After four rounds of bombardment, Li Zhi took out sixteen cannons on Osaka Castle. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

The next time is the time for the "free bombardment" of artillery. Osaka Castle, which is more than two miles in radius, will become a hell of flesh and blood.

One hundred and sixty eighteen-pounder guns moved forward, two miles west of Osaka Castle, and began to bombard the famous Japanese city in close proximity.

At a distance of two miles, the eighteen-pounder cannon could already fire directly.

"Boom! Rumble! ”

"Boom!"

The cannonballs shot like meteors at the walls of Osaka Castle, and everywhere they went, they went up in smoke.

The Japanese-style castle wall is a thin brick wall, only about 20 centimeters thick. Because of the scarcity of Japanese cannons, such walls were more than enough to defend arquebuses and could not be broken by manpower, so this kind of wall was very popular among Japanese castles. Walls are generally built on top of moats or walls, and the drop from the ground below is very large, making it difficult for besieging soldiers to climb.

Behind the walls there are usually wooden shelves on which people stand on the shelves and attack enemy soldiers who climb the walls with spears. The walls were usually filled with a large number of shooting holes, and the iron gunners fired at the besieging enemy behind the shooting holes.

Such walls are very effective against enemies with only iron cannons.

But such a wall, in front of an eighteen-pounder cannon, is a layer of tissue paper. One hundred and sixty cannonballs smashed into the western wall of Minomaru in Osaka Castle, and more than 100 large holes were smashed in an instant. The huge kinetic energy of the cannonballs hit the thin city walls, and they can often smash all the surrounding walls of one or two meters.

Behind every meter of the city wall stood an iron gunner, and the moment the cannonball smashed the city wall, the bricks and stones flew flying, often injuring the iron gunner behind the city wall.

The flowering bomb will explode when it hits the ground. The soldiers in the castle had already seen the exploding flowering shells at this time, and as soon as they saw the flowering bullets falling nearby, they fled and did not form a queue in the castle.

The sparks that exploded from the flowering bombs were like flowers of death, blooming one after another in Osaka Castle. Some sparks didn't kill the soldiers in the city, while others took three or four lives at once.

Eighteen-pounder guns have a lifespan, and after 200 rounds have to be recast, so each shell has a fixed cost. However, for Li Zhi, who uses the billet casting cannon method, the cost of recasting the cannon is relatively low. The depreciation cost of the cannon is very limited for each shell fired, and more gunpowder money and flowering shell money are consumed.

The cost of a bullet was about seven pieces of silver, which was a lot, but it was still far less than the lives of Japanese soldiers in Osaka Castle. Even if two flowering bombs killed a Japanese ashigaru, Li Zhi would not spend more than one or two or five dollars of silver. If he killed 10,000 ashigaru in Osaka Castle at such a cost, Li Zhi would only need a cost of 15,000 taels. With only this amount of silver, Li Zhi took millions of taels of silver in the city.

It's a bloody ledger.

Li Zhi's cannon stopped firing after ten rounds and began to cool the barrel.

Osaka Castle is already in a hellish situation on earth:

Beneath the broken walls were the dead and wounded soldiers, either injured by flying fragments of the walls or directly hit by cannonballs. As soon as the soldier is hit by a shell, the slightest contact between his body and the shell is the entire torso taken away. Ground meat was all over the floor, and the smell of blood was like a slaughterhouse. Blood flowed like a spring from the wounds of the wounded and wounded soldiers, and flowed everywhere on the western walls of Osaka Castle, which were more than 900 meters long.

Sticky blood flowed down the walls and into the moat beneath the walls, staining all the nearly kilometer-long moats west of the walls red. The moat, which was more than three miles long, looked like it was full of blood at this time.

The situation behind the walls was not good either. At least 500 or 600 people were killed by the explosion of the shell, and many more were wounded. The wounded man who had been pierced into the body by an iron projectile lay on the ground groaning and convulsing, but the soldier next to him had nothing to do with the wound.

The samurai house in the castle was set on fire by flowering shells, but no one had time to extinguish the fire, and the wooden buildings were blazing, adding to the chaos in the city.

There were also cannons in Osaka Castle, and the soldiers in the city also knew that this short pause was due to the need for the Ming army outside the city to cool the barrels. It won't be long before the cooled cannon will fire again.

Osaka Castle Daishi Abe Masaji made a decision - to continue to defend the castle to the death is to sit still, and he decided to lead the soldiers of Osaka Castle out of the castle.

Li Zhi rode on the horse of the Chinese army and saw the west gate of Sannomaru in Osaka Castle suddenly open, and thousands of Japanese ashigaru, especially 6,000 iron gunners, ran out of Osaka Castle in a long line. The ashigaru, under the command of a shouting samurai officer, formed a position to the west of Sannomaru.

The soldiers of the Tokugawa family moved quickly, apparently preparing to strike a crucial blow while the cannon cooled down. It took more than ten minutes, and after the 7,000 soldiers formed a little formation, they quickly pressed towards Li Zhi's tiger division.

The Japanese army in Osaka had 6,000 iron gunners, and these iron gunners hoped to shoot at Li Zhi's riflemen and defeat Li Zhi.

Artillery does need to be cooled, and if the barrel continues to fire in a high-heat condition, it will cause the propellant to ignite by the high-heat barrel. Even if the gunner lowers the hot barrel with a damp cotton cloth, it is necessary to wait for the barrel to cool down to a lower temperature before continuing to use it, otherwise the life of the barrel will be reduced.

However, the problem of barrel life has never been a problem on the battlefield at a critical time. No matter how precious a cannon is, it is not as precious as a few lives.

After more than ten minutes of cooling, the eighteen-pounder cannon was no longer in a red-hot state. Li Zhi gave the order, and the gunners did not hesitate to load the shotgun into the barrel and aimed it at the Japanese soldiers who rushed quickly.

At a distance of four hundred, three hundred, two hundred paces, the Japanese ashigaru armed with iron cannons rushed into the range of the shotguns.

"Boom!"

"Boom! Rumble! ”

One hundred and sixty shotguns came out of the eighteen-pounder gun, and the projectiles broke away from the butt of the shotgun under pressure, scattered and burst out, and pounced on the fan-shaped area in front of it. Tens of thousands of shotgun projectiles looked like a dense fog flying at high speed, shooting like a grim reaper towards the ignorant Japanese Ashigaru.

As soon as the dense fog touched the ashigaru in the front row, it immediately penetrated the ashigaru on the bodies of these Japanese soldiers, and penetrated through the front and back. In an instant, the blood mist burst out from the countless ashigaru bodies, spraying several meters high, dyeing the surrounding land and the other ashigaru around him all red.

The Japanese ashigaru, who had been shot, screamed and convulsed, and fell to the ground one after another, rolling and moaning on the ground. The soldiers in the front rows were like weeds cut down by a lawnmower, unable to get up again.