Chapter 302: Hell On Earth
Under the stern orders of Division Commander Masaharu Honma, the Japanese 27th Division had no choice but to continue their arduous march, risking bombardment.
One hour later.
“Woo…”
Just as Masaharu Honma gritted his teeth, forcing himself and his troops to press on, a shrill whistling sound suddenly pierced the sky. That sound, like the horn of the Grim Reaper, instantly cut through the smoke and dust permeating the air, stabbing straight into the eardrums of every Japanese soldier.
An SBD-2 Dauntless dive bomber, its fuselage gleaming with silver-gray light like a predatory bird of prey, dove from three thousand meters altitude toward the ground at nearly a straight angle.
As the plane dove at high speed, the intense airflow passed through the wind siren under the wings, emitting a piercing and shrill alarm-like wail.
The sound was so soul-chilling that the Japanese soldiers on the ground, upon hearing it, needed no orders; they instinctively dropped their weapons and scattered in terror like startled birds and beasts.
The truck drivers, too, could no longer afford to think of anything else.
They slammed on the brakes, the trucks screeching with friction under inertia and halting in the middle of the road.
The driver at the front didn’t even have time to pull the handbrake; he impatiently shoved open the door, leaped out in one bound, and dashed to the roadside ditch, burying himself in the mud as deeply as possible.
Masaharu Honma, riding on horseback, was swiftly yanked down by several alert guards beside him.
The guards acted roughly yet incredibly swiftly, grabbing his arms one on each side, hustling him in a scrambling crawl to the roadside, and pinning him face-down in a muddy ditch.
“I’m not leaving… Let me up… You idiots… You bastards, let me up… Woo woo woo…”
Masaharu Honma’s eyes bulged with rage as he struggled furiously, roaring in indignation from his mouth.
He strained desperately to crawl up from the mud, but how could he break free from several strong and sturdy guards?
Four guards pressed down hard on his back and limbs, holding him firmly underneath.
Masaharu Honma’s face was pressed into the muddy water; as he struggled, he swallowed several mouthfuls of foul, earthy rotten mud, his mouth and nostrils filled with turbid slurry.
He felt utter humiliation; this wretched posture was an experience he, an imperial lieutenant general, had never had before.
When the SBD-2 dive bomber was just over eight hundred meters from the ground, its nose suddenly pulled up sharply. Then, the massive five-hundred-kilogram heavy aerial bomb hanging under the wing, under gravity’s pull and accompanied by a crisp “click” of mechanical release, abruptly detached from the wing. Like a black Grim Reaper, it hurtled toward the ground with a sharp whistle.
“Boom!”
A thunderous roar shook the entire valley. The super-heavy aerial bomb landed precisely in the middle of the highway, its explosive shockwave like a visible white blast wave radiating wildly in all directions from the blast point.
Japanese soldiers within a hundred meters had no chance to scream; their bodies were instantly torn apart and vaporized by the immense shockwave and heat, turning into flying chunks of flesh and viscous liquid.
Their weapons, gear, even their clothing disintegrated into the finest dust in an instant, leaving only a massive crater blasted in the ground and the pervasive stench of blood and charred flesh in the air.
Even soldiers a hundred meters or even two hundred meters from the blast, if without good cover, would have their organs shattered by the horrific shockwave, blood spurting from mouth and nose, dying on the spot.
Those who luckily survived often bled from all orifices, eardrums ruptured, temporarily deafened by the massive explosion, their eyes vacant like walking corpses.
As for the trucks, artillery, or piled-up supplies within the blast radius, they were all smashed like they’d been punched by a giant’s fist, instantly exploding into twisted scrap metal and scattered parts, unrecognizable in their original forms. This was the true power of such a super-heavy bomb—not mere killing, but total destruction.
Masaharu Honma, prone in the ditch, felt the ground beneath him tremble violently as a massive blast wave carrying mud, rubble, and an indescribable stench slammed into his back.
The blast tossed his body with a shudder; more slurry flooded his mouth and nose, his ears ringing loudly, temporarily hearing nothing.
He felt as if trampled by a giant beast, his bones creaking all over.
He buried his face dead in the muddy water, arms tightly hugging his head, curling into a ball against the force that seemed to tear his body apart.
The surrounding guards pressed him just as tightly, their bodies trembling, but none dared let go.
After the roar, heaven and earth seemed to lose all sound in an instant, leaving only the intense ringing in Masaharu Honma’s eardrums and the “thumping” of blood rushing through his body.
He was pinned in the cold muddy water, slurry and rubble mixed with foul bloody foam coating his face and mouth, even sucked unconsciously into his nostrils and throat.
A sharp pain stabbed his chest, as if struck by an invisible giant hammer.
Then, a nauseating sickness surged to his throat, his stomach spasming violently as if to vomit out his guts. He coughed hard several times, only bringing up more slurry and bloody foam.
When the guards slightly eased their hold, allowing him to barely lift his head, the sight made his pupils contract sharply.
The once flat highway was now blasted into a pit dozens of meters wide and several meters deep. The pit’s edges were charred black, the soil fused into glass by the heat.
Around the pit, the Japanese soldiers who had been marching in neat order had vanished, leaving only scattered bloody flesh and unrecognizable bone fragments on the ground.
The air was thick with the smell of gunpowder, scorched char, and stomach-churning blood.
Those once majestic Type 94 trucks were now twisted scrap heaps, wheels flung dozens of meters away, cabs shattered to fragments. Supplies, ammo crates, even soldiers’ helmets and rifles were torn into tiny parts by the huge shockwave, scattered across the devastated ground.
Masaharu Honma’s eyes glazed over the scene, a wordless terror and despair surging from deep within. This sight was more horrific and destructive than any battle he’d experienced before.
He suddenly recalled the scenes from the Battle of Shanghai.
Back then, the Imperial Navy’s naval guns were the true Grim Reapers.
The Guangxi Clique’s sixty thousand elites, dubbed “Wolf Soldiers,” launched a desperate assault on Japanese positions. Under naval gun cover, they were nearly annihilated in moments. It wasn’t ordinary shelling; it was true “plowing the courts and sweeping the holes.”
He remembered clearly: the Imperial Navy’s guns ranged from 76 mm to the terrifying 460 mm.
Take the largest 460 mm high-explosive shells on battleships: each weighed 1.3 tons, with over 300 kg of explosive, a blast radius exceeding 200 meters! One shot could level half a football field.
In other words, one shot from that thing could kill everyone in a football field—either blasted to mincemeat or shaken to death by the horrific shockwave!
And now, he faced a strike from the sky with the same destructive power.
Moreover, this strike wasn’t one or two rounds, but continuous.
The Chinese Air Force actually possessed heavy bombs rivaling Imperial Navy naval gun power—this was simply inconceivable!
Masaharu Honma tremblingly reached out, wiping the mud and blood from his face, his eyes filled with shock and fear.
His body shaking, he laboriously propped up his upper body, trying to climb from the mud.
Turbid slurry still oozed from his mouth and nose, blood and saliva mixed, dripping from his chin.
Even his head throbbed intensely, eardrums as if torn, hearing only continuous ringing, nothing else.
Masaharu Honma had served over twenty years, fought countless battles from the Russo-Japanese War to the invasion of China; he thought himself inured to life and death, having brushed shoulders with the Grim Reaper many times.
But a threat of death so direct and destructive as just now was his first personal experience.
That five-hundred-kilogram aerial bomb—if it had landed just a hundred meters closer, no, fifty meters! In days, his name, Masaharu Honma, would be carved on a cold Yasukuni Shrine tablet. It was a fear he’d never known, a bone-deep powerlessness against such force.
But before he could fully recover from the shock and terror of that heavy bomb, more black dots began appearing one after another on the distant horizon in the sky. They grew rapidly, soon discernible as more, more planes!
They pressed forward like dense storm clouds, the formation far larger than before.
Then, with ghostly shrieks, one after another SBD Dauntless dive bombers, like rigorously trained dancers of death, began diving in formation at nearly vertical angles sequentially toward this highway dozens of miles long.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Heavy bomb explosions rose and fell without end. The entire pass became an explosive inferno, the ground shaking violently as if to tear apart. Blasted earth, rubble, and corpse remnants rained down like hail.
Between explosions sounded the distinctive dull “rat-a-tat-tat” of large-caliber machine guns. That was the SBD bombers’ guns strafing the ground during dives. Dense bullet rain reaped lives on the highway like the Grim Reaper’s scythe.
Japanese soldiers were either directly pulverized by heavy bombs, no intact bodies left; or flung by blast waves, bones shattered, organs ruptured, vomiting blood into disability; or precisely hit by machine-gun bullets, bodies riddled with bowl-sized holes or limbs torn off, maimed.
More burst into astonishing survival instinct under death’s threat. With desperate roars and screams, they raced for roadside ditches, rock crevices, even meager earth mounds, seeking any chance to live.
In an instant, this highway over ten miles long was filled with running, shouting, cursing, screaming, and explosions.
Thick smoke, firelight, flesh, ruins intertwined like a living hellscape. Death’s shadow enveloped everyone, despair spreading like plague.
