"China will not stay asleep forever, and if it takes too long for Japan to rise, there is no guarantee that China will not have heroes and great men to achieve revival, and then Japan will have no hope at all. Even if China really stays asleep, it will inevitably be completely divided by the great powers after a long time, and if Japan can't become a great power quickly, it is likely that it will not even be able to catch up with the last train", Ito Hirobumi thought of this, and finally made up his mind, "Saigo-kun is right, we must win this war, no matter what the cost is, we must win, for this goal, we can and should bet all the bets!" Do as you say, but you can't afford it, so I'll do it! ”

"The Navy will not let your Excellency down again!" , Saigo Congdao suddenly looked ecstatic, bowed to Ito Hirobumi and thanked him, he was ready to commit suicide, anyway, the Japanese government must execute the contract even if it is only to maintain international credit, and it is worth it if he dies, but he didn't expect Ito Hirobumi to be willing to come out and take the blame, and he didn't even have to lose his official position, so he was naturally grateful in his heart.

"If Dadonggou loses, there is still a little personnel left in the Combined Fleet to rebuild, if it loses again, don't think about recovering in ten years, or even fifteen years", Ito Hirobumi let out a faint sigh after hearing this, and the whole person seemed to be several years old all of a sudden, and only spoke again after half a ring, "Since it has been desperate, then just spend more, and when the warship arrives, the cabinet will allocate another amount of funds to import smokeless ****** and picric acid explosives, so as to avoid another loss of the Combined Fleet in this regard, Don't be stingy with the current inventory, all of it is used for training and improving artillery skills as much as possible, and it won't be used in the future anyway. With so much ammunition, if it can't be trained, it can only mean that the navy is not working hard enough. I don't want to see that in the next naval battle, our artillery will still be inferior to our opponents, and even the rate of fire of (of the same type) artillery will be a big cut behind! ”

Saigo was naturally even happier when he heard this, but both Ito Hirobumi and he underestimated the greed of the Western capitalists, and after the Battle of Daitogou fully proved the superiority of high explosives, the West greatly raised the prices of smokeless gunpowder and picric acid. The unexpectedly active Beiyang sailors have made Japan have to wait for Western companies to deliver to their doors, and the other party has become more and more expensive.

As a result, just three bases (limited to those ten warships) of ammunition cost more than a million pounds. The total amount of hard currency paid by the Japanese government for the reconstruction of the Combined Fleet increased to more than £4 million, leaving the treasury empty like never before.

If it weren't for the fact that the Beiyang Naval Division was limited by lack of funds, the frequency of sorties was not high, and it did not dare to move those ships flying the flags of the Western powers, Japan, an island country, would even be in danger of being completely blocked

Speaking of which, the Japanese government originally planned to pretend to negotiate peace and use Li Hongzhang's order to temporarily stabilize the Beiyang Naval Division, but what they didn't expect was that after the replacement of the commander of the Beiyang Naval Division, Liu Buyun was no longer able to control him, although Li Hongzhang issued an order that the Beiyang Naval Division was not allowed to "go to sea to provoke" during the peace talks, but this guy still used routine training as an excuse to often let Dingyuan or Zhenyuan take his little brother out to hang out.

Although the Beiyang Navy Division did not dare to sail to the coastal waters of Japan for fear of encountering mines, it still caused a lot of losses to the Japanese military and civilians, and the psychological panic continued to spread in Japan.

The more urgent problem to be solved is the logistics supply that the Japanese army in Korea has almost cut off

After a number of transport ships were sunk by the Beiyang Naval Division, the Japanese base camp no longer dared to take the Yellow Sea route to transport supplies to the Japanese troops in Korea, so they could only choose a safer approach.

The main route was to transport supplies to the port of Busan in southeastern Korea, and then to Seoul, the capital of Korea, by land, where the main force of the Japanese army entering Korea was located.

The secondary route was to take the Sea of Japan route to transport supplies to the port of Wonsan on the east coast of Korea, which was seized by a Japanese army with an infantry brigade (dissatisfied with the formation), who would be used as a surprise force to cooperate with the main force of the Japanese army in North Korea on the Seoul side, because it was a landing in Wonsan, so it was called the "Wonsan Detachment".

The secondary route was just that, firstly, it was only necessary to carry out a large amount of cheap shipping, and this shipping route was the safest, and secondly, the strength of the Yuanshan detachment was relatively small, and their scheduled mission required them to cross mountains and mountains without carrying heavy weapons, so it was easy to meet their logistical supply needs.

The problem of the main route is too great, first of all, the strength of the Japanese army in Seoul is much more than that of the Wonsan detachment, not only the remnants of the defeated troops withdrawn from the Pyongyang campaign, but also the main force of the 3rd Division of the Japanese Army that landed in Korea before the Battle of the Yellow Sea (the Wonsan detachment also belongs to this division in terms of organization) and the headquarters of the First Army, with a total strength of no less than 20,000, and a large number of heavy weapons, and the supply consumption is more than 10 times that of the Wonsan detachment, so the logistical pressure is extremely great.

Coupled with the fact that North Korea's infrastructure is miserable, not to mention railways and asphalt/cement roads, and there is not even a smooth gravel road that can be used by large horse-drawn carriages, the difficulty of transportation can be imagined.

What made the commander of the Japanese First Army, Yama Prefecture Aritomo, even more headache, was that the land of Korea was not peaceful at this time

Before and after the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese army not only grossly interfered in the internal affairs of Korea, supported Korean traitors and pro-Japanese puppet governments, but also exploited and plundered Korea even more, causing the anti-Japanese sentiment of the Korean people to rise to an unprecedented height.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, the rebel army of the Donghak Party of Korea, which had made peace with the Korean government after the Qing army entered the DPRK, once again rose up, and the leader of the "Southern Junction faction," Chun Hyun-joon, who had always been resolutely anti-Japanese, gradually gained the leading power of the rebel army, making this peasant uprising of unprecedented scale in Korean history show an increasingly strong nationalist tendency.

Although the rebel army was inferior in weapons and could not be defeated by a single stronghold with a little city defense, it was enough to pose a fatal threat to the Japanese army's land supply lines, making the logistics supply of the main force of the Japanese army entering Korea more and more stretched.

Although the Japanese army in Korea brutally strangled the Donghak rebel army with the cooperation of some Korean traitors, due to the extreme lack of ammunition (after the adventurous Yellow Sea route was abandoned, even the Japanese soldiers who were sent out to carry out combat missions had a maximum of 5 rounds of ammunition per person). The morale of the rebels was so high that they had to fight to the point of bayonets in almost every battle, so that even if they could win, the number of casualties, especially death and mutilation, would be considerable