Chapter 1 Airborne Competition Ends with the Annihilation of the Japanese Air Group That Took Off from Xuzhou

On the ground, Unit Commander Asou Isoroku watched helplessly as four bombers flew over, not only failing to bomb the charging enemy troops, but instead opening fire over his own unit, adding insult to injury for the already battered Asou Unit.

During the ambush of the Asou Unit at Zhao Village, six regiments of the Lunan Detachment participated. The Fifth and Eleventh Regiments were in the rear, providing suppressing fire to prevent the Japanese from breaking through to the artillery positions.

The four regiments ambushing on either side of the road were mainly the Third and Fourth Regiments, with the Ninth and Tenth Regiments providing support.

Immediately after Lin Fan issued the order to charge, the Third and Ninth Regiments on the left side of the road, and the Fourth and Tenth Regiments on the right, shouted and charged towards the Japanese.

The charging soldiers could clearly see, "When those Japanese were being bombed by artillery fire, they were running around everywhere.

But when the ground attack aircraft started strafing, all those fleeing Japanese lay down; they didn't dare run anymore."

As the regiments charged closer, the Japanese soldiers of the Asou Unit, though afraid to stand up, crawled rapidly in that direction.

Occasionally, some Japanese fired in that direction. On the left, Regiment Commander Shan Huacan of the Third Regiment commanded twelve companies, each with six heavy machine guns mounted on small carts at the front.

The Ninth Regiment, under the command of Regiment Commander Tian Huacai, also had six heavy machine guns pushed by each company at the front.

Regiment Commander Tian Huacai knew the usefulness of these small carts: they not only facilitated the movement of the heavy machine guns, ensuring strong continuous firepower during the charge,

but also provided the best protection for the soldiers charging behind the heavy machine guns.

These carts, made of welded steel plates, could withstand the shooting of various Japanese firearms, greatly reducing casualties among the charging soldiers.

Regiment Commander Tian Huacai knew this clearly, as he had come from a regular regiment, but the soldiers of his Ninth Regiment did not.

After all, these soldiers had just been transferred from the security regiment, and this was their first time experiencing such a large-scale charge.

The previous two times they fought with the First Regiment, they were mixed in with the soldiers of the First Regiment during the charge, and they hadn't experienced much.

Pan Zhong and Deng Xian, pushing the heavy machine guns this time, listened to the clanging sounds of bullets hitting the carts as they pushed.

At first, those pushing the heavy machine guns were a little scared, after all, the bullets were just whizzing past them.

The heavy machine guns they were pushing had a much larger cross-section than a human body, and therefore took many more bullets.

Moreover, because the heavy machine guns were constantly firing, they became the bullseye for all the Japanese; their machine guns, rifles, and heavy machine guns were all aimed at them.

Even the Japanese grenade launchers, mortars, and infantry guns were firing at this position.

However, the Japanese mortars and infantry guns, such heavy firepower, were constantly under the control of those ground attack aircraft overhead.

As soon as the Lunan Detachment's planes overhead saw a cannon fire a shell, they would immediately search carefully, not stopping until they had destroyed it.

This made the four battalions of the Asou Unit very miserable: only the soldiers of the Lunan Detachment were allowed to charge and attack; the Japanese were not allowed to retaliate.

"Is there any sense of reason here? Is there any martial virtue?" Unit Commander Asou Isoroku roared in his heart, furious and helpless, as he crawled on the ground.

No one knew the words Unit Commander Asou kept bottled up inside, but every Japanese soldier knew that the situation of the entire unit was not optimistic.

He had no choice but to send another distress telegram: "This humble officer, along with the brave warriors of the entire unit, witnessed four heroic and fearless bombers of the Empire fly over the unit and immediately explode.

Numerous warriors of the unit were killed and wounded. Enemy troops have now launched an infantry charge, and enemy planes are circling overhead. This humble officer's life or death is insignificant, but the survival of the entire unit of five thousand warriors is of great importance. Please, Brigade Commander, send capable reinforcements as soon as possible."

His telegram was sent to Brigade Commander Inoue Munetake, who was already on the train, and was nervously watching his troop deployment in the command post.

This telegram was sent less than fifteen minutes after the previous one, and the content made Inoue Munetake's heart bleed.

Clearly, twenty-four planes had departed from Xuzhou. How could only four have reached the battlefield?

And not only did those four fighter planes fail to bomb the enemy troops, but they also bombed their own troops?

What exactly was happening on the front lines?

Commander Sanpou Jiro of the Xuzhou Special Task Force was in the command post. After reading the telegram sent by the Asou Unit,

he first ordered, "Forward the original text to Commander-in-Chief Terauchi Hisaichi of the North China Area Army."

Afraid that the North China Area Army would have too many telegrams and that Commander Terauchi Hisaichi would receive the telegram late, he personally dialed the headquarters of the North China Area Army and read the contents of the third distress telegram from the Asou Unit over the phone.

The implication, of course, was to ask the Commander-in-Chief to increase the air force's efforts. Commander Sanpou Jiro did not know Terauchi Hisaichi's difficulties and only hoped that the Commander-in-Chief would send more warplanes.

He did not know that Commander Terauchi Hisaichi's heart was already filled with regret when he heard that only four of the twenty planes had reached the battlefield and had detonated over their own troops.

He knew this would happen and shouldn't have sent the air force over in the first place. What a waste of so many planes! He knew they were all going to die, but he didn't learn his lesson and still sent the planes, clinging to the hope that they would be successful.

There was no room for luck on the battlefield! Commander Terauchi Hisaichi's heart was still bleeding.

Commander Sanpou Jiro did not hear his reply for a long time and urged him again over the phone.

Commander Terauchi Hisaichi coldly replied, "It is impossible to send the air force; it will never be possible. The Asou Unit must be saved. The Xuzhou Special Task Force must do everything in its power to rescue the Asou Unit. Rescue the Fukagawa Battalion!"

After making his demands, he slammed the phone down and immediately ordered his adjutant, "Immediately send a telegram to the Hefei Airport, ordering the air group that departed for Xuzhou to immediately cancel its mission and return! Urgent!"

Commander Terauchi Hisaichi, still worried, added two words: Urgent!

He was now really anxious. So much time had passed. If he couldn't stop the air group that took off from Jinan Airport, they would suffer another loss.

It didn't matter if those Japanese soldiers died; they could train new pilots. The Empire's resources were scarce, and every plane that crashed was money. If all thirty-six planes were destroyed, that would be a huge sum!

When the order from the Commander of the North China Area Army reached Jinan Airport, the flying group had already taken off.

Although the airport could not understand Commander Terauchi Hisaichi's order, they immediately began calling.

Commander Terauchi Hisaichi's order was very strange: if another place needed urgent air support, they could simply have the air group change its destination.

But this time, they were simply canceling the mission and returning immediately!

Captain Kamikata Yusuke, who had already flown over Teng County, was equally puzzled when he received the order from Jinan Airport: His flying group had already taken ninety-nine steps of a hundred-step journey. Now they were being told to return.

Captain Kamikata Yusuke couldn't understand, and he didn't need to understand! This was actually Commander Terauchi Hisaichi's idea.

These lower-level Japanese soldiers only needed to execute orders like machines.

Captain Kamikata Yusuke was clearly not a machine. He longed for battle and desired battle.

Now that the battlefield was right in front of him, how could he give up just like that?

So Captain Kamikata Yusuke replied, "My group has already begun bombing the enemy; we cannot withdraw."

This was a powerful and irrefutable reason. In fact, he had just finished replying.

His plane began to shake. A plane was not an animal; it was a machine. It had no pain; it only shook when it was mechanically damaged.

Now the fighter plane piloted by Captain Kamikata Yusuke was under attack, and the damage was still increasing.

His headset was filled with exclamations, "Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"

"I've been hit!"

"Kaniya-kun! There's an enemy plane behind you!"

"Captain Kamikata! There's an enemy plane above you!"

...

The entire Japanese flying group was exclaiming, each pilot warning the other Japanese: they were under attack.

These Japanese pilots seemed to have eyes only for what they could shine a flashlight on: they could only see other Japanese being attacked, but they couldn't see that they were also being attacked.

"Da-da-da!"

"Da-da-da!"

Even locked in the cockpit, pilot Asashi Kazuo could hear the sound of machine guns firing.

Among these sounds were the ones made by his own guns firing, and the ones made by the guns of the other planes around him.

Asashi Kazuo was following behind Captain Kamikata Yusuke. Originally, when he saw the captain's plane being attacked, he immediately sped up to try and reinforce the captain.

As a result, his plane was also tightly pursued by an unseen opponent, and countless bullets hit his plane.

Even though he was trying hard to accelerate, the engine sputtered a few times and died.

At that moment, Asashi Kazuo could no longer worry about the life or death of Captain Kamikata Yusuke; he had to worry about his own survival.

He kept telling himself, "Calm down! Calm down! Stay calm!"

But Asashi Kazuo's hand was trembling so much that he could see it himself. He tried to turn the ignition key several times, but couldn't get it to turn.

Finally, he managed to turn the ignition key halfway, but the engine didn't respond at all.

Their flying group had been flying at an altitude of three thousand six hundred meters.

With the engine stalled in mid-air, the plane was still moving forward due to inertia, but it was also being pulled toward the ground by gravity.

Chasing behind him was Shi Zhengqing, a fighter pilot from the Lunan Detachment. According to the assigned targets,

Shi Zhengqing's target was this Japanese fighter plane. He unexpectedly followed the Japanese plane from behind, holding down the firing button without letting go.

The two machine guns continuously fired dense bullets, most of which hit the middle and rear of the enemy plane.

Shi Zhengqing clearly saw that the propeller of the enemy plane below had stopped turning.

This was a sign that the enemy plane had lost power. If the enemy plane could not restart its engine in the air, a crash was inevitable.

To ensure that he completed the task assigned to him, Shi Zhengqing continued to fire even after the enemy plane's propeller stopped turning. The two machine guns continued to cut into the enemy plane with their tongues of fire.

Asashi Kazuo's panicked heart and trembling hands had tried more than ten times, but the engine was still silent, without any response.

Looking at the ground rushing towards him, he dared not delay any longer and immediately jumped out.

Asashi Kazuo, who had rushed out of the cockpit and into the blue sky, had not even had a good look at this world before he was greeted by a string of dense machine gun bullets.

A large hole was blasted in his chest, and Asashi Kazuo's eyes immediately became empty. Without even opening his parachute, his whole body fell straight to the ground.

Having completed his mission, Shi Zhengqing immediately pulled up his plane and searched for the next target.

Yu Zhengyang, the captain of the Lunan Detachment's air group, had assigned himself the lead Japanese plane.

That was Captain Kamikata Yusuke's plane. Captain Yu Zhengyang was the first to attack.

Captain Kamikata Yusuke's air group, which had come all the way from Jinan, was not prepared for the sudden and violent aerial attack.

This made them very uncomfortable. According to their experience in recent battles, they had not fought against the Chinese army's planes for a long time.

Even from the rumors they had heard from the wounded soldiers who had been sent back earlier, they only heard that on the battlefield of the Battle of Wuhan, the Chinese army's planes could only protect the city of Wuhan and would not take the initiative to attack.

Moreover, wasn't this Xuzhou territory? Shouldn't this all be the territory of the Imperial Air Force?

Was this place no longer safe?

No one answered Captain Kamikata Yusuke's question, but the fact that his plane was being beaten was real.

Yu Zhengyang chose the same angle of attack as Shi Zhengqing. This had all been studied: attacking enemy planes from this angle would prevent the enemy pilot from seeing them and would also make it difficult for the enemy plane to escape.

Yu Zhengyang kept a close eye on the enemy plane that was flying left and right below, firing his two machine guns non-stop. He maneuvered his plane to keep a tight grip on the enemy plane, constantly firing behind it.

Watching as things kept falling off the enemy plane, the tail was gone, and the enemy plane was no longer turning nimbly. The tip of the enemy plane's right wing was gone, and the Japanese plane could no longer fly steadily.

Flying erratically in the air, Captain Kamikata Yusuke desperately tried to control his fighter plane. He could already feel that the entire plane was out of control, and he couldn't hold on any longer.

He had to land! He had to make an emergency landing!

This was an occupied area, so even if he landed on the ground, Captain Kamikata Yusuke was not afraid.

He believed that this was an area already occupied by the Japanese, and the local people would definitely help him and send him to the Japanese troops.

So Captain Kamikata Yusuke began to dive down, trying to make an emergency landing.

Yu Zhengyang had not expected that this Japanese pilot and this plane would be so resilient. He had been hitting it for so long, but it could still be controlled.

"How can this be?" Captain Yu Zhengyang absolutely could not let this enemy plane escape.

He sped up and dived down, quickly catching up with Captain Kamikata Yusuke's plane. At this time, Captain Kamikata Yusuke's engine had stalled, and he was no longer trying to restart it.

He was thinking of using inertia to rush straight to the earth and make an emergency landing in the fields. In front of Captain Kamikata Yusuke were all flat fields, all fields after the rice harvest, very flat, and the best place for an emergency landing.

However, the constant shooting of the machine guns behind him made him very uneasy: the machine guns were shooting too accurately, and Captain Kamikata Yusuke's hands and feet had already been hit and injured.

If he was unlucky and a bullet hit his chest or head, he would be dead. To get rid of the plane chasing behind him, Kamikata Yusuke also increased the angle of his dive so that the plane could go faster and make it easier to get rid of the plane behind him.

If he knew the Lunan Detachment flying group's battle plan, Kamikata Yusuke would not have thought so.

Captain Yu Zhengyang's plan was very simple. When the attack was launched, each fighter plane was assigned its own target enemy plane.

The fighter pilots of the entire Lunan Detachment were all staring at their targets, chasing them wherever they flew.

Anyway, the pilots of the Lunan Detachment would not let go of their targets until they shot down the target plane and watched it crash.

The order was given by Yu Zhengyang himself, and his target was accelerating away, accelerating towards the ground.

Although he could already see that the Japanese plane had stalled and the propeller was no longer spinning, judging from the Japanese plane's actions, it was trying to make an emergency landing.

"This can't be! This can't be done!" Captain Yu Zhengyang firmly refused.

He drove his plane and chased after it, firing his machine guns at the enemy plane, which could no longer swerve left and right to dodge. The dense machine gun bullets broke the left wing of the enemy plane at the root again.

This time, Captain Yu Zhengyang didn't have to worry about it: after the plane driven by Captain Kamikata Yusuke lost half of its wing, the balance in the air was broken.

The entire plane stood vertically in the air and kept spinning. Captain Kamikata Yusuke, who was dizzy from being spun around, could no longer make an emergency landing, and now he had no chance to jump out and escape.

Yu Zhengyang watched his target crash headfirst into the field and explode into a cloud of orange-red fire.

Then, he pulled up the nose of the plane, and the fighter plane nimbly swept over the place where Kamikata Yusuke had crashed and went to chase after the Japanese bomber group.

Pilot Kaniya Hei was a fighter pilot in the Japanese Kamikata Yusuke group.

When the entire formation was attacked, he turned sharply to the left in a panic. At this time, he just wanted to avoid the plane that was constantly hitting him.

A cornered dog will jump over a wall, and that was what he was doing now. Kaniya Hei, who was only thinking about escaping, flew to the very top of his team's bomber group.

Attacking it was Wu Youdao of the Lunan Detachment air group, who chased the Japanese plane into the very top of the Japanese bomber group.

The machine gun bullets he fired could penetrate the fighter plane below and still hit the bomber below.

In ancient times, there was one arrow that killed two birds, and now there was one bullet that hit two planes!

Although Wu Youdao's target was the fighter plane in front, it was the bomber flying below that crashed first.

Pilot Uchiyama Yuzo was flying a bomber and was fleeing in a panic. The bomber pilots had all heard the fighter pilots shouting in their headsets.

The constant shouting of "I've been hit!" made Uchiyama Yuzo's heart tremble. He dared not stay here and could only try to fly forward, hoping to escape this airspace.

To his great horror, for some unknown reason, machine gun bullets kept coming down through the skin from overhead, already tearing his right hand to shreds.

Although there were many planes being attacked that he could hear in his ears, not a single bomber had been attacked.

Uchiyama Yuzo became the first bomber to be attacked. Before he could even report the news, he was shot in the head.

Pilot Uchiyama Yuzo's body leaned forward, pressing hard on the control stick, and the bomber immediately plunged to the ground.

The Japanese soldiers in the cabin screamed in fear, and the angle at which the plane was diving towards the ground became larger and larger, almost perpendicular to the ground.

The bodies of the Japanese soldiers in the cabin were all squeezed to the rear of the cabin, and they could not even struggle, let alone go to the cockpit to see what was happening.

Wu Youdao watched as one of the bombers on the lower level suddenly pointed its nose straight down and plunged into the ground, exploding into a large cloud of fire.

However, the fighter plane that he had been chasing and shooting at was still stubbornly escaping.

Although he could already see that its speed had slowed down, the Japanese soldier still dared to continue to escape.

Kaniya Hei kept flying to the left, kept flying to the left, and that was how it was circling in the air.

He also saw a bomber inexplicably diving towards the ground, and Kaniya Hei did not know that the bomber was being harmed by him, and was completely accidentally injured. Da Feng Novel

It wasn't a big deal for Kaniya Hei to keep circling like this. His right wing was already scarred and obviously dragged down the performance of the entire fighter plane, which made Kaniya Hei a little helpless.

Originally, his tactic was to avoid the enemy head-on and wait for another fighter plane from the team to come and help, but he had been circling in the air for three laps.

He still hadn't waited for a single Japanese soldier to come forward to help. Kaniya Hei kept calling in his headset, calling for a fighter plane to come and help.

The replies he received were all, "I'm being attacked." "I'm falling!"

Of the eighteen fighter planes in the entire Kamikata flying group, not a single one came to help.

This made Kaniya Hei very desperate. He could no longer turn, and his battered right wing finally couldn't hold on. First, it broke off a section, then another section, and soon the right wing of his plane was completely broken off.

Like a cross-section, the inside of the cabin could be seen clearly. Kaniya Hei's plane could no longer maintain its stability or continue to fly forward.

The engine also stalled, and a raging fire broke out in the middle of the cabin. The entire plane fell straight to the ground like a stone, and Kaniya Hei had no way to eject himself to parachute out.

Wu Youdao, who had been attacking the plane, did not know that the Japanese soldier could no longer parachute out.

He still did not let his guard down and continued to chase the enemy plane, which was falling like a stone, until it crashed into the earth and exploded into flames. Then he pulled the plane up and chased after the Japanese bomber group.