The two foreigners were sent away by a small book, and when the snowflakes began to fall on the Lorraine plateau, the weapons and equipment of the various departments finally arrived with the accompanying military and civilian workers, and on September 15 of the sixth year of Shenwu, the expeditionary force officially took over all the defensive lines of the French army east of Saint-Dizier. Before that, the 1st Armored Division was divided into small detachments stationed all over the line, even if it was only a small formation, but this fierce force that surpassed this era still made everyone look sideways.

In the first theater east of Saint-Dizier, the commander of the 11th Army, Duan Qirui, grabbed the horsewhip, but sat on a warrior military off-road vehicle, before, he had to load his beloved horse and groom into a container with the troops, and transport it across the ocean to Marseille, but he didn't want the Red Sea to be too hot, and there were many bumps on the sea, the horse died before it reached the port of Marseille, and then went to the front line of Saint-Dizier, and the commander of the French colonial army stationed here gave him a mount, and he didn't want to wait for the equipment to arrive, the horse was useless.

This year's snow had just fallen, and a bad, porous road crossed the bushes with fallen leaves, and although the French army had light rails, a small number of one-and-a-half-ton trucks and three-ton trucks purchased from China still crushed the road. Autumn is always rainy, when the 11th Army took over the defense line, taking advantage of the autumn rain to stop and also renovated the road surface, the forks in the road also deliberately set up Chinese character road signs, but this snow, the road surface is wet, with the truck rolling, the artificial compaction of the road surface began to be uneven again.

"This road is going to be overhauled!" When the body of the car shook, Xu Shuzheng, the chief of staff who was holding the handle of the small fan, said with great difficulty: "We must use that kind of large roller machinery to repair it, otherwise it will be completely destroyed by next spring." ”

"Hmm." Lieutenant General Duan Qirui enjoyed the shaking of this off-road vehicle. He wasn't thinking about the road now, but about the new chariot battalion, good fellow. More than 60 combat vehicles, 16 self-propelled guns, and corresponding trucks and off-road vehicles came overnight, and the General Department probably wanted to make a big attack on its own defense line this time. "You Zheng, why did you say that the General Director chose us to make a breakthrough? It's so hidden, and the news is so dead, if you don't attack tomorrow. We don't know yet. ”

"According to the telegram from the General Directorate, this is just an experimental attack, and they are probably afraid that they will not be able to make foreigner jokes." Although Xu Shuzheng is wise. But he could not guess the real intention of the General Directorate's attack this time, and he could only use his brain from the national prestige and military prestige, after all, now the people of the whole country and even the whole world are watching the performance of the Chinese with wide eyes. Although Lin Wenqian is prestigious. But if the battle is not fought well, the impact will still be very bad.

Xu Shuzheng's answer just made Duan Qirui feel painless 'um', he was not thinking about what national prestige and military prestige was, but thinking that if those ironclad chariots could really break through the enemy's trenches, then Cao Kun's 33rd Division stationed in this section could follow up and chase the chariot battalion to bite off a piece of meat from the Germans. If 33 is able to capture Mount Baledik, then the capture of the St. Dizier salient at its front will be like a scoop.

The army commander and chief of staff each went to the headquarters of the 33rd Division with their hearts in mind. Cao Kun, who had already received a phone call, was waiting outside the headquarters with several people from the division headquarters, and saw the army commander Duan Qirui get out of the car. When several of them wanted to salute Duan Qirui, they were stopped by Xu Shuzheng's sentence of 'no salutes on the front line'. This made Cao Kun not embarrassed, but fortunately, Wu Peifu, the commander of the first brigade next to him, broke the siege, and he said to Duan Qirui with a smile: "The commander of the army is in person, and the division commander and the soldiers of the whole division are grateful for the five, which is ......."

"It's fine." Duan Qirui didn't have time to care about Cao Kun's unintentional mistake, he didn't come to see Cao Kun's 33rd Division at this moment, he looked at Cao Kun and said, "Where is the new chariot battalion?" Is the offensive plan decided? ”

"Report to the commander," he could not salute, Cao Kun could only stand upright, and he said loudly: "The new armored battalion is in a bush behind the defense line of our division. The battle plan has also been determined, our division is only to follow quickly after opening the breach, and the commander of the 1st Division, Commander Li, wants to occupy the Baledik Hill and occupy this place, so that the back road of St. Dizier in front of it will be cut off and will be down in the near future. ”

"Good!" The horse whip excitedly slapped a few times in Duan Qirui's palm, and the whole person was full of joy. Saint-Dizier on the Marne was the turning point of the central and eastern German defensive lines, and it was also a deadly salient, and the Baledik hill was twenty-four kilometers behind it, and if it could break through from the relatively weak eastern line of defense to the west of the Lignon Barois, it would still be very likely to occupy the Baledijk hill, if that was the case, Saint-Dizier would be like a pry out of fat, waiting to enter the mouth of the 11th Army.

As soon as Cao Kun said this, Duan Qirui, who had been looking at the map for more than two months, understood the key in an instant, and he said loudly: "The death squad on your side must protect the chariot and don't let it suffer losses, and the light and heavy machine guns of the whole division are also collected and handed over to the death squad to use......

"Marshal, the chariot battalion has brought a death squad of its own." Cao Kun had also made arrangements as Duan Qirui had said, but when he saw the assault infantry coming with the chariot, he gave up this idea.

"Didn't you say that there was only one tank battalion and some self-propelled guns, where did they come from?" Duan Qirui asked, "Can the troops they randomly find be more elite than the elite of our three towns in Beiyang?" ”

The predecessor of the 33rd Division was the third town of the Beiyang New Army, which was a team brought out by Duan Qirui himself, and he didn't dare to say anything about the artillery, but when it came to infantry, he dared to say that it was no worse than the 1st Division of the Renaissance Army, especially the elite selected from the whole division, not to mention it. The chariot battalion will grab a handful of people to be a death squad, so it is better to pick them in the 33rd Division. With such a grudge, Duan Qirui's division did not enter the door, but went straight to the chariot battalion in the bushes. He couldn't understand the chariot and self-propelled artillery, and as soon as he arrived, he proposed to Li Mengpei, the commander of the 1st Armored Division, that the 33rd Division form a death squad to attack with the chariot, and ensure that his men absolutely protected the safety of the chariot.

Duan Qirui is an old man in the army, and he came from the Beiyang coup, and the unified voice of the General Political Department to the officers of all departments is: In terms of management, we must be absolutely vigilant against this Beiyang system, and we must not despise it in words and deeds. Therefore, if other army commanders came, Li Mengpei could give a brief introduction to the establishment of vehicles, artillery, and infantry so that the other party would retreat in the face of difficulties, but he did not dare to say that the establishment of the armored division was a fusion of the three arms of vehicles, artillery, and infantry. On the one hand, you can't tell the truth, and on the other hand, you can't take it lightly. Just scratching his head, the commander of the motorized infantry battalion on the side went out and came in with a rifle in his hand, and he said, "Commander Duan may not know. The infantry that accompanied the protection of the infantry was equipped with this kind of semi-automatic rifle, and I was afraid that the brothers of the 33rd Division would not be used to it. ”

The rifle brought in from the outside was very short, probably similar to a carbine and only a little more than a meter long, but this gun was a little 'fatter' than the 1896 7mm Mauser rifle used by the Revival Army, the two butts were basically similar, but the handguard on the body of the gun was thicker, and the strange thing was that the magazine that should have been hidden inside the gun body was loaded with too many bullets. It protrudes strangely from a smiling block, and its gauntlets are stamped from steel plates, but do not extend to the muzzle like a normal rifle. Rather, the barrel sticks out of the gauntlet partially.

When Duan Qirui picked up the gun, he felt that this gun seemed to be a little heavier than the standard 7mm Mauser, and then looked at the bolt and found that it was very different from the ordinary Mauser rifle. Seeing Duan Qirui's surprise, the battalion commander said, "Report to the commander." The prerequisite for the protection of the combat vehicle is that the firepower must be intensive. And our unit was the first battalion to be equipped with Shenwu Type 4 semi-automatic rifles. The gun uses a nine-round magazine with a rate of fire between thirty and fifty rounds per minute, which is equivalent to three to four ordinary rifles. Although the rate of fire is fast, veterans who are accustomed to bolt-action rifles will find it difficult to adapt to the rate of fire of this rifle in the early stage, so the task of protecting the vehicle tomorrow can only be completed by our department. ”

"Thirty to fifty rounds per minute...... Including Duan Qirui, the officers of the 33rd Division were taken aback, if it was really this rate of fire, it would really be three or four soldiers at the top of a soldier. After all, protecting a chariot is not about fighting bayonets, you really have to wait for the enemy to get close to the side to fight bayonets. So what else does the chariot protect?

A chariot can be built, but China can't make a bullet. The design of the gun is based on the performance of the bullet, but the design and development of a bullet is difficult to mature in four or five years, so the revival of the military is still the German 7mmx57mm rifle cartridge. Around this bullet, in order to simplify logistics, rifles, machine guns, and even the current semi-automatic rifles use this kind of rifle cartridge, and even the 6.5mm sniper rifle also wants to change, but the demand for sniper special ammunition is small, and snipers are also opposed to changing the gun just for the sake of changing the caliber, so it will not be done in the end.

The demand for semi-automatic rifles lies in the need for more powerful firepower in the motorized infantry brigade, which cannot only rely on the number of machine guns, but requires an increase in the rate of fire of each soldier's weapon, so the development of semi-automatic rifles based on 7mmx57mm rifle cartridges and submachine guns based on 9mm pistol cartridges began very early; As for the picture of a fully automatic rifle called '47' provided by Yang Rui (from the close-up in the famous movie King of War), it was finally put into a long-term plan because of the need to redevelop the half-power bullet.

The firearms designers who have watched those pictures believe that in order to meet the above performance requirements, not only the bullet propellant must be re-developed, but even the barrel material must be re-developed, and the most serious thing is that China lacks nickel and chromium, but large-scale wars must be based on its own resources, so not to mention the firearms, the selection of semi-power bullets, and the research and development of new propellants, as far as the automatic rifle barrel materials are concerned, it is difficult to achieve results without 15 or 20 years of research.

In fact, the original meaning of this statement is: My lord, semi-automatic rifles are enough, and if you engage in fully automatic rifles, wouldn't it be necessary for the whole army to be equipped with machine gun barrels? How much does it cost? There are many Chinese, and 10 million semi-automatic guns are enough for other countries, but if you really get 10 million machine guns, who are you going to fight?

Of course, half of this kind of rational thinking based on the national conditions of the country could not fall into the ears of the increasingly powerful Yang Rui. As a result, the research on semi-power bullets and fully automatic rifles has been established; The research of semi-automatic rifles and submachine guns was finally solved first by semi-automatic rifles -- the intelligence bureau obtained photos of the Russian M1912 semi-automatic rifle sample gun and a full set of design drawings, this semi-automatic rifle designed by the famous Russian gunsmith Federov was the only rifle that passed all the tests organized by the Russian Small Arms Committee in 1911 for 14 samples of semi-automatic rifles at home and abroad.

Since it was already the best semi-automatic rifle, and at the same time Russia was the enemy, copying its design and changing its 7.6mm caliber to 7mm caliber was the best choice for the General Logistics Equipment Bureau, and soon, the copycat version of the M1912 semi-automatic rifle was finalized and produced at the beginning of Shenwu 4, and the gun was officially named Shenwu 4-type semi-automatic rifle. The gun inherited the original gun's barrel short recoil automatic principle, card iron swing locking mechanism, rotary hammer type, magazine increased from five to nine rounds, firing 7mmx57mm Mauser pointed rifle rounds, the rate of fire is 30 to 50 rounds per minute, the initial use of motorized infantry soldiers feel very unaccustomed, because they will always subconsciously pull the bolt every time they fire.

Other people's guns are really better than their own. Duan Qirui and the others could only retract their previous proposal, and instead mentioned artillery, he said: "Division Commander Li, if the attack can be postponed by one day, all the artillery of the 11th Army can be transferred, especially the 150mm heavy artillery regiment." I can assure you that the transfer will never leak a bit! ”

"There's no need for Commander Duan, our department is a surprise attack this time, and there is no need to prepare for artillery fire." Li Mengpei had to smile again, "The 33rd Division still followed up after our department opened the trench gap, but this follow-up should be very fast and more careful. In order to be fast, our infantry is also equipped with trucks this time, and if there are cars, the attack is fast and the retreat is fast, if the German counterattack is in time, and the Baledik Hill cannot be attacked for a long time, then our troops will retreat by plane.

What can really support the operation here is that after dawn tomorrow, the 31st and 32nd divisions can make a feint attack on Saint-Dizier, so that it is difficult for the enemy to know the true intentions of our troops, and they will think that our breakthrough is to detour back to the rear of Saint-Dizier and encircle Saint-Dizier, and not to occupy the Bal-Dijk Hill. ”

......Duan Qirui studied at the Berlin Military Academy in Germany in his early years, and he was both happy and apprehensive about being able to use the German army as an opponent and a student to beat a teacher, but in his bones he wanted to make a difference, but this armored assault was just a peculiar experiment.

"Commander Duan doesn't have to worry, our air force will compete with German planes for air supremacy on the battlefield." Li Mengpei said, "They not only drove out German planes, but also partially supported ground battles. Let's be honest, this time we will fight if we can beat Baledik Mountain, and if we can't beat it, we will withdraw. This chariot unit is like the cavalry of ancient times, galloping vertically and horizontally, and never fighting for the gains and losses of a city or a place, so the 33rd Division must be prepared to retreat on the way to follow-up, leaving a back road everywhere, and not too suddenly. ”

Duan Qirui originally had the idea of succeeding in the first battle and occupying Saint-Dizier, but when he heard Li Mengpei say that 'the chariot troops are like cavalry in ancient times, galloping across the country, and never fighting for the gains and losses of a city or a place', he stopped thinking in his heart and went gloomily. (To be continued......)