Deputy Director Zheng Huaien reported and went down, this is an experienced middle-aged official, born in a family of royal retainers, revealing the shadow of the former Director Zheng Yuan.

The report is concise and to the point, and never adds your own opinion bias.

This is a very important quality as a secretary of the imperial family, His Majesty the Emperor has a unique understanding of the current situation in the world, and there is no need for the secretary to talk too much, which will form unnecessary interference.

Inside the Imperial Study

Emperor Richard was also briefed on military operations in the East Indies, and on the whole;

Military operations in Sumatra and Kalimantan are progressing steadily, and the subsequent construction of roads and factories is in full swing, and the resettlement work has begun to form an orderly rotation of occupation, construction, migration, and digestion.

The military campaign on Kalimantan had already occupied the provinces of Eastern, Southern and North Kalimantan, leaving only the combined Dutch heavy concentration area entrenched on the line of Sampet and Palangkaraya, which was victorious in one fell swoop.

Elsewhere on the island, the expeditionary force forcibly put some 73,000 indigenous labourers into hard labor camps and began to build the Ring Road, a coastal ring road.

The closest place to the sea is only two or three hundred meters, and you can see the magnificent and beautiful seaside scenery, and the farthest place is tens or hundreds of kilometers.

The coasts of the islands in the tropics are geographically complex, with many areas boasting large areas of wetlands and mangrove forests that flood at high tide and are not suitable for road infrastructure.

The engineering and technical personnel choose the inland area with a relatively solid foundation, and open up the main artery of a highway trunk line in the mountains and forests, most of which are inaccessible rainforest areas, and the construction is quite difficult.

With the advancement of a large number of laborers, all difficulties and obstacles have been solved.

The more than 73,000 indigenous laborers were divided into more than 30 teams, each with two or three thousand people, and the first team was the burning team.

The burning team uses large quantities of flammable materials such as gasoline and thatch, which are used to ignite wildfires in tropical jungles.

Due to the humidity of the tropical rainforest, it is difficult to ignite wildfires, and even if they are ignited, they will quickly and naturally extinguish, at most burning some messy shrubs and large tree surfaces, and can only be burned one by one.

Immediately behind the burning team is the logging team, they have a team of 8~10 people, and they must cut down two large trees and cut out the roots every day in order to complete the assigned task.

This is by no means an easy task, and each logging team can work from morning to night, and sometimes they have to work overtime in the dark when they encounter giant trees in the rainforest.

Behind the logging team is the finishing team, who is responsible for clearing the branches of the fallen trees with axes or saws, sawing the main trunks into sections and piling them aside in an orderly manner.

All the weeds and branches were cleared to form a level field for the team to enter.

The finishing team is followed by a transport team, usually using oxen and tractors, who haul the felled trees in sections and transport them to the stockyard of the timber processing plant.

Then use a tractor to turn the site deeply, rake it flat after a few days of exposure, clean out the root system of weeds and shrubs, all kinds of debris and stones, and then tamp and level.

Then there is the road construction team, they first mark the road lime line, then pad a layer of grass and wood ash tamping, pad a layer of lime tamping, then pad a thick layer of stone tamping, then pad a thick layer of fly ash tamping, then pad a thick layer of stone tamping, and finally pad a thick layer of dry soil tamping.

In this way, the gravel road is largely completed.

After the road construction team left, the following ditching team opened neat drainage ditches along both sides of the road, and set up highway mileage stone monuments, so that the main body of the sand and gravel road was completed.

Every 10 to 20 kilometers, a timber processing plant, a sand and gravel yard, a limestone factory, and a large flat land is carved out around these factories, and houses and towns are built out of wood.

Most of these towns and villages were located along larger rivers for easy access to water and subsistence needs, and were originally camps for hard labour and bridge teams.

in these villages and towns

In areas with lime line planning, a dozen or dozens of decent wooden houses will often be built in the center of the town, which are used for commercial purposes such as telegraph office, police station, bank post and telecommunications office, town office, shop, restaurant, tea house, etc., which are often the center of the town.

In other areas, there are large expanses of rudimentary flat workshops, basically four columns plus a roof, mainly for hard labor prisoners.

Such a simple workshop can shelter from the wind and rain, but it leaks from all sides, and cannot resist mosquito attacks, so it can only solve the problem of accommodation preliminarily.

In the future, after the aboriginal local service camp leaves, the Chinese immigrants who arrive one after another will be assigned such flat houses, which they will need to spend their own money to tidy up.

At the very least, buy a few large nylon mosquito nets to cover the flat workshop to prevent mosquitoes from the rainforest to avoid tropical malaria, diarrhea, skin ulcers and other diseases, that is the next step.

Thanks to the large number of people and the abundant indigenous labor force invested in the construction of the ring road, the project has been carried out quite quickly.

Each engineering site can often send hundreds of logging teams, and they can cut down two or three hundred large trees in a day, advancing thousands of kilometers.

Judging from this rate of advancement, if the battle to annihilate the Dutch defenders on the front line of Sampet and Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Kalimantan Province, progresses smoothly, the main body of the ring road will roughly take shape by the end of the year or early next year.

In terms of military deployment

The Kalimantan Corps led by Lieutenant General Fan Pengfei will gather its forces to launch the Battle of Sampeit on a certain day in mid-July, kicking off the prelude to gathering and destroying the Dutch heavy army group.

It is planned that in 1~2 months, the recalcitrant enemy will be completely defeated and eliminated, and after repairing for more than a month, it will be transferred to the next step of the clean-up operation.

The Kalimantan Corps has a total of about 55,000 people, and in addition to the troops left behind in various places, the main force of the corps that can participate in the Battle of Sampeit is nearly 40,000 people, which has a fourfold advantage over the more than 10,000 Dutch troops around Sampit.

There were 32,000 Dutch defenders in the area, spread over the 330-kilometre stretch from Sampeit to Palangkaraya inland.

This area is also the focus of the Dutch colonizers to develop the area, the agricultural conditions are good, densely distributed about 3,700 Dutch plantations and farms, living 5~60,000 Dutch whites.

Some of the early white families have been passed down for more than a dozen generations in the local area.

There are also hundreds of thousands of indigenous people living in this well-developed area, most of whom are plantation or farm workers, who have been exploited by white colonizers for decades.

According to the latest information

The Dutch are arming the indigenous men with all their might, distributing them with knives, guns, and cold weapons to use as cannon fodder against the Imperial army.

There are all signs that the Dutch are not resigned to defeat and will make a death throes.

Emperor Richard had secretly ordered the commanders at the front to carry out a dragnet strangulation of the local Dutch, and depending on the specific situation, measures could be taken to completely eliminate them and solve the hidden dangers at one time.

Since it is the new conqueror, then do not talk about benevolence.

Emperor Richard knew that these Dutch whites were very hard-boned, not to mention that the total number was only a million people, but the intensity of their resistance was quite high and very difficult to tame.

This was the case with the Boers in South Africa, where the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State combined had just over 400,000 men.

In the original history.

In order to conquer these two Boer countries, Britain successively invested a total of more than 400,000 troops, suffered more than 22,000 casualties, and spent more than 200 million pounds in huge military expenditures.

In fact, it was not long before the Boers regained their numerical superiority in South Africa, and the British had no choice but to adopt a policy of softness......

So, can white Dutch cause big trouble for the Tang Empire in the East Indies?

From the current point of view

White Dutch do not yet have such ability, with less than 300,000 white Dutch people living in Sumatra and Kalimantan, and the rest are concentrated in the Java archipelago.

Due to the geographical fragmentation of the archipelago, this gave the Imperial army a huge advantage in each defeat, and could sweep away the hidden danger through a series of tough military means.

In this regard, the Tang Empire has a wealth of experience.

Although it was inevitably criticized in a short period of time, it attracted strong criticism from some European countries and put a lot of international pressure on it.

But in the long run, it's all worth it.

Due to the complex geographical conditions of the East Indies rainforest, it is difficult for the delicate horses in the region to survive, and the local white people generally do not ride horses, so there is no cavalry raid like South Africa.

The so-called guerrilla warfare can only be waged on foot.

The Aceh War lasted for 25 years, and it was because the rebels had the quiet support of the local Acehnese people that they were able to hide in the rainforest for so many years.

The Dutch had no such conditions, and after the unconditional expropriation of local white farms and plantations, the Dutch who hid in the rainforest had no choice but to die.

Emperor Richard knew that Lieutenant General Fan Pengfei, the commander of the Kalimantan Corps, was an extremely experienced veteran, and judging from his military deployment, he was steady and steady, and there were almost no weaknesses for the enemy to take advantage of.

Although the military advance has been slower, the victory is steady.

Comparatively

The Sumatran Corps, which was dominated by the Second Corps of the Royal Praetorian Guard, broke out several fierce battles with the Dutch army in the area of the battle monument, and although it was victorious, the losses were not small.

After several battles, more than 4,000 officers and soldiers were killed and wounded.

The Dutch army was quite stubborn in its will to resist, and its tactical play was also flexible, and it was indeed a tough nut to crack down on flanks, and to attack convoys and ports across the battle line.

On the frontal battlefield and the flank battlefield, more than a dozen battles broke out on both sides in a row, which brought a lot of pressure.

In light of this

The Imperial War Department urgently deployed the only armored division to reinforce the Sumatra battlefield, the Imperial Armored Division under the command of Brigadier General Tang Li Yi (note, formerly known as Lei Xiao), the 71st son of the Emperor, and is expected to arrive in early August.

In addition to the Panzer Division, the Royal Janissaries also increased the Second Mindanao Division, further increasing the strength from 89,000 to 112,000, and the real decisive battle began.