The night came like a tide from afar, swallowing up all the light, and it was already dark.
The Japanese troops pressed heavily on Gaoyou from the south, and all the people in the villages near Gaoyou fled. They dragged their families and families along the road and fled towards Baoying in the north.
Every war is an ordeal. Whether it is the cruel and murderous Japanese soldiers or the squadrons with lax military discipline, many villages will suffer a catastrophe.
In order to survive, the people in the nearby areas would always flee after every war, and then wait until the war was over before returning to their desolate homes. However, sometimes when they returned, there was nothing left but ruins, and many people became refugees again.
The news that heavy Japanese troops were coming from the south spread like a plague through the villages, very quickly. In just a few hours, many villages were deserted.
The area around Gaoyou is about to become a war zone. If you don't escape, you will be arrested and made into a civilian husband. Being a civilian husband is not a big deal. At most, it will be a little bitter. Just get over it.
But what the common people feared most was losing their lives. If they were captured by the Japanese and used as laborers to dig trenches, Chinese officers and soldiers would attack them and execute them as traitors.
If they were working as civilian husbands for the Chinese Communist Party and helping to repair fortifications, if they were attacked and caught by the Japanese, they would be mistaken for Chinese soldiers and killed.
Therefore, no matter which party they were caught by, they would not be able to escape death, so they simply stopped doing nothing and started to flee early.
At this moment, on the highway from Gaoyou to Baoying, although it is already dark, there are still dark and crowded people.
The local wealthy squires have handed over their houses to the care director and others, and they are taking refuge in the direction of Huaiyin, because Huaiyin is now in the hands of the squadron and is considered a safe territory.
The wealthy squires were riding in bumpy carriages, slowly moving northward with the crowds of people, while the ordinary people were walking on their feet.
The entire fleeing team stretched with no end in sight, and the people coming from all over the small roads merged into the highway like a trickle, making the fleeing team become extremely large and bloated.
If there were a few Japanese planes dropping bombs overhead, the escape road would be littered with corpses and turn into a bloody road again like the road from Shanghai to Nanjing.
Fortunately, it was night and the Japanese planes would not arrive. The Japanese army aviation units were being restrained by other war zones. It had been a long time since the Japanese planes had been seen.
The fleeing crowds were moving slowly, their thin bodies carrying heavy packages, and many malnourished women were still holding sobbing babies.
The entire road was lifeless. Except for the heavy footsteps, everyone was immersed in walking, with numb and empty expressions on their faces.
They were worried about their lives after arriving in Huaiyin and whether their homes would be destroyed in the war. Everyone was worried.
To the south of the fleeing team, in the direction of Gaoyou, there was a rumble like thunder, and large flashes of light burst out from time to time, reflecting the shape of the ferocious clouds in the night.
The Japs have already reached Gaoyou, and the Sulu Guerrilla Corps is fighting the Japs in Gaoyou. The faint sound of artillery strikes the hearts of the fleeing people, making them feel particularly heavy.
No one dared to stop because they didn't know how long the officers and soldiers of the Sulu Guerrilla Corps could hold off the Japs. Once those wolf-like Japs caught up with them, they would feel chills on their backs just thinking about it.
Although the Japanese Central China Headquarters has formulated a series of policies for the occupied areas, they no longer kill as wantonly as in the past. They only kill guerrillas.
But after all, the devils can't change their ways of eating shit, and they still occasionally break out some evil deeds of the devils, which makes the people afraid.
Moreover, among the people who retreated north this time, there was some gossip that many of the Japanese troops coming from the south were those who participated in the atrocities of the Nanjing Massacre.
Of course, the source of these gossips cannot be verified, but all the people were scared and worried. People who originally wanted to stay in the area also evacuated because they knew about the Nanjing Massacre and how cruel the murderous Japs were.
Because some people knew that the Gaoyou area would be beaten to pieces. Although the people would suffer a lot if they evacuated north in the cold winter months, they had to do this in order to free up the preset battlefield.
In order to achieve the goal of annihilating the Japanese troops, sometimes the interests of some people have to be sacrificed, because only when there is a country, there is a family. If the country is destroyed, there is no way to talk about that family.
The rumors flying all over the sky made the evacuated people panic, but what they didn't know was that in Huaiyin in the north, Zhang Liechen, the deputy captain of the Northern Jiangsu Corps, was too shocked when he received the telegram.
They actually evacuated all the people within a radius of dozens of miles and wanted to evacuate to Huaiyin for temporary refuge. Although the people fleeing north were still on the way, Yang Ling's telegram had already reached Zhang Liechen's hands.
"To prepare to accept at least 100,000 people evacuating north, all towns and villages near Huaiyin must determine the number of people they will accept in advance, then vacate their houses and prepare firewood and food. They must ensure that no one evacuates to the north will freeze or starve to death.
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Yangling adopted a diversion method. If more than 100,000 people flooded into Huaiyin at once, the entire county would be paralyzed, so these people had to be assigned to various towns and villages for temporary resettlement.
There used to be a lot of people fleeing in various towns and villages, and a lot of houses were vacant. Now they just need to be vacated to accommodate these people who have evacuated north.
The people who are evacuating north all carry their own food with them. When the Northern Jiangsu Corps provides more relief, they will be able to get through this winter.
Although Yang Ling had already considered many aspects, deputy captain Zhang Liechen still felt heavy pressure when faced with the arrival of so many refugees.
But he also knew that as long as the people who retreated to the north were settled, their northern Jiangsu Corps would have a steady stream of soldiers.
At the same time, by evacuating the people within a radius of dozens of miles, Yang Ling and the others were able to free their hands and feet to fight the Japanese. Whether it was for future development or for the protracted war of resistance in the occupied areas, they had to fight through a big battle.
Smash the enemy's offensive.
Yang Ling and others asked the Sulu Corps to fight the Japanese in Gaoyou, but there was nothing they could do. They needed time to rest, replenish their troops and arrange the battlefield.
Yang Ling's main force has already begun to replenish their troops at Jieshou. The supplementary battalion from Huaiyin has arrived here, and the new recruits who have been training for a period of time have begun to replenish the battle losses.
The wounded were being transferred to the rear of Huaiyin, and Huaiyin was also busy. In order to accommodate the refugees, all the civilian and combat officers who stayed behind took action.
Moreover, Yang Ling knew that they were going to fight a big battle with the Japs next, so they currently had too few troops. While asking for help from the deputy general headquarters of the theater in Xinghua, they asked the local armed forces under the Northern Jiangsu Corps to quickly form an army and go south.
There were more than 4,000 officers and soldiers, which was a very powerful force.