Don't look at the 150,240 large-caliber howitzers of the Japanese heavy artillery brigade. One shot will create a large crater with a diameter of several meters, and the killing radius reaches a staggering 50 meters.
It almost means that if a shell is dropped, an area the size of two basketball courts will be within its destruction range.
But that doesn't mean that there are no safe places in Songjiang City, which covers an area of 2.0 square kilometers.
A Japanese heavy artillery brigade has a total of 30 150mm howitzers, 20 240mm howitzers, and 10 305mm howitzers. A saturation attack means throwing 60 shells. Even one shell can kill 5,000 square meters and can be hit by artillery fire.
The area covered by wind and air waves will never exceed one-eighth of the Songjiang City area with a total area of more than two million square meters.
This is not to say that the Japanese heavy artillery brigade is not powerful enough, but that relatively speaking, Songjiang City, which was not a small city in the first place, still has a way to survive because of its sufficient depth.
If it were the American cowboys at the Five Sacred Mountains more than ten years later, gathering hundreds of cannons and dozens of aircrafts to bomb the city, then Songjiang City would have truly connected the city and turned people into powder.
For example, this machine gunner of the 67th Army in the machine gun fortifications who saw the Japanese "big balloon". Although the rumbling sound of gunfire exploding all around him had caused him to lose his hearing with cotton stuffed in his ears, his eyes were still good.
Through the thick smoke, he saw the strange thing flying in mid-air with a big head and a long tail.
As a machine gunner in an air defense battalion, Mo Songzi had seen this thing frequently on the North China battlefield. The Japanese often used it to observe the opponent's positions and guide artillery bombardments.
The North China Plain is already flat. The Japanese often have an unobstructed view of their opponents' positions with this device, but the distance is too far. The farthest can even be up to ten kilometers. Even if the Chinese army has this type of anti-air combat, the range can reach 2,500 meters.
Even the Oerlikon machine gun cannot pose a threat to such a large balloon that is far out of range.
Anyway, Mo Songzi fired two springboards at this thing on the front line, but it turned out that it was useless. The only thing that poses a threat to the big balloon is the airplane.
But in the skies of North China, have there ever been Chinese fighter planes? It’s okay to dream.
But now, the big balloon has reached a place where he can see it clearly with the naked eye. Is this asking him to die?
"Get up, get up, you are all very good, get up, there is work to do. Come on, come on!" Mo Songzi looked at his subordinates who were huddled in the corner and holding their heads, and kicked them all.
Shouting was just a subconscious behavior. Apart from the buzzing in his own ears, he couldn't hear any other sounds.
The fear on the faces of the soldiers has not disappeared, but this does not prevent them from working under the urging of the sergeant squad leader. Some wiped the dust from the machine guns with cloths, some moved the bullet plates, and some got together with the specialized personnel.
He looked through the gun sight at the sky pointed by Mo Songzi, and took advantage of the moment when the smoke was blown away by the wind and faded to find the large balloon still floating in the sky, and kept reporting the position to Mo Songzi, who was already sitting in the shooting position.
Mo Songzi used the crank to continuously adjust the muzzle of the gun, and used the crosshair on the barrel to lock the large balloon at a straight line distance of 1,500 meters away and a vertical height of 100 meters.
That happens to be the limit of the firing angle of the machine gun inside the fortification.
Tang Dao, who designed the machine gun fortifications, never thought about using machine guns for air defense. They were mainly used to shoot infantry with level fire. Mo Songzi just instinctively enlarged the shooting hole, but he didn't expect it to be used.
A city that was constantly trembling under the heavy bombardment of Japanese artillery, a dangerous machine gun fortification that could be bombarded into the sky at any time, a group of Chinese soldiers who were controlled by fear but still trembled to control the machine gun, holding a dusty machine gun and aiming at it.
Balloons in the sky.
However, the observation airships or manned balloons used by the Japanese army are really not just a country thing. For this thing that will appear to be a country thing in the future, Japan has invested huge sums of money in research since the mid-19th century.
Japan's use of balloons for military purposes can be traced back to the civil war in the Meiji period. During the Southwest War, government troops were besieged by Saigo Takamori's tribe in Kumamoto Castle and were cut off from the outside world. Finally, a balloon developed by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in the city was used to transmit information back.
Kyoto.
After that, the Japanese Navy began to develop balloons and successfully developed them in mid-April 1877. However, during the test flight, it was found that the balloon was still unstable and its safety could not be guaranteed. Then, the unconvinced Japanese Army also independently developed a balloon.
Balloons, but as you know from the test results, the army is not much better than the navy, so it still doesn’t work.
After more than ten years, Japan, which is accustomed to practicing appropriationism, decided that I would not invest money in research and development, but I would buy it.
We spent a huge sum of money to import a complete set of balloon equipment from France, but this unlucky Japanese kid did not die. When it was transported back to China via the Indian Ocean, the rubber coating on the surface of the balloon deteriorated and melted due to the high temperature and humidity, making it difficult to guarantee the air tightness. The following year,
The test flight still ended in failure.
It wasn't until 1903 that a "Yamada" type balloon manufactured by a private citizen performed well in an army exercise and was quickly popularized.
To put it bluntly, the bumpkin balloon in Mo Songzi's eyes was really developed by bumpkin.
However, even this country thing is still very rare on the battlefields of China and Japan. It can even be said to be technically sophisticated, and it is of great help to the Japanese army in terms of function.
For the army of this era, there are nothing more than two methods of battlefield reconnaissance: reconnaissance by scouts on land and reconnaissance by reconnaissance aircraft in the sky.
But the Japanese use this thing called a tethered balloon to create an additional method, which is even better than those two.
Tethered balloons have several advantages over airplanes: First, they can hover in the air and observe targets 360 degrees. Targets up to 10 kilometers away can be detected through observation instruments, while it is difficult to observe clearly from a passing airplane;
Second, the balloon was connected to a telephone line, which could transmit information to the front at any time, but the aircraft at the time could not do this.
Third, the balloon is not affected by time and can be launched at night;
Fourth, there is no sound when the balloon takes off, making it difficult to detect.
Relying on this, the Japanese could accurately guide artillery, causing great damage to Chinese soldiers on the North China battlefield. Especially in the Battle of Jinling a month later, their advantages were fully demonstrated.
The main reason is that the Chinese Air Force has been completely depleted. The Japanese army can even raise large balloons 10 kilometers away, and all anti-aircraft and anti-aircraft artillery can only stare at it.
However, it is not easy to raise this kind of balloon. The tethered vehicle alone weighs 5 tons and has more than 10 tethering ropes. When lifting off, it is necessary to first deploy the heavy air bag and then fill it with hydrogen, which takes 40
The operation of multiple soldiers requires flat avenues and wide spaces at the same time.
Therefore, when the weather was bad, even if the artillery in Songjiang City made the Japanese soldiers cry for their fathers and mothers, the Japanese did not come up with this thing to let their artillery retaliate. They waited until the heavy artillery brigade arrived and served as the commander of Songjiang City.
The most powerful boss, Hisao Tani, commander of the Sixth Division, felt that the opportunity had come.
I just didn't expect it. The heavy artillery brigade was too powerful. The smoke caused by the gunfire covered Matsue City tightly. The balloons with special observation instruments could not see the specific situation in the city. Hisao Tani was so angry that he ordered the balloon troops to fly from more than 2,000 meters away.
The distance was as close as 1,000 meters, but the commander of the balloon unit was not an idiot. He quietly stayed 1,500 meters away and stopped advancing.
It was not that he was afraid of the machine guns of the Chinese who were being tortured, but that he was afraid of his own people's artillery.
The heavy artillery brigade is on the north bank of the Huangpu River, and the balloon is in the general direction of the flight of the artillery shells. Although there is no precedent of a balloon being knocked down by its own artillery shells, what if it happens?
Besides, it’s so close to the city wall. What if the surviving Chinese take a heavy machine gun and hit it?
The commander of the Japanese balloon unit was definitely smart enough. After considering many contingencies, he chose to levitate the large balloon in the wilderness 1,500 meters away from Songjiang Castle.
The closer you are, the clearer you will naturally see.
Unfortunately, death is just a few minutes away.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!" Mo Songzi, a sergeant shooter of the 643rd Regiment of the 67th Army, fired.
In order to ensure the hit rate, Mo Songzi fired twenty bullets in one go, then immediately replaced the bullets with new ones and continued firing, then changed again, and fired again!
Mo Songzi didn't think too much and chose to fire in the air at this time and spent a full 60 rounds. In fact, the main reason was to fight against the huge fear of being bombarded with a cannon at any time.
No one who has not experienced this kind of battle situation can understand the fear that the soldiers tried their best to suppress.
The previous 105mm howitzers and 75mm mountain guns were fine. You know that as long as they don't hit the fortifications, the chance of saving your life is greater than 95%.
But the current 150 and 240 howitzers can penetrate concrete walls of more than one meter as long as they hit the target. Solid fortifications and the people inside them will be directly blown to pieces and buried alive.
In the entire Songjiang City, except for the air-raid shelters where people feel a sense of security, the rest of the city is all about gambling on luck and how many names of gods you know.
It was almost the same fear as a death row prisoner kneeling at the edge of the execution ground, waiting to be put on the guillotine.
People and cannons can be blown up at any time, so why not save a ball? It’s better to pick up the ball and play ball.
Mo Songzi actually has such a mentality.
A little sergeant quietly changed the course of a war.
If Hisao Tani hadn't been too anxious, if the heavy artillery brigade hadn't fired too fast, they would have waited for the observation balloon to lift off first. If the balloon had been further away,
If any of this happens, it is very likely that the artillery positions in Songjiang City will suffer heavy damage.
But, there is no if.
The observation balloon violated regulations and reached an area 1,500 meters away from the enemy. A Chinese machine gun sergeant fired because he refused to be afraid!
One of the two observation balloons owned by the Tenth Army was sieved in the air by a 20mm machine gun.
Expensive observation instruments and soldiers fell from a height of 100 meters and were smashed into parts.
The other one has broken down long ago and has not had time to be repaired.
The legendary leak in the house caused continuous rain all night long, which refers to the Tenth Army.
From this moment on, the Tenth Army lost its sharpest "eyes", which even the aviation force could not make up for.
This chapter has been completed!