A few days later, Falkenhausen drew up a detailed breakdown of the weapons purchase. According to this plan, the Nanjing government will purchase enough equipment from Germany to arm two divisions in the next six months; For the former, who has always been shy in his pocket, this is already an unprecedented large-scale spending. As for this military purchase order, which is completely based on the current situation of the Nanjing government's army, the bald head can't find any fault; Soon after, his brother-in-law, who was finance minister, sent an official letter to Berlin and signed a corresponding financial pact with the Germans.

"Why are there so few heavy weapons purchased by the Nanjing military?" Seeing the purchase list provided by Falkenhausen, ****** frowned and said with some dissatisfaction. There were more than 30,000 guns of all kinds in this list, but the number of guns was only a pitiful 32; Even among the few artillery pieces, the most powerful was the 75 mm short-barreled infantry gun. Due to the serious shortage of heavy weapons, it has directly led to a significant reduction in the total contract amount, and on the whole, this order is not even as huge as the equipment cost of a division of its own army!

"Is the level of industrial security really so poor in this country? I remember that nearly half a century ago, it was the existence of the Armstrong 120mm rapid-fire gun that could be relied on to produce its own imitations. ****** sighed and muttered with regret in his expression. According to the decree on the appropriation of the army expansion signed by him after he took office as the head of the four-year plan, a new 3,250-man standard infantry regiment alone will be equipped with six 75-mm infantry guns, two 150-mm infantry guns, and 12 37-mm anti-tank guns, and its support firepower is stronger than that of the 15,000-strong Nanjing Rectification Division. And if you rise to the same divisional size, the difference in firepower between the two sides is even more vast: at present, each German infantry division has a separate artillery regiment, and the regiment is armed with up to 36 105mm howitzers and 12 150mm howitzers.

Although the Nanjing government still seems to be a little bit of a fussy in arms purchases, because the other side uses ores and agricultural products as payment, the ****** who urgently need these raw materials also feel unsatisfactory. After some consideration, ****** was suddenly surprised to find out. The thorny dilemma of the shortage of inorganic raw materials that I faced before has been fundamentally changed. If we continue to import ore from the Soviet Union and Sweden in the future, and at the same time add this large amount of imports from the Far East, then Germany can complete the task of strategic reserve of critical metal minerals on the premise of meeting its own needs for arms expansion!

As the promoter behind this cooperation, Fang Yan also quickly learned about the development status of the matter from ******. He was encouraged to see the increasing military trade between the Nanking government and Germany, and the ideal complementarity of weapons and raw materials, based on complete equality, was rare even in the entire history of the world. With the conclusion of this cooperation, Fang Yan also noticed the current equipment shortcomings in the German Army; Considering the dual factors at the military and political levels, we need to make corrections and improvements to this.

First of all. The 50-mm mortars currently armed with the Wehrmacht can be thrown into the trash. This weapon, developed by the famous Rheinmetall in 1936, is not at all sorry for its development time and birthplace: compared with similar foreign products, it is not only complex in structure and heavy in weight, but also in terms of range and power. For these reasons, Germany itself stopped producing this weapon since 1941 and switched to grenadiers and weapons of the same caliber captured from the Soviets. For a country with a well-developed basic industry, this has to be said to be an extremely humiliating performance.

This is not the case with the German 50 mm caliber mortars, and the performance of larger caliber products can be imagined. In the historical plane. The existing mortars of the German army proved to be second- and third-rate goods that were far behind their opponents in terms of performance after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war; If it were not for the absolute superiority of the Red Army, which had suffered the catastrophe of the Great Purge, in the fields of personnel quality and coordination with the arms, the number of losses of the German army would have increased significantly. However, the interesting thing is. After the Germans captured the Soviet 82-mm and 120-mm mortars, the imitations were very popular with the front-line officers and soldiers - a testament to the lack of creativity of German designers. Considering the brutal intervention of the Socialist Party in the fields of culture, education, and even science and technology since coming to power, which has led to the imprisonment or exile of large numbers of dissidents; Fang Yan has every reason to think. This lack of creativity in the field of design is precisely the bitter situation created by the National Socialist Party itself.

In addition to mortars, the Army's individual weapons also needed a revolutionary replacement. Today. The distance of infantry engagement has changed from long-range trench warfare to medium-range conflict; Traditional high-power rifles were seriously overpowered, and weapons with moderate effective range and faster rate of fire became the mainstream of adaptation to the battlefield. It was not until 1944, when the edifice was about to collapse, that the STG44 assault rifle appeared in the German army, and at this time it was powerless to change the general trend of Germany's defeat.

Considering that rifles and mortars are the most basic weapons of land combat, covering at least seventy percent of the soldiers, and directly related to their life and destiny, Fang Yan decided to start implementing improvements in these two areas. Although he personally knew nothing about the design of this individual weapon, there were currently high-performance stock copycats: the Japanese Type 89 grenadier had been installed in the army since 1931, and this equipment with a total weight of only 2.6 kg and capable of firing a 50 mm grenade at a distance of 700 meters was clearly an ideal replacement for the German-made 50 mm mortar, which had a total weight of 14 kg and a range of only 520 meters. Although the weapon had no sighting equipment, its sheer superiority in its lightness and cheapness more than outweighed it; Not to mention that with adequate training, experienced veterans can hit more than 95% with grenadiers.

On the large and medium-caliber mortars, Fang Yan was also ready to buy a batch of Soviet goods, and then ordered his own arsenal to copy them. Since the Soviet Union, which pursued a planned economy, had no concept of intellectual property rights at all, the cost of extracting technology from this country was undoubtedly the lowest. As for the automatic rifle, the appearance of this weapon is also only a matter of piercing a layer of window paper with medium-power bullets; Fang Yan only needs to come up with this idea, and those professional gunsmiths will make everything after that fall into place.

On January 17, a self-propelled assault gun, converted from the chassis of a Bobcat tank, also completed cross-country and artillery tests at the army training ground near Berlin. Army generals, including Guderian, were impressed by this strange combat vehicle without a turret: in its lightweight size of only 15 tons, it contained a 105 mm L28 howitzer in a fully enclosed form, and its armor at a 60-degree angle at the front was further strengthened to 40 mm, and the defense against incoming shells was greatly improved. Although the vehicle was loaded with only 28 shells and its thrust-to-weight ratio was only more than 10 hp/ton, there was no one among all the army generals present who did not understand the great significance of this offensive and defensive self-supporting weapon.

For Guderian, his armored blitzkrieg was a crucial addition. The advent of this self-propelled weapon made it possible for fast-moving armoured divisions to receive real-time support from medium-caliber artillery - if the assault gun in front of you were to be weakened and converted into a semi-open self-propelled gun with a fighting compartment, it would be able to keep up with the pace of tank advance. At that time, the armored forces' ability to attack fortifications will also reach a new level, and many fortified strongholds that originally needed to be bypassed can now be directly cleared!

In the eyes of other infantry generals, the assault gun in front of them is even more of a blessing for them. Designed to support infantry, the weapon's strong frontal armor allows it to reach the fortifications of pillboxes that would make them vulnerable to inflicted precision strikes at close range. In addition, this vehicle is also a great boost to the infantry's anti-tank capabilities: in defensive battles, it can take on incoming enemy tanks head-on with its heavy front armor. Compared to an infantry-operated anti-tank gun without any protection, this low-profile assault gun is undoubtedly safer and more efficient.

This time, without Fang Yan taking action, ****** had already allocated a large amount of procurement funds to the noisy army. The main purchase for the armored forces was the sacrifice of protection in exchange for speed of two self-propelled guns: the main armament of the Wasp remained unchanged, while the Cricket was armed with a 150 mm L12 heavy infantry gun. Although the infantry has always been the poorest of the professional services, thanks to the low price of this type of assault gun, named "Stalker", which is only 35,000 marks per unit, they have also been able to secure a budget of 150 units this year. According to the plans of the General Staff of the Army, each infantry division should have at least one assault battery directly supported.

"This firepower should be enough for the army to meet the needs of the war, right?" After learning that the assault cannon and related transformation vehicles appeared, Fang Yan couldn't help but think in his heart with joy. With these cheap and efficient weapons, even if the HNA diverted a large amount of air support that originally belonged to the army, the German army would be able to win all the key land wars on its own. (To be continued.) )