The battlefield launched by the Japanese North China Front lasted throughout the winter of '41, and the Japanese sweep in the spring of '42 finally stopped after the launch of the Anti-Union Campaign. The continuous brutal sweeps and the large-scale use of poison gas have caused the major strategic regions in North China, which have suffered heavy losses, to basically lose their ability to cooperate with the anti-United Nations operations.

After the launch of the entire Anti-Union Campaign, in addition to the troops of the Jinsui Military Region who were transferred to the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Border Region in time and the main force was preserved. The rest of the units could only take on the task of rescuing the pilots of the downed planes of the Anti-Japanese Union and harassing and containing the Japanese railway transportation.

Without the cooperation of the major strategic regions in North China, the Anti-Japanese Union almost alone assumed the pressure of the two strategic blocs of the North China Front and the Kwantung Army in this battle. In particular, after the launch of the campaign, the North China Front continued to reinforce its troops, which brought heavy pressure to the operation of the Anti-Japanese Alliance.

And Lieutenant General Harem Jun, who attended the meeting, although he did not give Okamura Ninji too much promise, he was not very impressed with Okamura Ninji's judgment. As the chief of staff of the China Dispatch Army, it seems that he came to Beiping only out of respect for the Kwantung Army. However, in terms of action, it gave the greatest support to the North China Front.

After returning to Nanjing, the Type 94 anti-tank rapid-fire guns, as well as two independent field artillery wings, an independent field heavy artillery brigade, and four mountain artillery squadrons were transferred from all divisions and regiments of the 13 th Army stationed in East China and the units directly under them. After the 11th Army ended the Battle of Changsha, it transferred a field heavy artillery wing to the North China Front.

And the classmate of Harem Chun, who was already the prime minister and the land minister at this time in the Japanese army base camp, was also at the request of this harem Chun. After the end of the Malayan Campaign, more than 70 British-made two-pounder anti-tank guns and 34 British-made 25-pounder field guns captured on the Malayan Peninsula were also transferred to the North China Front.

By the end of the Battle of Singapore, all the two-pounder guns, dozens of 25-pounder and eighteen-pounder field guns, plus hundreds of Vickers heavy machine guns, and all the ammunition of the British army that had surrendered were also sent to Tianjin as soon as possible, and all of them were equipped with the North China Front.

After the start of the Southeast Asian Campaign, the British Army in the Far East, composed of British and Indian troops, Australian and New Zealand troops, retreated all the way from the Malayan Peninsula to Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, basically without organizing decent resistance. In more than 50 days, the whole of Malaya and Singapore were lost.

By the end of the Battle of Singapore, the Dutch East Indies Campaign, which was ongoing but had already been lost, was not counted. The British troops deployed in the Far East and the reinforcements that followed, as well as the Australian and other British Commonwealth forces, were all wiped out. Only more than 100,000 were captured, and a large amount of equipment was lost.

In addition, the British army has never been in the habit of destroying equipment in the event of defeat, and the great rout that is not chosen along the way. Almost all the equipment of the British army in the Far East was lost to the Japanese in its entirety. The British gave generously, and the Japanese naturally did not have any embarrassment when they received it.

However, in the case of some bad things in North China, the Japanese army's Type 94 anti-tank rapid-fire guns have outdated performance, and the number is also insufficient. The Japanese, who have always been stingy, naturally would not let go of such a large batch of Soviet-made guns that were already backward on the battlefield in North Africa, but thought they were enough to deal with the thin-skinned Soviet-made tanks of the Anti-United Nations, and threw them rusty in Southeast Asia.

As for ammunition, the weapons and equipment discarded by the Commonwealth troops piled up. In the Battle of Singapore alone, the 77 bullets captured by the Japanese were enough for these machine guns to fight for a year. Of course, if these machine guns are not scrapped before these bullets are exhausted.

The great defeat of the British army in Southeast Asia left the Japanese army with abundant supplies. Except for the lack of tanks, the rest of the artillery is of a complete range of large and small calibers, and most of the ammunition is quite sufficient. The Japanese then transferred the heavy weapons in these equipment to North China and handed them over to the North China Front, which was asking for anti-tank weapons from the Japanese base camp all day long.

The most important thing was the extremely sufficient number of artillery shells captured by the Japanese army on the battlefield in Southeast Asia. The British themselves lacked high-explosive grenades, and naturally there were not many captured. But tens of thousands of rounds of armor-piercing shells were enough for the Japanese to scrap these artillery. And the twenty-five-pounder field gun, which uses a high-explosive grenade, can also be used as a large-caliber anti-tank gun.

As for whether the field artillery will be changed to an anti-tank gun, it will aggravate the wear and tear of the barrel rifling, and the Japanese army does not care too much about speeding up the scrapping of the barrel. Anyway, this batch of artillery was captured, and although the overall number is not small, the overall number is still not large for an army.

If it is said that an additional production line of shells for this batch of artillery is not cost-effective for the Japanese. Therefore, even if all these artillery pieces are scrapped after this war, it will not matter to the Japanese. For the Japanese, this batch of artillery is nothing more than a waste use.

In fact, the Japanese in World War II did not reach the end of their rope and were always dismissive of the captured equipment most of the time. And not as widely used as their allies in Europe, the Germans. In this regard, the approach of the Japanese, who were weaker, was very different from that of their allies in Europe.

Of course, this has a lot to do with their special combat environment and logistics. It also has a lot to do with the fact that they spent the rest of the time in a series of defensive operations except in the early days of World War II. However, this has something to do with the unique oriental thinking of the Japanese. It was not until the end of World War II that the rear replenishment was really inadequate, and the Japanese army began to use captured equipment on a large scale to fight.

If it weren't for the repeated requests of the North China Front, Lieutenant General Harem Chun would have taken advantage of his special relationship with the prime minister, and this batch of equipment would have rusted in the warehouse until it was defeated and surrendered. But it was this batch of equipment, especially the large number of two-pounder guns and twenty-five-pounder field guns inside, that brought considerable trouble to the breakthrough of the Anti-United Nations.

The Japanese North China Front used these Type 94 anti-tank guns, as well as the British-made two-pounder guns that were subsequently transferred from the base camp, plus the 94 anti-tank guns that were drawn from the Japanese army, to concentrate a total of more than 300 antitank guns. In addition to the Taisho 11-year infantry anti-aircraft guns, the 97-type 20-mm automatic guns were inlaid along the Bayanshutu, Sunit right banner, inlaid with yellow flags, and inlaid with white flags. Until the Taifusi Banner, Zhenglan Banner, and Duolun Line built a long anti-tank fire network.

In some key areas that may become the key points of the anti-coalition offensive, such as the line of yellow flags and white flags, the density of anti-tank fire has even reached more than 30 guns per kilometer. Combined with the British 18-pounder and 25-pounder field guns, which were used as temporary anti-tank guns, the density of anti-tank fire even exceeded that of the Soviet-German battlefields of the same period.

These anti-tank guns, which were in large quantities, were improvised by the Manchurian Arsenal under the control of the Kwantung Army before the war, using the repair institute under the North China Front Army, and more than 50,000 Type 99 and Type 93 anti-tank mines were transferred from the mainland. In addition, the three anti-tank trenches dug from the white flag to the front line of Huade formed an impassable wall of anti-tank fire in Okamura's heart.

The configuration of its anti-tank positions and anti-tank fires was also adjusted to a certain extent with the participation of officers transferred from the Kwantung Army who had participated in the battles in Tongliao and Linxi. Adopt a large depth anti-tank fire point with the coordination of light and dark bunkers, and the anti-tank fire points and anti-tank mine nets are mutually matched.

The most powerful, although there are no armor-piercing shells but use high-explosive grenades, the British field guns that are also a great threat to the Soviet-made light tanks used by the United Nations, and the two-pounder guns are frontal anti-tank fire. The 94-type rapid-fire cannon and the Taisho 11-type infantry flat-fire gun were used as the two wings of firepower.

The lightest Type 97 20-mm automatic gun and the Taisho 11 Type infantry anti-aircraft gun were used for mobile ambushes, which were specially designed to deal with the weakest side and rear armor of the tank. With the combination of anti-tank trenches and dense anti-tank mines, and various anti-tank obstacles, this General Okamura Ninji created a rather sumptuous reception banquet for the armored cluster offensive prepared by the Anti-Japanese Federation.

At the same time, in order to solve the problem of covering infantry, Okamura Ninji also used the British-made Vickers heavy machine guns transferred from the base camp to build a large number of light and dark machine gun fire points that formed a cross-fire boundary around the anti-tank fire points. This machine gun was a little too cumbersome for the Japanese army, which was poorly mechanized. But for defense, there is no problem.

In fact, the full weight of this machine gun is 10 kilograms lighter than the Type 92 heavy machine gun used by the Japanese army. Moreover, the rate of fire is higher, and the sustained firepower is far better than that of the Type 92 heavy machine gun. But the Japanese did not know what to think, perhaps because this machine gun needed a condensation barrel to ensure a high rate of fire, or because the high rate of fire consumed too much ammunition, so they considered this machine gun to be bulky.

The rich gifts of the British in the Southeast Asian theater made up for the weaknesses of the Japanese army's consistent lack of anti-tank capability and mobile air defense capability in a certain way. In the battle that began a few months later, there was a strange scene of the opposing sides also using third-party weapons to fight each other, and the British anti-tank guns fired at the British-made tanks.

It's just a pity that these two-pounder guns produced by the British could not fight the German tanks on the North African battlefield. When they arrived on the battlefield in China, they were also unable to deal with the infantry tanks they had made themselves, although they were slow-moving, but they were hard-skinned, and they were even more powerless to deal with the medium tanks that had become the mainstream of tank development.

However, these anti-tank guns, which were already backward, brought a great threat to the T-26 light tanks used by the Anti-United Nations. The T26 tanks lost by the Anti-Japanese Federation in this battle, and two-thirds of the losses were under the same possession of this one, and even more than the Japanese anti-tank guns. As for the Japanese army's Type 94 rapid-fire guns, they hardly played a big role.

In addition to the preparation of firepower, everything was scraped together to mobilize the equipment that could be used in order to go all out. This time, Okamura Ningji adjusted the deployment, and the action he made in the eastern direction of Chadong can be described as quite large, and it is also very open-minded. Except for the fortifications of the bunker and the deployment of anti-tank fire, which were carried out in secret, and most of them were chosen at night, the rest of the fortifications were never built under any cover. Even when there were anti-United Nations reconnaissance planes in the air, he did not hide it in the slightest.

Okamura Ninji is stubborn and insists that there is nothing wrong with his judgment, but this does not mean that he is rigid and dogmatic. As a senior commander of a large army, having confidence in your own judgment is a prerequisite for becoming a senior commander. If you don't have confidence in your own judgment, then how can you command thousands of troops to fight?

But self-confidence is not the same as dogma and rigidity, let alone blind arrogance. He thinks that Lao Tzu is the best in the world, and he ignores all his opponents. In combat, he always thinks as comprehensively as possible. In this respect, Okamura Ninji was quite different from other high-ranking officers of the Japanese army.