deploy their troops outside their own turfs into this region, and any further attempts to deploy their forces further away to exchange for Chiang's own troops being sent to this region would be impossible. As demonstrated later during the Chinese Civil War, the warlords would often simply refuse to take the commands or send their own troops during the campaigns and battles just to keep their own strength. The last blunder the nationalists made was their infatuation with holding on to as much land as possible, which resulted in insufficient force to complete the planned mission. Although more than 300,000 nationalist troops were mobilized in this campaign, around two-thirds of them were deployed to guard the newly conquered land. As the enemy left more than half of its original strength in the region to fight the guerrilla warfare, these troops were tied down, because it was difficult to exterminate the elusive enemy and safeguard the territory at the same time when a static defense posture was adopted in order to hold on to the land. In the meantime, the remaining mobile strike force was insufficient to exterminate the main force of the enemy attempting to breakout, thus neither the extermination of the enemy nor the long-term safeguard of the newly conquered territory could be effectively achieved. Although the nationalists failed to eliminate the enemy, they did succeed in eradicating the enemy and temporarily taking the enemy base in the region, though this success was negated by the political fallouts such as failing to achieve its original objective of exterminating the enemy within the region in this first campaign of the full scale Chinese Civil War after World War II. The communists, in contrast, did not have the dilemmas of the nationalists and benefited greatly from the nationalist blunders, and thus successfully escaped the nationalist encirclement. In carrying out their plans for the breakout, the communists successfully escaped in the directions where the nationalists totally unexpected and thus achieving surprise, and once the nationalists had realized what was happening, it was too late to redeploy their troops to make up for their misjudgements. Proportionally, the communist had suffered much greater loss because although the number of casualties are the same of both sides, the nationalists had five times more troops than the communists. However, this setback for the communists was minor in comparison to the strategic success of the breakout, and