After the "private label business" was exposed, the international impression of the Japanese people plummeted.

Many Europeans and Americans began to pay attention to the war in the Far East, and most of them had a sympathetic attitude towards China's anti-Japanese war, especially many newspapers and magazines in the United States, which mercilessly criticized that "Japan is a belligerent demon and a typical example of the failure of the evolution of modern civilized society."

Only Germany and Italy are somewhat ambiguous.

They are often mentioned in some important newspapers, "In the distant Far East, there is a new hegemon, on the rise."

On September 10, 1937, the day after the end of Japan's "5-day cabinet meeting", hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, under the command of the wartime cabinet, launched an all-out offensive from South China to North China.

At 6 a.m. on the same day, nearly 100 warplanes took off from Taiwan to bomb the urban area of Guangzhou and its nearby ports, plunging the entire urban area of Guangzhou into a sea of fire.

General Yu Hanmou led the 12th Army to resist.

At the same time, the 29th Flying Group and other Guangzhou air force units dispatched more than 70 fighters to engage in a desperate struggle with the invading Japanese planes, shooting down and damaging 31 enemy planes that day, and shooting down a total of 67 Japanese planes in the following six months, inflicting a devastating blow on the enemy's Kaohsiung Air Force.

The reason why the Japanese army sent valuable fighters and attacked Guangzhou without any tactical significance was because since the July 7 Incident, the coastal ports in North China and Central China had been severely blockaded by the Japanese fleet, and China could no longer transport any strategic materials, and only the port of Guangzhou was different, because it was close to Hong Kong and Macao, and many ships could continue to transport goods under the banner of Britain and the United States.

The Japanese army did not want to offend Britain and the United States.

However, since the Songhu area suffered repeated setbacks, the psychology of the Japanese army has been a little perverted, especially in September, after Japan officially transferred to the wartime economy, its people's livelihood and economy plummeted, and the psychological distortion believes that the reason why the Japanese army has been defeated again and again is because of the British and American Western powers, secretly supporting the Chinese army.

Therefore, the Japanese army's bombing of the urban area and port of Guangzhou was intended to intimidate the ordinary citizens of Guangzhou and no longer transport all kinds of strategic materials for the Chinese army.

Of course, the Japanese army also had an indirect attempt to intimidate Britain and the United States.

However, the Japanese army's move was more to warn Hong Kong, Macao, and other Western concessions that they must no longer show any more tricks to support the Chinese War of Resistance, otherwise it cannot be ruled out that there will be a series of incidents of "accidental bombing" in the future.

Although the heroic counterattack of the Guangzhou Air Force dealt a heavy blow to the aggression of the Japanese devils, on the day of the bombing, more than 1,300 innocent people were brutally poisoned, dozens of merchant ships were burned, and countless losses of life and property were lost.

The Japanese air raid on Guangzhou was the second major loss of life and property in just seven or eight days since the Typhoon Ding Chou (also known as the September 2 Typhoon Disaster) occurred in Hong Kong on 2 September.

The bombing aroused the righteous indignation of people all over the world, who believed that it was a violation of humanitarianism by Japanese devils.

In order to guard against such incidents, the Nanjing Military Commission had no choice but to order some air force units in Kunming and Guilin to be stationed along the coast of Guangdong to assist the local air force in Guangzhou in defending Guangdong.

On September 11, 1937, the Japanese troops in North China divided into two routes and attacked our army's positions on a large scale.

The main force of the Japanese army advanced to the vicinity of Wei County, Hebei, one attacked the Laiyuan area, and the other advanced to Lingqiu, Shanxi, and the 17th Army and the 73rd Division of Huaxia fought fiercely with the Japanese army, and then gradually withdrew westward to the line of Pingxingguan.

The strategic purpose of the Japanese army was Taiyuan, Shanxi.

Yan Xishan, the commander of the Second Theater of Operations in Huaxia, was furious and prepared to concentrate the elite of the Jin Sui army and fight a decisive battle with the Japanese army in the area of Xinkou and Hepingxingguan.

On the other hand, the Japanese army, with the 10th Division as the main force and under the leadership of the division commander Ryosuke Isoya, attacked along the Jinpu line to the front line of Cangzhou and Baoding, with the strategic purpose of occupying Baoding and completely annihilating the First Army in China.

The group army was based on the 29th Route Army, and its commander was General Song Zheyuan, a famous anti-Japanese general, and the group army had three armies, namely Zhang Zizhong's 59th Army, Feng Zhi'an's 77th Army, and Liu Ruming's 68th Army.

However, shortly after the reorganization of the First Group Army, the Nanjing government appointed General Feng Yuxiang, the founder of the Northwest Army, as the commander of the Sixth Theater (i.e., the North China Theater) and ordered him to come to Baoding to command the Jinpu Road War of Resistance.

The 29th Route Army originated from the Northwest Army system.

The arrival of Feng Yuxiang made Song Zheyuan and others mutter, secretly suspecting that Nanjing was seizing their military power in disguise, so they retired one after another, and General Song himself went to Mount Tai to recuperate, causing the entire group army to be disheartened and suspicious of each other.

Therefore, when the Isogu Division began to attack Baoding along the Jinpu Road, the internal contradictions of the First Army always broke out, and the whole army had no intention of fighting at all, and it almost collapsed at the first touch.

In view of the signs of erosion in the whole of North China, the Nanjing government had no choice but to transfer Feng Yuxiang back to Nanjing, reappointed as the commander of the Third Theater (i.e., the Songhu Theater), and let Song Zheyuan come back to clean up the mess, so that the entire First Army was slightly better.

It's a pity that it's too late, and the decline is already over.

On September 11, at the same time as the Japanese army in North China was moving south, the Japanese army in the Songhu area also launched a new offensive.

The Japanese army dispatched more than 100,000 follow-up troops, more than 70 ships, and nearly 1,000 warplanes.

In order to compete for air supremacy in Central China, the Japanese army dispatched six aircraft carriers and all long-range bombers on the mainland and Taiwan, and not only the Type 96 land attack was dispatched, but even more than 80 Iraq-style heavy bombers BR.20 bombers purchased by Japan from Italy were also put into the Songhu battlefield.

BR.20 bomber, is before the Second World War, by the Italian Fly Ya developed bomber, with stress skin and other advanced technology of the bomber, in 1936 test flight success, 6 months after the test flight, immediately put into formal production, has been equipped with the Italian Air Force 13th squadron.

The Japanese army has also purchased 85 bombers, the bomber is equipped with 3 12.7 mm machine guns, empty weight of 6.5 tons, can carry 3.6 tons of bombs and fuel, 2 Feiyat engines, can provide 2000 horsepower, the maximum speed of 440 kilometers per hour, the range of 2750 kilometers, compared with the 96 land attack, it is considered to have its own advantages.

At 11 o'clock in the morning, a group of Japanese bombers flew over Songhu.

After the enemy planes converged, they did not need fighter planes to escort them at all, but formed a dense formation, like locusts crossing the border, densely packed with a large area, and even the Huaxia Air Force, which was preparing to come forward to meet them, was stunned with fright.

This time, the Japanese bomber group also learned to behave.

Under the command of the commander of the Kasumigaura Air Wing and Okuda Osa, the Japanese bombers not only adopted a dense box-shaped formation, but also relied on the mutual cooperation of various machine guns and artillery to form a dense anti-aircraft fire network for defense, which was completely insoluble for the Chinese Air Force in 1937.

Because each Type 96 medium bomber is equipped with a 20-mm machine gun and three machine gun turrets, if it is properly coordinated, it is still a very good air defense method.

Such a tight formation caught the Huaxia Air Force off guard.

At the Purple Mountain Air Command Center, Major General Liu Yicheng, who assisted Lao Jiang in command, was also a little dumbfounded when he received a report on the battle situation at the front.

The box-shaped phalanx is to use a number of thick-skinned bombers to form a three-dimensional box-shaped structure in the air, with the purpose of making full use of their strong points and avoiding their weaknesses, and through mutual cooperation and care, the shortcomings of the bomber group's slow speed and low flexibility are transformed into the advantages of rigorous defense and fierce firepower as a whole.

By the way, isn't this the favorite bombing tactic of the U.S. military in the late stage of World War II?

This guy remembers that the U.S. B17 and B-29 bomber groups often used this tactic when they carried out strategic bombing of the German and Japanese mainlands. I pour, how did this happen.

In fact, Liu Yicheng was less suspicious of himself.

He has a prejudice against the Japanese, always thinking that the Japanese devils are all pigs, and they will not come up with such practical tactics at all, and he himself does not want to think about it, if the devils are really pigs, why do they need to fight for 14 years in the War of Resistance, doesn't it mean that the Chinese military and civilians are stupider than pigs.

The box-shaped phalanx was first created by the king of the Japanese bombing, the navy Okuda Kikuji, and the U.S. military was the later copyist, but the U.S. military was famous for its brilliant results.

So who exactly was the initiator, no one remembers at all.

But the best way to deal with this kind of phalanx is to have the fighters launch a dense number of rockets in the air, so that the bomber group has to retreat and dodge, take the initiative to abandon the strict formation, and then the fighter group will rush up again, tearing the enemy apart like a wolf pack.

Where did the Chinese Air Force in September 1937 get air-launched rockets?

Even the world-famous "Katyusha" rocket launcher does not know whether it has been successfully developed at this time, and in the face of large-scale bomber box-shaped formations, even if it is a traverser, it is also in a helpless situation.

By the way, someone has Professor Willy Messerschmidt on their hands.

This person is not only a well-known German aircraft design master, but also a pioneer in the study of rockets and jet fighters, and Major General Liu Yicheng secretly made up his mind that after the end of this air battle, he must return to western Sichuan, and it is best to develop rockets first.

It's just that in the face of the current crisis, what should we do?

All kinds of information about the destruction of the box bomber group churned in Major General Liu's mind like a wave, but the urgency of the war on the front line did not allow him to think about it anymore, but fortunately, he soon had a flash of inspiration and finally thought of an unreliable way, that is, to use bombers to deal with bombers.

Because the bombing of the Songhu position was the ultimate goal of the Japanese bomber group.

In 1937, the bombing technology was very backward, in order to improve the bombing accuracy, the bomber had to reduce the altitude, the best altitude for bombing was about 1,000 meters above Songhu, but now it is a large-scale strategic bombing, naturally it does not need to be so accurate, and the flight altitude can be increased.

If we take into account the issue of counterattacks by anti-aircraft artillery units.

In particular, the number of 88-mm anti-aircraft guns in western Sichuan is as high as 36, plus the original anti-aircraft guns in Nanjing, a storm of anti-aircraft artillery has long been formed in the sky over the Songhu area, so the bombing altitude of the Japanese bombers should be adjusted to about 3,000 meters.

At the same time, among the Huaxia Air Force hovering over Songhu, there were also nearly 50 Flying Bear bombers.

This bomber is a high-altitude and high-speed bomber, although this "high-altitude and high-speed" is relative to the bomber of 1937, but this little gap has completely become a "killer move".

Liu Yicheng's tactic was very simple, let the Flying Bear bomber increase its altitude, drop heavy bombs from a high altitude, and explode at a regular time of about 3,000 meters.

A 750-kilogram bomb has a killing radius of 2-3 kilometers, which may be a bit reluctant to deal with a light fighter, but for a bomber that is slower and wants to reduce the altitude and prepare to drop the bomb, it is a proper tragedy.

Nearly 50 Flying Bear bombers, along with nearly 100 other heavy fighters, climbed to an altitude of more than 8,000 meters and made a posture of preparing to dive and attack.

The imminent attack of the Chinese fighters caused the Japanese bomber group to become nervous, and for a while they no longer cared about bombing the ground positions, but carefully contracted the battle line, lined up more closely with each other, and wanted to break the myth of heavy fighters.

As soon as they reached the highest point, the Huaxia fighters immediately began to dive.

More than 150 heavy fighters swooped down from an altitude of nearly 10,000 meters, faintly emitting a roar like wind and thunder, and the sound was fierce and immense, like a piece of meteorites falling into the world.

For some reason, when the pilots of the Japanese bombers saw the indomitable attack of the Chinese fighters, they couldn't help but get nervous, and even the "bombing king" Okuda Kikuji himself was a little uneasy, and his intuition told him, "Most of the bombing operations are not good."

Fortunately, the Huaxia fighters were just scaring them.

As soon as the heavy fighters rushed to about 5,000 meters, they began to timidly pull up, and they did not dare to really rush to the bomber group that was waiting for them, causing the Japanese pilots to boo, and they wanted to laugh at the "bravery" of the Huaxia Air Force on the public channel.

At that moment, a black dot-like object fell from the sky.

Could it be that the Huaxia Air Force has been frightened into the air and disintegrated?

When the Japanese pilots were "Nani" one after another, the leader of the team, Kikuji Okuda, suddenly thought of a possibility, suddenly chilled, and issued a poignant warning on the public channel, "It's a bomb, everyone run."

"Nani, bombs? What is the job? ”

The Japanese pilots still felt a little funny, and they didn't feel the bomb at all, so there was nothing to be afraid of.

The reason why the Huaxia Air Force ran away halfway through the dive turned out to be because the bombs they were carrying seriously affected their flight speed, and now they were preparing to travel lightly, so they dropped the bombs in advance.

As the bomb got closer and closer, it was not only oversized, but also sneering at white smoke.

At this time, the Japanese pilots were panicked, they were not fools, they knew too well the explosive power of heavy bombs.