The First Part of the National Martyr's Lonely City Blood War Chapter 18: The Siege of the Bloody City (Part One)

  Everywhere is smog, everywhere is rubble! The charred corpses are emitting a clear smoke!

  At this moment, the ancient city has been surrounded by two divisions and a brigade of Japanese troops, with no way out. The Japanese, who are used to being frugal and even eating from small plates, have suddenly become generous, with over 200 75mm or larger caliber cannons bombarding the city and Chinese military positions day and night!

  Historically today, the Japanese army should have launched a fierce attack on Songgu Town, but on the 27th, the entire day, the Japanese infantry seemed to have evaporated? There were only endless shells falling from the sky, and Chinese soldiers hiding in artillery caves and fortifications could only quickly eat the sour rice balls in their hands amidst the flying dust.

  No one complained; all Chinese soldiers knew at what terrible cost their comrades had paid for these rice balls.

  These rice balls were made yesterday, but due to the Japanese army's artillery blockade, they couldn't be delivered. The 2 teams of 50 people each, who formed the food delivery squad, braved the Japanese artillery fire and advanced in the smoke, with flashes of explosions and people falling down one after another. The officers and soldiers at the front line gazed with wide eyes and held their breaths to cheer on their brothers who were delivering food.

  The Japanese artillery forward observation point seemed to have discovered the unusual movement on the Chinese garrison's position, and the Japanese encirclement fire became even more intense. A Chinese soldier's broken body flew into the sky, and a box of rice balls he was carrying scattered like blood flowers in the air.

  In the end, only six people arrived at the front line. An old cook with a wrinkled face panted heavily and handed a rice ball to the officer who pulled him into the trench: "Sir! It's a bit cold!"

  The old cook soldier suddenly fell into the trench with his head tilted to one side, and it was only then that the officer discovered that his rice balls were covered in blood! When they opened the old cook soldier's backpack, everyone found out that two bullets had already penetrated his body, and every single rice ball in the bag was soaked in his blood!

  The commander of the front-line position was crying and shouting on the phone, "Don't send any more food!"

  In the late afternoon, the fine weather turned gloomy, and a heavy sense of oppression was squeezing the expeditionary army officers in the ancient city. Song Yuanhang, who was stationed in the new city district, ate well and slept soundly every day, making his colleagues in the 200th Division envy him.

  Song Yuanhang deliberately made it easy for the soldiers under his command to relax, as the ancient city defense war had just begun, and his new city district would be the final act of this play. He was conserving his strength in order to fight a decisive battle against the Japanese army.

  Finally, the plane Song Yuanhang had been longing for airdropped 2 tons of medicine and food over Tonggu City on the evening of the 28th. The white shadow of the parachute under the night sky made Song Yuanhang ecstatic! However, soon after, Song Yuanhang couldn't smile anymore. The transport plane without escort was attacked by Japanese night fighter planes and fled westward with flames, looking like a desperate situation.

  This precious supply is the only support that the 200th Division has received since the war began more than a week ago! Although it was done for an ulterior motive, it gave all the officers and men of the besieged 200th Division a signal - they were not alone; the Expeditionary Force in the rear, the Military Affairs Commission in Chongqing, and the people throughout the country had not forgotten this lone army fighting bloody battles with the Japanese invaders in a distant foreign land.

  "One can per squad, five candies per soldier! Tell them these are comfort goods sent from the rear!" After Dai Anrui finished speaking, he glanced at Song Yuanhang who was standing aside with a disgruntled expression and smiled slightly: "Relax! Except for the medical supplies given to the field hospital, consider the canned goods and candies dropped by air as borrowed from you, I'll return them after this battle is won!"

  Song Yuanhang naturally understood Dai An's purpose, it wasn't about the quantity of goods, this time the airdrop was meant to tell the officers and soldiers that they were not alone, so he smiled slightly and responded: "It's not that cheap, this is an airdrop, you have to pay for shipping and interest, be prepared!"

  "Ah?" Duan Anli was taken aback for a moment, but Song Yuanghai's faint smile at the corner of his mouth gave him away. The two burst out laughing and then, taking advantage of the interval between the enemy artillery fire, Song Yuanghai followed Duan Anli to the defense zone of the 600th Regiment, where the fighting was most intense.

  Facing the canned goods that were mysteriously sent down by the superior tonight, almost everyone in the 600th regiment, including Deputy Regiment Commander Fang Yongseng, was perplexed!

  "This is what Chief of Staff Song has brought for everyone. For these things, Director He even got scolded by Gualo! It almost blew the roof off!"

  Dai Anrui patted Fang Yongseng's shoulder and announced the origin of the supplies to everyone.

  Fang Yongseng heard that Song Yuanghai was going to parachute medicine! He tightly grasped Song Yuanghai's hand and held it firmly, but couldn't say a word.

  Slightly trembling hands, eyes that are completely red, a face of beard plus gunpowder smoke, turned this brave and good fighting proxy captain into an unpainted Peking Opera facial makeup character.

  Song Yuanhang understood Fang Yongsheng's meaning, a man should not easily express gratitude! Everything is left unspoken! However, Song Yuanhang himself could not say his original intention out loud, and thinking of that generous Wu Tuanzhang, he felt a mix of emotions.

  Dai An interrupted Fang Yongsheng and Song Yuanhang, saying: "An Yi, these supplies were issued in your name! Don't come looking for me, Dai, again!"

  "Introduce the situation here!" As soon as Dai An's words came out, the atmosphere in the command center suddenly became tense, as if the temperature had dropped by several degrees.

  While judging the military situation, canned food and sweets were quickly distributed to each class and every soldier. The soldiers and grassroots officers looked at this greeting from their hometown with incredible surprise. Many people saw planes and parachutes at night, but they didn't expect that everyone would get a share of the delivered goods?

  "My goodness! Is this from Chongqing? There's even a date and a slogan for supporting the troops!" The soldiers were extremely excited as they passed around the canned goods, while the candies were distributed by the deputy company commanders of each company, with five pieces per person. By the time it got to the end, due to insufficient quantities, many officers only managed to get one piece.

  This is a very cheap ordinary fruit hard candy, in the scarce rear area, even a big child can buy 2 pieces, on the colored cellophane paper are printed with various words such as "Fight to the End", "Swear to Death Not to be a Slave of a Lost Country" and so on, inside which is wrapped red or yellow sugar ball.

  Many soldiers couldn't bear to eat them, carefully putting the candies into their pockets close to their bodies. In their eyes, these were no longer just ordinary candies, but a longing for their country and family. Until later, when most of them fell on foreign soil, the few pieces of candy in their pockets still held body heat.

  But a can was only enough for each soldier in the squad to take one big mouthful, however it had been passed around several times among the soldiers and when it got back to the squad leader's hands, there was still more than half left, nobody dared to eat it!

  Compared with them, the medical officers and nurses of the field hospital were much happier because they found a private luggage box that Soong Mei-ling had specially brought for Song Weihang.

  After distributing canned fruit with the USA logo to the wounded, a large group of girls gathered in front of the box discussing whether to open this box sealed by the Aviation Committee!

  Under the influence of curiosity, they opened the sealed box, which was filled with various dried fruits, Swiss toffees and American chocolates. After denouncing Song Yuanhang's sinister intention to lure and bribe the field hospital doctors, the girls divided the sweets equally and destroyed the box! They didn't know that Song Yuanhang was actually unaware of this, if he had known, he would have personally delivered them with a smile.

  After the shift change, Wang Wen returned to the rest room on the second floor. In her chaotic memory, there was a small bed that belonged to her. How she yearned to breathe in some air without the smell of blood! After working continuously for 12 hours in the stuffy underground room, Wang Wen hadn't had a drop of water, and now she didn't have an appetite at all.

  Back in her room, Wang Wen was surprised to find a small pile of caramels and several pieces of American chocolate on her bed. Not to mention on the battlefield in Burma, at this time even domestically, these sweets were considered luxury goods.

  When Wang Wen was studying abroad, she liked to eat all kinds of sweets. The small bag she brought back earlier had already been liberated by a group of sisters! Where did these sweets come from? A huge question mark floated above Wang Wen's head!

  When Wang Wen learned that the medicine and candy were all requested by Song, the chief of staff of the Garrison Brigade, to be airdropped from Chongqing, she was so surprised that her little mouth didn't close for half a day! That annoying guy actually wanted to airdrop supplies? In Wang Wen's opinion, would the self-interested Song Yuanhang do something without any benefits? It was really unthinkable.

  After staring at the candy for a long time, Wang Wen made up her mind and gave herself a sufficient reason. Song Yuanhang was indeed a big pervert and a big scoundrel, but the candy was innocent! She would just consider it as his apology gift to himself!

  With a rare lemon-flavored hard candy in her mouth, Wang Wen quickly fell asleep...

  Inside the 600th Regiment's command, after intelligence screening and identification, combined with changes in the Japanese army's mobilization numbers, all intelligence and battlefield judgments prove that the Japanese have indeed increased their troops, and the current situation of the 600th Regiment is not optimistic. The intense battles over the past few days have resulted in more than half of the 600th Regiment being reduced, while the situations of the 598th and 599th Regiments are no better.

  Standing beside Dai Anrui, Song Yuanghai was completely stunned. The 56th Division of the Japanese army had actually arrived a whole week earlier than in history? According to history, it would be tomorrow that the vanguard search regiment of the 56th Division of the Japanese army would arrive. Had his burning down of the 143rd Regiment of the Japanese army changed the course of history?

  Song Yuanhang suddenly felt a chill, he knew that if Tonggu lost, history would likely repeat itself, Pingmanna's great retreat, the loss of Mizhi and Zhenzhou, the Chinese Expeditionary Force lost its only way back home. Thinking of this terrible ending, Song Yuanhang was shocked out of his wits! Absolutely cannot let the tragedy of tens of thousands of soldiers being buried in the wilderness happen again!

  But the situation in front of him left Song Yuanhang at a loss, the 200th division was completely on passive defense, and what's even more frightening is that the Japanese had already dominated the rhythm and pulse of the battle.

  The time window was fixed at 3:00 am on the 29th! The dense fog in the early morning shrouded the entire Tonggu area, and Dai Anlan, the commander of the 200th Division, was anxiously observing from the front-line outpost. Twenty minutes ago, the Japanese army launched a fierce artillery attack on the position of the 600th Regiment north of the Tonggu Railway, and the density and speed of the artillery fire seemed to be getting bigger and bigger? Urgent shells fell in batches within the defensive position of the 600th Regiment.

  "Damn it!" Di'an cursed in a low voice, he knew that the rapid artillery fire was a pre-attack signal for the infantry to launch an assault, and possibly within a few minutes, after the artillery fire extended, the Japanese infantry would launch an attack.

  The 55th Division, reinforced by the 56th Brigade, formed a comprehensive encirclement. The unexpected dense fog at dawn just covered up the Japanese army's attack plan, and more than a dozen observation posts set up by the 200th Division on the front line lost their effectiveness.

  Song Yuanhang returned to the Garrison Command, staring at the map with his eyes wide open, this would be a day when the Battle of Songhu turned into an important turning point. The 600th Regiment of the 200th Division deployed on the east side of the railway was directly involved in a fierce bayonet fight with two Japanese regiments.

  By 10 am, the city wall that the 600th Regiment relied on collapsed, and the Japanese army took advantage of it to release toxic gas in the northwest corner. The 600th Regiment was forced to retreat back into the city under severe casualties, at which point the retreating troops were less than a battalion.

  On the west side of 131 highland, Japanese raiding troops stepped on landmines laid down by Chinese forces the previous night. The Chinese defending army's 598 regiment immediately called for fire support from the division's direct-affiliated heavy artillery battalion. Amidst flying shrapnel, the densely formed Japanese attacking troops were knocked to the ground piece by piece.

  Due to the limited amount of artillery shells, the bombardment only lasted for five minutes, which caused the Japanese troops who failed in their surprise attack to retreat hastily back to their starting position after leaving behind hundreds of corpses.

  After the thick fog dispersed, the reorganized Japanese army used unprecedentedly fierce artillery fire and guided planes to bomb with colored smoke bombs by artillery observers.

  The Japanese army's thirty-minute artillery preparation had already flattened everything on the surface of Hill 131, including nearby buildings, but the Japanese artillery fire failed to destroy the Chinese army's underground tunnel shelters. The camphor trees withstood the test and played an important role.

  When the Japanese army, like a yellow ant, rushed out of the jungle around the city, they were immediately killed by Chinese soldiers who had already rushed out of their hiding positions and quickly joined the battle.

  The 24th-style heavy machine gun sprayed out a continuous stream of fire, repeatedly knocking the Japanese soldiers to the ground. Shan Dong's big man Xu Fanghua personally operated the gun and was the number one machine gunner in the 200th Division. In that joyful sound, there was also the special shooting sound of the Zhongzheng rifle.

  Not far from the heavy machine gun, two light machine guns and their shattered bodies flew into the sky from a nearby bunker!

  Soon, the heavy machine gun was suppressed by the Japanese 92-type infantry cannon, and a stray shell exploded near the heavy machine gun! The ammunition hand was instantly knocked to one side, and Xu Fanghua only felt a heat in his head, with a crimson blur in front of his left eye.

  Xu Fanghua wiped the fresh blood off his hand and followed the trajectory to discover a Japanese Type 92 infantry gun located 400 meters away at an angle of 60 degrees to his right, apparently the Japanese were also adjusting their sights, and the previous light machine gun position must have been blown away by them.

  First strike is the strongest! Xu Fangguo turned the muzzle, and a dense barrage of bullets clanged against the shield of the Type 92 infantry gun, occasionally piercing the shield and sending up a mist of blood.

  In the brief moment when the heavy machine gun shifted its firepower, dozens of Japanese soldiers with bayonets on their rifles suddenly rushed into the trench. The leading sergeant aimed his rifle at Xu Fanghua, who was operating the gun and firing. Just as the sergeant was about to pull the trigger, the deputy gunner, who was loading the next round, threw himself in front of Xu Fanghua. Seeing the deputy gunner fall into a pool of blood, Xu Fanghua let out a loud roar and joined the melee with his engineer's shovel.