Chapter 78 Zuiwo battlefield

In fact, Gao Pin believed that the US military's supplies had almost been moved, and he wanted to launch a "counter-attack" to destroy all these supplies in order to completely smash the US military's landing operation.The purpose of firing flares is to allow the Japanese soldiers who were ordered to come from various places to find the assembly point. Shortly after midnight, the Japanese mortar shells attacked the 3rd Marine Regiment, and then the 21st and 9th Regiments also appeared at the front. Under the cover of the mortars, the Japanese army shouted "Long Live" and officially launched an attack on the American positions. "Reverse impact" across the board.

At the end of a round of fighting, the Japanese army left more than a dozen corpses, turned around and fled in a hurry. The impression given to the US military was that although the attack was rapid and sharp, the Japanese troops participating in the battle were still limited and lacked the ability to attack persistently. There is not much difference in night raid battles. However, this is just an illusion. The first round of attacks was a probing attack, in order to find the weakness of the US military.After trying it out, the Ninth Regiment on the right wing is the strongest. Due to its slow expansion to the inland, its strength has not been overly thinned; the Third Regiment on the left wing, although the situation was once serious, now has the support of the "Sherman" tank group , These tanks stayed on the front line all night, and their defenses were difficult to shake.

Gaopin's favorite object is the 21st Regiment in the middle. At 4 o'clock in the morning on the 26th, the Japanese army finally started its main attack. The soldiers were divided into many groups, led by officers, and launched wave after wave of violent attacks on the defensive area of ​​the 1st Battalion of the 21st Regiment. Automatic rifles, light and heavy machine guns roared together, and batches of Japanese soldiers fell to the front of the position, but the successors were still fearless. Ever since the first time they witnessed a Japanese suicide attack in the Battle of Guadalcanal, the U.S. Marine Corps has been trying to figure out why the Japanese did it, and why they could do it.

Some people think that they were anesthetized or injected with stimulants. That's what the 1st Marine Division guessed back then, but there is no direct evidence.Some people wondered whether the Japanese soldiers were drinking too much wine before going to the battlefield, which is why they all looked like lunatics. The latter speculation found its basis in Guam: wine bottles were piled up at the place where the Japanese army assembled and set off. Many of the captured Japanese soldiers were already drunk, and the jugs carried by the corpses were also full of wine bottles. taste. This is another way of "drunk lying on the battlefield".The murderous and drunken drunkards relied purely on the advantage of numbers, and rammed their bodies into the muzzle of the gun. One group of drunkards turned into dead ghosts and fell down, while another group of drunkards scrambled to rush forward.

On the American positions, the roar of automatic weapons first reached the maximum decibel level, and then gradually decreased until it became silent-this marked that the Japanese army finally broke through the weak defense line of the First Battalion. Fighting soon spread to the other two battalions of the 21st Regiment.The U.S. artillery positions in the rear have been supporting the infantry. As the Japanese army approached, the range of their artillery became shorter and shorter, but the firing speed became faster and faster. The artillery shells formed a continuous torrent, concentrating on the Japanese troops. The area rushed rapidly.

Gaopin's "counter-shock" was a three-day carefully prepared military operation, and it can be said that it included all the night attack tactics that the Japanese could think of.In addition to the original "Long Live Assault" and "Powerful Assault", they also designed the "Crack Drilling Warfare" and "Infiltration Warfare" that targeted the gaps between various US military forces. At this time, the defense line of the Third Marine Division was nearly 5,500 meters, and the terrain in the defense area was extremely dangerous. This made it inevitable that there were gaps and gaps between every two units of the US military.

The Japanese army attacked the third battalion of the 21st regiment at first, and after being bounced back, they found a gap between the battalion and the first battalion of the 9th regiment.At the gap, there were almost no U.S. troops defending, so the Japanese army slammed into it. They actually used this method similar to a bug (computer loophole) in the game to occupy a beachhead behind the 3rd Battalion of the 21st Regiment. It wasn't until part of the Japanese army attacked the headquarters of the third battalion at the beach that the third battalion woke up like a dream, knowing that a considerable number of enemies had infiltrated its rear.The battalion commander hastily organized non-combatants such as cooking soldiers and clerks to resist. At the same time, an improvised patrol went around to the top of the mountain behind the Japanese army and threw grenades at the Japanese army, trying to cause chaos in the Japanese army.

The rest of the Japanese troops that infiltrated continued to march towards the sea.They are shouldering the most important mission entrusted by Gaopin, which is to destroy all the materials and equipment brought ashore by the US military, so everyone is covered with explosives.Unfortunately, they don't know where the U.S. military's material dump is, so they can only fumble in the dark. The dump was not found, and the Japanese army came across the field hospital of the Third Marine Division.In the U.S. Marine Corps, even wounded soldiers are not so easy to mess with.Hearing the Japanese soldiers coming to disturb the tranquility, the wounded grabbed grenades, carbines and all available weapons. The slightly wounded who were still able to move ran out of the tent in underwear and pajamas to meet the enemy. Shoot out of the tent.

After a scuffle, the wounded soldiers actually killed 16 Japanese soldiers. The entire third marine division was mobilized. The battalion directly under the division headquarters and the engineering units transporting supplies all went into battle. The artillery positions concentrated their firepower to bombard the densely populated areas of the Japanese army until they defeated the Japanese reinforcements.The final word was finally completed by the remnants of the 1st Battalion of the 21st Regiment, who filled the gap with a decisive counterattack. At this time, the total number of Japanese troops infiltrating behind the U.S. defense line has surpassed the troops in front of the defense line. However, because the Japanese officers who charged in the front in the initial stage of the "counter-shock" had all died one after another, the drunkards lacked command and combat units. Fighting on their own, without any contact and cooperation.

Alcohol did help the Japanese soldiers go on a rampage, but its effect could only last for a while. After the initial excitement passed, the soldiers all became groggy and weak.After dawn, except for a few who fled into the mountains and caves, all the infiltrating Japanese troops were wiped out. The Japanese army occupying the main position of the first battalion of the 21st regiment was equally confused and paralyzed.Although they seized American mortars and many artillery shells, they neither used nor destroyed them, and just buried themselves in digging foxholes. When follow-up reinforcements were cut off by artillery fire, digging a foxhole was no different than digging your own grave.As soon as the wind blows and the wine sobers up, some desperate soldiers commit suicide by blowing up their stomachs with a grenade. Other soldiers hide in dug foxholes, waiting for death.

At noon on July 26, the U.S. military eliminated these almost numb Japanese soldiers one by one, and the first battalion of the 21st regiment regained their main position. There are as many as 4,000 Japanese corpses left on the battlefield.When cleaning the battlefield, the U.S. military found some documents of the Japanese army, only to discover that the scale of the Japanese night attack was not trivial. Gaopin invested a total of ten brigades that night, twice as many as Saito's "counter-assault".It was naturally not an easy task for so many Japanese soldiers to gather in one place in the dark, no wonder flares were used. The third marine division almost capsized in the gutter, which was related to Geiger's reluctance to deploy the reserve force, so that the troops were too thinly deployed, but Geiger also had his difficulties.Geiger's difficulty is that the troops landing from the south of Guam are also in dire straits and need more support.