Like Wang Shuhui, the Baath Party does not have a high opinion of the two current forces vying for hegemony in China. In particular, in terms of military capability, in accordance with the old habit of the Baath Party of "despising the enemy strategically and attaching importance to the enemy tactically," it is very common to strategically regard both the intruding army and the Ming army as "earth and tile dogs."

Wang Shuhui believes that when looking at a person, we should look at the person in the environment and background in which he lives. Let's take Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, Sun Yuanhua, and Lu Xiangsheng as examples, in the environment and background of the Ba'ath Party, they have not received special education and have not carried out systematic study, and even Sun Yuanhua, who has the highest level of scientific knowledge among the four, does not have a high level of primary school students trained by the Ba'ath Party.

However, if you look at them in the apocalyptic environment of the feudal agricultural era, these four people are very good and capable people.

For the Baath Party, which is completely industrialized both in terms of the productive forces and in the relations of production, their backwardness and uselessness are caused by the disparity in the level of social civilization.

To give a simple example, the daily life enjoyed by an ordinary salaryman in modern society is incomparable to that of ancient emperors. The absolute disparity in productivity, that's huge.

Let's take Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, Sun Yuanhua, and Lu Xiangsheng as examples, in their environment, whether it is the upper echelons of the Ming Dynasty or the upper echelons of the army, they are not sober enough to understand the Baath Party. However, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong judged from their own actual experiences, and Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng judged from the background of the Fuxing Trading Company, which had a lot of contact with them, and they were both very wary of the Baath Party in Hubei.

It was precisely because of this fear that they had deployed a certain number of intelligence officers in the surrounding areas of Hubei, and it was these intelligence officers who immediately passed on to them the news of the Baath Party's "big army" heading north after the Ba'ath Party's northward movement was officially launched.

The Ba'ath Party's northward plan uses more than 200,000 troops. But this does not mean that the Baath Party will directly send 200,000 troops to the northern regions in one go.

According to the plan of the General Staff of the Renaissance Army, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Army Corps in the northwest of the Renaissance Army will move west out of Wuguan and gradually take over the entire Shaanxi and Shanxi regions from south to north and from west to east. The 1st and 2nd Army Corps of the Northern Reconstruction Army will enter Henan directly from Hubei, while sweeping away the Dashun Army, which is Gao Yingxiang's emperor, and receiving major cities in Henan.

At the same time, the 1st Army Corps in the Northeast of the Fuxing Army will cooperate with the actions of the Yangtze River Fleet of the Fuxing Navy, go north along the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, completely cut off the north-south communication in the Central Plains, and finally join up with the 3rd Army Corps of Ludong, which has completed control over the entire western part of Shandong, near Liaocheng.

According to the plan of the General Staff of the Fuxing Army, the northward movement of the entire Fuxing Army was divided into three major armies, namely, the Western Route Army, which carried out the task of receiving the tasks of Shaanxi and Shanxi, the Central Route Army, which carried out the task of receiving the tasks of Henan and Zhili, and the East Route Army, which carried out the task of receiving the tasks of the eastern regions of Jiangsu and Shandong.

Of course, the entire plan was divided by the Baath Party into two parts: the Northern Expedition plan, which carried out military tasks, and the liberation plan, which carried out the tasks of receiving and building.

The Northern Expedition was mainly carried out by seven integrated divisions of the Baath Army.

They will not participate in the specific actions of the three-way army in the west and the east planned to go north, but will go straight to the northern region, first eliminate the main force of the Chuang army and the Ming army entrenched in the Central Plains, and then eliminate the Gao Yingxiang troops stationed in the Beijing area, and then break through the Shanhaiguan Pass to complete the strategic defense of the eastern Liaodong region. Eventually, they will cooperate with the Liaonan Army, which has expanded into the Haizhou region, to complete the task of eliminating the Liaodong warlord group and the Later Jin Jurchen regime.

The liberation plan was carried out and completed by the three armies of the Western and Eastern Routes.

Compared with the simple and straightforward Northern Expedition plan, the liberation plan was much more complex.

Militarily, the regular armed forces under the jurisdiction of the various route armies should eliminate the intrusive and Ming armies entrenched in the newly received areas, sweep away the bandits and bandit armies in various localities, and carry out militarized management of the areas where they are located. In local construction, the production and construction corps under the jurisdiction of the various route armies should organize and train the local masses and complete the restoration of local agricultural production activities in the first year.

In the liberation plan, in addition to the military action to stabilize the local area and declare the Baathist's sovereignty over the local area, priority was given to the restoration of agricultural production and the construction of transportation.

After conducting initial organization and training for the local masses, the Production and Construction Corps will divide the local masses into three and organize the local masses of children under the age of 16 into a cadet army whose main tasks are ideological and political training, cultural knowledge study, and military training.

In addition, young people aged between the ages of 16 and 25 among the local masses will be organized into a specialized production and construction corps that mainly undertakes the construction of railways and highways, and also receives ideological, political, and cultural education.

Adults over the age of 25 among the local masses will be organized by the Production and Construction Corps to restore local agricultural production according to the conditions of agricultural production in different areas, according to the standards of farms first, communes second, and cooperatives third.

Of course, because of the preparation of food supplies by the Baath Party over the past 10 years, the food supply for the first year in the accepted areas will be borne by the Hubei base areas. That is why the Ba'ath Party's liberation programme did not seek to advance by leaps and bounds, but had to be carried out in a step-by-step manner according to the level of local road traffic.

You must know that the entire Central Plains region was completely unable to achieve self-sufficiency in food supply due to natural disasters and the destruction of the war between the invasion army and the Ming army for hegemony. However, without relatively perfect transportation, especially without railway transportation as the main line of transportation, it is very difficult to transport a large amount of grain and materials stored in Hubei to the local area.

What's more, in order to restore agricultural production in the newly received areas, a large number of agricultural production equipment and seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and other materials are needed in the newly received areas. Since there were no industrial enterprises of the Ba'ath Party in the area, these machinery and equipment and basic materials had to be transported from the Hubei base area to the local area. Without relatively perfect transportation, such large-scale transportation of equipment and materials cannot be completed.

At the beginning of 1632, the Baath Party's plan to go north began in earnest.

In addition to the seven integrated divisions that carried out the Northern Expedition mission, they began to set out from the Nanyang area at a very alarming speed, quickly broke through the Kaifeng Fu area where the Chuang army was stationed, and went straight to the Central Plains area where the Chuang army and the Ming army confronted each other. The Western, Central, and Eastern Route Armies, which were carrying out the liberation mission, also began to advance in three directions along the completed railways and highways.

The suddenness and rapidity of the Baath Party's actions put tremendous pressure on Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, Sun Yuanhua, and Lu Xiangsheng. Unlike Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong are the legendary generals of the defeated army for the Fuxing Army. They had all commanded seemingly powerful forces at various times, and in the same way were completely annihilated and captured by the Revaissance Army in a very exaggerated way.

Therefore, after receiving the news that the Fuxing Army had begun to advance by leaps and bounds into the Central Plains, the two generals who had accumulated a lot of experience and had considerable war quality immediately disengaged from the troops of Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng, and then no longer cared about Gao Yingxiang's jealousy of them, and rushed north and shrank to the Beijing area.

Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng first expressed great incomprehension about Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong's actions. After interrogating and understanding the prisoners of the intruding army, Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng, who also became jealous of the revival army, immediately withdrew from the Zhending area and retreated east to the Hejian area, which was still under the control of the Ming army, after learning that the large force of the revival army had successively broken through Kaifengfu, Daimyofu, and Guangpingfu.

According to Sun Yuanhua's idea, he was ready to work with Lu Xiangsheng to withdraw the living forces to the Cangzhou area for defense, and then go south along the Grand Canal to the Jiangnan region after the Grand Canal was opened.

It cannot but be said that if the plans and arrangements of the Ba'ath Party are excluded, and if the war capability of the Ba'ath Army is not taken into account, the actions of Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, Sun Yuanhua, and Lu Xiangsheng are all relatively sensible moves.

Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, who had a certain understanding of the combat effectiveness of the Renaissance Army, pinned their hopes on the renaissance army's attack with nearly 100,000 of the 200,000 elite soldiers with high-quality weapons and equipment purchased from the Baaxing Party.

Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng were ready to take the Shandong region, which is still very stable and calm at the present stage, as the rear, to hold the defense line of the Grand Canal in the Hejian Fu area, and watch the war between the Fuxing Army and the Chuang Army. Finally, after regaining strength in the course of the war between the two sides, they went south to the Jiangnan region to guard the Jiangbei region in preparation for a possible counteroffensive on the part of the Ming army in the future.

From a strategic point of view, both sides are quite sensible in their thinking. However, the problem with the invasion of the army was that Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong still lacked a fundamental understanding of the combat effectiveness of the revival army. Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng did not expect that the entire Shandong region had become the sphere of influence of the Ludong base area of the Baath Party.

You must know that after Zhang Hong, the governor of Denglai, was promoted to the governor of Shandong in 1630, in addition to the Yanzhou Prefecture, the five prefectures of Dengzhou, Laizhou, Qingzhou, Jinan and Dongchang in Shandong were all able to be fully controlled by the Baath Party. By the beginning of 1632, the process of nationalizing land in the entire Shandong region had been basically completed, except for the entire area of Yanzhou, the northern part of Jinan Province, and the western part of Dongchang Province.

The most important thing is that Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng did not know that in Dezhou, in the southern part of the Cangzhou region, where they had just arrived, there was a force of about 5,000 people stationed in the Ludong base area of the Baath Party.

The original mission of this unit was to provide armed support to various land reform teams in the northern part of Jinan Province. However, as soon as Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng's troops were stationed in Cangzhou, the ministry received a report from local intelligence officers.

There is not competition within the Baath Army. At present, the higher-ranked troops in the Revival Army are all the troops that Wang Shuhui once personally commanded. Among them, the corps in the southern Liaoning base area were the leaders, and the troops in the Hubei base area were secondary. Because of the lack of experience in large-scale battles during the establishment of the Ludong Base Area, the units in the Ludong Base Area ranked the lowest in the Revival Army.

Almost all of the main leading cadres of the major units of the Ludong Military Region under the jurisdiction of the underground are all disciples of Wang Shuhui. There is no other reason for this, it is purely because Lu Dongji's construction work is relatively independent, so the main cadres sent to the local area are people with relatively rich work experience.

As for the majority of the leading cadres of the units of the Ludong Military Region, who were mainly responsible for local construction work in the plan to go north, they were originally prepared to put on a good show in the military tasks in the plan to correct their name. However, due to the requirements of the General Staff, they had to undertake the task of receiving the Eastern Route Army and providing logistical support for the main forces arriving in the Central Plains in the northward plan.

The Ludong Military Region, which has been quietly built in Shandong for three or four years, now has nearly 100,000 regular troops, nearly 300,000 second-line local troops, and more than 500,000 workers' and peasants' production and construction troops. After the initial completion of the land reform, 500,000 workers and peasants have already entered factories and farms to undertake local construction tasks. After the bandits, bandits, and other reactionary forces in various localities have been basically wiped out, nearly 300,000 second-line local troops will soon be transferred to take on the work of building local governments.

Nearly 100,000 front-line troops of the Reconstruction Army have been engaged in the war with great enthusiasm after undertaking the work of escorting local construction for three or four years.

In the words of Li Mingde, deputy commander-in-chief of the Ludong Military Region and commander of the Military Region, "450,000 new troops have never been on a formal battlefield, and 450,000 old troops are only experienced in exercises. ”

Therefore, after receiving the news, the General Headquarters of the Ludong Military Region immediately sent a telegram to the Central Military Commission, requesting the Central Military Commission to hand over the combat tasks of Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng's troops to the Ludong Military Region on the basis that the main force had not yet arrived.

After Wang Shuhui received the telegram in the northbound planning headquarters in the Nanyang area, he smiled and said to Tang Yafeng and Gu Guozhang beside him:

"Li Mingde, this guy is not authentic, he wants the teacher to beat the student. Then let's give the Ludong Military Region a chance. The combat mission against Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng was handed over to the Ludong Military Region for execution. Let the main forces complete the supply and rearmament in the eastern part of Shandong, and launch a direct attack on Beijing. ”

After the order was conveyed to the Ludong Military Region, the Ludong Military Region immediately transferred troops to form a corps of about 30,000 people. Because of the importance attached to this battle, the commander-in-chief and political commissar of the Ludong Military Region, and the deputy commander-in-chief and commander of the Ludong Military Region, concurrently served as the political commissar and commander of the corps.

In February 1632, in the vast snowfall, the First Regiment of the Ludong Military Region of the Fuxing Army appeared outside Cangzhou.

Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng, who were at a loss in Cangzhou City, did not expect that their side would encounter a military attack.

They are still concerned about the logistical supply of more than 50,000 troops. Because the messenger sent to the Shandong region has not been heard from for more than a month. Without the logistical support of Beijing, Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng, who had no food and salary, quickly ran out of the treasury and grain stocks of Hejian Prefecture, and were about to lose control of the troops.

Just when the undercurrent of tens of thousands of troops in Cangzhou City was surging, the unknown troops that appeared outside the city gave Sun Yuanhua and Lu Xiangsheng a very huge blow.