Chapter XI: Turning the Tide
Tough battles take place in bottleneck provinces, mostly in Xuanhan. Nationalists are trying their best to reach Chengdu and capture our fighters!
Shortly after year 1940 begins, a great attack is launched against Weinan. Here, the frontline went back and forth until May, until we scrapped enough units to attack, as additional militias are still being recruited!
For whatever weird reason, it seems KMT has large support. It’s probably due to all the counter-revolutionaries that are being captured together with the territory...
On 1st May, a large scale assault is launched with the intention to cut off several Nationalist divisions while advancing down the river. The first battle in Chengkou looks promising.
Province after province, PLA relentlessly advanced forward, this time towards Wanxian to throw Nationalists back behind the river.
This is the situation in late July. Poor infrastructure and slow units don’t allow for faster execution. Reinforcements from Yan’an are arriving.
In early September, the encirclement is completed. About ten Nationalist divisions are captured throughout the next two months.
As our units forces a breakthrough in Jiayu, the infrastructure in Xianning seems to be completely destroyed.
This is the map of Chinese theater in late November.
Numerical superiority allows the PLA to advance in several places at once!
Even before the end of 1940, Changsha is attacked.
It is swiftly taken and it doesn’t take long to reach and attack Changde, the contemporary Nationalist capital.
The town’s garrison is however reinforced and therefore the attack is called off. But for whatever reason, Nationalists reinforced from the frontline units, allowing ours to join the attack on the town.
A month passed and it still seems the Nationalists were unable to relocate their supply dump to Chongqing, which has adverse effects on its defenders.
After the capture of Guiyang (near the Yunnan and Guangxi), Chiang Kai-Shek was found dead amongst the defenders of the town itself.
Therefore, a general surrender of all the KMT forces was announced on 12th March (well, 9th, as I forgot to save it and had to re-load from the monthly auto-save
) 1941by Lin Sen instead, ending the 14-years long conflict between KMT and CPC.
However, it was believed that the remaining Chinese warlords would not sit on the sidelines anymore. With Yunnan and Guangxi already supplying KMT divisions on their soil earlier and now willingly accepting KMT refugees, they’ve both formed a, what we believed to be, a defensive alliance together with Sinkiang and Tibet.
Being the strongest of the whole alliance, Guangxi declared war upon us first, followed by Yunnan, then Sinkiang and lastly Tibet. Their reasoning was mostly the same – territorial gains.
Guangxi wanted to reclaim Guangdong, which was formerly usurped from them by the Nanjing government.
Tibet had long-standing quarrels with every Chinese government since they declared independence, dating back to the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, mostly over Kham.
Sinkiang, despite being a friendly leftist government, felt the opportunity to expand into the territory of the long-hated Ma enemy, as the NRA’s presence was still strong in the area, though officially Gansu and Qinghai were under the administration of PRC.
Yunnan didn’t have a real reason to enter the war, but they have been promised swathes of Xikang, Sichuan as well as Guizhou. This was probably their best shot for territorial expansion and they weren’t willing to wait until the communists marched into Kunming...
While this caught the PRC by surprise, the army was still mobilized and deployed unexpectedly well from the war with KMT, with most of the troops in Sichuan, Guizhou and Hunan. Their plan was to annex Guangxi and Yunnan and unite it under Yan’an government, while installing loyal (in the case of Sinkiang
more loyal) governments into Sinkiang and Tibet. But it would be a challenge to put these disobedient warlords back to their place...
AAR is sychronized with the game!
