The Russian army in the Oskemen and Aledka areas has reached 230,000 troops, commanded by the commander of Army Group North Zarubaev and the commander of Army Group South Bildgreen.

Tsarist Russia is a very strange country, and unlike the arrogant and aggressive diplomacy on the surface, the domestic media propaganda is full of enthusiasm, threatening to defend national interests at the expense of bloodshed, and to occupy the Far East and Xinjiang provinces, they are actually inadequate in military preparations.

Although in June and September 1900, Tsarist Russia carried out two successive military conscription and mobilizations, increased its army by 440,000 in the country, and transferred several groups of main forces from the European front and the Balkans to Oskmen to form the Northern Army, but in terms of the distribution of military equipment and materials, it was completely chaotic and dragged on.

Xinjiang Province has already entered winter, the Northern Group Army and the Southern Group Army are still applying for winter clothing, and nearly half of the temporarily formed Southern Group Army is still in a state of having guns and bullets.

According to the statistics of the General Administration of National Intelligence, even the main force of the Northern Army, ostensibly has 3 armies and multiple reading regiments, with a total of 127,000 people, but the actual heavy equipment has not yet been transported from Europe, and there are only 134 howitzers of 75mm caliber at present.

In terms of artillery power, the so-called main Russian force is not as good as the reading force of the Yarkand Khanate, which is supported by France and Russia, although the artillery of the Yarkand Khanate is relatively old, the total number is more than 300 solid.

The intelligence proves everything, Russia is not ready for war, and at present it only wants to use the so-called strong army force to intimidate China, and they do not believe that China really dares to fight.

At least Nicholas II personally believed that in the face of the huge number and great strength of the Tsarist Russian army, the "Qing Zheng Axe", which had a total of only a few hundred thousand troops, was completely vulnerable, and did not have the courage to start a war with the Tsarist Empire.

When Yang Zongli sent a telegram and Hu Chuyuan asked about the situation on the Northwest Front, Hu Chuyuan was secretly discussing this matter with Lu Guangquan and Li Kaiye.

Hu Chuyuan's opinion is very clear, it is foolish to completely force Tsarist Russia to break out all war potential now, but it is completely possible to defeat the so-called Yarkand Khanate before Tsarist Russia is ready.

November 7, 1900, late.

The authorization order signed by Hu Chuyuan for the counterattack was issued to Li Kaiye, and from then on, the military command of the Northwest Front will be officially held by Li Kaiye, who will command all divisions subordinate to the Northwest Front on the spot.

Thousands of troops are easy to obtain, but one general is hard to find.

There is no doubt that Li Kaiye is the good general that Hu Chuyuan carefully selected and finally gave full trust.

Hu Chuyuan even thought that if New China was going to award the first army general...... The top ten will be Li Kaiye, because this person is too powerful.

…… The desert roared, and the yellow sand and snow fluttered and fluttered in the cold wind, sweeping away like a huge yellow-white wave.

It was the first time in his life that Li Kaiye had seen such a cruel world.

He had received authorization from Hu Chuyuan and the Army General Staff, and now he was the commander-in-chief of the Northwest Front, with the Huguang Corps, China's most elite corps, as well as the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Corps and the Xinjiang Provincial Corps.

Since the domestic reserve force was far from sufficient, with Hu Chuyuan's special approval, he began to directly transfer recruits from Hunan and Hubei provinces on a large scale in March to conduct intensive training in Shanshan, Jiuquan, and Lanzhou, expanding all eight divisions of the Huguang Corps to a wartime scale of 30,000 men each.

The Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Corps certainly cannot compete with the most elite Huguang Corps in China, and it has only increased to four divisions at present, temporarily expanding to the size of integrated divisions, with a total of 82,000 troops.

For the time being, the Xinjiang Provincial Corps has only one division, but there are more than 40,000 people, mainly local soldiers, and they have a strong sense of defending their homeland, and almost all of them bring their own horses to join the army.

However, the number of grassroots officers in the Xinjiang Provincial Corps is seriously insufficient, and the actual combat strength and military execution capability are not very strong.

With the secret expansion of his military strength in the northwest to 370,000 people, and the expansion of the new barracks of the four major corps of Huguang, Jianghuai, Qingxu, and Zhili, the number of domestic firearms stocks has bottomed out, and the arsenals in various places are urgently producing new Jiangnan rifles, and the Laiwu Arsenal and Fuzhou Arsenal are producing Browning rifles.

Fortunately, the stock of 7.62mm caliber pointed bullets is very abundant.

On the American side, the Oakland Arsenal and the Colt Arsenal are stepping up production of new Browning rifles, and many other firearms factories are ...... Including the Springfield Arsenal in the United States, it has also been authorized to produce the new Jiangnan M1894 rifle, and is mass-producing rifles and bullets to meet the needs of the Chinese market.

Arsenals in Kuching, Haiphong, North Vietnam, and the Philippines are also speeding up production.

Purely competing for productivity, Li Kaiye is still very confident.

Although the headquarters already has six reliable military off-road vehicles, Li Kaiye is still used to riding horses, and in heavy snowstorms, he rides a Hequ horse improved with the blood of Baibu horses, with black hair and white hooves, commonly known as snow treading.

He liked the name.

The number of such war horses in the country is not much, the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Corps mainly uses Hequ horses and Mongolian horses, and the Xinjiang Provincial Corps mainly uses Yanqi horses, and Mongolian horses are used to supplement the deficiencies.

Li Kaiye felt that it didn't matter, Mongolian horses also had the benefits of Mongolian horses, especially in such a harsh environment.

Heavy snow swept the wind and sand, and he took dozens of cavalry from the guard company to brave the wind and snow all the way to Tuoxun County, where the newly formed 33rd and 35th Divisions of the Huguang Corps were hidden in the big Gobi Desert at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains at the southernmost tip of Tuoxun County.

The two divisions are relatively small in size, with less than 20,000 men, but they are all elite soldiers drawn from the Huguang Corps, and hundreds of young noncommissioned officers of Huguang nationality are drawn from the three army academies in Changsha, Wuchang, and Nanchang to supplement them.

These people came together with only one goal, and that was to train China's first new mechanized corps.

A few miles away from the barracks, Li Kaiye had already seen dozens of armored vehicles speeding through the desert, with hundreds of soldiers following behind him.

Due to the small number of armored vehicles in active service, in order to train a sufficient number of driving personnel, each armored vehicle has to undertake four small groups of training exercises, and after entering service, these armored vehicles have hardly stopped running.

Reining in his horse, Li Kaiye watched from afar with a telescope, and at a glance, more than 30 armored vehicles were divided into three groups according to different functions and models, and nearly two battalions of infantry columns followed behind.

The white armored car in front was the car of Sun Daoyuan, the commander of the 33rd Division, who was himself the commander and watcher, and was also using binoculars to observe the surrounding terrain and the formation of armored troops.

Although the Army General Staff has given a set of systematic answers, it is still only on paper and needs to pass the large-scale practical test.

Li Kaiye also has no definite answer to this, and many times, he will silently speculate in his mind alone.

At present, the infantry cannon armored vehicle TZB-2 is the absolute main force and core of the mechanized corps, with many advantages such as fast speed, good mobility, excellent cross-country and obstacle crossing, fierce firepower, and average armor protection.

With TZB-2 as the core, use trucks and cavalry to fight in a wide range of roundabouts, raid the opponent's supply lines, cut off the best retreat route of the opponent, form an arched encirclement, use slower self-propelled artillery units, cooperate with the artillery columns under each regiment to carry out fire coverage strikes, and finally organize a large-scale encirclement offensive to completely annihilate the opponent.

Or use the TZB-2 to forcibly break through the opponent's blockade line and trenches, divide the opponent's army group into multiple small forces, concentrate firepower to eliminate the two flank troops, and flank and encroach one by one.

These are the two more suitable tactics that Li Kaiye deduced in his mind, and he believes that these are also the most important combat methods of the mechanized corps.

If the TZA, which has more powerful defensive armor and firepower, is officially put into service, then the TZA should be used as the main core force for assault operations, and the TZP is responsible for carrying out rapid and mobile concentrated fire and artillery shelling with conventional artillery, and then the TZB will complete the outflanking and cutting attack.

At the same time, the army has made large-scale use of trucks, off-road vehicles, and armored transport vehicles to carry out rapid mobilization, and carried out lightning operations around the three major systems of armored vehicles.

This is, of course, a more perfect mechanized tactic.

Fast!

Li Kaiye believed that the biggest characteristic of the tactics of the mechanized corps is not its strong attack and defensive power, but its "fastness," which pierces the opponent's most important defense point with lightning speed, and that the real large-scale operation is still decided by the conventional troops.

The mechanized corps cannot be stopped, and it must continue to march, cut, and outflank the opponent, and it must ensure that the mechanized troops, cavalry units, and conventional units form a hierarchical and integrated advance.

The 33rd Division's small-scale tactical coordination exercise gradually came to an end, and Li Kaiye continued to ride his horse into the exercise site.

Seeing him coming, Sun Daoyuan immediately asked people to drive his TZB-2 infantry machine gun armored car to meet him, and there was still more than ten meters away, Sun Daoyuan jumped down fiercely, and ran in front of Li Kaiye in a few big steps.

Sun Daoyuan saluted with a straight body, and shouted loudly: "Sun Daoyuan, the commander of the 33rd Division, has seen the commander!" ”

Thirty-seven-year-old Sun Daoyuan is a big-faced, rough-skinned, black person, surnamed Ge is resolute and resolute, looks like a rough man, in fact, he has read Chinese and foreign classics, and has studied machinery and chemical industry and other professional knowledge in Germany, which can be called a knowledge-based general.

Li Kaiye returned the salute with a horsewhip, still riding on horseback, and asked Sun Daoyuan, "How is the training?" ”

Sun Daoyuan replied: "Report to the overseer, our 33rd Division plans to organize 80 TA1,420 TB2, 110 TP3, and 570 other auxiliary vehicles...... Now, if we can replenish the planned vehicles, our 33rd Division can go directly to the battlefield. ”

Li Kaiye nodded slightly with satisfaction and said, "Don't worry about auxiliary vehicles, you can make up for them next month." Production of the Model T is already accelerating, and I confirmed with the Prime Minister yesterday that more than 300 new cars will be in service by the end of the month. However, we are asking for it, and the Zhili Corps and the Qingxu Corps are also asking for it, don't worry. ”

When he participated in the first Qing War, Sun Daoyuan was only 27 years old, graduated from the Fuzhou Artillery Art School, the predecessor of the Fuzhou Army Academy, studied at the Berlin Army Academy in Germany for two years, and was urgently transferred back to China to serve as the commander of the artillery column of the first battalion of Huguang.

After the war, Sun Daoyuan returned to the Berlin Army Academy in Germany to continue his studies, and under the instruction of Hu Chuyuan, he studied German affairs and thought while remediating mechanical expertise.

In 1895, Sun Daoyuan returned to China as the brigade commander of the artillery brigade of the first division of the Huguang Corps, which was directly under the control of Li Kaiye at that time.

Li Kaiye jumped off the horse, personally boarded a TZB-2 infantry machine gun armored car, drove it himself, Sun Daoyuan also climbed into the cockpit, and the two of them talked about some necessary improvements and dissatisfactions.

Li Kaiye likes to ride horses very much, but he knows in his heart that it will not be long before the entire Huguang Corps will begin to enter the process of mechanization, and as the first commander of the Huguang Corps, he must be the most proficient in mechanization.

Therefore, he also put in a lot of hard work in driving the locomotive, and every once in a while he had to come to the training base to inspect it, drive it himself, and participate in training and tactical exercises.

The TZB-2 is certainly not able to compete with the cavalry in terms of speed alone, at most it is the speed of a little donkey, but they can ...... non-stop 24 hours a day Even non-stop driving for several days and nights in a row, coupled with the defense and firepower of armored vehicles, the advantage of such a group surname is incomparable with cavalry units.

Only by sitting in the cockpit can Li Kaiye especially experience the changes of the times and the sense of elimination, and he knows very well in his heart that as long as the new more than 100 new TZB-2 armored vehicles officially arrive at the base, he will be completely sure that he will completely defeat the troops of the Yarkand Khanate and the northern group army of Tsarist Russia stationed in Eskemen and Aredka.

Of course, like Hu Chuyuan, his ambitions are also very big.

This result of the war could not satisfy him, and he wanted to continue to attract the main forces of Tsarist Russia to the northwest front, crushing the opponent at once, and cutting off the supply of the entire northeastern front.

At that time, no matter how Yang Zongli fights, the person who ranks first in the credit book will definitely be him.

Skillfully driving this armored car, what he thought of in his heart was Yang Zongli, the five tigers of the Philippines in the past, except for Yang Zongyue who was still in the Philippines, the other four people had already returned to the motherland.

He thought that now was the time for the Five Tiger Generals to be high and low.

He.

Li Kaiye is the first person.

This thought flashed, Li Kaiye did not continue to think about it, and concentrated on driving the armored car and leading the other vehicles back to the base together.

In the Gobi Desert base at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, the 33rd and 35th Divisions are concentrated here, thousands of vehicles are scattered and parked, and there are a number of test vehicles specially used for dismantling and maintenance training.

On a large field farther away and wider, hundreds of vehicles train for driving classes around various man-made obstacles.

In the valley on the west side, a large gasoline reserve base is being built, which can store 7,000 tons of gasoline, and in Shanshan, there is a 100,000-ton reserve center to cope with the westward expansion of the entire mechanized corps.

At that time, a large amount of gasoline was hoarded in Shanshan, and then transported along the railway to Wusu and Huocheng, and transported to the divisions and regiments by trucks and tankers through these two regions, and accompanied by the entire mechanized corps to the whole of Kazakhstan.

Hu Chuyuan gave him a guaranteed goal to raid the surname to occupy Omsk, and the highest was to fight until Tyumen.

Looking at this large base from a distance, where nearly 37,000 troops were concentrated for intensive training, Li Kaiye could already imagine the future in his heart, and in half a year, these two divisions would be formally formed.

At that time, he can really do a big job.

(To be continued)