The third day of September.

The Bohai Sea, which is an inland sea, is calm, and a huge fleet is cleaving the waves and heading towards its destination at high speed.

This is Xu Shiyang's attack fleet, including all naval ships and hundreds of transport ships belonging to shipping companies, in order to ensure capacity, Xu Shiyang even hired some of Li Feihu's ships, a total of 260 ships.

In this sortie, Xu Shiyang mobilized a total of five brigades from Dingyuan, Zhenyuan, Jingyuan, Jingyuan, and Laiyuan, which were newly transferred from Qi Province.

plus half of Xu Shiyang's guards, trapped troops.

The total field strength is 7,800 people, in addition to more than 5,000 sailors and sailors participating in the battle, several newly formed small special operations units, and more than 5,000 militia transferred from Qi Province and southern Liaoning.

The total number of troops is more than 18,000.

According to the intelligence and staff estimates of the previous fugitives, there are about 1,000 or so real Tartars and 2 to 3,000 aha near Gaizhou, the target of the attack.

The Qi army has an absolute superiority in strength, and most of the people left behind by the Tartars are half-dings who have not yet grown up or old men over 50 or even 60 years old, and even there are disabled people, and there are few troops with combat effectiveness.

On the fifth day of the ninth month, the vanguard of the Qi army quickly occupied the deserted Lianyun Island in small boats, and then the guards landed on the island and established the former enemy headquarters on this small island.

In the plan, this island will take on the work of a logistics base, a material transfer station and the like for the offensive of the Qi army, but the main attacking force will not land on the island, because it will be too troublesome, and they will go directly to the predetermined landing site near the mouth of the Qinghe River.

There, the first troops to land were specially selected elite traps, who came ashore in small boats in the dark of night to eliminate the possible coastal patrol forces of the Tartars, and to take control of a landing field to guide the follow-up troops.

However, the landing process was very smooth, and the Tartars did not have the coastal defense force that the staff had envisioned, they did have two beacons on the coast, but the defenses were very rudimentary, and there was only an aging Tartar, his family, and Aha stationed in them.

The vigilance of these people was very low, and it was not until the trapper touched the beacon and cut the neck of the tartar that his family and Aha realized that the situation was wrong, and after seeing the body of Allah, these slaves surrendered very happily, and the beacon tower naturally could not be lit.

Lu Zhishen, the trapping officer who led the team, ordered the first batch of prisoners of this operation to be sent to Lianyun Island, and he led the team to control a half-mile-long stretch of coastline, and then lit a bonfire to guide the follow-up fleet.

Not long after, the second batch of landing troops arrived, this time a newly formed engineering unit - after occupying southern Liaoning, in addition to filling the gap in the cavalry company, Xu Shiyang did not expand the formation of each brigade, nor did he form a new field brigade, but prepared for the establishment of many strange small units.

This so-called engineer is one of them, according to Lu Zhishen's opinion, the engineer seems to be an auxiliary team that opens the road in the mountains and builds bridges in the water, but Xu Shiyang seems to attach great importance to this unit that is still very small at present, and he is also very concerned about the equipment investment of these engineers.

The engineer battalion came with 200 people this time, and these guys used the Dafu boat in the team to transport a long series of flat deck boats like sampans, these boats have a relatively uniform type of connection and thick planks, and the side of the boat is quite a long slip on the opposite side, and then linked with special thick planks and thick hemp rope, quickly forming a floating trestle that extends into the sea!

This is the new toy brought by the engineer battalion: the bridge-building boat.

Multiple bridge-building boats of the same type were linked together, making it easy and quick to erect pontoon bridges for cavalry to pass through the sea or river, as in this case, it took the sappers just over an hour to erect a trestle.

This thing is a special equipment commissioned by Xu Shiyang and the General Staff of the Qi Army to learn the lessons of the Lushun landing operation, and it seems to be working well now.

This trestle bridge was mainly supplied to the cavalry infantry of the Jingyuan Brigade and the cavalry companies under the Field Brigade for landing, while the infantry units still relied on small boats for transfer landing.

Even so, more than 15,000 people had already landed in just over two hours.

In this day and age, this is definitely enough to be jaw-dropping in efficiency.

With the trestle, the cavalry units could land quickly with the infantry without being dragged behind, so after landing, Xu Shiyang had a reconnaissance unit that was relatively strong compared to the local Tartar defenders.

In order to prevent his strategic intentions from being exposed prematurely, Xu Shiyang scattered all the regular cavalry companies of each field brigade, so that the Gaizhou Tartars could not figure out the scale and target of the Qi army's landing.

Xu Shiyang was very satisfied with the efficiency of the cavalry company, and on the first day of landing, the regular cavalry company repelled 7 or 8 Tartar scouts in a row, killing 5 of the other side and capturing 3 of them at the cost of two deaths, and the Tartar sentry cavalry could not even touch within 5 miles of the landing site.

……

"Take a break! Attention! ”

Xu Shibai, who was the commander of the cavalry company of the Jingyuan battalion, shouted at his subordinates:

"Tell me!"

"The goal of our brigade is to sweep away all the Tartar villages and forts near Gaizhou separately as a company! Remember, don't let anyone you see it! ”

"Bring back all who are alive! Kill everyone who won't leave! Take everything you can to take away! Burn everything you can't take away! Plug all the wells! Not a person, not a grain of rice, not a house is allowed to be left for the tartars! ”

This is the main purpose of Xu Shiyang's Gaizhou attack - to destroy the production capacity near Gaizhou as much as possible, destroy the foundation of people's livelihood, and bleed the Jurchen economy!

"What's the problem, ask now!"

"Report!" An mounted infantryman raised his right hand in a manner similar to that of a schoolboy from another plane.

This is also one of the guidelines advocated by Xu Shiyang: before the war, junior officers should explain their tasks and goals to soldiers as clearly as possible, so that even if they lose their commander for a short time, soldiers will not fall into a state of not knowing what to do.

If a soldier has doubts about how to complete the task, he should also raise it before the battle, and everyone can make some fine-tuning in the details, but once the task is given, everyone must do their best to complete it without compromise.

"Speak!" Now that the mission has not started, Xu Shibai naturally has no right not to let the soldiers speak.

"I want to ask, what should I do if I encounter the Tartar brigade?"

Nowadays, the quality of soldiers is not high enough, and there are always some people who ask such stupid questions, but Xu Shiyang does not allow his officers to be impatient, and Xu Shibai can only answer patiently:

"What else can I do? If you meet him, him! ”

As he spoke, he took out a small firework like a monkey and said to the soldiers:

"It's a flare! If the enemy army exceeds the number we can handle, I will let it go and find reinforcements, so don't worry about encountering a large number of enemy troops, you can do your job! ”