Chapter 142 A million lions go down to Jiangnan

In the Red Army's "Red Alert" campaign in 1935, the first place where the battle started was Jiangyin. At two o'clock in the morning on 31 May, a small gasoline-powered fishing boat docked silently near the port of Jiangyin, where the Yangtze River Fleet is located. The reason why gasoline power instead of diesel engines with lower efficiency is mainly due to the low noise of gasoline engines.

About a kilometer from the port, a long, flattened body, about two and a half meters long and one meter wide, was lowered into the water with a cigar-shaped propulsion device with eight blasting crusts weighing 40 kilograms each. Launched along with the propulsion were four frogmen wearing tight diving suits, carrying breathing apparatus on their backs, and stepping on frog flippers.

This was the first actual combat of the first generation of "man-operated torpedoes" in Germany, which Lin Han and Hannah had concocted by the traversers.

This set of underwater propulsion units, codenamed "Blackfish". Using a battery-powered system, it is actually a miniature submarine, powered by batteries, with a range of five kilometers on a full charge, capable of carrying 300 kilograms of equipment and four diving frogmen under water.

According to Lin Han and Hannah's idea, this kind of "man-operated torpedo" was mainly used for special operations, infiltrating the military port where the enemy was moored and mooring the warship, and installing the rock-blasting device carried at the bottom of the ship to detonate it. The purpose of achieving the maximum combat effect with the minimum investment.

Historically, during World War II, Britain, Italy, and even Germany all had similar man-operated torpedo underwater combat equipment, and they all achieved brilliant results in actual combat. The appearance of Hannah and Lin Han, two traversers, allowed Germany to start developing this equipment very early.

Subject to the limitations of technology in this era. The first generation of the "Blackfish" was not a successful work, the main flaws were that the cruising range was too short, the underwater stability was poor, and it was very restrictive when fighting in harbors with large waves and a wide range. The harbors where the British warships were anchored were often more than a dozen kilometers or even tens of kilometers deep, and there were even many patrol boats cruising on the surface at night, and the range of the "Blackfish," which lacked endurance, was not enough to launch an attack from a safe distance and retreat in its entirety.

However, in the relatively calm Yangtze River, in the Chinese battlefield with extremely poor night patrol protection, the "Black Fish" had a good opportunity to show its skills.

Jiangyin Port, the station of the Yangtze River Fleet. There are also patrol boats at night. Patrols are conducted every four hours. Sometimes, due to the laziness of the patrol officers, there is often no one to go out all night. After 1935, due to the financial constraints of the Nanjing Nationalist Government, the fuel supply also began to be tight. The treatment of the Yangtze River fleet declined. Under the deliberate "lure" of the Red Army. The high-ranking officers of the port garrison even secretly resold large quantities of fuel from stockpiles to the Red Army. Even the diesel fuel used in patrol boats was sold.

In order to "save fuel". Now the Harbor Guard has stopped even routine night patrols. The most recent patrol dates back to more than 20 days ago, when Navy Minister Chen Shaokuan came to inspect it, he pretended to go through the motions at night. Also most of the time. Several patrol boats in the harbor are lying on the edge of the pier basking in the sun. As for the old coal-fired patrol boats in the harbor, they had long been used by the commander to run the Yangtze River shipping to "help" the Red Army transfer supplies to earn private money.

The Nationalist Government in Nanjing, which was economically bankrupt, was now reduced to the point where all its troops had to "work" for their opponents.

The four "water ghosts" who infiltrated Jiangyin Port were prepared for one ocean and three soils. Yiyang is a frogman instructor from Germany, and he personally led the team to participate in the battle, in order to test the actual effect of the "Blackfish" in actual combat, so as to provide experience for the improvement of the next generation of Blackfish. The other three frogmen were all students of the frogman unit he had trained for the Red Army this year, and all three of them were surnamed Yu, their names were Yu Da, Yu Er, and Yu San, and the three of them were three brothers in a family. Originally, he was a fisherman begging for a living on Honghu Lake, and joined the Honghu Red Army in 1932. Due to his good water nature, he was later selected to join the newly formed frogman army.

The frogman unit formed by the Red Army has trained a total of 40 underwater frogmen, and this is also their first actual combat operation.

At a depth of one meter, the propeller at the tail of the "Blackfish" rotates at high speed, pushing the "Blackfish" underwater. On either side of the flattened body of the "black fish", two frogmen are attached to each of them.

In the harbor of Jiangyin, the three capital ships of the Yangtze River Fleet are docked in a row, the cruiser Ninghai in the middle, and the 900-ton Weisheng and Desheng sailor carriers on the left and right sides respectively. The Wasion and Desheng were originally armed merchant ships that were later converted into water engine carriers. In addition to carrying two seaplanes each, the two ships also installed a 47 mm rapid-fire gun in the bow position for self-defense, and the firepower was very poor. In addition, there were two other small gunboats of 100 tons parked in the harbor, but the four frogmen who infiltrated the harbor did not pay attention to them at all.

Since the patrol ship in the harbor did not go out at all, the four of them easily infiltrated the side of the cruiser Ninghai as if they had entered their own back garden boat to drive the Blackfish, and then the four of them started to plant a rock blasting device below the waterline of the Ninghai.

In the eyes of the Red Army, the warships in Jiangyin Harbor were the cradle of the Navy of the future Red Republic, and it would be a pity to blow them up directly. The purpose of the Red Army in this battle was only to injure the Ninghai and make it lose its ability to move and not be able to escape in the short term, so the location where the fire powder was installed was not the most lethal bottom keel position, but the sides of the hull. In order to ensure that the hull of the ship sits and sinks rather than rolls over when it enters the water after the explosion, the installed explosives are also deliberately symmetrically placed in four corners.

Twenty minutes later, four 40-kilogram bombers were placed. The four of them, who were still unsatisfied, also installed the remaining four bomb bombs on each side of the hull of the Desheng and VIA.

As soon as the qiē was installed, the three Yu brothers and the German instructor returned to the "mothership" fishing boat in Blackfish, and with the help of a small crane on the guò fishing boat, the blackfish was hoisted out of the water and placed back in the cabin.

At six o'clock in the morning, with the sound of eight loud bangs in a row, the ship docked on the shore, and the hull of the ship was blown out of several large openings under the waterline of the three ships equipped with the bombing bow sheet, and the river water rolled in, sitting and sinking on the shore almost in no particular order, and all of them lost their ability to move in a short period of time.

And these eight loud bangs. Just like the sound of a horn to get up, it also opened the prelude to the "Red Alert" operation.

In a telegram sent to the whole army, the superior of the Red Army clearly told all the soldiers participating in the battle: "In this campaign, our Red Army will take the complete destruction of the comprador traitorous regime headed by Song Ziwen as the ultimate goal!" ”

In the early morning of May 31, 1935, with the explosion of Jiangyin Port, it stretched from Beiyandang Mountain in Zhejiang in the east, to Wushan at the junction of Hubei and Sichuan in the west, to the Dabie Mountain Base Area in the north, from the coastal area of Zhejiang to the inland of the Yangtze River, and exceeded the junction of the Red Army Base Area in the south and the Zhì District controlled by the Nationalist Government in Nanjing. Countless Red Army soldiers. An all-out attack was launched against the Nationalist Government's control area in Nanjing.

On the morning of 31 May, the four provinces under the control of the Nanjing Government were in an emergency, and there was only one piece of news coming from all directions, and all of them had the same demand: Our side was fiercely attacked by the Red Bandits! The scale of the Red Bandits is unprecedentedly strong. The firepower is fierce, please help!

After the baptism of war in 1934. He also received a "generous" "weapon gift" from Chairman Song, the head of the transport brigade. As well as aid from the Soviet Union and Germany, after a winter of military expansion and training, the mobile troops of the Red Army in the south have swelled to a terrifying number of millions.

Zhejiang, Anhui, Hubei and Henan provinces. The Red Army in all four places launched an all-out attack and launched the most fierce attack with the momentum of a boulder crushing an egg.

On the Hubei battlefield, because it was a piece of meat that had already been swallowed up a long time ago, and with the cooperation of the Red Fourth Front Army in Sichuan and the Bashan guerrillas, the Hubei Red Army did not dispatch many troops, only 50,000 troops, but it was enough to wipe out the "white army" in the whole province.

The Henan battlefield was only a containment feint, and the number of troops dispatched was only 100,000. At present, most of the main forces of the Nanjing Nationalist Government are concentrated in the three most elite provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui, and the 100,000 Red Army has swept away Henan, while the eastern army in Hebei does not dare to make a rash move.

And Anwei and Zhejiang are the most important attack directions of the Red Army in this campaign.

This winter, Song Ziwen in Nanjing racked his brains desperately to expand the army, but only pieced together to expand the army to 500,000, although he did not lack guns and soldiers for the time being, but excellent and qualified officers could not be replenished in the short term. And these troops, with poor officers and poor training, were only a belly of troops to send equipment and troops to the Red Army on the front line.

What really has some combat effectiveness is the three "tax police divisions" that he put in Jiangsu to protect his family's foundation, as well as several troops led by Chen Cheng's 18th Army, but the total number of people is only more than 100,000. Coupled with the habit of Song Ziwen's businessman, he regarded the tax police division as the lifeblood of protecting the family and the hospital, and he held it in his hands, and refused to put it on the front line where it was most needed, and he didn't think of attacking in a hurry until the start of the war, but it became a refueling tactic.

The war that broke out in late May and early June turned from the very beginning into a devastating "march" occupation operation of the Red Army. Whether it is Henan or Hubei, the local defenders are almost all crushed or surrendered at the touch of a crab. The speed of the lost ground was almost equal to the speed of the march of the Red Army.

The situation in Anhui, which is regarded as a barrier in Jiangsu and is a key protection, is not much better.

The Red Army from Dabie Mountain surrounded Lu'an, organized hundreds of artillery pieces to bombard the city for a day, and the 20,000 defenders voluntarily raised their flags and surrendered.

Anqing's Eighteenth Army, Chen Cheng's resistance was a little more decent. However, it was bombed by 40 planes that took off from the Huangshan base area, and then shelled by the Red Army's Yangtze River Fleet, and after barely resisting for 36 hours, the defenders were demoralized and surrendered.

In the course of the siege and bombing of Anqing, Chen Cheng asked Nanjing more than once: The Red Bandits dispatched a large number of air forces to bombard our army's positions, and there were as many Red Bandit planes in the sky as locusts, but where is our Air Force?

Song Ziwen did not answer him, but three hours before Chen Cheng left his army and fled by boat, he heard a news message from the Red Army radio broadcast: "The Hangzhou Air Force headed by Gao Zhihang has revolted and defected to the people's side this morning when it was carrying out the mission of bombing the Red Army in Taizhou. ”

Then, after hearing this broadcast, Chen Cheng lost his morale and immediately ordered to arrange a boat to escape from the river. It's a pity that his escape skills are far inferior to the long-legged general Sun Yuanliang. Three hours later, he was intercepted by the Ruijin on the river and captured.

By 4 June, the whole province of Hubei had been basically liberated, Henan had also fallen into the hands of the Red Army, and the artillery party army in Anhui had collapsed on all fronts, while the artillery party defenders in Hangzhou. When the Red Army soldiers came to the city, they learned from Gao Zhihang very well and directly "revolted".

On 2 June, the Red Army seized Anqing, on the 3rd occupied Chizhou, besieged Hefei, and on the 4th, the defenders of Hangzhou declared an "uprising".

Song Ziwen is an even less well-known shortcoming than Chang Kaishen. This is evident in this war. Before the war, he was born out of a "businessman" mentality. Regardless of He Yingqin's opposition, he held the three tax police divisions in his hands to the death, but he refused to fill in the front lines of Anqing and Lu'an, which were most needed. By the outbreak of war, the front line was in an emergency. Only the Red Army was under tremendous pressure. Hurriedly mobilized troops and horses. The result naturally became a fueling tactic.

Cross the river from Nanjing. The two tax police divisions sent to Lu'an received the news of the fall of Lu'an as soon as they took action, and the destination of their advance was changed to Hefei. As a result, when marching between Hefei and Xuzhou, they were ambushed by the Red Army, and two elite tax police divisions plus other reinforcements totaled 70,000 people, but they were surrounded by 200,000 Red Army regiments. Three days later, the army was annihilated. On June 10, Xuzhou fell, and on the same day the defenders of Hefei also surrendered.

The war situation north of the Yangtze River has eroded to this point, and the war situation south of the Yangtze River is just as bad.

The Red Army south of the Yangtze River had the Yangtze River as the crossing line, and the speed of troop mobilization and assault was even more violent.

On 7 June, the southern front had already reached the city of Qianhu, and Song Ziwen threw the last sharp police division in his hand and other troops totaling 150,000 people into the long and narrow front of Qianhu, Xuancheng, and Huzhou. And their opponent was the Red Army, with a total of 500,000 troops, and they also had air supremacy.

In the face of an opponent with superior forces, it is a taboo for soldiers not to defend the point but to defend the line. The Red Army, which had gradually mastered the laws of mobile warfare, slightly concentrated its forces on two fronts between the three cities and attacked fiercely, broke through the defensive line lightly, divided the three places, and swallowed them all in one bite like a dumpling.

The defense lines of Qianhu, Xuancheng and Huzhou only lasted three days before the whole line collapsed, the 150,000 army was wiped out, and Song Ziwen's last belongings and the last tax police division were also completely annihilated by the Red Army in the Battle of Qianhu.

On the day of 11 June, when Chairman Song, who was guarding Nanjing and was shocked three times a day, took stock of his own family background, he was horrified to find that there were only more than 30,000 troops left in his hands, and these more than 30,000 people, except for Sun Yuanliang's newly formed 88th Division, which was stationed in Shanghai to rest and recuperate, were almost all composed of new soldiers, and their combat effectiveness was also extremely bad.

And his opponent is the million-strong Red Army that has been ruthlessly "replenished" from him, and the strength of the weapons and equipment and air force has been greatly increased again.

The fate of the Nanjing Nationalist Government, due to Lin Han's history of crushing, had been advanced by 15 years, and it had fallen to the point where "the great river east was about to end."

His only lifeline was the intervention of the great powers.

The speed of the defeat of the Nationalist government in Nanking exceeded the expectations of all the great powers. When the British and American parliamentarians who wanted to "pull him along" were still discussing how to deal with the situation in China in the Diet, the Nationalist Government in Nanjing was easily toppled by the opponent like a paper house within 12 days of the start of the war, and lost most of its territory and army.

"Adolf. Hitler was right, the Nationalist government in Nanking simply said that they were pigs and insulted all the pigs in the world! Four provinces, 400,000 troops, in less than twelve days, were wiped out by the Red Bolsheviks! Even if 400,000 pigs were released and the Red Elements from the Far East were to be arrested, they would not be able to catch them in 12 days. ”

On the front page of The Times, the person who wrote the insulting report was posted by a reporter who received Lin Hanqian. The content of the post was also written according to Lin Han's request.

At Lin Han's request, this reporter attributed all the erosion of the Far East to the incompetence and corruption of the Nationalist Government in Nanjing, laughed and scolded in the newspapers, and belittled Song Ziwen's government officials as worthless.

And the title of the article is bold in big red letters: their whole family is thieves, and they are worse than pigs.

The reporter took out the information given to him by Lin Han and published in the newspaper the amount of money deposited by Minister Kong Xiangxi, the brother-in-law of Chairman Song, in HSBC: $40 million! With this proof, the arms loans given by the United States of America and the British Empire to Chairman Song were all swallowed up by him and Kong Yuanxi.

His remarks in the newspapers were only an outlet for the British to vent their anger and dissatisfaction at the loss of the colony of China. At this point, Kong Xiangxi was a little wronged, only a very small number of the $40 million in deposits in his hands in this plane were earned from the 50 million arms loans, and most of them were through Guò to do business with the Red Army as a middleman, as well as the dividend income from "laundering (crab) money" for Lin Han.

In order to "spend" more German foreign exchange in Shanghai, Lin Han has been frantically using "cash" to smuggle shopping materials in Shanghai, and then sell them at low prices to turn them into usable "real money". Such a huge trading volume can only be eaten by Kong Xiangxi, the Minister of Finance. In this process, Lin Han and Hannah certainly made a lot of money by relying on their "capitalless business", and Kong Xiangxi also ate pig's head and ears with meat as well.

After the report was published, the angry British government complied with the "public opinion" and took the opportunity to fall into the trap and ordered HSBC to freeze Kong Xiangxi's huge deposits. A few years ago, the "Carlisle" incident, HSBC's 350,000 tons of gold disappeared, and the loss was huge.

Kong Xiangxi's "misfortune" is only one example of the great powers meddling in China's affairs. The real clash between the two sides took place on the Yangtze River behind the city of Qihu. (To be continued......)