Like the Tang Dynasty's division many battles, this time in the attack on Guangzhou, the first to fire was artillery!

In order to alleviate the casualties of the infantry by the Ming artillery during the subsequent siege, Li Xuan personally ordered the two artillery battalions in the siege force, namely the First Artillery Battalion and the Guards Artillery Battalion, to carry out intensive artillery bombardment of the artillery positions on the city of Guangzhou, and be sure to destroy these Ming artillery on the city.

However, the Ming army at the head of the city was not to be outdone, and also gave artillery to return fire, and the two sides launched a vigorous artillery battle more than 400 meters apart, and the rumbling sound was transmitted to the Pearl River.

But after the two sides fought back and forth for more than an hour, many Ming troops found that although they also fired back, the shells did not know where they went, and after fighting for a long time, there were not a few shells that fell on the artillery position of the puppet Tang thief army on the opposite side.

However, the artillery on the head of the city suffered heavy casualties, and even a twelve-pounder naval gun that had been purchased at a great price was destroyed.

What's going on?

The Ming army at the head of the city was puzzled, could it be that the cannon in their hands was not as good as the thief army opposite? It's impossible, this is a cannon purchased from those Francophone people, and the governor of Liangguang, Lord Wang Yue, even gave these artillery pieces an incomparably powerful name: Super Invincible General Cannon!

The fact is naturally not that the quality of the artillery of the Ming army is not good, but that the quality of the artillery of the Ming army is not good!

This is because the defenders of the Ming army in the city of Guangzhou did not have many professional artillery!

Although the Ming army widely used firearms, most of them were small cannons of tens of catties and hundreds of catties, mainly bowl cannons and small Franc machine guns. There is no need to pay much attention to the use of these artillery, just load the gunpowder and shells according to the regulations, and then ignite them.

But now it is a large-caliber cannon, and it is still a solid bullet, in order to shoot this kind of artillery accurately, but old artillerymen, especially the gun commander, need to carefully calculate the amount of gunpowder, adjust the angle, so as to be able to get a hit.

But the artillerymen in the Ming army were basically illiterate, so how could they calculate the trajectory?

They just pointed the muzzle of the gun roughly in one direction and then charged the gun, so it was strange that they could have a high hit rate.

And the Tang Dynasty is different, Li Xuan attaches great importance to artillery power, this artillery is specially trained, the artillery commanders in the artillery unit are all experienced in battle, and the officers in the artillery unit are also proficient in arithmetic and can carry out complex calculations of various ballistics.

The quality of the artillery on both sides is almost completely different from the same level, which also causes the results of the artillery bombardment on the two sides to be completely different.

However, even though he saw that his artillery unit completely suppressed the Ming army's city-head artillery, Li Xuan still frowned.

Because after these cannons appeared on the head of Guangzhou, he realized a situation!

That is, the Ming army has begun to pay attention to the power of firearms, this attention has made them begin to equip a large number of artillery and arquebuses, and these two weapons are actually no technical content, if the Ming Dynasty is determined, it is able to cast a large number of artillery and arquebuses, which means that in the follow-up war, the Ming army encountered by their own army will be equipped with more and more artillery, and it is not the previous bowl mouth cannon, Francophone cannon and other small cannons, but regular field artillery.

That's not a good situation!

But even if he is worried, there is no way, after all, he can't stop the Ming army from developing and applying artillery.

His Tang Dynasty divisions all used arquebuses and artillery in batches, and he couldn't expect the Ming Dynasty to foolishly continue to fight with himself with the handcuffs and bowl cannons in the Yongle period.

The enemy, too, will learn and improve himself in the war.

Now the only thing he expects is that the Ming Dynasty will be more slower to equip artillery and arquebuses.

But his wish is obviously about to fail, he doesn't know that Zhang Yue has already begun to cast guns in Huguang, and he is directly copying the muskets of the Tang Dynasty, as for the artillery, they don't need to imitate, just directly produce their original general cannons and Franc machine guns.

Even on the Jingshi side, those cabinet bigwigs saw the threat, and then began to make cannons and guns, and Emperor Zhengde had even issued an order for the Ministry of Industry to imitate and produce arquebuses as soon as possible, and then use them to equip the thief suppression troops and the Beijing camp.

And if Li Xuan knew how many muskets the Ming Dynasty was preparing to make, I am afraid that his jaw would drop in shock!

Because Emperor Zhengde asked the Ministry of Industry to produce arquebuses, the first batch was 10,000 guns, and it was to be completed within a year, and then allocated to the thief suppression troops in Huguang and the Beijing camp, this output would not be much lower than that of the Tang Dynasty.

The subsequent production of arquebuses in the Ming Dynasty will definitely be higher and higher, and after the variable of the pseudo-Tang thief army, the era of large-scale equipping of arquebuses in the Ming Dynasty has been advanced by several years.

In fact, after the Ming Dynasty came into contact with the West and Japanese arquebuses during this period, it would also carry out the research and development and imitation production of arquebuses, and finally came up with a bird gun, and the output was not small, the first batch of 10,000 bird guns was produced and equipped with the army within a year.

This is the strength of a big empire, although their efficiency is lower, but they can't resist their heritage, when the Tang Dynasty worked hard to collect craftsmen, but the income was only a few hundred or thousands of craftsmen, the Ming Dynasty could mobilize tens of thousands or even more than 100,000 related craftsmen for production at any time.

In this era of manual production, craftsmen are productivity, and the more craftsmen, the greater the productivity!

Li Xuan is too lazy to think about the future now, anyway, the most important thing now is to take Guangzhou!

The artillery battle between the two sides continued, and almost every moment there would be rumbling cannons, and as the artillery battle progressed, the Ming artillery on the city head gradually muted.

This does not mean that the heavy artillery of the army has been destroyed, in fact, these big guys who move thousands of pounds or even thousands of pounds are not so easy to destroy, but what is destroyed is the battery and artillery.

To erect the artillery, but it needs a turret or a gun carriage to fix it, and to make the gun successfully fire shells, it needs artillery.

When the fort was destroyed, these guns naturally became unusable, and the large number of artillery casualties made the Ming army begin to lack enough gunners to operate the artillery.

Even if the quality of the Ming army's gunners is not good, they can still reload and then fire, which is something that ordinary soldiers can't do.

At the same time that the artillery at the head of Guangzhou was gradually suppressed, the artillery units of the Tang Dynasty Division also suffered certain losses, but the quality of the artillery of the Ming army was too poor and the accuracy was not good, so it fought for two days, and the two artillery battalions of the Tang Dynasty were only destroyed two five-pound artillery, and more than 20 artillery members were killed and wounded.

Seeing that the artillery force at the head of the city had been successfully suppressed, Colonel Lei Wan, the deputy director of the Operations Department on the side, said to Li Xuan: "Your Majesty, is it time to take the next step?" ”

Li Xuan nodded slightly: "Let the engineer troops start to act, the musket troops and artillery must provide good fire cover!" ”

Lei Wan immediately nodded and said, "The minister obeys the order!" ”

With the order, the soldiers of the two engineer battalions began to move!

Their main task was to dig a traffic trench from the traffic trench about fifty meters away from the city wall of Guangzhou!

According to the battles of Liuzhou and Wuzhou, the generals of the Tang Dynasty have fully planned that when the battle is being attacked, the communication trenches can effectively cover the advance of their own army and avoid a large number of losses on the road.

With the use of the communication trenches, it is completely possible to go forward to a place about twenty or thirty meters away from the city wall and then launch an attack!

Therefore, in the early preparation stage, the sappers of the Tang Dynasty Division had already dug a large number of communication trenches, and the closer they were to the city wall, the stronger the counterattack firepower of the Ming army.

So this time, when they dug fifty meters away from the city wall, they all stopped their pace, because if they continued to advance, the Ming army's shotguns and even archers would be able to inflict intensive damage on them.

Without the cover of a large number of artillery forces, it was impossible to continue the excavation operation.

And now, with the cover of artillery and even musketeers, the engineering units and even ordinary soldiers began to brave the fire of the Ming army and began to dig back, trying to extend the communication trench near the city wall.

Facilitate the subsequent landfill of the moat.

In this process, although there were casualties among the engineers and ordinary troops, such casualties were still acceptable, and they were relatively smooth.

The next step is to fill in the moat and create a passage for the army to storm the walls!

However, at the stage of filling the moat, although there is the cover of the communication trench, but during the landfill operation, the soldiers will inevitably be exposed to the multiple firepower of the Ming army, in order to avoid a large number of casualties of the regular army, the troops responsible for filling the moat will be the garrison army.

At the same time, in order to appease these garrisons, Li Xuan personally ordered that all garrisons who participated in the landfill battle would receive double salaries this month, and the food this month would be compared to that of the regular army.

And also let the regular army units continue to provide them with fire cover!

To a certain extent, this also greatly improved the morale of the garrison, but the high morale was also unable to fill the large number of casualties in the moat stage.

On the first day of the moat filling operation, that is, on the third day of the Guangzhou Campaign, more than 300 people were killed and wounded by the garrisons of various units participating in the battle, which made the Tang Dynasty Division suffer large-scale casualties for the first time!

But even with a lot of casualties, the battle continued!

On the fourth day of the Battle of Guangzhou, when the Tang Dynasty Wang Division paid more than 200 casualties, it finally filled in several sections of the moat.

In this way, the infantry of the Tang Dynasty Division will be able to rush over directly and launch a battle to ascend the city!

On the fifth day of the Battle of Guangzhou, according to the predetermined plan, the Tang Dynasty Royal Division was about to launch a forcible landing battle, attacking the city in the most crisp and direct way!