"Tunnel warfare, tunnel warfare, lay down millions of divine soldiers!" This well-known song tells the history of the Chinese military and people's tenacious struggle against the Japanese aggressors during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Marshal Nie Rongzhen said: "The tunnel warfare in which the people of North China are out of nowhere and won by surprise is a great pioneering deed of the people of North China to defend their homeland, carry out guerrilla warfare, and defeat the stubborn enemy in the plains." The geopolitical war has once again demonstrated the infinite might of the people's war."
Tunnel warfare is a special and effective form of fighting that adheres to protracted warfare and the war of resistance behind enemy lines on the objective basis that the enemy is strong and we are weak, the enemy occupies cities and railway lines, and we occupy the vast rural areas, and is a great magic weapon for resisting the well-equipped and well-trained Japanese Kou.
From 1942 to 1944, the Japanese invaders carried out a "great sweep" on the Jizhong Plain, implementing a three-light policy of "killing, robbing, and burning the light" in local villages and towns. The beautiful and fertile Jizhong Plain is everywhere a desolate scene of "looking up to see the watchtowers, stepping onto the highway; no village without filial piety, and wolf smoke everywhere". In the cruel environment of "no danger to base," how to protect the lives and property safety of the local masses, how to carry out guerrilla warfare in the plains, and how to persist in revolutionary struggle have become major issues for the survival of the military and people in Hebei.
The terrain of the Jizhong Plain is different from that of the mountainous areas, and there is no danger to base it on, and such a topographic environment and characteristics have completely exposed the local military and civilian anti-Japanese activities and guerrilla warfare to the enemy's eyes, and there is a danger of being swept up and suppressed at any time.
According to General Lü Zhengcao, who led the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in Hebei, the formation of the tunnel was not achieved overnight, but underwent a process of gradual development. In order to prevent being captured by the Japanese puppet army, the masses of the people in the central Hebei region hid in the vegetable cellar and the yam cellar when the enemy came to search for them, and later dug a hidden hole in their own home, also known as "toad squatting." The volume of this hole is very small, and people cannot move in it, but can only passively hide. Once the enemy is found, it is difficult to escape.
Due to the limited concealment efficiency of a single cave, the masses connected several caves to form tunnels. The connection grew wider and wider, "and by the spring of 1944 not only were the tunnels open to every house, but the tunnels were open from this village to that village." In the history of North China, there are records of tunnel excavation operations: "Its cellar land not only hides millet, but also avoids capture." The captives did not dare to enter the cellar, but the grass was smoked. However, its many ambiguities, that is, smoke, have his tricks out of no harm. The first family wears the tunnel and wears it again, and every time it is long, it tastes and meets the place where his family wears. The "tunnels in the period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression" are not only related to the lives of cadres and guerrillas, but also have a major bearing on the work and combat mood of cadres and fighters. With a good hole, the warriors were happier than keeping a magnificent manor house. "
The earliest recorded tunnel warfare in history took place during the Warring States period more than 2,400 years ago. There is a record of digging tunnels for offensive and defensive operations in the "Mozi Beixiao", and this tactic has a new development in the Three Kingdoms period. The Battle of Anzhong between Cao Cao and Zhang Xiu in 198 AD, the Battle of Yijing between Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zhan in 199, the Battle of Yicheng between Cao Cao and Yuan Shang in 204, the Battle of Jiangdu between Cao Zhen and Zhu Ran in 223, and the Battle of Chen Cang between Zhuge Liang and Hao Zhao in 228 all appear in the underground warfare.
According to the Zizhi Tongjian, in 199 AD, Yuan Shao besieged Gongsun Zhan in yijing for a long time. Yuan Shao then sent his troops to dig tunnels all the way down to Gongsun Zhan's castle tower, and Gongsun Zhan knew that he would not be spared, so he hanged his sisters, wives and children, and then set himself on fire and set himself on fire to death. In 204 AD, Cao Cao's army besieged Yecheng, and for the first time used the siege method of "tunnel warfare", "building tushan up and digging tunnels down", completely cutting off the connection between inside and outside Yecheng, and finally easily attacking Yecheng.
The masses in the Jizhong region have a tradition of building cellars, "making cellars in the fields, opening the land like a wellhead, three or four feet deep, storing more grain in the lower part, and spreading around it, and the sheng valley is as many as thousands of stones." Whenever the northern nomads attacked, the local people hid in the cellars. The enemy did not know the details and did not dare to rush into the cellar, so he had to burn smoke with firewood and grass. Because the holes in the cellar are connected, crisscrossed, and for miles, many holes are dug, and smoke enters and exits from the main hole, leaving the enemy with no way to do anything.
In 1942, the Japanese army adopted the tactics of encirclement of iron walls and sweeping grates to carry out a large-scale extermination of the Jizhong Plain, and systematically built strongholds, built roads, dug blockade ditches, and carried out fine fragmentation and division, in a vain attempt to extinguish the anti-Japanese beacon fire. In total, the Japanese army built more than 1,700 strongholds, watchtowers, and bunkers in Jizhong, and newly built more than 5,250 kilometers of roads, dividing the points, pillars, roads, and ditches used in the base areas of Jizhong into more than 2,670 small pieces, each of which was under the tight fire net blockade.
Faced with the powerful offensive of the Japanese army, the anti-Japanese struggle in Jizhong had to be forced to go underground. At the meeting, the leader of the Tenth Military Subdistrict of the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region said: "It is not enough to rely solely on 'toad squatting' to passively evade, and we must think of another effective way to hide and fight." At the meeting, some people proposed that the various "toad squats" be connected to become tunnels, one village can be connected, and several villages can also be connected; when one village is attacked, it can hide in another village; the enemy has found one, and there are many more; the tunnels can be used for Tibetans, and can also be used for other purposes such as transporting troops and fighting.
After this resolution was passed, the party members, militiamen, and masses of the Tenth Military Subdistrict connected the underground of the main roads of the whole village with a "medium" type channel in accordance with the terrain of the village, built four defense facilities for smoke prevention, fire prevention, poison prevention, and waterproofing in the tunnels, combined the tunnel vents with the chimneys, wells, and wall roofs on the ground, built bunkers and shooting holes at the edges of the villages, streets, and other corners, formed a tunnel network of houses and houses, streets, and villages, and built a three-dimensional defense system of internal and external joint defense, cooperating with each other, and striking at the enemy.
The construction of the tunnel network was completed, and on the basis of giving full play to the advantages of the tunnel fortifications, the military and people of Jizhong created a variety of tactics relying on the tunnels. They summed up the four advantages of authenticity: "It is easy to fight the enemy, it is good to hide oneself, it is good to drill and fight, and it can also run when it is fought." There are tunnel nets between the villages, which can help each other in battle, pinch the enemy, and achieve greater results.
The tunnel struggle must rely on the strength of the masses, otherwise it will not be completed. The tunnels are basically built according to the village, and digging the tunnels requires a lot of manpower and material resources, and also bears the risk of retaliation after being discovered by the Japanese army, which is impossible without the support of the masses. The relationship between the Communist Party of China and the masses, even the Japanese admit: "Because of the blood and geographical relations, the relationship between the people and the Chinese Communist Party and army is very strong."
The Jizhong region was the earliest area occupied by the Japanese army after the War of Resistance Against Japan, where the Japanese army burned and plundered, and the masses of the people became staunch anti-Japanese people. General Lü Zhengcao once said: "The people of Jizhong experienced real harm in the Japanese invasion, so it is a revolutionary and patriotic region."
Tunnel struggles must be waged on the basis of villages, and on the Great Plains of North China, villages often have complete or segmented walls that surround the entire village. The main role of this wall is to defend against robbery and protect the villagers, but in the War of Resistance Against Japan, it became the basis for the defense of tunnels and villages. At the same time, the villages in the central Hebei region are generally larger in scale and have a high population density, and 200 or 300 households in a village are the norm. This environment naturally supported the tunnel struggle, since the enemy had an average of only fifty or sixty enemy puppet troops in a stronghold, and it was difficult for a man to encircle a village alone. When the enemy surrounds the East Street, the masses can run from the tunnel to the West Street out of the village; or to another tunnel, the hole in the ground to hide, the enemy often has nothing to do.
On May 27, 1942, the Japanese army dispatched more than 300 people to sweep more than ten villages in Dingnan County, including Dongxi Zhaozhuang, Dongxicheng Village, and Mafucai. The Dingnan County guerrillas and militia continued their struggle after giving the Japanese a head-on attack. Unfortunately, the Japanese found the tunnel entrance. Although the enemy did not dare to enter the tunnels, they violated international conventions and cruelly put a large amount of poisonous gas into the tunnels, causing more than 800 people to die and creating a terrible tragedy.
This massacre awakened the people at the cost of blood, and while the people of Jizhong hated the Japanese army incomparably, they also became aware of the various hidden dangers and problems existing in the construction of the tunnels, and provided bloody experience for the future construction and struggle of the tunnels.
With the development of the war situation, the party organizations in Jizhong demanded that all localities should transform tunnels that could only be hidden and could not fight. Yang Chengwu, commander of the Jizhong Military Region, also summed up his experience in building operational tunnels, and a pamphlet written into "Tunnel Struggle on the Jizhong Plain" was distributed to various localities. Since then, the tunnels in Jizhong have become more and more perfect and more and more skillfully constructed. All kinds of new tunnels are constantly being created by the masses of the people, and the enemy is neither easy to find nor easy to destroy.
According to the party department, during the eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the tunnels built by the people of Jizhong were about 15,000 kilometers. In order to preserve their living forces and effectively strike at the enemy, the people of Jizhong, under the leadership of the party, gradually extended the tunnels according to the needs of the war, and finally dug up a tunnel network connecting households, connecting villages and villages, connecting in all directions, and echoing from top to bottom, and changing the fortifications such as milling plates, counters, stoves, and temples into concealed gun holes that could be attacked, forming an underground three-dimensional crossfire network. In the tunnel, there are headquarters, rest rooms, arsenals, grain storage rooms, guiding signs, traps, kitchens, etc., forming an underground Great Wall that can fight and hide, can be attacked and defended, and can be freely advanced and retreated.
In order to strike more effectively at the enemy, the people of Jizhong have also found a set of methods for opposing the enemy's destruction of tunnels in the course of struggle: First, they camouflage the opening of the cave so that it is not easy for the enemy to discover; second, they have designed the cave to be complex and changeable, which can confuse the enemy. It is also possible to strike at the enemy in the cave; the third is to build the tunnel into a safe fortress for poisoning, waterproofing, and fire prevention, so that the tunnel warfare will flourish with the momentum of the fire and achieve extraordinary results.
Characteristics and Significance of Tunnel Warfare Under the circumstance that the overall military strength of China and Japan is very different, tunnel warfare has achieved a combination of concealment and combat. The tunnels are fully equipped, with shooting holes, lookout holes, and Lare holes, and the holes are equipped with flaps, traps, flaps, bayonets, sandbags, stone slabs, and other mechanisms to attack the enemy, as well as rest houses, toilets, food, water, lights, and other equipment to protect themselves. Maximize the use of authentic performance. Tunnel warfare and ground combat work together to effectively strike at the enemy while preserving our strength.
Tunnel warfare has achieved joint defense operations between tunnels and tunnels, and between villages and villages. Tunnel warfare is a kind of struggle strategy of "drilling, drilling and fighting, drilling and fighting again", which can help each other in battle, so that the enemy has no target and no confrontation, so as to defeat the enemy psychologically. Relying on the tunnels, the villages organized the joint defense of heaven, earth, and courtyard households, as well as the joint defense along the high roofs and tunnels along the edge of the village, forming a three-story firepower network, relying on the tunnels to attack and retreat to defend, forming a pattern of three-dimensional warfare.
The high development of the tunnels in central Hebei has enabled our army to establish a consolidated rear in the plains. In the tense environment of the enemy's "sweeping" and "liquidation," many tasks were carried out in secret in the tunnels, and most of the factories, hospitals, newspaper offices, warehouses, and radio stations in the base areas were also located in the tunnels, thus providing safe protection for the struggle against the enemy.
Driven by tunnel warfare in central Hebei, tunnels in other parts of North China have also been widely developed. The guerrilla warfare model created by tunnel warfare is a miracle in the history of military warfare and a valuable spiritual wealth. Tunnel warfare "turns the undefendable plains into insurmountable fortresses, the mighty power of the people's war, and the wonder of the history of war." It not only made great contributions in the War of Resistance Against Japan, but also made outstanding contributions to the subsequent victory in the War of Liberation. This ancient method of warfare has been further developed and created in the War of National Liberation against Japan, played a miraculous role in striking at the enemy, and will forever be recorded in the annals of history.