Li Yunzheng hurriedly asked, "What solution have you come up with?" ”

Wei Zelong smiled: "Do you know about hot air balloons? ”

"Of course I know, I've heard that the Navy is equipped with that kind of thing, and the Navy has hot air balloon carriers, but what can those hot air balloons do us do?"

"We can use hot air balloons to correct shooting for artillery."

Li Yunzheng was surprised for a while, "If we use a hot air balloon to correct the shooting of artillery, it is better to use an airship, the time for a hot air balloon to arrive here is much longer than the time it takes for an airship to come to us." ”

Wei Zelong shook his head and smiled: "The hot air balloon will arrive at Shanghai Port this afternoon, and then correct the shooting for us at the port." ”

"How is this possible, isn't the hot air balloon in China, how can it be so quickly rushed to Shanghai?"

"That's right, the hot air balloon mothership now has two in each fleet, each with a hot air balloon on it, but after the hot air balloon entered service, it has experienced very little actual combat, Your Majesty is worried that this force will be embarrassed in wartime, so it was decided to send this force to participate in the actual battle, and the hot air balloon unit has been dispatched very early, so it can arrive this afternoon."

Wei Zelong and Li Yunzheng discussed for a while, and began to arrange things after the arrival of the hot air balloon, Wei Zelong asked Li Yunzheng to be responsible for protecting the hot air balloon and the hot air balloon mothership, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a hot air balloon carrier arrived at Shanghai Port, and the commander of the hot air balloon unit personally went to Wei Zelong's headquarters to meet Wei Zelong.

The commander of the hot air balloon unit is named Liu Jingkong, and he is a group of air force officers carefully trained by Lin Fei, but there are no planes yet, so Liu Jingkong can only serve in the hot air balloon unit first, and the commander of the airship unit also served in the hot air balloon unit first, such as Lin Gecheng, the hot air balloon unit, which has become the cradle of air force officers.

In the headquarters, Wei Zelong briefed Liu Jingkong on the combat mission -- to provide shooting correction for the artillery bombarding Liujia Village, and one of the designed uses of hot air balloons was to correct the shooting of artillery.

However, Liu Jingkong has a characteristic, that is, he thinks about the problem carefully, and he can think of things that ordinary people can't think of, so Liu Jingkong said to Wei Zelong: "Don't think I'm too talkative, I want to ask, our artillery, have you considered a layered attack?" ”

"Layer strike?" Lin Fei prescribed military language to his subordinates, and everyone must use military language when issuing orders and reporting military information, and "hierarchical strike" is not a military language vocabulary, so Wei Zelong frowned and asked, "What does hierarchical strike mean?" ”

Liu Jingkong said with a smile: "I know I didn't use military language, because the meaning I want to express is not in the military language, I think about it this way, Zhangjiacun is stationed in the enemy's car soldiers, and the combat equipment is also cars, these cars will definitely flee after being hit, if the vigilance of the Qing automobile soldiers is particularly high, they will flee as soon as our test shells go off, and we will most likely not be able to hit anything at that time." ”

Wei Zelong was stunned for a moment, "I really ignored this question, what do you think we should do?" ”

"There must be more than one artillery in your hand, so you should let these artillery pieces be aimed at Zhangjia Village, and some artillery should be aimed at the retreat route of the Qing automobile soldiers, when the Qing automobile soldiers retreat, our shells can cover their retreat routes in time."

"Okay, I'll order the troops to arrange it immediately." At this time, the participating troops were four divisions, including the 11th Division, each division had an artillery regiment under the division, equipped with 30 HP-2 75-mm guns, and each group army also had an artillery brigade directly under the group army, equipped with 10 HP-3 105-mm howitzers.

The number of artillery pieces in the entire participating units was 140 in total, and Wei Zelong ordered the artillery commander to allocate strike areas to each unit according to what Liu Jingkong called "hierarchical strikes."

At 8 o'clock in the morning, Wei Zelong gave an order, and the battle to bombard the Qing automobile troops officially began.

The hot air balloon is equipped with a six-ton pod, because the hot air balloon does not need to take on combat missions like an airship, so the volume of the airbag can be made very large, and the load capacity will exceed that of the airship, this type of hot air balloon is the HQQ-K-600-1 hot air balloon that Lin Fei tested in Vietnam, after the hot air balloon officially entered the army, the soldiers of the army gave this type of hot air balloon a nice name - Tiangong.

Lin Fei actually didn't pay attention to the hot air balloon, because this kind of thing is destined to not be used for a long time, once the enemy plane appears, the hot air balloon is the favorite meal of the enemy pilot, so the Tiangong hot air balloon has no separate name, only the number - Tiangong No. 1, Tiangong No. 2 and so on.

The six-ton pod ensured that the hot air balloon could be loaded with 10 Jade Bird 3 aircraft and 10 sets of telescope reconnaissance components, and at the same time the shells fired from the 10 platforms were observed and corrected, which was very important for today's battle, because the six artillery units involved in the battle were in different places and had different calibration shots.

The 105 mm howitzers of the division's artillery brigade opened fire first, and the shells fell more than 500 meters east of Zhangjia Village.

When the shells landed near Zhangjia Village, the Qing automobile soldiers inside didn't think there was anything wrong, they felt that it was impossible for the Huaxia Army to know about this place, and they even felt that this place was far away from the front line, and even if the shells of the Huaxia Army hit, they would not be accurate, and they heard the explosion and thought that it was a stray bullet that flew by accident.

The test firing was soon completed, the artillery unit began to fire in an all-round way, and the shells soon fell in Zhangjia Village, and the cars of the Qing Automobile Corps were parked in the open space in the village, facing the shells, they had no ability to resist, and a number of shells fell, and more than a dozen cars were blown up into scrap metal on the spot.

More and more shells fell on Zhangjia Village, blowing up Zhangjia Village to the ground, black clouds covered the sun, one after another cars were destroyed by shells, the cars were filled with gasoline, when hit by the shock wave of the shells or fragments, the gasoline was often the first to detonate, the whole car will become a huge fireball, flying into the sky, the scene is very scary.

The fragments of the car will also fall like raindrops, the blackened iron sheet of the body will fall to the ground, smashing out a big hole, the burning wheels will fall to the ground, rolling on the ground, and the whole Zhangjia Village will be full of black smoke and screams.

These terrifying scenes made the Qing automobile soldiers panic, the commander realized that the Huaxia artillery on the opposite side was prepared, and hurriedly ordered the troops to retreat, before there were 150 cars in Zhangjia Village, and when they retreated, there were only more than 70 left, and more than 80 were destroyed by intensive artillery fire.

The shells of the Huaxia army were fired from the north, so the Qing automobile troops retreated to the south, and as soon as the Qing automobile troops retreated, the people on the hot air balloon detected it, and the hot air balloon immediately informed the artillery of the direction and position of the retreat of the Qing automobile troops.

The artillery regiment of the 11th Division aimed at the retreating position of the Qing automobile troops, and fired at the Qing automobile troops at full speed, and the HP-2 75 mm howitzers fired an overwhelming rain of bullets with a rate of fire of 15 pieces per minute, completely drowning the Qing automobile soldiers in the sea of fire.

When the Qing automobile soldiers escaped from the shell circle in embarrassment, there were only more than 30 cars left in more than 70 cars, and when they continued to retreat to the south, they entered the strike position of the 12th Division Artillery Regiment, which was already the limit of the shell strike distance, so only more than 10 cars escaped from the clutches.

The Qing automobile soldiers felt that they had run out of the maximum range of the Huaxia artillery, so they stopped, but at this moment, suddenly another shell fell near the Qing automobile soldiers, and the Qing automobile soldiers were so frightened that their faces were bloodless, and it was at least ten kilometers away from the artillery position of the Huaxia Army, how could there still be shells!

It is impossible for the Qing automobile soldiers to know that these shells were fired from the 240 mm caliber main guns of the Great Emperor-class cruisers moored in the harbor.

Originally, there was no Emperor-class cruiser to attack the Qing Automobile Corps this time, but Lin Fei heard that the artillery was bombarding the Qing Automobile Corps in Zhangjia Village, and there were hot air balloons to correct the shooting, so he decided to exercise the target calibration ability of the hot air balloon troops when they suddenly received a request for corrective shooting, so he ordered the Emperor-class cruiser to participate in the shelling, and the Emperor-class cruiser knocked down the shell here.

The Qingguo automobile soldiers were frightened by the artillery with such a long range, they threw down the cars, fled to the surrounding woods, disappeared, and saw the Qingguo automobile soldiers from the hot air balloon, they could only see the ant-like cars, and people were not visible at all, so these Qing soldiers escaped death, but those cars were not so lucky, and under the corrective shooting of the hot air balloon, they were killed by the main guns of the Emperor-class cruisers.

The shells of the Great-class cruisers did not need to hit the car directly, they only needed to explode fifty meters around it, and the shock wave would be enough to detonate its gasoline.

The whole shelling lasted for an hour, the Qing State painstakingly built the automobile troops were all wiped out, the Qing army's Shanghai defense line, the strongest barrier disappeared, of course, this shelling also made the Chinese artillery unit consume nearly a third of the shells.

Liu Jingkong reported to Wei Zelong: "The Qing automobile soldiers have basically been completely annihilated. ”

Wei Zelong slapped the table and shouted "Okay", and then ordered the troops to launch a full-scale attack on the Qing army's Shanghai defense line!

As soon as the order was issued, the four Huaxia divisions launched attacks on Shanghai from four different positions, and the first to attack was the divisional artillery regiments of each division, which fired a rapid fire at the area where the infantry was about to attack, and the artillery shells rained down on the Qing positions.

Wei Zelong also asked for naval artillery support, and the battleships anchored in Shanghai at this time were Wei Wen, Wei Wu and Zhou Mu, and the three battleships gathered all their firepower to launch a fierce bombardment of the Qing army.