Since the Japanese army was preparing to attack Henan, Binshan Yuan ordered the intelligence department to closely monitor every move in the Eighth Theater, so Chen Feng's unusual actions were quickly reported to the North China Front Headquarters. After receiving the report from Chiyoko Koga, Binshan Yuan immediately summoned the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Okabe Naosaburo, to discuss, and the two agreed that the transfer of the Eighth Theater was different from the previous one, and that it should be aimed at the Imperial Japanese Army, so the North China Front issued an urgent military order, all troops immediately canceled their vacations, and the security zone (occupation zone) near the Eighth Theater immediately reduced its strength.

At the same time, the 14th Division, the 15th Mixed Brigade, the Heavy Artillery Brigade, and the Tank Wing directly under the North China Front were urgently assembled and ready at any time to meet a possible offensive in the Eighth Theater.

However, Binshan Yuan did not wait for the attack of the Eighth War Zone, but waited for the attack of the Eighth Route Army. It was not the Eighth Theater or the First and Second Theaters that first engaged the Japanese army, but the Eighth Route Army, which had always kept a low profile.

On 22 September, the headquarters of the 129th Division issued an order demanding that all regular troops, guerrillas, county brigades, and district squads under the jurisdiction of the 129th Division immediately take action, actively look for fighters, and carry out a large-scale attack on the Japanese hinterland to create opportunities for fighting in various parts of the Second and Eighth Theaters.

On September 24, 1939, the 129th Division of the Eighth Route Army mastered the law of retaliation after the Japanese army was attacked, and reconnoitred and learned that Weixian County was a key stronghold of the Japanese army, and there were many defenders, so it was decided to use the 386th Brigade (Brigade Commander Chen Geng, Deputy Brigade Commander Xu Shiyou) to conceal and assemble in the area near Xiangchenggu south of Qiu County. Lure the Japanese army to attack and annihilate it.

On the afternoon of the 24th, the 386th Brigade sent small units to continuously attack the Japanese troops in Weixian, Quzhou and other counties. On the 25th, the supplementary brigade of the 40th Wing of the 10th Division of the Japanese Army stationed in Wei County, with the cooperation of an infantry regiment (600 people) of the puppet army, under the command of the captain of the brigade Sato Shaosa, swept south of Wei County. At about 12 o'clock, when the Japanese army advanced to the vicinity of the Tishh camp, the cavalry company of the 386th Brigade suddenly attacked, killing the Japanese captain and interpreter, and then fought and retreated. Lure the Japanese army into the Xiangchenggu area.

After 30 minutes. The Japanese advanced to Xiangchenggu and stormed the position of the 1st Battalion of the 688th Regiment. After fierce fighting, the 1st Battalion destroyed 2 Japanese cars and killed and wounded more than 120 Japanese puppet soldiers. Thwarted the Japanese attack. Then. The Japanese army attacked the northeast corner of Xiangchenggu again. It was stubbornly resisted by the supplementary regiment and suffered heavy casualties. By 17 o'clock, the Japanese army attempted to break through to the west. It was blocked by the main force of the 688th Regiment hidden in Zhangjiazhuang and Maluobao, and the retreat was cut off by the main force of the new 1st Regiment. The battle lasted until dusk, and the 386th Brigade attacked from all sides, and the Japanese army was completely annihilated. In this battle, a total of more than 942 Japanese soldiers below the captain were killed, 81 people were captured, 247 puppet soldiers were killed, 397 people were captured, 8 artillery pieces were captured, more than 900 long and short coercive pieces (strong), 18 cars were destroyed, and the Eighth Route Army suffered only 350 casualties.

When the news came, the Japanese army was extremely angry, and General Binshan Yuan never thought that he would prevent the wrong target by taking precautions, so that a black tiger came to Tubalu to dig out his heart. He didn't care much about the demise of a small supplementary brigade, but after the Sato brigade was completely annihilated, there was less than one infantry squadron left in the imperial army in the entire Qiu County area, and Qiu County was adjacent to Handan Xingtai and other places, once the Tuba Road crossed Qiu County and entered Handan, then the problem would be serious.

Although the Eighth Road is not good for field warfare, if it is said to engage in sabotage, even the Eighth War Zone of China, which Huang Jun has the most scruples, cannot match it. If you can ignore it in the past, but now you must not be careless, Handan and Xingtai are the logistics bases of the 32nd Division that is fighting in the south, and once it is lost, the supply of the imperial army in Henan will become a problem. Even if it was impossible for the Tuba Road to attack a big city like Xiahandan, it would greatly affect the operation of the troops if they destroyed the railway line along the line, so Bin Shanyuan ordered the 10th Division stationed in southern Hebei to immediately send a strong force to encircle and suppress the Tuba Road in southern Hebei.

This time, the Japanese army obviously underestimated the Eighth Route Army, especially the 129th Division. The Japanese army has always been very proud of its intelligence department, and in the past battles, they can be said to know the strength and movements of the large and small armies of the Nationalist Government, but they can only know a rough idea of the Eighth Theater and the Eighth Army, so until now the Japanese army does not know how many troops there are in the Eighth Theater and the Eighth Army. Because of this, this time the Japanese army paid enough for their recklessness.

On September 27, 1939, the 39th and 40th Wings of the 10th Division of the Japanese Army, with the cooperation of the artillery wing, the cavalry wing and the divisional search team, together with a puppet infantry brigade, totaled more than 11,600 people to Qiu County, trying to find the main force of the Eighth Route Army in southern Hebei, and fought a decisive battle with it.

However, this time, the Eighth Route Army did not quietly move as before, but waited for the arrival of the Japanese army, as if it was going to have a showdown with the Japanese army.

As one of the only three infantry divisions led by Yan'an, the 129th Division, like the 115th Division and the 120th Division, has a very glorious predecessor. The 129th Division was reorganized on August 25, 1937 from the 4th and 31st armies of the Fourth Front of the Red Army, the 29th and 30th armies of the Northwest Red Army, the 1st to 4th Independent Regiments and the cavalry regiments of the 15th Army Corps, with a total of more than 13,000 people. Liu * was appointed as the division commander, and Xu * was the former deputy division commander.

Since the Lugou Bridge Incident, this army has been active in the Shanxi Plateau, although there are not many big battles, but the small battles are continuous, the small victories are big victories, but the results should not be underestimated, and several of the battles are even more miraculous! Since the 129th Division crossed the Yellow River on September 30, 1937 and set out for the anti-Japanese front in North China, the 769th Regiment of the advance unit first attacked the Japanese frontline airfield at Yangmingbao in Dai County, Shanxi Province, destroying 24 aircraft. Then, the main force of the division advanced to the Pingding and Xiyang areas south of the Zhengtai (now Shitai) Railway, attacked the Japanese troops advancing westward along the Zhengtai Railway, and successively won victories in the battles of Changshengkou, Qigancun, Huangyadi, and Guangyang.

After that, in order to restrain the Japanese army's attack on the Yellow River defense line, and cooperate with the Kuomintang Army in southern Shanxi and the Eighth Route Army in the northwest and southwest of Shanxi, the 129th Division launched traffic sabotage battles and ambush warfare along the Zhengtai Railway and the Handan (Dan) Chang (Zhi) Highway in February and March 1938, and successively won victories in battles such as Shentouling and Xiangtangpu, and annihilated more than 2,000 Japanese troops. From the beginning of April to the 27th, the 129th Division, under the command of the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army, fought together with the 344th Brigade of the 115th Division, the 1st and 2nd Columns of the Death Squad, smashed the "Nine-Route Siege" of more than 30,000 Japanese troops in the southeast of Shanxi, recovered 18 county towns including Liaoxian and Licheng, and consolidated and expanded the Shanxi-Hebei-Henan anti-Japanese democratic base areas. By October 1938, in just one year, the 129th Division had grown to more than 50,000 men.

Not long ago, the 129th Division had just completed the reorganization of its troops, and after the reorganization, the 129th Division had 14 infantry brigades under its jurisdiction and some units directly under the division, with a total strength of more than 70,000 troops. More importantly, due to the support of the Eighth Theater, although the weapons and equipment of the Eighth Route Army at this time were still not comparable with the Japanese army, they were more luxurious than before. Take the 129th Division as an example, there are 14 brigades in the division, of which 8 brigades are fully equipped with Hanyang-made rifles, 4 brigades are full-fledged rifles, and the remaining two brigades are all Japanese-made equipment.

After more than two years of development, the 129th Division has adjusted all the weapons and equipment of the troops, and it is no longer as diverse as before, don't look at the guns or those guns, but after adjustment and supplementation, the combat effectiveness of the troops has increased by at least 1 times, or even more!

And all this is not clear to the Japanese army, and it is taken for granted that more than 10,000 people went to encircle and suppress, and the Tuba Road is not a self-defeating collapse, at most it will flee before the arrival of the imperial army as before.

Unfortunately, the Japanese army was wrong, and at three o'clock in the afternoon of the 28th, a brigade of the Japanese army was ambushed by the Eighth Route Army on the first line east of Qiu County, and the battle lasted only half an hour, and the Japanese infantry brigade suffered more than half of the casualties, so it had no choice but to retreat.

When the commander of the Japanese army, Major General Jiro Yamada, arrived, he asked about the situation and immediately ordered a large force to pursue. However, also on the first line, the Japanese army was ambushed by the Eighth Route Army again, and the Eighth Route Army installed nearly 20 tons of explosives on the mountain wall, and detonated the explosives after the main force of the Japanese army entered the first line. The violent explosion blew up the mountain walls on both sides of the first line of heaven, and all the more than 4,000 troops who entered the first line of heaven were buried alive.

Then the Eighth Route Army launched a charge against the remnants of the Japanese army, and the four brigades totaled more than 20,000 people around the remaining more than 5,000 puppet troops to storm fiercely, and after eight hours of hard fighting, the Japanese army finally broke through to less than 2,000 people, and the rest were all left in the first line. In the battle, the Japanese puppet army suffered more than 8,000 casualties and more than 1,000 captures, only more than 1,600 people escaped back to Qiu County, and even the supreme commander, Major General Jiro Yamada, was killed in the battle, and the losses were extremely heavy!

For a time, citizens of Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi'an, and other big cities rushed to the local Eighth Route Army offices to offer condolences, and even Lao Jiang, who had always looked down on the Eighth Route Army, had to admit that this time the Eighth Route Army was indeed impressive.

The Chinese were jubilant, and the Japanese army was gloomy. The loss of more than 10,000 troops was very important to the Japanese army at this time, and now the North China Front had to deal with the pressure of China's three theaters of operations at the same time, and the strength was already stretched, and now it was still at the critical moment of the war, and the loss of 10,000 people was indeed terrifying!

But China. The army will not give the Japanese army a chance to breathe, just when the Eighth Route Army encircled and annihilated the Yamada Brigade of the 10th Division of the Japanese Army, more than 90,000 people from the two group armies of the Second Theater launched an attack on the 3rd Brigade of the Japanese Army stationed in the Luliang area. (To be continued......)

PS: Thank you for your support, today this book ushered in the first hall master, cheers for the new hall master, and also adds more to the new hall master!