Chapter 90: Surabaya landing

Wang Xiangzong withdrew his gaze from the large map of Java Island hanging on the wall! Their 3rd Marine Division has finally caught up with this war of attacking the Netherlands, and it must play a brilliant battle! Quickly take the entire island of Java!

After taking out the pocket watch he had been issued and looking at the time, he couldn't help but turn his head to look at the young staff officer standing behind him and ask, "How are the troop preparations?"

As the first batch of troops to enter the battlefield, they will land from Jinshi under the cover of the navy after the order of war has been issued, and then join our Jǐng reserve troops lurking on the island, and penetrate directly behind the port of Surabaya from the flank, and cooperate with our frontal attacking troops to annihilate the 3,000 Dutch garrisons guarding there in one fell swoop!" the young lieutenant staff officer faithfully reported.

After listening to his report, Wang Xiangzong looked at the night sky outside that had completely darkened with an expressionless face, and secretly thought in his heart: "There are still three hours to start!"

In order to fight this war well, the Huo Jiajun Navy also did its best, and could not help but transfer over nine of the latest general-class destroyers, and the more than 30 or so latest freighters that had just been launched by the Huo family fleet were all equipped here as transport ships! You must know that these 5,000-ton cargo ships are all equipped with Huo Jiajun's new power equipment, and their maximum speed can reach 18 knots! Their superiority in speed is already comparable to that of the best cruisers of this era!

Xu Shoushan stood in the neat command tower, although his expression was serious and serious, but the excitement revealed in his eyes still made people understand that his heart was not as calm as he appeared! As the captain of the new destroyer 'Lianpo', he was excited that he could participate in the biggest military operation since the rise of the Huo Jiajun, even if he was now only tasked with simple landing support, as well as blocking the coast and striking at the few remaining East India fleets in the Netherlands!

"Captain Xu will rely on the help of your naval brothers next!" Liu Guangming, commander of the Third Division and the First Regiment of the Marine Corps, said with a smile.

"Don't worry, our navy's naval guns will escort your landing operation!"

Looking at Xu Shoushan's confident appearance, Liu Guangming smiled faintly, Jinshi's Dutch army is not much, about five hundred, compared with the number of nearly four thousand in their group, it is really not enough, but the lion pounces on the rabbit also do his best, the Huo family army is to destroy the withering and decaying, before the enemy reacts, completely defeat them with the smallest loss!

Li Yang silently wiped the Type 80 rifle in his hand, he has been a soldier for almost two years, and among the young contingent of the Huo Jiajun, he can already be regarded as a veteran! This time their regiment was the first attack force, and they undertook the important task of capturing Jinshi! This was the first time that these troops, who had only participated in the task of exterminating pirates, had participated in this kind of formal confrontation between armies! Although the Dutch army on the other side of the strait was only 500 men, their combat equipment was far from theirs! But the thought of stepping on a bloody battlefield still made him feel a little uneasy!

Stuffing the bullet into the gun magazine and carefully carrying it to his back, Li Yang finally checked the equipment of his whole body, and quickly rushed to the assembly place of his troops!

There is only a short Surabaya Strait between Madura and Java, and the narrowest point is less than five kilometers, so the transport ships attached to the 3rd Marine Division do not exceed 1,000 tons!

Although Jinshi is relatively far away from Madura Island, it is only a distance of more than ten kilometers! Therefore, a regiment of attacking troops reached the open sea of Jinshi Port in less than an hour by means of transport ships that had been specially strengthened with power equipment!

In order to ensure the concealment of the first attack, the Cobra special forces had already cleared out the jǐng troops on the periphery of this small coastal port! Therefore, the soldiers of the Huojia Army who landed here almost did not encounter any obstacles, and soon opened up a five-kilometer beachhead, and after all the troops and equipment of nearly 4,000 people had landed, with the cooperation of the naval guns, the all-out attack on Jinshi began!

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Hendrik Lorenz was the commander of the 3,000 Dutch garrisons stationed in the port of Surabaya! Although he had already received an order from General Pitt from Batavia to order the officers stationed in the troops everywhere to be strict and not to leave the barracks without permission! However, the long-term comfort had corroded the soul and body of the Dutch army! They were now accustomed to comfortable beds and soft bodies of women, and were no longer the strong army of the Dutch colonial period that they had been!

Except for the time when Huo Jiajun had just occupied the Nusa Tenggara Islands, and he had been in the barracks for a month or two, he had hardly returned to that cold and dirty place in his eyes!

In addition, the news that the combined expeditionary forces of the Netherlands and Portugal had now set out from Europe reached Java by telegraph! In only half a month, they would be able to reach the East Indies, and by that time the Dutch army here would reach 80,000, and it would have been expected to defeat those hateful yellow-skinned monkeys and win the war! Therefore, he did not have the slightest burden of leaving the barracks privately! Because in his opinion, those hateful invaders should hurry up to build fortifications to resist the king** The team is about to start a counterattack, instead of choosing to take the initiative to attack the island of Java!

"Boom......!"

Just after 12 o'clock in the morning, when the people had already fallen asleep, the violent sound of artillery began to roar over the main ports on the northeast coast of Sumatra and Java!

"What's going on?" Hendrik sat up from the fat powder pile, the residual sleepiness in his brain that made him a little unresponsive for a moment!

However, the sound of cannons and fires coming from outside the window couldn't help but make his mouth grow gradually, and his face was full of surprise and disbelief!

"Kick!" After a rush of heavy footsteps, a young second lieutenant officer slammed open the closed door with a 'bang'! Looking at Hendrick, who was still sitting on the bed in a daze, he couldn't help but say anxiously: "Sir, those Orientals have begun to attack, their artillery fire is very fierce, and our army is almost unable to resist!"

"What?" Hendrick, who came back to his senses at the second lieutenant's report, collapsed from the bed naked like a cat that had been stepped on by the tail! He grabbed the second lieutenant's shoulders and asked nervously: "We have more than 3,000 heroic Royal Army, why can't we resist it for so long?"

"Sir, their artillery fire is so fierce, more than a hundred light and heavy artillery pieces have bombarded our barracks and coastal batteries in succession, and our troops have suffered heavy losses in their first round of artillery bombardment, and they can't resist their landing force of tens of thousands of men at all!" replied the second lieutenant with some horror!

In this era, the coordinated tactics of artillery in which artillery was used intensively, carried out large-scale saturation artillery bombardment, undermined the enemy's morale, and mobilized infantry to carry out skirmish line assaults only existed in the German army! As for other countries, artillery was only infantry support weapons, and there was no concept of concentrated artillery fire at all! Therefore, the Dutch soon completely collapsed under the blows of the mortars, infantry guns, and naval guns of the Huo Jiajun!

Seeing his commander hurriedly put on his clothes, put some money in his pocket, and ran outside in a panic without taking a gun, the second lieutenant couldn't help but ask with some confusion: "Sir, where are you going, you haven't got your gun yet?"

"You take it for me, the situation here is too important, I will personally go to Batavia to report to General Pete, you go and tell the army to resist, reinforcements will arrive soon!"

Looking at his commander's neat and neat running behavior, the second lieutenant couldn't come back to his senses for a while, he couldn't imagine that the Royal Dutch Army officer he respected very much, Colonel Hendrik, the commander of the 3,000 troops stationed in Surabaya, actually threw down the army that was still resisting and ran away by himself!

Xu Shoushan took out a cigarette roll and lightly swiped it on the barrel of the 130mm naval gun that was already red, and suddenly, the high speed of the cannon that had been ejected from the barrel quickly ignited the cigarette in his hand!

Looking at the Surabaya Harbor, which had been contained by artillery fire in the distance, Xu Shoushan picked up the cigarette in his hand and took a pleasant puff! The four 130mm naval guns on the destroyer Lianpo, with a speed of nearly six rounds per bell, could not help but destroy the fortifications and coastal batteries built by the Dutch, and they were also completely stunned by the old soldiers who had never seen a new type of heavy artillery!

Looking at the artillerymen who were full of excitement and leaping to try their faces, Xu Shoushan couldn't help but smile, no matter how much live ammunition he usually fired, it couldn't compare to the effect of these ten minutes of actual combat on a soldier's artillery skills!

"Send a report to the command that the Lian Po has completed the shelling mission, and the 3rd Marine Division has successfully landed in the port of Surabaya!"