The terrain around Lightning Lake is quite interesting, somewhat like a basin surrounded by mountains but opening up and down. It was originally centered on Lightning Lake and surrounded by hills, but there were gaps in the northwest and southeast corners.
If Gao Jingshi came here according to the consistent organizational style of the Ming army and brought a large number of infantry, then this terrain would be very suitable for defensive warfare.
Although the circular hills with Lightning Lake as the center and a radius of about seven miles are not dangerous, as long as a defense line is set up on the mountains, the opponent's Chahar cavalry will never be stupid enough to rush uphill to fight - the loss of horsepower is too great, and the cavalry advantage All lost.
Therefore, the main defense only needs to be placed in the openings in the northwest and southeast, and arrays of bayonets and muskets are deployed. In this way, the cavalry will be sent as much as they come.
It's a pity that Gao Pragmatic has no infantry under his command this time. Unless he considers using most of the cavalry as mounted infantry and letting them abandon their horses and form a formation, this battle cannot be fought like this.
However, abandoning the horses and setting up a formation is actually not feasible, because the opponent has long known that their strategic headquarters is an all-cavalry team. If they abandon the horses and set up a formation, their intentions will be seen through at a glance, and they will not be fooled no matter what - now Gao Pragmatically, we can basically confirm that there is Burihatu in the opponent's army. Since he is there, it is impossible to understand such a simple truth.
So, how should we fight this battle when the entire formation is full of cavalry? Similar to his previous experiences, Gao Pragmatic first tried to find the lessons learned by his predecessors - and possibly later generations - in the few military works he had read.
The military classics he had read in the past were actually limited, and there were even fewer that specifically discussed cavalry. Now that he was on the grassland, the only thing he could think of was the book "Modern Times" that he had leisurely flipped through a few pages while studying at the party school. "Cavalry in War", the author is Semyon Mikhainovich Budyonny of the Soviet Union - he is generally called Marshal Budyonny in China.
This article titled "Cavalry in Modern Warfare" is the shorthand of a report delivered by Budyonny on March 24, 1930, at the War Research Class of the Communist Academy.
Perhaps because it is just a report, this article is not very in-depth, but Gao Pragmatic feels that this article still has some reference significance for the cavalry that he currently commands with half a foot in the musketeer. of.
Marshal Budyonny, the famous commander-in-chief of the Soviet army, has a great reputation. He was one of the first five military leaders to be awarded the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. He was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union three times (1958, 1963, 1968).
He joined the Russian army in 1903, graduated from the Petersburg Cavalry School in 1908, and served as a sergeant in the cavalry for a long time. After the October Revolution, he was demobilized, participated in the establishment of Soviet power in his hometown, and created a cavalry unit. In 1918, he led his troops to join the Red Army, and the troops were successively expanded into cavalry regiments, brigades, and divisions.
During the Civil War, he successively served as commander of the cavalry regiment, commander of the cavalry brigade, commander of the cavalry division, and commander of the cavalry corps. In 1919, he became the commander of the famous 1st Cavalry Army. For more than 20 years from 1919 to 1941, in order to express their admiration for the 1st Cavalry Army, the Soviet people once called a standard military cap of the Red Army the "Budionny cap".
After the civil war, Budyonny successively served as deputy commander-in-chief of the Red Army in charge of the cavalry, cavalry supervisor, military district commander, and first deputy people's commissar of national defense.
During the Great Patriotic War, he served as a member of the headquarters of the Supreme Command, and served as the commander-in-chief of the direction and the commander of the front army for a short period of time. In January 1943, he served as the commander of the first cavalry established. After the war, he concurrently served as Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the Soviet Union in charge of horse breeding, and later as Director of Cavalry. Since 1954, he has served as director of the General Inspection Group of the Ministry of National Defense.
All in all, this Duke has been inseparable from the cavalry all his life, so most of his works are about the cavalry, such as "Operations of the 1st Cavalry Army from January 6 to March 3, 1920" (1923); "Cavalry in Modern Warfare" (1930); "Red Cavalry" (1930); "Cavalry Tactical Principles of Combined Arms Regiments" (1937); "Cavalry Tactical Principles of Combined Arms Regiments" (1938); and others Many memoirs.
At least in terms of professional ability, Gao was convinced that Budyonni was much better than him, there was no doubt about it.
"When people evaluate the cavalry as a branch of arms, they usually only point out its mobility and regard this mobility as its basic characteristic. This also leads to an underestimation of its other characteristics, sometimes This also led to an incomplete use of cavalry.
Sometimes this issue is vulgarized, and some people go so far as to say that cavalry can only "shock" and kill with sabers. However, history has proved, and I emphasize 'historical proof', that that kind of evaluation and that kind of attitude towards the cavalry is completely wrong and amateurish. Even in the distant historical period, the cavalry never refused to deal with shooting and technical equipment 'in principle'. We never see this in the history of cavalry. For example, the Skifo cavalry is known to primarily use bows and arrows. "
The Skifo people are the Russian name for the Sogdians in ancient Chinese books, but Gao Pragmatic didn't know much about the Sogdians, so he didn't delve into it when he saw this place.
"If we talk about the era before the Thirty Years' War, then we will see that the cavalry used pistols to shoot more than they used sabers to kill. North American cavalry made extensive use of pistols and demolition tools.
Therefore, we can see that in this or that era, under this or that condition, the cavalry itself refused neither technical equipment nor shooting. None of this has ever happened in the history of cavalry.
There was a time when the cavalry was lifted to the sky and knocked down to the ground. The 'progress' of cavalry in various eras cannot be measured by whether it rejects technical equipment.
The cavalry will use the technical equipment sent to it, and the cavalry will use the technical equipment that other arms have. The cavalry will use modern technical equipment at any time.
In this way, the topic only concerns the extent to which technical equipment is adopted and used, how it is combined with maneuvers and mounted assaults, and how this method is adapted to contemporary combat styles. Therefore, it is wrong to only refer to cavalry combat effectiveness as 'saber killing power'.
The characteristic of cavalry is its ability to combine tremendous rapid mobility with devastating cavalry assaults involving extensive use of firepower and supporting technical weapons. "
These paragraphs appeared earlier in the article, and they are also the parts that impressed Gao pragmatism the most. In the past two or three days since the setback in the Ye Bushou encounter, especially since he was stationed at Lightning Lake, Gao Pragmatic has been thinking about Budyonny's discussions and explanations about the cavalry, and he really discovered a few things that he had never paid attention to before, or At least not enough attention is paid to the key points.
According to Budyonny, firearms did not hinder the development of cavalry at least until the early Soviet Union. Even though machine guns were already available at that time, cavalry still had their place to be used. Instead, Budyonny criticized some people for not understanding Use cavalry - Judging from his record in the early Soviet Union, he is qualified to say such a thing.
As for the middle and late Soviet Union, the cavalry has certainly lost its former prestige, but through Budyonny we can see that the cavalry was not necessarily completely defeated by the machine guns, but more seemed to be defeated by the armored forces.
why? From the point of view mentioned by Budyonny here, what he considers to be the "characteristics of cavalry" is its ability to combine huge rapid mobility with devastating cavalry assaults that include extensive use of firepower and auxiliary technical weapons - Obviously, armored troops have all the characteristics he mentioned, and they can do better than cavalry.
Being perfectly replaced and completely surpassed by armored forces is probably the real reason for the disappearance of cavalry.
Of course, at this time, Gao Pragmatic does not have to worry about the disappearance of the cavalry, which will happen at least a few hundred years later. What he cares about is how to bring into play what Budyonny calls "the characteristics of the cavalry."
Among the most memorable words from Gao Pragmatic, Budyonny mentioned that "In the era before the Thirty Years' War, cavalry used pistols to shoot more than they used sabers to kill. North American cavalry widely used pistols and explosive tools." This is a great reminder. Gao is pragmatic, and he still has a secret weapon in his hand - oh, it can't be said to be too secret, because he has actually used it before.
what? Explosive weapon: Palm mine - of course, Gao Pragmatic is more accustomed to calling it a grenade.
According to Budyonny's description of the characteristics of cavalry, "huge mobility" must be organically combined with "firepower and auxiliary weapons" and "destructive cavalry assault" in order to fully unleash the power of cavalry in the firearms era.
The firepower and auxiliary weapons here, firepower should refer to the amount of projectiles delivered by the gun. This is something that Gao Pragmatic cannot go further for the time being. After all, based on Jinghua's current technology, if we want to increase the amount of projectiles delivered, we can only consider evolving to metal-cased bullets, but copper-cased bullets are still technically difficult to produce.
This thing is too professional and may require professional processing tools. Gao Pragmatic himself does not understand the processing principles. He can only provide bullet-style ideas for the craftsmen to slowly explore, and he may not get any results for decades. The development of productivity has only reached this point, so naturally it cannot be forced. Just like he also wants to develop an internal combustion engine, but in an era when he cannot even develop a steam engine, how about a woolly internal combustion engine?
However, for the "auxiliary weapons" section, because of the "explosive weapons" mentioned by Bujoni himself as a reminder, Gao Pragmatic quickly thought of the palm mine.
The palm thunder thing itself is the first of its kind in China. It may have been created in the Northern Song Dynasty, because it had basically taken shape by the Southern Song Dynasty. However, due to the gunpowder ratio at that time, there were still some problems, and the purification technology also needed to be improved. In addition, as mentioned many times in this book, the predecessors liked to add some inexplicable things to gunpowder - such as various poisons, Poisonous smoke, so the power of the explosion alone is really limited.
After Gao pragmatically started his own private military industry, he naturally abandoned this path that has been proven to be purely deviant by history, and focused exclusively on improving the explosive capability. In fact, the insufficient explosive power only allowed the craftsmen to consider increasing the lethality of the explosion fragments. Therefore, A new type of Jinghua grenade was developed.
Jinghua grenades were first equipped to Gao Pingshi’s own armed servants, including the only two garrison armies of Thang Long and Golden Port at that time. However, since the two garrison armies had ended large-scale wars at that time, the grenade did not have much opportunity to perform. .
One of the more famous applications was actually in the Battle of Yunnan and Burma. The troops using grenades were under Liu Wei's command. In the ambush battle where Wang Mangyingli, the White Elephant of Jinlou, was defeated head-on for the first time in the entire Yunnan-Burma War, the most outstanding use of firearms was land mines, followed by palm mines.
However, the land mines played a huge role at the beginning of the battle, but the palm mines played a role in the battle after Liu Wei defeated the Burmese Wang Shu Mangzhuo in a hand-to-hand challenge. Relatively speaking, more attention was paid to the role of landmines in that ambush battle. Although the palm mine performed well, it was overshadowed by the landmines.
Later, Gao Pragmatic himself also used land mines and palm mines to play a role in quelling the Northwest Rebellion, but the performance of land mines was also more brilliant and eye-catching.
However, Burihatu is a person who is both capable of learning and very cautious. If he hopes to lead troops to minefields with one move that will be widely used, I am afraid that the chance of success is too slim. For these reasons, Gao Pragmatic decided to change his mind this time and mainly considered making grenades effective.
When considering hand grenades, in addition to Budyonny's discussion reminding Gao of pragmatism, there are also some aspects that came to mind when he recently reflected on the reform of the Ming Army's cavalry.
At this time, the Ming army's cavalry was half-equipped, and their speed and endurance must have lagged behind Chahar's light armor or even unarmored cavalry. However, the defense capability must have been greatly improved.
This means that if the Chahar cavalry wants to cause more effective damage to the Ming army cavalry, it must be closer to the Ming army than before. Otherwise, long-distance shooting and projectiles will be just a scratch, and it is difficult to say that the two sides can fight for a whole day. How much loss did the Ming army's cavalry bring?
If Chahar people have plenty of time and are not in a hurry, they can indeed grind slowly. Just like their ancestors, the cavalry and semi-cavalry have lost their temper little by little, and the morale of the troops is constantly decreasing, and sooner or later there will be a moment of collapse.
However, Gao Pragmatic had previously speculated that the Chahar-Mongolian army did not have such conditions. They were actually more pressed for time than himself. Therefore, whether it was the main force of Tumen or the force of Burihatu who came this time, In the final analysis, diversionary feints are limited by the important factor of time, which cannot be delayed. The results must be seen early.
Of course, the best result for this result is to directly defeat the Economic Strategy Headquarters, but I am afraid that Burihatu himself does not dare to expect too much. The second best result is to defeat the Strategy Headquarters through this battle - no matter what aspect it is, as long as it is afraid. If it can slow down the momentum of the strategy headquarters to take the lead in attacking Guihua City, it will be considered qualified.
In this case, Burihatu will definitely not be able to delay it anymore after it has been delayed for two or three days. He must effectively repel the Jinglue headquarters and attract some other Ming troops to go for reinforcements as a last resort. In other words, Burihatu had to take the initiative to attack, and this was the opportunity to use grenades.
Burihatu is a smart man. Gao Jingshi felt that if he simply gave up the terrain advantage to fight him on the ground, he might suspect fraud, so Gao Jingshi deliberately sent 5,000 people to quietly ambush in the crater on the west side of Lightning Lake. On the back, he led the main force out of the northwest valley mouth and lined up to wait.
Buyan Huangtaiji and Buyan Hatu learned in the army that Gao Pragmatic's formation was dispatched, and they left the northwest valley mouth and formed an array outside the valley. Buyantaiji was overjoyed when he heard this and said: "Gao Rixin was worried that we would catch turtles in an urn in the valley, but he actually came out on his own initiative. God is helping me. This victory can be expected!"
As expected, Burihatu thought it was unreasonable, and after a moment's thought, he immediately ordered: "Send an order to send three white tassel guards to the west of the lake to have a look. Pay special attention to whether there is an ambush of elite Ming troops in the shade of the mountain."
Although Buyantaiji did not expect this at first, when Buyantaiji said this, he came to his senses. As soon as the messenger left, he immediately asked: "The ruler is worried about the elite soldiers being ambushed by the Ming army after the battle." Break into the flank of our army?”
Burihatu simply replied: "I just don't believe that Gao Rixin will honestly confront us without any other treacherous tricks."
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