The movements of the British troops on the beachhead were reported to the joint headquarters of the 1st Mixed Brigade and the 3rd Garrison Brigade, and Liu Yongfu and the three of them, combined with the information reported by the Buenos Aires side, quickly analyzed the reasons for the British garrison on the beachhead.

"Brigade Commander Liu, Deputy Brigade Commander He, please take a look"

Shen Fushan, commander of the Third Garrison Brigade, pointed to the marching map on the table and analyzed: "The British expeditionary fleet is divided into two routes, one is mainly confronted by our army off the coast of the port of Buenos Aires, and the other fleet is going upriver along the mouth of the La Plata River, and there is a great tendency to advance to the inland area of the Paraná River. ”

"Advance along the river, destroy or occupy the area along the Paraná River, on the one hand, mobilize and exhaust the reserves of our army, on the other hand, indirectly support the local Argentine armed forces, and finally join the Brazilian army support forces to launch a fierce attack on our army.

The British have a lot of appetite. ”

Based on the intelligence of the British army, He Yanliang guessed the strategic intentions of the other party.

The British used this trick in the Opium War thirty or forty years ago, the warships occupied Zhenjiang, and the large army came to the city of Nanjing, forcing the Manchu government to negotiate peace with a swift and decisive march and accept the terms of peace talks that were favorable to the British army. Now, in the past few decades, the British have tried to repeat their old tricks, and it has been in vain to apply this trick to us. ”

Following He Yanliang's words, Shen Fushan added.

"Today's Wehrmacht is not a decadent and backward Manchu Green Battalion army, and even if the British use their superiority in naval military power to attack our army, they will not be able to bargain for anything."

Transferred from Annam to the Han mainland, and gradually promoted from battalion commander to commander of the main mixed brigade, Liu Yongfu had the most profound understanding of the difference between the national defense army and the Manchu army.

The Qing army's Green Battalion troops ate empty noises, drank soldiers' blood, smoked heavy cigarettes, and other kinds of chaos, and even Feng Zicai's troops in Guangxi, which had defeated the peasant rebel army several times, could not stop this kind of chaos.

On the other hand, in the national defense forces, the salaries of soldiers and officers and men are statistically verified by the General Staff Headquarters, and then distributed by the State Bank to the accounts opened by the soldiers in the banks.

At the same time, drawing on the experience of later generations, systematically cultivating professional officers and rationally optimizing the structure of the troops is another important measure to ensure that the combat effectiveness of the expanded national defense force will not seriously decline when a major war comes.

Before the outbreak of the Argentine War, the Wehrmacht had a total of hundreds of thousands of field troops, but after the outbreak of the war, the total number of troops expanded to more than 300,000, including the supplementary field army, garrison army, and militia troops, including 220,000 front-line troops and about 100,000 local left-behind troops.

Of the newly expanded nearly 200,000 troops, more than half of the grassroots officers were drawn from other units, and the other part were temporarily promoted to military cadets like Wang Shizhen, Lu Rongting, and others, as well as veterans with rich combat experience.

Following the German policy of officer corps after the end of World War I, a large number of officers were retained in peacetime to serve as deputy officers in the troops, so that when war broke out, according to the organizational structure of the shelf troops, a unit was quickly divided into two basic units, and then recruited recruits were supplemented to form new combat units.

The combat effectiveness of the newly expanded troops has declined to a certain extent in the initial stage of integration, but in the mode of grassroots officers and backbone noncommissioned officers leading the new with veterans, they can help the recruits adapt to the battlefield environment in the shortest possible time and complete the transformation of recruits into qualified wars.

The main force of the First Mixed Brigade was divided into three and split into other battlefields, and there were only more than 1,000 soldiers in the First Mixed Brigade under the direct command of Liu Yongfu, while about half of the more than 6,000 soldiers in the Third Garrison Brigade were recruits.

The strength of the First Mixed Brigade and the Third Garrison Brigade, engineers, artillery, logistics, and other units combined, Liu Yongfu barely had more than 10,000 troops under his command.

Adhering to the military traditions of the Taiping Army and later major powers, the Wehrmacht also had a formed Boy Scout unit.

However, unlike the Boy Scouts of the Taiping Army, the Boy Scout Camp only recruited war orphans, orphans recruited from the mainland, and some children of civilian families who had a strong desire to join the army.

After several years of expansion, the number of young soldiers between the ages of 12 and 15 exceeded 10,000, and the number remained at about 15,000, and the number of young soldiers under the age of 12 was 40,000, and the trend was increasing year by year.

The boy camp is a supplement and improvement of the army middle school education, at least two-thirds of the young cadets who enter the army middle school every year come from the boy boy camp camp, therefore, many civilian families regard joining the boy boy camp as a shortcut to become officers, and have sent boys to the boy boy camp to study.

Among the generals of the later period of the Taiping Army, such as King Chen Yucheng, King Mu Tan Shaoguang, Protector King Chen Kunshu, King Harmonic Tan Tiyuan, and Li Mingyuan's biological father, Li Shixian, were all born in the boy boy battalion.

The young soldiers of the Taiping Army, who were simple in faith and brave in battle, rushed to the front line of the war, but they often became the victims of the victory of the Taiping Army's top brass.

In the battle of Wuhan, Chen Yucheng's boy battalion acted as a death squad, with heavy casualties, and in the defensive battle of Jiading, more than 100 boy battalion soldiers retreated to cover the main force of the Taiping army, and all of them died.

The high-level corruption and the retreat of the army were one after another, and the soldiers of the boy boy battalion at the bottom sacrificed for the sake of illusory bloodshed, and in the end all they got was betrayal and abandonment by the top of the Taiping Army.

The cruelty and ruthlessness of those in power were naked in the war, and Li Mingyuan, who regarded himself as a South American Chinese leader whose ideals had never been destroyed, could not take advantage of the worship of the boys in the boy boy camp and consume them in the tragic war in advance.

Not only was Liu Yongfu's request rejected, but also the requests of the generals who were from the remnants of the Taiping Army and asked to recruit teenagers to form death squads to attack the city under the old practice of the Taiping Army.

The harsh wording was reprimanded by Li Mingyuan, and the little pride that had just risen in Liu Yongfu's heart was immediately extinguished, and he and his deputy He Yanliang, who were familiar with him in the past, formed an organizational team, and Liu Yongfu was a little more cautious and cautious when formulating the battle plan.

"There is His Royal Highness personally in Buenos Aires, and it is difficult for the British army to break through there, and the new capital is connected to the open sea by the Patus Lagoon, and the large British warships cannot get close to the port area, and the threat to the new capital is limited, but if the British warships do not entangle with our army, only one army unit will be left to occupy the beachhead and arrange fortifications to contain our army's actions, and their naval frigates and gunboats will give up entanglement with our army and attack Rosario, Paraná City, and Santa Fe City all the way against the current, will not that disrupt the operational deployment of our army?"

After Liu Yongfu calmed down for a few minutes, he raised his worries.

"It's not out of the question."

He Yanliang frowned, propped one arm on the table, and pondered.

"Ladies and gentlemen, telegram from the front headquarters!"

When the three of them were bowing their heads and thinking about countermeasures, the officer on duty in the telegraph room hurriedly walked into the war room and took out a telegram and handed it to Liu Yongfu.

"Well, well, more than 14,000 mines have been deployed in the Santa Fe and Paraná river valleys, and the mine-laying warships of the river fleet are laying mines in the waters around Rosario, and the front headquarters has ordered our army to launch an attack on the British landing force tonight, delay the British fleet's breakthrough to the inland river basin, and buy as much time as possible for the river fleet to lay water-resistant mines."

Liu Yongfu said three good words in a row, and handed the telegram in his hand to He Yanliang and Shen Fushan respectively: "Five days ago, the river fleet also transported a batch of weapons for the first mixed brigade, I thought that they had just finished the inland river escort and transportation mission, but I did not expect the navy to move very fast, hundreds of kilometers of water in the Santa Fe and Paraná river sections have been laid mines, and mines are also being laid in the waters around Rosario. ”

"Yes, the waters of the mouth of the Le Plata River are wide, and it is difficult and ineffective to lay mines, so we simply do not lay mines in an area of 300 kilometers on the banks of the Le Plata River, paralyzing the commanders of the British fleet, making them think that our army acted in a hurry and did not have time to lay mines on the Paraná River, so as to encourage them to sail boldly to Rosario, and by the way, taste the power of the mines of the Han country."

Shen Fushan put down the telegram and said with a smile on his face.

Mines, grenades, machine guns, and mines are relatively low in technology, and Li Mingyuan, who was born as a mercenary, knew a lot about these weapons that he often came into contact with in his previous life; when fighting in the field, he used existing weapons or equipment to lay tricky mines, and to discover and circumvent the mines laid in places are all professional skills that must be possessed; therefore, in some specific military industrial fields, with Li Mingyuan's intervention and command, the armed equipment of the national defense forces is much higher than that of Western officers in the same period.

Pressure-haired, triggered, floating, electrolyte-based, and other mines for different purposes were constantly invented, and then experimentally improved and mass-produced, and finally stockpiled until the day when they were needed.

Liu Yongfu did not understand the construction principle of mines, but he could intuitively feel the power of mine attacks after watching the simulated mine attack tactics of naval exercises.

The general strategic policy has been properly formulated by the general headquarters of the front, and what Liu Yongfu and others have to do is to complete specific tactical arrangements in accordance with the orders of the general headquarters.

"Convey the order of the front-line headquarters of officers at and above the battalion level, all regiments and battalion units should be ready for battle before 12 o'clock, and launch a surprise attack operation on time at 12:40 at midnight!"

"Yes!" ……

.。 m.