Munitions Empire

Tang Mo heard the good news while having lunch; his aircraft carrier had completed the fighter jet take-off and landing experiments, and he foresaw the birth of a modernized fleet with an aircraft carrier at its core.

As long as this fleet existed, Tang Mo would be able to control the Endless Sea and even extend his reach to the Demon Sea, controlling the world's two largest oceans and establishing a maritime hegemony for Tang Country.

However, there was also some bad news that greatly annoyed Tang Mo. Warships from the Anti-Tang Alliance had appeared on the sea lane between Dragon Island and Dongwan, ambushing Tang Country's transport convoys.

In fact, the navies of these countries had been attacking Tang Country's fleet all along, exploiting their numerical advantage. They launched surprise attacks across the vast sea, striking and then fleeing, causing significant trouble for Tang Country's maritime transport lines.

To date, the Alliance's sneak attacks on Tang Country's fleets had sunk more than 1 million tons of transport ships, severely affecting Tang Country's oil transportation.

If it weren't for the fact that Tang Country was doing so well on land, having directly seized the southern oil fields of the Dahua Empire to ease domestic demands, the situation of Tang Country might have been even more passive.

Even though Tang Mo's submarine forces were also continuously sinking the enemy's transport ships, and even faster than the Alliance was sinking Tang's transport ships, this mutual destruction was still quite unsettling.

The Alliance warships appearing on the sea routes from Dragon Island to Dongwan were mostly cruisers and destroyers, which were fast and numerous, with formidable fighting capabilities, causing the Tang Army great headaches.

Both sides engaged in small-scale battles on these sea lanes; sometimes, it was just one destroyer against another.

The scale was always small; if the enemy numbers were too great, they simply didn't engage and turned to flee instead. In over two months of skirmishes, the Tang Army lost seventeen or eighteen destroyers, while the losses for the various countries' warships were roughly twenty to thirty.

Despite the greater losses for the foreign fleets, they had indeed achieved some success. The loss of Tang Country's transport ships was significant, and this had already severely impacted some industrial production.

Nevertheless, this passive situation was only temporary as Tang Country's navy was intensifying its escort efforts, and overall, Tang Country still maintained the initiative.

In a few months' time, once Tang Country's aircraft carrier began to be combat-ready, the maritime situation would undoubtedly lean toward the Tang Army.

What Tang Mo was waiting for was just for the aircraft carrier to join the naval ranks.

...

South of Fengjiang City, on a high ground, Tang Army soldiers were in the rugged trenches, cleaning up a battlefield littered with bodies.

The wreckage of a destroyed Panzer IV assault gun was still emitting heat, and two Tang Army soldiers were counting dog tags torn from the bodies of their comrades.

Every Tang Army soldier had an ID tag to certify their identity, which also facilitated the accounting of casualties or fatalities.

The task of collecting such ID tags was very harsh; each one soaked in fresh blood represented a young soldier who had departed forever.

The distinctive M35 helmets of the Tang Army were quite conspicuous on the battlefield, easier to distinguish than those of the Dahua Empire soldiers and the Qin Army soldiers.

The defensive positions here were ingeniously designed; in fact, it was the first time the Tang Army had encountered such defensive fortifications.

The Qin Army had buried a Dahua Type 2 tank in the position, exposing only its turret and had carefully camouflaged it.

Such "steel bunkers," arranged this way, reached the peak in terms of concealment and defensibility, not easily detected or destroyed.

Numerous times, the Tang Army's Panzer IV assault gun shells had hit the earthen mound in front of this buried Dahua tank, unable to destroy this highly threatening target.

Due to the effective camouflage, it was also difficult to detect such "bunkers" from the sky. Only when the frontline Tang Army troops launched an assault did the soldiers encounter this cursed obstacle in their path.

The machine gun on the tank could easily suppress the advancing Tang soldiers, and then the Qin soldiers would launch a counterattack from predetermined positions, annihilating the Tang soldiers pinned down by machine-gun fire one by one.

By the time the Tang Army had gathered enough tanks and armored vehicles to come to the rescue and eliminate this fire point, casualties had already been incurred, and it was all too late.

In the recent assault, the Tang Army had lost over thirty soldiers, equivalent to the total annihilation of a platoon.

Even though the combined forces of the Dahua troops and the Qin Army had also lost nearly a hundred men, such an exchange rate was unprecedented.

"The enemy's positions are becoming more fortified," said a battalion commander, looking at the not yet dried bloodstains on the walls of the trench, speaking with a pained voice.

The combat effectiveness of Qin Country's army was quite high. They would plant booby traps in their positions and even feign death to take approaching Tang soldiers down with them.

A piece of ground often required repeated contests, and both parties would suffer heavy casualties before victory was determined. Although the Tang Army always managed to capture the ground they aimed to take, the cost had been rising steeply.

Because the defenses around Fengjiang were becoming thicker and the number of troops was increasing, the impact of the Tang Army's armored assault tactics was diminishing.

It was much like the Battle of Kursk; with the thickness of the Soviet defense lines laid out, the German Armored Corps would advance ten-plus kilometers a day only to find themselves still deep within enemy lines and taking heavy fire, failing to achieve a breakthrough.