General Jiang Dingwen of the First War Zone gave this 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. 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. Moreover, 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.