memorial tower, a bronze eagle with a weight of more than a thousand kilograms, which was cast with a shell, was smashed and melted. On the east, west and north sides of the memorial tower, there are more than 27,000 large-scale inscriptions engraved with the names of the dead soldiers of the Indian-Burmese New Army, all of which were smashed. This memorial tower, composed of four square columns, is so strong that it can't be shaken at all, and it was finally "fully utilized" and transformed into a toilet. Liaoning Qingshi Pagoda inscribed with Sun Liren's handwritten Chinese characters "Memorial Pagoda for the Dead in India and Burma, Newly Edited by the Army" 16 was smashed and abandoned about 300 meters away from the cemetery. I don't know where I threw the inscription. Sun Liren's elegiac couplet inscribed on the monument has disappeared.