On October 24, 1898, Peng Dehuai was born into a poor peasant family in Xiangtan in Hunan province. He left school early and worked as a labourer and then as a coal miner, and he joined the army as a young man and rose through the ranks, and he took part in the Northern Expedition in the 1920s. He rose quickly. He joined the Communist Party in 1928 and led the Pingjiang uprising the same year.
In the 1930s he commanded armies of the Red Army in the campaigns in Jiangxi and in the Long March, and during the war against Japan he was deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army and later directed the large offensive of 1940 known as the Hundred Regiments offensive, which attacked railways and Japanese garrisons across the north. The fighting was hard. In the civil war he commanded the first field army in the north west, and he led it against the Nationalist forces in Shaanxi and Gansu. His forces won those campaigns.
He was made one of the ten marshals in 1955 and became minister of defence. In October 1950 he was given command of the Chinese forces that entered the Korean War, and he directed the campaigns of the first year, including the advances of late 1950 and the fighting around the 38th parallel in 1951, and he held the post until the armistice of 1953. He was known for a plain manner and for living simply, and he was respected by the soldiers he led.
His career ended in 1959. At the meeting at Lushan he criticised the Great Leap Forward and the reporting of the harvest figures, and he was removed from his posts and criticised in public, and he spent years under supervision and was attacked during the Cultural Revolution. He died in Beijing in 1974. He was rehabilitated after 1978, and his account of the Lushan meeting was published later.