Chapter 745 Invisible Enemy
The pandemic was spreading silently, and no one on either side of the offensive and defensive battle could have imagined that this was a severe infectious disease that could change the course of the war. It was just that it was still brewing and had not yet shown its greatest power.
From the overall situation, Pétain and even the entire French government believed that the current situation was just the darkness before dawn. The American Expeditionary Force was still marching out in an endless stream. As long as the war lasted until the end of the year, a million-scale fresh troops would enter the European battlefield, which would greatly change the balance of power between the two camps. The trend of the war would inevitably tilt towards the Allies. All they had to do was hold on to the current defense line and wait.
Although blocking the news was a good idea, the disease could not be solved by closing one's eyes and pretending it did not exist. In the Allied positions, infectious diseases were spreading at an alarming rate. Although there was no extremely high mortality rate, a patient could obviously not be treated as a healthy person. The French soldiers suffered a large-scale reduction in personnel, and soon this reduction in personnel spread to the defense line where the British Expeditionary Force was located.
As for the British choice, it was no different from that of the French. At the most critical stage of the war, the Germans were coming on strong and no bad news that would be detrimental to the war situation could appear. The British Expeditionary Force also decided to block the news.
French, British, Algerians, Vietnamese, Indians, the invisible virus is interpreting the concept of equality for all at this time. Regardless of class and race, all are within the reach of the virus.
The Germans were shocked to find that although the expeditionary force from America had arrived in Europe, the combat effectiveness of the British and French armies seemed to have become weaker. Although they did not know the specific reasons, the Germans knew that this was a good opportunity.
At the same time, the Allied forces' lack of progress on the southern front forced the Germans to allocate part of their forces to support the Allied forces on the southern front while besieging the British Expeditionary Force.
Upon learning the news, Paris wanted to launch a counterattack against the Allied forces before the German reinforcements arrived.
Pétain also knew that some of the soldiers were unable to fight, but at the request of Paris, he had no choice but to launch a counterattack, hoping to curb the aggressive offensive of the Germans. At the same time, it also showed that the French army was still combat-ready and prevented the Germans from knowing that the French army was plagued by disease.
Marshal Pétain deployed six French divisions to cooperate with the colonial army to launch a counterattack against the Allied forces. Although compared with the total force mobilized, six French divisions were not many at all.
In Marshal Beatty's eyes, these soldiers from the colonial movement were not the bravest soldiers, nor were they the least valuable soldiers. It was most appropriate to use them to complete this task.
In the direction of the French infantry's advance, countless soldiers wearing Deutschland helmets were lying on simple defense lines, with their rifles placed on mounds of earth; there was a machine gun every few dozen meters on these defense lines, with the tripods of the heavy machine guns spread as far as possible, and the machine gunners were also lying on the ground; behind the defense lines, field guns and howitzers were waiting eagerly; a large number of armored vehicles were hidden further back, ready to cooperate with the infantry in launching a counterattack at any time.
This is the German Fifth Army, the only one stationed on the southern front to cooperate with other Allied forces. Their guns and ammunition are loaded, and countless pairs of eyes are silently staring at the front.
Finally, French flags appeared in their field of vision. The number of attacking soldiers seemed astonishingly large, but no matter whether those French military caps had white, black or yellow skin, everyone was trotting forward in silence. Apart from the sound of dense footsteps and the rustling of accessories on their bodies, even the wind was quiet.
The heavy howitzers of the Fifth Army made a loud noise, proving to the French that this attack had lost its surprise. Moreover, the French were facing the Fifth Army that had just changed its guard. As the French army accelerated its charge, the dense sound of gunfire rumbled on the German positions.
The unsheltered French soldiers fell in droves, and the rain of shells was mercilessly harvesting lives like weeds.
On the same day, the British Expeditionary Force, which had no way to retreat on the northern front, took out its trump card: tanks that came into being during this war, hoping that these war machines could turn the situation around.
The British mobilized 130 tanks on the front line, most of which cooperated with the British infantry's defense line and acted as mobile fortresses to stop the advance of the German army.
The British, who thought they could contain the German attack, soon discovered that things were not that simple. The German attacking forces also took out German-made tanks and put them into this offensive operation.
The A7V tank caused a huge shock to Germany after the British Expeditionary Force used tanks. It was not enough to just produce anti-tank guns. The German General Staff put forward the technical requirements for German tanks and commissioned the Seventh Transportation Department to develop a design plan for the tank, which was named the A7V battle tank.
The design was completed by engineer Joseph Vollmer. Due to the needs of the war and the use of the ready-made "Holt" tractor chassis, the design work progressed quite quickly. Subsequently, the German military could not wait to produce the A7V tank. In this way, although there were still many problems with the prototype, the first A7V tank was officially produced in a hurry.
The A7V tank has a combat weight of 30 tons, a length of 7,350 mm, a width of 3,060 mm, a height of 3,800 mm, a track width of 2,100 mm, and a ground clearance of 200 mm.
The main weapon on the tank is a 57mm low-speed gun; the total weight of the gun is 193 kg. The base number of ammunition for the gun is 180 rounds, which can be called the world's crime. The German army will use this batch of tanks to give the British who invented the tank a lesson.
The world's first tank war also began. Although the British were ahead in inventing tanks, the number of tanks far exceeded that of the Germans. However, the British, who did not have much army tradition, were obviously not as good as the Germans, who had a strong army tradition, in the use of this weapon. Although the Germans had not used this weapon for a long time, they had already vaguely understood how to use tanks.
The 30-ton A7V tank had almost no mobility, and the German tank commanders took advantage of this almost non-existent mobility to hunt down the tanks on the British defense line.
The front rows of tanks advanced steadily forward, with each row stopping alternately to shoot at the British tanks, swinging towards the British positions like a sickle that was unstoppable, while armored vehicles and trucks loaded with infantry supported the tank units in front like hammer handles, their firepower and mortar support made the attack firm and thorough.
Although they were protected by tank armor, once they penetrated deep into the British positions, the criss-crossing trenches began to hinder the tanks. When the German soldiers attacked in groups, they were often trapped in the complex positions and unable to escape. They were surrounded by the familiar terrain used by the British soldiers. When surrounding a single tank, they usually concentrated a large number of explosive packs or grenades to attack. Once they succeeded, they would immediately retreat and disappear in the trenches, making it impossible for the German soldiers to pursue them.
But this could not change the fact that the front-line positions had been breached, and the defense system built by mines, machine guns and snipers was very difficult to defend under the German tactical attack.
British tanks and A7Vs fired at each other. In this tank battle, the British found that when facing German tanks, the Greyhound tanks could not cause any damage to them. Nine British tanks were destroyed or abandoned, while only one A7V of the German army was damaged. The Germans used this method to show that in terms of manufacturing army weapons, the British Navy, which had just started, did not consider it comprehensively.
At the same time, in another salient, the German army's progress was also smooth, and the wreckage of British tanks on the position indicated the result.
In the fourth year of the war, the German offensive seemed to have returned to 1914, with the might of a tiger, pushing the front line 30 kilometers at once. Although the achievement of 30 kilometers a month was unremarkable compared to the advancement speed of dozens of kilometers a day in World War II, in the positional warfare that had lasted for four years, this breakthrough was enough to be gratifying.
The British and French forces once again gained a firm foothold. Now they no longer wanted to fight back. They just waited for the American Expeditionary Force to reach Europe with more than one million troops, and then they would pile up the Germans to death. Anyway, one less German death was one less, and the British could kill Indians, the French could kill Algerians, and the Vietnamese.
Two hundred and fifty thousand casualties and one hundred thousand soldiers entering German prisoner-of-war camps proved nothing. Even the British and French forces had begun to hand over the more dangerous positions to the colonial troops, and put their own soldiers in positions that were easier to evacuate to prevent being caught off guard by the Germans.
Coincidentally, the British and French allied forces both adopted a posture of holding out to the death to buy time, if one year didn't work then two years would do the trick. There would always be a day when the Allies couldn't bear it anymore. This could even help consume the Americans' strength and prevent them from becoming more powerful after the war.
In May, coughing sounds could be heard from time to time on the streets of Madrid. For some reason, the nearest hospitals were full, and many doctors were even sick.
Some Spaniards were already suspicious of this infectious disease that came from nowhere, and people were whispering about their concerns about the future. Almost at the same time, symptoms of influenza appeared in London, but now was a wartime period, and the British Cabinet implemented strict wartime control. Through information exchanges with the French, some British Cabinet ministers had already understood that this was an infectious disease that was spreading.
(End of this chapter)
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