Episode 179 Ice Training

On the night of August 19th, Xiang Xiaoqiang came out of the Purple Mountain Fortress, and before he had eaten dinner, Hu Jiong had already handed over an insulated rice cone. Hu Jiong smiled:

"Madame ordered it to be sent."

Xiang Xiaoqiang opened the rice cone of the vacuum liner, and a burst of fragrant heat came out, which turned out to be his favorite soup-filled xiaolongbao.

He asked casually:

"Which lady?"

Hu Jiong hesitated for a moment and said with a smile:

"It's Mrs. Shang."

Well, sure enough, it's Xiuxiu. Although every time Xiang Xiaoqiang eats soup-filled xiaolongbao, what always appears in front of him is the warm scene with Qiu Yu, but Xiuxiu is obviously more careful than Qiu Yu, and since Qiu Yu shared that sweet memory with her, Xiuxiu has remembered it in her heart.

Xiang Xiaoqiang took chopsticks and put the xiaolongbao sent by Xiuxiu in his mouth, closed his eyes and felt the hot, sticky and thick sweet juice, but he always recalled the first time he and Qiu Yu ate and "shot" Qiu Yun's face......

"Where's the adult?" Hu Jiong personally drove for him, and after sitting in the driver's seat, he asked, "Go to the headquarters or the barracks?" ”

"Where is General Guderian training now?"

Hu Jiong immediately said:

"Lord Hui, General Guderian is now training in the Tangshan field, and this week is training the first division."

Xiang Xiaoqiang took out his pocket watch and looked at it, it was seven o'clock in the evening. He nodded:

"Now I'm going to inspect the Tangshan site. Don't say hello, let's go straight away. ”

Then he reached out of the window and beckoned, and called a Praetorian Guard officer to call his home and tell the two ladies that he had something to do tonight and would not be coming back.

The Tangshan field is actually the scope of the Tangshan Sniper School. Tangshan is far away from the urban area of Nanjing, and the distance by highway is fifty or sixty kilometers. The round-trip journey plus the time spent there, I'm definitely going to stay there tonight.

……

The training ground of Tangshan Sniper School covers an area of more than 100 square kilometers, in which all kinds of landforms are complete, including mountains, hills, plains, woodlands, shrubs, rivers, ponds, training villages, simulated ruins, etc. This is a military training ground with the best conditions in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River plain area of the Ming Dynasty. Not only is it a good place to train snipers, but many other branches of the military also come here for training and exercises as needed.

For several months, Guderian led a group of German armored officers to train the Ming armored mechanized troops. Arguably, armored forces were Guderian's favorite cause. Having such a powerful armored force in Daming for him to train single-handedly eliminated his dissatisfaction with coming to Daming to a large extent. After all, he was reluctant to leave Germany to the Ming Dynasty, in addition to being a German himself, the more important reason was that Hitler valued him and let him build a German armored corps. And now, this condition can still be met by Da Ming.

Since the beginning of this month, the top decision-making level of the Ming Dynasty has decided to order the 11 divisions of the People's Guard Corps to increase the intensity and duration of training and conduct fatigue training for the troops after the Qing Dynasty in October. Now the Tangshan Sniper School is almost completely occupied by the People's Guard, 24 hours a day and night non-stop training, day or night, hundreds of square kilometers of training ground are filled with the roar of engines. This has never been done before.

The so-called fatigue training is aimed at both people and vehicles. In order to keep the situation secret and try to give the outside world as little as possible the impression that "the Ming army is frantically preparing for war," the recent training exercises have been confined to this training ground of more than 100 square kilometers and have not been leaked to the outside.

The two most commonly trained events are "Long Distance" and "Tactical Maneuver". A division is a few hundred tanks, more than 1,000 armored vehicles and automobiles, and these two or three thousand steel guys line up in a long line, allowing them to "run in circles and long distances" in this field of more than 100 square kilometers.

This kind of "long-distance running and pulling training" trains precisely the shortcomings of mechanized units in large-depth raids -- maintenance and logistics. The experience of World War II deeply reminded Xiang Xiaoqiang that the best mechanized troops are often defeated not by the enemy, but by maintenance and logistics.

……

At about eight o'clock in the evening, Xiang Xiaoqiang's car drove into the training ground of the Tangshan Sniper School. Xiang Xiaoqiang and several guards climbed into an armored car and, led by a gendarme from the sniper school, went directly to Guderian's training ground.

Soon, the rumbling sound of cannon in the distance came. Experienced ears will know that this is the unique sound of the tank's cannon, and it is different from the howitzer when you hear it, "dang, dang", with a slight metallic texture.

After a while, the rumbling engine also came to my ears. The armored car turned over a small hillside, revealing a large mountain basin below, a large field of snow-bright headlights, black steel figures flashed in the light, and the soldiers shouted loudly.

It's a hot scene.

Xiang Xiaoqiang stood in the armored car on the hillside, picked up the telescope on his chest and looked down, and found a strange scene.

There seemed to be some kind of plank on the ground, and there was a large one, about a few meters wide and more than ten meters long, and an armored officer stood on the board and walked backwards, while directing a tank with his hand to carefully drive the plank and slowly drive forward. The turret roof of the tank was opened, and the commander leaned in to stare at the gestures of the officer in front of him, while speaking to the driver on the in-car radio. There were also more than a dozen tanks lined up in the back, all with their lights on, slowly moving forward, like passing through a toll booth.

Xiang Xiaoqiang squinted his eyes and guessed for a while, but he couldn't guess what he was doing.

"This is training or something?" He turned his head and asked the gendarme in the car.

The gendarme scratched the back of his head, hesitated for a while, and finally simply said in a loud voice:

"Report sir, I don't know!"

Xiang Xiaoqiang nodded, waved his hand, and said:

"Go, go down."

The armored vehicle spewed green smoke and rushed down the hillside.

Xiang Xiaoqiang's appearance caused a burst of cheers on the training ground. This time, Xiang Xiaoqiang went deep into the Northern Qing Dynasty and brought back more than 1,000 captured brothers, which undoubtedly added a lot of points to him in the hearts of the officers and soldiers.

"My lord, this is a new project arranged by General Guderian," a gendarme of the 1st People's Guard Division replied to Xiao Qiang, saluting, "We are training to cross the river on the ice in winter." ”

"Crossing the river on the ice in winter?"

Xiang Xiaoqiang was very surprised, and glanced at the long queue of tanks that crossed the "river" one after another. The ground was made of bricks into low piers, and these low piers were covered with slats in the shape of a "river" more than ten meters wide, and then the tank carefully drove up...... Isn't this "crossing the river" what is?

What did Guderian do when he trained his troops to cross rivers on ice?

Xiang Xiaoqiang muttered in his heart: The Qing War is still top secret, and it has not been revealed to the officers of the Foreign Legion, even Guderian has not revealed it. Did he estimate it himself?

Although the winter in Jiangnan is also very cold, the rivers and lakes are generally not frozen. It's a different story in North China. The winters of the thirties were very cold, and almost all the rivers in the north froze. Smaller ravines will freeze to the bottom, while wider rivers will form thick layers of ice, which is realistic to pass through tanks. If the Northern Qing Dynasty is raided, it will inevitably face the winter battle in North China, and it will also be indispensable to cross the river on the ice. A mechanized army that is good at crossing rivers on the ice will save the boat and bridge troops a lot of trouble, and the speed of advance will be much faster.

And in Guderian's writings after World War II, there is also a rather detailed discussion of the crossing of the river on the ice of tank troops.

Xiang Xiaoqiang stared at the "ice surface" in front of him, looking at these wooden planks that were too thin for furniture, one by one on the piers of several bricks, and the steel behemoth of one or twenty tons rumbled over it, pressing the wooden planks trembling and breaking at any time. The commander is a few meters in front of the tank, and the commander leans over the turret, using a headset to keep in touch with the driver at all times, controlling the speed of the tank. The machine gunner, loader and radioman all exited the tank and walked a few meters in front of the tank with their respective weapons.

"By the river" stood a German armored officer with a hooked nose, blond hair, and knife-like eyes staring harshly at every movement of the tank crew. From time to time, he waved his arms and yelled fiercely. The interpreter on the side shouted loudly:

"Avoid the track prints of the car in front! A sucker! Do you want the country to lose a tank? ”

The commander of the tank on the "ice" immediately yelled at the driver with a headset, and then the tank veered to the side, avoiding the place where the tank in front of it had pressed as it crossed the river.

Be sure to avoid the track prints left on the ice by the previous tank, which is an iron rule for tanks to cross the ice in winter. The same ice cannot be subjected to the weight of the tank more than once. This caused the ice to collapse and the tank to fall overboard.

The German tank officer was dissatisfied again and shouted. The translator translates it the same way:

"Stupid pig! Pull the joystick to be smooth! Smooth!! Smooth!!! Hell me, be gentle! Gentle!! Gentle!!! It's like stroking your lover! …… Are you a pig? Control at 8 km/h! Eight kilometers! Eight km!! Eight kilometers !! Don't make me repeat it over and over again, I've repeated it enough! ”

Xiang Xiaoqiang smiled. When these German instructors first arrived, they were still full of scruples, and they were polite in their words and deeds, and the Ming officers and soldiers were not very fond of them. When the German instructors guided the training with them, they were still very unconvinced, thinking that the German armored forces had only been built for two years, and my Ming armored forces had been developing for more than ten years, so why should they listen to your German dictatorship.

But later, with the contact between the two sides, the German officers and soldiers became less and less concerned with themselves as outsiders, and the Ming officers and soldiers also obeyed these Germans with superb tactics from the eyes of their hearts. In the past few months, the quality of the armored troops of the Ming Dynasty has improved rapidly.

Suddenly—

"Boom !!"

There was a loud bang, and a cloud of smoke exploded almost a few meters away, followed by two or three loud explosions nearby. Xiang Xiaoqiang was startled and instinctively hid behind the armored car. The gendarme next to her shouted loudly in her ear:

"My lord! It's a training bullet! It's a simulated enemy shelling! It's still dangerous, get into the armored car! ”

Nodding to Xiaoqiang, he climbed into the armored car and watched through the armor baffle. He knew that the training shell was an imitation of a shell, which made a loud noise and had a pyrotechnic effect, but the explosive force was small and there was no shrapnel. However, if it explodes right next to someone, it will still injure them.

Sure enough, from the time the first "shell" exploded, the "banks of the river" were a mass of shouts. The German ** officer squatted down, grabbed a steel helmet and put it on, waved his arms and shouted. The interpreter next to him also squatted and shouted:

"Enemy shelling——!! Personnel on both sides of the strait lie down and hide——!! People running across the river——!! Subsequent tanks stop on the ice——!! The ice tank accelerates to 15 km/h, puts on medium gear, and stabilizes the ——!!! ”

But after all, it still did not stabilize, and just as the tank was spewing green smoke and accelerating suddenly, there was a crisp "click", the plank broke, and the tank plunged into the "ice river".

"Hell !!" The translator continued to meticulously translate, "Stupid pig!! Back the tank fell back! Save people!! ”

In the tank that "fell into the water", the commander and the driver hurriedly got out of the tank and "swam" ashore in a gray way.

……

Xiang Xiaoqiang laughed when he saw this, and slammed his fist on the armor plate and praised:

"Good! Very good training! …… Where is General Guderian? Take me to him! ”