In fact, Tao Jingfei, as the commander of the Tianjin battlefield, did not agree to launch the Tianjin Campaign right now. Because as a senior commander, he knew that this battle could not be fought like this. In particular, the rush to storm the city without detailed intelligence support made this battle full of unknowns.

In the face of such a cunning and ferocious opponent as the Japanese army, not only would it be impossible to solve the battle in a short time, but the price to pay would be quite huge. What is Tianjin? Fighting in the city of Tianjin is like fighting in a chicken farm. The chicken farm is about to take it back, but it can't break all the old hens that lay eggs inside, plus the eggs that have already laid.

This kind of battle is not easy to fight, so Tao Jingfei still thinks that he should give himself some more time and find a way to find out the deployment of the Japanese army in the urban area, even if it is a rough deployment. At least not the troops are fighting blindly in the city, as is the case now. We can only use the price of blood to find out the actual situation of the deployment of the Japanese army's troops little by little.

But the current situation in Tianjin City could not give him too much time to reconnoitre. We can't just watch the hundreds of thousands of people in Tianjin starve to death in the city because of the lack of food, and we can't take any action ourselves. When he received the order from the headquarters, Tao Jingfei could almost be said to have launched a battle head-on.

In order to be on the safe side, Tao Jingfei adopted the method of attacking the narrowest east and west sides of the Tianjin urban area, and using a force to feint in the south of the city to distract the attention of the Japanese army. Strive to seize the Jintang Bridge, the Konggang Bridge and the Wanguo Bridge, cut off the connection between the east and west of the Japanese army, and then divide and annihilate them.

However, the lack of intelligence made him not very optimistic about this attack plan that was most suitable for the current situation. Sure enough, after the battle began, the progress was still as he expected, and the participating troops paid a heavy price, but the progress was still quite unsmooth.

Fortunately, after many years of hard fighting with the Japanese army in the northeast, the troops gained a considerable understanding and familiarity with the characteristics of the Japanese army's defensive operations, especially the urban defense operations, and made certain progress. Although this progress is far from being decisive for the development of the war situation, at least it has broken into the city.

However, such a little psychological comfort is still quite difficult for Tao Jingfei to accept. However, although he already had a certain idea of adjusting the deployment, the order of the headquarters strictly prohibiting the use of artillery in urban operations made him hesitate all the time. Now No. 1 is personally in charge of his own headquarters, which undoubtedly gives him considerable confidence.

With confidence, this move is much faster. The reason why Tao Jingfei ordered the troops who had already advanced to the original concession to turn around and launch an attack upstream was to cooperate with the troops in Hexi who were attacking the Jintang Bridge, mobilize the Japanese naval fleet on the Haihe River, gather around the Jintang Bridge, and strive to blow it all up and sink it on the river surface downstream of the Jintang Bridge in one go.

At the same time, Tao Jingfei secretly mobilized two 150 howitzer battalions and all of the 105 cannon battalions under his control, and immediately secretly entered the Wenchang Palace and Nankai Middle School, which had been cleared, to prepare for the implementation of fire coverage of the Haihe River section from the Jintang Bridge upstream to the Jingang Bridge and downstream to the junction of the Huajie and the Japanese Concession.

In order to strengthen the shooting accuracy of the artillery, Tao Jingfei sent all the artillery staff officers in his hands down. He repeatedly stressed to the commanders of the various artillery units that no test firing was allowed. It is necessary to strictly ensure the accuracy of shooting, and to ensure that all shells fall on the Haihe River.

At the same time, Tao Jingfei sent a telegram to the air force and asked them to send no less than one plane to cooperate with the shelling operation. Although the attack planes suffered heavy losses, they ordered the troops that had already advanced to the original concession and established a direct line with the artillery units. And send the best artillery observers to provide the most accurate data for this shelling.

In order to keep it secret and prevent retaliation from Japanese artillery, Tao Jingfei took great pains in artillery deployment. Using the firing range of more than 10,000 meters of his German-made 150 howitzer, the artillery was deployed outside the range of the Japanese Taisho howitzer. The terrain is relatively open, and the number of surrounding houses is small.

After the artillery participating in the battle arrived at the designated positions, the various units of the front also completed preparations for a new offensive. Before the attack order was issued, Tao Jingfei wanted to ask Yang Zhen for instructions. only to find that No. 1 was talking to his own college classmate, and he didn't even look at himself. Tao Jingfei knew that this was No. 1 and didn't want to interfere with his specific command.

Gritting his teeth, Tao Jingfei personally gave the order for a general attack to all the troops on the front line. With his order, the battlefield of Tianjin lasted only a few hours of brief calm, which was interrupted by the sound of dense gunfire. In accordance with the redefined objectives and the order of attack, the various units were organized into battalions and companies, and launched a new round of attacks along the dense alleys of Tianjin.

The troops attacking the Jintang Bridge attacked inch by inch under the cover of reinforced artillery. However, this operation is different from previous offensives in that it is mainly based on pressure. At the same time, the previous tactics of frontal assault were changed, and the two flanks were adopted to outflank and cut off the route of reinforcements from the Japanese army from other directions to the first line of Jintang Bridge.

In order to protect the Jintang Bridge and the Jingang Bridge, the Japanese army forced the fleet deployed on the Haihe River to assemble on the front line of the Jintang Bridge. At the same time, the troops attacking north from the Italian concession in the east of the river also launched an attack on the east bank of the Jintang Bridge along the river. At the same time, two 76-mm cannons were transferred into the city, and they were erected north of Nihonbashi.

Hedong and Hexi launched a new round of offensive on both flanks of Jintang Bridge with the cooperation of the attacking troops northeast of Jintang Bridge. In particular, the front and flanks of Hexi were interspersed with multiple ways to outflank, so that the Japanese defenders on both sides of the Jintang Bridge fell into a three-sided attack in an instant.

Under tremendous pressure, the Japanese defenders of Jintangqiao fell into a situation of weakness in a short period of time. In the case of the ground reinforcement route, which has been cut off. At the request of the defenders of the Jintang Bridge, the Japanese concentrated almost all the ships, especially those equipped with large-caliber artillery and the greatest threat to the United Nations attack forces, on the river on both sides of the Jintang Bridge, trying to cooperate with the defenders on both sides of the battle, so they repeated their tactics to suppress the attack forces of the Anti-United Nations.

This time, the offensive of the anti-union was very fierce, and after adjusting the tactics, the multi-way infiltration was interspersed with the frontal forced assault cooperation, which made the defenders of Jintang Bridge unable to adapt for a while. In addition, the goal of the anti-union offensive in other directions is very clear, that is, the artillery deployed by the Japanese army in various strongholds, so that these artillery are temporarily unable to support the front-line operation at Jintang Bridge.

Less than two hours after the launch of the anti-union offensive, the entire front line of Jintangqiao fell into a dangerous situation. And what it means to lose the Jintang Bridge, the Japanese army is still clear. Under such circumstances, mobilizing naval ships to go up to both sides of the Jintang Bridge to provide artillery support for the defenders became the only option for the Japanese army. And Tao Jingfei made such a big determination, and it was this moment to adjust the deployment and wait.

Tao Jingfei did not wait for all the Japanese ships to enter his fire ambush circle before giving the order to open fire. Instead, after receiving a report from the air plane that most of the remaining Japanese ships on the Haihe River had entered the fire ambush circle set up by him, he immediately ordered all the artillery participating in the battle to open fire according to the firing Zhuyuan conveyed by his superiors.

At the sound of an order, the three artillery battalions and the two reinforced divisional artillery battalions simultaneously attacked the entire Haihecheng section from the north of the Jintang Bridge, with a 76-mm direct-aim artillery position east of the Japanese Bridge, and the area controlled by the firing boundary as the end of the river. The dense cannonballs instantly covered this section of the river, and on the river surface on both sides of the Jintang Bridge, a dense column of water was set off.

As the two most threatening Japanese ships, the gunboat Suma and the 101 sea sweeper, won the lottery first in this dense rain of bullets. The artillery shells that came from the Anti-United Nations were too dense. These two ships are the largest targets, because of their own combat characteristics, they are almost unarmored. It was only by relying on the order of the Anti-Japanese Federation to strictly prohibit the use of artillery in urban operations that the ships that could rampage through the Haihe River were hit by more than a dozen shells when they came up.

Because of their own special needs in use, these two ships are almost unarmoured, and they can withstand the bombardment of more than a dozen rounds of 150 shells. Before the first round of artillery fire was over, the ship was blown up in pieces, and all the guns were dumbfounded.

Barely held out for more than ten minutes, but couldn't bear the falling shells, and sank to the bottom of the river with a whirlpool. Along with the two ships were two more slower-moving converted barges, an icebreaker, and three gunboats. For these light ships, each 150-millimeter grenade is like a hammer falling from the sky, which is simply not something they can withstand.

Seeing that the situation was not good, the remaining Japanese ships did not care about cooperating with the army at all. I turned around and tried to run downstream. But the narrow Haihe River is not a wide sea, where would they make such an easy U-turn. Two Japanese gunboats in a panic came directly to kiss and sank themselves.

After Italy withdrew from the war, the Japanese did not hesitate to snatch it from their former allies, and the modified shallow gunboat Narumi simply crashed directly into the embankment on the riverbank. The remaining Japanese ships were either sunk or paralyzed by the falling shells.

Although the remaining Japanese ships kept trying to break through the artillery blockade of the Anti-Japanese Union. However, under the guidance of the artillery observation planes in the sky and the observers deployed by the Anti-Japanese Federation on several high-rise buildings in the control area, the artillery fire of the Anti-Japanese Federation was almost chasing the Japanese ships. In particular, a cannon battery deployed on both flanks of the Japanese Bridge directly cut off the retreat of these ships by firing at direct fire.

The Tatara and Fushimi Hogawa shallow water gunboats, the No. 22 special sea sweeper, the Yellow River special laying boat, the Chidori mine boat, and the improvised gunboats converted from icebreakers, barges, and sailboats. One by one, they were either sunk by the bombing, or they were seriously injured and paralyzed on the river, or they ran aground on the embankment in a panic.

When the artillery bombardment that lasted for an hour stopped, the wreckage of Japanese ships was everywhere on the entire river below the Jintang Bridge on the Haihe River. Since he took hundreds of thousands of citizens of Tianjin as hostages, he never thought that the previous anti-union would eventually put artillery into the battlefield.

Against such a vigorous artillery bombardment by the United Nations, the Japanese navy, which was hardly prepared, suffered a solid loss at this time. This is because most of the Japanese naval vessels that entered the Haihe River to fight were unarmored inland river ships. Even a couple of river shallow gunboats, which did not have even the most basic armor.

Even among all the artillery put into the United Nations, almost none of the armor-piercing shells were used, except for the 76-mm cannon, which used some armor-piercing shells. However, these large-caliber ordinary anti-personnel blasting grenades are also quite lethal to these unarmored ships. A single large-caliber missile, which is enough to pose a deadly threat to these ships.

Except for the two small river gunboats, which escaped by hiding under the Jintang bridge by virtue of their short stature, all the ships deployed on the Haihe River were sunk. There was even a gunboat, which was thrown off by a huge wave of 150-millimeter grenades, and was directly overturned on the surface of the river.