Chapter 12: The Beginning of Military Industry (Part 1)

  After some thought, Hu Weidong decided to designate those potential but temporarily unqualified handgun team members as "reserve team members". Only after passing the assessment and gaining recognition from himself and others in actual combat could they become formal "handgun (special warfare) team members". As a result, all the original handgun team members were suddenly downgraded...

  After that, the militia regiment's learning and training enthusiasm reached an unprecedented high, with a rare serious attitude. With the addition of Long Fei Bao, an excellent hand-to-hand combat and shooting instructor, the military quality of the more than 400 militiamen, including reserve members, has made rapid progress. However, Hu Weidong did not allow everyone to practice too much, after all, the enemy may come at any time, if everyone is practicing to exhaustion, that would be a disaster... The method of letting soldiers practice until they are exhausted and even injured in movies and TV shows can only be done in rear bases where it is unlikely to be attacked by the enemy. If the militia regiment did that now, it would be too stupid...

  However, for more brain-intensive tactical training, Hu Weidong put forward almost harsh strict requirements, which allowed the many advanced tactics he knew to be applied to actual combat earlier, and he soon didn't have to lead the team in person every time. Advanced scientific and flexible tactics made up for the insufficient single-soldier combat effectiveness of the militia regiment to a large extent, and gradually became one of its deeply rooted traditions. Hu Weidong also never put down cultural education, especially those young people who he thought had potential were picked out to be personally taught in small classes, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the three mobile schools not long after...

  Although he was very strict with training, Hu Weidong did not agree that "taking soldiers who are not well-trained to the battlefield is irresponsible for their lives." This statement is because now it's not like if you don't attack the enemy they won't attack you. If you only focus on training all the time, the team can't expand quickly, and when the enemy comes with superior forces, the militia regiment will still have just that many people, isn't that waiting for death?

  Hu Weidong thought that as long as there was a relatively large chance of winning and the gains outweighed the losses, then they should go into battle without hesitation. Through "replacing training with fighting", not only would the troops be tempered, but also more weapons and ammunition could be captured to arm more troops, which would enable the establishment of a powerful army at the fastest speed. This was also the only way for a weak militia company to survive under the siege of strong enemies. As for how to guarantee victory when they were not strong enough, it depended on him and the entire militia company thinking hard while training and learning diligently...

  Due to the spoils of war from the previous battle, the militia regiment's firepower increased greatly, especially the pistol team was able to expand significantly, and could disguise itself as a district-sized plainclothes team. Equipped with over 80 twenty-shot pistols, under Hu Weidong's command, as long as they gained the upper hand at close range, dealing with several hundred regular soldiers would be easy. The difficulty of raiding mining points suddenly decreased. In the following twenty-odd days, except for two mines near Xingguo County that didn't dare to touch, all large mines in the county with over 50 miners were swept by the militia regiment. A total of over 800 people from the mining team, mobile team and regular army were killed or captured, more than 5,000 miners were rescued, and a large number of weapons and equipment were seized, mainly:

  More than 600 rifles

  Pistols 73 (including twenty double-barreled 12)

  18 Flower Cannons

  Czech-style light machine guns 4

  Two water-cooled Madsen heavy machine guns

  2 x 60mm mortars and 60 rounds of ammunition

  More than 80 wooden-handled grenades were made by the country

  Dagger 103 pieces...

  In addition, the militia regiment also captured a large amount of materials, including: over 300 taels of gold, over 5,000 yuan, over 200,000 catties of grain, over 5 tons of salt, hundreds of mules, over 100 carts, over 300 catties of brass, over 500 catties of lead, over 20,000 catties of tungsten sand, over 30 tons of coal, over 10 tons of ammonium nitrate explosives (the most cost-effective explosive before and after the war of resistance, with a power at least several times stronger than gunpowder...), over 400 catties of high-explosive TNT (including nitroglycerin and other mixed explosives), over 30,000 detonators, as well as valuable industrial equipment and even spare parts were dismantled and taken away by Hu Weidong's men, who also took away tens of thousands of catties of "scrap" steel and iron...

  For a militia regiment that mainly implements the ration system internally and has not yet established any external trading channels, those funds and some materials (such as tungsten sand) that can only be exchanged for cash at present can only be reserved for future use. However, the value of strategic materials such as explosives, detonators, machinery equipment, copper, lead, and steel is completely different, especially the hundreds of thousands of detonators are even more precious...

  With these materials, the several materials needed to reload bullets were all ready. The main explosive of the detonator, fulminate of mercury, can be made into a large amount of bullet propellant, and copper and lead are the main materials for making bullet heads. Although the arsenal was still severely lacking in skilled workers at present, with Wu Yun-dong's experience as a reference last year, Hu Weidong did not spend much effort to successfully create a bullet reloading production line with high production efficiency that can be easily disassembled and assembled. In mid-January 1935, the first bullet reloading production line started production, and more than 10,000 bullets were reloaded in the same month. According to the reflection of soldiers who had used them, the shooting accuracy of rifles was not greatly affected after loading with reloaded bullets. Within 100 meters, there was almost no difference felt, as for longer distances, at present, militia generally only opened fire when the enemy approached within 200 meters (in a test at the end of January, the average hit rate of shooting human-shaped fixed targets at 100 meters distance was about 60%, and the results of 200 meters with moving targets were even more unbearable...), so the impact was not great.

  This proves that Hu Weidong's management charter for the arsenal has indeed been of great help in improving product quality, whether it is output or quality. His arsenal has already significantly surpassed the production line that Wu Yunzhong had established during his time in the New Fourth Army. As workers' skills become more proficient, the output and quality of reloaded bullets can be further improved. However, what makes him a bit regretful is that although the quality of these reloaded bullets is quite good, they are still semi-handmade products and cannot be fully standardized. If installed in magazines or belts for use in automatic weapons, it is easy to encounter jamming situations. Therefore, in general, they can only be used in rifles and must be loaded one by one.