Chapter Fifty-Nine: The Combined Fleet Strikes! (below)

June 1946 was a dark month for the US forces stationed in Japan, the US Pacific Fleet Command, and the Pentagon. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

-- The Japanese army, which had been pressed and fought for several months, finally launched a terrifying counterattack with great momentum!

In this operation, which was named the "Great Kansai Counteroffensive" by the Hiroshima base camp, the Japanese Army invested almost all its strength in a desperate gamble. And the combined fleet of the Japanese Navy, which had been cowering in Kure Harbor for several months, once again showed its deadly sharp fangs to the US military!

As a result, before the Pentagon and the White House could react, they were drowned out by the bad news that came from the Japanese front like snowflakes.

In the face of the ground attack of the superior Japanese forces and the sea shelling and blockade of the Combined Fleet, the Pentagon understood from the very beginning that this partial division was doomed to an end from the moment it received the news.

Then, the artillery fire and bombs of the Japanese Combined Fleet were transferred back to the eastern part of the Seto Inland Sea, where the US troops were entrenched in the ports of Wakayama, Osaka, and Kobe. The Anzac, which had been semi-surrounded in Kobe for several months, was the first to lose. These brave and fierce warriors who had a devastating feud against the Japanese Empire, although extremely tenacious, were comparable to any famous army in history. But in the face of the non-stop bombardment of hundreds of warships, the repeated bombing of tens of thousands of aircraft, and the various strong poisonous gases that permeate all day long, even if he is an iron man, he can only be crushed into minced meat a little bit.

With the loss of Kobe, the forward stronghold of the American army, and the annihilation of the most elite backbone troops, the situation in the region was finally completely rotten. After inspecting the battlefield from the air by plane, General Patton, commander of the US forces stationed in Japan, had to give the order for a complete retreat from the Western Front.

However, before leaving, the remnants of the thousands of Anzac Corps who had been ordered to be cut off seemed to have been completely irritated by the blood feud, and not only detonated the ammunition that they had too late to take away, but also carried out the third massacre of the citizens of Osaka and released the remaining poison gas bombs -- this humanitarian disaster was naturally widely publicized by the "relevant parties" again, and it also made the US military further confirm the name of the devil in the eyes of the Japanese.

Then, from Kyoto to Osaka, to Nara and Wakayama, the entire Kansai region began to rush eastward. However, this retreat was not smooth - the sea route was blocked by the Japanese Combined Fleet, and except for a few small boats, the big ships did not want to go at all. The railways in the occupied territories had long since collapsed in the midst of the war, and there was no locomotive to be found or how to dispatch them. In the past, the U.S. military mainly relied on roads to transport supplies, but now there are countless Japanese guerrillas active on almost every road, digging pits and digging pits and blowing up bridges, and laying mines and mines, causing all U.S. trucks and jeeps to break down. Even the inland waterways of the Yodo River and Lake Biwa were mined by the Japanese guerrillas out of nowhere......

As we all know, it is difficult to organize an offensive, but it is even more difficult to organize an orderly retreat than to organize an offensive. Because when attacking, the soldiers know that they are the attacking side, and they will subconsciously think that their side will be stronger and more confident. But when it comes time to retreat, the situation will be reversed. Soldiers will subconsciously think that they are the weaker side, and their spirits will become nervous and depressed, and those who are left behind will worry about being caught up by the enemy, and they will also worry that their comrades in front will not come to their rescue...... There have been many defeated armies that have turned into frightened birds during the retreat, and even if they are only frightened by the sound of birds or rumors, they will suddenly collapse and disintegrate themselves.

Therefore, there are many armies in history that have been able to defeat strong enemies and conquer fortified cities in field battles. However, there are very few armies that can be defeated without dispersing, and can be defeated without being chaotic -- such an army that can fight and retreat. As long as you don't fall halfway, sooner or later you can become a prestigious iron army.

It is a pity that on the Japanese battlefield, the actual quality of US officers and men is obviously still far from the glorious title of "Iron Army."

Although the staff of the U.S. Army, before the front-line troops began to retreat, did make a plan with due diligence and devotion to a very detailed and brutal scorched earth policy: in the towns and towns of western Japan that were ready to be abandoned, destroy ports, bridges, power plants, waterworks, burn grain, pollute wells, and even massacre the remnants of Japanese civilians, it was almost necessary to regress this civilized country to the barbaric flood era. But, in fact, the battle line collapsed much faster than they had anticipated, so that the retreat quickly turned into a rout, and the whole plan was completely wasted paper.

While the U.S. troops on the ground began to retreat in great strides, the American and Japanese pilots in the sky were still fighting to the death. In order to compete for air supremacy in the battlefield, both sides basically went out in a hurry. Although the American pilots who were forced to lower their standards many times due to the brutal war of attrition and expanded on a large scale, their standards were much worse than at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. However, the Japanese pilots who could not stand the other side were even more rookies among rookies, and parallel goods among parallel imports -- basically they were all tender newcomers who had been trained in the past two months, and according to the pre-war physical examination standards, I am afraid that three out of four people would fail to pass the ...... Although there are so many training planes and high-octane gasoline after the 100 mark in the hands of the base camp that there are so many of them at the moment, these rookie Japanese pilots can barely fly for a hundred hours, but a lot of experience and feel can only be understood and cannot be conveyed, but they cannot be stuffed into the heads of students by cramming teaching alone, and there are also physical and physical injuries that can not be made up for by mental will alone.

As a result, the American pilots on the front line were initially very comfortable, jokingly calling this kind of ravaging and hanging of Japanese rookie fighters a "turkey fight," and in the Theater alone, the US Navy and Army Flying Corps shot down an average of 2,000 Japanese planes a day. Yet, despite this, more Japanese planes continued to take to the skies the next day - there had never been a precedent for so many planes to appear on such a small and narrow battlefield at the same time since the invention of the airplane! Moreover, those Japanese pilots, who were initially clumsy and immature to the point of making people laugh, gradually became sophisticated and difficult after being tested in one big air battle after another: after all, the most effective way to train troops in the world is always to learn war in war!

All the unlucky people who don't have the heart to learn or can't learn will all die in battle, and those who can survive the rain of bullets are either lucky or masters...... War is like this, whoever can survive in the killing ground will be able to survive in the future.

-- Relying on the black technology artifact [Chrono Vending Machine], which can explode equipment infinitely without the cost of capital (provided that there is a legal right to issue money from Japan), the current wartime base camp in Hiroshima has almost completely abandoned industrial and agricultural production, and has thrown all the population under its jurisdiction, regardless of gender, into the war. In addition to myopia and presbyopia, normal people have been caught one by one, and they all played the National Airplane Flying Contest and the National Tank Racing Sports...... Anyway, the planes, tanks, fuel and ammunition are all in vain, how many or as many as you want, and you don't feel distressed if you crash into the ditch, and you don't even bother to repair it if it's broken, you just throw it into the field, and replace it with a new plane and a new tank. So much so that the road from Kobe to Sekigahara is littered with abandoned iron lumps, and there are tank cemeteries and aircraft graveyards everywhere, and it is estimated that in the future, it is estimated that many people will be able to feed just selling scrap iron......

Due to the gradual change of control of the air supremacy on the battlefield, the US troops on the front line had no choice but to withstand the bombing and strafing of Japanese planes, retreat on two legs, and soon lost their ranks, turning into a rout like an avalanche and a bursting embankment -- it is obvious that this method of retreating while walking and being beaten while walking is absolutely undesirable, and the US troops on the Japanese battlefield are not the Chinese Red Army on the Long March, and they can still not disperse under the encirclement, pursuit, interception, and wanton and indiscriminate bombing.

In order to contain this chaotic and all-round decline and prevent the retreat from turning into an avalanche of disaster, General Patton mustered three divisions of fresh troops in the midst of the chaos, and went against the flow of fleeing people to prepare for a blocking battle in the area east of Kyoto to cover the calm retreat of the main force. Then, on the famous ancient battlefield of Sekihara in western, Japan, on one of the few open fields on this Japanese island, a tank battle broke out between the main forces of the armored forces of the United States and Japan -- although the performance of the Japanese army's three-type medium combat vehicles can only be said to be average, and the current group of Japanese rookie drivers and gunners who have only undergone a few weeks of training are even more clumsy and desperate in terms of tactical level, and all kinds of collisions, frictions, and misfires have emerged one after another, and there are also tanks directly driven into the ditch to pretend to be submarines. made the American ironclad athlete on the opposite side laugh and lose his big teeth...... But the fatal problem is that the number of Japanese tanks on the opposite side is simply too much, and the number is even more desperate! No matter how many Japanese tanks the U.S. military can destroy, there will definitely be more Japanese tanks in a few hours! Even if these are all enemies like tofu dregs, too much tofu dregs can still crush people!

After four days and four nights of fierce fighting, the US military successfully destroyed more than 27,000 Japanese tanks and shot down more than 12,000 Japanese planes in the Sekigahara battlefield, but it also lost more than 3,500 tanks and armored vehicles, plus more than 3,000 field guns and anti-tank guns......

Thus, when 30,000 Japanese Red Guards in the Hokuriku region moved south from the Hida Mountains, rushed into the ruined Gifu and Nagoya, and cut off the rear routes and supply lines of the American troops on the Sekigahara battlefield from the rear, the Battle of Sekigahara inevitably ended in a crushing defeat for the U.S. forces -- at least 100,000 U.S. troops were dumpled in the region, and General Patton, the commander of the U.S. forces stationed in Japan, escaped in a hurry by seaplane with a small entourage. But even if the US military is lucky enough not to be put into the encirclement, its future is not bright. Because next, it is the time to sweep the tail of chasing the dead and chasing the north.

-- By the time the Battle of Sekigahara was defeated, the retreat of the American forces was in complete confusion.

At first, the retreating American troops along several roads were sloppy and had some formation and order, but after being bombed by Japanese planes several times, all the troops were completely chaotic, everyone ran at will by temperament, and they didn't know where their bosses and colleagues were. The reconnaissance planes flying over their heads, whether they were American planes or Japanese planes, could not distinguish anything from the rest except that they knew that there were "American and British ghost animals" underneath them -- these routed US troops, who had lost the command of their superiors and the most basic order, and ran wildly along the highway according to the animal's survival instinct, became ideal targets for Japanese planes, and many trucks and jeeps full of soldiers were blown up by Japanese pilots with aerial guns; There have even been cases of American officers and soldiers killing each other in order to grab roads or loot vehicles.

What is even more desperate is that some bold Japanese guerrillas found an opportunity to take advantage of the opportunity, and even changed into US military uniforms and mixed in to shoot cold shots, thus further aggravating the confusion of the retreating contingent, and because of the US military's indiscriminate call for air support, it also led to a series of tragic incidents of accidental bombing.

From Kyoto and Osaka to Tokyo, abandoned tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, and artillery are the most striking sights on both sides of the coastal highway in Tokaido. Most of them were naturally dropped by the American army, but many of them also came from the pursuing Japanese troops.

Then, many American troops who had no food or drink were so hungry that they tried to break into the Japanese countryside to collect food and water, but they were used as prey by the Japanese militia guerrillas in the countryside to set up ambushes and beat them with sticks -- as early as the Warring States Period, Japanese peasants had a tradition of "hunting for fallen warriors," that is, sneaking up on defeated and lone samurai and robbing them of their property and weapons and equipment. Now that they have been replaced by the American and British ghost animals who were defeated in the war, and they have the righteous name of patriotism as an incentive, they are naturally correct.

What's more, in order to further motivate the villagers to kill the enemy, the wartime base camp also awarded a high reward: anyone who gets a "white ghost" head can get a reward of ten gold coins, and if it is a "" head, the reward will be halved. In addition, a lot of firearms and ammunition were successively dropped to help the villagers in the war, so that the villagers behind enemy lines had more strength to beat the water dogs -- as a result, the hundreds of thousands of American troops who landed in Japan seemed to be quite a lot, but in Japan, which has a population of tens of millions, in the face of such an enthusiastic all-people guerrilla war, it was still like a drop of water falling into a wine glass, and it was soon gradually dissolved without a trace......

In this way, hundreds of thousands of American troops gave up a large area of land that they had only captured in repeated bloody battles, and fled non-stop and frantically all the way to Shizuoka Prefecture at the foot of Mt. Fuji, only to barely stabilize their footing, and once again formed a confrontation with the Japanese army at the end of the strong crossbow. However, the US occupation zone in the Japanese archipelago has shrunk by more than half during this period, and the loss of troops, materials, and technical weapons has reached the point where even with the US military's deep pockets is deeply painful. In addition, the morale of the whole army has also plummeted, and it is difficult to recover.

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Finally, when the Japanese army's "Kansai counteroffensive" came to an end, the frightened US troops stationed in Japan were finally able to take a breather, and after a rough inspection of their own losses and a report to Washington, the Pentagon and the Oval Office of the White House were suddenly gloomy again.

“…… In just one month, we lost 280,000 Army and Marine Corps soldiers, 20,000 artillery pieces of all kinds, 4,500 tanks, more than 140 ships, 23,000 aircraft and 48,000 crews, and 13,000 ground crews......"

President Truman looked at the shocking lines and rows of numbers on the document almost with grinning teeth, and at the same time had a serious headache about how to deal with the congressional inquiry that would inevitably follow," ...... And the preliminary results are as follows...... Shot down about 200,000 Japanese planes ?! ”

This unbelievable number made him stunned at first, showing a dumb expression of disbelief, and then seemed to think of something, and began to gradually turn from shock to anger, and finally slapped the document on the desk with a hard slap, inhaled deeply, exhaled a long breath, and then ...... The spit cannon is full fire!

“…… What are the Pentagon and Patton bastards kidding! 200,000 Japanese planes?! The Japanese haven't produced so many planes since the start of the war, right? Do you count the kite and the seagull as the result of the battle? Even if you make up a story, you make it up a little bit like me! ”