Chapter 150: Charles' tank is the real tank
At Lafox, the German defense line ushered in another gloomy evening.
The autumn wind brought cold rain to Colonel Jurgen Khalil. He tightened his coat and continued to wade through the water.
A group of German soldiers were scooping out water with their spiked helmets. When they saw Colonel Khalil coming, they stopped what they were doing and stood to salute.
"Don't stop, boys!" Colonel Khalil said expressionlessly, "Bailing water is more important than paying respect to me. They may cost you your lives, but I won't!"
The soldiers laughed.
Several gophers as big as cats ran past us. After spending some time together, they were no longer afraid of humans. Sometimes, we didn’t have time to clean up the corpses, and would find them gnawed beyond recognition the next morning.
But Colonel Khalil had no way to deal with them.
He murmured, "I'd rather deal with a French attack than this thing!"
"Hey!" Colonel Khalil shouted at the two soldiers who were slacking off under the machine gun position, "If you don't want to be hit by bullets, make your parapet thicker. They are about to be washed away by the rain!"
The tired soldier responded, hurriedly found an engineer shovel and climbed up the muddy trench.
Colonel Khalil warned them a few more times before turning into the communication trench and walking deeper into the trench until they arrived at the headquarters of the 2nd Infantry Regiment.
Colonel Khalil, who was soaking wet, lowered his head and crawled in. He had no intention of sitting down at all. He was worried that he would get the only remaining dry space wet, although it was only a matter of time.
"Colonel!" Just as Khalil was standing at the entrance of the cave, shaking his body nervously, the staff officer carefully handed him a document.
When Colonel Khalil took the document he discovered it was a newspaper.
"What is this?" Colonel Khalil looked at the staff officer in confusion.
The staff officer replied: "This is a newspaper brought by the intelligence agent from France. He thought it might be useful to you!"
Khalil put the newspaper aside, took off his raincoat and helmet, wiped his hands, then picked up the newspaper again and walked into the dim light.
After only a glance, Khalil looked up at the staff officer in surprise: "Char's tank?"
"Yes, Colonel!" The staff officer replied, "Our intelligence officer said that after Charles said these words, he realized that he had let the cat out of the bag. He left the scene in a panic and was then scolded by Gallieni!"
Colonel Khalil nodded and turned his gaze back to the newspaper. After reading it for a while, he chuckled and said, "He is right. The tanks that attacked us these days do have this problem. They are running around in front of us like blind men, firing randomly without seeing the target, but we can easily destroy them!"
"That's not the important thing, Colonel!" the staff officer reminded.
Colonel Khalil was stunned for a moment, then nodded thoughtfully: "You are right, Wolfe. If Charles knew this, he would not make this mistake, so..."
The staff officer went on to say: "So his tank must have a faster speed, so it will be difficult for our artillery to hit it. It may also have stronger defenses, and even our K bullets may not be able to penetrate it!"
Khalil said, "Hmm." "This means that his tanks will rush to us with the French and shoot at us crazily with machine guns!"
"We should be thankful that France has a stupid parliament, Colonel!" said the staff officer. "It was they who eliminated Charles' tanks and bought two non-tank tanks at a high price to charge at us. Otherwise, we would have become a cold corpse long ago!"
"That's right, Wolf!" Khalil replied with a smile. "The French Parliament saved us. It's a pity that I can't write them a letter of thanks!"
The staff and several officers in the command center all laughed when they heard this.
"Now!" Colonel Khalil waved the newspaper to the officers: "What we need to consider is how to deal with this tank, Charles' tank, a real tank!"
After a brief silence, Wolfe was the first to propose an idea: "Although we want to increase the inventory of K bullets, it seems that we can't place too much hope on it!"
"Yes!" Colonel Khalil pointed his finger in the air to show his agreement: "Char will strengthen the thickness of the frontal armor, and our K bullets may not be able to penetrate it. The side may be able to penetrate it, but by the time we see the side, the enemy infantry is already in front of us!"
Colonel Khalil nodded to the recorder: "Write it down, Koenig, we can't ignore every detail!"
The recorder responded and quickly wrote down the key point on the document.
"Then we can only rely on artillery!" The staff officer continued to analyze: "But if Charles' tanks are also fast..."
The command center fell into silence for a moment.
They didn't know the speed of the tanks, and the target was moving fast and slow and was unlikely to move in a straight line. It was difficult to destroy such an irregularly moving target with artillery.
After thinking for a while, Colonel Khalil said: "Perhaps, we can carry out a larger-scale attack on the target, or shoot in sections!"
Segmented shooting is an artillery tactic, which is actually the modern coordinate calibration.
It is done by setting all parameters of an artillery group and completing test firing before the battle, making sure that the shells of this artillery group will fall into a known area in front of the position and be prepared.
When the war breaks out, when the enemy target enters or is about to enter this area, you only need to shout "Fire!" on the phone, and the shells will immediately be fired and turn the area into a sea of fire.
Obviously, this method saves all the intermediate steps, greatly shortens the launch time, and significantly improves accuracy.
The disadvantage is that this artillery group must always remain on standby at the set parameters and cannot fire at other positions, otherwise it will lose its meaning.
Therefore, it is necessary for many artillery groups to implement this static calibration in order to completely divide the wide battlefield front.
Colonel Khalil muttered to himself: "We need more artillery and lots of shells!"
Someone said worriedly, "We are short of cannons and shells everywhere, Colonel! They won't give them to us!"
At this point, the defense line has been stabilized, and the entire defense line of hundreds of kilometers is in combat. In addition, transportation is difficult during the rainy season, and scarce resources such as cannons and artillery shells cannot be obtained just by wanting them!
The staff officer silently took the newspaper from the table and waved it to everyone: "Or, we can report this intelligence to General Waldeck and listen to his thoughts?"
Colonel Khalil understood what the staff officer meant. If General Waldeck realized that Charles' tanks would launch an attack on the La Fox Line, he would definitely be willing to transfer the artillery over!
(The second one from the left in the picture above is a K bullet. Usually each soldier is equipped with 5 rounds, and the machine gunner is equipped with a belt of 250 rounds)
(End of this chapter)
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