Section 102: Anger

"There are too many things that the Japanese want!"

Yang Chao said with a smile, but this time it was not a Japanese who came to deliver an order to Yang Chao, but a little eunuch. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Xiao Chengzi's father-in-law looked anxious: "Lord Yang, don't do business with the Russians, the Japanese are going crazy." It's hard for the emperor to do it, there are a lot of officials who impeach you up, and there are also those who say they want to kill you. The emperor asked me to tell me that your foreign guns and cannons are as profitable as selling them to the Japanese. ”

The Japanese launched a second campaign, but it did not go well, and as on any previous occasion, the losses were lost.

Therefore, the Japanese began to make external moves, and if the hard ones didn't work, they would come to the soft ones, and contact the imperial court through the British minister Zhu Erdian, hoping to strangle the Russians' sources of arms by monopolizing the output of the Shandong Arsenal.

After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the British appeared unusually low-key, and even the Americans intervened.

It is not that the British have confessed, but that the British have achieved the greatest result, and the British, through diplomatic efforts, have made it impossible for the Russian Second Fleet to find a port in the whole world, otherwise the Russian fleet would have arrived long ago. But this already made the Russians very angry, and they didn't want to push the Russians into a hurry.

The second is the French, who did not want to clash head-on with the British, but the French had already threatened the British. The Russian fleet was not angry, and when it first arrived in the waters of the Atlantic, it saw a British fishing boat, and nervously thought it was a Japanese warship, and directly opened fire and sank it. At that time, the British were on the verge of war, and directly dispatched the British Empire's Invincible Armada to bury the Russian fleet directly in the Atlantic.

In the end, the French came forward and told the British that if they rashly entered the war, the French would have to sell off the British bonds, and the British owed the French a lot of money, because they borrowed much more than Japan and Russia during the Boer War, and the British army spent more than the Japanese, and the British borrowed 150 million pounds in France alone, not to mention the amount of debt they borrowed at home.

One hundred and five hundred million pounds, but a billion taels of silver, this is a huge amount of money, and if the French throw their brains into the London market, it is strange that the British financial market does not collapse. So having obtained a promise from the French not to let the Russians into their colonial ports, the British began to keep a low profile, and although they did the Japanese so much, they did not make a big deal of it.

Even the use of money to block the Russians' arms this time was done so secretly, but Yang Chao felt that the British seemed to be holding back their badness.

However, the British sent money, and the so-called reaching out and not hitting the smiling face, Yang Chao still made a guarantee, and welcomed the British to send supervisors to the arsenal, and Yang Chao took the initiative to invite the British to visit the factory.

Because Yang Chao no longer needs to send supplies to Lushun, from rifles to shells is enough for the Russians to use for a month, and a month is enough, because no matter how you look at it, their damn Second Fleet should also go to Lushun.

As long as the Russian fleet arrives in Lushun, Yang Chao is not going to support them, and if they really overthrow the Japanese, it will be very troublesome.

In Yang Chao's vision, the Russian fleet converged, and then a naval battle with the Japanese warships, with the strength of the Japanese who could easily annihilate the Russian fleet, they would not lose too badly in front of the strengthened Russian fleet, and the final outcome should be Russia's crushing victory over Japan, and Japan lost the naval battle, but it would not lose its sea supremacy, and the two sides would have to fight a decisive battle on land.

When the two sides are exhausted from fighting on land, it is time for my Daqing Dynasty to make a powder debut, Yuan Shikai's Beiyang Army entered the Northeast in a high-profile manner, personally recovered the Northeast, and Yang Guowei replaced Japan as a fortress in Asia to block Russia's southward advance, and then obtained the support of Britain and the United States, and began to start industrialization.

So Yang Chao's support for the Russians should also come to an end.

At the beginning of May, the Japanese began a sustained assault on Arthur.

They gathered an army of 200,000 in Lushun.

The Japanese mobilized a total of 400,000 troops in the northeast, leaving 200,000 to guard in Mukden at this time, and 200,000 were transferred to Lushun.

It can be said that the focus is on Lushun, and if the Russians take the opportunity to launch a counteroffensive at this time, they have the best chance of capturing Mukden.

It's just that Linievich's level is not as good as Kuropatkin, he also saw this opportunity, but when the Japanese attacked, Kuropatkin couldn't resist it, and now in the case of defense, Linevich also lost his troops, and the Russians' large-scale attack lasted for three days, if it weren't for the Japanese not having enough troops, they would have been able to take advantage of the situation to attack Tieling.

"Hmph, a hundred-kilometer-long front, a general battle of five or six hundred thousand troops on both sides combined, is not something that ordinary people can play."

This battle situation was not expected by Yang Chao at all, Yang Chao is becoming more and more interested in that Kuropatkin, this thing can retreat in such a large-scale battle as the Battle of Mukden, it is simply a miracle, and the Battle of Mukden was fought like that, in the end, the Russian army lost more than 80,000, and the Japanese army lost more than 70,000, this level should be difficult for anyone to do before the First World War.

Reminiscent of the scene in World War I, when hundreds of thousands of Russian troops were surrounded and annihilated by the Germans at every turn, it is very good to prove Kuropatkin's ability.

Kuropatkin was a colonialist through and through, having participated in Russian expansion around the world, fought in the Turkish War, operated in China's Xinjiang region, supported the Kokand Khanate, and was appointed commander of the Far Eastern Army because of his support for expansion in Liaodong.

However, before the war, this man suggested that the Russian army withdraw from Liaodong, in order to avoid war with the Japanese, some people said that he was weak, and the Russo-Japanese War was lost because he was afraid of the head. As an old colonist who fought all the way from a small soldier to the Minister of War and is now the commander-in-chief of the Far East, how could he be a weak man?

Kuropatkin's idea was that before the Trans-Siberian Railway was built, it would be difficult for Russia to gain an advantage in the northeast, so he hoped to delay time, and the longer the delay, the better it would be for the Russians.

After the start of the war, Kuropatkin also retreated again and again, mainly to preserve troops, which gave the outside world the illusion of continuous defeat of the Russian army, but with the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway, every day of delay, the Russians were stronger.

However, his professional methods could not be understood by the majority of the people, and there were a large number of opponents in Russia, and even the Tsar himself was impatient with his explanations.

Linievich was different, he did not want to delay, so as soon as he seized the opportunity, he went on the offensive, but was defeated.

However, bizarrely, after the defeat and retreat from Mukden, he had nothing to do, but Kuropatkin was dismissed from his post on the grounds that the First Army, which attacked Mukden, was not in a good position to fight, which led to the defeat of the entire army.

Apparently he was the scapegoat of Lynevich, and before Lynevich launched the offensive, he was against it, but the tsar was supportive, and now he has been defeated, the tsar directly took Kuropatkin, and there are rumors in Russia that he will be court-martialed.

"Poor scapegoat."

The Japanese won Kuropatkin, but not Kontrachenko, the guy who later the USSR was going to give monuments to build really had two brushes.

After counterattacking the Japanese, Kondrachenko completely drove the Japanese out of the vicinity of Arthur, but did not continue to attack, he knew how to handle it, he tried his best to strengthen the defense, and designed three outer lines of defense. The first was to build machine gun and artillery positions in the mountains near Lushun; the second line is based on the forts and highland fortifications built in the past as the defense line, and heavy artillery is installed; The third way is the permanent fortifications.

It looks no different from the old defenses, but the use of old defenses is the embodiment of his level.

His three lines of defense, the firepower is coordinated with each other, and the first line of small and medium-caliber artillery and the rear heavy artillery can directly bombard the enemy, which can maintain a dense cross-fire network. 203 The ring fortifications on the high ground were also linked together by him with trenches and trenches, and became an interconnected defensive network.

After launching the Battle of Arthur, the Japanese spent 10 days clearing the outlying positions, and then crashed headlong into this defensive net, resulting in a bloody head.

In the past, Nogi Noshinori was deadlocked on this defense line for more than three months without progress, and now Gentaro Kodama, Kuroki Weizhen, and Okuho Gong are taking turns to fight, and they are still helpless here.

After fighting for twenty days, it was not until the end of May that the Japanese voluntarily abandoned the offensive.

At this time, the Russian Second Fleet arrived.

In mid-May, the Russian Second Fleet arrived at Cam Ranh Bay, and after only one day here, it was driven out by the French, ostensibly a protest from the Japanese, but in fact it was a concern for the British, and what the French were most afraid of now was that the British would directly enter the war, and the British warships had been following the Russian fleet all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, and when they arrived in the Indian Ocean, the British fleet in India continued to monitor, and if the British Navy entered the war, everyone knew that the Russian fleet was doubling its strength and was dead.

So as soon as the Japanese protested, the French took it when they saw it, and asked the Russian fleet, which could be started with a little coal, to get out of the way, and the Russians went to the open sea, and only then did they get enough coal through the French coaling ships, and then set off for the north.

Everyone decided that the Japanese should stop the Russian fleet in the Taiwan Strait, but the Japanese did not, and the Russians sailed smoothly through the Taiwan Strait and swaggered their supply ships into Shanghai.

On May 25th, they arrived in Shanghai, and after adding coal, they sailed to Lushun, and on May 27th, the day when the Japanese-Russian naval war began, the Russian warships arrived at Lushun smoothly.

The reason for this success was that the Japanese fleet not only stopped attacking Arthur by land, but also lifted the naval blockade of the port of Arthur, and the Japanese combined fleet withdrew to Japan and mainly protected the transport ships to Korea in the Tsushima Strait.

But the Japanese did one thing, asking the Qing government to arrest Yang Chao and hand him over to Japan for trial.