After four rounds of bombing, Li Zhi destroyed sixteen cannons on Osaka Castle.
The next time will be the time for the artillery's "free bombing". Osaka Castle with a radius of more than two miles will turn into a hell on earth filled with blood and flesh.
One hundred and sixty 18-pound guns moved forward, two miles west of Osaka Castle, and began to approach and bombard this famous Japanese city.
At a distance of two miles, the 18-pounder can already shoot directly.
"Boom! Boom!"
"boom!"
The cannonballs shot towards the walls of Osaka Castle like meteors, destroying everything they touched.
The Japanese-style city wall is a thin layer of brick wall, only about 20 centimeters thick. Because Japanese cannons are scarce, such a city wall is more than enough to defend against matchlock guns, and it cannot be broken down by manpower. Therefore, this kind of city wall is very popular among Japanese castles.
Popular. City walls are usually built on top of moats or city walls, with a large gap from the ground below, making it difficult for siege soldiers to climb.
There are usually wooden shelves behind the city wall. People stand on the shelf to defend and attack enemy soldiers who climb the wall with spears. There are usually a large number of shooting holes on the city wall, and iron gunners shoot at the siege enemies from behind the shooting holes.
This kind of city wall is very effective against enemies who only have iron cannons.
But such a city wall is just a thin layer of paper in front of the 18-pound cannon. One hundred and sixty cannonballs hit the west wall of Osaka Castle Sannomaru, immediately making more than a hundred big holes. The cannonballs were huge
The kinetic energy hitting the thin city wall can often destroy the entire surrounding one or two meters of city wall.
There are iron gunners standing behind every meter of the city wall. When the cannonballs smash down the city wall, the bricks and stones fly, often injuring the iron gunners behind the city wall.
The blooming bombs would explode after they landed. The soldiers in the castle had already seen exploding blooming bombs. As soon as they saw the blooming bombs falling nearby, they fled in panic and formed no queue in the castle.
The sparks exploded by the blooming bomb were like flowers of death, blooming one after another in Osaka Castle. Some sparks did not kill the soldiers in the city, while others took away three or four lives at once.
The 18-pound cannon has a lifespan, and it needs to be recast after firing 200 rounds, so each shell has a fixed cost. But for Li Zhi, who uses the iron billet casting method, the cost of recasting the cannon is relatively low.
Every time a cannon shell is fired, the depreciation cost of the cannon is very limited, and more money is consumed in gunpowder and spent ammunition.
The cost of one exploding bomb is about seven taels of silver. Although it is a lot, it is still far less than the lives of Japanese soldiers in Osaka City. Even if two exploding bombs killed a Japanese Ashigaru, Li Zhi only spent a dollar.
Two and a half taels of silver. If the ten thousand ashigaru in Osaka City were killed at this cost, Li Zhi would only need fifteen thousand taels of silver. With only this little silver, Li Zhi would have captured millions of taels of silver in the city.
of food.
This is a bloody ledger.
Li Zhi's cannon stopped firing after ten rounds and began to cool down the barrel.
Osaka City is already in a miserable situation like hell on earth:
There are dead and wounded soldiers everywhere under the damaged city wall. Some of these dead and wounded soldiers were injured by flying fragments of the city wall, and some were directly hit by artillery shells. As long as the soldiers hit by the artillery shells had even the slightest contact between their bodies and the shells, their entire torsos would be damaged.
Take it away. Minced meat is everywhere on the ground, and the smell of blood is like a slaughterhouse. Blood flows out from the wounds of dead and wounded soldiers like spring water, flowing everywhere on the more than 900-meter-long west wall of Osaka Castle.
The thick blood flowed down from the city wall and into the moat below the city wall, dyeing the nearly kilometer-long moat on the west side of the city wall red. The three-mile-long moat now looked like it was full of blood.
The situation behind the city wall was not good either. The explosive bomb explosion killed at least five or six hundred people, and there were many more wounded. The wounded who were pierced by iron bullets lay on the ground groaning and twitching.
The soldiers next to him could do nothing about this kind of trauma.
The samurai's house in the castle was set on fire by explosive bombs, but no one had time to put out the fire. The wooden buildings burned blazingly, exacerbating the chaos in the city.
Osaka Castle also has cannons, and the soldiers in the city also know that this brief pause is because the Ming army outside the city needs to cool down the cannon barrels. It won't be long before the cooled cannons will fire again.
Osaka Castle Abe Shoji decided to continue to defend the city and wait for death. He decided to lead the soldiers in Osaka Castle to fight out of the city.
Li Zhi was riding on the horse of the Chinese army and saw the west gate of Osaka Castle Sannomaru suddenly opened. Thousands of Japanese Ashigaru, especially 6,000 iron gunners, lined up and ran out of Osaka Castle.
Under the command of the shouting samurai officer, a formation was set up to the west of Sannomaru.
The Tokugawa soldiers moved very quickly, obviously preparing to launch a critical blow during the cooling time of the cannon. It took more than ten minutes, and after a brief formation of the seven thousand soldiers, they quickly pressed towards Li Zhi's Huben Division.
The Japanese army in Osaka has 6,000 iron gunners. These iron gunners hope to compete with Li Zhi's riflemen and defeat Li Zhi.
The artillery does need to be cooled. If the barrel is continuously fired under high heat, the propellant will be ignited by the high-heat barrel. Even if the gunner lowers the hot barrel with wet cotton cloth, he still needs to wait for the barrel to cool to a lower temperature.
temperature before continuing to use it, otherwise the life of the barrel will be reduced.
However, the issue of barrel life has never been a problem on a critical battlefield. No matter how precious a cannon is, it is not as precious as a few human lives.
After more than ten minutes of cooling, the 18-pounder cannon was no longer in a red-hot state. Li Zhi gave an order, and the gunners loaded the cannon barrels without hesitation and aimed at the Japanese who were rushing over.
Soldier.
At a distance of four hundred steps, three hundred steps, and two hundred steps, Japanese ashigaru armed with iron cannons rushed into the range of the cannonballs.
"boom!"
"Boom! Boom!"
One hundred and sixty shotshells were ejected from the gun barrel of the 18-pound long gun. The shotshells broke away from the shotgun holder under the pressure and flew out in all directions, rushing towards the fan-shaped area in front of it. Tens of thousands of shotshells could be seen.
It looked like a dense fog flying at high speed, shooting towards the ignorant Ashigaru of Japan like a god of death.
As soon as the thick mist touched the ashigaru in the front row, it immediately penetrated the ashigaru of these Japanese soldiers, from the front to the back. The blood mist burst out from countless ashigaru in an instant, spraying several meters high.
, dyeing the surrounding land and other ashigaru around them red.
The Japanese Ashigaru who were shot screamed and twitched, and fell to the ground one by one, rolling and groaning on the ground. The soldiers in the first few rows were like weeds cut down by a lawnmower, and they could never get up again.
