But in any case, Xue Yue at least seized a little territory, and also weakened the strength of the Red Army, and Gu Zhutong, who led the army to attack Dabie Mountain, was always much stronger. Because He Yingqin was afraid of a sneak attack on Wuhan and left behind an army of 100,000, Gu Zhutong was able to command less than 200,000 troops, but he ran into Gao Jingting, a first-class guerrilla warfare master in China and even Shijie, and the masses in Dabie Mountain hated the Kuomintang to the core, and fully cooperated with Gao Jingting's strategy of clearing the wilderness, which made Gu Zhutong's army difficult, and not only did not destroy the Red 28th Army in a few months, but suffered more than 10,000 casualties under the piecemeal defeat of the Red 28th Army and the Dabie Mountain militia guerrillas. However, in the course of one battle after another, the Red 28th Army gradually understood the advanced squad tactics taught by Hu Weidong, became more and more proficient in the use of "advanced" weapons and equipment, and its ability to attack fortified positions and field operations improved by leaps and bounds. When Gu Zhutong led his troops to enter Dabie Mountain, the Red 28th Army could only eliminate the small units of the national army at the battalion and company level in a structured manner, and the attack was all based on sneak attacks, but at the beginning of 36, Gu Zhutong had already received three war reports of the total annihilation of brigade and regiment-level troops, and the Red 28th Army also began to counterattack and attack, concentrating the main force to kill the Dabie Mountain to attack the towns and even county towns in the national control area, and repeatedly succeeded. Who knew that Gao Jingting had gathered all 30,000 regular Red Army and 100,000 militia guerrillas to launch an unprecedented fierce attack on the retreating Nationalist troops, and the 36 planes of the Red Army Air Force also participated in the battle for the first time since joining the Red Army

The Red 28th Army killed, wounded, and captured more than 70,000 enemy troops, and successfully converted a large number of national prisoners of war after receiving the support of cadres from the corps headquarters, and the strength of the Red 28th Army soon surged to more than 50,000 people, and two new supplementary brigades were built in addition to the original military headquarters and the 82nd Division, greatly increasing its strength. However, He Yingqin and Gu Zhutong were both scared, coupled with the changes in the domestic situation since then, the war-torn Dabie Mountain Soviet District finally won a rare period of recuperation, and its vitality gradually recovered

On Hu Weidong's side, although the national army has not come to encircle and suppress it for the time being, life is even more difficult, it turns out that it is bandits. During the Republic of China, bandits were rampant, Henan was among the best hard-hit areas, in history on the eve of the Anti-Japanese War there were more than 400,000 bandits in Henan, including 100,000 in western Henan, which are all full-time bandits, those who usually work in agriculture, and come out to rob and make a living during famine If they are also counted, it will be an astronomical number. Moreover, the bandits in Henan are not only numerous, perhaps because of their long history, their "guerrilla tactics" have been quite powerful, and both the warlord troops, the Central Army, and the Red Fourth Front Army have suffered great losses from the bandits in Henan and have not been able to gain a firm foothold here. Hu Weidong had never learned to suppress bandits, and his subordinates lacked talents in this area, so he was immediately overwhelmed

If it is a frontal battle, except for a very small number of bandits, even if it is twenty to one, they are not the opponents of the well-equipped, well-trained and battle-tested commanders and fighters of the Red 15th Army, but those bandits usually do not fight you hard at all, and when the Red Army advances, they will either hide in the mountains and circle with you, or they will temporarily hibernate and become peasants again. The former is easier to deal with, after all, the Red Army is also first-class in taking mountain roads, and after seizing the Gongxian Arsenal, a special mountain unit was also set up. The latter is much more troublesome; because there are so many bandits in Henan that almost every household in the countryside is related to the bandits, and because of the "righteousness of the rivers and lakes," the people are generally ashamed of telling the officials to tell the truth, and because the peasants are afraid of the bandits' retaliation, few people generally come forward to report and expose them, and as a result, the 15 th Red Army, which has always had the superiority in intelligence, became deaf and blind for the first time. And those bandits never launched an attack on the formed Red Army troops, they only dealt with the lone Red Army soldiers and the staff of the Soviet district government, and brutally retaliated against the local masses who helped the Red Army, only in the month of September 35, as many as 1,273 party members and cadres and Red Army soldiers were sacrificed, and the mass casualties were as many as more than 5,000 people, but this also completely angered Hu Weidong...,

Although it is impossible to carry out the three-light policy like the Kuomintang and the Japanese, it is still possible to strengthen control, and Hu Weidong used military control and militia building to deal with the symptoms at the same time, and at the same time worked hard to do a good job in mass work and develop agricultural production in various counties to cure the root cause. Taking into account the insufficient strength of the Red Army (in order to ensure the eradication of banditry, the garrison must reach several times, or even more than a dozen times the strength of the bandits. At the same time, Hu Weidong decided to temporarily control only the towns and communication lines for those newly seized counties, so as not to sacrifice too many administrative personnel in vain, and at the same time mobilized a large army to eliminate bandits from Gongxian County to county by county, that is, to transform the Red Army into propaganda teams and work teams to replace administrative personnel and government cadres to work in the countryside, the bandits will undoubtedly seek their own death, and if they do not do it, when the county's militia system is completed, they will no longer have a place to stay. Either they were arrested, and a considerable number of them were under pressure from the Red Army, or moved by their love for the people, and took the initiative to confess.

As for the sentencing of the bandits, Hu Weidong is adopting the policy of "only punishing the evil and coercing and never asking." "Confession is lenient, resistance is strict. In addition to the two basic principles, it is also specifically stipulated that "those who rape women and kill the elderly, and women and children shall not be pardoned (that is, they will be killed if they turn themselves in)." The reason is to survive and rob the ** is forgivable, and once the evil loses the bottom line, it is too difficult to transform into a good person, it is better to kill it is more convenient, although this increases the resistance to eliminate the bandits, but it successfully prevents the resurgence of bandits, so that the western Henan region, which was once a den of thieves, gradually reappears peaceful

During this period, the Red Army lost 5,746 commanders and fighters, and 7,291 Soviet government workers were killed, including more than 8,000 party members, and the casualties among the masses reached more than 20,000, and the losses were even greater than the previous battles with the large units of the national army. However, it was precisely because of the experience of the Red 15th Army during this period that it was able to adapt more quickly to the transition from movement warfare to guerrilla warfare in the early stage of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, Henan's uncontrollable banditry has been completely eradicated in the hands of the Red Party, which has made those who have been attacking the Red Party "only destroy, not build." The guy shut up, and also won the support of the majority of the people, laying a solid foundation for the Soviet district government to concentrate the people's efforts to restore and develop production.