ps: I'm sorry, I drank high at the class reunion yesterday, and I forgot how to get home, so I didn't even write a leave note.

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In the early morning of 1 April, on the outskirts of Gerga, 79 kilometres north of Tashkent, the southbound railway, which had taken four months and took 200,000 prisoners of war to build, came to a halt after crossing Shymkent. At the end of the railway, two 1938-style hammer heavy train guns resembling the K5 "Leopold" slowly drove towards the two cross-shaped temporary railroad tracks on the left and right under the command of soldiers. On the train, the soldiers of the 701 battalion of the mobile railway gun have already begun to prepare for the shelling.

The area of the 22-kilometer Zhange Bazha Gang fortification in front of the railway artillery was a headache for Song Ziqing and the General Staff, and even alarmed Yue Peng, who had never made a move since the start of the war, to personally come to inspect it. "Are the parameters out? Okay, just follow this, after 40 minutes, the cannon hasn't been fired, and I'll go to the confinement room by myself! Contact the command, and in 30 minutes I will see the reconnaissance plane in position. After Kong Qinggui gave the order loudly, he personally climbed onto the observation platform on the top of the observation carriage, and the folding lifting platform quickly sent him and several officers to a height of 45 meters.

After decades, Kong Qinggui was still not used to the cold in the northwest, so he handed the stove in his hand to the orderly before picking up the telescope. At this height, you can already see the fortified area in front of you, and the picture in the telescope makes the officers of the railway artillery battalion who participated in the battle for the first time gasp. I could only see the 15-kilometer-wide and 5-kilometer-deep fortified area as silent as a ghost town, all kinds of dilapidated fortifications emitting black smoke, strange-shaped corpses all over the surface, tanks tilting their heads, large and small craters denser than the sesame seeds on the baked cakes, and even a snake with broken wings stuck straight upside down in the mud at the edge of the woods. In order to seize this necessary place to go south to Tashkent, five divisions of the 15th Army, one brigade of the Polish Army, and 60,000 Soviet troops have been strangled for a week in this place called Zhangebazhagang, but after paying the price of more than 3,000 soldiers killed, there is still no hope of seizing. Actually, it's not just here. To the south, the Uzbek Army Group was also blocked on the southern bank of the Almazar river, all because of the Soviet fortress group built on the hill 45 kilometers away.

"Son of a bitch!"

Looking at the body of the pilot in the cabin with half of his body exposed, Kong Qinggui, who had participated in the skillful capture of the Irkutsk fortress back then, was already a major general, and still couldn't change his fiery temper, so he put away the warm hearth and pointed to the Soviet fortress built on the mountain in the distance, and scolded: "See? Car No. 1 pressed the fortress cannon with a range extender projectile! Car No. 2 hit the fortified area and blew me up! You know? ”

After clarifying the target, the two company commanders immediately adjusted the shells as needed.

The Hammer Heavy Train Gun is the Army's most powerful barreled artillery, similar in appearance to the K5. The caliber is 305 mm, 50 times the caliber, the range is 55 kilometers when using a 256 kg bottom exhaust range extender projectile, the range of the bottom depression range extension projectile of the same weight is 47 kilometers, and the 450 kg heavy bomb is 32 kilometers, and the rocket range extender under development can reach a range of more than 80 kilometers.

The army has always had a large-caliber complex, and after the European War, it wanted to use the captured Grand Berta to imitate a 500 mm caliber long-range heavy artillery. However, as the army took the route of a large air force, many of the army's plans were scrapped, especially the plan for heavy artillery over 300 mm. It wasn't until the two Anhai-class battleships were replaced with 330 mm naval guns that Qin Zhangshu felt that he could use this batch of guns to realize the long-dreamed long-range heavy artillery, so he immediately proposed a modification plan. However, at that time, the military budget was insufficient, and the army, which had always tightened its belts to get by, only raised three modification costs, which were handed over to the Anqing Railway Machinery Factory and the Nanjing Naval Factory for joint research and development. After Yang Qiu learned about it, he also handed over the chassis drawings of the K5 to the two factories for study. After two years of experimentation and modification, it was finalized and delivered in August 1938. Since the artillery was eliminated by the navy and only needed to be refurbished, compared with the high price of $1.2 million per German K5, the full set of hammers cost only 720,000 yuan (about 360,000 US dollars). After the start of the war. The War Office has converted all of the remaining 14 guns and has delivered seven so far.

Thirty-five minutes later, when two lightning-converted two-seater reconnaissance planes flew over the head of the hammer, car No. 1 was the first to open fire. "Boom!" Roaring violently. Not only did it squeak the chassis of the heavy train, but it also alarmed tens of thousands of army officers and men who were resting in the rear. If the No. 1 car is 47 kilometers away because the target is firing. If you don't feel anything beyond the visual distance of the ground, then the shell of the No. 2 car shows everyone how powerful the hammer is.

The 450-kilogram low-speed heavy grenade accurately hit the fortified area 22 kilometers away, and a mushroom cloud up to 300 meters high immediately rose on the surface, and the soldiers standing at the height could clearly see that all the buildings and bunkers around the explosion were completely bulldozed as if they had been blown by strong winds. The fire control developed from the navy ensured that every shell could accurately hit the target, especially in the fortified area where the infantry comrades suffered a lot, and it was washed over and over again by the blast wave, and the Soviet troops hiding in the bunkers and trenches were blown to pieces, the rubble swept and shrapnel flew indiscriminately, and the craters that were several meters deep after the explosion shocked everyone.

As the train guns fired, the rested infantry once again put on M56 helmets and rushed into the attack position with their guns in hand, and the officers also deployed the offensive route as planned, and the tanks began to start, waiting for the horn of the charge to sound.

At the same time, a squadron of Thunderbolt fighters also appeared in the sky, far away guarding the Yun-10 high-altitude observation aircraft behind them. In the cabin, Yu Lei, commander of the Air Force's strategic bombing, and Dai Jintang, commander of the 15th Army, pointed to the group of several gray-brown Soviet fortresses hiding in the forest under the mushroom cloud: "Look, there. Tashkent had a total of three fortress groups, from north to south were "Turkestan", "Stalin" and "Kalinin", corresponding to Zhigar, Tashkent and Almazar, respectively. The three main Sekis were similar, each with a twin Type 1937 305-mm fortress gun, and Tashkent with two twin fortress guns. The maximum range of a light bomb is 44 km, and a heavy bomb can hit 30 km. The sub-fortresses are also full of 203-mm long-range cannons with a maximum range of 27 km. The main and auxiliary fortresses are both underground well structures, with internal compartments 2 meters thick, and ammunition depots are at the bottom, about 20 meters from the top cover. The secondary fortress has two layers, and the main fortress is three layers to prevent direct penetration. The ammunition depot of the main fortress was designed in the adjacent mountain, and the outer walls of all the fortresses were connected by passages with an average thickness of 3 meters, and the roof of the turret was also 3 meters thick, but in winter Apanashchenko ordered a layer of cement steel reinforced by 2 meters thick, and a 150-mm thick steel plate was laid in the middle of the two layers. In order to avoid our aerial reconnaissance, the roof was deliberately covered with soil, and in addition to the winter snowfall, the reconnaissance plane always thought that it was simply covering the soil and reinforcing it, and it was not until it blew up the soil layer that it knew that there was still a cement layer inside. We've tried sneak attacks. But the fortress was cleverly laid out, not to mention the dense mountains and forests, and there were two infantry positions in the middle to protect it. They also cut down all the forests on the east and west sides, and the assault pair was easily exposed to the hills.

There are four lines of defense in the fortified area of the Gangeba Gang below us, two of which extend into the mountains. In total, there were about 60,000 Soviet troops and 5 international columns, with a total strength of between 80,000. The 15th and 33rd armies had already destroyed two of them, but the remaining two were within range of the fortress guns. You see that Kong Qinggui's hammer train cannon can't blow up the fortress, so now you can only take out the nearby infantry and mountain dead spots first, suppress them with shell smoke to interfere with their aiming, and then solve the fortified area and the fortifications along the way. ”

"Look, they're firing!" Yu Lei's voice. The Soviet fortress artillery began to counterattack, and the twin 305-mm fortress guns in the main fortress took the lead in firing at the front of the fortified area, followed by six 203-mm long-range cannons hiding in the secondary fortress and supported at an angle with the main gun as the axis. Dai Anlan pointed to the explosion and continued: "The crossfire formed by the eight fortress cannons. It was just enough to cover the entire area of 15 kilometers in front of the Gang, so the troops rushed in and suffered heavy casualties. We also organized three bombings with 100 planes, but most of the bombs were eaten by mountains and forests, and now it is snowmelt again. Even incendiary bombs are not very effective. It's a similar story to the south, where we're in the hills and forests. There are forests and rivers. Taking advantage of the melting snow, Apanashchenko blew up the Syr Darya River and nearby rivers to increase the flow, breaking the pontoon bridge several times. Coupled with the threat of fortress artillery, Xie Ruyi had suspended crossing the river, and the main force turned south to cooperate with Sun Chuanfang to attack Samarkand first. ”

After the two introduced, Yue Peng understood what the problem was. In the general staff's battle plan, the firepower is calculated according to the top of the 3-meter fortress, and although the hammer train gun cannot break through this thickness, the maximum 800-kilogram armor-piercing bullet currently equipped by the air force is sufficient, and even if it cannot be penetrated, the explosion can crack the inner layer to form a scattering stream to kill and injure the soldiers inside. But now it has suddenly increased to a 5-meter cement and steel plate interlayer, and the level of protection has reached or even exceeded 460 mm Krupp homogeneous armor, a value that even the Navy's 406 mm extra-heavy armor-piercing projectiles can't beat! The scatter stream will also be absorbed by the steel plate, and no internal damage will be formed.

800 kg of aviation armor-piercing shells could not be smashed, let alone railway guns with a smaller angle of ground firing. Therefore, according to the calculations of the Air Force, at least 3 tons of bombs of the level of more than 3 tons are required. However, the 3-ton aviation armor-piercing projectile cannot be made immediately, because the armor-piercing projectile body is not like a high-explosive projectile that can be directly cast with pig iron, and it must use alloy steel casting technology. Not to mention China, even Europe and the United States cannot process 3 tons of alloy steel castings with machining, and they must be manufactured by hand. Not to mention that the pure manual construction is expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive, it takes at least three or four months from design to finalization. So this sudden situation made the army very worried, and even thought of the 420 mm big Berta captured during the European war, but the range of the big Berta was too short to get through. The Air Force also thought of using the Navy's 406-mm armor-piercing bombs to convert them into bombs, but the 406-mm shell body weighed more than 1 ton, and the bomb was different from the shell, so it was necessary to modify the shape, add a tail, and fill the balance, even if it was modified, the weight would exceed 2 tons, and the dive bomber could not move at all. If bombers were used, the horizontal bombing angle of the fortress built on the hill was very small, and there was not a sufficient number of roots to ensure the hit, so the train guns were brought in in the hope of blowing up the angle that could cover the bomb first.

Since Gerga and Almazar are the only way to flank Tashkent, there is no way to talk about victory without pulling out these two big nails. Therefore, Xu Shuzheng could only surround it first, transfer train artillery to cooperate with the air force to bomb day and night, and then focus on the direction of Samarkand and Urgench, while speeding up the clearing of the periphery, while thinking of a way.

After learning all about the situation in the department, Yue Peng, who returned to Shymkent, first sent a telegram to Beijing about the situation here, and asked the armament department to immediately study the heavy bombs, and finally after studying with Xu Shuzheng, he ordered to cancel the plan to cover the attack with railway artillery, and there was really no need to take such a risk when a large encirclement had already been achieved.

At the same time that the annihilation battle in Tashkent was blocked, Du Yuming's 10th Panzer Division, after cooperating with the 24th Army to flank Dushanbe, had already been ordered to quietly avoid the line of sight and return to Bukhara, 230 kilometers west of Samarkand.

On the dirt road to the Bukhara Pass, soldiers in sight sit in tanks, trucks and wagons, covering their mouths and noses with scarves over their mouths and noses, rolling westward. Since this is the junction of the Turkestan Mountains and the Transwenguz-Karakum Head Desert, the sky is covered with yellow sand when the wind blows at noon. "Hehe, it's still comfortable for you, the tanks and trucks are all wheels, it's good to see that we have a horse." Lin Xunnan, commander of the 106th Division, rode a horse to catch up with Du Yuming's half-track command car, opened the door and got into the carriage and sat down, and immediately put on a comfortable posture.

Du Yuming smiled dumbly: "Youxiang, you are born in the blessing and don't know the blessing, I don't believe you go to the tank to try, you can run ten miles and your bones will fall apart." ”

"I'm not going, it's as hot as a steamer, and I'm still comfortable on both legs." Lin Xunnan was envious, but he really let him drive the tank and immediately shook his head. When he saw the map on the table, he asked, "By the way, I heard that Tashkent is in trouble." ”

Apanashchenko's fortress array has spread all over the army, so Du Yuming said with a smile: "Yes, Apanashchenko has set up a fortress array, which can be regarded as making Xie Ruyi's commander Xie Ruyi miserable." Hearing that 20,000 horses were smashed in seven days and not pry open, even the chief of the General Staff was alarmed and went to the front line to inspect the situation in person. ”

"The fortress is trouble, but fortunately, we don't have to fight it. By the way, how far is Bukhara? Any intelligence? ”

"It's still 15 kilometers, and the reconnaissance battalion should be about to encounter." Du Yuming handed the telegram from the reconnaissance plane to Lin Xunnan: "At present, it has been found that there are two regiments, 30 tanks, one artillery battalion and two anti-tank battalions. How about you, do you come first or let my brother try my hand? ”

Lin Xunnan was also refreshed, waved his hand and smiled: "Come on, we mud legs, we won't compete with you." ”

Du Yuming smiled and threw the telegram to the staff officer: "Order Ji Ming's regiment to speed up, and I will see the battle start in an hour." ”