"Indochina needs to be strengthened. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info”

In the Shanghai Governor's Palace, almost all the high-ranking officers and staff officers of the Far Eastern Theater made such a judgment. Although the Tang Dynasty was initially involved in the situation in Siam, in all fairness, even if Rama I ascended the throne and Zheng Xin was killed, in fact, the commercial interests of the Tang Dynasty would not be affected. Instead, Rama I was a standard ruler of the Lord, and under his rule, Siam began to recuperate after years of war and the fluctuating reign of Trung Sin. And Datang was able to take advantage of Siam's economic and social recovery to seek benefits from it.

But this little bit of business interests is no longer in the eyes of the Tang people. It can be said that with the successive victories and the implementation of strategies, Datang is no longer satisfied with making some money doing business in Siam. Interfering in Siam was not a temporary move, but actually constituted a relatively important part of Datang's international strategy.

The Tang Dynasty was committed to building its own colonial empire and rapidly industrializing the country to raise the level of civilization. This is due to the fact that the Tang Dynasty is fundamentally a country established by the Crossing Public, and the Republic of China and the Modern Masses in the Crossing Masses are all groups that have seen the future, they have clear development goals, and they are highly looking forward to restoring their original living standards and social forms. The industrialization and high civilization of the Tang Dynasty are not just enough to build the North American mainland by themselves. This will inevitably require a huge system to support it, regardless of the international environment, at least it needs a large enough domestic demand market, a large enough source of raw materials, and a large enough population.

Strategically, Pan-East Asia can be said to be the most important part of Datang and the center of realizing the dream of the Tang century. Even more so than North America. The so-called pan-East Asian. In fact, it can also be called Asia-Pacific. It stretches from the Siberian Far East in the north to Greater China, the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, the Indochina Peninsula, the islands of Southeast Asia, Oceania and the islands of the western Pacific. The region is undoubtedly centered around Greater China, with an abundant workforce, an almost complete range of natural resources, important ******** strategic importance, and the potential to become a world center.

From the moment when the Cuckoo Plan was successful and the Governor's Mansion in Shanghai was listed, from Bai Nan, a war export madman, to the Tang State Council and Congress in Los Angeles. They all have an extremely ambitious consciousness -- that is, pan-East Asia can only belong to the Tang Dynasty, and there will be no country in the substantive sense here, let alone a colony of any country. Datang will establish a regional political and economic system with China as the regional core and Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia as the economic and development hinterland.

This grand blueprint was not formulated by Bai Nan alone, but a consensus idea in the Tang Dynasty political arena. So under this kind of thinking, when there is an opportunity for Siam to intervene, the Tang people will make a decisive move. Of course, it is precisely because of the accidental and sudden nature of the outbreak of the Siam crisis that the Tang people need more or less aftermeasures to improve the whole problem.

Siam is the political heart of Indochina, involving Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Arguably. The Tang people pressed the point of Siam, and it was not only Siam itself that reacted. Rather, it is a country on the entire Indochina Peninsula. The Burmese invasion of northwestern Siam was a new problem that the Tang Dynasty had to face. Datang has never been a country that suffers, and there is no reason to sit idly by and watch this region be taken away by the Burmese.

The national strength of the Tang Dynasty is growing by leaps and bounds, especially Bai Nan's more cheap and life-threatening Yamato Corps, which enables him to support many wars with a certain intensity. Prior to this, the Tang Dynasty was limited by the size and manpower of the country, so it could only trade with Siam, and at the same time supported goods like Nguyen Phuc Anh. But now, the Tang people look at the old Nguyen regime of Nguyen Phuc Anh, plus the Xishan Dynasty in the north, which is very much an eyesore, and sooner or later they will be eliminated.

Although the mountain battle brought a lot of trouble to the logistics of the Tang people, this battle had to be fought. The Tang people had to subdue or even destroy the Burmese in order to truly dominate Indochina and establish overseas territories based on the values of the Tang Dynasty.

Of course, this is not a Total War or Iron Ambition game after all, and the complexity of the war is overwhelming. With Bai Nan's power, when he came to this point, he also had to ask for help from home, because in the foreseeable war against Burma, Bai Nan could expel the Burmese from Siam, but if the Gongbang Dynasty did not repair it, Siam would continue to have conflicts in the future.

Also, Burma began to decline after Mon Yun, and now the British have established colonies in Bengal and are constantly expanding eastward. The next step is Assam and other regions, and then Myanmar. On the other hand, after the sixties of the nineteenth century, the British intensified their invasion of Burma, and finally were able to destroy the Gongbang dynasty and establish a colonial government there. In this plane, the British lost to the French in northwest India, and they must work harder to expand eastward, Burma is a major stronghold of the Tang Dynasty extending into the Indian Ocean, and it is also the best barrier to stabilize the southwest of China, and it is also a resource-rich area, which the Tang Dynasty cannot give up.

Therefore, in Burma, there is a hidden competitive relationship between the Tang Dynasty and the British, even if the so-called colonization of the two countries is still not a word. But in any case, there is always nothing wrong with dividing Myanmar's sphere of influence in advance.

The war against Burma will be dominated by the Yamato Corps, with a small number of regular troops of the Tang Army participating, and there will be no large-scale mechanized corps like in the Qing Dynasty, and the Japanese soldiers will fight in the mountains and forests with the soles of their feet, and the conditions are unimaginably difficult. Even, if there are some tactical mistakes, it is very likely to face defeat. Since the founding of the Tang Dynasty, there has never been a defeat in the exact sense, and Bai Nan does not trust the Yamato Corps enough, and he will also worry that they will collapse in the mountains and forests of Burma. When the time comes, it will be quite a hassle to clean up.

There is a possibility of failure, but the probability of success is greater, after all, this is the army of two eras. Although the Burmese were still more firearms than the Qing army before them, they were still not comparable to the Yamato Corps, and as long as they were cautious and appropriate, the war would inevitably be won.

The only problem is that Bai Nan does not have enough military funds to maintain such a war, the Siamese side did not fight hard, and it also cost him millions of funds, and now if it enters Burma, there will inevitably be greater pressure on logistics, and the Tang army needs to spend money to hire Siamese people to carry on their shoulders, of course, this part can be offset by cheap grain produced in the Tang Dynasty. After the Battle of Thonburi, the Siamese Standing Army basically disappeared, and it was the Tang Army that maintained the structure of Siam's overseas territory. And this part of the Tang army has been transferred into Burma, and it is inevitable that something will happen in Siam.

After all, now Siam and Cambodia need the Tang Army to defend them, even if they don't need 10,000 people, they need at least seven or eight thousand people. Therefore, it is inevitable that Bai Nan will continue to transfer the Yamato Corps from Ou Yu, and even send German mercenaries to fight in Indochina. However, the German mercenaries are more expensive than the cheaper Japanese in terms of the price of use, which still makes Bai Nan not plan to use them on the main battlefield, and it is not bad to carry out security maintenance work.

The tropical climate was more unbearable for both the Japanese and the Germans, and this may also become the most important problem faced by the Tang army. Stocking up on antibiotics is still a guarantee to at least go to the tropics.

In terms of funding, Bai Nan had to reach out to the country, which was also justified. In a letter to President Zhao Daling, Bai Nan expressed the hope that the president would approve a sum of 20 million Tang Yuan for the Tang Army's expansion operations in the Indochina Peninsula. The Tang Army's national defense budget of 100 million Tang Yuan this year is a small amount, and this opening of 20 million Tang Yuan is equivalent to taking another fifth of it. Of course, Bai Nan didn't decide to ask for this money just by patting his head, he compiled a relatively detailed account, including all kinds of expenses required, covering more than 20,000 Tang foreign soldiers and various military material transportation costs, ammunition supplies and medicine procurement, as well as local maintenance funds.

Although the amount of money is large, but the money is basically rotten in their own pots, the purchase of various military supplies are domestic enterprises, stimulating the production of domestic enterprises, and transportation is conducive to the country's shipping industry.

In fact, Bai Nan can still make a sum of money, that is, a sum of money scavenged from Siam and Chenla. These two countries can also be regarded as relatively wealthy, especially some nobles still have a lot of money in their hands. Zheng Xin's property and the property of the Rama I family have been confiscated by the Tang army, plus some Siamese nobles who fought against the Tang army before, Bai Nan can still get about 10 million Tang Yuan in funds. In this way, he will have 30 million military expenses, which can support him to fight this war.

In the previous years of the Qing-Burma War, the Qing army spent 9.11 million taels of military spending, which is roughly 20 million Tang Yuan. That was the entire cost of more than 60,000 people fighting for seven years, and Bai Nan prepared 30 million Tang Yuan, which was more than half of the military expenses of the Qing army in the Qing-Burma War. However, it is obvious that the Tang army had to pay more expensive salaries than the Qing army's Green Battalion and Eight Banners, even if it was a Japanese soldier in the Yamato Corps. Moreover, the various military supplies that go out on the expedition are also more complex and the most expensive. Therefore, with the development of civilization, the trend can only be to spend more and more money on a war. Bai Nan prepared about 36,000 troops, which Bai Nan believed would be able to support the Tang army for at least two years of war. If you can feed the war with war, then you are even more optimistic. (To be continued.) )