Not to mention the puppet military and political system in Beiping at this meeting, even the general departments of the North China Front Army in Beiping are not clear. The various intelligence systems in North China have planted a number of intelligence networks in Beiping, but they have not received any information about the Japanese army's tripartite high-level operational coordination meeting.

Okamura Ninji's excessive caution made the intelligence systems of the various base areas in North China completely ignorant of the Japanese army's joint operations meeting. This in turn led to the fact that in terms of intelligence collection for the Japanese army in North China, the anti-union intelligence system, which relied heavily on the intelligence system in the Guannai, also had no way to understand the Japanese military meeting.

The passivity of intelligence cast a heavy shadow on this battle. If it weren't for Yang Zhen's joint action against the Kwantung Army and the North China Front, he would have been prepared in advance. In view of the possible reinforcement and adjustment of the deployment of the Japanese North China Front, some targeted arrangements have also been made.

It also made the troops in the various base areas in North China, who had just been able to take a breath from the autumn sweep launched by the Japanese army, and were seizing the time to recover at the moment, as well as raising winter materials, suffered heavy losses in the winter sweep launched by the Japanese army. Few people expected that the Japanese would launch a series of large-scale sweeps despite fatigue.

Less than half a month after this meeting, the Japanese North China Front mobilized heavy troops and launched a campaign against various base areas in the Guannai, with Jin-Cha-Ji, Taihang, and Taiyue as the main targets, and the subordinate base areas in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region as the priority targets, and continued an unprecedentedly cruel sweep throughout the winter.

In order to cut off the strategy of the anti-union to move south or westward, in this so-called winter sweep, the Japanese army not only concentrated heavy troops to launch a sweep against the two major base areas of Jinchaji and Taihang. They also adopted cruel methods of reuniting households in mountainous areas and creating no-man's land, which was even worse than the previous methods of burning, killing, and robbing all the people.

In the course of the counter-sweep, the units in the various base areas have greatly improved their technical and tactical level by relying on their training in dealing with the Japanese army's sweep in the second half of the year. In addition, although a large amount of ammunition was consumed due to the frequent anti-sweeping operations in the second half of the 41st year, there was still a certain reserve of ammunition in an attempt to rely on the mountainous terrain to carry out resolute anti-sweeping operations.

However, despite the stubborn resistance of the troops in the various base areas, the Japanese troops involved in the sweep brought severe losses. However, the Japanese army only partially used poison gas in the process of sweeping. The extremely rare large-scale use of all kinds of poison gases, especially the large quantities of erosive poison gases and asphyxiating gases, has brought even heavier losses to the anti-sweeping forces.

During this winter sweep, the Japanese army mobilized almost all the chemical warfare units of the North China Front. And at the fastest speed, hundreds of thousands of rounds of poison gas shells and smoke canisters were mobilized from the Kwantung Army, the Japanese army in the south, and the mainland, as well as a large number of poison gas warfare equipment. Among the Japanese troops that swept up the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region, even the standard of a chemical squadron was formed for an operational brigade.

The Japanese army adopted a large-scale poison gas war in the course of the sweep, using poison gas to open the way once it encountered an attack, and even sent aviation units to directly drop poison gas bombs on the villages in the sweep area, so that the counter-sweep operations in various base areas in North China took a sharp turn in a short period of time.

The units, which were basically devoid of protective equipment and first-aid medicines, suffered heavy losses under the large-scale gas bomb offensive of the Japanese army. Among the units participating in the battle, the number of poisoned people in the largest battle even reached 100 percent. Not only did the front-line cadres and fighters suffer heavy casualties under the poison gas, but senior cadres were also poisoned many times.

In the midst of the battle to cover the retreat of the villagers and the headquarters organs, the troops of a regiment of the Taihang Military Region were covered by several thousand rounds of asphyxiating poison gas fired by the Japanese army because of the blocking position. Because there were no gas masks, the Japanese army used a new type of poison gas, and all the two battalions of all the participating troops were poisoned and unconscious except for a very small number of people.

Among the commanders of the regiment, except for the deputy commander who did not participate in the battle because he was wounded before, the deputy political commissar who was transferred to study at the Party School of the Northern Bureau before the war, and the regiment commander who broke through with a small number of personnel and survived. The chief of staff was killed in the first day's fighting, and the seriously wounded commissar shot himself before the Japanese pounced.

The director of the political department and all the cadres above the battalion level were taken to Taiyuan because of the short guns they wore and the documents they wore to reveal their identities, and they were taken to Taiyuan for detention. The rest of the cadres and fighters below the battalion level, including dozens of anti-university members who acted with them, were all killed by the Japanese soldiers with bayonets in a coma.

Under the sweep of the Japanese army by all means, in order to maintain the vitality and old foundation of the troops, the remaining troops in the major base areas finally had to give up the method of frontal confrontation with the Japanese army, and all units withdrew one after another from the scope of the Japanese army's key sweeps. or jump out of the outside line to fight, or retreat to the deep mountains and old forests to rest and breathe.

In 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 mountainous areas of Taihang, Beiyue, and Taiyue along the Tongpu, Zhengtai, Jinpu, and Pingzhang railways. All the people who did not want to move were massacred, and a large number of houses, food, and supplies were burned in the areas they raided.

The original reserves, the amount of winter materials that were not sufficient in the first place, the loss was quite huge. Even wells in the swept areas of the base areas were either filled to death, thrown into the carcasses of humans or animals, or simply thrown into gas bombs to contaminate them and render them unusable. During the sweep, the Japanese army even completely destroyed all the springs they encountered with explosives.

In the Beiyue District of Shanxi, Chahar and Hebei alone, more than 50 million catties of grain and hundreds of thousands of loads of cotton were robbed and burned. A large number of livestock were killed or plundered, and more than 200,000 houses were burned or destroyed by artillery fire. By the end of the Japanese army's winter sweep, there was hardly a single intact house in the entire Beiyue area. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the base areas, and a considerable number of villages were even wiped out by the entire village. Large swathes of farmland were gassed by the Japanese army and could not be cultivated for several years.

Compared with the troops, the losses of local cadres are particularly heavy, and it is impossible to describe them with not one out of ten. Almost all of the county party secretaries and county magistrates of the counties under Yanbei District were killed or captured and killed. Ninety percent of the cadres at the district and village levels were killed. In a county to which Beiyue District belongs, all the cadres at the district and village levels in the county were killed.

With this hand, the Japanese army has further compressed the activity space of various base areas in North China. The massive loss of materials and personnel caused further aggravated the pressure on the survival of various units in North China. The arsenals and clothing factories of the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei and Taihang Military Regions were all destroyed.

There has been a general shortage of food and salt in various base areas, and many troops have even reached the point where they have no place to raise black beans. In some base areas, meetings were held, and the cadres attending the meetings could not even sit still because of excessive hunger, so they could only lie on the kang to hold the meeting. One or two soybeans have become high-grade nutritional products, and they can only be enjoyed after special approval by the leaders at the level of the military region.

Even in January of '42, a large part of the troops in the Jin-Cha-Ji, Taihang, Taiyue, and other major base areas did not change into winter clothes. The cotton and cloth that the central government had collected to the Hedong region at great cost had not had time to make winter clothes, and a considerable part of them were destroyed during the Japanese army's winter sweep.

By March of '42, the last remaining guerrilla zone in the Jizhong Plain had to be abandoned. All the forces in the major base areas can only be transferred to the sparsely populated deep mountains and old forests in the mountainous areas such as Beiyue, Wutai, and Taihang. The Pingxi base area was forced to shrink to Yanbei District, and the activity space of the Pingbei base area was further compressed to 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, a year-on-year decrease of 50 percent or even more than before the anti-sweep. The actual control areas of each base area have been further reduced, and almost all the remaining grain-producing areas after the loss of the Jizhong Plain have also lost their embers......

In particular, almost all of the materials for the winter were lost to embers. The losses of weapons and equipment were also quite heavy. Many of the old bones that had been tempered by years of struggle were either sacrificed in the anti-sweeping battles or were captured because the troops were scattered. Some people who are not determined simply bury their weapons and go home because they are discouraged.

There are even a large number of opportunists and soft bones who have defected and surrendered to the Japanese army and become shameful traitors. The entire major base areas in North China, especially the areas that were swept away by the Japanese puppet army, have become ghost places where thousands of Xiao Shu ghosts sing. Many places in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border area, which were the top priority of the Japanese army's sweep, were uninhabited within hundreds of miles of being killed.

This winter was an exceptionally long and cold winter for the Kannai troops. Most of the troops survived hunger and cold, as well as almost daily shifts and battles. Although the Anti-Japanese Union also urgently dispatched almost all of its airlift capabilities, with Linxi and Rebei as take-off and landing areas, it carried out large-scale airdrops on various base areas behind enemy lines in North China.

It also dispatched a group of combat aircraft stationed in Yan'an to carry out air strikes on the Japanese sweeping troops. However, the air transport capacity of the Anti-United Nations is still limited, and it is simply unable to meet the full consumption of several major base areas in North China. If winter clothing, food, and necessary weapons and ammunition are added, even the most basic needs of the base areas in North China are still astronomical.

Even if Yang Zhen went all out, he could only meet 30% of the needs of several major base areas. And this is already the limit of the anti-United air transport capacity. Not counting the five transport planes that were shot down and crashed by the Japanese in the airlift, the consumption of fuel alone accounted for one-third of the fuel reserves of the Anti-Japanese Union for this battle.

If it were not for the fact that before the start of the campaign, the Americans rushed to replenish 20,000 tons of high-quality aviation fuel, the Soviet side, under the repeated coordination of the Americans, also transferred 3,000 tons to the Soviet-German battlefield when there was a brief period of calm. Relying on the surplus aviation fuel of the Anti-Union Alliance, it was almost impossible to sustain the entire battle.

However, despite the greatest efforts made by the anti-United Nations combat aircraft group to cooperate with the ground anti-sweeping sorties, they have repeatedly dispatched sorties regardless of wear and tear with a high-intensity sortie frequency. However, in the end, because the number was too small and the ground-air coordination was poor, it could not play a decisive role and failed to change the unfavorable situation of the anti-sweeping operation on the ground.

As a counterpart to the Anti-Japanese Federation fighting in the eastern direction of Suidong, the northwest of Shanxi even had to rely on the central government to transfer grain from the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo border region in order to finally hold on. However, its own grain production can only barely meet its own needs, and it is necessary to transfer grain from northwest Shanxi Province to solve the shortage of grain in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo border area, in order to support the northwest Shanxi and various base areas in North China to tide over the difficulties.

In the face of strict lockdown in the surrounding area, there is no channel for outsourcing, so we can only tighten our belts with all our might. All the troops left behind and all the staff of the organs, including the chairman, only ate two meals a day, so as to save precious food to help the troops of the northwestern Shanxi and Taiyue Military Regions.

Even in mid-January, the frequent sweeps of the Japanese army caused huge transportation losses. We had no choice but to take advantage of the fact that the Yellow River had not yet been civilized, and transfer the main forces of each of the Jinsui Military Region and the Taiyue Military Region back to the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Border Region for rest and training, so as to prevent the troops from starving or freezing to death.