Christmas Eve, New Year's bells ring, and in the blink of an eye, the wheels of history rumbled into 1905. In this new season, the most talked about topic after tea and dinner is still the continuous fermentation of the Russo-Japanese Far East war. By the beginning of 1905, Japan, which was far inferior to Russia in terms of population and industry, both at sea and on land, had not been torn apart by the claws of the Russian bear, but had made incredibly smooth progress.

Before the outbreak of the war, Japan was actually very intimidated by the Russian giant bear. This is not only because Russia has three times the population, four times the income and countless times the industrial base of Japan, but also because the country has a strange magic that makes the whole of Europe tremble. Although it was not the Russian army that defeated Napoleon, but the cold weather in Russia, and the Anglo-French forces in the Crimean War, the Russian army was still remembered as an invincible behemoth like a fierce beast and a dragon. Once it roars, it will sweep through the sky with its never-ending sea of people, sweeping away any enemy in its path, and turning them into the dust of history.

For this reason, there were by no means a few people in Japan who opposed war with Russia; This was because they believed that if a war broke out with Russia, Japan would fall into a situation from which it would never recover, and the achievements of reform and reform over the past 30 years would be completely destroyed. This argument has a wide market in Japan, and the Japanese people who have begun to go abroad to see the world are also somewhat frightened by the terrifying power of the Russian giant bear. After the signing of the war order against Russia, the hearts of the top echelons of the Japanese military circles, including Emperor Meiji himself, were also full of anxiety and anxiety, and they no longer had the vigor and confidence to declare war on the Qing court in those years. After nine years of intervention by the three countries and the return of Liao, Japan has indeed made great progress in all aspects of national construction, but the rise of a great power is obviously not something that can be achieved overnight in such a short period of time. At present, Japan is still a scumbag country compared to the traditional European powers, and it is much inferior to Austria-Hungary and Italy, the weakest of the great powers (well, provided that the Italian army does not noodles), and this time their opponent is the Russian Empire, which can be called the world's first-class power! It's like a system error, so that the vice boss of the penultimate level is parachuted directly into the kindergarten level to guard it, and the player's level equipment in the early stage is not an order of magnitude at all with the boss in the late stage!

With a throbbing heart, the Japanese cautiously took the first step into the minefield. However, after months of fighting, the Japanese suddenly found that the hairy and sturdy enemies in front of them were nothing more than that! The Russians were vain, but their command and tactics were remarkably different: they were slow, barely hidden, charged like wild beasts without any discipline, and lacked the determination to carry it out to the end. However, the Japanese Army, because it had been studying under Germany since before the First Sino-Japanese War, had a high quality of officers and flexible tactics. The command of the commander Oyama Iwa is quite the essence of Moltke, far better than the indecisive Kuropatkin who was born as a staff officer. The only place where the Russians had an advantage was the few hand-to-hand fights that appeared on the battlefield. And today, in the era of hot weapons, as long as the Japanese army is careful to avoid close contact with the Russian army, the combat bloodline from the savage beast cannot give the Russians any role.

The Liaodong landing battle some time ago allowed the Japanese to thoroughly find out the bottom of the Russian army, so that while Dashanyan sent the Third Army to besiege Dalian, he also dared to attack the superior Russian army with inferior forces behind solid fortifications. Although the offensive was not a wise decision from a military point of view, and it almost ended up with a trap and the entire army in it, good fortune once again befell the Japanese. Due to the outstanding performance of Japanese generals such as Kuroki Yuzhen and the continuous onslaught of Japanese soldiers who sacrificed their lives and deaths, Kuropatkin mistakenly believed that the Japanese army had a frontal strength far superior to that of the Russian army, and after resisting for a while, he had no intention of fighting and hurriedly retreated. In the subsequent Battle of Shahe, the Japanese army had previously searched for information about the Russian attack from the corpses of Russian officers, so that they had enough room to prepare. After more than a month of defensive counterattacks, the Japanese army killed, wounded, and captured more than 50,000 Russian troops at the cost of losing 25,000 people, and finally stabilized the land war situation in Manchuria.

On the oceans, the Japanese Combined Fleet also seized sea supremacy on the battlefield almost in a singing posture. Needless to say, the world-renowned naval battle 10 months ago, when the Combined Fleet completely crippled the main force of the Russian Pacific Fleet at the cost of sinking three battleships, and did not leave the port to look for the enemy for half a year. Although Makarov led the fleet to flee to Vladivostok, the Russian Pacific Fleet had a safer place to stay, and was not killed by the Japanese as in history; But this action of the Russian fleet also meant that they permanently abandoned the Yellow Sea and Liaodong, and could only operate in the narrow waters of the Sea of Japan. With the transfer of the main anchorage of the combined fleet to the port of Sakaimi in the western part of Honshu Island, the establishment of an early warning system, and the detour of Japanese transport ships, the effect of breaking diplomatic relations with Russian patrols has also been greatly weakened. Although the Japanese fleet was still unable to catch these annoying pirates, the overall situation was much better than it had been a few months earlier.

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The victories at the battles of Liaoyang and Shahe greatly boosted the morale of the Japanese and made them confident in their victory over Russia, and the news of the departure of the Russian Second Pacific Fleet increased the urgency of the Japanese top brass, prompting them to take more active action as soon as possible to achieve victory. The Japanese base camp thinkers glanced at the map and then turned their attention to the Dalian fortress, which was heavily garrisoned by the Russians.

As the only ice-free port that Russia has seized since the founding of the country, Dalian carries the hope of Russia's expansion into the Far East, and is "the most brilliant jewel in the crown of the Tsar", with incomparable political and military value. If the Japanese army can conquer it, then not only will the main army besieging Dalian be freed, but it will also be able to severely dampen the will of Tsarist Russia to war, and the contradictions in Russia will be further intensified due to the defeat on the battlefield. In addition, once Dalian was conquered by the Japanese, the only place for Rozhdestvensky's expeditionary fleet would be to Vladivostok on the other side of the Korean Peninsula. As a result, not only was the Russian fleet even more distant, but it was almost certain that they would be held back head-on by the Japanese fleet as they passed through the narrow Tsushima Strait; And even if the Russian fleet successfully reached its destination, then its range of activities was limited to a very narrow range, which was undoubtedly better for Japan, which relied heavily on the Yellow Sea route for the transportation of troops and materials!

However, achieving this goal is unimaginably difficult. Although the Russo-Japanese War was ushered in before the Russian military installation in Dalian was fully completed, the impregnable core of the fortress was already formed; With the arrival of some troop transports a few years ago and such a long period of reinforcement and repair, the Dalian Fortress showed no signs of falling, and remained like a tenacious reef in the raging waves. Previously, the Japanese army, under the command of Nogi Noshinori, the "god of war", formed a death squad with fanatical allegiance to the emperor and the spirit of bushido to launch a meat bomb offensive, and suffered huge casualties; More than 50,000 Japanese officers and soldiers were killed or wounded in battle, and even Nogi Noshinori's two sons fell on the charge that captured Dalian. The heavy casualties of the Japanese army under the city of Dalian even alarmed Emperor Meiji, and when he saw the number of casualties reported to him by Nogi, he couldn't believe it, and he sent a telegram back to ask if the other party had added an extra 0 to the back! After paying such a huge price, the Japanese only seized some unimportant areas around the fortress, and did not have a decisive impact on the capture of the fortress; If you want to continue to fight like Nogi Noshinori, I am afraid that it will take more than half of the lives of the Japanese Army to finally get your wish!

After the Japanese army failed to attack the main position of the Russian army again, and there were few thousands of daredevils left, even Emperor Meiji, who relied heavily on Nogi, finally couldn't help it. The situation is already very obvious, Nogi must be removed from his post, or he will bury the entire Japanese army in the bottomless pit of this Russian fortress! However, Emperor Meiji, who was well versed in Nogi's character, knew very well that once the headquarters announced that he would be relieved of his duties, the soldier would inevitably commit suicide by seppuku to protect his samurai reputation, and Meiji was extremely reluctant to accept this Confucian general who was good at reciting Chinese poetry. Under the emperor's favor, the headquarters sent the chief of the army staff, Kodama Gentaro, who was known as the "reincarnation of Toyotomi Hideyoshi", to Liaodong by the night and ordered Nogi to secretly hand over the command in private.

Although Kodama has been working in the core of the base camp for many years and does not have much experience directly on the front line, his insight into the battle situation and his ability to use artillery are far better than Nogi, who can only blindly attack. Kodama arrived at the front line with a batch of the latest 280mm howitzers, which made the Japanese offensive under his command even more ferocious. After more than half a month of concentrated artillery fire, tunnel operations and blasting, the speed of the Japanese army's advance gradually increased, and under the heavy howitzer bombardment day and night, the thick gate of Dalian Fortress was finally smashed open by continuous heavy blows!

(PS: Anyway, this book has been put on the shelves today, this chapter is still a public chapter, and it will be released tomorrow, VIP capable book friends, please subscribe and support it, it's not easy for the author to get off work every day~~~)