In order to continue to attack the national power of the Dongluo, in April this year, the Chu army's top brass formulated a plan, hoping to consume the enemy's manpower, money, food and weapons through continuous attrition operations.
Prepare for the final attack.
However, the attrition campaign had only been going on for a few months, and some generals on the front line said that the casualties were too great and could not be sustained.
It would be fine if there were really heavy casualties, but in fact there were not many casualties. Last month, in August, there were more than 600 casualties on the Shanhaiguan Customs front line.
Do you think it’s too much?
But you have to know that the Chu Army has completed three months of basic recruit training in the Army Recruit Camp in Tianjin. There are more than 5,000 recruits waiting to go to the front line to replenish battle losses!
This is purely about recruiting new soldiers, and does not include the large number of strategic reserves in the rear.
The casualties of more than 600 people in a month were nothing to the Chu army of hundreds of thousands.
But even so, some generals on the front line still said that the casualties were too great and the fight could not continue.
In this regard, Luo Zhixue feels that a very bad concept has emerged in the military: excessive pursuit of low casualties.
War itself is a very cruel thing, and women cannot be kind.
It's not that pursuing low casualties is bad, but it depends on the situation.
On the Yunnan-Guizhou side, it is natural for you to engage in low-casualty operations to fight against some of Xi Ming's remnant and defeated generals and guardsmen with low combat effectiveness.
But when you faced the Dongjiu people on the Jiliao front line and still stubbornly pursued low-casualty operations, this was just a mental problem.
The Chu army is not a real elite warrior who can fight in every battle, and each person is invincible... To put it bluntly, they just have better equipment, more people, more people, and better food.
The advantage was there, even quite large, but it was definitely not to the extent that the Dongjiu people in front collapsed and fled after the Chu army killed them.
The Dongbiao people are not clay figures who will stand and let you beat them, nor are the guards soldiers with low morale in the Qianming Dynasty who have low morale and almost no will to resist.
This involves a very crucial fact.
That is, after the Great Chu Empire replaced the Ming Dynasty, the roles of the Central Plains Dynasty and the Donglu people have been reversed.
In the past, it was the Eastern captives who attacked the Ming Empire, and the Eastern captives were the attacking party. People in the Central Plains gnashed their teeth when talking about the Eastern captives.
But now, the Great Chu Empire is the attacker, sending troops eastward to attack and destroy from time to time. Many people in the East gnash their teeth when they talk about the Great Chu Empire...
Looking at it from the perspective of the Dongqiu people, they should not fight to the death to protect their family and country!
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After reprimanding the Army for being hypocritical, Luo Zhixue also took advantage of the situation and came up with a solution, which was to rotate to the front line.
In the previous attrition operations, the troops stationed on the Jiliao front line continued to fight, and at the same time, they were continuously replenished with new troops from the rear.
Although this situation can maintain the number of soldiers on the front line, it is very stressful for those soldiers who have been on the front line.
Watching their comrades around them die and be wounded one after another, and then being replaced by new recruits one after another, they will be filled with a sense of pessimism, feeling that they will fall sooner or later and will never be able to return to their hometown.
To a certain extent, this was also the reason why the generals on the Jiliao front line in August generally requested to stop strategic attrition operations.
Even the generals would feel uncomfortable watching their men die on the front line one after another, and this continuous casualty would last for a long time because of the attrition operations, which seemed to be endless.
For this reason, Luo Zhixue personally issued an order to conduct rotation operations on the combat troops on the Jiliao front line, especially the Shanhaiguan front line.
A troop goes up to fight for a few months, and then withdraws to the rear to rest and recuperate after a wave of exhaustion.
Then other new troops will step up to continue the fight.
Anyway, the total strength of the Chu army is sufficient. Continued rotation operations can not only alleviate the pessimism of the soldiers, but also allow more troops, especially some newly formed troops, to gain combat experience and allow more officers to make military exploits.
With Luo Zhixue's order, the Chu army began a large-scale defense change and took turns going to the front line of Shanhaiguan to fight.
Moreover, before being rotated to the front line, the old first-class divisions will be reorganized and refitted, that is, the old first-class divisions will be reorganized into the new first-class divisions before going to the front line.
As the time turned to the autumn of the fifth year of Chengshun, the Dachu Empire's defense industry layout across the country had been initially completed.
At present, the defense industry of the Great Chu Empire has formed two major bases, Hantianfu Daye Industrial Base and Yingtianfu Dangtu Industrial Base.
At the same time, it is supplemented by Changsha Industrial Base, Guangzhou Industrial Base and Tianjin Industrial Base.
As for the earliest Xiangyang Industrial Base, it was not large in scale at the beginning. Later, the main forces gradually moved to Daye Industrial Base. Therefore, the scale of Xiangyang Industrial Base was actually very small, and it did not switch to the production of flintlock guns, but continued to produce them. For a period of time, as the war on the Western Front ended, the demand for firearms on the Northwest Front was not so urgent. At the same time, as the production of flintlock guns continued to increase, a batch of matchlock guns that had been reinstalled by Class A divisions were replaced by Class B. division troops, so the matchlock production line at Xiangyang Arsenal was completely stopped to make preliminary preparations for the subsequent transfer to Chang'an.
According to the plan of the Ministry of Industry of the Dachu Empire, many high-tech personnel from the Xiangyang Arsenal will be transferred to the Chang'an Arsenal in Shaanxi Province to serve as the main technical backbone of the Chang'an Arsenal that has already drawn up preparation plans, and in the process, the production of flintlock guns will be completed.
After the construction of the Chang'an Arsenal is completed, the defense industry layout of the Chu Empire will form a layout of two major and four middle schools.
In addition, there are three independent vertical arsenals, namely the Dangtu Heavy Artillery Factory, which focuses on the production of large-caliber army howitzers, the Hantian Heavy Artillery Factory, which focuses on the production of long-barrel heavy artillery, and the Zhenjiang Ammunition Factory, which specializes in the production of various types of ammunition.
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Each of the two major Fourth Middle School arsenals will rely on supporting industries in the local industrial base to form a comprehensive arsenal, capable of producing flintlocks, conventional artillery, ammunition, armor, swords and other cold weapons.
It's just that the scale and specific focus of weapons production are different.
Take the Hantian Arsenal, for example. The focus of this arsenal is mainly on field artillery for the army. The factory supplies more than 70% of the three types of field artillery, namely two and a half kilograms, five kilograms and nine kilograms, to the Chu Empire Army.
The Dangtu Arsenal focuses on the production of new flintlock muskets. The arsenal is a large-scale comprehensive arsenal established after the new flintlock muskets were developed. From the very beginning, it has finalized a large-scale three-phase flintlock musket production line construction plan. , currently two production lines have been completed, with an annual output of 80,000 units, which has exceeded the annual output of Hantian Arsenal's 50,000 units.
After the third phase of the flintlock production line is completed, the factory's emergency annual production capacity will reach 150,000, which is three times that of the Hantian Factory.
It far exceeds the planned annual production scale of other arsenals, which is only 20,000 to 30,000 pieces.
Of course, this production capacity refers to overtime work during the war and production capacity regardless of cost. If we wait until the end of the war, especially after the Dongdu is eliminated, the production lines of major arsenals will resume normal production. The annual gun production capacity is expected to be reduced to about 50,000 to 60,000 guns.
And now, the war is not over yet. Are the Chu army still using troops in Yunnan, Guizhou and the northeast? At the same time, low-intensity military operations such as the northwest, Sichuan, north and even inland areas still need to be carried out frequently to suppress bandits and eliminate all kinds of illegal armed forces. The most important thing is that the Chu army has not completed the comprehensive replacement of the new flintlock muskets.
Therefore, major arsenals are still working hard to expand production capacity.
Against such a background, the first-class divisions in the Chu Army have also entered the refitting stage one after another. After all, the 26th and 27th Divisions of the current Sixth Army have been completed, and the 20th Division has been completed. The preparation plans for the Eighth Division and the Twenty-ninth Division were suspended.
Mainly due to the increasing pressure on military expenditures on the Army side, and the fact that the Army is now obsessed with renovating the existing Class A divisions and expanding the size of the cavalry, the 28th Division, The preparation plan for the two divisions of the 29th Division.
According to the deployment area and the tasks faced, the units will be reorganized and refitted in batches.
The main principle is to reorganize and re-equip first, and then transfer to the front line to replace the old first-class divisions operating on the front line.
The first batch of troops includes the Fourth Division, the Eighth Division, and the Twentieth Division currently in Xuanda and Shanxi.
After these three divisions complete the change of equipment, they will be transferred to Jiliao, especially the front line of Shanhaiguan, to replace the first, tenth and eleventh divisions that have been engaged in a long-term war of attrition in Shanhaiguan.
In addition, the 13th Division stationed in Guangdong will be reorganized and refitted to participate in the subsequent Yunnan-Guizhou Campaign, so that the troops on the Yunnan-Guizhou frontline can be replaced and reorganized and refitted in the rear.
The flintlock gun is not afraid of moisture and light rain, and is more suitable than the matchlock gun for combat in the mountains and elm forests of Yunnan and Guizhou.
However, the Yunnan-Guizhou front line fought relatively smoothly. In addition to difficulties in marching and supplying, it actually encountered no stubborn resistance from the enemy. Therefore, it is still unknown whether the Yunnan-Guizhou front line can wait until the 13th Division is completed and transferred.
But when it comes to fighting, it is always better to be prepared first. Even if it is not needed to fight Yunnan and Guizhou, the 13th Division will be able to shoulder the heavy responsibility of border defense after it passes.
According to the Army's plan, it is planned to complete the refitting of all Class A divisions within two years. After the reorganization of Class A divisions is completed, it is planned to take three years to refit Class B divisions. The entire refitting plan is planned to last five years. years and above.
Five years is already very fast, which means that the arsenal behind the Chu army needs to produce at least hundreds of thousands of new flintlock guns every year in these five years.
According to the order, the 20th Division deployed in Youzhou City became the first old-style first-class division to be re-equipped.
