Fifteen kilometres away, a wounded soldier train with red cross sheets fluttering on its roof is speeding up. The car was crowded with wounded soldiers with severed limbs, most of whom had been wounded in the battle against the 202nd Division.

Since the 14th Field Hospital directly under the 123rd Division was also attacked by Zhou Youfu and suffered heavy losses, most of the wounded soldiers could not be treated at all, so they could only be simply dealt with and sent back, for many of them, time was of the essence.

Lin Xiuxuan and Qin Xiaosu were running wildly in the dark, and they ran back to the woods, telling the refugees who were still talking about the war situation that they had to leave quickly. Because I have just seen the guerrillas burying them on the railway*, it is estimated that the Japanese will carry out a brutal sweep along the line during the day tomorrow.

And the people were skeptical, and they would not go. A loud explosion was heard in the distance. Apparently it was the train collision that triggered the ammunition explosion.

"Did you hear that? Don't go yet. ”

Only then did everyone help the old and the young, and hurriedly left.

Mitsuji Hashimoto, commander of the 5th Special Railway Unit, was holding the telephone under the Second Railway Supervision Department in Bangkok, listening to a telephone conversation by Lieutenant General Nishiojo, deputy chief of staff of the Southern Army. Nishiojo's idea was simple, to continue to increase the efficiency of the railway.

Shouichi Terauchi is now the captain of the transport brigade and must be responsible for the supply of weapons on both sides of the north and south lines. In the south, Yamashita Bongbun urgently needed more ships to transport troops and supplies ashore, while in Thailand, the key was rail.

Continuing to increase the size means that the railroad force must repair bombing damage during the day with greater efficiency, and at night, the frequency of shifts must be less intervaled, and the pressure on single-track railways is self-evident.

As early as when Thailand tendered for the construction of this railway, Japan began to pay attention to its military value, and due to the political considerations of the Thai government at that time, the British finally won the bid. Japan, on the other hand, secretly prepared the same signaling system. Being able to complete the seamless handover of the railway depends on early preparations, which can be regarded as a huge miracle in military history, but the peak still has to be increased.

Lieutenant General Nishidaijo said that the senior general of the temple had already seen the weakness of Chu Tingchang, so this time he decided to first suppress and then promote, first stabilize the defense of Chiang Mai, stock up enough supplies, and wait for the enemy to exhaust his sharp energy, and then pull the main 4th Division up and crush the enemy in one fell swoop. Now, seeing that Chu Tingchang has taken the bait, he has fallen into a situation where he can't advance and feels a pity when he retreats, so he has to continue to have illusions. After this drags on in January, the heat is almost over.

According to the prediction of the commander of the temple, the time point for defeating Chu Tingchang and MacArthur will be roughly the same, and Japan will be invincible in the world by then, so at such a critical moment, the railway troops must continue to work hard.

Hashimoto Osa put down the phone and let out a sigh of relief. Lieutenant General Nishiojo is a well-known talker in the army, and he has to repeat the things he explained at the meeting several times on the phone. Hashimoto hadn't closed his eyes for 36 hours, so he was finally able to sleep for a while.

As soon as I fell asleep, the phone rang again. He turned over and answered the phone, the story was a trivial matter, and his subordinates didn't dare to take responsibility, so he let him take the idea and pass it perfunctorily.

After listening to two sentences, I couldn't help but be so shocked that I didn't feel sleepy at all. They told him that the two military columns had collided. It took him a few seconds to realize the seriousness of the matter. If the guerrillas had planted *, then it would not have been a collision. It should be a single train derailment. A collision means that something is wrong with the scheduling or signaling system.

Supposedly, it would not have been someone who had invaded the railway signaling system, which would have to be done by someone from a rather high level in the duty department, but the railway had already been taken over by the Japanese. In addition, the Yugoslav authorities also boasted of Haikou and infiltrated the entire Thai intelligence system. Is there something wrong with Suzuki? Hashimoto subconsciously pushed the possibility of responsibility to others.

Keiji Suzuki did say at the military meeting that if the Thai intelligence organization is eliminated, the enemy will soon return to airdrop a new team, so with his experience, it is better to infiltrate them as much as possible and feed them with real and false annihilation, so as to minimize the damage. Such a bizarre theory is strange if there is no problem.

It's just a week ago that Suzuki was still sitting at the end of the meeting and talking like a fart, but the days after Tojo's assassination suddenly became important. Senior General Terauchi personally called the top brass of the Thai-Burmese Front, which was about to merge, and demanded that Keiji Suzuki's opinion be taken seriously.

Hashimoto hurriedly put on his military uniform and rushed out, he had to rush to the scene overnight to check the reason, preferably the responsibility of the southern agency rather than his own. As for the railway, it could be repaired quickly. It is enough to pull the train across the railway, but only reduce the frequency and speed by half, so that in the event of an accident, the train driver will have time to respond (brake). Of course, this also means that efficiency will be reduced by three-quarters. He guessed that Nishiojo would be furious when he heard the news, so he had to leave the headquarters and go to the scene so that he wouldn't have to answer his calls.

When Chu Tingchang sat on the marching bed and washed his feet, he received information from the British army. His orderly shouted: Master Guan is powerful and ran in.

Chu Tingchang excitedly read the information several times to confirm that there was no mistake, and then quickly got up and put a stick of incense on the statue of Guan Erye.

He calculates the capacity of the railway every day, and his heart is beating terrified. Every night, that means a wing of infantry, or thousands of shells, are transported here.

Obviously, the railways will be suspended for a while, and such an opportunity must not be missed. He immediately made a decision to increase his attack on Chiang Mai tomorrow and make a detour to cut off the railway. He wanted to see if the Third Brigade couldn't get out.

Commander Chu did lack some key information, so he couldn't guess what the real reason was why the commander of the Amano Kunichen Brigade was shrinking behind the infantry line and didn't dare to come out.

At night, Amano also sent a large number of his reconnaissance troops to conduct a long-distance roundabout reconnaissance of Chu Tingchang's troops at dawn, and he had long noticed that the enemy retained an offensive formation, which was convenient for launching a new offensive during the day, and the communication between friendly neighbors was loose, and there were no defenses at all, and there were many gaps to drill. This was one of the prerequisites for his counterattack, and the other was that the Sherman tanks had to be avoided.

His unit was formed according to the full German model, and in addition to tanks, there were also 4.5-ton Type 97 cavalry tanks. This small reconnaissance vehicle is ideal for traversing a variety of terrain. The purpose of their attack was to scout the track marks on the ground and find Sherman's whereabouts. Then, depending on the whereabouts of these monsters, carry out a sneak attack across the sky.

What Amano was afraid of was only the Sherman tank, and he hadn't figured out how far the 48-fold 47mm main gun could penetrate the Sherman, but for the 12-ton Stuart, the enemy's careful thinking was something that Chu Tingchang didn't guess if he wanted to break his head, otherwise he could have calculated it. ，

In order to plan the attack, Amano transferred two secret units from the headquarters of the Southern Army, the first communication team and the meteorological survey unit directly under him. The communication unit is used to measure the position of the opponent's headquarters, and the meteorological unit is used to predict the weather, he needs the morning fog in the morning to cover the attack, of course, if the sun is good after sunrise, the fog will quickly dissipate, so he needs to prefabricate whether the next day will be cloudy.

One of the cavalry chariots did not disappoint him, it took advantage of the heavy fog to climb to the commanding heights, and saw the silhouette of the moving Sherman tanks in the morning fog in the distance, numbering at least 20 units, and quite a few armored vehicles behind them, as if they were about to outflank Chiang Mai.

When the reconnaissance tank retreated, it was spotted by a nearby infantry company. The infantry company mobilized several heavy machine guns to fire at it, and when the tank fled in a hurry, it fell into a swamp, killing two Japanese soldiers in the vehicle. A copy of the commander's notes was seized. It depicts exactly the route he followed along the Sherman track.

Amano got the news and immediately decided to make a big detour attack away from Sherman, striking at the rear of Chu Tingchang.

He used a tank wing and a mechanized infantry brigade for this attack, in addition to various armored vehicles and radio survey vehicles from the Field Survey Headquarters directly under the Southern Army. The infantry brigade is equipped with a type of armored troop carrier, which is the essence of the Kwantung Army, which usually plays the role of the Soviet Army during annual exercises, but in fact, the Soviet Army in the Far East only has motorized infantry, and the mechanization degree of this unit exceeds that of the Soviet Army.

At six o'clock in the morning, the fog had not lifted, and the US military canceled the bombing plan.

The 5th Army, unwilling to give up the opportunity to attack, launched an artillery bombardment. Unlike the vigorous attack on this side, 15 kilometers away, the Japanese attack quietly unfolded.

About 60 tanks, 15 armored vehicles and 90 half-track personnel carriers, waving the blue sky and white sun flag, slipped past the junction between the 202nd Division and the machine gun units directly under the army. The tanks of this unit concealed the sunburst emblem and were specially modified to make it look somewhat like a Stuart tank from the side. Of course, the walking route is hidden behind the embankment, so that only the turret part is exposed.

Some Chinese soldiers heard the sound of tanks passing, and since the Japanese never sent tanks, many Chinese soldiers thought that there were no Japanese tanks in the area. Another huge cover was the fact that the Japanese made a sortie of armored troop carriers, a half-track vehicle that had never been seen by all Allied soldiers. For the Chinese soldiers, who are accustomed to seeing the M3 half-track, it is easy to regard this unit that marches quietly and does not fire a single shot as their own.

After passing through the first line of Chinese troops, the Japanese armored units hid in the jungle, in the shallow and deep behind enemy lines, without forming a defense, only small patrols near the transport lines. Chu Tingchang was on the offensive, and he didn't want the troops to be too extended, so that they would have to assemble during the attack, and second, the supply line would be too long. He did have some lazy thoughts.

However, the attacking force did not know that what they were about to attack was only Zhao Xiaoli's attack group headquarters, and the scale was only at the regimental level. The field radio measurement technology of the Japanese army was quite backward, and there were many communication units in Chu Tingchang's troops, and even ordinary infantry companies had no less than one radio station, and these radiation sources invisibly formed interference, making the measurement of the radio group (predictive command center) very inaccurate, so in this attack, the survey vehicle also followed, hoping to reduce the target area in the final stage.

Zhao Xiaoli's tanks were all photographed on the front line, and near his headquarters, there were only a few vehicles and logistics troops left to be repaired, and even he himself was not at the headquarters.