The Japanese soldiers at Midway were trying their best to repair their Taisho-11 light machine guns, which had been operating in the Pacific theater since they had behaved mediocre and often made all sorts of unbearable mistakes.

Since the final failure of the Japanese Empire's attack on the Hawaiian Islands, the Japanese Navy has drawn up a huge plan for a strategic decisive battle around Midway, but unfortunately the US Navy is not fooled and has been stationed in Hawaii to wait for more of its aircraft carriers to be launched.

In desperation, Yamamoto had no choice but to lead the remnants of the Japanese navy south, and retreated back to the waters near the Marshall Islands, where the islands were numerous, and trained naval aviation troops with heavy losses in order to fight again. With the support of this navy, the Japanese Army in Australia launched an offensive code-named "Nagato", capturing a series of important northeastern towns in Australia.

However, this series of attacks did not make Japan elated, and anyone with a little vision knows that the Japanese navy spent all its money on a stud that the US government would be defeated and surrendered, and it was a complete failure. Instead of capitulating in frustration and humiliation, as most politicians in the Japanese base camp had expected, the Americans drew their swords like a giant who had been awakened from a sweet dream.

The Combined Fleet ran away, or "turned in," and the mess left behind was handed over to a wretched bunch of Japanese Army and Marines, who had been thrown all the way to Midway only to fight a desperate war without sea and air superiority.

A group of Japanese soldiers were ordered to dig trenches on the beach and build various fortifications out of looted sandbags and wood from the island, and they still believed that the Japanese Navy could kill them when they needed to, and strangle the U.S. naval landing force that was preparing to invade the "sacred land" beneath their feet. Optimists thought they would win the war within a month, while pessimists thought they would return to their homeland by the end of 1939.

The commander in charge of the more than 20,000 Japanese infantry on Midway Island was named An Teng, a veteran commander who had fought in the war in China for several years, and he had rich combat experience and was one of the more promising figures in the Japanese Army. Being sent to Midway to command the battle at a critical juncture also shows the trust that the base camp has in him.

But to tell the truth, although this Anteng has a lot of combat experience, but it is the so-called "experience" of fighting in China, and in the face of the Chinese regular army, whose weapons and equipment are similar to those of Japan, or even slightly behind, his command can be regarded as decent, but when he is transferred to the Pacific Ocean to deal with the US military with obvious firepower superiority, his little experience is a little out of place.

As on Kauai, the Japanese Army continued to build a defensive line on the beach in an attempt to completely block the landing of American troops on the beachhead, and this tactic is also one of the oldest tactics of resistance to the landing operation, and can only be described as a word that is not brilliant. Moreover, the Army and the Marine Corps have not received any news of the Navy's "transfer", and they have always believed that the Navy is nearby and can support them in the operation.

"Wipe it clean, it's too easy to jam. A Japanese machine gun shooter reminded his comrades who were wiping machine guns: "I don't know if the commanders know about it, and the use of this weapon is simply harming our own people." ”

The Taisho 11 light machine gun was designed and produced in 1922 as Japan's main light machine gun, and according to Japan's consistent "non-mainstream" idea at that time, this machine gun also decided to create a "path of imperialist development with Japanese characteristics".

The Japanese Army strangely believes that the integration of their automatic weapons into combat units of the same level as infantry squads and platoons will inevitably increase the ammunition consumption of front-line infantry, so it is necessary to consider the resulting ammunition guarantee problem. This is not a problem at all in Germany and the United States, where industrial production capacity is relatively high, but it has become a fatal technical indicator in Japan, which shows that Japan, which became rich overnight after the First Sino-Japanese War, is not as rich as it seems on the surface.

Prior to the arming of this light machine gun, the basic combat units of the front-line infantry of the Japanese Army were not equipped with automatic weapons, and all used manual "three-zero" rifles or "three-eight" rifles. The Japanese military has always advocated the "bushido spirit" of being industrious and thrifty, and emphasizing the "bushido spirit" of using bayonets instead of bullets -- of course, the reason for this is actually to save some steel and build more useful big guys such as warships.

As a result, this use of light machine guns has become a problem, and ammunition security has become a problem. Specifically, there are two aspects: first, the quantity of ammunition, that is, to ensure that it is sufficient, and second, the type of ammunition, that is, to ensure that it is universal. And generality is the fundamental requirement to ensure ammunition support. Rifles and machine guns use the same type of cartridge, which maximizes the convenience of ammunition support in battle.

Hearing this, I couldn't help but shout out for the Japanese Army's embryonic family weapon shooting ideas, and Germany, which was far away on the other side of the ocean, really embarked on the road of paying attention to the development of family and generalization of weapons under the leadership of Accardo, and a number of weapons and equipment with very high versatility were born.

For example, most of the parts of the German Leopard tank can be used in common with the Tiger tank, which also allows Germany to take advantage of the tank production line. However, even the 21 st century U.S. general-purpose fighter program has not achieved the grand long-cherished wish of complete universal parts -- do not doubt it, yes, this time, the cute senior officers of the Japanese army are once again at the forefront of the world, and they have put forward a cute demand.

The Japanese Army considered the issue of the convenience of front-line infantry in battle. It is required that this type of automatic weapon, which will be incorporated into the front-line infantry combat formation, should use the same ammunition feeder as the rifle. That is, the machine gun was to be fed with a 5-round magazine using a rifle. In this way, the infantry has achieved universal ammunition supply, which can not only further improve the convenience of ammunition security, but also simplify the process of factory production, especially in terms of ammunition packaging, the whole box Japan 6. 5mm rifle cartridges are stored together with a magazine of 5 rounds of ammunition, and there are almost no loose ammunition packaging, so that the bullets can be directly used for rifles and light machine guns at the same time when they are unpacked on the battlefield.

That is, while emphasizing the universality of infantry and machine gun ammunition, it also emphasizes the universality of infantry and machine gun ammunition supply, and infantry and machine guns are the same ammunition and ammunition supply tools, and when a box of ammunition is opened, the rifleman can directly use it, and the machine gunner can also use it directly; in battle, the rifleman's bullets can be collected for machine gun use; when the machine gun is broken, or in order to save ammunition, the remaining ammunition can be distributed to the rifleman.

Doesn't it sound lofty? Doesn't it sound wonderful? Of course, if you can play something in the end, you have to admire the strong tolerance of Japanese gun designers. However, the end result of such a balance is that the "user experience" of this product is really poor.

In today's society, it is very important for products to emphasize a user experience, which explains the feelings of users of a product in the process of use. As a weapon, the user who uses them is the soldier, and if the user experience of the weapon is poor, then the soldier can only complain with his life.

This light machine gun with Japanese characteristics is very sensitive to changes in the meteorological environment, and at the beginning, it was used in the low temperature and severe cold conditions in Northeast China, and the reliability was very poor.

Obviously, this temporary remedy did not fundamentally change the problem of poor reliability, and later it became even worse when used in the conditions of high temperature and humidity in Southeast Asia, and even the oil pot did not help. In the reports of the front-line machine gunners, the failure rate of the Taisho-11 light machine gun will be relatively low only in the season when it is neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor wet, and under the ideal conditions of careful wiping and maintenance and mild combat intensity.

It is not difficult to explain why this Japanese-invented weapon has such a bad reputation that after the Chinese army captured this light machine gun, it rarely kept it for itself. Because according to the quality of the Chinese army at that time, there were really not many people who could use such machine guns.

The poor Japanese Army, on a few improvised machine-gun emplacements on the beach, set up this glitchy machine gun, ready to resist the attack of the Americans. In fact, as the commander, Admiral Anteng never thought that the Americans would come, because a month ago, the Japanese Navy lured the United States into a decisive battle nearby, and it took more than ten days to wait for the figure of the US Navy. To this day, he has stubbornly maintained that the US Navy will not be able to appear in the waters near Midway for at least two months.

It turns out that his adjutant likes to slap him in the face, and he hits him hard and accurately. When Antan was self-righteous, his adjutant rushed into his headquarters and said in a loud voice the last thing Anteng wanted to hear: "An American plane has appeared in the sky! The Americans have attacked!"

Before the adjutant's eldest brother could calm down, the terrible air defense sirens began to sound, and the ground of the entire Midway Island seemed to tremble, trembling violently in the explosion of one aerial bomb after another.

Two more foundations, let's go here for today's update.