Chapter 29 Chapter 28 The Inhuman "April 12" Raid (1941.4.12)
From April 12 to 20, 1941, the Japanese invaders launched a large-scale "sweep" against the anti-Japanese base areas in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area (known as the "April 12" sweep in history).During the 9 days of the "mopping up", the Japanese invaders implemented the inhumane "Three Alls Policy", causing the anti-Japanese base areas in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area to suffer unprecedented catastrophe, and the lives and properties of the people suffered extremely heavy losses.
The anti-Japanese base area in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area is located at the junction of Hebei, Shandong, and Henan provinces, at the junction of Central China and North China, and is located in the traffic arteries of Central China, East China, North China, and Yan'an. The southward and westward advances of the Japanese army played a major role.” Especially in the Shawo areas such as Neihuang, Gaoling, Weihe, and Dunqiu (the latter three counties were newly established during the Anti-Japanese War) in the center of the border area, since ancient times It is a battleground for military strategists. In September 1938, Comrades Yang Dezhi and Cui Tianmin led a part of the 344th Brigade of the 115th Division under the orders of the 18th Army Headquarters to cross the Taihang Mountains and cross the Ping-Han Railway blockade between Qi County and Tangyin in northern Henan. The 689th regiment that arrived earlier rendezvoused.After more than a month of fighting, the puppet and stubborn troops in the east of Pinghan Road, south of Zhanghe River, and both sides of Weihe River were basically wiped out, and an anti-Japanese base area in the sandy area was opened up. In 1940, district party committees, administrative offices, military districts, divisions and other party, government and military leading organs, as well as military factories, printing factories, bomb factories, hospitals, banks, etc., were stationed in Xinggu, Qiankou, Diandang, Chaicun, Yang Gu and other villages.The sandy area became the center of the anti-Japanese struggle in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area.Under the leadership of the party and the government, the army and the people used Shagang and Zaolin to carry out guerrilla warfare, inflicting heavy blows on the enemy time and time again, and formed a series of attacks on important cities such as Kaifeng, Xinxiang, Anyang and the enemy's main communication channel, the Ping-Han Railway. serious threat.For this reason, the Japanese invaders regarded the anti-Japanese base areas in the sandy areas of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area as a thorn in their eyes and a thorn in their flesh, and they always tried to destroy them completely.In order to eliminate the threat of our army, the Japanese invading army launched a series of sweeps against the anti-Japanese bases in our sandy area starting from June 1940. Among them, the "April 12" raid was the largest and caused the most serious losses to our bases.
On April 12, 1941, the Japanese invaders mobilized the 35th Division, the 1st Independent Mixed Brigade, the 4th Cavalry Brigade, Li Ying, Yang Zhenlan, Sun Buyue, Cheng Daohe and other puppet troops, as well as Si Huasheng, Han Laojun, etc. The stubborn troops, with a total of more than 15,000 people, more than 20 counterweight guns, more than 110 vehicles and tanks, and two planes, started a large-scale "sweep" to the sandy area in five directions, trying to wipe out the leaders of the party, government and army in our border area in one fell swoop. Organs and the main force to destroy the anti-Japanese base areas in the sandy area.
The characteristics of the enemy's "mopping up" this time are: "1. Combination of large and small advances; 2. Concentrate on 'sweeping' one point (sandy area); Send people or use firepower to conduct a rigorous search, and use searchlights at night in an attempt to make me have nowhere to hide; 5. Make a big "sweep" public opinion in the secondary direction, so as to take secret and sudden actions in the main direction; 6. Disguise our army, Create chaos; Seventh, occupy our border villages first, and then encircle them with the main force, surround them layer by layer, and shrink inward, creating a situation where it is difficult for me to break out; Eighth, implement the inhumane "three light policy."
At the beginning, in order to confuse our army, the Japanese invaders took a tentative battle. First, they sent about 2,000 people from the Li Ying Department of the Kuomintang's "First Route Army to Suppress the Communist Party" from Dongzhuangji, Neihuang County, and attacked Yezhuang and Cifan in the south. At the same time, a brigade of the Yang Zhenlan Department of the Puppet 24th Route Army and about 800 people from the Puppet Sun Buyue Department, with the cooperation of the Japanese invaders, set off from Huangxinzhuang in Junxian County and drove directly to Anhua on the east bank of the Weihe River via Huagu city.Anhua City was only five miles away from Xiaohuailin Village, where the headquarters of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region Command was stationed at that time.The menacing enemy poses a great threat to our military command center. The main force of our second column went into battle to meet the enemy.When this puppet army was about to be defeated, the main force of the Japanese army that had gathered and hidden around the sandy area suddenly rushed towards me.
On April 14, the enemy on the west route departed from Anyang to Wuling and crossed the Weihe River, and then divided into two routes; the enemy on the east route traveled from Puyang to Houhe via Ma Xinzhuang; Neihuang; the enemy on the South Road starts from Baidaokou, passes through Baimao, and Xiaochai Village to Houhe.The five-way enemy formally carried out an "iron wall encirclement" to the basic Shawo area south of Neihuang, north of Huaxian, west of Puyang, and east of Weihe.In the evening, tanks, cars and cavalry of the Japanese and puppet troops swarmed in. Shells fell one after another around Xiaohuailin Village.In the flames and smoke, Commander Yang Dezhi and Political Commissar Cui Tianmin led the agencies and troops to hide on the spot and wait for transfer.
After night fell, Yang Dezhi and Cui Tianmin led the agencies and troops, with the help of the cover of night and strong wind, from the middle of the two enemy groups, crossed the Nanqing Highway, and quickly moved to the straw hat fairy village in Nanle County.Then jump to the Guancheng area to bankrupt the enemy's plot to annihilate our leading organs and main force.However, the Second Battalion of our Fourth Regiment, which was in charge of covering the retreat of the large troops, was attacked by nearly a hundred times the Japanese and puppet troops. He would rather die in battle than cover up his determination to transfer the large troops out of Husband. On the same day, the puppet army fought for a day and a night, and all sacrificed honorably.
After the Japanese invaders failed in their attempt to find our main force for a decisive battle, on April 16-18, they adopted methods such as "big attack", "small encirclement", "repeated raids", and "tight blockade" to search the sandy area, kill people and set fire to them. , looting property, cutting down trees and deforestation.The vicious and vicious enemies, like crazy beasts, kill people whenever they come to a village, burn houses when they see them, and rob them when they see property.The means of killing are omnipotent, creating the most brutal and inhumane record of atrocities in the world.
On the morning of April 16, the Japanese invaders set up the headquarters of the 1st Independent Mixed Brigade in a courtyard in Liujia Hutong, north of Qiankou Village Road.They drove more than 1,000 people who were arrested in the jujube forest to the yard of Liu Jingpei's house, forced everyone to lie down, and piled up one layer after another. The devil soldiers stepped on it and poured shit on people. They urinated, poured boiling water, and then used machine guns to massacre them. Before that, they drove hundreds of other men and women to an alkali nunnery on the southeast side of Qiankou Village, and forced them to take off their clothes. , The puppet army beat people with whips and sticks, shot them with machine guns, and ran wildly on people's corpses on horseback.
On April 17, the Japanese invaders and the puppet Sun Buyue besieged more than 100 people in Yanggu Village in a jujube forest less than 110 meters long, and set up machine guns on all sides to force them to cut down jujube trees. Enemy machine gun kills.At the same time, the enemy transferred more than 900 people from Tuzhen, Sangcun, Chengbu and other villages to Zaolin, took them all to an empty field in Yanggu Village, and killed more than 300 people with machine guns on the spot.They tied the hands and feet of those who survived with ropes, and threw them into six wells respectively; when the wells were filled, they pressed heavy stone rollers and millpans, and bombed the stone rollers and millpans, and then filled the wells with soil. Sealed.In the ditch at the east end of Yanggu Village and the ditch at the west end of the village, the Japanese invaders and gangsters poured water on the 500 to 600 people who were too crowded to turn around, poured gasoline on them, lit them on fire, and fired with machine guns.The mother of Hu Jiuni in the village competed with the enemy for two hens, but was stabbed to death by the enemy with a bayonet; Killed, the child was torn in half by the enemy.The enemy broke into Mi Qiujing's house and stabbed Qiujing's grandmother to death with a bayonet; Qiujing's sister was cooking when she was kicked down by the enemy, grabbed the child in her arms, and threw her into a boiling water pot to scald to death.
The cavalry of the Japanese invaders stabbed more than 60 people to death with bayonets one by one in Jiahe.Anshan's 70-year-old mother was chopped into 8 pieces by the enemy.An old lady who was fifty years old was disembowelled.
In Nanzhangbao, the enemy imprisoned more than 20 people in a house, locked the door, and set fire to them to death.There was an old man who sold tofu, his ears and eyes were cut off, and his internal organs were thrown out on the street.
In Tuzhen, there were two children who were thrown into the fire by the Japanese invaders and burned to death, but the enemy laughed out loud.
In Yuzhuang, the enemy tied seven ordinary people to a cart, drove them for fun like cattle and horses, made them run back and forth on the street, and finally stabbed them to death one by one with bayonets.
In Dongzhangbao, a 4-year-old girl was skinned by the enemy and hung on a big tree by the water hole at the east end of the village.
In Chengbu, the enemy tied up more than 40 people who were captured from the sand nest, threw them into a big pit, and killed them with bombs.At the same time, more than 20 young women were also arrested. The enemy stripped them naked, had fun on the street, and finally shot them to death with machine guns.The crimes committed by these "fascist gangsters against our fellow women (including old women and young girls) cannot be described in words representing human civilization, and ferocious beasts will be shocked to see their atrocities!"
After the enemy's "mopping up", there were tragic dead bodies everywhere in the sandy area. According to the investigation and statistics of the reporter group accompanying the army of the Hebei-Luyu Military Region on May 1, 1941, only Nanzhangbao, Dadikou, Yuzhuang, Dongzhangbao, Xuecun, and Po In 15 villages including Chekou, Yuanliu Village, Wenxinggu, Chengbu, Tuzhen, Yanggu, Sangcun, Jiahe, Maji, and Qiankou, 1,477 people were killed, 129 were disabled, and 258 were missing. 48 households were killed.Among them, 296 people died under quilts in one village of Tuzhen, 41 people disappeared, and 21 households were exterminated.
In order to completely destroy the anti-Japanese base areas in our desert area, the enemy followed the massacre with burning and looting.According to the investigation and statistics of the military reporter group of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region, 141 villages were burned in the basic area of Shawo with a radius of 50 miles (80 of which were all turned into scorched earth).Among them, Nianhuang County has 83 villages including Nanzhangbao and Dongzhangbao; Gaoling has 40 villages including Shaocun and Xuecun; Dunqiu County has 15 villages including Hushiwen Village and Zhangzui; Weihe has 3 villages including Dawangdan a village.21,159 houses were burned in Neihuang County; 22,844 houses were burned in Gaoling County; although there is no detailed statistics in Dunqiu and Weihe, more than three quarters of the houses were burned.Among them, Gankou Village in Neihuang County burned 1,350 houses; Nanzhangbao burned 1,432 houses; Tuzhen Village had only 987 houses, and 973 houses were burned; Wangzhanggu Village had a total of 38 households, except one survived. , and the rest were all burned up; even the chicken coops and pigpens in Chengbu Village were burned down.
While killing and burning, the enemy used slogans such as "distribute the foreign wealth of the Eighth Route Army to the east of the river" to lure and coerce people west of the Weihe River to loot their property in the sandy area.In Neihuang and Gaoling counties alone, 132,396 stones of grain were looted and burned (not including army losses).Jujubes and peanuts are two special products in the sandy area. Every time the enemy came to a village, they would take away or burn all the seeds of jujubes and peanuts.The looted bedding, furniture, food, red dates, peanuts, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, etc. were taken away in carts.
In addition, the enemy also brought axes and hacksaws to cut down jujube trees and other village trees everywhere.According to statistics, more than 128,000 jujube trees and forest trees were destroyed in the whole sandy area.Among them, 3,349 trees were cut down in Qiankou Village; all the jujube trees in the broken car entrance were cut down; from Ding Village to the west to Sang Village, there are few jujube forests that stretch for dozens of miles.Most of the felled trees were burned or pulled away by cars, and the remaining parts were scattered all over the ground, making the deserted desert look even more desolate.
In 1942, the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region Party, Government, and Military Organizations established the "April 12 Cemetery for Soldiers and Compatriots who died in battle" in the sandy area.The stele records: "Since the Japanese invaders harassed...in the border area of Neihuang, Dunqiu, and Gaoling counties, 142 villages have been burned, more than 50,000 houses have been destroyed, more than 4,000 people have been martyred, and wells have been blown up. Hundreds of eyes, hundreds of thousands of trees were felled, and private property was looted. The tragedy of the murder was unprecedented in human history. For example, in Qiankou, nearly a thousand people were killed by machine guns; in Yanggu, Filling the six eyes of the well and killing more than a thousand people; searching and killing the refugees in the Shawo of Xuecun, about a thousand people.... Babies were torn apart alive, women were raped and had caesarean section, and men and women were forced to live in the same room, and after being humiliated and beaten , People who set fire to death can be found everywhere. After the catastrophe, there are corpses everywhere, bloody everywhere, wells and ruins, rubble and scorched earth, and nothing remains, and it is desolate as far as the eye can see!"
The devastation suffered by the sandy area in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area is the epitome of the Japanese invasion of China. This inscription is the bloody and tearful accusation of the people in the sandy area against the Japanese invaders!
During the "April 12" raids, Comrade Zhou Yuming, who was a propaganda member of our Eighth Route Army guerrilla team, was adopted by Zhang Guangcai, a farmer in Sang Village, because he was too young to adapt to the fierce fighting environment.He is one of the survivors of the Japanese massacre.When the Japanese writer Seiichi Morimura visited him in September 1982, he described the situation of the "April 12" raids in Hebei, Shandong and Henan. The recording of his conversation is excerpted as follows:
On the night of April 12, 1941, after the Japanese army completed the encirclement of the base of the Eighth Route Army, they burned down all the villages, killed everyone they saw, and looted everything they saw, which opened the curtain of the "three light policy".
I stayed at the old man Zhang Guangcai's house. The village is called Zhangsang Village. The village is located in the north of Huaxian County along the tributary of the Yellow River, where jujubes and apples are abundant.There are three members of Uncle Zhang's family, the elderly couple and a daughter who is one year younger than me.
During the daytime on April 12, when the Japanese army came to the village, the four of us hid in an underground kiln for storing food in winter in the woods outside the village.
...At this time, the Eighth Route Army had moved to other places, not in the village.When we hid during the day, we heard the din of looters coming from the direction of the village and the tragic cries of the villagers, and we saw thick smoke from the burning of the village in the kiln.It wasn't until about 9 o'clock in the evening that the screams gradually died down.It seemed that the Japanese army had gone to other places, so we went back to the village to check the situation. When we came back, our house and other people's houses were still burning.Villagers' corpses were strewn all over the road, in front of the house, and inside the house.
My adoptive father, Uncle Zhang, used to think that the Japanese only killed Eighth Route Army soldiers, but now seeing that even farmers were killed, he decided to leave the village. Uncle Zhang took his wife, daughter, and I to escape from the encirclement of the Japanese army along the path in the woods.When we walked about two miles along the jujube forest path, the Japanese soldiers found us and asked something in Japanese. The four of us escaped from the Japanese Ping in desperation. At first, Uncle Zhang's wife and daughter were holding hands, so we separated when we ran away. Uncle Zhang and I walked all night and finally escaped from the encirclement of the Japanese army.
Our base area is 30 miles from east to west and 10 miles from north to south, including dozens of villages. About 8,000 people were killed. The guerrilla investigation found that in one village, the Japanese army drove all the villagers into a big house, piled up firewood and burned them all to death, with 400 dead bodies.
The Japanese army also used various methods to force the villagers into the well, drop grenades from above, or drop big stones from the well to kill the villagers.There is a well where 72 bodies were found.I went into a yard, and although I didn’t know the family members very well, I speculated from what I saw that a man who might be his father was stabbed to death in the yard with a bayonet, and the body was pushed into the cesspit of the toilet. The body of the bound son may be the body. There are seven wounds on the body, all of which were picked by bayonets. On the nearby ground lay a young woman in her 20s with her lower body naked. This may be her daughter-in-law. There are more than ten wounds on the body. The bayonet wound, judging from the circumstances, she was killed after being raped, and the body of a baby less than one year old was lying on her breast. It looked like the baby was grabbing the mother's breast, and it seemed to be shouting "Mom, "Mother" died, and the baby's back can clearly see three marks of being stabbed by a bayonet.
All the wells and ditches in the village were piled with dead bodies. When we came back to the village, the houses we lived in were burned down, all the food we robbed, and we didn’t even have water to drink.
When I returned to the village today, the tragic scene I saw was still vivid in my mind.At that time, my adoptive father searched for several days but failed to find his wife and daughter. Finally, he found the bodies of both of them in the kiln in the woods where he hid at first. It is estimated that the aunt was too tired to walk before returning. underground kiln.
In 1973, when I was 47 years old, I visited the Zhang family in Zhangsang Village.My adoptive father, the savior, Uncle Zhang, later married again and had three children.There are graves all around the village, and white banners are inserted on the graves.The village is now full of trees, jujube trees and apple trees, and people live a simple and happy life
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