Chapter 409: Republic of China: Starting from the First Class of Whampoa Chapter 419: Artillery Group Violating the Drill Regulations

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Protagonist:

Lv Muzhi

"Request support from the division headquarters immediately!"

Outside Hanyang Town, the soldiers of the Paratrooper First Battalion had already exchanged fire with the Japanese garrison.

"First Company, hold the front and charge! Second and Third Companies, encircle from both sides and take Hanyang Town at the fastest speed!"

Lv Ziqing roared, and the Tomson submachine gun in his hand was the first to let out a roar.

Immediately afterward, intermittent gunfire erupted around the outskirts of Hanyang Town.

Amid the interweaving of various automatic and semi-automatic fire, the Japanese soldiers' slow Type 38 rifles could barely cope, with no room to fight back.

The occasional clicking sound of Garand rifles echoed intermittently among the paratroopers' ranks.

That was the unique, crisp, and pleasant sound of an M1 Garand rifle after emptying its magazine.

"Damn it, hold the few machine gun bunkers on the outskirts of the town! Hold on until reinforcements arrive!"

The Japanese had a machine gun bunker at the north entrance of the town, left behind by previous Xia Guo troops, with its opening facing north.

Inside, a Type 92 heavy machine gun was spitting tongues of fire, temporarily blocking the Airborne Regiment's advance.

"Bazookas, ready!"

"Smash this turtle shell for me!"

A Youth Army platoon leader shouted.

Then two paratroopers brought over bazookas and rocket shells.

The bazooka was dark green all over, like a thick water pipe, with a caliber of 60 millimeters, fired from the shoulder.

A paratrooper corporal knelt on one knee, aiming calmly.

Whoosh—

A rocket shell trailed a long tail flame and struck the Japanese machine gun bunker precisely.

With a deafening bang, the originally arrogant bunker instantly became ruins, its top cover blown open.

The Japanese machine gunners inside, along with the machine gun itself, were blown into pieces.

"Charge! Send them back to their hometowns!"

At Lv Ziqing's order, he led the men in the final charge.

The M1919A4 machine gun team lay prone, using powerful machine gun fire to cover the friendly charge.

Others charged ahead, with BAR automatic rifles and Tomson submachine guns sweeping wildly while moving.

The Japanese puppet troops defending Hanyang Town numbered over three hundred.

The ratio of Japanese to puppet troops was nearly one to one.

Among them, there were over 180 Japanese troops and about 150 puppet troops.

In less than half an hour, attacked by over six hundred paratroopers, this enemy force encountered the most powerful individual firepower they had ever faced in their lives.

One assault drove the devils out of Hanyang Town.

The remaining devils retreated toward Fenglingdu, while that squadron of puppet troops simply and neatly raised white flags.

When Lv Ziqing's paratroopers, clad in American gear and wearing paratrooper boots, walked into the town center, the civilians along both sides of the street were stunned.

The Xia Guo army in their memories was certainly not like this.

If not for the blue-and-white emblem on the side of the American steel helmets, the common people would never have associated this paratrooper unit with the Xia Guo army.

An old man plucked up the courage to step forward, looking at the colonel's rank insignia on Lv Ziqing's shoulder, and asked stammeringly:

"Commander... where did you cross the Yellow River from? I didn't see any boats on the opposite bank."

Lv Ziqing pointed to his head and laughed heartily.

"Sir, we don't take boats; we come from the sky!"

The townspeople hadn't seen any troops other than the Japanese and puppet forces for a long time, and they chattered:

"How long will you stay this time?"

"This area is full of devils; hurry up to Zhongtiao Mountain, it's very rugged there, the devils can't catch you."

Lv Ziqing signaled everyone to be quiet:

"A big battle will start soon; don't run around if you have nothing to do."

"Hurry home and find a cellar to hide in!"

"Those without cellars at home, leave here quickly; going up the mountain is fine too; come back after the battle is over."

"This time we came and won't leave unless this entire unit dies here!"

The roar in the sky approached again from far to near, and the second batch of aircraft arrived precisely over Hanyang Town.

Again, thirty silver DC3 transport aircraft tore through the clouds, scattering over six hundred pure white parachute flowers over the Shanxi land.

This time, the paratroopers did not land in the wild but directly into the town's core area.

Some paratroopers landed directly on the tiles of residential houses,

some landed on the street.

And some paratroopers... had their parachutes caught in the old locust trees of ordinary people's homes, unable to move for a moment, and could only sway back and forth, asking comrades and townspeople to come rescue them.

The villagers brought ladders, took sickles for reaping wheat, and scrambled to rescue the Youth Army paratroopers hanging from trees and rooftops.

After landing, these paratroopers packed up their parachutes and began to find their units.

Lv Ziqing stood in the town center, watching the second batch of paratroopers continually gathering around him, his confidence greatly increased.

With the Second Echelon joining, the forces under his command had already broken through the one-thousand mark.

Except for the few paratroopers sacrificed in previous battles, he still had over thirteen hundred elite paratroopers at his disposal.

Lv Ziqing had no time to rest, bringing several staff officers and company commanders to begin arranging the defenses of Hanyang Town without stopping.

The large number of defensive works built by the Japanese Army in Hanyang Town were originally intended to serve as the second line of defense blocking the Xia State Army's advance into Shanxi after Feng Ling Du was breached.

The reinforced machine gun bunkers, deep anti-tank ditches, and more than twenty artillery pieces were all meant to defend against the Xia State Army advancing northward from the Feng Ling Du direction.

This also meant that almost all bunker embrasures and cannon muzzles were pointed dead south.

This was also one of the reasons Lv Ziqing's paratroopers could quickly take Hanyang Town.

And since Lv Ziqing led his troops to parachute down from the northern front, these south-facing works were difficult to put to use.

Right now Hanyang Town had been seized by the paratrooper troops.

If the remnants of the Japanese Army's 225th Regiment came back in defeat from Feng Ling Du, they would find that the defensive line they themselves had built was now blocking their own retreat.

However, this made the northern defenses weak, and Japanese reinforcements would come from the north.

"Turn the heavy machine guns left by the devils around! Most of the remaining artillery, emplace them all north of Zhen Zi!"

"These works and weapons left by the devils are now ours!"

"We have two tasks now!"

"First, cut off the retreat of the Japanese at Feng Ling Du to the south!"

"Second, block the Japanese reinforcements coming from the north!"

"Don't be afraid, we still have the third wave of airborne troops for support!"

"Remember, paratroopers are born to be surrounded!"

"No matter which side the devils come from, let them bleed under the guns of the Special Airborne Regiment!"

At this moment at Feng Ling Du, the Japanese Army's 37th Division, 225th Regiment was under tremendous pressure.

The offensive of the Shaanxi Army troops bursting out of the Zhongtiao Mountain area was wave after wave, coming and going again and again.

The Youth Army's artillery fire on the opposite bank carried out full firepower coverage on the Japanese positions.

155 howitzers, 132-millimeter rocket artillery, 105-millimeter howitzers, various seventy-five caliber mountain guns and infantry guns.

The Youth Army's First and Second Armies, totaling six divisions and eighteen regiments, deployed all their artillery.

The number of artillery pieces of seventy-five millimeter caliber and above in the entire army exceeded five hundred!

The density of the artillery array far exceeded the regulations in the drill manual!

More than five hundred artillery pieces roared at the same target at the same moment.

This was the first time in the history of the War of Resistance.

"Prepare to cross the river!"