Republic of China: German-equipped divisions massacred as warlords guarded the nation's borders

Twelve li south of Changzhou. Behind the hills and low slopes.

Zang Keping leaned half his body out of the command tower of Tank No. 2 and looked north through binoculars for a full three minutes.

Three minutes later, he put down the binoculars.

His expression was complex. There was excitement, disdain, and a hint of... disbelief.

"Commander, what did you see?" the gunner below asked, looking up.

"A bunch of lunatics."

Zang Keping retreated back into the tower, his tone as calm as if he were remarking on the pleasant weather. "About three thousand cavalry and five tanks. They're charging towards us in formation."

Five tanks? What model?

"Renault FT"

The gunner paused for a second.

Then he laughed.

Renault FT. From 1917. 37mm short-barreled gun, 22mm frontal armor, speed less than 8 km/h. This thing was already a museum piece on the European battlefield. Now they're using it to charge Chen's army positions?

"Commander, this isn't war. This is food delivery."

"Shut up." Zang Keping tapped the gunner's helmet. "The young marshal said to let them charge first. All units are forbidden to fire; wait for my orders."

He picked up the car radio microphone.

"Attention all vehicles. The entire Independent Armored Brigade is under orders: no one is permitted to fire the first shot. Repeat: no one is permitted to fire the first shot. All tank engines shut down, camouflage nets remain in place. All MG42 tanks in infantry positions are to be loaded but not exposed. Once the enemy is within 400 meters, await my command."

A series of urgent "Received"s came through the radio.

Then the entire position fell silent.

A deathly silence.

On the opposite side of the position.

Ivanov, the commander of the Belarusian mercenary corps, rode a tall horse, clutching a half-empty bottle of vodka in his hand.

Behind him were three thousand Cossack cavalry.

They wore a motley collection of military uniforms, including grey overcoats from the Tsarist era, Japanese Type 38 ammunition vests, and British cavalry boots that seemed to have been acquired from who-knows-where. But each of them rode a well-fed and strong horse, and their swords were gleaming.

These men were veterans who had been stranded in the Far East during the White Russian Civil War. They had fought the Germans and the Bolsheviks, and were ruthless killers. Zhang Jialiang spent 300,000 silver dollars to bring them from Harbin to serve as pioneers.

"Commander Ivanov!" A Fengtian Army liaison officer rode up from behind. "Young Marshal Zhang ordered you to launch a probe first. We don't know what the Chen family army has deployed..."

Ivanov took a swig of vodka, gulped it down, and then threw the empty bottle on the ground.

"A test?" He laughed in broken Chinese. "Ivanov doesn't know what a test is."

He drew his saber and stood up straight on his horse.

"Brothers! That's the Southern warlord's makeshift stronghold ahead! They don't even have decent cannons! Follow me and we'll crush those cowards into mincemeat, and tonight we'll drink their good wine!"

Three thousand cavalrymen roared in unison.

"Hurrah!"

Five Renault FT tanks, puffing out clouds of black smoke, thundered and rolled across the field ridges, charging towards the hills and low slopes to the south.

The sound carried very far across the open plain.

Zang Keping lay on the observation post of the command tower, watching the torrent of cavalry in the distant billowing dust, silently counting the distance in his mind.

Two kilometers.

1,500 meters.

One kilometer.

The Renault tanks were too slow, and the cavalry surged ahead. The dust kicked up by three thousand warhorses blotted out the sky, and the sound of their hooves merged into a deep, rumbling thunder.

Zang Keping is not in a hurry.

800 meters.

He could now see the expressions on the cavalrymen's faces. Some were shouting, some were brandishing their swords, and some had cigarettes dangling from their mouths.

No one was afraid.

That's true. In their minds, the infantry positions of the southern warlords could be flattened with just a few charges. They had done this hundreds of times in Siberia.

Six hundred meters.

500 meters.

Zang Keping picked up the microphone and his lips moved slightly.

"Attention all units"

Four hundred meters.

Just right.

"Fire."

That instant.

It was as if a hundred slits had suddenly opened up on the hillside, each spewing out a dazzling tongue of fire.

The sound didn't sound like a gunshot.

It was unlike any other gunshot.

When the MG42 fires, the rate of fire is so fast that the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel doesn't reach the ear one by one; it's all blurred into a continuous, high-frequency roar.

hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss—

It's like ten thousand bolts of cloth being torn apart at the same time.

The Cossack cavalry at the forefront didn't even hear what the sound was before they and their horses were torn to pieces. 7.92mm bullets struck flesh and horses at a rate of twenty rounds per second, creating an invisible wall of bullets over a distance of four hundred meters.

The first rank of cavalrymen seemed to have crashed into a transparent steel plate.

Warhorses broke their forelegs, riders were thrown from their saddles, broken sabers tumbled in the air, and entrails and shredded armor were churned into a paste by bullets. Some men remained in the posture of wielding their swords, but their bodies had vanished from the chest up.

The effect of firing one hundred MG42s simultaneously is not "shooting".

It means "cutting".

The second rank of cavalry charged into the carnage of the first rank, and before they could rein in their horses, they were swept up by the barrage of bullets. The third rank saw the carnage ahead and tried to turn back, but the cavalry behind them continued their frenzied charge. Within thirty seconds, the entire charging formation was compressed into a chaotic massacre of men and horses.

But the MG42 did not stop.

It will never stop.

Zang Keping watched the massacre from the command tower, his face expressionless.

He had fought for twenty years, but he had never seen such a way of killing.

This is not a battle. This is a harvest.

Ivanov was thrown off his horse.

His warhorse was hit by at least seven bullets and died instantly. His own right leg was also cut open by shrapnel, and blood gushed out of his boot.

He lay on the ground, his face covered in mud and blood, desperately trying to look ahead.

His three thousand cavalry?

Gone.

The section of road from 400 meters to 300 meters was littered with pieces of flesh and wrecked horses. The survivors crawled on the ground, but every two steps they were pinned to the spot by a string of bullets.

"Impossible..." Ivanov muttered in Russian. "This isn't a machine gun... what kind of monster is this..."

What he didn't know was that the real nightmare was yet to come.

Five Renault FTs, which had fallen behind the cavalry, had just climbed up. The sturdy monsters puffed out black smoke, their 37mm guns trembling as they turned toward the hills.

Zang Keping saw it.

"Armored brigade! Start the engines!"

Boom boom boom boom—

The Maybach engines of thirty Panzer II tanks ignited simultaneously. Camouflage nets were flung off the turrets, and the gray steel behemoths rolled out one after another from behind the low slope.

Ivanov saw those things.

His eyes almost popped out of their sockets.

Thirty vehicles. Thirty tanks.

It's a whole size bigger than his Renault! And the turret isn't equipped with a 37mm short-barreled gun, it's equipped with a 75mm tank gun!

"My God..."

He never understood how a local warlord in the south could possess such a thing, even until his death.

The Panzer II tank could fire without stopping. 75mm armor-piercing rounds rained down on the five Renault tanks at a rate of 280 rounds per minute.

22mm of frontal armor?

That's just a layer of sheet metal.

The first Renault was penetrated from the front by three armor-piercing rounds, its fuel tank exploded, and the entire tank turned into a fireball. The second attempted to turn around, but its side armor was riddled with bullets. The third tank's turret was penetrated before it could even turn into position, and the driver's compartment was also breached.

Fifteen seconds. All five Renaults were totaled.

Not a single shell was fired.

Zang Keping leaned halfway out of the command tower and glanced at the now quiet battlefield.

From the first MG42 firing to the last Renault being destroyed, the entire process...

Twelve minutes.

Three thousand cavalry. Five tanks.

Total annihilation.

Zang Keping took a deep breath and picked up the radio.

"Reporting to the Young Marshal. The Independent Armored Brigade's first battle has concluded. The enemy's vanguard has been completely annihilated, and our side suffered zero casualties. Please instruct on the next steps—should the main force launch a full-scale attack to the north?"

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the radio.

Then Chen Zijun's voice came through, as calm as if he were talking about something trivial.

"No. Retreat thirty li."

Zang Keping was taken aback.

"Put away your tanks and machine guns. Leave a few damaged Renaults in place. Then retreat across the board, quickly, the more panicked the better. Act like you're just going to shoot and run."

"Young Marshal?"

"Zhang Jialiang brought 100,000 men. They'll overeat if we can't swallow them all at once," Chen Zijun said with a hint of amusement. "Let them into the Taihu Plain. Let them think we're afraid. Once his 100,000-strong army is all in our hands—"

The last sentence on the radio made the hairs on Zang Keping's back stand on end.

"I'll make sure the Fengtian clique remembers this painful lesson, so they'll never dare to mess with my Chen family army again..."