The banner of Bei Yihui not only helped the 15th Group Army to transform and transform the Japanese prisoners of war, but even played an obvious role in the Japanese attack on Bengbu, so the devil's army was shaken, and the will to resist was far less firm than at the beginning, as a result, the Japanese captured the whole city in less than a day, and the total number of captured and surrendered Japanese troops exceeded 12,000, and the battle was able to capture so many prisoners of war, which was the first time in the history of the 15th Army (not counting the surprise attack of Qingdao that fished in troubled waters), However, the casualties of the Japanese were only more than 8,000, which was undoubtedly much less than Shiraishi had predicted before the war. Tomohisa Shiraishi, who was also a follower of Kita Ichiki in the past, could not help but sigh, "Even though his predecessors never valued the role of ordinary soldiers when they were alive (Note 1), because his ideas and ideas reflected the general aspirations of lower-level officers and soldiers, many Japanese people he had never met regarded him as spiritual mentors, and if he had realized that Liliang was hidden at the bottom, perhaps Japan would be a different place now

Although the attack on Bengbu was far more smooth than expected, the so-called "one stone stirs up a thousand waves", which also immediately caused a series of chain reactions. First of all, after hearing the news, the devils in Nanjing immediately sent the 18th Division, the only field division in the city, to the north at night, hoping to recapture Bengbu as soon as possible and keep the 200,000 men of the 2nd Army. The 18th Division used to be a permanent division in Japan, but it was once abolished before the war, and it was rebuilt after the outbreak of the all-out War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

Tan Zhenlin, commander and political commissar of the 4th detachment of the New Fourth Army, took the opportunity to lead his troops north to approach Nanjing, and also said that Chen Yi of the 1st detachment had come over to "drink soup." It should be noted that among the four detachments of the New Fourth Army, these two detachments were obviously much stronger. Either one of them was stronger than all but these two detachments of the New Fourth Army combined, and even if only field troops were now brought with them, the two combined were as many as 70,000 or 80,000 men (Note 2). Moreover, the weaponry and equipment are not much worse than those additional divisions and even public security divisions and regiments left behind by the devils, and if they encounter the garrison and independent garrisons of the devils, they even have a certain advantage, and as a result, the Jiangnan base area of the New Fourth Army has expanded rapidly. The Japanese army's control over the Yangtze River Delta had serious problems. The vanguard of the 4th detachment even hit the city of Nanjing for a time, and the railway line from Nanjing to Shanghai was frequently attacked, so the Japanese Central China Dispatch Army Command was forced to ask for help from home. However, because of the urgent situation in Manchuria, the Japanese army base camp had no time to take care of anything else.

In desperation, the Japanese army in Nanjing, after asking the commander-in-chief of Xuzhou, Shunroku Hata, for instructions and obtaining consent, ordered the transfer of the two field divisions that were originally deployed on the western front against the Yangtze River to launch an "offensive defense" against the Kuomintang army, and gave up all the Japanese-occupied areas west of Hefei in one go, freeing up a large number of troops, which finally temporarily stabilized the order of the elite area of the Yangtze River Delta.

The Japanese probably didn't think of it themselves. In the past two years, the New Fourth Army has been anxious about the fact that the territory is too small, and immediately seized the territory abandoned by the Japanese army after discovering that the devils had withdrawn eastward, and the generals of the national army were worried that the Japanese army was deceitful in its eastward retreat, so they did not pursue it decisively. Instead, he reported the matter to the Military Commission first, so as not to bear the responsibility for his own arbitrary decision, and as a result, when Lao Chiang's order came down, those territories were almost seized by the New Fourth Army

The Nationalist Army immediately demanded that the New Fourth Army unconditionally return those territories, and after being refused, it even more brazenly launched an attack on the New Fourth Army stationed in western Anhui, but to Lao Chiang's disbelief, the Nationalist Army was defeated even though it was twice as strong. As a result, Lao Jiang, who had lost all his face, became more and more resentful of the New Fourth Army, and considering that the Red Party's development speed in the past two years was too fast, he consciously did not do anything again for fear that he would only have to wait for death in the future

Although the Japanese army relied on shrinking its forces to temporarily keep Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou, it was unable to send reinforcements to the 18th Division that went north to attack Bengbu, but the field division was a field division after all, and Shiraishi Tomohisa did not dare to be careless at all, you must know that the Japanese column now has a strength of more than 20,000 troops, including five or six thousand wounded soldiers, and the more than 12,000 captured devils must also be guarded by enough liliang, otherwise it will become a time bomb. If that's all it takes, Shiraishi Tomohisa's task is only to hold Bengbu after all, and even if Bengbu lacks strong fortifications to protect it, it can at least be defended according to the city, and the buildings in the city can always be used, at least it is better than attacking the fortifications, but the problem is that Ishihara Waner quickly led the army to retreat south after learning that Bengbu was lost, and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity of the unstable foothold of the Japanese to attack and recapture Bengbu from both sides

Fortunately, although the enemy in the north had a large number of troops, there was only one railway bridge to go for the time being, and their superiority in strength could not be brought into play at all, and the Japanese troops did not dare to use large-caliber artillery to deal with the officers and men of the Japanese column guarding the bridge, and the Japanese column did not need to send many troops to defend the bridge, but only needed to arrange a sufficient number of machine gunners to block the bridge deck with firepower. In fact, the reason why Shiraishi Tomohisa did not take the seemingly more secure method of blowing up the bridge was that it was not easy for China to build a railway bridge, and he also wanted to use this iron bridge to make more achievements

Note 1: All kinds of organizations formed by Kita Ichiki and his party members must be military officers to join, and because his ideology is deeply suspicious of the Japanese upper echelons, there are basically no high-ranking officers among the members, and the result is that the lower level is not grounded, and the upper level cannot reach the sky, and failure is a matter of course

Note 2: This time and space is limited by the development area (first, because the central government assigned the Jianghuai region to the 15th Army, and second, because the devils did not even hit Wuhan in this time and space, the area of the occupied area is small, and the New Fourth Army is not easy to take the initiative to seize the territory of the national control area, so it is naturally difficult to develop. By the end of 1938, there were 200,000 local troops and militia guerrillas, of which less than 100,000 were field troops. (To be continued.) )