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Text: Peng Yibin
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introduction
On May 1, 1942, the Japanese army launched an unprecedented sweep of the North China base area, known as the "May Day Sweep". This large-scale strategic operation dealt a heavy blow to the base areas.
Even the commander and political commissar of the 8th Division of Jizhong were killed in the sweep. If the Japanese army does one or two more sweeps, maybe our base area will not exist at all.
But strangely, soon after, the Japanese army stopped sweeping the base area, and the Eighth Route Army finally jumped out of the enemy's encirclement and turned the corner. What's going on here?
(Japanese Sweep)
1. The tragic May Day sweep made the base areas in Jizhong in danger
In April 1942, a pair of young siblings were in a hurry, and the Japanese soldiers, who noticed the abnormality, stopped them for questioning. The child pointed to the filial piety clothes on his body and said, "Let's go to Xiguan for funeral." ”
In fact, the two children were on this trip to pass on important information to the Eighth Route Army at the given county intelligence station, because the Japanese army was always on guard, and adults could easily arouse suspicion, so they could only risk sending the children.
At this time, the base area in North China was suffering from the sweep of the Japanese army's "iron wall encirclement". The information delivered this time was about the frequent troop movements of the Japanese army. But what they didn't know was that this intelligence foreshadowed a large-scale sweep of unprecedented scale in the near future.
On 1 May, in order to completely destroy the anti-Japanese base area in central Hebei, the Japanese army gathered more than 50,000 troops, and also dispatched the air force to cooperate, and hundreds of tanks and automobiles surrounded the base area.
This large-scale strategic operation was commanded by the commander of the North China Army, Okamura Ninji, and was described by the Japanese army as "the most brutal of the 75 sweeps carried out in 1942."
(May Day Sweep)
Although the troops had received the information sent by their sister and brother in advance, in the face of such a well-planned sweep, the Jizhong base area still suffered serious losses, and the battle situation was extremely tragic.
Beginning on 1 May, the military and civilians in the base areas carried out 270 anti-sweeping struggles, resulting in the final failure of the Japanese army's plan to wipe out the main force and the head of the Jizhong government in one fell swoop. Annoyed and angry, Okamura Ninji changed his strategy and began to shift his focus to local troops and militias, while vigorously searching for cadres of the Eighth Route Army.
The organs of the Jizhong Military Region were attacked by the Japanese army, and the militia units were also surrounded, and the propaganda chief, the political commissar of the regiment, and other cadres of the Jizhong Military Region were killed one after another, with nearly 1,000 casualties.
In June, the commander and political commissar of the Eighth Division of Jizhong died during the breakout, becoming the highest-ranking general of our army to lose in the "May Day Sweep".
However, Okamura did not give up the goal of annihilating the main force, and the Japanese army successively dispatched 25,000 troops to launch several sweeps of the Taihang Mountain base area, which is where the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army and the Central Northern Bureau are located.
(May Day Sweep)
In order to break out of the enemy's encirclement, the president of Kang Da ordered to disperse and break through. At this time, most of the members of the Anti-University were cadres above the battalion level of the 129th Division. They have been on the battlefield for a long time and have rich combat experience, and through tactics such as "small circles" and "big shift changes", they successfully threw off the Japanese army and successfully broke out of the encirclement.
However, some of the students still died in the breakout, and after the dispersal of the operation, a detachment of the Anti-Japanese Army Middle School was surrounded by the Japanese army. These cadets were only teenagers at the time, but in the face of a strong enemy, they regarded death as home, and after running out of ammunition and food, they rushed into the enemy army and engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat, and finally all died heroically.
The cadres of the Eighth Route Army who survived the catastrophe still have lingering palpitations when they recall the "May Day Sweep". The sweep lasted more than two months, and the Japanese army repeatedly used intensive "dragnet" and "combing" tactics to spread a large impermeable net, compressing the base area little by little until it was completely annihilated.
(尸横延野)
Second, the "counter-sweeping" of clever tricks jumped out of the encirclement of the Japanese army
It can be said that the effect of the Japanese army's "sweep" was very remarkable, and it dealt a devastating blow to the base areas. However, the tenacious Eighth Route Army did not rest on its laurels, but instead developed many effective "anti-sweeping" tactics.
Lu Zhengcao, commander of the Jizhong Military Region, said: "It is very important to grasp the timing of the 'encirclement' of the Japanese. If you jump early, the enemy will abandon the original plan and implement a new encirclement on you, and if you jump late, of course, you will not be trapped in the encirclement......"
Grasping the strategic opportunity is a valuable experience summed up by the blood of the military and civilians in the base areas. This method was used by Liu Bocheng during the third sweep of the Japanese army in 1941. At that time, the Japanese army's target was directly aimed at the headquarters of the 129th Division, and the location of Liu Bocheng and his headquarters was only more than 30 miles away from the sweeping Japanese army.
The Japanese army divided its forces into more than 20 troops and advanced southward in a grate formation. Liu Bocheng commanded the 129th Division to be divided into two echelons, front and rear, and waited for the opportunity. He clearly knows that acting too early will expose himself, and there is only one chance to break through.
(The Eighth Route Army is actively preparing for war)
Waiting until the afternoon, Liu Bocheng felt that the time was ripe and ordered to move immediately. After a difficult trek of more than 50 kilometers in a day and night, the division headquarters successfully jumped out of the encirclement of the Japanese army.
Based on his experience in many counter-sweeps, Liu Bocheng wrote the "Tactical Instructions for Opposing the Enemy's Sweeps," which not only analyzed the various tactical characteristics and drawbacks of the Japanese army's sweeps, but also formulated in detail a series of countermeasures, as well as a series of norms for the troops' operational essentials and the use of ammunition.
Another experience of counter-sweeping was timely preparation, and in the "May Day Sweep," Liu Bocheng's reconnaissance detachment received accurate information from the Japanese army and began to direct the troops to move from May 21. When the confident Japanese arrived on June 9, they found that the original headquarters of the Eighth Route Army had long been empty.
(Liu Bocheng)
The last experience, and the most important anti-sweeping experience of the Eighth Route Army, is that the enemy advances and we retreat. As early as the 1940 Licheng Conference, Liu Bocheng put forward this tactical idea.
This strategy was specifically aimed at the Japanese army's "cage policy", which did not fight hard with the enemy's internal line, but chased the enemy and beat him in the ass. Divert the main force to flank the enemy from the outside, destroy their bases and transportation supply lines, and engage in guerrilla warfare with the military engineering team. When necessary, face the enemy head-on, and concentrate superior forces to carry out mobile warfare and annihilation warfare.
This operational principle was widely used in the anti-sweeping campaign, and the Eighth Route Army gradually shifted from passive to active militarily.
Third, the "Great Purge" was finally aborted, and the reasons behind it are thought-provoking
Judging from the long-term war situation, Okamura Ningji's sweep dealt a heavy blow to the base area, so why was it not carried out in the end?
(Base areas are actively preparing for war)
In 1940, the Japanese army put forward the "cage policy" against the anti-Japanese base areas in North China, which was also the strategic guiding ideology of the Great Sweep. They successively built more than 2,700 pillbox strongholds in North China, and after the "Battle of the Hundred Regiments", they transferred two divisions from the Central China Battlefield to increase their strength in North China.
In 1941, the Japanese army headquarters approved the "Guiding Outline for the Long-term War in Greater East Asia", and at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the "Public Security Enhancement Campaign" in North China was clearly implemented, and 75% of the troops of the Japanese army invading China except for the Kwantung Army and all the puppet troops were mobilized to carry out a large-scale sweep surrounded by iron walls.
(Jizhong anti-sweeping operation map)
From 1941 to 1942, the Japanese army organized 132 sweeps with 1,000 people and 27 sweeps with 1 to 70,000 people, repeatedly sweeping the same area for more than three months. Such a high-intensity, long-term large-scale operation made all the Japanese troops highly nervous and physically exhausted, and they had reached the limit of what they could bear.
In the face of China, the core of Japan's strategy of aggression against China is to achieve a quick victory, and the longer it drags on, the smaller the chance of victory. Both Okamura Ninji and the Japanese military department were well aware of this truth, and the sweep was the concrete implementation of this guiding ideology.
(May Day Sweep)
Because of this, Chairman Mao put forward the idea of "protracted war" in 1938, and this policy was also implemented throughout the Eighth Route Army's War of Resistance against Japan. Under the guidance of this idea, the military and civilians in the base areas developed many counter-sweeping methods, and finally dragged down the Japanese army, which has been discussed in detail in Chapter 2 of this article.
In addition, the international situation was also an important factor in the abortion of the Japanese sweep, which attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and within a few months the Japanese army controlled almost the entire western Pacific. Of course, the United States could not sit idly by, and the Battle of Midway in 1942 became a turning point in the situation of the United States and Japan.
(Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor)
In the face of the powerful United States, Japan did not dare to take it lightly, and they dispatched a large number of troops to the newly occupied areas to actively prepare troops for the counterattack of the United States. As a result, the Japanese army could no longer concentrate superior forces to carry out a sweep, and this strategy naturally could not be continued.
Okamura Ninji's "sweeping" strategy was ultimately aborted, which was the result of the combined action of multiple factors, but the most important point was the huge sacrifice made by the Chinese people to persist in the War of Resistance and once again demonstrated the correctness of Chairman Mao's "protracted war" policy.
Resources
[1] Wu Qiang prepared to build the "May Day" Anti-Sweeping Memorial Hall in Jizhong during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. People's Daily Online.2013-09-11
[2] Anti-Sweep: Jump out of the "cage" to fight. Hebei Daily.2015-08-14
[3] The formation of the "three-light policy" of the Japanese invading army. People's Liberation Army Daily.2015-05-13
[4] Why did the Japanese defeat Midway? A fatal cause made Yamamoto fifty-six regret it. Anti-Japanese War Memorial Network.2022-10-18