Originally, the north of Ava was the traditional control area of China, and the Central Plains dynasties changed dynasties, and the losers often lost a corner of northern Burma, so China's power has always been strong, and the Chinese have always been dominant. After the arrival of the Japanese army, they adopted the basic strategy of bribing the Burmese and driving out the Chinese, and quickly took root in northern Burma, but the brutal oppression inevitably attracted hatred. Now the Chinese in northern Myanmar are rushing to report to the army of Chief Chu.

Outside Lashio, Tao Mingzhang found that he no longer needed to rely on British intelligence that was punctual and inaccurate, and Wingate sent his Chinese team to contact the 5th Army for intelligence cooperation. The situation of the Gaoligongshan generation is completely different from that in the Qin Gang. When they were there, the local hill tribes also supported the Allied forces, but they were wary of the Chinese army, and the language barrier was difficult to communicate, but here Zhou Youfu had even been in the middle of the battle, collecting ivory from the battlefield and doing business with local Chinese merchants, because the local population base was too good, the British intelligence group had to rely on Chu Tingchang's army to collect intelligence. Moreover, there are still many defeated expeditionary forces in the area, and they are far better at identifying enemy weapons and troops than the illiterate Burmese, who were bribed by the Japanese.

The 55th Division, as the last force of the Japanese army that could be loosened, was reported to Tao Mingzhang as soon as it left Myitkyina. In order to build a bridge over the Irrawaddy River, the Japanese army requisitioned a large number of people and prisoners of war, but naturally they could not hide it. The escaped POWs hid in a nearby hill and determined the approximate size by counting the number of Japanese field kitchens and artillery pieces that crossed the bridge.

Soon, a large amount of information was accurate to the specific troops, numbers, artillery, routes and other information dispatched by the Japanese and flew to Tao Mingzhang's hands like snowflakes. The Japanese army in Myitkyina poured out, the main force of the 112th Wing crossed the bridge in the morning, and the 144th Wing crossed the river at the same time downstream, they took different routes, and the Japanese used barges to transport trucks on the wider river, which seemed to have an intention to fight quickly.

For the motorized troops that assaulted along the road, it was essential to collide head-on with the enemy's vanguard, after all, Chu Tingchang left the tank behind, and he was also prepared to rely on a certain sacrifice to test it. But Tao Mingzhang found that he gradually had a head start. Even in fast movements, it is possible to respond quickly. He immediately explained his preliminary plan to Zhou Youfu, although the two disliked each other, but there was no suspicion in combat cooperation, which was also the style of Chu Tingchang's army.

Soon he received news that the Japanese had stopped at the most dangerous section of the mountain road dozens of kilometers in front of his convoy and began to concentrate their horses. This was a standard procedure for the Japanese to prepare for war. Compared with motorized troops, the process of transforming mule-horse troops from marching to combat is like slow motion. After all, the inability of livestock to reverse is easy to cause chaos, and the animal power is weak, and many heavy weapons need to be disassembled, which is also a troublesome place.

Obviously, Takeuchi had his source of information, and according to his analysis of the information, he hurriedly seized Yamaguchi, thinking that he had taken the lead enough to hit his opponent.

As outsiders, the Burmese had just arrived here, and they did everything they could to help the Japanese gather intelligence in order to protect the profits they had plundered. This gave Takeuchi the illusion that he had an advantage in intelligence gathering.

Tao Mingzhang feinted to attack Lashio, and the main force moved westward without concealing Takeuchi. After all, there are very few roads that motorized troops can choose from, and there are only two roads built by the Japanese road construction troops in the past six months. Takeuchi surveyed the local terrain several times, knew where the key points were, and immediately seized the dangerous terrain to set up an ambush, and at the same time sent the cavalry of the 55th Search Wing along the road to search.

The cavalry of the search wing saw the truck speeding all the way from a distance, and quickly turned their horses back, thus confirming the reliability of the information of the Burmese spies.

Takeuchi immediately adjusted his plans, preparing to wait for the enemy convoy to enter the road with nine bends and eighteen bends, and then use his four main brigades to cut it into several sections; At the same time, the strongest cavalry wing in the mobile force, and the Hanaya infantry wing, carried by two automatic vehicle brigades, quickly rushed from the path to the front line of Lashio to catch the enemy by surprise, and the enemy probably thought that the Japanese did not have the ability to march motorized, and he wanted to give the opponent a little color.

He was ready to encounter the Chinese tanks, because the Burmese spies also reported that the Chinese convoy occupied the middle of the road, and there were tanks on the side of the road, but he thought that in such a valley area between two mountains and one road, the tanks were completely useless, and they would be killed. His idea was plausible in some outdated theories, the tank's artillery fire range was high and low, it could not threaten higher targets, and poor visibility was not conducive to mountain warfare.

Knowing that the enemy occupied the most dangerous section of the road, Tao Mingzhang did not have time to devise Taifu tactics, so he immediately met with Zhou Youfu and had a brief discussion, and then divided his troops on the spot to deal with the two enemies.

According to this simple plan, Zhou Youfu's tank once again played the role of outflanking the enemy from the flank, while Tao Mingzhang mobilized the artillery to give a little color to the enemy who thought he occupied the commanding heights and was invincible.

Lieutenant General Takeuchi was a 31st graduate of the University of the Mainland, who had stayed on to teach, and was a standard Japanese professional soldier. Zhou Youfu, who played against him, only claimed to be an auto mechanic who graduated from high school, and the theoretical level of the two was very different, but Zhou Youfu's understanding of the use of tanks was very close to that of a general of Rommel's level, while Takeuchi was far from wide.

In Lieutenant General Takeuchi's conception that the tank was first and foremost a weapon of attack, the stereotype stuck in World War I, when the speed of the tank did not exceed the speed of the infantry, but this is not the case now. Stewart's tank highway speed exceeded 60 kilometers per hour, and even though Zhou Youfu did not have theoretical ability, he knew one thing: the tank was first and foremost a mobile weapon, and in short, it could be suitable for most occasions where cavalry was applicable.

Yasuo Sushimoto's 55th Sosu Wing was reorganized from the original cavalry wing of the same number, and was a mobile force of Takeuchi's housekeeper. As the lead of the automobile troops, they quickly advanced on the forest path in an attempt to sneak up on Lashio. The Chinese came on the main road, and they walked on the small road, and it seemed that Lashio was a blessed land for the Japanese army, and the success of this sneak attack was bound to repeat the drama of cutting off Du Yuming's back road.

The cavalry was galloping, and suddenly encountered a half-track car from the side of the road to intercept the road, and the soldiers on the half-track car strafed, and immediately killed several cavalrymen who were not in a hurry.

Zhou Youfu used a half-track to open the way for the tank, he himself was the driver of the Type 221 reconnaissance vehicle, and he knew very well that the movement of these vehicles was relatively small and not easy to be discovered by the enemy in advance, and secondly, these vehicles had a wide field of vision, which could make up for the problem of tank vision, and was very suitable for reconnaissance in front of the column.

As soon as the Japanese cavalry was in disarray, trees fell in the nearby forest, and the first tanks rushed out of the mountain road where the cavalry could not pass.

The skirmish began, there was no decent engagement at all, and the Japanese cavalry quickly fled in all directions. Instead of chasing the cavalry, the tank units quickly rushed forward.

Zhou Youfu had accurate information and knew that the enemy's automobile units carrying battle defense artillery were just one kilometer behind the cavalry. He estimated the time it would take for his tanks to rush to the front of him by setting up a temporary position and deploying these weapons in the event of a sudden situation. Tanks are not offensive weapons, and any slow attack will incur huge losses.

Everything was as he expected, the enemy's reaction was not fast, and when he noticed the sound of gunfire in front of him, he immediately stopped the convoy and prepared to counterattack. But it was easier said than done for the column on the mountain trail to unfold. In the blink of an eye, the tank had arrived. Tanks rushed along both sides of the road, and these tanks, which were only 12.5 tons, were behemoths here. The Japanese fast column was caught in the middle and was beaten by a burst of machine guns.

At the same time, Tao Mingzhang's troops unloaded their cannons in front of the enemy, and even the heavy 105 mm * guns were no slower than the Japanese deployed a 75 mm field gun drawn by mules and horses. As soon as the car quickly turned in unison in the preset position, it had already aimed its gun in the general direction. The artillerymen on the car quickly jumped down, moved the large racks on both sides, sorted out the ammunition, and began to prepare. As soon as the forward search battalion exchanged fire with the Japanese, the rear artillery support had already arrived. The fight is accurate and hateful.

Although the commander of the Takeuchi Division knew the mountains and rivers in the defense area well and was able to seize the favorable terrain before the opponent, there were no fortifications on the mountain after all, and his troops were all exposed to the surface of the hillside for defense, while the mountain artillery unit he deployed behind the mountain could not beat the Chinese army on the anti-slope plane, and the range was insufficient to attack the Chinese army artillery. Tao Mingzhang's artillery position was selected in a hurry, but the advantage of 12 kilometers to 8.5 kilometers in the firing range gave him a lot of redundancy for adjustment. In addition to his increased coverage, the range advantage allows him to attack some anticline targets. And the death squads, with the participation of locals, have already penetrated deep into the mountains, searching for enemy artillery positions. These positions were completely within the range of Tao Mingzhang's heavy artillery, and as long as they were exposed, they would be immediately wiped out.

The Takeuchi division was not without heavy artillery of this level, but he gave the automatic vehicle brigade of the towed artillery wing to the infantry, so he could only leave this firepower in Myitkyina.

The condescending superiority of the Japanese army became insignificant in the face of the huge killing range of 105 shells against the exposed target. The 201st Division advanced about 100 meters from the artillery fire, and the large number of automatic weapons of the Chinese army was at its maximum effectiveness at a range of about 100 meters, and as a rule of thumb, the Japanese did not have time to reoccupy positions and deploy heavy machine guns at this distance, and the slower rate of fire of the rifles was completely suppressed.

Takeuchi soon waited for the bad news, his most proud subordinate Seiichi Murayama was killed by enemy artillery while commanding the battle at a hidden observation post, along with more than 30 people from Nakasa's headquarters and communications troops. The hill they were on was not in the battle zone, but the Chinese army suddenly fired a few shots and killed Murayama, who was known as a ghost and liked to scout under the enemy's nose.

Tao Mingzhang used a telescope to observe the front battle in the rear, and found that there was a significantly higher mountain near the battlefield, and his eight-fold telescope naturally could not see what was famous on the mountain, but casually asked if it was within the firing range, and after receiving an affirmative answer, he felt that if he was Japanese, he might occupy such a commanding height for reconnaissance, so he ordered a few shots casually.