"Onboard!"

On the evening of September 6, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the Division, raised his arms and shouted, just like tens of thousands of officers and men of the 2nd Guards Division. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

After two days and three nights of fierce fighting, under the cover of naval guns and aircraft, Tadamichi Kuribayashi finally broke the resistance of the 6th Marine Division (1st Regiment owed) of the United States Marine Corps on Christmas Island and completely occupied the island.

Although they lost their air cover and artillery superiority the next day, they gave full play to the characteristics of sufficient supplies, fierce infantry firepower, and familiarity with the terrain of islands and reefs, and inflicted heavy casualties on the opponent, and the 2nd Guards Division paid a heavy price, with more than 3,000 casualties and more than 80 tanks.

This price surprised Kuribayashi Tadamichi himself, and also made the 2nd Guards Division put away the mentality of underestimating the American army from top to bottom.

The Second Guards Division is not an ordinary army unit, it is strengthened by firepower and armor before departure, and even the Tiger tanks that are not available in ordinary units can be found in the Second Division, and there are many other cutting-edge weapons, such as half-track armored vehicles, Himmler organs, and hunters Tan Annihilation introduced from Germany, and the tank wing is mainly equipped with Japan's newly produced Type 4 tanks -- Chito. It is said that it is a new tank, but it is actually a Japanese version of the T-34, using a 75mm/L48 tank gun, which is more like a hybrid of the T-34 chassis equipped with an improved German No. 4 turret, which is just half a pound and eight taels compared to the Shermans.

The weapons in the hands of other infantry are not bad, all of them are equipped with Type 99 rifle machine guns, in addition to STG43 assault rifles, American Browning heavy machine guns are also equipped with a batch, and they also have recoilless guns and other weapons that are very rare for the Japanese army.

But this kind of equipment is still a little difficult to fight against the American troops, especially in close combat, although the Type 99 rifle is much stronger than the previous 38 rifle, but the Type 99 rifle and machine gun combination still can't suppress the combination of the Americans with M1 Garand + BAR, as for the Browning heavy machine gun, the Americans also have more, if it weren't for the part of the STG43 support field and a small number of MG42 removed from the armored vehicle to hold down the position, it would not be able to beat the Americans when firing at night.

Of course, the Americans could only be beaten passively during the day, and the naval artillery fire of the Combined Fleet and the attack planes hovering overhead provided Kuribayashi Tadamichi with great fire suppression.

The rapid capture of Christmas Island is Tsukahara's only requirement for the Second Division, and every day of delay, the Combined Fleet will face the threat of land and air navigation at Pearl Harbor; although the US forces do not dare to attack the mobile fleet in a big way and will shell the fleet, it does not mean that it will not attack the transport troops, especially the oil tankers, and the mobile fleet under the command of Kakuji Tsunoda has suffered considerable losses in carrier-based aircraft in the recent period, and now it has to cooperate with the ground offensive, and the strength of covering the transport fleet has only decreased, not increased. The longer it drags on, the more unfavorable it will be to the fleet -- Tsukahara is fighting this landing battle with the loss of tankers!

The US top brass was also very shocked: In just 60 hours, a marine division with a number of more than 14,000 men was wiped out, and this was the fourth marine division that had been lost to Japan.

So far, the Marine Corps has been organized into a total of 6 active divisions, and the 1st Marine Division was defeated by Horikichi with hundreds of naval guns on Kuah Island. The other two Marine Divisions suffered heavy losses in the Battle of Tarawa; Now the fate of the 6th Marine Division is also very bad, all but one regiment is wiped out (nearly 4,000 American troops were captured in the end).

In order to make up for the losses of the Marine Corps after the Battle of Tarawa, Admiral Kim supplemented the personnel and trained the 7th and 8th Marine Corps Reserve Divisions.

But Washington did not have time to lament the loss of Christmas Island, which was expected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was nothing more than a matter of time.

Although the speed of the loss was a little faster, the results were even more optimistic than initially estimated. In the face of the achievements of sinking the 400,000-ton warships of various types of the Japanese army, the army's floating army aviation has stabilized a little, and everyone admits a reality: the army aviation has made great sacrifices, and the results of the battle are not small, and the results of these 400,000-ton warships have exceeded the sinking achievements of the navy in the South American battlefield! (Of course, the quality is not the same)

Therefore, Truman's painting of the big pie for the Army Aviation -- the construction of an independent air force after the war -- was praised and agreed by all quarters.

What worries the Joint Chiefs of Staff now is the deteriorating situation in South America:

The main force of the South American Allied forces is the Fifth Army of the US Army, which originally had a total of 11 division-level units (some divisions were less than full) and more than 200,000 people, but later added three division-level units, with a total number of nearly 270,000 people, making it the largest group army in the US Army and its combat effectiveness is second to none.

Since the Pearl Harbor incident, the U.S. Army has been expanding at full speed, and so far it has been formally organized into nearly 80 divisions (excluding National Guard divisions), and more than 20 divisions are being formed. The 80 divisions include 14 armored divisions and 2 cavalry divisions (in fact, they are also armored divisions), and the Fifth Army alone has 14 division-level units, including the old powerhouses such as the 1st Red Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, and the 3rd Armored Division, as well as new units such as the 12th Armored Division.

At the beginning, except for the 20,000 people before the Roosevelt Jr. cluster, the rest were roughly distributed as follows: more than 20,000 in Ecuador, nearly 40,000 in Colombia and Venezuela, and nearly 20,000 in French, Dutch, and British Guiana (with a total of more than 8,000 Allied forces of the three countries), El Salvador was the main force of the US army, with more than 110,000 officers and soldiers, and more than 50,000 in the Recife region. With the addition of the allied forces, the total strength of the ground forces in the South American theater has exceeded 300,000.

But this superiority in forces did not translate into battlefield superiority.

After the German assault on El Salvador, the first unit to collapse was the Brazilian Division, and the defeat not only dispersed the American position, but also exaggerated the panic atmosphere to the extreme, and then Clark directed some of the troops who had lost their heavy equipment to retreat, and asked the Roosevelt Jr. cluster to quickly close.

By the time Patton arrived in El Salvador, the U.S. forces had grown to more than 90,000 and nearly 20,000 troops were retreating from El Salvador toward Recife. As soon as Patton accepted command of the army group, he immediately stabilized his troops and quarreled with Clark, who insisted on a quick retreat, believing that there was no point in holding on and counterattacking, while Patton held the exact opposite view.

Marshall and most of the people in the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with Patton's opinion that El Salvador had nearly 100,000 American troops and less than 10,000 German troops, so why did they choose to retreat instead of attacking? As soon as the order was given, Clarke, in displeasure, handed over all command to Patton, and flew to Recife with a portion of his own points.

But this fleeting warplane soon came to naught: Rommel, with a keen sense of the battlefield, immediately sent more than 30,000 men of an infantry division, two marine brigades, a heavy armored battalion and an air wing to El Salvador, and ordered Sauken to launch a fierce attack at all costs.

The reinforcement prevented El Salvador from being recaptured by the Americans, and the Sauken offensive intensified the panic of the American forces on the southern flank.

Four days later, the tide of the battle took a turn for the worse, and with the annihilation of Roosevelt Jr. and the failure of Patton's counterattack against El Salvador, the Fifth Army was in a very bad position.

The total number of the 5th Army, which had been fighting fiercely with Rommel for several days, had dropped to just over 80,000 (including the three battalions sent by Roosevelt Jr. to cover the Navy and the more than 4,000 Hewitt of the Navy).

In order to prevent the German army from pursuing wildly, Patton divided the retreating troops into three waves and retreated in turn, and the officers and men of the naval cluster and the army aviation who were rescued after parachuting all followed the group army headquarters, and the three Roosevelt cluster infantry battalions became the only directly subordinate units of the headquarters.

But Rommel stuck to it, and made the American rearguard miserable with a fierce short assault, like a fierce hyena, unable to strangle the whole elephant, but again and again using his agility and ferocity to pounce on the opponent and tear off the flesh, until the opponent was covered with bruises and scars.

Patton has surrounded the armored troops in front of Rommel more than once, but it is useless to encircle them, and the US armored forces cannot gnaw the spearhead of the heavy armored battalion with the Tiger 2 as the core, once the time drags on, the German follow-up troops and the huge attack aircraft group will immediately fly over to support, and the German battle group in the encirclement is very calm and calm, and seems to be very experienced in the encirclement.

Rommel took advantage of Patton's lack of fighting spirit and relied on this method to cover it up - I just like the way you look at me and helpless.

Patton can now also see that the reason why the division commanders of the Fifth Army asked to retreat together was not at all to better preserve their strength, but because everyone was afraid of being left alone and cut off! -- That means the whole division is destroyed. If a division commander runs out of troops and survives on his own, what face does he have to return to China?

These division commanders also did not agree with Patton to lead his troops to break off, because the risk of breaking off was too great, not to mention how could the commander of the group army break off for the division commanders? If Patton was killed, a thunderous Marshall would have shot them - unbeknownst to everyone, Marshall was seriously ill and hospitalized. Taking a step back, even after Patton broke off, troops are needed, and now although the troops directly under the group army are still famous, they have lost all their heavy equipment, so they can't let 3 battalions of infantry and naval battle groups go into battle, right?

Now these senior officers were neither willing to die themselves, nor did they want Patton to die, so the whole army could only choose the sub-optimal method of retreat in this tacit helplessness of each other, although the speed was not fast, much slower than the break of the first and the main force to break through, but it was obviously much more orderly than fighting separately and fleeing in a mess, and the morale and supplies could barely be maintained, Washington acquiesced in this approach, and only hoped that Patton would bring most of the main force back to Recife.

In the early hours of 7 September, a landing interception operation codenamed "Right Hook" began, and the German Naval Transport Unit transported the 2nd Panzergrenadier Division to land in Alakalu, with the goal of cutting off the American retreat......