After the expansion of the army, Qin Zhiyuan had a total of six divisions.
Their designations are the 1st to 4th Infantry Divisions of the Foreign Legion, the 1st Armored Division, and the 1st Artillery Division.
There is no longer a brigade-level organization in the infantry division. Directly below the division is the regiment. The standard three-three system. A standard regiment has about 3,500 people. Plus the division-affiliated troops, each division has 12,000 people.
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The number of armored forces is slightly smaller. Each regiment has 102 tanks. Plus the logistics support force has about 1,500 people. There are a total of nearly 400 tanks in the three regiments. The divisional artillery of the armored forces uses 12 guns.
There are more than 700 155mm self-propelled artillery vehicles in the army. Since they are no longer equipped with accompanying infantry, there are more than 7,000 people in total.
The artillery division is the largest unit, with 40 194mm self-propelled artillery, 40 155mm self-propelled artillery, plus nearly a hundred towed artillery, the number is close to 20,000, which can almost be split into two divisions.
After the expansion, the six divisions had a total of nearly 80,000 soldiers. In addition to Chinese and Annamese, some French were also added.
These French people did not have any resistance to accepting Qin Zhiyuan's command, but were somewhat looking forward to it. The reason was probably that it was easier to gain military exploits by staying under Qin Zhiyuan's command.
Among the four infantry divisions, Qin Zhiyuan disrupted the troop organization and mixed Chinese and Annan people.
Wu and Ruan had no objections to this. Ge Lifu and Liu Zizheng also agreed to accept some Annan people, and everything went very smoothly.
By mid-June, Qin Zhiyuan's troops completed their expansion and moved to Ferenta-de-Noy again, taking over from the French Fourth Army that had been defending in this area and taking charge of the war against Germany in this area.
At this time, the battlefield on the Eastern Front was in mourning.
It doesn't matter if you are French, British or German.
The civil strife in the French army had actually been put down. Foch calmed most of the soldiers and only used artillery against a Russian unit. The Russian unit had about 15,000 soldiers and had lost 6,000 people in the previous battle.
, the survivors openly rebelled, in their own words: We were informed that we were sent to France to pay for the arms sold to Russia.
Foch treated them decisively and fiercely. He used artillery to attack the military camp of the Russian army. The Russians finally succumbed and were dismissed.
Although the civil strife in the French army has been calmed down, the French army has also lost its offensive capability, and the entire southern front is in a stalemate.
The Germans on the opposite side were also having a hard time. Crown Prince Wilhelm's aggressive advance was criticized. The loss of nearly 100,000 people offset the advantage gained by the German army by defeating Niweiler's spring offensive. The Germans were adjusting their defense. There were about four divisions.
Troops were transferred from the German Eastern Front to the Western Front to fill the defense vacuum created by the destruction of Crown Prince Wilhelm's Army.
General Oscar von Hutier was transferred to Reims to serve as the southern commander of the German army and command the newly formed 18th Army. He will be Qin Zhiyuan's opponent in the next period of time.
If Qin Zhiyuan is proficient in war history, then Qin Zhiyuan must know that although General Oskar von Hutier is not well-known, he invented Hutier tactics during World War I. This tactic is also known as penetration tactics or storm troops.
Tactics was the predecessor of the German army's later mechanized all-arms doctrine.
Just when Qin Zhiyuan faced a new opponent, the British Commander-in-Chief Haig also selected a new attack direction.
The British's spring offensive went smoothly at the beginning. Near Arras, the Canadians performed extremely well. They successfully captured Vimy Ridge and continued to attack the Germans based on this.
But after Ludendorff dismissed General Derwig von Falkenhausen from his post, the British offensive ran into trouble. They suffered an average of 6,000 casualties per day, but never achieved a victory similar to Vimy Ridge.
The British offensive in Arras ceased after Easter, and British Commander-in-Chief Haig turned his attention to the Belgian coast.
How should I put it? As a naval power, Britain's insistence on ports is really surprising.
Prior to this, in 1914 and 1915, the British had launched two large-scale attacks on the Ypres area in western Belgium, but both ended in failure.
Now British Commander-in-Chief Haig felt it was time for a third attempt.
Before this attack, Haig sent people to check all the weather data since 1830. He found that every August, the Flanders area where the British planned to launch the attack would fall into the rainy season. Therefore, Haig decided to rush to the attack.
Launch an offensive before August.
But just like the spring offensive proposed by Nivelle, no one was optimistic about Haig's battle plan. Not only Foch and Pétain were not optimistic about it, but even everyone in the UK was not optimistic about it.
In order to get Haig to give up his battle plan, Lloyd George ordered the 450,000 newly trained local recruits to postpone reinforcements to France. An army reporter from The Times who had previously served as a lieutenant colonel in the army even bluntly proposed to Haig:
Water will be your enemy.
By water, I mean not just the rainy season, but also Flanders' fragile drainage system.
The Flanders region is low-lying, with a storage lake upstream and a frequently overflowing Issel River. As early as the beginning of the World War, the Belgians opened dams and flooded the east bank of the Issel River.
To prevent the Germans from breaking through. If an attack is launched in Flanders, even if the Germans do not take the initiative to open the floodgates and release water, the heavy artillery bombardment will cause flooding in this area.
Haig was not unaware of the dangers in this area, but he did not make any adjustments. Just after the Battle of Arras, Haig began preparing to launch an attack in Flanders, even though Lloyd George had not yet approved it.
Haig's battle plan.
See, disobedience is not unique to the French.
The Flanders Offensive, like the Spring Offensive, started out smoothly.
The British had a big plan. After the failure of the second Ypres offensive in 1915, they dug tunnels under Flanders. The person in charge of this was General Herbert Plummer, commander of the British Second Army.
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The longest of these tunnels is a mile long and 100 feet deep, 22 of them in total. The reason why they were dug so deep was to avoid detection by the German army. In order to cope with the low-lying terrain of Flanders, there were even electric pumps in the tunnels.
It was used to pump out stagnant water and reach directly under the German positions.
These 22 tunnels were eventually dug into 21, and the frantic British piled a total of 445 tons of explosives inside. The largest one contained 41 tons of explosives, making it the largest landmine in the world.
Haig's bombardment began at 3:10 in the morning on July 7th. The scale of the bombardment exceeded that of the spring offensive prepared by Nivelle, with an average of one cannon every seven yards.
When the shelling started, the mines in the tunnel were detonated, and 19 of the 21 super mines were successfully detonated.
The earth-shattering explosions of these mines could be felt in London. Their destructive power was unparalleled. Entire mountains were blown up. About 10,000 German soldiers died on the spot and countless others were injured.
The British captured the town of Messina easily and at almost no cost.
After the battle report reached Paris, there was a deep reflection behind the jubilation. Why did the British always make progress, while the French made no progress at all?
On July 10, a telegram from the War Department was sent directly to Ferenta de Noy.
Lyautey asked Qin Zhiyuan to launch an attack on the Germans in the direction of Reims. The French needed news about regaining their lost territory, even if it was just a village.
