General Jiang Dingwen of the First War Zone gave his account of the behavior of Henan civilians : " During the campaign , the unexpected phenomenon was that the people of the mountains in western Henan attacked our troops , taking guns , bullets , and explosives , and even high-powered mortars and radio equipment ... They surrounded our troops and killed our officers . We heard this pretty often . The heads of the villages and baojia ( village mutual-responsibility groups ) just ran away . At the same time , they took away our stored grain , leaving their houses and fields empty , which meant that our officers and soldiers had no food for many days . " This was revenge for the 1938 Yellow River flood and the Chinese famine of 1942 – 43 ( the famine killed some 4 million people in Henan ) . General Jiang 's account also said : " Actually this is truly painful for me to say : in the end the damages we suffered from the attacks by the people were more serious than the losses from battles with the enemy . " The Henan peasants picked up the weapons Kuomintang troops had abandoned to defend themselves against the Japanese . When the Kuomintang army ordered the Henan locals to destroy the local highways to prevent the Japanese advance , they refused . In fact they sometimes even went back at night and mended roads which the army had torn up by day
1938 Yellow River flood
1938 Yellow River flood
Operation Ichi-Go