Chapter 97: Choice
Even if the surplus troops of the Mongolian Border Army Group were transferred to the east, Lanzhou had no plans to launch an active counterattack for the time being.
On the one hand, this is because Japan's national strength is still at its peak at the moment, and it is naturally impossible for the northwest to take advantage of the situation for Britain and the United States.
On the other hand, the severe drought in Henan that began in 1941 also posed a huge obstacle to the Chinese army's counterattack.
In fact, shortly after the end of the Zhengxian Campaign, the top leaders in the Northwest had already noticed the development of the drought in Henan. To this end, the Northwest National Defense Government made emergency appropriations to support Henan in building the Yellow River diversion canal, digging deep wells and a series of other production self-help measures. However, without rain for more than a year, these efforts were in vain.
By the spring of 1942, the drought in Henan had become even more severe.
Not a drop of rain fell along the Longhai Road throughout the spring, and rivers in the central counties dried up. It was expected that the harvest would be completely lost that year.
Under such circumstances, the Hebei-Henan War Zone and the Hubei-Henan-Anhui War Zone had to put aside their plans to fight against Japan and focus on disaster relief.
Since it was unknown how long the drought would last, the best way to provide disaster relief was migration. However, at that time, the entire Henan Province had a population of approximately 30 million, and it was impossible to relocate all of them. Therefore, entire villages and towns were transported to Xikang, Jinshan and other provinces for resettlement.
But compared with the entire disaster-affected population, it is just a drop in the bucket, not to mention that most of the villages are unwilling to leave their homeland where they have lived for generations before they encounter desperate situations, which has brought great difficulties to the relocation work.
As the relocation work became difficult, the Northwest had no choice but to adopt emergency measures such as reducing the level of grain collection and promoting the implementation of the Land Law.
However, in the entire Henan Province, there are more than 400,000 troops in the Northwest Army Headquarters alone. If other troops are included, the number will exceed one million. The food rations for these one million soldiers have become a big problem.
The Hubei-Henan-Anhui War Zone may be able to make up for it through the output of Anhui, Xuzhou and other provinces, but the Hebei-Henan Military Region can only rely on the supply from the rear area.
In order to meet the daily needs of the Heluo Army Group, the Northwest had to transport food from Shanxi, Shaanxi, Liangzhou, Hubei and other places on the one hand, and on the other hand had to open the war readiness warehouses and take out all the old supplies. Under such circumstances, how could the troops of the Mongolian Border Army Group increase the burden on the front line?
Fortunately, the Japanese army was also affected by the drought and the dispatch of troops to Southeast Asia. For a time, it was unable to restore the offensive momentum on the Henan battlefield. As a result, the two sides entered a state of "fake peace" confrontation.
However, the fact that the Japanese army did not take action in Henan does not mean that they entered a defensive state in other places.
In the spring of 1942, the Japanese troops in Hebei and Shandong launched a massive "Spring Mopping-up Operation", which dealt a heavy blow to the anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in the Jiangsu, Xuzhou, Shandong, Henan and Anhui war zones and Hebei, forcing various anti-Japanese forces to flee into the mountains to temporarily avoid the Japanese army's attack.
After this round of attacks, the Japanese army increased its efforts to induce surrender of those with weak wills, causing Shen Ke's 127th Division in Xu Hai, Zheng Dazhang's 1st Reserve Cavalry Army in Hubei, Henan and Anhui, and Zhang Dongkai's 18th Cavalry Regiment in Hebei to surrender to the enemy one after another.
As a result, the situation of fighting behind enemy lines became increasingly worse.
Faced with the Japanese army's frenzied raids and political inducement to surrender, the Northwest fought back tit-for-tat.
On the one hand, the Northwest ordered the reconstruction of the 127th Division based on Wang Qifeng's 4th Cavalry Division. On the other hand, the Northwest ordered the Shanxi East Anti-Japanese Corps and other units to take the initiative to attack and cut off the Zhengtai Railway many times, causing great trouble to the Japanese army's attempt to fight to support the war.
In April 1942, the Sixth Air Force of the Northwest Air Force in Suiyuan carried out multiple batches of small-scale intensive bombings on the areas around Datong. The Japanese army was unable to intercept them, and the troops stationed in Mongolia were therefore in a state of panic.
A bigger counterattack occurred in Shanxi. Based on the instructions from the Northwest, Yang Aiyuan, commander-in-chief of the Shanxi-Chahar War Zone, formulated a "short knife" combat plan.
The plan mobilized 11 armies and 19 divisions, including the Northwest Shanxi Southern Group, the Northwest Shanxi Group, Sun Tongxuan's Eighth Army, and Liu Shirong's Fourth Reserve Army, to launch a counterattack against the Japanese troops throughout Shanxi. The purpose was not to regain lost territory, but to kill the Japanese army's manpower and destroy their combat readiness facilities as the top priority.
Although the Japanese army had learned of the plan of the Shanxi-Chahar War Zone in advance, because the counterattacks were well coordinated and the attack times were relatively consistent, the Japanese army with limited manpower could only focus on the front and ignore the rear. As a result, although it inflicted certain casualties on Sun Changsheng's 2nd Cavalry Division, Liu Tanfu's 9th Reserve Division, Mi Wenhe's New 4th Division and other units, it was unable to prevent the Chinese army from winning the overall victory.
During the eleven-day battle, the Chinese army recovered three county towns, destroyed 48 small and medium-sized Japanese strongholds, killed 811 Japanese soldiers and 6,112 puppet soldiers, forced 3,417 puppet soldiers to defect, seized and destroyed a batch of Japanese supplies, caused the Tongpu Railway to be interrupted for two weeks, and suffered about 16,000 casualties, which dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese army in Shanxi.
Regardless of how the Japanese troops in Shanxi considered revenge, in central China, they were already impatient to start a war.
All this was because of the bombing of Tokyo carried out by US Army Lieutenant Colonel James Harold Doolittle.
On April 18, 1942, 16 B25 medium bombers of the U.S. Special Flying Squadron led by Doolittle took off from the USS Hornet aircraft carrier escorted by the 16th Task Force, bombed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and other places in Japan, and finally flew to Quzhou, Zhejiang, China and other airports and landed.
This sudden bombing caused great shock to the Japanese government, the army and the navy, and they doubted the country's air defense capabilities: "16 bombers, without fighter escort, were able to fly over major cities in Japan in broad daylight without any being shot down. I began to feel that the homeland was no longer safe."
In order to prevent the Chinese and American air forces from using airports in Zhejiang, China to carry out "shuttle bombing" on the Japanese mainland, the Japanese headquarters decided to destroy the air force bases and forward airports on the Zhejiang-Jiangxi line on the same day.
On April 21, 1942, the Japanese Imperial Headquarters notified the China Expeditionary Army to "prepare for the Zhejiang Operation." At that time, the Japanese 13th Army had issued Operation Order No. 19, which was scheduled to start on April 25 against Chinese troops in northern Jiangsu and central Anhui. Therefore, the commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army, Hata Shunroku, suggested to Army Minister General Sugiyama Motoko, "Currently, Operation No. 19 has been prepared. Once it is terminated, it will cause difficulties for the commander. We hope that it will be carried out according to the original plan."
On the 22nd, General Sugiyama replied: "According to the overall situation, the Zhejiang airport group must be destroyed immediately. To this end, immediately suspend the 13th Army's Operation No. 19 and quickly switch to the operation to destroy the airport group."
On April 30, the Imperial Headquarters issued Order No. 621 of the "Continental Order": "The commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army should start operations as soon as possible, mainly to defeat the enemy in Zhejiang Province, destroy its main air base, and crush the enemy's attempt to use the area to bomb the Empire's homeland."
The use of troops was "composed of the main force of the 13th Army and some troops drawn from the 11th Army and the North China Front Army, with more than 40 infantry battalions as the backbone."
The order from the headquarters made the determination of the First Army stationed in Shanxi and the Army stationed in Mongolia to retaliate immediately come to naught, but the "Zhejiang Operation" was already inevitable.
However, after weighing the pros and cons, General Hata Shunroku and Lieutenant General Sawada Shigeru, commander of the 13th Army, had some objections to the headquarters' combat intentions and troop deployment. They believed that if they destroyed the airport and then withdrew, the enemy would be able to quickly repair and use it, and that aiming solely to defeat the enemy was too passive.
So the two of them discussed and decided to change the combat objectives and deployment, increase the number of troops used, and expand the scale of the operation: "The main goal is to annihilate the enemy in the first theater, and the secondary goal is to occupy the flight base."
"Its backbone is about 80 infantry battalions."
The 13th Army used 58 battalions to "attack the Eastern Third War Zone from Hangzhou."
The 11th Army used 27 battalions to "attack the enemy forces in the Second Western Theater to support the 13th Army."
As a result, in mid-June, the North China side transferred another six battalions originally allocated to Shanxi to the 13th Army, bringing the total number of troops used by the Japanese army to 91 battalions, which was in fact more than twice the number of troops used in the original combat plan of the headquarters.
General Hata Shunroku believed that: "Although the dispatched army does not have enough troops to hold the planned occupied area, in order to prevent the airport group in the area from being used by the Chinese Air Force, it is necessary to hold the newly occupied Jinhua area, and deploy some strike forces near the area so that a new attack can be launched at any time."
Also, because "the combat area was not limited to Zhejiang Province, but as far as Jiangxi Province, and there was even an attempt to open up the Zhejiang-Jiangxi line, the name of the operation was changed from the original 'Zhejiang Operation' to 'Zhejiang-Jiangxi Operation'", before the Japanese army plan was implemented, Guiyang had discovered that the Japanese army in front of the Second War Zone had been very frequently mobilized since the middle of this month, and judged that the Japanese army might launch an attack on Jinhua, Lanxi and Quzhou areas, so the 74th Army and the 26th Army, two main forces, and the well-equipped Fifth Reserve Division were transferred from the Third War Zone to strengthen the Second War Zone as its mobile force.
The commander-in-chief of the Second War Zone, Gu Zhutong, ordered his deputy commander, Shangguan Yunxiang, to enter Chun'an and command the troops stationed on the north bank of the Qiantang River.
The commander-in-chief of the 10th Army, Wang Jingjiu, was ordered to command the troops on the south bank of the Qiantang River and the garrisons in Jinhua and Lanxi.
Later, according to the telegram order of the Military Commission, the 25th Army was formed with Li Jue as the commander-in-chief. It was stationed in Jinyun and commanded the troops in southern Zhejiang.
Based on the enemy situation it had mastered, the Third War Zone also formulated a combat guidance plan for defending Jin, Lanzhou, and Quzhou, which planned to involve a decisive battle with the Japanese army in the Jinhua area. The Military Commission replied on May 17, disagreeing with the Third War Zone's policy of a decisive battle in the Jinhua area and instructed that the decisive battle should be fought in the Quzhou area.
The reply said: "The three armies of Wang Yaowu (the 74th Army), Ding Zhipan (the 26th Army), and Wang Tiehan (the 49th Army) must be assembled near Quzhou. Do not leave them in the Jin and Lan areas to be consumed by the enemy one by one. Our army's strategy is to fight a decisive battle near Quzhou, and this cannot be changed."
In accordance with the instructions of the Military Commission, the Third War Zone re-formulated the guiding plan for the defense of Quzhou on May 22 and implemented it immediately. However, by then, the Japanese army had already begun its attack.
