Chapter 445 Battle of the Somme

Chapter 445 Battle of the Somme

Chapter 445 Battle of the Somme

France, fifty miles east of Amiens, on the north bank of the Somme.

The Battle of the Somme has been going on for more than twenty days.

The Allies were on the defensive at Verdun, with the French army as the main force and the British army as the auxiliary. This side was on the offensive, with the British army as the main force.

Forty-nine Mark I tanks rumbled toward the German trenches, and British soldiers with Martini bolt-action rifles crouched behind them.

Looking at these steel monsters whose shapes were very different from the Huai Army tanks, Shao Quanyi, who was watching the battle with a telescope from a distance, shook his head slightly.

Shao Quanyi appeared in the Battle of the Somme on his own request. As the fourth of the four Shao brothers, he had the least presence.

The second brother Quanxiao has a strong personality. He did well in military studies in Germany, so he has some confidence in his second brother. In addition, he is only one year younger than Shao Quanzhong, so he sometimes dares to talk back to his eldest brother.

Now, my second brother has become the emperor.

The third brother is the president of China Telecom. He runs an almost monopolistic business and makes the most money for the second brother. He is highly trusted by the family.

As for Quanyi, his grades at the Berlin Military Academy were average, and when he returned he was not even admitted to the General Staff. He was demoted to be a company commander, and he always felt that he had brought shame to Shao Quanzhong.

As Shao Quanzhong's younger brother, Quanyi was under a lot of pressure. He fought bravely in every battle. He felt that he was promoted in every battle because of his surname Shao, not because of his ability, and he felt very sorry.

Now he has been promoted all the way and has become the acting commander of the Guangdong New Army Tank Division and the commander of the First Brigade. He is in charge of the most powerful mechanized tank unit under Shao Quanzhong, and he feels even more insecure.

To this end, he specifically applied to his brother to come to the European War as a military observer to see how this large-scale war was fought.

This position of observer is quite dangerous. You see, when the great powers were observing the war between the North and the South in Japan, the observers occupied a small hill to watch the battle alone, and neither side dared to provoke them.

On the one hand, the great powers were so powerful that neither side dared to provoke a bunch of them at the same time. On the other hand, the scale of the war was limited, and it was just a small area, so it was not easy to make a mistake.

This is a battlefield with more than two million troops, with shells and bullets flying everywhere. Even if you are flying the five-color flag of Daxia, there is no guarantee that others can see you clearly.

He couldn't tell anyone if he was beaten, and Shao Quanzhong wouldn't lead his troops to fight. He could only pray for good luck.

But this scale of war is the first in world history. Senior commanders can definitely improve their skills if they can be there in person. Shao Quanyi is in urgent need of improving his skills, so he took the risk.

Large-scale battlefields are really different. The Huai Army's largest battle was during the Western Expedition, when they faced the Russian Central Asian troops. Including the vassal army, they only had 100,000 troops in total.

The most powerful time for the army was when it was fighting the Ottoman Empire, when it had only four or five mechanized divisions.

The British and French used 86 divisions to attack, while the Germans used 40 divisions to defend. There were two fronts, 25 kilometers wide on one side and 15 kilometers wide on the other side. The battlefield was 8 kilometers deep. The Huai Army had no experience in such large-scale operations.

My brother has great ambitions. As for the Huai Army, he can actually mobilize a million men. It’s just that it is not yet time for the Huai Army to perform. Therefore, the experience gained in wars of this scale is very valuable.

Seeing that the British only deployed 10 tanks on a 49-kilometer-wide attack front, Quan Yi couldn't help but shake his head.

The British really don't understand tanks. The Huai Army used armored units for the first time in the Battle of Tashkent eight years ago, and now they are extremely experienced. Tanks are not used in this way.

The fighting style of tanks lies in mobility and suddenness, and you must fight a blitzkrieg, and long-distance encirclement is the best. If you use tanks in such a strategic decisive battle, and the number is so small, will it be effective?
Shao Quanyi’s own tank division has 500 tanks, and the First Brigade has 300 tanks. Is this the only thing this British boss can do?

Well, in fact, the British were just trying out tank warfare, they had no experience in using tanks in combat. After all, the shipping capacity of the English Channel was too tight, and tanks took up too much space.

Sure enough, most of the 49 tanks broke down not long after they were driven out, and only 18 were in normal use - the scale of the war was too large, the logistics were a mess, and the tanks were not properly maintained.

Eighteen tanks on a battlefield ten kilometers wide - basically a drop in the bucket, useless.

Then, the German anti-tank guns showed their power, and ten of the eighteen tanks were paralyzed, with only eight reaching the enemy trenches.

"For the record, tanks must be used on a large scale. Too few tanks are useless. They are not suitable for large-scale trench warfare where both sides have pre-set battlefields. Tanks should be used to raid on large plains without railways."

The staff officers behind him kept recording and taking photos to obtain first-hand information on the battlefield.

The tanks performed poorly, but the British attack was still very effective.

Since the Battle of Verdun, the British Army has been preparing to open up a second battlefield to relieve the defensive pressure of Verdun. It took them half a year to prepare, so the preparations here were quite sufficient.

The British had 2189 artillery pieces and 1160 mortars, and many of them were huge cannons removed from warships. Based on the losses suffered in the previous war, they were quickly converted into breech-loading guns with full firepower. The German artillery was all on the Verdun battlefield, and the Germans only had 672 artillery pieces and 300 mortars, with a clear disadvantage in firepower.

The huge number of artillery clusters bombarded with earth-shaking sounds, which may be the largest-scale artillery bombardment in history so far.

Quanyi looked back and saw that the hot air balloons behind the artillery position had been shot down by the German anti-aircraft guns, as well as the German hot air balloons.

The staff officers recorded, "In a large-scale battle, both sides would sacrifice their anti-aircraft guns to knock down the other side's observation balloons first, so the barrage tactic cannot be reliably implemented--"

Huh? The British army is still advancing slowly in the barrage. How did they do that?
Damn! The British soldiers who were charging fast were hit by their own shells, causing heavy losses.

Well, the British Army’s General Staff developed a brutal barrage tactic known as the “creeping barrage.”

After losing the observation balloon, artillery strikes extended forward at a speed of 50-100 meters per minute, which was the speed at which the staff estimated the soldiers' advance.

However, the soldiers' advancing speed was not fixed, and they might rush forward to be hit by their own artillery, so the General Staff estimated that this tactic would cause 10% casualties among the charging soldiers.

In fact, due to the chaos on the battlefield, 15% of the British assaulting soldiers died under their own artillery fire.

The British are so cruel, they don't even consider their own lives as human lives...

Quan Yi wrote in his observation report, "Before the emergence of instant battlefield communication and precise dispatch, the barrage slow-moving tactic is not recommended."

It is hard to say that this advice is absolutely correct. In order to achieve victory, sacrifice is sometimes necessary... This is the cruelty of the battlefield.

Although the bombardment killed many British soldiers, the power of the thousands of artillery clusters was indeed overwhelming. The German fortifications along the way were blown up, and the British army quickly advanced -

"Boom! Boom!"

The German artillery fired back, accurately hitting the middle of the densely packed charging British soldiers.

The British didn't know why the German artillery fire was so accurate, but Quan Yi knew.

On the battlefield, there must have been sturdy bunker observation holes built by the German military in advance, and the underground telephone lines led all the way to the artillery positions in the rear. This was a tactic developed by Shao Quanzhong, Lao Ge and Xiao Ai.

The German army used precision artillery fire from a numerical disadvantage, killing large numbers of British troops. The British troops who rushed to the trenches suffered heavy casualties and were quickly pushed back.

With the current technological bonus, the German army's "artillery call" tactic is superior to the British army's "barrage creep" when defending.

Quan Yi was just recording faithfully, but he did not tell the British the secret of the German artillery call. Compared with Britain, Germany is a bigger customer of the Good Fruits military-industrial complex...

Moreover, when the British army was attacking with a barrage of artillery fire, the soldiers were still advancing in lines. This was a tactic used in the musket era to concentrate firepower. Now that cannons are king, this tactic should be abandoned. The German army's skirmish line is the correct answer.

However, the British Army's tactical improvements were not that fast, and they were still using the tactics from Baliqiao fifteen years ago.

As a result, the backward tactics cost more British soldiers their lives. The British troops in dense formations suffered even greater casualties when they were attacked by German artillery.

On the battlefield, Quan Yi experienced the advanced tactics of his elder brother and Emery.

It turned out that what we learned at the beginning, what my eldest brother taught us during the militia training in Shaojiawei, surpassed the current tactical level of the British.

The Berlin Military Academy taught the most advanced tactics. No wonder Big Brother sent us to Germany to study military...

"The British Army's staff was also very immature, and the battle plan they formulated was too rigid. They did not consider the differences in the battlefields, and rarely conducted staff reconnaissance before the battle. They forcibly stipulated the advance speed of each unit according to the map, which severely limited the combat effectiveness of each unit..."

It turns out that the staff system of the German army and the Huai Army was also better than that of the British army. The British staff was almost like the civil servants of the Privy Council of the Song Dynasty, sitting in Kaifeng and micromanaging the formations of generals thousands of miles away. The reason why they could not be defeated was entirely due to the artillery advantage created by Britain's strong industrial capacity...

Suddenly, the staff officer behind him rushed over and knocked Quan Yi to the ground.

Quan Yi was confused. I am nearly four kilometers away from the front line. Why should I lie down?

I lay on the ground and looked back. Wow, the British soldiers behind me kept falling down in rows. It seemed that they were attacked by the Maxim machine gun.

But how did the German machine guns hit them from such a long distance? This seemed completely impossible, and a big question mark popped up in Quanyi's head.

(End of this chapter)