Two kilometers east of the Blue Flag, East Golden State Bay.

On the Arthur fleet moored here, the gunners removed the muzzle baffles one after another, revealing rows of cannons. Although it is said to be a fleet, in fact, this fleet, which was only temporarily formed before the war, consisted of only three destroyers and a dozen gunboats. East Jinzhou Bay was the main force of the Later Jin's attack on the Jinzhou defensive line, and two destroyers and seven gunboats were deployed here to provide fire support for the defenders.

Commanding this fleet was Rear Admiral Zhang Weigang, whom I had known since I was an intern, a somewhat boring middle-aged man. At this time, Major Zhang was standing on the slipway of the destroyer, looking at the Houjin troops a kilometer away. There was no wartime tension in his heart, but a little idle and boring. On the long wall of the defensive line in the distance, the army units were already firing in full swing, and he could only stay in the sunshine on the stationary ship.

At this distance, the Houjin soldiers, seen with the naked eye, are smaller than the ants under their feet. If they didn't move, Zhang Weigang really couldn't tell them apart from the sand. Between the Houjin troops in the distance and the beach a hundred meters away, more than a hundred mutilated corpses lay sparsely, as well as shattered shield carts and overturned cannons. This was a tentative attack launched by Houjin when the Lushun fleet was first deployed to East Jinzhou Bay. They didn't send a naval division - maybe this is also related to the fact that they didn't have a naval division in East Golden State Bay, but sent out some artillery at night, dragging artillery to bombard closely.

Then the fleet fired flares into the sky.

After that, it's half an hour of target shooting. The scattered Houjin gunners on the land were concentrated by their naval guns more than ten times or even dozens of times, and the flying solid shells poured onto their heads like rain in a storm. It took less than five minutes for the Houjin soldiers to lose the courage to shoot at each other, and they ran back as fast as they could. A company of Marines paddled ashore with a sampan, easily blew up the cannon that Jiannu had left on the shore, and then returned unhurriedly.

After that night, Houjin wisely chose to keep a kilometer away from the fleet. The fleet whose target is beyond the shooting range has completely become an existential fleet, and the daily job of the navy is to sit on the deck and fish and dive.

Well, sure enough, it's a first-class person in the Navy.

Defending this section of the defense line was the Qingzhou Regiment of the Dengzhou Army, and the regiment commander was Major Liu Pojun, the former chief of staff of Dengzhou Town. Liu Pojun's aid to southern Liaoning this time is actually a return to his hometown. He was originally a refugee from Liaodong who was taken in by Dongjiang Town, and after being transferred to Shandong, he joined the army and rose all the way to the position of chief of staff.

It was already about 10 o'clock in the morning, and Liu Pojun was staying on the command platform more than five meters above the defense line to observe Jiannu. In the morning, he received an analysis of the battle situation, and the defenders of Dongjiang Town stationed in Xiuyan abandoned the city, broke through with the support of the river fleet, and went south along the Wuchong River River to reach Kashima, and then withdrew to the headquarters of Dongjiang Town. Xiuyan has not been transformed into a fortress, and it is still a square ordinary city, the number of artillery is insufficient, and the defenders are also second-line troops, so it is normal to lose it.

The two red banners of Xiuyan, Jiannu, took advantage of the situation to move south, reinforced into Zhuanghe and Huanggudao forts, and patrolled the coast every day to prevent Shang Keyi (Note 1) stationed on Shicheng Island from coming up to fight guerrillas.

After solving the hidden dangers on the Eastern Front, Huang Taiji, who stayed in Fuzhou City, could devote all his energy to the Golden State Front. According to the latest intelligence, the scale of Houjin's mobilization this time was larger than previously expected, and the Eight Banners mobilized a total of nearly 20,000 people, of which the Armored Man and Yu Ding were divided in half. In addition to the Houjin Eight Banners, the newly formed Han army Wuzhen Chaoha also formed a formation to fight, with nearly 5,000 soldiers. Not counting these combatants, the number of people under the leadership of each department also exceeded 30,000, and about tens of thousands of people were responsible for transporting follow-up military rations and materials, with a total number of more than 80,000.

In the future, judging from Jin's national strength at that time, this time Huang Taiji was going to bet on the national fortune. Houjin invested more than half of the country's armed forces, and the transport troops stretched from Gaizhou to Fuzhou Daying, with endless convoys and horse teams day and night. After Houjin's transport troops passed through Xiongyueyi, they officially entered the guerrilla range of our army, and special forces and scouts were everywhere. Huang Taiji was determined and sent a large number of Bayala to kill our army. These hunters from the mountains and forests are very skilled, and they have the advantage of the main field, so they quickly drove our stragglers out of the avenue.

Today is the beginning of June, and it has been more than 10 days since the Houjin Brigade arrived in the Jinzhou area. In the early morning of this day, after the scout report came up, Jin had an offensive tendency, and Liu Pojun sounded the rallying cry and dressed himself neatly to prepare for the battle. According to the information obtained after the war, Huang Taiji went straight to the defense line where Liu Po's army was located after repairing for more than a week. He didn't hesitate, even if he didn't get any information about it.

At the very beginning, the war entered a white-hot stage. The first to enter the battle was the Zhenglan Banner, and the banner owner was Mang Gurtai. Mang Gurtai led the army to break through Lushun and kill Zhang Pan a few years ago, but he didn't expect to come back a few years later, but he faced the Ao-Song army.

Mang Gurtai, who once crossed the Isthmus of Golden State, must now feel very unfamiliar here. The original wilderness has almost disappeared, and all the stones and trees on the ground have been removed. On the plains north of the Jinzhou defense line, there are countless ditches criss-crossed, and the outermost part is a number of horse blocking ditches that twist and turn, only half a person high, and there is no soil around. Then there was a deep moat about one zhang wide, and the excavated earth was piled up behind it to form an earthen wall, which was one zhang high and had a zigzag shape, and there was a moat every hundred steps or so, which was much higher than the earthen wall.

There were many flags fluttering on the earthen wall, and there were rammed earth battlements above them, in which large and small artillery pieces were mounted. From time to time, there were figures flickering on the wall, but it was the heralds who were running quickly, conveying orders from their superiors to the junior officers.

Beyond the continuous earthen walls, the five-meter-high Jinzhou defense line reflected a faint brilliance in the sunlight, and it felt unreal from a distance. This long blue-gray wall connects the Korean Sea and the Bohai Sea, and there is no place that is not heavily guarded, and trying to find a weak point to break through is completely unrealistic fantasy.

It was past 11 o'clock in the afternoon, close to 12 o'clock. The land of southern Liaoning has become a sea of Houjin soldiers, and all kinds of flags and armor are spread all over the land. There was a burst of thunder in front of the Houjin Front, flashing red cannon flames, and about twenty Hongyi cannons of various calibers continued to roar, hitting six to twelve pounds of iron bullets at the Jinzhou earthen wall one and a half miles away. Iron bullets whizzed and fell into front and back of the earthen wall, splashing patches of black dirt. The earthen wall was silent, and there was no return fire.

Liu Pojun faced a large number of Jiannu artillery, and the number of artillery equipped with a unit length front was not inferior to that of the Qingzhou regiment. Firing at this distance, Houjin had to fire at a large elevation angle, and the shells fell almost vertically, but they could pass over the earthen wall that blocked the soldiers in Dengzhou Town.

Naturally, an anti-artillery hole was built behind the earthen wall, and the soldiers who stayed behind the earthen wall could huddle in it to avoid the cannonballs falling from the sky. Of course, if you are not particularly unlucky, it is okay to sit behind the earthen wall and rest, and the probability of being stoned to death at this distance is really low. Most of the soldiers are still in the Golden State defense line at the moment, and they will wait until the Houjin attacks in a big way before entering the earthen wall defense.

The heavy artillery battalions of the IDF stationed here are also returning fire. They are equipped with large double-diameter cannons specially designed to bombard the city walls, and it is okay to make a cameo to hit people. After the artillerymen finished measuring the range, they adjusted the gun mount, and the muzzle of the black hole pointed at the sky to the north at an angle of more than 30 degrees. With a few loud bangs, the air waves from the muzzle of the cannon rolled up large clouds of mud and sand, forming a cloud of white smoke and yellow sand mixed in front of them.

The artillerymen behind the heavy artillery let go of their hands covering their ears and turned to look at the observers on the platform. They were behind the earthen wall and did not have direct visibility into the shelling effect, so they needed the assistance of specialized artillery observers. After the observer reported the landing point of the shell, the gunners then calculated the adjustment angle with reference to the artillery manual, corrected it and fired another round.

After several times, the observer gave a positive signal, and more than two dozen cannons opened fire at a combat rate of fire. The heavy artillery regiment is equipped with a 26 times the diameter of the "Hurricane" cannon produced in Australia, and the firing range is much longer than the Hongyi cannon of Houjin opposite. Their target was not to scatter the Jiannu artillery, but to shell directly at the infantry camp of the Jiannu. In the observer's binoculars, the crowded Houjin Brigade was hit by shells from time to time, and a winding bloody road appeared in the crowd in an instant.