Without the help of the Chinese intelligence agency, it is simply impossible to expect Deng Shichang and others to guess the enemy's battle plan under the current conditions.
This is like walking on a night road in the dark night. You know in your heart that you will encounter ghosts along this road, but where will you encounter them? You don’t have a Taoist monk to help you do it, so you can only wait in fear.
The atmosphere in the Jingwu Heroes Association is like this now. Deng Shichang and the others feel more and more that Tianjin is the direction of the enemy's sneak attack, but there is no evidence, and you don't have any intelligence to support your judgment.
What's more important is that Tianjin is a big place. Where can the Japanese attack? This is not something you can guess by just guessing!
"No! We can't wait for new information. We must report to the capital. We can't delay it any longer..." Gordon was really loyal to Emperor Tongzhi. He gritted his teeth and said, "You are all afraid of taking responsibility. I Don’t be afraid, if you have any blame in the future, just put it on my head!”
"I will bear the responsibility for lying about military information!"
This is really a good way to let the foreign devils take the responsibility, so the court will not be cruel to the foreign masters!
In this way, an urgent military information signed by Gordon and everyone was transmitted to the Forbidden City through the telegraph network. At this time, the battle of the Yongding River Defense Line had reached its most difficult moment.
After dark, the Japanese Sixth General Offensive finally began. The Marco Polo Bridge rebels occupied two-thirds of the area, and the remaining third was unable to get through.
The cross fire net built by Li Tuo at the bridgehead killed the rebels one after another. The angles of the bunkers on the left and right were so tricky that the suppressed rebels couldn't even raise their heads!
Those rebels carrying sandbags and pushing corpses forward were mowed down layer by layer like wheat. The high lethality of heavy machine guns was not shown in World War I, but it was raging across the land of East Asia in advance.
Guiziliu had been watching indifferently. He was waiting for it to get dark. In his eyes, the batches of dead people in front of him were just numbers.
At eight o'clock the sun set in the west and the sky was completely dark. Guiziliu ordered the army to cross the river and attack!
At this time, the lurking rebels on the south bank began to move out in full force. In the darkness, no one raised fire and it was impossible to see clearly on the north bank, but there were too many troops invested in this wave of attacks on Guiziliu!
One hundred thousand, a hundred thousand people, spread out east and west for several kilometers with Marco Polo Bridge as the center, and it was so dark that it was impossible to see the end!
Li Tuo couldn't see these enemies, but he could feel something strange on the other side, as if there were countless wild beasts in the darkness.
"Look...there's something strange in the reeds opposite!"
There are also a group of so-called snipers in the imperial army. These were selected by Zai Chun after seeing how powerful Chinese snipers were.
Of course, this kind of sniper can only be regarded as a folk marksman, with better eyesight and better marksmanship. Zaichun's men do not have the ability to systematically cultivate these talents.
But it’s great to have this group of people as observation posts. They are the first soldiers to detect abnormalities on the other side!
It was too uncomfortable to fight in the era without night vision devices. When Li Tuo picked up the telescope and looked over, it was completely dark and he couldn't see anything at all.
I put down the telescope, rubbed my eyes, and stared at the other side. Only then did I realize that countless dark things emerged from the reeds on the other side!
The north bank was the defense line of the imperial army. In order to have a broad view, the imperial court had already cleared away the reeds and aquatic plants on the shore. The shooting ports of various fortifications and bunkers had good sight lines.
However, the ecology of the south bank is very well protected, with dense aquatic plants and forests of reeds. The sixth purpose of the Japanese is to hide their troops and block the view of the other bank.
The opportunity came tonight. Dark clouds covered the moon, the sky was dark and the wind was high. One hundred thousand troops pushed tens of thousands of wooden boats and started launching into the water. In this operation, the rebels robbed almost all the wooden boats in the Baiyangdian water system.
The 100,000-strong army was equipped with more than 20,000 wooden boats. These boats were usually placed on land and camouflaged with various weeds. Once they were put into battle, a few soldiers would pick them up and rush into the river.
"I saw it... I saw it clearly... The other side was preparing to force a crossing... They were all wooden boats. They gave up attacking from the bridge..."
"Fire...we must not let them rush over..."
Click, click, click... The fire dragon suddenly rose into the sky from the north bank!
This was the scene of a major battle. Several kilometers of fronts and countless shooting ports began to fire. The fortifications that defended the river basically did not move during this afternoon's battle.
The army was continuously firing at the fortresses guarding the bridgehead, and at this moment, the several kilometers of defense lines were fully open!
The tongues of flame spewed from the muzzle of the gun connected into a sheet, like a fire snake in the darkness, and the bullets hit the river water, causing layers of splashes!
The rebels on the boat made popping sounds when they were hit by bullets, and some even flipped and fell into the water, but the boat kept moving forward. At this time, Li Tuo and the others discovered something was abnormal.
"What's going on? Those rebels were shot but didn't fall down yet? How come only a few fell into the water? Something's wrong..."
In ancient times, there were straw boats borrowing arrows, but today there are straw men borrowing bullets!
There were no living people at all on the first batch of boats launched into the water. They were actually countless straw men!
Where are people? People are pushing the boat underwater and breathing through reed pipes!
As soon as the wooden boat crossed the center of the river, the water ghost lurking in the water showed its head and lit the straw and dry firewood on the boat with a kerosene lighter wrapped in oilcloth.
This wooden boat was covered with wet wood and straw soaked in kerosene asphalt. Once it was lit, thick smoke billowed out and headed towards the north shore!
The first wave of fireships created a large amount of smoke and completely destroyed the observation posts of the imperial army, which could cover the breakthrough of the second and third batches of wooden ships.
Guiziliu looked at the flames of the battlefield with a sinister smile on his face, "Feint attack? Haha... Sometimes feint attacks are just as difficult to deal with!"
Thousands of wooden boats were filled with straw and firewood, and the black smoke rose into the sky. Even the arrogant airships had to go around the smoke. The shooting ports of all the fortifications were all blind. They could only rely on their senses to shoot towards the smoke. If you perform burst injection in the belt, it all depends on whether it will be effective or not.
"Kill... the whole army is on! Fight to the capital and capture the faint king alive!"
The second and third waves of wooden ships began the general attack. There were four to five rebels on each ship. They became a fighting group, and three of them were musketeers holding rifles.
The remaining two were demosmen with better martial arts skills. Their bodies were covered with explosive bags, and they held various bizarre individual weapons in their hands, including axes, daggers, and short guns. They would be relied on to seize the beach and land in a while.
"Row a boat, row a boat... More people kill an elephant. They have more cement coffins, but we have more people!"
Finally, the first group of suicide squads broke through the smoke belt. It was only about ten meters away from the north shore. As long as people were willing to sacrifice their lives to fill it in, there was no line of defense that could not be broken through!
