bookbashuk #220 - Tank Dream
#220 - Tank Dream
Li Yunlong had seen tanks before and knew their power very well.
Even the weakest of the Japanese midget tanks were nearly impossible to destroy for the Eighth Route Army, which initially only had machine guns and rifles.
It was only with the advent of weapons like the RPG that Li Yunlong stopped being so awestruck, but the feeling was completely different now that he was going to produce them himself.
The Japanese didn't have weapons of mass destruction like the RPG. Although they had some 37mm anti-tank guns, most infantry battalions didn't have them. If the Independent Regiment was now equipped with tanks, it would be a devastating weapon against the Japanese infantry battalions!
A single battalion could wipe out an entire Japanese battalion without any problems!
How could Li Yunlong not be excited?
"When can we start producing tanks?" Li Yunlong asked eagerly. "When will we be able to arrange for training for tank drivers?"
Looking at Li Yunlong's impatient appearance, Ren Zhong smiled slightly.
"We have already started training tank crew members in large numbers in the border area. If nothing goes wrong, the tank crews will be dispatched at the same time as the tanks roll off the assembly line here."
Ren Zhong was happy to tell Li Yunlong about this part of the plan.
After all, Old Li also held a position in the military sub-district and could barely be considered an edge player in the base area's high command.
"No, that won't work," Old Li said, shaking his head like a rattle drum.
"It's better for our own people to learn. We can send hundreds of people from the Independent Regiment to learn to drive tanks."
Old Li was good at everything, except he was used to hogging everything for himself and always favored his own people.
"This is not an easy task, Old Li. Tank driving crews are technical arms. If they don't understand culture, can't read, and don't have the ability to understand or control machinery, they simply won't be able to learn to drive tanks."
Ren Zhong popularized a lot of basic knowledge about tanks to Li Yunlong, but Old Li was adamant about one thing this time: he wanted to extract 200 people from the Independent Regiment to practice driving tanks in the border area's tank driving class.
He even demanded to join the study class himself to personally oversee the learning.
The lure of tanks was simply too tempting for Li Yunlong. Compared to that, even the Japanese had to take a backseat.
Ren Zhong had already planned this. The first batch of 200 people, 50 crews, in the border area, their main task was to serve as seed players for the tank units in each base area. After they were trained in the border area, each base area would draw and deploy 10 crews, and then deploy 10 tanks to start large-scale tank unit training, training a tank regiment-sized tank force in the base area.
Because in Ren Zhong's plan, in the near future, each base area would have a tank regiment-sized force, about 200 tanks.
With this scale, the Eighth Route Army would initially form a steel torrent, and could sweep across the entire North China.
Regardless of whether the ratio between T-34 heavy tanks and M3 light tanks was 1:4 or 2:3, once the Eighth Route Army formed a unified cluster of thousands of heavy firepower tanks carrying 76mm guns, it would be a disaster for the Japanese in North China, and their doomsday would come.
And with this scale, even against the main force of the Kwantung Army, Ren Zhong had absolute confidence in defeating them!
Because according to the information Ren Zhong had found, although the Japanese Kwantung Army had a large force and was the most well-equipped group in the Japanese Army, its mechanized army was still the largest armored corps in the history of the Japanese military, with 675 tanks and 155 armored vehicles. Adding the other 2 independent tank regiments (usually an independent tank regiment has 52 tanks), the total number of tanks in the entire Kwantung Army was only about 800.
It should be known that many of these were midget tanks, and most of the main force was only medium tanks, making it difficult to fight against Ren Zhong's modified M3.
If it was an equal number of duels, Ren Zhong didn't believe that a tank team unified with 76mm tank main guns couldn't beat the Japanese's fragile-skinned tanks with small guns within 60mm.
The current situation is that no one knows that Ren Zhong, this industrial booster freak, has appeared in the Eighth Route Army. After a few years, he has forcibly built a preliminary heavy industrial system.
Compared to Yan Xishan's industrialization, Ren Zhong's industrialization is not only more comprehensive in terms of types, but also leads him by more than one era in terms of technical level, and some things lead by even more than ten or twenty years.
Many things, not to mention outsiders, even people like Li Yunlong who are close to Ren Zhong can't see clearly.
This is a quirk born out of the collision of two completely different eras of thinking. The Japanese would never have dreamed of the impact that giving the Eighth Route Army less than a year would have.
If the Japanese knew what Ren Zhong was doing in the base area, even if they had to sell their pots and pans, they would launch a full-scale offensive now and would never wait another second.
Looking at Old Li's appearance of not giving up until he achieved his goal.
Ren Zhong smiled.
"Let's drink, let's drink! What is your identity now, Old Li? Will the brigade commander give you the opportunity to leave your leadership position?" Ren Zhong said.
"Brother Ren, so does that mean there are no problems on your end?" Li Yunlong asked, delighted. "As long as there are no problems on your end, brother, I'll take care of things with the Brigade Commander."
"Damn! This wine today, it's a real pleasure to drink. Brother Ren, you wouldn't just have one bottle prepared, would you? This little bit isn't even enough to wet my whistle."
Li Yunlong seemed to have already received his pass to study tanks in the Border Region, and was now preparing to drink to his heart's content.
Ren Zhong, knowing this guy's capacity and character, certainly wouldn't have just one bottle of wine.
However, after the second bottle was finished, Ren Zhong refused to bring out any more.
Just kidding, most of the two bottles went into Old Li's belly. Don't let his heavy drinking fool you, his capacity is alright, but it's only about a kilogram, any more and he'll be drunk.
He was in just the right state now, Old Li was nicely at about eighty percent drunk, listening to him brag about the old days with Kong Jie, Ding Wei, and Zhang Wanhe, Ren Zhong, who was about sixty percent drunk, felt very affectionate, especially envying Li Yunlong and the others' old war friendship of standing by each other through thick and thin.
It was a messy debt where it was unclear who saved whom, but when something really happened, these people would unhesitatingly use their bodies to block bullets for each other.
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For some reason, the Brigade Commander actually agreed to Li Yunlong's request to select 200 people from the Independent Regiment system to form a group to go to the Border Region.
Perhaps the Brigade Commander was trying to avoid Li Yunlong getting into trouble out of boredom, and now he was taking advantage of this opportunity to go with the flow and send this unstable element, Li Yunlong, directly to the Border Region.
Just as the electrolytic aluminum factory was coming to an end, Ren Zhong also went north with Li Yunlong, bypassing the Japanese-occupied Taiyuan area and directly crossing the Zhengtai Railway and Tongpu Railway to return to the Border Region.
On the banks of the Yellow River, three ferry crossings had already begun construction of permanent bridges. From the looks of it now, these three bridges were still somewhat rudimentary, using a combination of wooden piles and iron-clad floating boats. On both sides of the riverbank, wooden piles and iron plates were used to build sturdy iron-plate bridges. In the deep water sections in the middle, there were currently no conditions to build concrete bridge piers, so iron-clad floating boats were still used to lock them in place, connecting the two or three hundred meters of river surface through a combination of floating boats and iron plates.
Although this made it somewhat shaky for trucks to pass, and the speed couldn't be fast, according to Ren Zhong's bridge standards, it was qualified if a G506 could tow a 2-ton 105mm howitzer through.
After all, at this stage, the heaviest weapon transported between the Border Region and Northwestern Jinxi was the 105mm howitzer. As for tanks, Ren Zhong didn't plan to transport them across the Yellow River Bridge. Except for Jiuyuan outside the Great Wall, he planned to wait for the winter freeze, after the floating boats were frozen solid, to lay steel plates and let the tanks pass over them, transporting the Border Region's tanks to Jiuyuan, equipping Jiuyuan with a tank battalion.
Li Yunlong led his men into the third phase of the tank class, and he began studying day and night how to drive tanks in combat.
The Border Region's first tank factory's M3 tank production capacity had already reached 20 vehicles per month, and it was rapidly expanding new production lines. As the number one key project of the Border Region's military industry in the near future, the mature M3 tank production line would be expanded to 5 or 6 new production lines within the next year, achieving a monthly production capacity of over 120 vehicles!
In terms of distribution, the Border Region was of course the main production base, with at least two or even three production lines.
In the Border Region, the three important base areas of Luliang, Wutai, and Taihang Taiyue would each build a tank production line. However, these three places mainly produced the tank's outer shell and main structural parts. Communication equipment, power equipment, and even the artillery parts would now be provided by the Border Region, after all, the production of gun steel could not be completed by ordinary steel plants.
The several dozen tanks produced in the early stages in the Border Region were now being abused in shifts by three tank classes almost around the clock. All kinds of minor problems were exposed under high-intensity operation, allowing the engineers of the Mechanical Equipment Research Center, together with the Border Region Red Star First Armored Vehicle Factory and Red Star Engine Factory, to conduct research and modifications day and night.
After more than 2 months of improvements, the performance of the M3 tank had now become stable, at least allowing wild drivers like Li Yunlong, who were new to the business and drove violently, to safely drive thousands of kilometers without breaking down.
For Li Yunlong, facing this newly emerged world in his life, he was completely attracted to it in the Border Region and forgot about home.
During the day, he was busy learning and driving, and at night he often took the initiative to invite Ren Zhong to discuss how to use this completely new type of arm. This illiterate man who hadn't even learned 500 characters now deeply realized the importance of culture and began to self-motivate and stay up late to study culture.
Although Ren Zhong didn't know much about tank warfare either, he knew that he had a world behind him. When he encountered problems that Ren Zhong didn't understand, when he traveled back to the main world, after frantically searching and asking questions online in a fishing style, he quickly had ideas, which was completely on a different level compared to Li Yunlong, a pure peasant.
And when Chief of Staff Ye was free to come to Ren Zhong, Chief of Staff Ye also enthusiastically participated in Ren Zhong and Li Yunlong's tank tactics discussions.
What infantry-tank coordination, infantry-artillery coordination, air-ground coordination, cluster charge, blitzkrieg tactics, Li Yunlong, who had driven tanks and even touched the P51D Mustang fighter at the airport, seemed to have opened a new world window and began to look forward to the days when the Independent Regiment had a tank battalion and an air squadron forming a three-dimensional combat system.
He suddenly felt that living the life of a division commander didn't seem so good anymore, only living a life with a complete army, navy, and air force was the real good life!
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