Rise From Eight Hundred Chapter 320

Chapter 320 'Bloody Balloon'

Don't look at the 150 and 240 large-caliber howitzers of the Japanese heavy artillery brigade. One shot will create a large crater with a diameter of several meters, and the killing radius reaches a staggering 50 meters.

It almost means that if a cannonball hits an area the size of two basketball courts, it will be within its destruction range.

But that doesn't mean that there is no safe place in Songjiang City, which covers an area of two and a few square kilometers.

A Japanese heavy artillery brigade has a total of 30 150mm howitzers, 20 240mm howitzers, and 10 305mm howitzers. A saturation attack means throwing 60 shells. Even one shell can kill 5,000 square meters and can be hit by artillery fire. The area covered by the wind and air waves will never exceed one-eighth of the Songjiang City area with a total area of more than two million square meters.

This is not to say that the Japanese heavy artillery brigade is not powerful enough, but that, relatively speaking, Songjiang City, which was not small to begin with, still has a way to survive with sufficient depth.

If it were the American cowboys who were at the Five Sacred Mountains more than ten years later, gathering hundreds of cannons and dozens of aircraft to bomb them wildly, then Songjiang City would have truly connected the city and turned people into powder.

For example, this 67th Army machine gun shooter saw the Japanese "big balloon" machine gun fortification. Although the rumbling sound of gunfire exploding all around him had caused him to lose his hearing with cotton stuffed in his ears, his eyes were still good.

Through the thick smoke, he saw the strange thing flying in mid-air with a big head and a long tail.

As a machine gunner in an air defense battalion, Mo Songzi had seen this thing frequently on the North China battlefield. The Japanese often used it to observe the opponent's position and guide artillery bombardment.

The North China Plain is already flat. The Japanese often have an unobstructed view of their opponents' positions with this device, but the distance is too far. The farthest can even be up to ten kilometers. Even if the Chinese army has this type of anti-air combat, the range can reach 2,500 meters. Even the Oerlikon machine gun cannot pose a threat to such a large balloon that is far out of range.

Anyway, Mo Songzi fired two springboards at this thing on the front line, but it turned out to be useless. The only threat to large balloons is airplanes.

But in the skies of North China, were there ever Chinese fighter planes? It's okay to dream.

But now, the big balloon has reached a place where he can see it clearly with the naked eye. Is this asking him to die?

“Get up, get up, get up, you've got some work to do. Come on, come on!” Mo Songzi looked at his subordinates who were huddled in the corner with their heads in their hands, and kicked them all.

Shouting was just a subconscious behavior. His own ears were buzzing and he couldn't hear any other sounds.

The fear on the faces of the soldiers has not disappeared, but this does not prevent them from working under the urging of the sergeant squad leader. Some wiped the dust from the machine guns with cloths, some moved the bullet plates, and some got together with the specialized cannons. The gun sight looked at the sky pointed by Mo Songzi, taking advantage of the moment when the gunpowder smoke was blown away by the wind and faded, to find the big balloon still floating in the sky, and kept reporting the position to Mo Songzi, who was already sitting in the shooting position.

Mo Songzi used the crank to continuously adjust the muzzle, and used the crosshair on the barrel to lock the large balloon at a straight line distance of 1,500 meters away and a vertical height of 100 meters.

That is exactly the limit of the firing angle of the machine gun inside the fortification.

Tang Dao, who designed the machine gun fortification, never thought about using the machine gun for air defense. It was mainly used to shoot the infantry with level fire. Mo Songzi just instinctively enlarged the shooting hole, but he didn't expect it to be used.

A city that was constantly trembling under heavy Japanese artillery bombardment, a dangerous machine gun fortification that could be blasted into the sky at any time, a group of Chinese soldiers who were controlled by fear but still trembled to control the machine gun, holding a dusty machine gun and aiming at it. Balloons in the sky.

However, the Japanese military's observation airship or manned balloon is really not a country thing. For this thing that will seem to be an extremely country thing in the future, Japan has invested heavily in research since the mid-19th century.

Japan's use of balloons for military purposes can be traced back to the civil war of the Meiji period. During the Southwest War, the government troops were besieged by Saigo Takamori's tribe in Kumamoto Castle and cut off contact with the outside world. Finally, a balloon developed by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce University in the city was used to transmit information back. Kyoto.

Since then, the Japanese Navy began to develop balloons and successfully developed them in mid-April 1877. However, during the test flight, it was discovered that the balloon was still unstable and its safety was not guaranteed. Then, the unconvinced Japanese Army also independently developed a balloon, but as you know from the test results, the Army was no better than the Navy, so it still didn't work.

More than ten years later, Japan, which is accustomed to practicing appropriationism, decided that I would not invest money in research and development, but I would buy it.

We spent a huge sum of money to import a complete set of balloon equipment from France, but this unlucky Japanese boy did not die. When it was transported back to China via the Indian Ocean, the rubber coating on the surface of the balloon deteriorated and melted due to high temperature and humidity, making it difficult to ensure air tightness. The following year, The test flight still ended in failure.

Until 1903, a "Yamada" type balloon manufactured by a private citizen performed well in an army exercise and was quickly popularized.

To put it bluntly, the bumpkin balloon in Mo Songzi's eyes was really developed by a bumpkin.

However, even this country thing is still very rare on the battlefields of China and Japan. It can even be said to be technically sophisticated, and it is of great help to the Japanese army in terms of function.

For the army of this era, there are nothing more than two methods of battlefield reconnaissance: reconnaissance by scouts on land and reconnaissance by reconnaissance aircraft in the sky.

But the Japanese use this thing called a tethered balloon to have an additional method, which is even better than those two.

Tethered balloons have several advantages over airplanes: First, they can hover in the air and observe targets 360 degrees. The observation instrument can detect targets up to 10 kilometers away, but it is difficult to observe clearly from a passing airplane;

Second, the balloon was connected to a telephone line, which could transmit information to the front at any time, but the aircraft at the time could not do this. Third, the balloon is not affected by time and can be launched at night;

Fourth, there is no sound when the balloon takes off, making it difficult to detect.

By relying on this, the Japanese could accurately guide artillery, which caused great damage to Chinese soldiers on the North China battlefield. Especially in the Battle of Jinling a month later, its advantages were fully demonstrated.

The main reason is that the Chinese air force has been completely depleted. The Japanese army can even raise large balloons 10 kilometers away, and all anti-aircraft and anti-aircraft artillery can only stare at it.

However, it is not easy to raise this kind of balloon. The tethered vehicle alone weighs 5 tons and has more than 10 tethering ropes. When lifting off, it is necessary to first deploy the heavy air bag and then fill it with hydrogen, which takes 40 Multiple soldiers operate at the same time, requiring flat avenues and wide spaces.

Therefore, when the weather was bad, even if the artillery in Songjiang City made the Japanese soldiers cry for their fathers and mothers, the Japanese did not come up with this thing to let their artillery retaliate. They waited until the heavy artillery brigade arrived, as the soldiers under Songjiang City. The most powerful boss, Hisao Tani, commander of the Sixth Division, felt that the opportunity had come.

I just didn't expect it. The heavy artillery brigade was too powerful. The smoke aroused tightly covered the city of Matsue. The balloons with special observation instruments could not see the specific situation in the city. Hisao Tani was so angry that he ordered the balloon troops to fly from more than 2,000 meters away. The distance was as close as 1,000 meters, but the commander of the balloon unit was not an idiot. He quietly stayed 1,500 meters away and stopped advancing.

It was not that he was afraid of the machine guns of the Chinese who were being tortured, but that he was afraid of his own people's artillery.

The heavy artillery brigade is on the north bank of the Huangpu River, and the balloon is in the general direction of the flight of the artillery shells. Although there is no precedent of a balloon being knocked down by its own artillery shells, what if it happens?

Besides, it's so close to the city wall. What if the Chinese who are still alive use a heavy machine gun to hit this side?

The commander of the Japanese balloon unit was definitely smart enough. After considering many contingencies, he chose to levitate the large balloon in the wilderness 1,500 meters away from Songjiang City.

The closer you are, the more clearly you can see.

Unfortunately, death is just a few minutes away.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!" Mo Songzi, a sergeant shooter of the 643rd Regiment of the 67th Army, fired.

In order to ensure the hit rate, Mo Songzi fired twenty rounds of bullets in one go, then immediately replaced them with new bullets and continued to fire, then changed again, and fired again!

Mo Songzi didn't think too much. He chose to fire in the air at this time and spent a full 60 rounds of artillery shells. In fact, he mainly wanted to fight against the huge fear of being bombarded with a cannon at any time.

No one who has not experienced this kind of battle situation can understand the fear that the soldiers tried to suppress.

The previous 105mm howitzers and 75mm mountain guns were okay. You know that as long as they don't hit the fortifications, the chance of saving your life is greater than 95%.

But the current 150 and 240 howitzers can penetrate concrete walls of more than one meter as long as they hit the target. Solid fortifications and the people inside them are directly blown to pieces and buried alive.

In the entire Songjiang City, except for the air-raid shelters where people feel a sense of security, the rest of the city is all about gambling on luck and how many names of gods you know.

It was almost the same fear as a death row prisoner kneeling at the edge of the execution ground, waiting to be put on the guillotine.

People and cannons may blow up at any time, so why not save a ball! Might as well just pick up and play 'ball'.

Mo Songzi actually has such a mentality.

A small sergeant quietly changed the course of a war.

If Hisao Tani hadn't been too anxious, and if the heavy artillery brigade hadn't fired too fast, they would have waited for the observation balloon to lift off first, and if the balloon was farther away.

If any of this happens, it is very likely that the artillery positions in Songjiang City will suffer heavy damage.

But, there is no if.

The observation balloon violated regulations and reached an area 1,500 meters away from the enemy. A Chinese machine gunnery sergeant fired because he refused to be afraid!

One of the two observation balloons owned by the Tenth Army was sieved in the air by a 20mm machine gun.

Expensive observation instruments and soldiers fell from a height of 100 meters and were smashed into parts.

The other one has broken down long ago and has not had time to be repaired.

with the legendary house leaking but raining all night, it was the Tenth Army.

From this moment on, the Tenth Army lost its sharpest "eyes", which even the aviation force could not make up for.

(End of this chapter)

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