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On October 1, 1940, Luo Lei's Fourth Army and Jiao Guangxu's First Mountain Army officially began their offensive against Mandalay. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

At 7 o'clock in the morning, the two armies concentrated more than 1,000 artillery pieces of 75mm caliber, and at the same time, the air force sent three flying groups to take turns to launch air raids on Mandalay.

Under the guidance of the wooden school firing machine, shells of various calibers fell in turn inside and outside Mandalay, and thick black smoke columns, accompanied by a loud roar, rose from the criss-crossed positions of the Japanese army, and the ground trembled violently.

As the first strike group flew over Mandalay, countless bombs, with the greeting of death, let out a sharp whistling sound, dense explosions rang out one after another, and everything on the route of fighters, attack planes, and bombers was all reduced to nothing in the smoke and dust.

An underground ammunition depot hidden by the Japanese army in the east of Mandalay was hit by a falling aerial bomb that pierced the top, accidentally causing a martyrdom, and the explosion and fire rose hundreds of meters in the air, and the mushroom cloud was hideous and terrifying under the morning light, and the impact hit the buildings within a radius of several kilometers.

In a strong, permanent underground garrison north of Mandalay, Lieutenant General Masahiro Baba, commander of the 53rd Division of the Japanese Army, sat with a pale face and a slight trembling body in a resting room behind the headquarters, from which he could clearly see the work of the staff officers outside.

Masaro Baba is a graduate of the 24th military department of Lu Shi, a student of the 33rd class of Lu University, and has served as an instructor of the Army Cavalry School and Lu University for a long time, and has just been promoted to major general of the army two years ago to serve as the commander of the third cavalry brigade.

Masaro Baba's brother-in-law is Admiral Takuzo Kobayashi, who is the current governor of Taiwan, and Masaro Baba's promotion path is not unrelated to Kobayashi's strong support.

Due to the unstable current and voltage of diesel, the flickering lights make people feel very depressed. Masahiro Baba frowned, his eyes staring straight at the cup of tea on the table in front of him, and the tea in the cup was trembling violently with the explosion of fierce pears from above.

Despite the psychological preparations, the intensity of the offensive launched by the An Jiajun was still far beyond Masaro Baba's expectations.

For the Japanese army, in a large-scale battle, it is very luxurious to invest more than 200 artillery pieces for attacking fortifications, and at the same time to have 20 or 30 fighters to help in the battle, but now the number of artillery guns used by the other side has reached thousands and the number of fighters is at least more than 100, and in order to maintain the ability to continue to strike, the other side seems to have the same number of fighters to rotate, and it has to be said that the other side is generous and luxurious.

With the fierce shelling and bombardment of Lintou Baba Masahiro, the last trace of luck also disappeared, and he knew very well in his heart that he was very likely to lead his troops here to destruction, and to fulfill his promise of "see you at the Yasukuni Shrine" when he left Japan!

No one wants to die, and at this time, Masaro Baba is struggling to find a way to survive.

It is a pity that the river flotilla used to transport supplies has been destroyed under the frequent bombardment of the opposing air force, and even if it is not destroyed, the other side has already controlled the area below Mandalay on the Irrawaddy River, and at the same time, the other side of the river has been occupied by the enemy's mechanized troops who have crossed the river from Sagaing.

The south and east of the city were tightly surrounded, and the almost endless shells were fired from there, and although there were no troops in the north to attack the city, it was entirely possible to imagine what would happen to the tanks and armored vehicles after the infantry unit escaped from the fortified city.

Since the start of the artillery bombardment of the Anjia army, Masaro Baba has given orders to all the troops under his command to hold on to the spot and not to attack arbitrarily, and then he went to the underground headquarters to deal with this extremely difficult siege battle. During this time, he received too much bad news through the radio, and the fortified cities of Gotha Baharu, Zhitra, Patna, and Mawlamyine were lost one after another, and so far, there have been no successful examples of defending the cities, and the cities are like living coffins, burying all the masters in them.

This massive reinforced concrete bunker, originally housed the vaults of a British bank in central and northern Burma, was a six-story reinforced concrete building that was transformed into a solid underground command center after the Japanese replaced the British as rulers, and various communication lines organically connected the whole city of Mandalay.

Looking at the busy staff officers in the headquarters, Lieutenant General Masahiro Baba beat his spirits, got up and walked out of the room, and came to a periscope artillery observatory located in the southeast corner of the headquarters.

It turned out that the six-story building above was hit by more than a dozen 500-kilogram aerial bombs, and the entire bank building collapsed with a bang. The violent shaking of the wall and foundation drove the underground headquarters to sway with it, as if it had withstood a major earthquake of magnitude ** at this moment.

The violent shaking slowly stopped after two minutes, the underground headquarters was full of dust, coughing sounds, the electric fan of the vent continued to expel the dust, and the fan of the air inlet also desperately sucked in the air with gunpowder smoke outside, and after about a quarter of an hour, the air quality in the underground headquarters improved slightly.

Masaro Baba stood up against the wall, rubbed his forehead, which had knocked out a large bag, took a deep breath, put his glasses in front of the artillery sight, stabilized the artillery mirror with both hands, and began to turn to watch.

In the smoke of gunpowder and the sound of continuous explosions, dense shells and aerial bombs rained down, and Masahiro Baba happened to see a Tibetan soldier cave not far away being hit by a large-caliber grenade, and countless stumps and broken arms flew into the sky with fragments of wood, and then fell back to the ground like hail.

In the smoke-filled city of Mandalay, under the fierce artillery fire of the An Jiajun and the bombardment of fighter planes, shivering, the devil soldiers who once shouted frantically for a decisive battle to the end are now pale and trembling like chaff, desperately curled up in the bunker and did not dare to move, chanting words in their mouths to pray that bad luck would not befall their heads.

The sound of explosions was incessant, and the shells of the An Jiajun and the aerial bombs dropped by the bombers, as if they did not need money, fell on every corner of the Japanese army and the Burmese army from the forward positions to the cities in the rear. During the whole process, the 53rd Artillery Wing, which was assigned to the division, did not fire a single shell at the request of the division commander Masahiro Baba.

Masahiro Baba said in a telephone call to the commander of the artillery wing, Ume Tanaka, "Our firepower projection capability cannot be compared with that of the opponent, and it is very likely that we will suffer huge losses if we return fire rashly. ”

Tanaka Ume Daisa was deeply convinced, so he dispersed the artillery wing into small units and carried out concealment, in order to reduce the huge losses caused by the artillery fire and bombing strikes of the Anjia army.

At 9:45 a.m., after nearly three hours of artillery preparation and intensive bombardment, the bomber group, which was already in its second sortie, began to drop napalm bombs on the Japanese positions, and for a time, a raging fire broke out inside and outside Mandalay.

In particular, the forward positions of the Japanese army became the focus of incendiary bombing, and the sea of fire in the sky was connected, as long as the devils and the Burmese army were contaminated with a little spark, with the viciousness of napalm, and under such high temperatures, it would be a tragic end of nine deaths and a lifetime.

The devils and Burmese soldiers in the front-line trenches were almost completely lost under the blow of this napalm, and those who survived were those who were cowering in the fortifications and were not directly hit by the shells. After the siege of Mandalay City on the 19th, Masahiro Baba ordered hundreds of fortifications to block the front-line positions with cement, and sent special personnel to transport food and drinking water to the devils in these fortifications from the top every day.

In the small space, several defenders plus a 92-type heavy machine gun and a few boxes of ammunition, it is difficult for the people inside to turn around, in the stuffy and airtight bunker, these people usually have to take turns to stick to the small shooting place to breathe, and several people's urine and urine and other everything must be solved in the bunker, the harsh environment here can be imagined.

However, because of this, the opportunity to come into contact with napalm was avoided, and the devils and the Burmese soldiers were finally saved, which was of course not a good thing for them.

At ten o'clock, the general attack of the An Jiajun on the city of Mandalay was officially launched.

The main direction of attack of the Anjia Army is the southeastern line, where the terrain is open and flat, which is very conducive to the assault of mechanized troops. Although tanks and armored vehicles could not cross the trenches, they could still act as mobile batteries to suppress Japanese firepower at close range, so hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles rumbled into a huge current of steel and entered the heavily defended trenches of Guyi.

Between the tank and the armored car, there are more than 30 strangely shaped and bulky tanks, and in the direction of the coaxial machine gun in the turret, there is a flamethrower, which is the deformation of the Tiger IV tank, which still retains the main gun, and the difference with the Tiger I tank is that the caliber of the tank gun is reduced

At 88 mm, the original position of the coaxial machine gun and part of the main gun ammunition was changed to a fire-breathing oil tank, which can carry 460 liters of fuel, and can meet the needs of 20 fire-breathing fires through compressed air control, and the fire-breathing distance can reach 160 meters, and the end is a sharp weapon for killing and setting fire.

The devils and Burmese soldiers hiding in the fortifications and bunkers were uneasy, their minds were full of question marks, why didn't they expect the Anjia Army infantry to swarm up? Why didn't the bazooka players and flamethrowers who posed the biggest threat to the bunker see any of them in the past? What went wrong?

When the Spray 4 began to effectively clear the machine-gun bunkers and overlapping fortifications built by the Japanese on the other side of the trench, it dawned on the devil and the Burmese soldiers that they were about to suffer.

After frantically firing useless machine gun fire, these devils and Burmese soldiers cried and grabbed the ground, and with everything they could use, reflexively began to desperately smash the door of the concrete-sealed bunker, and sadly hit with their bodies, picking at their fingernails, and even feeling that their nails were broken, just to get a way to escape.

It's a pity that the way out has been blocked, and no matter how hard they try, it won't help. This almost crazy behavior continued until the hot, high-heat flames instantly poured into the firing port, filling the entire bunker space and engulfing every Japanese soldier in the flames.

The Spitfire tank is nothing short of a mass killer of this era, and the armor thickness of the Tiger I tank is enough to withstand the attack of large-caliber howitzers, and the projectiles fired by machine guns, rifles, grenadiers and mortars can be completely ignored. Moreover, in order to reduce casualties, the Fourth Army of the Anjia Army chose a relatively small breakthrough point, and the density of armored troops was very high, so that a quarter of an hour after the breakthrough was opened, the Japanese commanders in the forward position could not make the determination to counterattack, and could only watch as one bunker after another and fortifications turned into living coffins for burying devils and Burmese soldiers.

Seeing that the Anjia army engineers began to blast the first trench to open up the offensive channel of tanks and armored vehicles, once the Spitfire tank reached the second trench, then the tragedy of the first trench would be repeated, in this case, the Japanese front commander had to open the door in the upper reaches of the trench, and suddenly the water of the Irrawaddy River poured into the first trench around the city, and in just half an hour, the trench five or six meters deep was filled with water, although this temporarily stopped the advance of the tanks and armored vehicles of the Anjia army, However, nearly 1,000 Japanese and Burmese soldiers who were not burned but could not be evacuated were drowned alive in bunkers and fortifications.

The reaction of the Japanese army was all expected, and soon, the infantry with rafts and rubber boats began to launch a forced crossing, and with the support of artillery fire from the rear, they quickly pushed closer to more than 200 meters away from the second trench, and then began to use the craters of the previous shelling and the abandoned bunkers of the Japanese army to build fortifications, and at the same time shoot at the Japanese trenches.

In the rear, construction vehicles drove to the first trench, which had become a river, and threw prefabricated elements into the babbling stream, and pontoon bridges for tanks to pass through appeared.

Leopard II tanks and armoured vehicles flew by, followed by Jet I tanks, and they reached the second trench and burned the devils and Burmese soldiers hiding in the bunker into roast pigs again. However, the second trench was not as strict as the first, and many devils and Burmese soldiers were frightened, opened the door of the bunker, and fled frantically to the rear, and the whole position was in chaos.

At this time, the attack planes and bombers hovering in the air were specially aimed at these retreating enemies to strike, and for a time, the entire Japanese position on the front line of the breakthrough was covered with bloody rain, and the human stumps and internal organs were thrown everywhere, and it was unbearable to see.

So far, the Japanese anti-aircraft artillery and anti-aircraft machine gun positions have not been violent, so Lieutenant General Luo Lei, commander of the Fourth Army, who commanded the siege battle, did not dare to rashly send army aviation helicopters to participate in the battle, but judging from the current situation, if the Japanese army cannot crack the tactics of the Anjia Army's layer-by-layer advancement, even if the helicopters do not participate in the battle, they will not be able to affect the battle situation.

The battle lasted from morning to 6 p.m., and the three Japanese trenches were breached, followed by an even more brutal battle of position.

The Japanese army built countless trenches and bunkers on a front five kilometers deep, and although nearly half of them were destroyed by the previous shelling and bombardment, a large number of them were still preserved. In addition to these trenches and fortifications, under many inconspicuous layers of soil, there are not necessarily a large number of human bombs buried by devils.

Therefore, as the night fell, the sound of gunfire and explosions became more dense, and the smell of blood in the air became more intense.

At 9 o'clock in the evening, the 53rd Artillery Wing of the Japanese Army, which had been in hiding without a trace since the siege of the city, began to intensively shell the first-line positions of the breakthrough made by the Anjia Army from their respective hiding positions.

Because the Japanese artillery was scattered in all directions of Mandalay City, the current shelling was only roughly calculated, and the shooting Zhuyuan had not yet been corrected, so after this round of shelling, most of the shells deviated far from the defense line of the Anjia Army in the southeast, and even more than a dozen grenades fell into their own lines, blowing up the devil soldiers and Burmese soldiers on their backs.

As the artillery fire began, the Japanese began to carry out a planned counterattack, and many human bombs came out of the overburden and rushed towards the tanks and armored vehicles of the Anjia army.

After nightfall, the air force again threw a large amount of napalm at the Japanese position, so the entire front was transparent, and from the perspective of light and darkness, the Japanese army launched an attack from the light to the dark, so the intention to return fire was violent early, and the surprise attack had to be turned into a strong attack.

Around those tanks and armored vehicles, the Anjia Army infantry built temporary positions to defend them, so the Japanese death squads were beaten into a sieve by general-purpose machine guns and automatic rifles before they could get closer.

At this time, the armed helicopters of the Army Aviation finally came to the sky over Mandalay, and in the night sè to strike at the Japanese artillery positions that sprayed shells, as the rocket nests under the short wings fired, one rocket after another flew towards the Japanese artillery positions, and in the continuous explosions, the unprepared devil artillery, like evildoers tormented in purgatory, churned and ruined in the sea of fire.

In this era, it is undoubtedly a difficult problem for air defense at night, the Japanese anti-aircraft guns and anti-aircraft machine guns were forced to begin to roar angrily, but because there were no artillery aiming tools, they could only shoot blindly, and there was little threat to the helicopters in the night.

When they were 400 meters away from the temporary position of the Anjia Army, the Japanese and Burmese soldiers began to open up the straggler formation under the command of the grassroots officers, and they bent down slightly, holding a 38 cover with bayonets in their hands, while the Japanese machine gunners who rushed to the forefront of the skirmish line were holding the newly issued "crutch" light machine gun, which was different from the crooked machine gun, and this kind of machine gun actually had bayonets on it, which really made people speechless.

When the devils and the Burmese army in front approached the temporary position of the An Jia Army a hundred meters, the Japanese army's chicken-neck heavy machine guns, grenadiers and mortars had already begun to find a suitable firing position.

The Japanese army and the Burmese army marched forward bravely, trying to rush through the distance of more than 100 meters as soon as possible, but they were greeted by the fire of mortars and tank guns behind the position, and then the Gaoping dual-purpose machine guns on the armored vehicles also began to wield, and finally the general-purpose machine guns and automatic rifles on the position.

The devil and the Burmese light machine gunner who rushed to the front just trembled and fell to the ground, and the sub-shooter on the side continued to pick up the machine gun, and after a few steps, the sub-shooter also struggled to be shot and fell to the ground, and the people behind continued to pick up the machine gun!

In the stormy shooting, the devils and the attacking troops of the Burmese army seemed to hit a steel plate, and those devils and Burmese soldiers who were shouting frantically seemed to be instantly formed in the same place. Most of the devils and Burmese soldiers were shot and fell to the ground during the run, and the devils and Burmese officers and soldiers who were hit by the powerful and lethal Gao Ping dual-purpose machine gun bullets were almost all torn apart, and a Japanese captain who was swept to the knee by the machine gun bullet rolled and struggled on the ground with a broken tui.

In the dense rain of bullets and frequent explosions, no one will care about the casualties of their colleagues, everyone has only one thought, that is, to rush to the Chinese position and kill them all, the huge casualties have made most of the devils and Burmese soldiers lose their minds, and more devils and Burmese soldiers are stepping on the corpses of their comrades and howling and fighting to attack.

The 105mm 55 times diameter cannon on the Leopard II tank is specially designed to clean up the heavy machine guns, grenadiers and mortars of the Burmese army, which pose a greater threat to the An Jia Army.

However, the Japanese grenadiers were still unguardable, especially at a distance of 100 meters, and the grenadiers equipped by the Japanese army had a hit rate of almost 100 percent under the use of experienced veterans.

Due to the dense concentration of officers and soldiers in the makeshift fortified trenches, each grenade that fell into the position could cause casualties among two or three officers and men, and the medics with red and white crosses on their heads braved the flying shrapnel to pass through the trenches and evacuate the wounded immediately.

On the contrary, in the face of the intensive firepower of the Anjia Army, the Japanese army, which lacked artillery preparation, continued to resist stubbornly after paying heavy casualties, constantly looking for positions on the flanks and joints of the temporary positions to explore.

The brutal battle lasted until three o'clock in the morning, and the commander-in-chief of the siege, Lieutenant General Luo Lei, stood at the tenon and tenon, looked at the miniature sand table in the center, and listened to the latest battle report of the staff officers.

For the counterattack launched by the Japanese army, Luo Lei had already predicted that the advance of the troops during the day was too fierce, and he believed that the devils must break this passive situation by returning fire in order to change the unfavorable strategic situation.

At four o'clock in the morning, the Japanese counterattack launched in the southeast of the city had shown signs of weakening, Luo Lei immediately made a decision, and immediately ordered all artillery groups under the group army to immediately begin to cover the entire city of Mandalay with indiscriminate artillery fire, and all troops immediately threw themselves into the counterattack against the Japanese army in front of them.

By daybreak, the frontline had once again advanced four kilometres to the southeastern edge of Mandalay.

Since the line of sight is no longer disturbed by the night, the accuracy of the direct fire of the Leopard II tank has been greatly improved, and the high-level dual-purpose machine gun on the armored vehicle that followed the cover, the roasted beans generally "clicked" non-stop, and the officers and soldiers who accompanied the attack of the tank and armored vehicle were highly concentrated, and all the devils who tried to get close to them were shattered, and the devil death squad wanted to get close to the tank almost became a luxury, and the Spitfire tank once again showed its powerful power, burning the devils in the bunker one by one.

At 10 o'clock in the morning of the 2nd, the Fourth Army of the Anjia Army, which had used the southeast as a breakthrough, finally stormed into Mandalay City.

In the close-range street fighting, the officers and men of the Fourth Group, who had already been rotated to attack the fortified arrows, were in high spirits, and under the cover of tanks and artillery, one strike group after another caused great trouble to the devils and the Burmese soldiers.

The 75mm recoilless gun was also used in the siege of Mandalay, this kind of light and easy to carry, armor-piercing thickness of up to 395 mm of large killing weapons, the barrier to the devil is almost a dozen accurate, and the firepower of tanks and armored vehicles echo each other, the devil is like a hedgehog that pulls out the thorn, and has to launch a counterattack to break the situation of passive beating.

In the chaotic firefighting, the individual weapons such as bazookas, automatic rifles, flamethrowers, and submachine guns possessed by the officers and soldiers of Anjia almost suffocated the counterattacking Japanese troops.

The Japanese had to fight hard, they stripped off their shirts one after another, and shouted wildly with bayonets from childhood

Alleys, houses, intersections, and even underground appeared, and under the fierce fire of the officers and soldiers of An Jia, the devils and soldiers of the Burmese army rushed to the ground one after another, and the soldiers of the An Jia Army also suffered many casualties in the brave fighting.

With the continuous expansion of the breakthrough and the increasing number of troops invested, the three divisions of the Fourth Army and the two divisions of the First Mountain Group began to extend from the breakthrough to the two flanks, and under the cover of tanks and armored vehicles, under the suppression of air attack aircraft and bombers, and under the fire of helicopters, the counterattacks launched by the devils and the Burmese army were crushed again and again.

The brutal battle lasted for four days and three nights, and at 4 p.m. on October 3, the underground headquarters of the Devils' Command Hub Bank Building in Mandalay was overcome, where the officers and soldiers found the body of Masaro Baba, who had committed suicide by disembowelment, and the ashes of the burned military flag.

However, the fighting did not end there, because the Japanese and Burmese troops still deployed a large number of troops on the Mandalay Hill northeast of the city, and after another 23 hours of fighting, the gunfire in the Mandalay area gradually stopped at 3 p.m. on the 4th.

In this battle, the Anjia army completely annihilated more than 25,000 Japanese troops and more than 44,000 Burmese troops, and the Anjia army also paid the price of more than 6,000 casualties.

After the battle, the stone city of Mandalay was almost in ruins.

What awaits the Republic of South China will be painstaking post-war reconstruction.

: Well, the siege battle that should have been larger in scale and more spectacular in the pen of the Son of Heaven seems a bit anticlimactic, mainly because there is not enough time for the codeword, I'm really sorry!。