Chapter 228: Encircling A Point To Strike Reinforcements
Facing the unstoppable, rolling steel torrent, the remaining Japanese troops fell into double despair of body and mind.
“Baka ya ro…”
Sergeant Ito, this short and stocky veteran who had just been doused in his comrades’ entrails and bloody mud during the shelling, was now completely insane.
His eyes were bloodshot, filled with veins, his face mixed with dried bloodstains, dirt, and tears, his expression ferocious like a demon crawling out from hell.
He watched his soldiers, those companions who were still gambling and complaining about the food with him yesterday, now falling one after another.
A soldier trying to throw a grenade had just straightened up when he was instantly torn in two by the tongue of flame from the M2 Browning heavy machine gun on top of the Sherman tank’s turret, his upper body flying out like a broken sack, blood and entrails splattered everywhere.
Another group of soldiers hiding in a shell crater trying to shoot were directly hit by a 75mm high-explosive shell, the explosion’s shockwave hurling their severed limbs high into the air before they fell back like a rain of blood.
“Are you all idiots? Hurry up and find weapons!”
Ito was heartbroken, his eyes nearly splitting, he shouted hoarsely at the top of his lungs, urging his men to quickly find anti-tank weapons, making a final, futile struggle.
“Anti-tank gun! Quick! Pull the anti-tank gun over!”
Soon, under the combined dragging of several soldiers, a surviving Type 97 20mm anti-tank rifle also called a gun was arduously dragged out from a pile of ruins and set up on the edge of a relatively flat shell crater.
The gunner was drenched in sweat, fumbling to load and aim. He stared deadly at a Sherman tank slowly approaching them and suddenly pulled the trigger!
“Bang!”
A crisp cannon shot. The 20mm armor-piercing round, trailing a faint tracer, accurately hit the frontal upper armor of that Sherman tank.
“Clang…”
A crisp sound came, like metal being tapped by a small hammer. The armor-piercing round that the Japanese had pinned their hopes on merely sparked a small, powerless cluster of sparks upon contact with the Sherman’s thick, sloped armor plate, then ricocheted away, rolling a few times on the ground and losing all its kinetic energy.
And that Sherman tank, as if merely bitten by a mosquito, only swayed slightly, the blue sky white sun emblem on its turret still clearly visible amid the smoke.
It didn’t even pause for a moment, its tracks continued turning, the engine emitting a dull roar, steadfastly pressing forward.
“Nani?! What?! How could this be?”
The Japanese soldiers who saw this were all stunned, their eyes revealing incredulous despair.
“Switch to the Type 91! Quick! Use the Type 91!” Sergeant Ito roared hoarsely, unwilling to abandon the last hope.
Several more soldiers, with tremendous effort, dragged out a larger, heavier Type 91 47mm anti-tank gun from another nearly completely buried position. This was the most powerful anti-tank weapon they had.
The gunners once again fumbled to operate it, their movements stiffened by fear, but they still fired.
“Bang!”
Another cannon shot, this one much more muffled. The 47mm shell once again accurately struck the front of the Sherman tank’s turret.
This time, the Sherman tank had an obvious reaction. Its massive body jolted violently, its tracks pausing for a moment.
“It works! The attack works!” a Japanese soldier excitedly shouted.
However, their excitement lasted less than three seconds.
The Sherman tank’s turret, after a slight vibration, began to slowly turn, its black maw of a 75mm main gun barrel, like the eye of a grim reaper, precisely locking onto this 47mm anti-tank gun that had just exposed itself.
“Boom…”
Before the Japanese gunners could load a second shell, the Sherman tank fired first. A high-explosive shell whistled in with an almost flat trajectory, smashing viciously onto the gun shield of that Type 91 anti-tank gun!
The violent explosion instantly turned that anti-tank gun and the five or six gunners around it into a pile of twisted, burning steel and charred, shattered flesh.
The last hope was shattered.
Utter despair, like an icy tide, engulfed Ito and all the surviving Japanese troops. The weapons they prided themselves on were laughable as children’s toys before the enemy’s powerful steel behemoths.
“Shock troops! Organize body bomb attacks! For His Majesty the Emperor! Shatter like jade…”
In extreme despair, Ito issued his final, most insane order.
Several thoroughly brainwashed, most fanatical militarists had sickly gleams in their eyes. They took out satchel charges and bundled grenades from the ammo box, strapped them tightly to their bodies, lit the fuses, emitted unintelligible howls from their mouths, leaped out from the trench, and launched a suicidal charge toward the nearest tank.
However, they faced a well-trained, tactically rigorous infantry-tank coordinated force.
These “body bombs” were still thirty meters from the tanks when they were picked off one by one by the highly vigilant infantry closely following behind the tanks, using precise semi-automatic rifle and submachine gun bursts.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
“Da da da…”
Those Japanese soldiers strapped with explosives fell like burst blood bags midway through their charge, the explosives on their bodies detonating and blowing them to pieces, posing no threat to the tanks.
Ito stared blankly at all this, constantly twisting his body, trying to command his soldiers to continue fighting, but soon, he sadly discovered that there was no longer a single soldier around him who could stand up.
Trenches, shell craters, everywhere were littered with comrades’ mutilated corpses. The entire position had become a slaughterhouse.
And the first Sherman tank they had attacked had crushed the last obstacle and charged right up to him.
A massive shadow completely enveloped Ito. He could clearly see the mud and blood plasma staining the tank’s tracks, smell the scorching, oil-scented engine exhaust.
He raised his Type 38 rifle and futilely fired his last bullet at the steel behemoth.
The bullet ricocheted off the armor, making a negligible crisp sound.
The next second, the tank driver didn’t even notice this insignificant existence. The heavy tracks, with crushing force, mercilessly rolled right over him.
“Creak… splat…”
A teeth-grinding sound of bones cracking and flesh being crushed rang out.
Sergeant Ito, this stubborn and mad veteran, didn’t even manage a complete scream before the tank’s tracks ground him, along with his rifle and his soldier’s dignity, into a blurry mess of minced flesh mixed with the dirt.
As the Xin County front was thoroughly devoured by steel and fire, and countless Japanese soldiers were crushed into minced flesh in despair, the shockwave of this battle raced along fragile telephone lines at the speed of light to Taiyuan, hundreds of kilometers away—the First Army headquarters of the Japanese North China Area Army.
Inside Major General Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s division command post, it was already a scene of chaos.
The violent explosions had shattered all the windows, dust and debris from the ceiling falling like rain.
Several staff officers ran around shouting beside the tottering map sand table, but all orders seemed pale and powerless.
Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu himself, this division commander who had been full of confidence in his defensive line not long ago, was now clutching the phone receiver tightly, that hand trembling violently from excessive force and fear.
His voice was hoarse and urgent, with a hint of a sob, roaring desperately into the mouthpiece as if it were his only lifeline.
“Moshi moshi! Commander-in-Chief Shinozuka! This is 24th Division Commander Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu! Our army is under an unprecedented offensive by the Shanxi militia! They… they have launched fierce attacks along our entire tens-of-kilometers defensive line simultaneously!”
Even across hundreds of kilometers, the urgent voice mixed with distant explosion rumbles from the phone receiver clearly drilled into Lieutenant General Shinozuka Tadanori’s ears.
“Our positions… our permanent fortifications have been mostly blasted down by their heavy artillery! The Chinese tanks… countless tanks have broken through the main defensive line! Requesting urgent tactical guidance! Requesting urgent reinforcements! Requesting urgent tactical guidance…”
Taiyuan, First Army headquarters.
Unlike the chaos and mess at the front, here it was still neat and imposing. But at this moment, the air was so cold it seemed to condense frost.
Lieutenant General Shinozuka Tadanori, the supreme commander of the First Army, stood ramrod straight before his desk like an enraged lion.
He gripped the receiver, listening to Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s incoherent desperate report, his usually steady face now clouded with fury.
“Baka ya ro…”
A thunderous roar erupted from Shinozuka Tadanori’s throat, lashing through the phone line onto Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s eardrums.
“Kuroiwa! Under your command is an imperial full-strength standing division! And you have the solid positions built for you at great cost by the army! Less than two hours into the battle, and you’re asking me for tactical guidance?”
Shinozuka Tadanori’s voice sharpened piercingly from extreme rage, full of contempt and humiliation.
“If you can’t even handle this, then immediately disembowel yourself in your command post! I wouldn’t mind rushing to Xin County to act as your kaishakunin!”
This vicious curse made Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu on the other end tremble all over, his face turning ashen. But survival instinct and his final sense of responsibility as a commander made him disregard all dignity and shame.
“Commander-in-Chief! It’s not that we’re incompetent! The Shanxi militia’s firepower is too strong… their artillery… and their tanks… there are just… just too many! Our defensive line can’t withstand their assault…”
Though cursed bloody by Shinozuka Tadanori, Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu still pleaded in near-begging tones: “This subordinate requests once again… dispatch reinforcements immediately! Otherwise… otherwise the 24th Division… will shatter like jade entirely!”
The word “shatter like jade” finally brought a trace of calm to Shinozuka Tadanori’s rage-clouded mind.
The 24th Division was only established in Manchuria at the beginning of last year, its backbone troops and officers transferred from other units.
The unit was moved to Shanxi right after formation, so its original purpose wasn’t for hard fighting, but for chasing down Anti-Japanese United Army guerrillas and local bandits hiding in the deep mountains and forests.
Such a unit could handle pacification warfare, but pitting it against the Shanxi militia—armed to the teeth, forged in the meat grinders of Nanjing and Xuzhou—was like porcelain smashing into stone, with a predictable end.
Though he hated their incompetence, he knew better that if a division was systematically crushed in just a few hours, it would be an unbearable humiliation and strategic disaster for the entire First Army, even the whole North China Area Army.
He took a deep breath, suppressing his anger, and said in a cold, emotionless tone: “I order you, at all costs, rally your troops and hold the line for me! Reinforcements… will arrive soon!”
With that, he slammed the phone down with a “bang.”
After hanging up, Shinozuka Tadanori turned to his chief of staff who had been standing by at attention and issued a series of rapid, clear orders.
“Immediately wire! The Independent Mixed 3rd Brigade stationed in Yangqu, advance at full speed to Xin County! Reinforce the 24th Division at utmost speed!”
“At the same time! Order Iga Toraji, immediately take off with all flyable Zero fighters, various fighters, and bombers from the 60th Air Squadron! Target, eastern Xin County battlefield! I want you to bomb it into a sea of fire! Blast all the Chinese tank forces there to fragments for me!”
With his orders issued, the entire First Army headquarters, this massive war machine, began operating at high speed. Telegraphs, phone rings, officers’ footsteps, and command voices filled the air.
At the airport near Taiyuan, shrill combat alert sirens pierced the sky. One after another Japanese aircraft were dragged from hangars, ground crew frantically loading bombs and refueling, pilots donning flight suits and rushing to their mounts.
Soon, aircraft after aircraft lifted off the runway and shot straight into the sky.
Just as the Japanese fighters urgently flew toward the Xin County battlefield, over Xin County and Guo County, a formation of over a hundred aircraft was quietly hiding in the cloud layer.
This air group led by Doolittle and Cheng Rufeng had refrained from assisting the ground forces earlier precisely to conserve energy and ammo for a lethal strike against the incoming Japanese Army Air Service reinforcements.
In Army terms, it was called encircling a point to strike reinforcements…
