Not to mention the puppet military and political system in Peiping, even the general departments of the North China Front Army in Peiping were not aware of this meeting. The various intelligence systems in North China were deployed in multiple intelligence networks within Peiping. The Japanese army did not get any information about this tripartite high-level operational coordination meeting. Any information.
Okamura Neiji's excessive caution caused the intelligence systems in various base areas in North China to know nothing about the Japanese army's joint operations meeting, which in turn led to a heavy reliance on the intelligence system within the customs in collecting intelligence on the Japanese army in North China. The Anti-Japanese Alliance intelligence system also has no idea about this Japanese military meeting.
The passivity in intelligence cast a heavy shadow over this battle. If it had not been for Yang Zhen's joint actions against the Kwantung Army and the North China Front Army, he would have been prepared in advance and prepared for possible reinforcements and adjustments to the deployment of the Japanese North China Front Army. , and also made some targeted arrangements. I am afraid that the Anti-Japanese Alliance will suffer a big loss in this battle.
It also allowed the troops in various base areas in North China, who had just taken a breather from the autumn raids launched by the Japanese army and were seizing the time to recover and collect supplies for the winter, to suffer heavy losses in the subsequent winter raids launched by the Japanese army. Almost no one was left. It was expected that the Japanese army would continue to launch large-scale raids regardless of fatigue.
Less than half a month after this meeting, the Japanese North China Front mobilized heavy troops and launched an attack on various base areas in the pass, with Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei, Taihang, and Taiyue as the main targets, and various base areas under the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region. As a priority target, an unprecedented and brutal sweep lasted throughout the winter.
In order to cut off the support for the Anti-Japanese Alliance's southward or westward campaign, during the so-called winter sweeps, the Japanese army not only concentrated heavy troops to launch a sweep against the two major base areas of Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei and Taihang, but also adopted a method of burning and killing more than before. Even worse are the cruel methods of merging villages and merging households in mountainous areas to create no-man's land.
In the course of counter-mopping up, the troops in each base area relied on the training they received in dealing with the Japanese army's large-scale mopping-up in the second half of the year, and their technical and tactical levels have been greatly improved. Although the frequent counter-mopping up operations in the second half of 2001 consumed a lot of troops, they We still have a certain amount of ammunition in reserve and are trying to carry out resolute anti-mopping operations relying on the mountains.
However, despite the stubborn resistance of the troops in various base areas, which caused serious losses to the Japanese troops participating in the raids, the Japanese army used poisonous gases on a large scale during the raids, which was extremely rare unlike the previous partial use of poisonous gases. , especially the large-scale use of corrosive poison gas and suffocating poison gas, brought even more heavy losses to the anti-mopping forces.
During this winter sweep, the Japanese army mobilized almost all chemical warfare units of the North China Front, and mobilized hundreds of thousands of poison gas shells and smoke tubes from the Kwantung Army, the Southern Japanese Army, and the mainland as quickly as possible, as well as a large number of Among the Japanese troops raiding the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region, the poison gas warfare equipment even reached the standard of having a chemical squadron in every combat brigade.
The Japanese army used poison gas warfare on a large scale during the raids. Once they encountered an obstruction, they would use poison gas to clear the way. They even sent aviation troops to directly drop poison gas bombs on villages in the raid area. This tactic made the anti-mopping operations in various base areas in North China very difficult in a short period of time. The situation took a turn for the worse.
Troops with basically no protective equipment or emergency medicines suffered heavy losses from the Japanese army's large-scale poison gas bomb offensive. Among the troops participating in the war, the number of people poisoned in one battle at most even reached 100%. Not only front-line cadres and soldiers were exposed to poison gas. There were heavy casualties, and many senior cadres were poisoned many times.
During the battle to cover the retreat of fellow villagers and headquarters agencies, troops of a regiment in the Taihang Military Region were covered by thousands of rounds of suffocating gas fired by the Japanese army because of their blocking position. Because there were no gas masks and the Japanese army used a new type of poison gas, all participating troops Except for a very small number of people in the two battalions, all were poisoned and fell into coma.
Among the commanders of the regiment, except for the deputy commander who did not participate in the battle due to previous injuries, the deputy political commissar who was transferred to the Northern Bureau Party School to study before the war, and the commander who survived with a few personnel to break through, the chief of staff died in the battle on the first day. , the seriously wounded political commissar shot himself before the Japanese troops pounced on him and martyred his country.
The director of the Political Department and all cadres above the battalion level were taken away from Taiyuan detention center because the short guns and documents they wore exposed their identities. The remaining cadres and soldiers below the battalion level, including dozens of anti-college students who acted with them, were detained in Taiyuan. While he was in a coma, all the Japanese soldiers stabbed him to death with bayonets.
Under the Japanese army's ruthless raids, in order to preserve the vitality and old foundation of the troops, the remaining troops in major base areas finally had to give up the method of direct confrontation with the Japanese army. Each unit successively withdrew from the Japanese army's key raid areas, or jumped out to fight outside. , or retreat to the deep mountains and old forests to rest and breathe.
Through a series of brutal sweeps, the North China Front relied on bloody massacres and forcible expulsions to create a large number of no-man's land in the Taihang, Beiyue, Taiyue and other mountainous areas along the Tongpu, Zhengtai, Jinpu, Pingzhang and other railways. The people who migrated were massacred in large numbers, and a large number of houses, food, and materials in the area they raided were burned down.
The original reserves of winter supplies, which were not sufficient in the first place, suffered huge losses. Even the wells in the raided areas in the base area were either filled to death, or were filled with human or animal corpses, or simply thrown into poison gas. The bombs were contaminated and rendered unusable. During the raids, the Japanese army even used explosives to completely destroy all the springs they encountered.
In the Beiyue District of Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei alone, more than 50 million kilograms of grain and hundreds of thousands of tons of cotton were robbed and burned, a large number of livestock were killed or plundered, and more than 20 houses were burned or destroyed by artillery fire. By the end of the winter sweep by the Japanese army, there was almost no intact house in the entire Beiyue District. Tens of thousands of people in the base area had been killed. A considerable number of villages were even wiped out. Large areas of farmland were spread by the Japanese army with poison gas. It will not be possible to farm for a few years.
Compared with the troops, the losses of local cadres were particularly heavy. It cannot be described even if there is not even one in ten. Almost all the county party secretaries and county magistrates of the counties under Yanbei District died or were captured and killed. The cadres at the district and village levels , 90% were killed. In a county to which Beiyue District belongs, all cadres at the district and village levels in the county were killed.
This move by the Japanese army further compressed the activity space of various base areas in North China, causing a large amount of material and personnel losses, further increasing the survival pressure of various units in North China. The arsenals and clothing factories in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei and Taihang Military Regions were all destroyed.
There is a general shortage of food and salt in various base areas. Many troops even have no place to collect black beans. Some base areas held meetings. The participating cadres could not even sit because they were too hungry and could only lie on the kang. At the meeting, one or two soybeans became a high-end nutritional supplement, which could only be enjoyed after being specially approved by the leaders of the military region.
Even in January 1942, a large number of troops in major base areas such as Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei, Taihang, Taiyue, etc. still had not put on winter clothes. The central government spent a lot of money to mobilize cotton and cloth from the Hedong area. Before they could be made into winter clothes, a considerable part of them were destroyed during the Japanese army's winter raids.
By March 1942, the last remaining guerrilla zones in the central Hebei Plain had to be completely abandoned. All the forces in the several major base areas could only be transferred to the sparsely populated deep mountains and old forests in Beiyue, Wutai, Taihang and other mountainous areas, and the Pingxi base area. Then they were all forced to shrink to the Yanbei District, and the activity space of the Pingbei base area was further compressed into a small area in Yanshan.
Including the entire Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei, Taihang, and Taiyue base areas, the population of these major base areas in North China has dropped sharply to less than 10 million. It has dropped by 50% or more compared with the same period before the counter-mopping up. The actual population of each base area The control area has further shrunk, and the remaining grain-producing areas after losing the Jizhong Plain have almost completely lost their embers.
Especially the winter supplies, almost all were lost to embers, and the loss of weapons and equipment was also quite heavy. Many old bones tempered by years of struggle were either sacrificed in the anti-mopping battle, or were captured because the troops were scattered. Some will Those who are not determined simply bury their weapons and go home out of frustration.
There are even a large number of speculators and weaklings who rebelled and surrendered to the Japanese army and became shameful traitors. The entire major base areas in North China, especially the areas that were raided by the Japanese and puppet troops, became a ghost place where tens of thousands of households were singing. The Japanese army raided many places in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border area, which was the top priority, and killed hundreds of people without a human habitation.
For the troops inside the pass, this winter was an exceptionally long and cold winter. Most of the troops spent it in hunger and cold, and in constant movement and fighting almost every day. Although the Anti-Japanese Alliance also urgently dispatched almost all troops With its own airlift capabilities, it carried out large-scale airdrops to various base areas behind enemy lines in North China, using Linxi and Rebei as take-off and landing areas.
A cluster of combat aircraft stationed in Yan'an was dispatched to conduct air strikes against the Japanese mopping up troops. However, the anti-alliance air transport capacity was still limited and could not meet the entire consumption of several major bases in North China. If winter clothing, food, and necessary weapons were added, Ammunition, even to maintain the most basic needs of various base areas in North China, is an astronomical amount.
Even if Yang Zhen goes all out, he can only meet 30% of the needs of several major base areas, and this is already the limit of the Anti-Alliance air transport capability, not counting being shot down by the Japanese army during the air transport and The fuel consumption of the five transport planes that crashed accounted for one-third of the fuel reserves of the Anti-Japanese Alliance for this battle.
If the Americans had not rushed to replenish 20,000 tons of high-quality aviation fuel before the launch of the battle, the Soviet Union, with the repeated coordination of the Americans, would have also transferred it to the Third Army when the Soviet-German battlefield was in a brief period of calm. Thousand tons, relying on the remaining aviation fuel of the Anti-Japanese Alliance, it is almost impossible to sustain the entire battle.
As for the combat aircraft group dispatched by the Anti-Japanese Alliance to cooperate with ground anti-sweeping operations, despite their best efforts, with high-intensity dispatch frequency and multiple dispatches regardless of losses, they were still unable to do so due to the small number and poor ground-air coordination. It played a decisive role and failed to change the unfavorable situation of ground anti-mopping operations.
As the northern part of Shanxi cooperated with the Anti-Japanese Alliance in fighting towards Suidong, it even relied on the central government to transfer grain from the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region in order to finally persist. However, its own grain output could barely meet its own needs, and daily grain transfers from northwest Shanxi were needed. The Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region has solved the problem in order to support the base areas in northwestern Shanxi and North China to tide over the difficulties.
Faced with a tight blockade in the surrounding areas and no channels for outsourcing, we could only tighten our belts with all our strength. All the remaining troops and all agency staff, including the chairman, only had two meals a day to save precious money. The food provided to the troops of the northwest Shanxi and Taiyue Military Regions.
Even in mid-January, the Japanese army's frequent raids caused huge transportation losses. They had to take advantage of the uncivilized Yellow River to transfer one main force from the Jinsui Military Region and the Taiyue Military Region back to the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. Rest and train to prevent the troops from starving or freezing.