I want to be emperor

Chapter 300 Ming Army's Counterattack

Changsha, the city where Yang Sichang personally sits in town and has gathered [-] troops!
Its ending was already doomed after the entire left army of the New Standard Army was wiped out. Luo Zhixue knew this, Yang Sichang knew it, and even many well-informed gentry families in the opposite city knew it.

Therefore, when the Chu army's reconnaissance cavalry appeared outside Changsha City, the defenders in the city began to waver, and some soldiers and even generals began to flee secretly.

As for the big gentry in the city, in fact, there have been people who fled long before the Chu army. After all, Chu thieves are different from ordinary thieves.

In the face of ordinary thieves, a large and strong city is a guarantee of safety, but staying in the countryside is even more dangerous.

But in the face of Chu thieves, this is the other way around. Staying in the city is even more dangerous, facing the spread of war at any time. After all, guns have no eyes.

If you are staying in a rural village, you don't have to worry too much about safety issues as long as you don't resist the tax honestly when the Chu thieves come calling.

Therefore, many wealthy gentry families in Changsha City, who are thoughtful and qualified, have already begun to arrange for their families to withdraw from Changsha, a city that is destined to become a battlefield.

When the Chu thief detectives also arrived in the area outside Changsha City, another group wanted to escape, but the big gentry who were still struggling before also ran away.

Faced with the fleeing of the big gentry in the city, Yang Sichang, who presided over the war in the city, was very angry at first, and ordered the closure of the city gates to prevent the big gentry from escaping, and called on the big gentry in the city and the ordinary people in the city to contribute money and force Defend the city together and tide over the difficulties together.

But of course, these big gentry families who want to flee are not ordinary people. Many of them are family members who are officials in the court and have a lot of connections.

In fact, many of these fleeing people were family members of middle and senior officials in the city.

Although many officials did not want to escape, or had no way to escape, this did not prevent them from sending their family members out of Changsha to escape the war.

Yang Sichang seems to have a high position and authority, but it is also difficult to fall out with a large number of gentry and big households or even a group of subordinates.

The gentry and their subordinates did not object directly and directly, but adopted the method of absconding secretly.

In the end, Yang Sichang could only turn a blind eye to this.

Under the pressure of the Chu rebels, the army and the people in the city have no morale, what can Yang Sichang do!
After all, everyone knows that the garrison inside the city with only [-] scraped together and no more than [-] soldiers to fight can't stop the [-] to [-] Chu army with hundreds of artillery pieces outside the city.

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After Luo Zhixue led the Chu army to arrive in Changsha City, they did not rush to attack. Instead, they set up camp first and built fortifications to prevent the Ming army from leaving the city to make surprise or night raids.

In the next few days, various siege equipment began to be built on the spot, mainly various long ladders for climbing the city walls, and shield vehicles for defending against Ming army guns and arrows during the advancement process.

As for other siege equipment, especially large-scale siege equipment, the Chu army with hundreds of cannons in hand said that they don't need it.

The Chu army has never needed any large siege equipment to attack the city. It is more effective than any siege equipment to directly pull up the cannon.

Artillery plus blasting, coupled with intensive musket fire support, and heavy armored infantry raiding, this is already the old routine of the Chu army's siege.

The Ming army, who was the defender of the city most of the time, also faced tit-for-tat, building more artillery fortifications, and extending the defense line from the city wall to build trenches and fortresses.

In order to offset the large number of field artillery and mortars in the Chu army.

This tit-for-tat offensive and defensive battle between the two sides had its initial signs in the Battle of Wuchang, and it was relatively mature in the Battle of Linxiang, and it has reached a peak in Changsha now.

Changsha, under the auspices of Yang Sichang, has quite complete artillery fortifications at the head of the city, as well as trenches and fortifications outside the city.

At the same time, compared with the Linxiang garrison, the Changsha garrison has another advantage, that is, there are [-] new standard troops in the city.

Although this right army was just a backup plan used by Yang Sichang to cover up the Chu army's spies, it was still organized and equipped according to the main force of the Chu army.

It's just that the quality and equipment level of the soldiers are not as good as the left army.

This right army has about a thousand new-style muskets, six two-and-a-half-jin field guns, and two five-jin field guns.

These thousand muskets and seven cannons are the most advanced and most important defensive equipment in the Changsha defenders.

In addition to these advanced guns, the other Ming troops in the city were also equipped with about [-] rods of bird guns, and thousands of other messy guns.

There are more than 300 small guns under [-] catties, such as attacking army guns and tiger squatting guns, and about [-] various artillery pieces such as general guns over [-] catties, and Frang machine guns.

In the entire garrison, there are about [-] armors of various types and [-] bows.

In order to gather these weapons and equipment, Yang Sichang searched almost the entire south of Chu, and even mobilized some from neighboring Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and other places.

For example, among the reinforcements sent by Governor Pianyuan, many of them actually belonged to the guards in Guizhou, Sichuan and other places.

However, this is still not enough to resist the Chu thief!

On the fourth day after arriving in Changsha, the Chu thieves made preparations before attacking the city, and finally launched an attack on the tactical node of the Ming army's outside the city.

In just the first day of the attack, the defenders in the city led by Yang Sichang felt the huge pressure of the Chu army, and understood why the Chu bandits were able to win consecutive battles, all the way from Nanyang Mansion from north to south, killing Hanyang, and then killing To Wuchang, and even now Changsha.

Chu Bandit's cannon is so powerful that it cannot be countered by manpower.

On the first day of the Chu thief's siege, at least dozens of field guns of various types and an equal number of mortars were used.

The rumble of guns lasted almost all day.

With the support of intensive artillery fire, multiple units of the Chu army launched attacks on the peripheral defense nodes outside Changsha City from multiple directions at the same time.

The defensive nodes of the Ming army outside the city, especially a few hills with more important tactical functions and relatively high terrain where artillery can be deployed, were all captured by the Chu army on the first day of the war.

By the evening, the Ming army had worked hard outside Changsha and had built an outlying position for several months, half of which had been lost.

Not to mention the loss of half of the troops, and the loss of troops was extremely huge. During this day, the Ming army lost at least 2000 troops.

These 2000 people were either killed or injured, surrendered, or escaped, etc., and disappeared forever from the Ming army system.

And the result they achieved was only about 300 Chu thieves were killed in the counterattack.

Three hundred Chu thieves, this is a drop in the bucket for a Chu thieves army with a strength of 5 to [-].

He suffered heavy losses on the first day of the war, which made Yang Sichang truly feel the strength of the Chu bandits.

When these Chu thieves fight, their routines are completely different from the traditional fighting methods that people know!
Before the Chu thieves attack, they will definitely bombard, and the intensity of the bombardment is far beyond people's imagination.

At noon today, in order to take down a defensive position built on a small hill outside the city of the Ming army, the Chu bandits frantically mobilized more than fifty artillery pieces, most of which were mortars, aimed at this small hilltop. Bombing wildly.

The guards of the Ming army on the top of the mountain did not resist this kind of violent bombardment at all. Even if they were hiding in the trenches, many people were killed by mortar shells.

The built parapets and civil fortifications are very effective in defending against the five-jin or even nine-jin field artillery in the Chu bandits.

The most important thing is that these Chu thieves didn't even line up to launch an attack, but just like the mice, they dug trenches and approached directly, and threw out a bomb that would explode after approaching 30 meters.

In the end, a group of heavy armored infantrymen of the Ming army who were hiding in the trenches and were about to rush out to fight a counterattack suffered heavy casualties!
After throwing the grenade, these thieves rushed up one by one.

And these Chu thieves were all in armor, and the spearmen, sword shieldmen, etc. among them were all heavily armored, and even the musketeers wore half-body armor.

Facing the Chu thieves in full armor, the remnants of the Ming army who had been bombarded and wounded by grenades had already suffered heavy losses, their morale had plummeted to the extreme, and there were many casualties without any effective resistance, and the rest surrendered.

This way of fighting made it difficult for the Ming army defending the city to adapt.

In particular, the way of digging trenches and throwing grenades after approaching made many defensive tactics formulated by the Ming army invalid.

Ditches and parapets, civil forts, are no longer effective fortifications against rebel armies.

On the contrary, the effect of melee fighting in the traditional sense is even better.

In today's battle, the reason why the Ming army was able to cause hundreds of casualties to the Chu army was that most of them were caused when they launched a countercharge.

The Ming army tried many times to suddenly launch a countercharge after the Chu thief approached 30 meters and before throwing the grenade.

The soldiers did not line up, but rushed out to fight, and relying on the elite heavy armored soldiers as the backbone, they caused intensive damage to the Chu army.

Because there was no formation, the attacking Ming army seemed to be in a loose formation, but their actions were faster, and they didn't even give the Chu bandits artillery time to react.

In this way, it is avoided to be intensively bombarded by Chu thief artillery after listing a dense formation.

In addition, Chu thieves seem to be able to rely on various trenches to gradually approach and throw grenades, but this tactic has advantages and disadvantages, and Chu thieves who rely on trenches to advance and fight are also unable to line up.

When the Ming army directly disregarded the formation and launched a counter-charge, the Chu army had no time to organize the formation, so they could only climb out of the trench and fight the Ming army in a melee... If they didn't climb out, they would die even worse hiding in the trench. The armored soldiers of the Ming army who will be rushed up are condescending, shooting a hole...

This kind of sudden counter-charge has been staged many times today, and it has caused a lot of losses to the Chu bandits.

It's just that this kind of tactic is extremely dependent on the quality of individual soldiers. Those elite infantry in heavy armor can thrive in this kind of melee, but ordinary guard soldiers will die miserably in this kind of situation.

The average individual quality and armor penetration rate of the Ming army are far inferior to those of the Chu thieves.

Therefore, in the actual melee, the Ming army still suffered far more casualties than the Chu thieves!

In the Battle of Linxiang, Yu Xiuwen had already tried to use this method to fight against the Chu thieves, but in the end Linxiang still fell!

In the face of absolute firepower, in the face of absolute armor rate, all schemes and tricks, all tactics come to naught.

The Ming army's counterattack seems to be able to make a bubble, but it is only limited to a bubble...

(End of this chapter)