The expeditionary force began to dominate Southeast Asia by recruiting defeated soldiers

January 7st

The commanders and division commanders of the Fuso 15th Army gathered together to discuss the "Shinpingyang Airport Surprise Attack Incident" that had just occurred.

Although the conflict on the border was intensifying, at the request of the 15th Army Commander Shojiro Iida, the commanders still took time out to return to Mandalay for a meeting.

However, these important figures who should have been sitting upright had their buttons unbuttoned, and were sitting unsteadily with their arms around the geishas.

That’s right, Lieutenant General Iida had the ingenuity to choose a restaurant run by a Japanese as the meeting place.

Since the Southern Army, which had conquered all of Southeast Asia, had a sufficient budget this year, Iida used the 15th Army's public funds to have a "big party" with his subordinates, drinking and having fun.

Iida, already drunk, followed the geisha's shamisen music and shouted in a drunken frenzy, "What are you talking about?"

"Why did the enemy seize the opportunity to attack our prisoner-of-war camp in Naupi?"

"How could the enemy cleverly cross the border and launch a surprise attack on our airport in Xinpingyang, and then quickly escape?"

"Why are there guerrillas everywhere in the northern mountainous areas now, disrupting public order in the areas controlled by the Locust Nation?"

Colonel Shinichi Kobayashi, the new commander of the 15th Army Military Police, was kneeling at the head of the wine table. When he heard such continuous questions being yelled at by his direct superior, his hair stood on end.

Although, as an undercover agent, he certainly knew the answers to these questions - the Allied forces had placed a surprise force in the Jiangxin\po area.

The continuous victories of this surprise force are naturally inseparable from the intelligence he continuously leaked.

However, on the surface he had to control his facial muscles and pretend to be listening carefully to the speech of his superiors.

'Have I been exposed?'

Kobayashi Shinichi's heart was filled with alarm, and his hand unconsciously reached behind his waist, but he grabbed nothing.

He suddenly remembered that he had handed his service pistol to the guard at the door when he entered the restaurant.

Thinking of this, he laughed at himself. After all, he had personally arranged those guards at the door from the gendarmerie. He didn't expect that it was his own arrangement that would eventually kill him.

'Perhaps this is just a trick of fate?'

As a communist with faith, Kobayashi Shinichi was not afraid of death. He just felt a little regretful that he would not be able to see the day when the military fascist forces fell.

"I don't know if the downline I developed has been exposed?"

Just when Kobayashi Shinichi had even thought of his own farewell poem, Iida Shojiro came up with the answer himself.

"It's because John the spy is leaking our information, bakayarro..." He cursed with his tongue sticking out. "This is a dereliction of duty on the part of the intelligence department. Xiaolin-kun, you have to know your shame. Know your shame."

After hearing Iida's angry curse, Kobayashi Shinichi actually breathed a sigh of relief.

"It seems Iida still believes that the information leak was caused by John's spies, and he simply blames my poor counter-espionage efforts."

Knowing that he was not suspected, he quickly stood up and bowed, then picked up the wine glass in front of him and drank the sake in it.

"Hey, I will do my best to eliminate those spies left behind by John's MI5."

"Hahaha, that's top-notch Fuji Ginjo. It's a waste for you to drink it like that, Kobayashi." The old devil Iida was very satisfied with his skillful PUA technique and laughed heartily.

虽然表面上看起来这次“新平洋机场奇袭事件”中，十五军损失惨重——400多名步兵、150多名地勤被消灭；40位飞行员或死或俘；20架中岛一式‘隼’战斗机与16架九七式战斗机被摧毁。

But this loss was just a minor defeat for a behemoth like the 15th Army, which had nearly 80,000 soldiers and hundreds of aircraft.

In fact, Iida didn't care about these "tinea" at all. As an old man, he just couldn't help but want to suppress Kobayashi Shinichi, a newcomer in the intelligence community, and wanted to give his lieutenant generals and division commanders who were "going it alone" a warning at the cocktail party.

"Mr. Kobayashi has just taken the position of military police commander for less than a month. How can this be his responsibility?" Lieutenant General Shozo Sakurai, commander of the 33rd Division, suddenly interrupted and tried to defend Kobayashi.

"The 'Xinpingyang Airport Surprise Attack' ultimately occurred because the enemy used a method similar to the Hans' 'blitzkrieg' to launch an amphibious surprise attack on our rear airport."

Sakurai Shozo was once the military attaché of the Fuso embassy in Gaul in Paris, so he still remembered the Hans' blitzkrieg that "rapidly passed" Paris in a few months.

He continued, "Our troops are accustomed to positional warfare, so it was inevitable that they were unprepared for this kind of mechanized assault. This failure was not due to our own fault."

Sakurai cleverly excused his subordinates, the Okuya Battalion, and then changed the subject and began to seek benefits:

"In the upcoming battle against John of Sindhu's army, I hope the entire army will pay attention to this new combat situation of mechanized surprise attacks."

"I propose that my 33rd Division serve as the vanguard of the entire army. I request that the 1st Tank Regiment and all the army's trucks be concentrated and assigned to my 216th Infantry Regiment. We will strive to break through the John's defenses with a single surprise attack."

"Then, after the breakthrough, use the high speed of the mecha troops to directly attack the John people's logistics nodes."

"This way, the three John Divisions and one armored brigade deployed along the border will all fall into chaos due to the loss of logistical supplies. Then, your allies will be able to surround them and easily defeat them."

After saying this, Shozo Sakurai stared at Shojiro Iida with burning eyes.

Although Iida was the army commander and Sakurai was the division commander, their actual military rank was lieutenant general, so Sakurai's words were not polite at all.

"Yes, Commander, we can't hesitate any longer. We must strike hard." The commander of the 15th Division, Mutaguchi Ren, who was afraid of chaos in the world, also joined in forcing the emperor to abdicate.

Seeing several lieutenant generals start arguing under the influence of alcohol and their attention completely away from him, Kobayashi Shinichi finally relaxed completely.

While clinking glasses with his colleagues with a fake smile, Kobayashi Shinichi secretly took note of Shozo Sakurai's suggestion to learn from the Hans and form his own rapid synthetic armored force.

He intuitively felt that this was very important information for the Allies - the Fuso army might be trying to change its tactics.

However, what Kobayashi Shinichi didn't know was that the conservative and bureaucratic headquarters didn't actually officially use the combined tank division until the Battle of Central Henan during Operation No. 1 in 1944. Through large-scale flanking maneuvers by armored forces, they completely surrounded the 13th, 29th, and 85th Armies of Tang's army.

Before that, the tank division was just an administrative organization, not a combat unit like the Hans Armored Division that could actually be deployed in combat as a whole division.

For a long time afterwards, the conservative Japanese continued to adopt the one-war-style tactic of splitting the tanks into squadrons and assigning them to the infantry to launch attacks. The advice of Sakurai Shozo, the overseas-educated Japanese, was ultimately just a suggestion.