One of the soldiers in the three-man machine-gun crew jumped out of cover and waved a signal flag in an attempt to stop the military vehicle. The other two continued to be in a daze, and when the truck approached, the machine gun on the roof of the car suddenly fired, killing the machine gunner. The fool waving the signal flag, having no time to dodge, was knocked off the bridge and fell into the river.

After the first truck quickly crossed the bridge, the brakes stopped, and Huang Tianyang, who was holding a cigarette in his mouth, jumped out of the passenger seat, raised Stern* to the window as a shuttle, and killed the Japanese second lieutenant who was waving the phone in the cabin. The soldiers behind jumped down and swept the enemy troops at the bridgehead. Soon the first bridge was occupied. Huang Tianyang has never been worried that his actions may fail, since he was a child, he is used to success, he has never had adversity, and the only humiliation in his life is after the fall of Singapore, because he did not take off his hat and salute the Japanese soldiers, he was rewarded with two big mouths. This incident did not make him feel defeated, on the contrary, it made him have a strong desire for revenge. He kicked the door open, rushed into the cabin, and pulled the trigger to shoot at the disheveled Burmese woman running out of the mosquito net. Anyone who cooperated with the Japanese was an enemy in his eyes, he could fight tanks single-handedly, and he didn't care about killing a few pro-Japanese civilians, and military law was not binding on him.

The cars behind did not stop, one after the other, rushing across the bridge. The soldiers who control the wooden bridge skillfully cut the telephone wires. In this way, the nearby Japanese troops did not have time to pass on the news, and they might be able to ventilate the news on foot, but they could not outrun on two legs.

At the same time, 40 km away. Xu Chong is still struggling to find another bridge, the Japanese in this area of extensive mining sites, tungsten ore, although the Japanese ability to process tungsten alloy is limited, but in the original Hasegawa left a long-term plan, tungsten is listed as an important strategic resource, the base camp greedily excavated these resources, sent to the mainland to hoard.

From a distance, Xu Chong could already see the bridge that needed to be occupied, and the good news came that the first bridge had been occupied by the vanguard of the 203rd Division on the march, and now their convoy was approaching quickly.

Last year, the 56th Division secretly passed through this area and went around to the rear of the 55th Division of the Expeditionary Force, which took eight days. Of course, they were led by cavalry and bicycled infantry, followed by sappers and motorized infantry in about 400 Anglo-American trucks, so they were still sluggish. This time, Chu Tingchang set a time limit of 70 hours for his troops to cross this mountainous area, leaving no time to stop and fight along the way. Since the road is ready-made, Chu Tingchang feels that this time is enough.

Xu Chong used a telescope to observe the bridge in the valley and saw that the Japanese sappers were swaying from the bridge to the piers below with safety ropes, as if they were installing something.

He secretly shouted that it was not good, seeing that the Japanese were clearly installing*, it seemed that there was no time for reconnaissance and preparation, and it was necessary to cut through the chaos quickly and immediately carry out a battle to seize the bridge. In fact, there was a mistake in his judgment, and the Japanese were not installing*, but inspecting the bridge, preparing for reinforcement works. Itagaki Seishiro planned to quickly divide his troops to cut off the expeditionary force's retreat after seizing Zhang Lingfu's military station. For Sakahara, there is nothing wrong with using the same cheap trick twice, because he thinks that Chinese generals do not have a long memory. He has seen too many scenes of Chinese troops demolishing each other and fleeing each other, and after so many years, he has not seen any changes.

Xu Chong quickly deployed his machine gun detachment to the commanding heights, and he himself led a team of men to attack from the end of the bridge. His men quickly crossed the ridge and bumped into several Japanese who were struggling to cut wood, and after two seconds of confrontation, the Japanese rushed up with axes and were immediately knocked to the ground.

The squadron leader of the garrison immediately used a telescope to observe the mountain, and his position due west was reflected in the sun rising in the east. Xu Chong quickly took aim, and from 250 meters away, he shot the commander with one shot.

At the same time the machine gunners began to shoot, and the Japanese sappers who fell under the bridge, having nowhere to escape, were beaten into a sieve.

The Japanese quickly moved the bridgehead heavy machine guns, because the original firing range was aimed at the north rather than the east, and by the time they moved the machine guns to the east side, one of Xu Chong's fastest groups had already rushed to 30 meters away, throwing several * in a row, and wiped out the machine gun team. The whole battle lasted 10 minutes, and if the Japanese really installed *, this time would have been enough for them to blow up the bridge twenty times.

A lieutenant at the Sakawara command received a call from the Ohashi garrison on the other end of the phone from the 102nd Field Road Support Force, reporting that about a platoon of the enemy was attacking a bridge codenamed 107. The staff officer held the phone and it took half a minute to find the bridge on the map, but there was no one on the other end of the phone, only the sound of gunshots. He did not dare to slack off and quickly reported this important situation to his superiors.

Sakahara was watching the battle at the front, waiting for the final encirclement of the 56th and 2nd Divisions. The Chinese army retreated quickly, almost jumping out of his preset encirclement. However, his 4th Tank Brigade still grabbed the front and blocked the enemy's breakthrough force with Sherman tanks as the core, and a brave 97 tank destroyed two Shermans in a row, beating the Chinese army back. Now at the critical moment, he must immediately take down the enemy's military station and annihilate most of its forces, and then he can turn back to deal with Chu Tingchang. Of course, the intelligence gathered by the 4th Division showed that Chu Tingchang was not very active in advancing westward, and his troops were attacking along the railway, and the progress was only two kilometers a day. At this rate, it poses no threat at all. It seems that Chu Tingchang is completely overestimated, he, like other Chinese generals, is accustomed to watching the destruction of friendly armies with a cold eye, and a general who cannot look at the war from the perspective of the overall situation is obviously nothing remarkable.

Sakahara watched through his telescope as his artillery fire extended to the enemy's rear, and could see that one of his own on-demand artillery was rapidly deploying in the smoke, almost pushing the cannon into the enemy's butt.

The 2nd Division and the 56th Division have been replenished with a lot of new recruits, but the performance is quite satisfactory, of course, if it is their old unit, the 5th Division, they may have surrounded the enemy. In the past year, he has heard many rumors that the combat effectiveness of the Chinese army in Burma has been rapidly improving, and the General Staff Headquarters is very worried that the combination of the huge industrial capacity of the United States and China's unlimited troops will become a nightmare for the Japanese Empire. Now it seems that he used two divisions to surround the 34th Army of 30,000 people, which shows that its performance is not enough.

The chief of staff, Lieutenant General Tachibana Ayabe, came out of breath, and Ayabe himself came, and something important might have happened. Sakahara slumped to the side of the ammunition box and waited for Ayabe to report.

"Commander, near a bridge in the Shan Highlands to the east, enemy intelligence has been discovered."

Ayabe said, pointing out the bridge on the map.

"Commander, if this bridge is lost, your counteroffensive plan will be very troublesome."

"That troop is it that has disturbed our army?"

"It's not clear, it's likely to be Commander Chu's troops, he is very good at using the tactics of infiltrating small forces to disrupt our rear."

Sakahara frowned and thought for a while, the enemy should have seen through his killing move that might reoccupy Lashio, so he planned to strike first and destroy the bridge?

Sakahara felt that he could dispatch the air support troops that were on standby in Thailand to recapture the bridge. He also didn't like to send in the air support forces that had been defeated repeatedly, but now this was the fastest force he could use.

"Just let the air force of Mizutani recapture the bridge, so decided?" He looked around at the generals.

"I think, or let the air support troops bring *, and if necessary, they can blow up the bridge? I think the enemy might be trying to capture it rather than blow it up. Shadow Zuo Zhao interjected.

"I can't waste time preparing*, I'm worried about time." Sakahara immediately rejected Kagesa's suggestion, and he thought to himself, is Kagesa dizzy?

Kagesa couldn't say anything about decision-making and could only retreat, but he immediately rushed to the communications unit and sent a telegram to Keiji Suzuki, who was far away in Thailand. He asked Suzuki to immediately send troops to monitor the movements of Chinese troops in Chiang Mai. Focus on investigating the positions of the two divisions other than Zhou Youfu's division. His wariness of Chu Tingchang was far higher than that of Sakahara. Of course, in the information he obtained, the other six divisions of Commander Chu Tingchang only had shelves, and it was impossible for them to enter the battle. As everyone knows, after Chief Chu got Xiong Xianghui, his army organization speed went up again.

Sixteen Japanese transport planes quickly took off and flew to the Shan highlands with a squadron of air support troops. This airdrop came from Sakahara's whim, and without any field and meteorological reconnaissance, 200 people were to be dropped into the ravine-crisscrossed mountains. However, in Sakahara, he didn't care about casualties, since the bridge was far from strategic, it didn't matter if there were more soldiers, and there would be casualties in any operation anyway.

Four hours after Xu Chong seized the bridge, a Japanese reconnaissance plane appeared in the air nearby, so much so that Xu Chong thought that the enemy was going to use suicide tactics to destroy the wooden bridge. At this time, Huang Tianyang's troops were still 30 kilometers away, and they were not moving very fast.

This highway built by the Japanese army has not been driven by any vehicles for most of the year, and many sections of the road have been flooded by rapidly growing herbs, so Huang Tianyang's action is not as fast as expected. Even if there was no enemy to stop him, sometimes he had to stop and look for a way through the wild grass that was one man high, but fortunately, there were many large cars and broken bicycles that the Japanese had abandoned last year along the way to identify, and he was only slightly behind Chu Tingchang's schedule. Along the way, the convoy kept dropping sappers and building damaged lots to allow the vehicles behind to move smoothly.

The Japanese transport planes flew into the valley and found that there were no areas that met the conditions for the airdrop at all, except for the mountains and rivers, which were forests. But Mizutani still insisted on the airdrop, and he was anxious for a chance to prove the value of the airborne troops.