The 37th Army, which was relatively weakest in the Eighth Route Army, was ordered to march eastward and attack the areas north of the Yellow River and east of Taihang. In addition, the national army on the north road of the Jinpu line was heavily damaged by the Japanese army in the early days of the Anti-Japanese War, and it became a lone army after the fall of Xuzhou, under the premise that the food and salary could not be guaranteed, the backbone of the national army voted for the eighth road, and the spineless cast devils, and only a few thousand men and horses were left to die in loyalty to the old Jiang, and the soldiers were thin and weak, and the ammunition was scarce, how could they be able to defeat the hundreds of thousands of people of the 37th Army?

As a result, in less than 10 days, the 37 th Army successfully seized Shimen and other large and medium-sized cities, connecting the vast guerrilla zone covering an area of more than 100,000 square kilometers. As a result, the North China Border Region was further expanded, and its jurisdiction included all of Shanxi and Suiyuan provinces, most of Hebei and Chahar Provinces, and parts of Henan, Shandong, and Rehe Provinces, with a total population of more than 50 million, which was only slightly smaller than the Central Plains Border Region, which was larger after the Central Plains Conference. Since then, the Nationalist army north of the Yellow River has been completely swept away, and the Japanese North China Front has been divided into two parts by the North China border region and its guerrilla areas, one is the more than 200,000 Japanese troops in Pingjin, which are surrounded on three sides and can only rely on supplies sent by sea to barely support, and the other is the north of the Great Wall and west of the Great Xing'an Mountains, which are entrenched in Chengde, Chifeng, and other urban strongholds and more than 100,000 devils in the Hailar fortress group.

On the surface, the Japanese army in North China still has a considerable strength, but the Eighth Route Army allocated most of the Japanese-style weapons and ammunition captured during the Central Plains Great War, and the strength is far from comparable to the past. Even when they saw the infighting between the two parties in China, they did not dare to take advantage of the fire. What's more, the Red Party Central Committee had long anticipated this, and specially ordered General Lin to lead 300,000 elite soldiers of the main force of the 27th Army, which had the largest number of troops, the best equipment, and the strongest combat effectiveness of the Eighth Route Army, to be stationed in the Baoding area, which made the Japanese army in North China jealous. Repeatedly asked the military headquarters for reinforcements, where would they dare to easily leave the cities and fortresses to give the enemy a chance to fight a war of annihilation?

But where can the Japanese military department send reinforcements now? The million-strong army of the Central China Dispatch Army has been wiped out by the two major armies of the Red Party in the past few months, and now there are only 100,000 troops left in the Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou zone, which is the most elite in the Japanese-occupied areas. However, it had to face the direct threat of the more powerful Chinese 15th Army, and it also urgently needed the support of the Japanese military headquarters; In the northeast, due to the seven battles and seven victories after the anti-Japanese alliance crossed the Songhua River in the south, the Kwantung Army fell into an unprecedented crisis. In addition to leaving 200,000 troops behind the Japanese military to defend the "interior" (including the Japanese archipelago, Korea, Taiwan, the Ryukyus, and the Pacific Islands). In addition, almost all other troops were sent to northeast China, determined to "fight the rabbit with a lion". Before the threat of the Anti-Japanese Federation was completely resolved, the Japanese military headquarters was temporarily unable to send even tens of thousands of reinforcements to other battlefields

For this reason, the Japanese army headquarters even wanted to expand the army in the country again, but quickly succumbed to the harsh reality and abandoned this unrealistic idea. It turns out that since the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War. Japan has mobilized 4 million young and middle-aged people to join the army, and because Japan still can't trust the alien races in Korea, Taiwan and other colonies, more than ninety percent of the conscripts come from the Japanese mainland, which is a great burden for Japan, which has a native population of only more than 70 million. You must know that the degree of industrialization of Japan at this time is generally similar to that of China in 1976 (and probably not as good) as it was in history, and it is not comparable to fully industrialized countries such as the United States and Germany. The most important point is that the degree of mechanization of Japanese agriculture is still very low, and it is necessary to invest enough labor to ensure agricultural production, so when a large number of young and middle-aged people in the rural areas are conscripted into the army, the labor required for Japan's agriculture is suddenly insufficient, which directly affects the output of Japan's grain and other important agricultural products. In addition, Japan was originally a grain importer, so the gap is even bigger now, and what is worse is that Japan now does not have much hard currency to import grain and other daily necessities

At the time of the full-scale outbreak of the war of aggression against China, the Bank of Japan's gold reserves, including reserves for the issuance of paper money, were only 1.35 billion yen, and at that time about 3 yen could be exchanged for 1 dollar, so that the Japanese authorities had less than 500 million dollars in hard currency before the war (which may have been slightly more, since there were silver and other precious metals). As the scale of the war continued to expand, Japan's trade deficit increased day by day, and due to the butterfly effect caused by Hu Weidong's crossing, the Chinese army in this time and space was much stronger than in history, so on the one hand, the losses of the Japanese army were much greater than the same period in history, and on the other hand, the land and population occupied by the Japanese army were also incomparable with the same period in history. In addition, in 1937, China was already quite poor, whether it was the government or the people, the hard currency such as gold, silver and foreign exchange held was actually not much, far from making up for the huge consumption of the war, and cultural relics, antiques, works of art and other non-essential goods seemed to be valuable, but because of the market capacity, the devil sold less and could not get much money (compared to the huge military expenditure of the devil), and if he sold more, it would soon become the price of cabbage, so the actual value was far less than the grain and other bulk materials looted by the Japanese from the occupied areas. But even the large quantities of these looted supplies are still far from enough to supplement the astonishing consumption of millions of Japanese troops over the past year or so.

What's even worse is that most of the benefits obtained from looting have always been swallowed up by those who handle them, and devils are no exception. Therefore, most of the looting proceeds of the Japanese invasion of China were embezzled by Japanese officers and men, especially officers at all levels, and only a small part of them could enter the Japanese treasury

Historically, Japan's balance of payments deficit during the six-year period from 1936 to 1941 was as high as about 5 billion yen, which not only exhausted the hard currency held by the Japanese authorities, but also caused the balance of the Japanese government's foreign debt to exceed $400 million The route to attack Southeast Asia and the attack on Pearl Harbor to launch the Pacific War, as for the embargo measures of the United States, in fact, it was actually a secondary factor, because even if the United States was willing to sell, Japan had no money to buy it (to be continued). )