M A N D A T O R Y I N T R O D U C T O R Y
Hello everyone once again, this will be my second blog entry on the Blitzkrieg I game and the last one featuring the Imperial Japanese Army/Imperial Japanese Navy as I gradually move towards the WWII and it's more intense and known battles. This one will be less focused on the description of History but will still feature an important battle of that times. The battle of Hubei in 1940 was one of the first and major examples of heavy urban combat during the Second Sino-Japanese 1937-1945 War. On with the blog!
The City of Hubei, Nationalist China, 1940.
Hubei was an important target for the IJA, it was a home to a series of factories, train stations and housing areas that could be converted to serve as an military barracks and an local Nationalist HQ. Not much was known about the defenders, their state of alert or their trenches. The region itself was almost idyllic, traditional music was playing inside the city, people were going on their daily chores. In spite of the war slowly reaching its fourth year there wasn't much of a sign of a struggle except for the soldiers occupying key train stations, the makeshift tents, emplacements and a series of still unfinished trenches half-filled with troops that were created on the far outskirts of the city. This, naturally was about to change as the mechanised units and the deep recon scouts combined with the newly raised paratrooper commando regiments of the joint regular IJA and the elite Kwantung Army forces slowly crept their way towards Hubei. The objective was the pacify the city by force, neutralising all enemy resistance on the way and the force Kuomintang and their allies to forever abandon the city as their property. Initial aerial reconnaissance photographs have revealed and confirmed a series of targets of opportunity and key industrial places:
Yet the enemy is not as weak as it was initally suspected. Series of anti-tank traps, pillbox bunkers, watchtowers, aforementioned trenches and even streches of barbed wire. However, the modern war is not simply based on outdated principles of assault operations, not on human-wave tactics but on the war of movement, focal point attacks, the recon in force, the Schwerpunkt doctrine and the power of field guns to smash away the defences letting a probing force to go through the gap and therefore blasting away the opposition from the inside like a sickness. The master of this struggle will be a single hidden man along with his buddies who will serve as the all seeing eyes of this operation.
Couple of minutes before the battle everything seems strangely normal. The train moves it's cargo somewhere far away from Hubei, the enemy soldiers sing their songs and the Chinese musical instruments accompany them. In the fields near the trenches there is a single man dressed in a camouflaged suit holding firmly a rifle in his right hand and a pair of binoculars dangling around neck as he cautiously moves to find a good observation spot. His name remains unknown.
A first glimpse of the enemy's military strenght. The scout has radioed in coordinates for the perhaps first of a kind use of the new Special Transport Plane Ki-57. A flight of those will bring some of the paratrooper commandoes on the field and they will serve as the vanguard force of the operation. For now, there is no frontline and the trenches are not to be breached. It is imperative to secure additional space for the arrival of the rest of our forces in this area. The sounds of the aircrafts signal the beginning of the end for Hubei as the Nationalists know it.
"GREEN, GREEN, GREEN!!". The vanguard arrives to the battle as the panicked Chinese muster their troops, sounding alarms all over Hubei and sending out some trains all packed with soldiers for the defence. The element of suprise has been lost but the operations go on regardless. Quickly regrouping the force, the officer i charge starts barking out his orders: "All! Ignore the line of defence! The target is the Fuchunchzhen train station! Go, go go!".
The charge is on. Rifle bullets rupture through the air as the stormtroopers move under the cover of friendly bullets. Flamethrowers purge away buildings from the face of the Earth. Few satchel charge throws and the enemy melts away in fire. In all their usefulness, the Maxims were badly placed, obstructed by the sandbag walls. Moments after the pacification of the train stations the HQ has sended up new orders.
The harbringers of death move forward to their new victim, the village adjacent to the train station. American medium bombers had failed to stop them, their bombs landing a little too far. Negating losses they press on, burning away the crops and the houses. The mortars did nothing, the armoured cars although heavy and reinforced by sandbags were easy pickings to flamethrower operators jumping from corners. Fuchunchzhen area is pacified, secured and will be transformed into a forward operations outpost for the paratrooper units deployed. Mechanised elements are creeping in via the captured train station and a motorized recon company has reported their forward troops to reach us here within five minutes. There is more...
Agents have been activated and now are proceeding with observation duties in key points of the city. Most of them report nothing out of the ordinary but Agent Kato had noticed more trains with soldiers & equipments on the run to a destination he couldn't identify. Sabashi, one of our informants has been delegated to find where exactly it is going to. Dressed like a Nationalist guardsmen and fluent in Mandarin he should not have any major problems with this op.
First batch of forces has arrived. Towing artillery pieces their main job now is to search the enemy defences for any gaps, breach those gaps and pour deep into the area preparing ground for the rest of the arriving combat units. The Battle for Hubei is now beginning for real. In spite of all their best efforts and the newest German weapons the Kuomintang forces in the end, couldn't defend it in the face of better tactics employed by the Japanese.
Sometimes, all you have to accomplish is to punch a hole within a single point in the defensive line and the rest comes falling down in disarray.
CONTENT USED :
Blitzkrieg I Real Time Tactics strategy game with the GZM 7.77.3 (I believe that was the version number) total conversion mod. WORS mod beta demo preview version with patch used.
SOME WORDS :
Funfact: the use of scout spies by the Japanese in support of combat operations was borrowed from the Germans.
