Chapter 55: Not a Pushover
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Chapter 55: Not a Soft Touch
I
There was also the matter of the Japanese soldiers in the blockhouse two li away. They had originally been the intended ambush target, but now they had become a mobile force capable of inflicting serious damage on our troops. And, to make matters worse, there was also the machine-gun-equipped armored patrol car more than ten li from here!
Yet surely the Commander-in-Chief could not have failed to notice such an obvious danger—such an obvious flaw.
“Risky enough, sudden enough, bold enough! Only Li Yunlong could come up with a way of fighting like this!” the Commander-in-Chief said softly. As though he had heard what Commander Luo was muttering, he raised his eyes and glanced at him. Commander Luo immediately stopped mumbling.
“Commander Luo, both Headquarters and the divisions and brigades unanimously support concentrating our strength at this point. Do you understand the strategic intention behind it?” the Commander-in-Chief suddenly asked.
“The strategic intention?” Commander Luo froze for a moment and instinctively looked toward Chen Bo.
“I wasn’t asking you. Get on with your work!” the Commander-in-Chief waved Chen Bo away. Chen Bo gave Old Luo an apologetic look.
“To launch an active offensive and strike at the material and troop support points sustaining the Japanese army’s large-scale sweep,” Commander Luo ventured.
“Then suppose you were in Li Yunlong’s position. If the enemy suddenly reinforced this support point, would you choose to continue the attack?” the Commander-in-Chief asked.
“I… I would continue attacking, but I probably wouldn’t choose the No. 4 ambush position as the starting point.” Commander Luo answered honestly. He walked over to the map and continued, “My idea would be this: keep the first part of the original battle plan unchanged, but turn the main assault on White Village Strongpoint into a feint. Draw the Japanese troops in Tiger Pavilion Mountain toward White Village as reinforcements, then launch a raid against the strongpoint near the No. 4 ambush position. Strike quickly and finish quickly!”
The Commander-in-Chief nodded slightly, lifted his tin mug, and took two sips of water, signaling Luo to continue.
“As an experimental tactic, I still advocate tackling the easy target before the difficult one. If we bite into a hard bone right from the beginning and suffer excessive losses, it could damage the men’s confidence in the operations that follow.” Commander Luo explained his concerns.
After several seconds of silence, seeing that the Commander-in-Chief still had not spoken, he said, “That’s all for now. I have nothing more to add.”
Chen Bo quietly mouthed the words “breakout” and “breakout” to Commander Luo. He accidentally said them aloud. The Commander-in-Chief turned and shot him a glance, and Chen Bo hurriedly turned away.
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“Oh? If you have something to say, say it loudly,” the Commander-in-Chief remarked.
“Heh-heh.” Chen Bo gave an awkward laugh, then reminded him, “Commander Luo, the direction of the frontal breakout—the one we discussed.”
Commander Luo paused, then hurriedly added, “Right, right! Let me add one more thing!”
“No need. Discuss it among yourselves when you get back to the regiment,” the Commander-in-Chief said. “Deputy Chief of Staff, notify the 386th Brigade and have them make a move in another direction as well, to provide support.”
Commander Luo was filled with regret, but it seemed there was no way to make up for his mistake now…
“A shield? What is a shield? A shield is something meant to withstand the enemy’s hardest blows!” The Commander-in-Chief nodded slowly and sighed. It sounded both like he was speaking to himself and like a pointed reminder to Commander Luo.
Damn it, how could I have forgotten the most important point of all? It was completely inexcusable!
II
As the strongest concentration of troops and firepower guarding the vital corridor into the Central Shanxi region, the Tiger Pavilion Strongpoint Cluster consisted of twenty strongpoints, large and small, arranged in a line along more than three hundred li of mountain roads.
White Village Strongpoint was the northernmost strongpoint in the cluster. Like the nearest Wild Rooster Terrace Strongpoint, it was a medium-sized position. Between them stood Tiger Pavilion Mountain, connected by more than twenty li of mountain road—the same Tiger Pavilion Mountain where the Japanese observation delegation had been wiped out the last time.
Wild Rooster Terrace Strongpoint was the position located just over two li from the Independent Regiment’s No. 4 ambush position.
Since the blockhouse system of the so-called “cage strategy” began construction in 1938, the Tiger Pavilion strongpoint network had undergone two “defensive upgrades.”
Take White Village and Wild Rooster Terrace as examples. Originally, each had centered its defenses on a three-story blockhouse.
During the Hundred Regiments Campaign in 1940, both strongpoints were destroyed. After they were rebuilt, the Japanese dug a trench two meters wide and three meters deep in a ring ten meters around each blockhouse and installed a drawbridge. They also placed chevaux-de-frise and barbed wire along the inner side of the trench, hanging tin cans from the wire. The searchlights on the roofs of the blockhouses were increased from two to three, and large quantities of illumination flares were supplied as well.
Near the end of last year, the Independent Regiment used “grenades fired through loopholes” to eliminate two small blockhouses. Since then, the entire Tiger Pavilion strongpoint network had further strengthened its defenses. More than thirty meters outside the first trench, the Japanese had erected another ring of barbed-wire chevaux-de-frise taller than a man. They had also cut down every tree and bush within fifty or sixty meters that could possibly be felled.
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If only the Eighth Route Army had not been so desperately short of artillery…
Guan Shan had once considered the New Fourth Army’s tactics for attacking blockhouses. They had even devised a modification for mortars, changing them from indirect fire to short-range direct fire. But Guan Shan only knew that such a method existed; he had no idea how it actually worked. When he tentatively asked Zhang Wanhe about it, Old Zhang said that the Eighth Route Army had been researching the matter for one or two years already, yet still had made no breakthrough.
Nor was there any proper military-industrial system. Ah!
Perhaps it was simply because he was too incompetent and ignorant, and had not yet made it through the beginner’s stage. After all, under circumstances like these, if he used his cheat too blatantly, wouldn’t he get… his account banned?
IV
White Village was a large settlement of more than a hundred households, with a total population of over eight hundred. Half of them bore the surname Bai and belonged to the family of Bai Laodeng, head of the Peace-Preservation Association. The other half were also tenants and long-term laborers of the Bai family. Around two hundred able-bodied men were now enrolled in the “White Village Security Company of the Imperial Allied Army,” a third-tier combat formation.
A second-tier combat formation was a company-sized unit of the Fourth Mixed Brigade of the Imperial Allied Army—in other words, what ordinary people contemptuously called the “Second Dogs.” Its ranks were mainly made up of surrendered local security troops, defectors from the Northwestern Army, and able-bodied men forcibly conscripted into service.
According to the Independent Regiment’s intelligence, on the third day after the ambush at Tiger Pavilion Mountain, the Japanese had reinforced the area with another company-sized unit. They had also transported more than a dozen truckloads of supplies back and forth. Clearly, the Japanese intended to use this place as a support base for a large-scale sweep in the near future.
The company transferred here was, in a manner of speaking, still “comrades in arms” of Chu Yunfei’s Shanxi-Suiyuan Army. It came from the former Shanxi-Suiyuan Army Quartermaster Commander Wu Jinying and Deputy Division Commander Wu Xiongfei of the 68th Division, both of whom had defected to the enemy in 1940. Originally protégés of Yan Xishan, the two men had possessed decent equipment and some fighting ability. After their surrender, they continued to exchange flirtatious signals with their former commander, maintaining an ambiguous relationship.
The first-tier combat formation was, of course, the Japanese army. But here there was only one reinforced Japanese squad of fifteen men: a squad leader, eight riflemen, a four-man machine-gun team, and a two-man grenade-launcher team.
Add to that the newly arrived reinforced company of the Imperial Allied Army, and it had to be said that White Village Strongpoint was definitely not a soft touch.
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