The torrent of steel from the 1st Lan Division continued to advance forward in a majestic manner. But...
After "advancing" for seven or eight miles, the radio in Rommel's command car rang again:
"The monkey calls the elephant, the monkey calls the elephant..."
"Elephant received it, please speak."
"Three hundred meters ahead, we found a large group of farmers on the road..."
"..."
There were two to three hundred farmers this time, and the reason for blocking the road was the same as in the previous village. They were also shouting and standing in the middle of the road, and in the fields one to two hundred meters on both sides, and they would not let tanks or cars pass.
…
Just when the Blue Division was blocked by villagers and couldn't get through, a sidecar motorcycle from the Red Division sneaked out of the village by the road, drove onto the highway, and fled westward.
An officer on the motorcycle sidecar looked back, wiped the cold sweat from his head, and shouted to his companions:
"They came so fast! We spent 300 Mingyang on the village in front of us, and it took less than half an hour to stop them? Damn it, those villagers couldn't do anything even if they were paid!"
Another officer riding a motorcycle, wearing goggles, also looked back and shook his head helplessly.
The officer in the sidecar said loudly again:
"We only spent two hundred Mingyang on this village. At this rate, we can only hold them off for five minutes at most!... Hey, let me tell you..."
He patted his companion, pointed to the roadside, and signaled him to stop. The officer driving the motorcycle pulled over and stopped, and the officer said:
"I said, we have to go back and see how they got here. It's not that fast to find the local government!"
So, the two of them rode their motorcycles and sneaked back to the vicinity of the village. They hid the motorcycles in the farmland beside the road, then got into the field, crouched, and took advantage of the cover of the low crops.
I touched the side of the leading tank company of the 1st Lan Division.
This is the approximate location. Those villagers who paid to block the road should be on the highway.
But there didn't seem to be many people shouting nearby, only the sound of engines running everywhere.
The two of them peeked out from the crop field and were surprised to find that the road that was crowded with villagers just now was now empty, leaving only a straight and wide asphalt road leading into the distance...
In the middle of the road and in the fields on both sides, there were countless tanks and armored vehicles parked, with their engines roaring.
On the turret of a tank in the middle of the road in the front row, a commander with a headset waved his hand back and shouted:
"Tanks—forward!!!"
…
Suddenly, the sound of the engines in the four fields suddenly increased by dozens of decibels, and hundreds of steel behemoths rushed over, spewing blue smoke.
The two officers of the Sixth Red Division were so frightened that they quickly lowered their heads and hid themselves in the crops, not daring to move for fear of being discovered.
A Lightning-3 tank roared and rushed one or two meters behind them. The two Red Army officers watched the two dark tracks turning over the soil and heading straight over their heads. They howled loudly in fright and walked towards them.
He crawled forward and yelled at the top of his lungs:
"Don't drive, don't drive. Hey, hey, you're going to run over someone! You're going to kill someone!!... Hey, my brothers, my brothers... We are from the Sixth Red Division, we are from the Sixth Red Division... Don't
Damn it, don’t..."
The commander on top of the turret looked at the endless fields ahead, recalling the glorious breakthroughs of the morning. Unable to suppress the excitement in his chest, he kept patting the top of the turret and shouted:
"Drive quickly! Drive quickly! Don't stop! Drive all the way to Nanjing! Hahahaha..."
Tanks rumbled past overhead.
The two Red Army officers hugged each other tightly and then let go. Their faces were as white as paper. They looked at the two deep track marks on the dirt on both sides of them in shock. They then touched their bodies to confirm that all the parts were intact.
Then they spat out a mouthful of gasoline exhaust and hugged each other and started laughing wildly.
"Crack...Boom!!!"
Just as the two were about to stand up, a muffled sound came from the front, and they were so frightened that they shrank back into the crops.
A commander held the turret, turned his head, and noticed a group of fireworks gradually disappearing behind him. He immediately knocked on the top of the turret and shouted:
"Stop!"
Several tanks around him stopped, and several tank commanders jumped down and ran a dozen meters behind. They were confused and talking around a pile of things that had been rolled into discus and were still blazing with fire and emitting black smoke.
"What the hell is this?"
"And fire."
"It looks like a sidecar motorcycle."
"Why is there a sidecar motorcycle here?"
…
The long armored division finally passed by. The two of them climbed up from the crop field in embarrassment and looked at the scene in front of them.
Empty fields and empty roads. Two to three hundred meters away, you can still vaguely see the back of the rearmost military vehicle of the 1st Lan Division.
In front of me, the "discus" that was emitting black smoke and holding flames was the sidecar motorcycle of the two of them.
…
"Huh? Very good," Commander Lan 1st Division was in the armored command vehicle, looking out the window at the villages retreating to one side of the road, and said with satisfaction, "We have passed three villages in a row, and there are no more farmers blocking the road.
.Looks like our luck is getting better.”
"I don't believe in luck," Rommel said while studying the map at his desk, "I only believe in the tracks of our tanks."
…
Five kilometers to the west, on the road, a small off-road vehicle of the Red Army and several sidecar motorcycles were speeding like crazy, with the sound of gunfire behind them. A fighter jet overhead kept shooting down, trying to kill them.
Get rid of it.
Every time the plane dived down, there was always a motorcycle that stopped and drove into the field beside the road. The soldiers came down and tied a red ribbon on the motorcycle to signify that it had been destroyed. After the plane dived for a few rounds, several motorcycles and
Every car was "destroyed", leaving only a sidecar motorcycle still speeding along.
When the plane dived again, the ten 20mm twin anti-aircraft guns in front of it that had not been "blown up" opened fire at the same time, and 24 tongues of flame were pointed directly at the lone fighter. The Blue Army fighter saw that it had flown to the Red Sixth Division.
Up in the sky, until he rushed down again, the sound of the exercise referee announcing that he had been shot down would be heard in the headphones. The pilot had no choice but to give up, pull up angrily, turn around and fly back.
The sidecar motorcycle rushed to the temporary division headquarters, risking hitting people, and stopped with a bang. A scout jumped down and shouted:
"Division seat! The 1st Blue Division is 5 kilometers east of us! ... The reconnaissance battalion suddenly encountered a large number of enemy tanks. After a brief exchange of fire, all of them were killed! The radio was also destroyed! Only I escaped alone..."
"puff--!"
Huang Shuliang was drinking water, and all the water gushed out.
"How can it be!"
He threw himself at the map, pointed at it and shouted:
"An hour ago, they were still more than ten kilometers east of us. There were three villages in the middle. Each village could hold them back for at least several hours. I expected to be able to drag them until dark! After dark, we
There are no more of those things on my head! Now..."
He knocked the helmet on his head:
"Why did they drive all the way here? Those villages cost us thousands of dollars. Why the hell did those villagers spend so much money and not do anything?... We originally promised them to wait for two hours and then pay each person.
Give me one piece of Mingyang, and if you wait for three hours, you’ll get another one and a half yuan for each person! Don’t they all want that one and a half yuan?”
The staff officer next to him said anxiously:
"Master, five kilometers is only fifteen minutes for the enemy! Master, make a decision immediately!"
Huang Shuliang glanced at the sky, rolled his eyes, waved his hand, and shouted:
"Send the order, everyone withdraws into Xinmengzhuang! Don't worry about leaving the baggage on the road. Pull the artillery into the village and disguise it! Quick! Engineers are laying mines at the intersection in front of the village! Dig a trench at the entrance of the village!"
Several staff officers were stunned:
"Master, do you want to...?"
Huang Shuliang gritted his teeth:
"Use this settlement to persist. As long as we persist until dark, we can fight them fairly for a while!... After dark, their planes will be useless, and their tanks will probably be of little use either! I told
You guys, those tanks have a very narrow field of vision, plus it’s dark and the sound is loud, they can’t hear where we are, but we can hear where they are from a long way away..."
Huang Shuliang's division is really well-trained. Within ten minutes, 10 anti-aircraft guns, 62 light mortars, 22 heavy mortars, 45 anti-tank guns, 10 light infantry guns, and 2 heavy infantry guns
, 15 light howitzers and 6 heavy howitzers were all pushed into this Dazhuangzi area of several square kilometers. The Red Sixth Division originally had twice as many artillery pieces, but after nearly a morning of bombing, only half of them were left.
Especially those heavy artillery with large targets suffered even more losses.
In addition to these artillery pieces, 60 anti-tank guns, 325 light machine guns, and 86 heavy machine guns were also moved into Zhuangzi. Like the artillery pieces, they were hurriedly concealed. Under air raids, the losses of light weapons were much less than that of heavy weapons. Basically
Over 70% to 80% are still judged to be intact.
In addition, more than 9,000 of the 12,000 people followed and retreated into Zhuangzi. These were the soldiers who were neither killed nor injured in the morning's indiscriminate bombing. Their combat effectiveness remained
It is intact and still maintains a complete organizational structure and command system.
Huang Shuliang is very good at buying villagers to cause trouble for the Blue Army. Now he has requisitioned the entire Zhuangzi very neatly. He gave the order, and the soldiers took over the entire Zhuangzi without saying a word just like in a real war. The villagers were only allowed to enter.
Exactly.
The sniper climbed to the tallest tree in the village and used a sniper scope to observe the road in the distance to the east.
The officers frantically commanded Zhuangzi, pushing the artillery pieces and machine guns to the appropriate positions. Many houses directly tore down the doors and pulled the artillery pieces in. The muzzles of the guns pointed out insidiously from the small windows.
.
In the livestock shed, by the well, behind the wall stacks, in the windows of the second-story houses... there are machine guns, anti-tank guns, and "Molotov cocktails" everywhere. The Molotov cocktails here are water in glass bottles. They hit the tanks directly.
If you smash it and let water flow over it, you can determine that the tank is on fire.
Of course the villagers refused to do it, and the villagers in the Ming Dynasty were not as easy to bully as the villagers in the Beiqing Dynasty. At first, they clamored to prevent the soldiers from moving in the machine guns and pushing the cannons, and they almost started fighting in several places. But the military police shouted
With the slogan "military exercises, requisitioning villages, and compensation of ten mingyang for each family that cooperates," soon the whole village cooperated. Many villagers even enthusiastically pulled the soldiers and asked them to bring anti-tank guns and machine guns to their homes.
He went there and kept introducing how good the terrain of his home was and how it was hidden...
This Zhuangzi is relatively large, with an area of four to five square kilometers. To the north is a large pond and there is no road. But to the south it is close to the highway, and it is open to the east, west and south.
But with more than a hundred artillery pieces, nearly 200 machine guns, and 9,000 troops deployed inside, this palm-sized Zhuangzi was overcrowded and turned into an out-and-out dense killing array. The firepower density was so exaggerated that it could be called
Unprecedented.
Huang Shuliang was on the roof of the tallest three-story building in the center of the village, looking eastward with a gun scope. The view here is very good. He can see the Shanghai-Nanjing Highway at the entrance of the village a thousand meters away. He can also see thousands of people heading east and west of the highway.
meters away.
…
"Master seat," a staff officer said anxiously, looking at the planes circling overhead, "nearly ten thousand of us are huddled in a palm-sized village. Of course the enemy dare not attack rashly, but if they use planes to bomb them, heavy artillery will
If Todoroki happens, doesn’t that mean we’re lying on the chopping block?”
Huang Shuliang held the straw stick in his mouth again, leaned against the gun scope without looking back, and said with a sneer:
"Don't forget, we are now in a residential area, and hundreds of villagers are detained with us... Moreover, we are the Qing prisoners who invaded the Ming Dynasty, and the opponent is the Ming army who came to meet them. This Zhuangzi
The people here are all Ming people. It is impossible for their Ming army to ignore the lives of so many people and bomb them with aircraft and heavy artillery. This is a trick that the Qing captives often do. Now let’s do it too...
…This exercise is so real.”
"Then... Master, what if they didn't think so much and just bombed? This is a drill, no one will die, and they only want to win."
Huang Shuliang said "hmm":
"So, we have to bet that Rommel will follow the rules... Don't worry, they Germans don't know anything else but the rules."
At this time, a voice came from the radio headset beside me:
"Big dog, big dog, I am a frog...The fox has appeared, the fox has appeared, 1000 meters, 1000 meters..."
"coming!"
Huang Shuliang immediately turned the gun scope and aimed at the road to the east in the distance.
At the far end of the road, the outlines of several gray tanks appeared. Immediately afterwards, tanks also appeared in the fields on both sides of the road.
…
The first few planes above Zhuangzi were buzzing and circling, flying low from time to time, but they neither dropped bombs nor strafed.
When the Sixth Red Division was on the road, they were bombarded and strafed all the way. However, after they withdrew into the residential areas, the Blue Army's aircraft became very restrained. They only circled and observed and did not attack the villages.
In Huang Shuliang's opinion, this is a good sign, which shows that the Blue Army knows the rules. In other words, if they want to attack themselves, they must force their way into this "intensive killing array" with only infantry and light weapons.