In March, the Northwest Wilderness is already feeling the breath of spring, the snow and ice are beginning to melt, the snow water seeps into the soil, and the withered yellow grasslands begin to show full of life. In the blue sky, several goshawks circled under the white clouds, looking for rats that had left their burrows and also began to forage on the grassland.

Colonel Ling Yuan, acting commander of the 277th Division of the Chinese National Defense Forces, took his adjutant Fan Hui and a team of guards from Kobdo over the Altai Mountains and arrived at the Brento Sea through Chenghua Temple.

In this era, there were two railways from the mainland to Xinjiang: one was the Lanxin Railway from Lanzhou to Dihua, the capital of Xinjiang Province, and the other was the Lanxin Railway from Suihua to Kobudo in the Zahaqin Banner and entered Xinjiang on the south side of Beita Mountain.

Before leaving Kobdo, Major General Yu Zhenhe, chief of staff of the 92nd Army under the Northern Front, quietly told Zhong Zhong to enter the mountains, and according to reliable sources from Beijing, the Wehrmacht might have a large-scale military operation in the northwest in the spring, and the whole campaign would not only end up with the recovery of Siberian territory east of the Macroyenisei River, but could be on a much larger scale than imagined.

When Ling Yuan heard that there was a big battle, he suddenly became excited.

The Northwest Theater and the Northern Theater did not fight any battles after 1938, except for occasional skirmishes with the Soviet troops along the ceasefire line between the two sides, and both the Chinese and Soviet sides appeared to be very restrained. After the Japanese army invaded China on a large scale, the Soviet army only carried out a large-scale offensive and then gave up military operations, especially after the outbreak of the war in Europe, the Soviet army had no time to look eastward, and Zhuyashvili strictly ordered the Soviet troops stationed in Siberia not to take the initiative to provoke disputes.

Due to the tight situation of the European battlefield, the Soviet and Russian sides had already exhausted their forces in the Far East, and it was an excellent time for the Chinese side to join forces with Germany and Austria to attack Soviet Russia and regain the lost territory.

Ling Yuan was ordered to rush to the Brento Sea. Check the readiness of water transport along the Irtysh River.

There is no doubt that logistical support plays a decisive role in modern warfare, and the most important point in the use of troops in the northwest is logistical support. In the operational plan drawn up by the General Staff, operations along the Trans-Siberian Railway are the most important tasks, and in addition, the flank offensive in Xinjiang and Kobdo provinces will also play a great role in containing them.

This era. The Altai region is also under the jurisdiction of the Khovdor province as it was during the Qing Dynasty. According to the campaign plan, in this campaign against the Soviet Union, the National Defense Forces will dispatch more than 2.6 million troops, half of which will advance westward along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in addition, 450,000 troops of the three group armies stationed in Xinjiang will march along the Ili River valley, and then turn to Central Asia, and the 750,000 troops of the five group armies stationed in Kobdo will be divided into two parts. Among them, the 11th and 31st armies will march to the area of the Tangnu-Ulianghai region, and then go down the Macroyenisei River to recapture Irkutsk with the main forces, and the 12th, 32nd, and 33rd armies, with a total of 500,000 troops, will march northwest along the Irtysh River and march towards Omsk.

The use of troops in the northwest only relies on the transportation of several Gobi highways by car, which cannot meet the logistical support during the operation, so the Ili River and the Irtysh River are transported by water. Very important for the Defence Forces.

The Russians for hundreds of years, before the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In fact, it has always relied on several rivers to maintain the transportation of Siberia and to control the region. In drawing up the campaign plan, the German adviser, Admiral Falkenhausen, proposed the use of waterways for the construction of communications. Since the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese have relied on caravans of camel horses for dry road transportation in Mongolia for business or marching wars, and water transportation has almost never been used.

"In fact, the Irtysh is capable of carrying inland river cargo ships of tens of tons. In the lower part of the Brento Sea, even cargo ships of up to 100 tons can pass during the watery season. Now the Altai railway from the ancient city to Kobdo has been extended to Salbulak on the Irtysh River, and the use of water transport can provide more logistical support for the troops! ”

Ling Yuan thought of the request of the chief of staff before leaving Kobdo, and in fact, in this winter, the Wehrmacht began to build a large number of motorized wooden boats in some towns along the Irtysh River. The purpose of his visit was to inspect the progress of shipbuilding and the dredging of rivers in the locality.

The Irtysh River is the only river leading to the Arctic Ocean in the southern foothills of the Altai Mountains, which originates in the eastern part of the Altai Mountains and joins the Ob River in the northern part of the West Siberian Plain. The middle and upper reaches of the Irtysh River were under Chinese rule until the middle of the Qing Dynasty, and even in the Treaty of Nebuchu, the northwestern border between China and Russia was west of Lake Balkhash.

However, in modern times, with the rise of the Rus' Empire and the decline of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Russian Empire took advantage of the Qing government's internal and external difficulties to occupy about 450,000 square kilometers of territory in the Pamir region of northwest China, including Lake Ixey, and later invaded more than 1.3 million square kilometers of territory outside the Tianshan Mountains in northwest China, including the entire Lake Balkhash region and most of the Ili River Valley, through the Treaty of Ili and the Treaty of Aihun.

At this time, the Beiyang government basically maintained the northwest border between China and Russia in the late Qing Dynasty, and the Alahu Lake area to the Zhaisang Lake area in the Tacheng area of Xinjiang was not invaded by Soviet Russia. In another time and space, the Soviet Russian Red Army took advantage of the opportunity of Ma Zhongying's bandits to trouble Xinjiang in 1934 and took the opportunity to send troops to occupy the Alahu area of Xinjiang and the Zaisan Lake area of Altai, but in this time and space, the Northwest Zhuma was completely suppressed and did not form a particularly strong force, and the situation of the Northwest Ma family causing trouble to the Northwest did not appear.

Xu Shuzheng took advantage of the Russian civil war to take the opportunity to recover the territory of the Lake Balkhash region and the Pamir region in the northwest, and after entering Central Asia, the Soviet army stopped its advance on Lake Balkhash and the Ayaguz River in order to avoid fighting with the Beiyang Army. Although the two countries continued to invoke the Treaties of Nebuchu and Aihun to provoke border disputes, no large-scale border conflicts broke out because Soviet Russia was temporarily in a period of recovery.

Due to the full-scale invasion of China by the Japanese army and the all-round defensive position of the Beiyang Defense Army, the Soviet army took the opportunity to occupy the above-mentioned Chinese territory in the early stage of the war.

The strength of the Chinese Army is now several times stronger than it was at the beginning of the war, with a total strength of 8.8 million Wehrmacht, and in 1942, about 1.5 million new recruits will complete their training and join the Wehrmacht's combat series. By then, the total strength of the Chinese National Defense Force will exceed 10 million, far exceeding the total number of troops that the Japanese army can mobilize.

After receiving the news from the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Hüschnitge, Xu Shuzheng strongly advocated that he should temporarily abandon the plan of all-out counterattack against the Japanese army in Northeast China and East China, and instead fully cooperate with the all-out attack of the Axis powers on Soviet Russia, and unite with Germany and Austria to destroy Soviet Russia first. (To be continued......)