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

ten minutes.

A full ten minutes of rapid artillery fire.

Forty-eight German-made heavy howitzers unleashed nearly two thousand high-explosive shells onto the Taihu Plain at a terrifying rate of four rounds per minute.

Two thousand rounds.

Each shot was a combination of 43 kilograms of steel and TNT, falling from the sky and indiscriminately blasting eight-meter-wide craters into the muddy plains.

This is not war.

This is a slaughterhouse.

The Fengtian Army on the Taihu Plain had been completely dismantled. The thirty-mile-long human flesh snake had been torn into countless pieces by artillery fire. The soldiers ran frantically among the shell craters and mud, but they could not outrun the Grim Reaper falling from the sky.

Howling was everywhere.

The howling of men, the neighing of horses...

The sixty warhorses pulling the cannons went completely mad amidst the deafening explosions. They broke free of their reins and charged wildly through the crowd, carrying the wreckage of the cannons. Their iron hooves crushed the backs of soldiers lying on the ground clutching their heads, and the cannon wheels ran over the legs of wounded soldiers who had no time to dodge.

Secondary casualties.

The secondary casualties caused by mad horses are even more terrifying than the shells themselves. Because a shell is at least instantaneous, while a person whose spine is broken by a horse's hooves will howl in the mud for half an hour before dying.

Zhang Jialiang lay prone behind an overturned ammunition truck, his hands tightly covering his ears.

He couldn't hear anything anymore.

It wasn't that he didn't want to listen; his eardrum ruptured in the third minute, and now all he could hear was a buzzing sound and endless vibrations from the ground.

His face was covered in mud and blood, making it impossible to tell whether it was his own or someone else's.

Yang Yuting knelt beside him, his mouth moving incessantly.

Zhang Jialiang couldn't see what he was saying, so he reached out and grabbed Yang Yuting's collar, pulled him in front of him, and looked at his lips.

"...Withdraw...We must withdraw!"

Despair filled Yang Yuting's face. The usually calm and composed chief of staff now had red eyes and trembling lips. He roared into Zhang Jialiang's ear with all his might.

"Young Marshal! Find high ground! Organize a retreat! If we don't leave now, it's all over!"

Zhang Jialiang's lips moved.

What he wanted to say might have been "I'm not leaving," or it might have been "What about my 100,000 people?"

But he didn't say anything.

Because at that moment, the cannon fire stopped.

It's quiet now.

It wasn't truly quiet. Wounded soldiers were still screaming, mad horses were still neighing, and cries and groans filled the air.

But the shelling stopped.

The deafening roar that seemed to fall from the sky and shatter a person's bones suddenly disappeared.

Yang Yuting suddenly looked up.

There was no relief on his face from surviving the ordeal. On the contrary, his pupils shrank to pinpoints.

"No," he said in a low voice. "The artillery ceasing fire isn't a good thing."

Zhang Jialiang stared at him blankly. He had been temporarily deafened by the explosion and had no idea what had happened.

Yang Yuting forcibly dragged him out from behind the ammunition truck, grabbed his arm, and started running north.

"Run! Run! The artillery has stopped, which means the infantry is about to charge!"

But he was wrong.

Not infantry.

It's a tank.

Three kilometers away on the reverse slope of the hills, the Maybach HL62 six-cylinder gasoline engines of thirty German-made Panzer II tanks were simultaneously ignited.

The roar of thirty engines merged into a deafening steel roar.

Zang Keping stood in the turret of the lead vehicle, pushing the hatch halfway open, the autumn rain pattering against his helmet.

He raised his binoculars and glanced at the Taihu Plain in front of him.

Smoke, shell craters, severed limbs, broken horses, mud...

And tens of thousands of Fengtian Army soldiers who were still lying shivering in the mud.

Zang Keping grinned.

"Assault formation! Full speed ahead!"

He slapped the armor plate on top of the turret and yelled at the driver inside the vehicle.

"Go! Run them over!"

Thirty Panzer II tanks advanced at full speed in an attack formation, their steel tracks grinding against the muddy ground with a series of muffled roars, like red-hot arrows piercing the plain.

The tracks of these tanks were specially widened for muddy terrain. The 400-millimeter-wide steel tracks carved two deep ruts in the mud, yet the tanks themselves remained completely unaffected. The nine and a half tons of combat weight were evenly distributed across the wide tracks, resulting in a ground pressure lower than that of an adult man standing in the mud.

Muddy ground?

To these steel monsters, it's no different from an asphalt road.

Thirty-five kilometers per hour.

On this muddy plain that made it difficult for 100,000 Fengtian troops to move an inch, thirty tanks charged forward at a speed of thirty-five kilometers per hour.

The distance from the hills to the front line of the Fengtian Army's position is only three kilometers.

five minutes.

It only takes five minutes.

Zhang Jialiang couldn't hear the sound, but he could feel it.

The ground beneath my feet was vibrating rhythmically. Not the violent tremor of an artillery shell, but a dull, continuous rhythm, like a heartbeat.

Boom, boom, boom...

Getting closer. Getting heavier.

He turned his head and looked south.

A row of black shadows appeared through the gaps in the smoke.

It's very short and very wide!

It looked like an iron coffin emerging from underground.

One, two, three... ten... twenty... thirty!

Thirty black steel monsters, arranged in an arrowhead formation, rolled out of the smoke with unstoppable force.

Zhang Jialiang couldn't hear the sound of the tracks grinding on the mud, but he could see it.

I saw the images of those things crushing through shell craters, their tracks covered in mud and blood. I saw the slender 20mm cannon barrel on the turret spinning, searching for its target.

Then, the first tank opened fire.

Da da da da!

The 20mm autocannon spewed out a stream of scorching bullets at a rate of 280 rounds per minute. Armor-piercing and tracer rounds alternated, leaving glaring red streaks in the dim sky.

The bullet belt swept across a makeshift sandbag fortification.

sandbag?

The 20mm armor-piercing round tore the sandbag to shreds along with the seven Fengtian Army soldiers behind it.

Sand, blood, flesh, and rags mingled in the air into a cloud of reddish-brown smoke.

Immediately afterwards, the second, third, fourth... all the tanks opened fire simultaneously with their machine guns.

Thirty 20mm machine guns formed a mobile wall of fire.

The wall of fire advanced at a speed of thirty-five kilometers per hour, crushing everything in its path.

People, horses, artillery vehicles, ammunition boxes, tents, flags...

Crush it all, tear it all apart.

Nothing can stop these steel behemoths.

The Fengtian Army's guard battalion reacted quickly, and dozens of loyal guards picked up their Type 38 rifles and fired desperately at the oncoming tanks.

boom! boom! boom!

A 6.5 mm rifle bullet struck the 14.5 mm thick frontal armor of the Panzer II.

Not even a spark was thrown out.

The bullet just bounced off, like a stone hitting a city wall.

A guard, as if possessed, charged forward with his bayonet, roaring as he stabbed at the tank's tracks.

The bayonet broke.

Then he got caught in the conveyor belt.

A muffled thud. A pool of blood and gore. And that was the end of it.

Zhang Jialiang watched all of this, and his blood seemed to freeze.

His guard battalion, his elite force, consisted of a thousand loyal guards whom he had brought from Fengtian and trained with three years of painstaking effort.

Compared to these steel monsters, they are like scarecrows.

It can't be penetrated, it can't be blocked, and it can't be escaped.

It can only be ground into minced meat.

"Young Marshal! Run!"

Yang Yuting's roar pierced Zhang Jialiang's shattered eardrums and entered his brain clearly for the first time.

Yang Yuting no longer cared about appearances.

He gripped Zhang Jialiang's arm tightly, dragging him northward. His military uniform was already torn, and his left knee had been struck by shrapnel while running, blood streaming down his trouser leg.

But he didn't care.

Right now, only one thing matters.

Drag the young marshal out, drag him out alive.

Zhang Jialiang was dragged along for two hundred meters. His legs were getting weak, and he almost fell into the mud several times.

Behind us, the roar of tanks grew closer and closer.

Twenty tanks had already breached the defenses of the Fengtian Army's Central Corps. Or rather, there were no defenses at all. Ten minutes of heavy artillery bombardment had reduced all fortifications and structures to rubble.

Tanks are like hot knives for cutting butter.

Without any hindrance.

"Car! Find the car!" Yang Yuting shouted hoarsely. His eyes searched everywhere.

In the distance, a Fengtian Army American-made Dodge truck was parked haphazardly on the side of the road. The windshield was shattered, and a piece of shrapnel was embedded in the hood. But the tires were still there, and the chassis was still intact.

Yang Yuting dragged Zhang Jialiang to the truck. He yanked open the door and shoved the terrified Zhang Jialiang into the passenger seat.

The driver in the driver's seat was dead. Half of his head had been severed by shrapnel.

Without batting an eye, Yang Yuting dragged the body off the ground and threw it there before jumping into the driver's seat.

He turned the key.

The engine coughed twice. It didn't start.

Yang Yuting cursed and turned around.

The engine started with a shudder.

The truck skidded in the mud and then veered off course.

Three hundred meters behind him, the tracks of a Panzer II tank rolled over the ammunition truck that Zhang Jialiang had just been lying on.

The entire ammunition truck was crushed into a pancake.

Psychotic explosion.

Boom!

The fireball rose into the air.

Zang Keping's tank ran over the abandoned command train of the Fengtian Army.

That once magnificent armored command vehicle now resembled a flattened tin can, emitting a screeching metallic tearing sound under the wide tracks of the Panzer II.

Zang Keping pushed open the hatch and leaned half his body out of the turret.

The autumn rain pattered on his face. It felt chilly.

He lit a cigarette.

The Taihu Plain before me resembled a plowed wasteland. Everywhere were bomb craters, wreckage, dismembered bodies, and burning vehicles.

Looking north, hundreds of trucks and horse-drawn carriages of all kinds were fleeing northward in a cloud of dust. Those were the remaining defeated soldiers of Zhang Jialiang.

Looking south, tens of thousands of Fengtian Army soldiers were still kneeling in the mud, their hands raised high above their heads. They had thrown away their guns, their hats, and some had even thrown away their shoes.

They knelt down and begged to surrender.

Tens of thousands of people knelt on the ground in the autumn rain.

Zang Keping exhaled a puff of smoke.

He picked up the wireless phone and pressed the call button.

"Young Marshal, Zang Keping is reporting..."

Chen Zijun's calm voice came from the other end of the radio.

"explain."

"The enemy's central army corps was completely annihilated. Commander-in-chief Zhang Jialiang fled north by car, with about three hundred remaining vehicles. Some knelt down and surrendered..."

Zang Keping glanced at the sea of ​​dark people.

"It's estimated to be as many as forty or fifty thousand."

There was a two-second silence on the radio.

"Confiscate their weapons, keep prisoners of war under guard, prohibit mistreatment or killing of surrendered soldiers, and provide them with rations."

"Yes!"

Zang Keping hung up the phone.

He stood on the turret, watching the taillights of the convoy fleeing north like stray dogs, and slowly finished his cigarette.

Then he stubbed out his cigarette and looked east.

In the distance, a hazy gray horizon stretched out, and beyond that, the Huangpu River flowed.

Zang Keping narrowed his eyes.

"Hurry up and clean up the battlefield," he said to his adjutant. "The real battle isn't with these stragglers."

His gaze pierced through the autumn rain and landed on the distant eastern sea.

That's where the real enemy is.