Under the towing of the parachute of uniform specifications, a large paratrooper seemed to descend a little faster than the others, and his butt was firmly on the snow when he landed, fortunately the winter sun did not quickly melt the snow on the ground, and the snow more than ten centimeters thick provided a little cushion, so that his poor ass would not fall into several petals at once.

The big man's voice seemed to be proportional to his size, and before he could take off his parachute bag, he shouted in a voice that was close to a roar:

"Everyone takes their gear and the parachute stays where it is! The company commanders are responsible for collecting their own soldiers and nearby airdropped supplies, and moving to the town as soon as possible! ”

"Major, are you alright!" One of the paratroopers who had landed earlier walked up to the big man and stretched out his right hand to help him up.

"It's fine!"

It didn't matter if the big guy pulled it, the paratrooper of ordinary stature almost stumbled and fell to the ground. This big guy is Major Shields of the 4th Airborne Regiment, a hand-to-hand combat master with a height of 1.89 meters and a weight of 96 kilograms, graduated from the Berlin Army Academy, and is now 31 years old.

Shields patted the snow on his body, he wore an M16 steel helmet like the soldiers, plus a square rucksack, it was difficult to tell from behind that he was a major officer, which was also his more individualistic side.

"Everyone, move fast!"

After freeing herself from the parachute, Shields shouted again, and the soldiers around her were not startled at the sound, but everyone involuntarily sped up. In a short time, the neat paratrooper companies were assembled, and the ammunition and materials scattered everywhere were quickly gathered.

"Oh, poor boy!"

Looking at the few wagons that were usually used to carry food and the thin horses pulling them, Shields muttered to himself, and this self-talk also reached the ears of everyone nearby with his loud voice, but fortunately most of the paratroopers were used to the uninhibited major.

"Major, I'm sorry, but this is all we can find in town!" The paratrooper sent by Garris to pick him up apologized that Fortintown was not a place for the wealthy, and that all four-wheeled things had to be pulled by horses.

Shields waved his hand generously, "Sgt. Sgt., don't be nervous!" I don't mean to blame you! My soldiers have been comfortable on the shores of France for dozens of hours, and it's time for them to move! ”

Centered around the Fortin River Bridge, there are three railways leading to the bridge, one to Dorchester to the west, one to Southampton to the northeast, and one to the west to Bonemouth. Lieutenant Colonel Garris's 1st Airborne Regiment occupied the area and destroyed all three sections of the railroad near the Fording River Bridge, and until the tracks were repaired, trains from either direction could only move about five miles from the bridge.

At this time, all the troops that the British planned to transfer from Southampton had not yet completed boarding, so the east side of the bridge would not be attacked by the British for the time being, and with the help of some soldiers of the 1st Airborne Regiment, the 4th Airborne Regiment of Shields also had plenty of time to transport all the ammunition and supplies back to Fortin.

In the end, these ox carts were loaded with only a small part of the ammunition and a few paratroopers who were unfortunately injured in the airborne, and the rest of the ammunition and supplies had to be carried back by more than 2,000 paratroopers, and Shields alone carried a large box of ammunition. In the German army, there were not many officers who really shared the weal and blight of the soldiers.

After the ******** of the soldiers to meet the 4th Airborne Regiment was over, there were only a few empty flares left in the hilly area, and the abandoned parachutes looked like half-withered white flowers, and when a cold wind blew, a few more were blown into the distance.

Lieutenant Colonel Garris's headquarters was located at the railway station on the east side of the bridge, from where the railway from Southampton branched off to head south to Bonemouth Beach. From the outside, this small station is just a very ordinary building in the great industrial era, the platform is short but very clean, the waiting room is a single-story spire masonry house, the house is not large, but there is a clock tower in the style of Big Ben, and the mechanical clock is still running professionally. The platform was almost empty, winter and war were great obstacles to people's travel, and next to the platform there were several sentry posts made of sandbags, and five or six German paratroopers were chatting about something.

Looking up the river from the platform, on the hillside across the river is a very classic castle-like villa, which is very reminiscent of the castle of a prince from a fairy tale, thanks to its white snow. However, it was too far from the bridge to be of great strategic importance, so Lieutenant Colonel Garris did not send soldiers to occupy it.

Standing in front of Shields, Lieutenant Colonel Garris was a head shorter, and Cullen was somewhere between the two.

"Lieutenant Colonel, all 2,500 soldiers of the 4th Airborne Regiment have now arrived, 4 of the troops who landed in the town were wounded in the leg and 1 had a broken arm, only 2 of the troops who landed outside the town were sprained, and the remaining 2,493 were ready to fight! In addition, we brought 200,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, 150,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition, 8,000 grenades, and 800 mortar rounds! Hirts's voice thundered in the room, and in hand-to-hand combat with the Russians, it was capable of overpowering even the Russians, who were known for their brutality and brutality. In the course of this paratrooping, about a company of paratroopers landed in the town area east of the bridge, and some even smashed directly into the houses of residents, and there were not a few people who hung parachutes on the roofs, and now white parachutes are still flying everywhere in the town.

"You came at a better time! We really want to thank some of our brothers in the Air Force, who taught us a good lesson about the two British divisions in the west, and now the British are still honestly staying there! "It was precisely because of the timely appearance of the air force group that the first battle that Garris had anticipated was greatly postponed, and with the 4th Airborne Regiment and the ammunition supplies they had brought, the defense of the Fording River Bridge was well strengthened, and the more minute Garris they delayed here, the landing force was able to transport an additional batch of supplies ashore. Without the capture of the bridge over the Fording River, the planned front from Dorchester to Southampton in the British could not be formed.

"Yes, I also saw it on the plane, the Air Force brothers are really good! Lieutenant Colonel, how should our airborne regiment be deployed? After thanking the Luftwaffe, Shields brought the conversation to the point, although the two British divisions in the west were a little injured, but an astonishing number of British troops were approaching one after another, and the German airborne troops did not dare to slack off on the defense of the bridge. The ammunition brought by Shields this time was very large purely in terms of quantity, but it was not really distributed to each soldier, and supply was always a major problem in airborne operations.

"Now the three battalions of our airborne regiment are deployed in Qiaoxi Township, on both sides of the bridge, and in Qiaodong Township, and your regiment will temporarily send one battalion to Qiaoxi Township, and the remaining two battalions will remain in Qiaodong as reserves, what do you think?" Failure due to lack of unity of command abounds in the history of the world, so before the landing operation began, Lieutenant Colonel Garris was appointed commander-in-chief of the operation, and out of politeness, he still assigned the task to Shields in an advisory tone.

"Yes!" Shields replied unequivocally.

At 11:20 a.m., the melodious sound of bagpipes came again from the west, and with a telegram from the General Headquarters, General Reeser had to order his British 17th Infantry Division and Canadian Cole Infantry Division to advance again in formation towards Fortin. The tone of the telegram was harsh, and the tone of taking the bridge at all costs was full of words, and as for the number of German troops here, the General Command believed that the reserves of the defenders of Bonemouth were attacked by a large force of German paratroopers, and that there should not be too many paratroopers occupying the bridge.

When the remaining artillery on the British positions opened fire, it was neither the British officers nor the German paratroopers who were most nervous, but the innocent residents. Mrs. Brown, 63, who lives on the west side of the bridge, described her experience this way:

"I vividly remember that I did not forget to pray to God for an early end to the war at dinner on the 26th, and to pray for the safe return of my two sons who had been called to join the Army! However, the calm was broken at 5 or 6 a.m., and there was a burst of gunfire from the other side of the bridge, and I learned from my neighbors that the Germans had taken the bridge, and I couldn't believe it at the time. But while I was eating breakfast, a couple of fierce German soldiers stormed my house and said a lot of things to me that I didn't understand. They behaved so brutally that they smashed the glass in the window without my consent, moved my furniture around the window, and mounted a machine gun there. My God! My house has become their battlefield! I tried to stop them, and they ended up being locked up in a guest room on the first floor. In the morning I heard two heavy gunfires, the first at about ten o'clock in the morning, with an unpleasant buzz overhead, and then a mass explosion and a very dense gunfire in the west; The second time was an hour later, and the sound of the explosion was so close to me that it seemed to be happening in the town, and I was terrified, and then I got under the bed because I was afraid that my house would be blown up. ”

In the process of advancing to Fortin's town in 10 horizontal formations of about 5,000 infantry, the British army used more than 10 remaining rapid-fire guns to bombard the town for nearly 20 minutes, and about 1/3 of the houses in the town west of the bridge collapsed in the shelling, and nearly half were damaged to varying degrees.

"Come on, bastards, and get a taste of what we're good at!"

On the ground floor of a British house, two German machine gunners watched the swaying figures in front of them, sofas, tables and other furniture were pushed to the window to defend against bullets, and two boxes of machine gun bullets and several grenades were placed on the ground next to them, and other machine gun fire points were roughly arranged in this way.

In the attic of a dwelling, a lonely German paratrooper, with his left eye slightly closed and his right eye close to the 5x scope on his rifle, was a simple but effective tool that allowed him to see the expressionless faces of the British infantrymen trotting forward with their rifles obliquely crossed. At this time, the formation of the British army has been dispersed, but the general outline of the 10 horizontal formations is still there, in the color and style of military uniforms, there is not much difference between the Canadian Army and the English infantry, for this professionally trained sniper, it does not matter whether it is a Canadian or a British who kills, the officer is his first target, and then the guy with a machine gun and other high-power weapons, when there is really no other target, he will shoot those ordinary British soldiers.

(There are various theories about the effective range of rifles and sniper rifles, it is said that for experienced snipers, the Mauser Kar98K sniper rifle equipped with a 4x scope can shoot 400 targets, and if a 6x scope is selected, it can shoot targets at 1000 meters, and the Mauser 1898 rifle with a longer barrel and faster muzzle velocity should have a longer effective range, but this does not seem to be the case, and the maximum effective range of the Mauser 1898 is between 600-800 meters should be more realistic)

"Target distance, 1500 meters!" A soldier lying on the roof of a house calculates the distance of the British infantry with a simple rangefinder, and behind the house, 3 mortars and 10 gunners are ready.

"Set the shell landing point at 1200 meters!"

After the order of the officer in charge of the mortars was given, the gunners fine-tuned the mortars, and the British artillery fire was still firing, but the mortars and gunners were safe before the masonry house in front of them was destroyed, and there were seven other such mortar positions in the town on the west side of the bridge.

About half of the first 10 columns of the British army were Canadian soldiers, and these young men had traveled far and wide to participate in a war that was somewhat inexplicable to them, but most of the Canadian soldiers who were known for their dedication and tenacity had no complaints (it is said that 3 of the 5 strongest ace snipers in history were Canadians, which is extremely surprising!). The young faces under the brim of their hats all looked indifferently at the town in front of them, which had not moved under the shelling, and the conspicuous steel bridge in their sight was their ultimate goal.

"Everyone, keep up! Soon it will be within range of the opponent! ”

On the far right of the first line, Canadian Second Lieutenant Jonny loudly told his soldiers that running thousands of meters in the middle of winter was no fun thing, and everyone was gulping for hot air. The Canadians held their rifles diagonally to their chests, the bayonets at the front of their rifles dangling in the sunlight.

Suddenly, Jonny noticed a few black things rising silently from the town, these things rose higher and higher, their trajectory was very different from ordinary cannonballs and bullets, Jonny had only seen one thing with a similar trajectory, that is, the mortar cannon used to be used by the fortress artillery, but that kind of thing made a very dull sound when fired, but there was nothing here except the sound of British artillery fire and shell explosions.

Mortars were not a new weapon, and the world's first real mortar was built in September-October 1904 by Russian artillery captain Gobiato. Leonid. Invented by Nikolayevich. At that time, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tsarist Russia and Japan were engaged in a fierce battle for the Port of Arthur in China. The Russian army occupied the fortress of Arthur Pass, and the Japanese dug trenches and approached only a few dozen meters away from the Russian position, and it was difficult for the Russian army to kill and injure the Japanese army with ordinary artillery and machine guns. So Nikolayevich tried to modify an old 47-mm naval mortar gun on a gun carriage with wheels, and fired a long-tail shell at a large elevation angle, effectively killing and injuring the Japanese troops in the trenches and repelling many Japanese attacks. This kind of artillery born on the battlefield is the world's earliest mortar, but until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the understanding and attention to mortars in various countries is not high, and at present, except for Russia, Germany, and France, most of the infantry in other countries have not seen mortars.

When the black stuff rushes headlong into the crowd and explodes, Jonny finally understands that this is a weapon to be reckoned with, a bomb that is not very powerful, but it can make people blow up without seeing the other party. The sudden blow did not cause the Canadians and Britons to fall into a large panic, and they couldn't help but speed up the pace of progress as they watched their companions fall one by one.

The black things rose much faster than normal artillery fire, and they kicked up snow and dirt on the snow again and again, and the ranks of the advancing British infantry gradually appeared one after another. The British artillery was still roaring, but it was simply not able to suppress the German mortars.

When Jonny and his soldiers stepped within range of German machine guns and rifles, the oncoming bullets made everyone feel helpless, and the soldiers who were shot in the chest or in the head took on a very typical posture due to inertia: they fell to their knees with their upper hands back, their hands outstretched, and sometimes their weapons thrown out of their hands, and finally the whole person fell face down. The position of a person who has been shot below the leg is much simpler, a standard forward leap and just waiting for the medics to arrive.

"Keep going!" Jonny had just taken the next step when an oncoming bullet silently burrowed into his body, and the moment he leaned back, his hat flew out, his soft blonde hair was clinging to his scalp due to sweat, and his eyes looked at the blue sky for the last time. When he knelt on his knees in the snow, he felt that the ground was so soft that it was like a comfortable bed, and he was going to sleep on this big bed forever.

While Jonny saw the man who wasn't shooting at him, Second Lieutenant Hildrand could see every movement of the man he had hit, and when he pulled the bolt, a bullet casing with a few wisps of smoke popped out of the gun, and then bounced it on the wooden floor. After refeeding the next bullet into the chamber, Hildrand began to search for his 417th target, the ace sniper who fought in the Turkish Civil War and successfully shot a Turkish marshal, and is now the number one killing machine in Germany and the world.