Southern guerrilla warfare: I led the Red Seventh Army Corps to amassed a million troops.

The preparations for the Qingming Festival campaign have begun.

Most importantly, there are the two large armies of Su Yu and Xun Huaizhou.

Mature local armed forces have been established in both southern and central Fujian, and Su Yu's side can move north at any time.

However, Xun Huaizhou was surrounded by enemy troops. The Kuomintang even transferred a portion of its troops from Jiangbei to Jiangnan in order to block Xun Huaizhou's column, which was entrenched in the Gantang Town area of ​​Huangshan.

Meanwhile, Xun Huaizhou was leisurely expanding his army and preparing for his third breakout attempt since entering Anhui.

Less than a month after entering Huangshan, Xun Huaizhou's column recruited 8000 new soldiers.

In many villages, almost all able-bodied young men of working age were sent to join the Red Army.

As for why the response was so enthusiastic?

The root cause is simply that they couldn't survive.

To support the encirclement and suppression of the Red Army by a million-strong army, the Kuomintang imposed various levies and exorbitant taxes, which was considered quite generous.

In order to complete the tasks assigned by their superiors and to make a profit for themselves, many local officials and military officers simply resorted to outright robbery.

Anyway, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, so Nanjing has no jurisdiction over this area.

Even if it incites a popular uprising, it can be conveniently suppressed as part of the Red Army's operations, allowing them to gain military merit.

This has caused great hardship for the people living around Huangshan.

The local land was already barren, and the people were already struggling to make ends meet. This disaster caused many families to go hungry.

According to Xun Huaizhou's understanding, around the middle of the year, the Nationalist army was conscripting able-bodied men in the area, disregarding the fact that many of these young men were the sole breadwinners of their families.

Once someone is conscripted into the army, the crops in the fields will be left unattended, and the whole family will go hungry.

Therefore, many people around Huangshan would immediately hide in the mountains as soon as they heard that the army was coming.

When these Kuomintang troops failed to complete their missions and could not capture able-bodied men, they would sometimes even vent their anger on the elderly, women, and children.

Robbery, beatings of the elderly and weak, and humiliation of women occur frequently.

When the Red Army entered Huangshan, the first thing they did was send out propaganda teams to tell the local people what they were doing.

The soldiers did not enter civilian homes, did not plunder property, returned borrowed items, and even voluntarily helped the villagers fetch water and chop firewood.

Iron discipline dismantled the villagers' wariness.

Subsequently, a mass meeting was held, and the action of confiscating the wealth of local tyrants and distributing their ill-gotten gains was launched after the people identified the perpetrators.

With rice in their mouths and new clothes in their pockets, the people's desire to join the army increased dramatically.

In the words of a local old man: "After joining the Red Army, how hard could life have been compared to now?"

But this kind of hardship, poverty, and bullying was not unique to the people of Huangshan.

This is a fairly common situation along both banks of the Yangtze River, north and south of the Yellow River, and even throughout China.

That's why there's a saying: the whole of China is a pile of dry tinder; it only needs a spark to ignite a raging fire.

After nearly a month of arduous fighting and hard work, Xun Huaizhou has also accomplished the task of establishing a base area!

Moreover, it was one of the most valuable and difficult base areas to be established.

While dealing with hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops, and during marches and battles, he managed to find time to spread the seeds of revolution.

Xun Huaizhou's original intention was to stay in southern Anhui for a longer period of time to ensure that the local armed forces could defend themselves.

However, Zhou Zeyuan's call prompted him to take action ahead of schedule.

In early November, a grand farewell ceremony was held in Gantang Town.

The people were not only bidding farewell to the Red Army, but also to their own sons.

Since there were still many remnants of the Kuomintang forces in the area that had not been completely eliminated, the news naturally reached the Kuomintang side very quickly.

At this time, the Nationalist army's deployment in southern Anhui was to defend the east, advance to the west, and block the south.

To prevent Xun Huaizhou from fleeing into the Jiangzhe region and threatening the safety of Nanjing.

Therefore, a considerable number of local armed forces were deployed in key areas of the east, forming a comprehensive defense system in depth.

They also deployed an elite column in the rear to intercept them at any time.

The force pressing in from the west consisted of field troops drawn from the National Revolutionary Army's Northern Route Army, numbering about six divisions, and was commanded by Chen Cheng.

The situation in the south is similar to that in the east, but their troop deployment is more flexible, and they can proactively intervene in the western battlefield at any time.

Xun Huaizhou's response was to first attempt a breakthrough on the front, using the strategy of besieging a point and attacking reinforcements to lure out the enemy's three forward divisions, and then divide and encircle them.

If that fails, make a feint to the east.

Lure the enemy's western and southern armies to accelerate their march, and search for weaknesses in the enemy while they are on the move.

They could either seize an opportunity to annihilate a portion of the enemy forces, or force their way through the gap between the two enemy units and find a chance to break out of the encirclement.

Logically speaking, the deployment of both sides can be considered a high-level game.

Regardless of whether they won or lost, it was a textbook battle.

Even Wei Lihuang felt that he was 90% confident of winning this battle.

The principal even exclaimed that the advantage was in his hands!

However, Chen Cheng's command skills were far inferior to Xun Huaizhou's, and he himself did not realize it, so he made a huge mess of things.

In the first phase of the siege and reinforcement strategy, Chen Cheng was not fooled.

He watched helplessly as Huo Kuizhang's 14th Division was badly wounded under Xun Huaizhou's attack, yet he refused to send reinforcements.

They insisted on waiting until the main force had fully assembled before sending reinforcements.

Moreover, they acted with extreme caution, sending out small detachments at the front that directly crashed into the Red Army's encirclement.

Xun Huaizhou was now at a loss. The enemy had seen through his ambush, so there was no point in staying in place.

He was originally prepared to abandon the first phase of the operation and quickly move on to the second phase.

Both the attacking and ambush forces have withdrawn from the battlefield, and their belongings have been packed.

Unexpectedly, a scout reported that the enemy's rear was undefended.

Xun Huaizhou judged that the enemy had amassed too many troops at once, and many places had not had time to be redeployed, so he directly deployed most of his troops to the battlefield.

This created a huge vulnerability in the enemy's rear.

With a try-it-and-see attitude, he organized a second siege and attack on reinforcements.

They bypassed the main enemy force and launched a direct attack on Chen Cheng's command post.

As expected, the Nationalist army strongholds along the way collapsed almost immediately, greatly alarming the Nationalist army's high command!

In fact, Xun Huaizhou's forward was more than 20 kilometers away from Chen Cheng's position at that time.

However, the Nationalist army had a tradition of reporting false military information, and Chen Cheng, in his panic, was unable to discern the truth.

He hastily ordered his troops to return, and they were ambushed, suffering a loss of 13000 men in the battle.

As the main force in the entire encirclement, it was quickly crippled.

The remaining armies naturally withdrew quickly and retreated to their lairs in order to protect themselves.

Xun Huaizhou, carrying a large amount of captured equipment and prisoners of war, swaggered away towards Huaiyu Mountain.

No unit dared to intercept them along the way!