Expedition to Europe

The bombardment lasted all night. The artillery of the 1st and 32nd Divisions raged for seven or eight hours. The artillerymen fired at least 12,000 tons of shells, so that when the bombardment ended, many artillerymen were exhausted.

The loss of the two squads of scouts had spread throughout the army. The night bombardment was both a vent and a revenge for the Germans.

The scouts were a unit that the whole army yearned for. Everyone knew that the soldiers there were "top soldiers" and all of them were first-class heroes. They were all brothers who lived together day and night, and they were all prepared to die on the battlefield, but it was too unfair to die silently like this. The artillerymen decided to make a big noise to see off the scout brothers.

The noise was indeed not small. They not only fired more than 12,000 tons of shells, but also damaged eleven artillery pieces.

These eleven guns are all small and medium caliber guns equipped by the 32nd Division. Compared with the guns of the 1st Division, the guns of the 32nd Division seem a bit old. Perhaps the artillerymen are using this extreme method to request the replacement of weapons.

The artillery of the 1st Division is okay. These are all new guys. It is no problem to bombard with such intensity three or five times.

The artillery may still be able to hold on, but the artillerymen have reached their limit.

The 194mm guns equipped by the 1st Division use firing bags as firing powder. The warhead alone weighs 81 kilograms. Every time the warhead is transported, two soldiers are required to use a cart to transport it from the storage room where ammunition is stored to the artillery position. In order to ensure a safe distance of more than 500 meters, they run back and forth twice a minute for seven or eight hours in a row. Even an iron man can't stand it.

Fortunately, these large-caliber artillery have a large number of auxiliary soldiers. Each gun needs an average of 30 people to serve to ensure the efficiency of the artillery.

When the sun rises again and a new day comes, the battle begins again.

This time, the battle broke out between the artillery. Since the strength has been exposed, Qin Zhiyuan will no longer hold back and demand that the artillery must suppress the Germans and not give them the opportunity to continue to wreak havoc.

It is foreseeable that the 185th highland, which was almost lost yesterday afternoon, will continue to be attacked today. The current 185th position is defended by the Chinese troops, and Qin Zhiyuan does not want his soldiers to be unprotected.

So when the Germans began their routine artillery bombardment before the charge, the artillery of the 1st and 32nd divisions responded strongly.

The French artillery does have unique skills. Although there is no anti-artillery radar yet, the French artillery can still calculate the approximate location of the German artillery position from the direction and arc of the shells, and then the German artillery position is waiting for the firepower counterattack of the 1st and 32nd divisions.

The so-called firepower counterattack does not necessarily mean that all artillery must be destroyed. Killing the enemy's artillery is the same. The high-explosive shells used by the giant artillery equipped by the First Division are a model of killing the enemy by shock waves.

The Germans were certainly unwilling to passively take a beating, and they were also organizing attacks on the artillery of the First Division and the 32nd Division.

Now we can see the cruelty of the artillery profession. No matter how the enemy attacks, they can only stay in place and fire shells desperately, striving to knock out the enemy's artillery first, and there is no way to avoid it.

This unavoidable cruelty does not include the self-propelled artillery equipped by the First Division. The biggest advantage of self-propelled artillery over fixed artillery is that they have legs. They stay in place and fire three or four rounds, and before the Germans calculate the artillery position, they will move immediately.

This is also considered another kind of cheating.

The artillery was fighting lively, and the infantry was not idle either.

Perhaps knowing that the artillery could not provide enough firepower cover today, the German infantry launched a charge early without waiting for the firepower preparation to be completed.

Or a wave-like skirmish line charge.

In fact, no matter what name it is given, as long as it is an attack with unprotected infantry, it is like filling it with human lives. Compared with the group charge, the wave charge just has a more "high-sounding" name, but there is no difference in essence.

The Xu Sheng Regiment of the Griff Brigade is numbered as the Sixth Regiment within the First Division. This is a unit basically composed of veterans. More than half of the soldiers in the unit participated in the First Division's attack on the Germans in Elbecourt last year.

Well, at that time, the First Division was still the First Brigade.

The Sixth Regiment has a total of more than 1,700 soldiers. Even the new recruits have undergone more than three months of training. It is now the most combat-effective infantry regiment in the First Division. Originally, this title belonged to the First Regiment under Chen Kangjian, but after Chen Kangjian's troops were refitted into armored units, Xu Sheng's Sixth Regiment was the most combat-effective infantry unit in the First Division.

As the most combat-effective regiment, Xu Sheng would definitely not be passive, so when it was determined that the artillery of both sides was bombarding and the Germans were unable to cover the infantry, Xu Sheng decisively sent troops to enter the fortifications in advance and sniped the Germans who were charging.

It was indeed a sniper attack. At this time, the Germans were still five or six hundred meters away from Hill 185. It was indeed true that only accurate shooters could shoot the Germans at this distance. Machine gunners were not included. Machine gunners relied on probability to shoot people. If you don't play machine guns for half a year or eight months, don't think about using machine guns to accurately kill the enemy.

This work was compiled and uploaded by Liujiu Book Bar~~

In Xu Sheng's troops, the proportion of precision shooters is astonishing. After Chen Kangjian's troops were changed to armored troops, the precision shooters in the troops lost their value, so these precision shooters were assigned to other infantry regiments. As a result, the proportion of precision shooters in Liu Zizheng and Ge Lifu's two brigades was almost more than 10%, and Xu Sheng's regiment was the most excessive, with nearly 30% of them being precision shooters.

The so-called precision shooters are different from snipers. Precision shooters accompany infantry in combat, while snipers are mostly single soldiers, with at most one observer. The requirement for precision shooters is to shoot at a chest target at a distance of 300 meters. The score must reach 5 out of 10. Although this is not as high as the hit rate of snipers, it is already quite rare when optical sights have not yet been widely popularized.

So the scene on the battlefield was very strange.

Obviously, the gunfire was not dense, with some shots and some not, but people fell down from time to time in the linear array of the German army, and they were not killed by one shot, but most of them were just injured. This caused more trouble for the Germans, because at this time someone had to rescue the wounded, otherwise they could only watch the wounded die miserably in wailing, which was simply torture for the advancing Germans, and the blow to morale was even more severe.

The Germans also had precision shooters, and they were precision shooters using rifles equipped with scopes, and these shooters were also looking for targets.

After all, the soldiers using sniper rifles were still a minority, and they were quickly at a disadvantage in the shooting with the shooters of the Sixth Regiment. The mortars in the Sixth Regiment have been equipped to the company level. Whenever a sniper is found, the Sixth Regiment will not use precision shooters to fight you, but directly use mortar firepower to cover you. It doesn’t matter if one shot misses, three mortars will be fired together, and two more rounds will be fired.

This is also considered cheating.