Episode 184 Hail

On 25 August, the day of the start of the "Meeting on Comprehensively Improving the Defense Capability of the Yangtze River Defense Line," seven engineer brigades that needed to build bridges for the Right Route Group Army set off by boat at the Zhenhai Port in Ningbo and headed for Sumatra Island in the South Sea. The troop carriers are fast, but the freighters are slow. If it is only a troop carrier, the average speed of the voyage can reach nearly 30 knots, but this kind of cargo ship accompaniment, the average speed of the fleet is at best 123 knots.

In this way, it will take nearly five days for a single trip, and nine days for the fastest round trip. In addition, when we arrived in Sumatra, we had to make some preparations locally, blocking the training area, and feeding and sheltering 20,000 or 30,000 people, which would take several days. In addition, before Day D, the Funahashi troops had to enter the predetermined positions at least three days in advance. In this case, the time spent on training in Sumatra is only about half a month. But fortunately, although this half a month is short, it is a fully enclosed, undisturbed training, you can completely let go of your hands and feet, how you want to toss and how you want, and the training quality is very high. What's more, this is not basic skill training in the first place, but a surprise reinforcement before the war.

D-Day is now only 38 days away. All preparations and deception have also entered the final stage of intensive development.

The first is training. The load of the army's regular combat training has been greatly increased, and the navy is fine, but the training of the army and the army and navy aviation has entered a white-hot stage. The gasoline burned every day is several times higher than in the past, and the shells, bullets, and bombs that are knocked out are also several times as good as in the past, as if fuel and ammunition are not worth money.

Just as "fierce" as combat training is logistical training. The speed at which a maintenance unit can rescue a wounded tank on the battlefield has been greatly increased, and the period of hauling a wounded tank back from the battlefield for overhaul and then returning it to the battlefield has been greatly reduced. In the enclosed training grounds, bulldozers "boom" and practice bulldozing the ground all day long. Now, two or three bulldozers can launch a field runway for single-engine aircraft to take off and land in the field in half a day, and a simple front-line airfield can be launched in just over a day. This is of great importance to the Ming planes going deep behind enemy lines to give full play to their might.

The most trained in aviation is the dive bomber unit. At present, the two new types of aircraft imported from Germany: the "Stuka-Vulture Dive Bomber" and the "BF-109 Fighter" have just begun to be industrialized, and not many have entered the troops off the production line, and the Ming Army's aviation units are mainly "Osprey" and "Kingfisher" two old types. But now more and more aircraft production lines have begun to stop the production of "Osprey" and "Kingfisher" and switch to two new types of aircraft.

But this may be slower, because the aircraft production line is not like the automobile production line, which has been completely streamlined, and thousands of units can be rolled off the assembly line in a month, after all, the aircraft still needs more manual links.

In accordance with the positioning of Xiang Xiaoqiang and the Supreme Command, the status of the aviation unit was raised to an unprecedented height in the operation against the Qing Dynasty. The main task of the aviation forces will no longer be to focus on bombing and destroying the rear of the enemy's battle line as it did in World War I, but will closely integrate with our ground forces and become part of the offensive machine. That is to say, it is necessary to shift from strategic bombing to tactical bombing, and directly act as a "flying artillery" for offensive troops, so as to truly realize a "three-dimensional air-ground offensive."

In this case, dive bombers become a top priority. Because it is more flexible and accurate than horizontal bombers, it is more suitable for the role of "flying artillery". In addition to traditional flight training, bomb dropping training, low-altitude strafing training, and fighter evasion training, there is also "air-ground cooperative training." The so-called "air-ground cooperative training" is mainly training to use radio to report coordinates and request air support when the ground troops' offensive is blocked. The air force must, on the other hand, fly over the target as soon as possible according to the coordinates it has received, carry out an attack, and clear the way for the ground troops.

If this kind of air-ground coordination is done well, it can play a role in the smallest details. For example, sometimes a cannon appeared in the small col in front of it, blocking the advance of a company or even a company of the Ming army, and then you could call the aviation, and after a while, a dive bomber would come and blow up the gun.

Of course, this is the ideal state. It requires hard training before the war and practical exploration during the war.

……

Even more insidious than regular training are some special training. The bridge building training carried out by the engineer brigade in Nanyang was a relatively large-scale one. Equally secretive was the "Hail" training at several training grounds in the Sichuan Basin.

This was the bombing of Qing Airport at the beginning of the year, and it was designed according to an idea put forward to Xiaoqiang. On that occasion, Xiaoqiang was asked whether a small bomb could be used, or simply replaced by 60mm mortar shells, in order to carry out a large-scale bombing of aircraft on local airfields. At that time, due to the urgency of time and the direct unsafe use of mortar shells, the proposal was vetoed, and the smallest bomb on hand at that time, that is, a 100-kilogram bomb, was used instead. The Ming army's twin-engine horizontal bomber "Swan" has a maximum bomb load of 1,000 kilograms, and this 100-kilogram bomb can only hold 10 bombs at most. Despite this, the bombing of the Qing airfield still achieved great results.

However, to a large extent, it was due to the lack of vigilance at the rear airfield of the Qing army. At that time, the Qing army airfield was completely stunned, and no one on the ground tried to fly, so the Ming bomber formation could calmly fly low, aim as much as possible, and find the best angle to bomb.

This time, as soon as the war began, the Qing army airfield was attacked. However, even if it is a surprise attack, the Qing army airfield will definitely not be like last time. It is conceivable that the bomber formations of the Ming army will be constantly bombarded by ground anti-aircraft guns while bombing, and the fighters escorting the escort may have to fight with the Qing fighters. Horizontal bomber formations cannot aim and bomb in a leisurely manner like last time, they must drop bombs and run.

Therefore, this "hail" bomblet is designed for this kind of mission.

The time was short, and a special production line was not prepared for such small bombs, but was modified from ready-made 60-mm mortar shells, which received the name "Hail". The "Hail Bomblet" has eliminated the rear firing kit as a mortar shell, removed the tail firing pin ignition device, and added a special tail for aerial bombs, as well as a detachment hook connected to the bomb bay fixture. In this way, the weight and mortar shells have basically not changed, and the weight of a single shell is still 2 kg.

In this case, excluding the weight of the bomb bay's special bomblet fixation device, a Swan bomber can hold up to 300 "hail" bombs.

……

In the past few days, one after another Swan bombers have lined up over the secret training ground in Sichuan, practicing throwing such bombs. In the area of the "enemy airfield" demarcated on the ground, dense explosions were heard one after another, and black plumes of smoke like jungles rose into the sky in groups, and the target planes on the ground fell one after another in the explosion.

A small number of such target planes used for training are scrapped airplanes, and most of them are fake airplanes with steel bars welded skeletons and then covered with canvas or iron sheets, and their strength is similar to that of real airplanes, or even only higher than that of real airplanes. This is to test whether the destructive power of such a small bomb against aircraft is sufficient.

In fact, as originally envisioned, this two-kilogram bomb could completely destroy an aircraft as long as it hit it directly. This is true even for large aircraft with twin engines.

A few bombers flew over and the entire airfield on the ground would be completely covered by the explosion. From a distance, it feels like a "carpet bombing".