Chapter 632: New Troops

The primary factor limiting the battle is the months‑long rainy season on the Jianghan Plain.

In the heart of Central China, spring and summer bring continuous rain, causing rivers to swell, roads to become muddy, and fields to flood, turning the entire Jianghan Plain into a vast marshland.

Under successive downpours, earthen roads collapse completely, highways become slick and muddy, vehicle movement is difficult, and heavy equipment can barely advance.

Moreover, the humid rainy‑season air makes firearms prone to moisture‑induced jamming, artillery breeches easy to fail, and battlefield mud greatly hinders infantry mobility, fortification construction, and logistical transport.

If a large‑scale assault on fortified positions were forced during the rainy season, the 200,000‑strong army would easily become mired.

Not only would assault efficiency be severely reduced, it would also cause Nonary-combat Casualties, wasting combat power.

Thus the spring‑summer rainy season completely eliminated the possibility of launching a counteroffensive.

Aside from climatic constraints, the preparation and equipment transport of the 200,000‑strong counteroffensive force is the core difficulty that delays the start of hostilities.

The two main war‑zone forces gathered for this Wuhan Counteroffensive total 200,000 troops.

Massive in scale and complex in system, the full suite of American equipment replacement covers small arms, field artillery, heavy howitzers, vehicle‑borne logistics, and a huge array of armaments.

In fact, the actual forces involved far exceed this number; the Quinary War Zone must guard against Japanese Army in North China, while the th War Zone must guard against Japanese forces in the Guangzhou area.

Various coordinated troops and transport units bring the total participating force to over 600,000.

The true main force is the twelve newly formed American Equipment Divisions.

Such a massive volume of materiel cannot be satisfied by conventional transport aircraft alone, especially the 155 mm heavy howitzers.

As the core killing weapon for the assault on Wuhan's city defenses, its large size, precise structure, and numerous components make transport extremely difficult.

To ensure transport safety and avoid damage to the heavy artillery.

All 155 mm heavy guns are professionally disassembled and split; barrel, carriage, base, recoil system, and ammunition components are each taken apart.

They are transferred in batches, along different routes and time slots, greatly extending the equipment deployment cycle.

Each component requires individual packaging, dedicated escort, and precise registration.

After reaching the front, they must be reassembled, debugged, calibrated, and live‑fired; the whole process is cumbersome, complex, and very time‑consuming, far beyond short‑term completion.

To ensure this batch of top‑grade heavy firepower reaches Hubei safely, Jiang Anguo specially planned a top‑secret land transport corridor.

The entire route starts from Lashu of Nanko, using C‑47 transport aircraft, first arriving at Kunming for fuel resupply.

After completing fuel resupply, material inspection, and batch sorting in Kunming, it departs eastward, flying over mountains and rivers, finally reaching the two major front assembly points Changde and Dangyang.

Changde serves as the core loading/unloading, preparation, and calibration hub; all heavy‑gun components and main armaments land here, handled by Nanko's professional technical officers and soldiers together with war‑zone engineers.

They complete assembly, ballistic calibration, and firepower adjustment, ensuring each heavy gun can fire upon arrival with zero malfunction and zero error.

Beyond the cumbersome equipment transfer, force reorganization, command integration, and tactical formation also require long time.

These 200,000 troops are not the original old units fighting directly, but a completely reshuffled, re‑equipped, restructured new force.

Four main armies, twelve infantry divisions, one heavy artillery division, plus the elite of Xu Guozhang's 150th Division.

The mix of service types is complex, with new and old personnel intermingled.

Adding Nanko's elite instructors for on‑site training, the dissemination of brand‑new urban combat tactics, and the polishing of Multi‑Branch Coordinated Tactics all demand ample time for integration.

When the two war zones merge, the command system must be re‑unified; Li Zongren and Xue Yue must coordinate orders, standardize organization, smooth cooperation, and resolve cross‑zone dispatch, force allocation, and logistics distribution issues.

Old Xu's 150th Division is somewhat more pliable; indeed Xu Guozhang even asked Jiang Anguo to hand command of the 150th Division over to Nanko's instructors.

But Jiang Anguo rejected it outright.

After all, Xu Guozhang's organization belongs to the National Government; if Jiang Anguo were to openly command the 150th Division, what kind of talk would that be.

Not to mention Xue Yue wouldn't agree; even reporting to the Principal could result in scolding Jiang Anguo.

However, from here, Jiang Anguo lets the dispatched instructors serve in Xu Guozhang's 150th Division as deputies, mainly for planning, not direct command.

From individual weapon drills and Squad tactics coordination to corps‑level fire coordination and heavy‑artillery position linkage, daily intensive training is needed to eliminate wartime mismatches, chaotic dispatch, and uneven combat power.

All these factors stacked, causing this Wuhan Counteroffensive, which should have started earlier, to be continually postponed.

Until September, the Jianghan Plain rainy season finally ends, roads dry, weather suitable, and the 200,000 troops finish full training.

All American equipment and heavy artillery are in place, and the command system is fully integrated and mature.

Favorable timing, terrain, and morale are all present.

Jiang Anguo and the senior leaders of the two war zones firmly believed the time had arrived, finally setting September 1943, officially sounding the main attack horn for the Wuhan Counteroffensive.

During the year of hibernation while the Quinary and th War Zones completed American equipment replacement and force restructuring, it was not only equipment updates; more crucially, tactics, methods, and combat thinking underwent complete iteration.

To prevent the two war zones from having fine equipment but no suitable tactics, or new weapons without know‑how, Jiang Anguo specifically transferred a large number of Nanko battle‑hardened veterans north into Hubei, stationed at the Changde and Dangyang training bases.

Speaking of it, they are all veterans; many soldiers also took part in the earlier Battle of Yichang and the Jianghan Campaign.

They hand‑train the Nationalist Army counteroffensive troops throughout, thoroughly reshaping this Central China main force that will spearhead the attack on Wuhan.

Among them, a special training team composed mainly of veteran core members of the original 201st Division and combat veterans under Yao Quanyi becomes the core of the whole training, tasked with the toughest, most brutal, most combat‑realistic urban assault training.

It also includes old Xu's 150th Division; Xu Guozhang and Jiang Anguo have forged a battlefield camaraderie, brief though it may be, but solid.

In the Battle of Yichang, Xu Guozhang's 150th Division literally entrusted their lives to Jiang Anguo.

Of course, Hu Lian's 11th Division is also among the units undergoing this re‑equipping and training.

The Japanese Army has occupied Wuhan for years; city defenses are dense, street bunkers numerous, urban terrain complex; recapturing Wuhan cannot rely on field battles alone.

The decisive factor is urban street fighting, point‑clearing, and block assaults.

To this end, Yao Quanyi, based on Nanyang's city‑capture experience, replicates Wuhan's street layout at the training base, constructing numerous mock blocks, hidden bunkers, broken walls, and street fortifications.

They conduct high‑intensity simulated training for urban assaults, completely discarding the Nationalist Army's traditionally rigid charge tactics.