I am an admin of a wordpress.org blog and I used to use "Yoast All in one SEO" plugin. While I was using this plugin it stripped the category base from my blog post URL's.

With yoast all in one seo: Site.com/topic/subtpoic/page/#
Without yoast all in one seo: Site.com/category/topic/subtopic/page/#

Now, that I have switched to another plugin, I am trying to manage the page crawl errors which are tremendous somewhere around 1800, mostly due to pagination. Rather than redirecting each URL individually I would like to develop HTC access 301 redirects rules. However all instructions on how to create these HTC access 301 redirect rules are regarding the suffix rather than the category base. So my question is, can HTC access 301 redirects rules work to fix this problem? Including pagination?  And if so, what would this particular HTC access 301 redirect look like? Especially regarding pagination? And do I really have to write a 301 redirect for each pagination page?