Bright Sword: The Flowers of War

Chapter 60 The Final Showdown (Part 10)

Just as John was driving his Chaffee tank toward Zhongshan Wharf, Su Yaoyang led the Third Battalion and the artillery company to Zhongshan Wharf at around 1:40 a.m.

Zhongshan Wharf was very large, covering several square kilometers, and there were also many warehouses and buildings around it, which allowed the Third Battalion to conceal their presence.

At 1:47, the Third Battalion spread out in a fan shape behind the ruins of the warehouse on the west side of Zhongshan Wharf. Several searchlights swept across the area, and in that instant, they saw a scene they would never forget.

More than 5,000 prisoners of war were divided into more than 20 square formations by barbed wire and stood barefoot on the frozen riverbank.

The Japanese army used fire hoses to create a ring-shaped ice wall around the crowd, and the limbs and broken arms frozen in the ice stretched upwards like coral branches.

Every now and then, some Japanese soldiers wearing gas masks would throw torches at the formation, forcing the people who were huddled up in the cold to disperse again.

"The Japanese devils... are... preventing a riot."

A soldier suddenly began to retch. At the edge of a certain formation, a dozen bodies that had been huddled together for warmth were frozen into a large lump. On the cut surface of the bayonet, one could see the corpses encased in ice crystals.

Su Yaoyang felt his hands trembling. When he raised his binoculars, a strange reflection flashed in the lens. He saw a group of people in white coats pushing a cart carrying stacks of enamel plates.

"He's a dentist."

Lu Shaobin's breath froze on his collar. "They're collecting gold teeth."

As if to prove this statement, the buzzing of a dental drill suddenly rang out in the distance, and the prisoners of war, who were being held down on the ice table, convulsed and kicked through the ice, revealing the frozen victims from the previous group of casualties underneath.

"Fuck those little devils!" A furious roar rang in Su Yaoyang's ears. He turned his head and saw the soldiers behind him with eyes that were practically spitting fire.

With immense willpower, Su Yaoyang turned his binoculars back to the dock and discovered that the Japanese army was systematically driving prisoners of war toward the riverbank.

"The Japanese devils are waiting for the tide to come in!" Lu Shaobin's tone changed. "Once the tide comes in, it will drown these prisoners of war, and then they can write in their report that the prisoners of war drowned en masse."

Su Yaoyang rolled up his sleeve, revealing a dark blue fluorescent watch. The hands were pointing to 2:00, ten minutes before the time he was supposed to meet John.

"We can't wait for them anymore." Su Yaoyang made up his mind. Every moment he waited meant another group of his compatriots would be killed by the Japanese.

"Mortar in position."

In the bitter cold, Xiong Junfeng's voice sounded like a rusty bearing.

Twelve M2 60mm mortars were mounted on the frozen ground, their barrels wrapped in burlap soaked in machine oil. As the loader opened the ammunition boxes, solidified antifreeze lard was seeping from the shell fuses.

"put!"

The moment the 60mm mortar shell sliced ​​through the snow, Su Yaoyang only saw the snowflakes on the trajectory of the shell instantly turn into water vapor.

Twelve 60mm high-explosive shells crashed into the group of Japanese guards standing around the barbed wire fence. The collision of extreme cold and high temperature instantly blasted open the gates of hell.

"Boom boom boom..."

The overpressure blast generated by the explosion of the shell's fuse evaporated the accumulated snow into a ring of white mist, and Japanese soldiers within a radius of twenty or thirty meters suddenly turned into paper-cut-like human-shaped pieces.

Body after body brittled and disintegrated in the shockwave of air at minus ten degrees Celsius.

A Type 92 heavy machine gun mounted on sandbags was blown into the air by the shockwave from its frozen ammunition plates, and countless 6.5mm bullets fell to the ground like a shower of flowers.

"Change to white phosphorus bombs!"

After the first round of shelling, Su Yaoyang's voice, as if emanating from an ice cellar, rang out: "Understood... White phosphorus bombs, prepare!"

Without further ado, the gunners took out shells with white-painted heads from the ammunition boxes.

"put!"

Twelve more shells exploded among the Japanese troops, but this time, what flew out after the shells exploded was flames that seemed to come from hell.

The moment the white phosphorus bomb exploded, looking at the twelve blue flames rising from the riverbank and the Japanese soldiers dancing in the fire, I suddenly thought of the female student I had met on the road who had been raped and killed, and I seemed to see the smile on her face as if she had gotten her revenge.

Before the flames of the white phosphorus bomb had even dissipated, Major Kota Moriyama, the second battalion commander of the 6th Regiment of the 3rd Division of the Japanese Army and the highest-ranking commander of the Zhongshan Wharf POW camp, had already cleaved through the thick smoke with his sword.

Before joining the army, this officer, who graduated from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tokyo, was naturally sensitive to numbers and directions. After the first round of shelling, he immediately looked in the direction from which the shells came. When the second round of shells landed, he had already taken out his pocket watch to calculate the interval between shelling rounds and drew a coordinate axis on the snow with his right hand.

In just a few dozen seconds, he calculated the approximate location of the enemy's artillery.

He raised his saber and roared towards the southwest: "Grenade launcher team, prepare! Coordinates (17, 4)! Distance 460 meters... Fire!"

Soon, the four Type 89 grenade launchers were launched in a direction 22 degrees southwest.

"Boom boom..."

The Type 91 grenades exploded loudly upon landing, and their landing point was less than fifty meters away from the artillery battery hidden behind a coal pile.

A piece of shrapnel even flew onto the ammunition box next to Xiong Junfeng, making a crisp snapping sound.

Startled by the Japanese army's rapid response, Xiong Junfeng quickly shouted, "Load white phosphorus bombs...fire!"

Twelve more shells exploded among the Japanese troops, and by sheer coincidence, two large pieces of bluish-white phosphorus flew onto Kota Moriyama in the cold wind.

White phosphorus clung to his wool coat, and the intense heat instantly burned his clothes to ashes, with flames even flowing down his spine into his trousers.

The intense pain made him jump up on the spot. When he jumped into the sandbox prepared for fire prevention, he found that the sand had already frozen into a hard block like concrete.

"Help me...please help me!" Kota Moriyama let out a hoarse, inhuman roar.

The orderly stepped forward quickly, his legs trembling at the sight of the man engulfed in flames. After hesitating for a moment, he tried to pry open Moriyama Kota's burning uniform with his bayonet, but instead scraped off his entire back, which was still ablaze. In the end, he could only watch helplessly as his major was burned to a pile of charcoal right in front of him.

The insidious nature of white phosphorus bombs lies in this: once white phosphorus gets on your body, there is no way to stop the burning of the white phosphorus unless you cut off the flames along with your flesh with a knife.

The violent explosion also startled the prisoners of war on the dock. Everyone stared in disbelief at the Japanese troops being ravaged by white phosphorus bombs not far away. Seeing the Japanese troops on the dock being blown up and running in panic, all the prisoners of war cheered loudly.

"Brothers...someone has come to our rescue!"

"We are saved!"

Prisoners of war who had already lost hope of survival

The crowd erupted in excitement, shouting and yelling, and some people started running from the riverbank onto the dock.

"Da da da da..."

As soon as they landed on the dock, machine guns roared to life, and streaks of fire lashed out like deadly whips, instantly killing many prisoners who fell in pools of blood.

(End of this chapter)