Episode 184 Hail

On August 25, on the day of the beginning of the "Conference on Comprehensively Improving the Defense of the Yangtze River Defense Line", seven engineer brigades that needed to build bridges for the Right Army set off by boat at Ningbo Zhenhai Port and headed to Sumatra Island in Nanyang for assault training on building pontoon bridges on the battlefield. Because of the large number of people, there were seven brigades, and the boat and bridge troops, in addition to the troop transport ships, there were several cargo ships carrying heavy equipment. The troop transport ships were very fast, but the cargo ships were slower. If it was just a troop transport ship, the average speed of the long-distance voyage could reach nearly thirty knots, but if this kind of cargo ships accompanied the fleet, the average speed of the fleet was only twelve or three knots at best.

This will take nearly five days in a single trip, and the fastest round trip will take nine days. In addition, when you arrive in Sumatra, you will have to prepare locally and block the training area. The food, accommodation and logistics of 20,000 to 30,000 people will take several days. In addition, before D-day, the hukou bridge troops must enter the predetermined position at least three days in advance. In this way, the time for training in Sumatra will be about half a month. Fortunately, although this half month is short, it is completely closed and undisturbed. You can let go of your hands and feet, and the training quality is very high. Moreover, this is not basic skills training, but assault reinforcement before the war.

Now there are only 38 days before D-Day. All preparations and deceptions have entered a intensive final stage.

The first is training. The military's conventional combat training has greatly increased its load. The navy is fine, but the training of the army and the land, sea and aviation corps has entered a white-hot stage. The gasoline burned every day is several times that of the past, and the shells, bullets, and bombs are also several times that of the past, as if fuel and ammunition are not expensive.

As fierce as combat training is logistics training. The speed of the maintenance unit to rescue injured tanks on the battlefield has greatly improved. The cycle of dragging the injured tank back from the battlefield and then returning them to the battlefield has also been greatly shortened. In the closed training ground, bulldozers are "booming" and practicing flattening the ground all day. Now, two or three bulldozers can launch a field runway for single-engine aircraft to take off and land in half a day, and a simple front-line airport can be launched in more than a day. This is crucial for Ming aircraft to fully exert their power through the enemy's rear.

The most trained aviation troops are dive bombers. Now two new aircraft introduced from Germany: the "Stuka Vulture Dive Bomber" and the "BF-109 Fighter" have just begun to be industrialized, and not many people have been put into the army. The Ming army's aviation troops mainly have two old-fashioned "Osprey" and "Kingaughter". However, more and more aircraft production lines have begun to stop the production of "Osprey" and "Kingaughter" and switch to the production of two new aircraft.

But this speed may be slower, because the aircraft production line is not like the automobile production line, and has achieved complete flow and can be discharged from the line of thousands of vehicles per month. After all, the aircraft still requires more manual links.

According to the positioning of Xiang Xiaoqiang and the Supreme Command, the status of the aviation force was raised to an unprecedented level in the Qing operation. The main task of the aviation force will no longer focus on bombing and destruction of the enemy's front line in World War I, but will be closely combined with our ground forces and become part of the offensive machine. In other words, from strategic bombing to tactical bombing, it will directly act as the "flying artillery" of the offensive forces, truly realizing "air-ground three-dimensional attack".

In this case, dive bombers become the top priority. Because they are flexible and accurate than horizontal bombers, they are more suitable for the role of "flying artillery". In addition to traditional flight training, bomb drop training, low-altitude strafing training, and avoiding fighter training, there is also "air-ground coordinated training". The so-called "air-ground coordinated training" mainly involves training to use wireless telegrams to send coordinates and request air support when the ground troops are blocked from attacking. The aviation troops must fly over the target as soon as possible based on the coordinates received, carry out attacks, and clear obstacles for the ground troops.

If this kind of air-ground coordination is good, it can play a role in the details. For example, sometimes a cannon appears in the small valley ahead, blocking the advance of a company or even a company of the Ming army. At this time, you can call the air force, and a dive bomber will come to blow up the cannon.

Of course, this is the most ideal state. It requires hard training before the war, plus practical exploration during the war.

...

What is more secretive than conventional training is some special training. The bridge training carried out by the Engineer Brigade in the South China Sea is the larger one. In addition, the same secret is also conducted at several training grounds in the Sichuan Basin, code-named "hail" training.

This was the large-scale bombing of the Qing airport at the beginning of the year, designed based on a concept proposed by Xiang Xiaoqiang. That time, Xiang Xiaoqiang asked whether a small bomb could be used, or 60mm mortar shells could be used instead to bomb the aircraft at local airports in large areas. At that time, due to the tight time and the unsafe mortar shells, the proposal was rejected, and instead used the smallest bomb at the time, that is, a 100kg bomb. The Ming army's twin-engine horizontal bomber "Swan", had a maximum load of 1,000kg, and this 100kg bomb can only be equipped with up to 10. Despite this, bombing the Qing army's airport still achieved great results.

However, to a large extent, it was due to the lack of vigilance at the airport behind the Qing army. At that time, the Qing army airport was completely stunned, and no one tried to fly on the ground, so the Ming bomber formation could be allowed to fly low calmly, aim as much as possible, and find the best angle to bomb.

This time, the Qing army's airport will be attacked as soon as the war begins. However, even if it is a sudden attack, the Qing army's airport will never be like the last time. It can be imagined that the Ming army's bomber formation will be constantly bombarded by anti-aircraft guns on the ground while bombing, and the escorted fighters may also have to fight with the Qing army's fighter jets. The horizontal bomber formation cannot aim at bombing as leisurely as last time, and must run away after throwing the bomb.

Therefore, this "hail-style" small bomb was designed for this kind of mission.

The time was short, so we did not prepare a special production line for this small bomb, but instead modified it with ready-made 60mm mortar shells and named it "Hail". The "Hail bomb" canceled the rear launching package as a mortar shell, removed the tail firing pin fire device, and installed a special tail wing as an aviation bomb, and a shedding hook connected to the bomb bay fixture. In this way, the weight and mortar shells have basically not changed, and the weight of a single piece is still 2 kilograms.

In this way, excluding the weight of the small bomb fixture dedicated to the bomb bay, a swan bomber can carry up to 300 "hail" bombs.

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In the past few days, swan bombers lined up over the secret training ground in Sichuan to practice throwing such bombs. In the "enemy airport" area designated on the ground, there were dense explosions, and jungle-like black smoke columns soared into the sky, and the target aircraft on the ground fell one after another in the explosion.

A small number of target aircraft used for training are scrapped aircraft, most of which are fake aircraft that are welded with steel bars and then covered with canvas or iron skin. The strength is similar to that of real aircraft, or even higher or lower. This is to test whether this small bomb has enough destructive power to the aircraft.

In fact, as expected in the design, this two-kilogram bomb can completely destroy an aircraft as long as it hits the plane directly. Even a large twin-engine aircraft is the same.

Several bombers were sent to fly over, and the entire airport on the ground could be completely covered by explosions. From a distance, it looked quite like a "carpet bombing".
Chapter completed!