Chapter 167: The Polish Campaign (30)

On this day, senior officials such as Yannick and Rundstedt came to the front line.

After getting off the plane, Rundstedt looked around and sighed with emotion. "Several of my military school classmates died on this land during the last war."

"Your Majesty General, this time we will definitely fulfill their long-cherished wish." Yannick comforted them.

"It made His Highness laugh." Rundstedt quickly regained his composure. "It's been so many years. It's just a little sad to be here again today." After saying this, he still seemed hesitant to speak.

Seeing this, Yannick took the initiative to speak. "It's okay to tell me what you have to say, General."

Rundstedt hesitated and then spoke cautiously. "Brauchich..."

"Walter von Brauchitsch? He wants to return to the army?" Seeing Rundstedt nodding, Yannick showed a hint of a smile. "It seems a bit humiliating to give him the position of battalion commander. How about giving him the position of chief of general staff, General?" Brauchitsch does have some military talent, but there are also many talents in the German army, and he is one more person. No more, no more than him. I gave him a chance before, but he didn't take it, otherwise he would be the current Army Chief of Staff. "Those who cannot keep up with the times will only be eliminated, just like this Poland."

"..." Rundstedt broke out in a cold sweat. He seemed to have mentioned something that he shouldn't have mentioned. The German army has been promoted to marshal for 20 years. After this Polish campaign, a new marshal is likely to be appointed, and the most likely candidate is himself. He didn't want to lose such a soldier's supreme honor, so he hurriedly lowered his head and said respectfully. "I understand, Your Highness."

Seeing that Yannick no longer wanted to delve deeper, Rundstedt also quickly changed the subject. "Your Highness, since we have so many super weapons, why did we only bring the K5 train gun?" This time they not only came for inspection, but also sent five K5 train guns to assist in the attack on Warsaw.

As the top commander of the Army, Rundstedt certainly knew some secrets. Except for the top secret nuclear programs, he knows a thing or two about V1, V2, V3 and so on.

Yannick asked casually. "General, do you know what the benefits of war are?"

Rundstedt thought for a moment. "Territory? Resources? Population?"

Yannick smiled. "Those are just one of them. Although wars are bloody, every war destroys countless families and separates wives and children; it makes countless people displaced and leave their homes. But war also has its benefits. It will rapidly promote the development of human science and technology, almost Every technological revolution is related to war."

For example, during Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, the front was very long and the shelf life of food was very demanding. So an Apel expert invented glass canned food after repeated experiments, which greatly enhanced the shelf life of food.

There is also assembly line production, which originally originated from the Anglo-American War in 1912. The US military was in urgent need of a batch of 5,000 firearms and required a short time to complete them. At that time, American gun factories were all small self-employed workshops, and no one dared to take over. Later, someone came up with a way. Dozens of manufacturers joined together, each made a part, and finally put the gun together. This kind of production reduces costs and saves time.

Computers, nuclear technology, rocket and aerospace technology, the greatest technologies of later generations of mankind, are all products of World War II.

"Take airplanes, for example. They were not initially considered useless in a war."

In the early 20th century, with the advent of heavier-than-air aircraft, militaries around the world began purchasing aircraft.

During the wars among European countries in the early 20th century, Italy seized a colony in North Africa from the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which later became Libya. In November of that year, Italy established an air force unit, and Giulio Zavodi was one of the pilots.

“Two boxes full of bombs arrived today,” Zavodi wrote to his father in Naples. "We'll drop them from the plane. The weird thing is, no one told us about this beforehand, and we didn't get any instructions from our superiors, so we carefully put the bombs on the plane. Drop these guys in Turkey It should be interesting in people.”

The rest of the story is history.

Three years later, all the major European armies had small air ministries, and they were at a painful juncture before the start of World War I.

However, mainstream technology organizations are still slow to understand the strategic importance of this setting. In October 1910, Scientific American magazine criticized the idea of ​​using aircraft as weapons of war, stating: "Except for the purpose of reconnaissance, we consider the usefulness of aircraft to be rather limited, since its carrying capacity is small, and if To avoid enemy artillery fire, it can only operate at high altitudes, and the destructive effect of the explosives it drops on cities, fortresses, enemy camps or troops on land, let alone warships at sea, is very limited. It has no real effect."

Indeed, in the early days of the war, aircraft were still used only as observation platforms, but air-to-air warfare was a natural step in the evolution of air combat. Both sides of the battle have aircraft and pilots, and they will soon meet on a narrow road above the trenches. The initial confrontation is indeed more gentlemanly, or very chivalrous, because these air warriors still have something in common with each other. Our compatriots on the ground are out of reach.

It wasn’t long, however, before they realized that the enemy in the trenches with their Mausers pointed at your head was saluting the same flag as the enemy gliding by in their painted Albatross fighter planes with their scarves around their necks. Someone drew a pistol in the air, the first plane was shot down, and the air war began.

Soon, aerial observers like Giulio Zavoddi, who flew over enemy lines, realized that they could easily drop explosives. Tactical bombing as a doctrine was born. In the words of Scientific American magazine, aerial bombs really began to “have a real effect on the war.”

“It’s easy to imitate, but difficult to create. If the enemy sees our super weapons today, they will do their best to imitate and copy them. Perhaps in a few years, those weapons will be used against us. And they will also try to find ways to defend against such super weapons, and then the attack will be greatly reduced.”

Just like the nuclear egg, no one knew whether it could be made or how to make it before the United States made it. It was not until the United States detonated the first nuclear egg that other countries were convinced that this thing could really be made, and major powers followed suit.

What the Americans did was called innovation. At that time, no one knew whether the nuclear egg could be made, and they were all crossing the river by feeling the stones. When everyone knew that it could be made, it became an engineering problem. It was easy to do it with the efforts of the whole country. In the future, even some small countries that were so poor that they were scumbags could make it.

As for the methods to resist these super weapons, even nuclear eggs have the method of "digging deep holes and storing food widely", and the current "super weapons" can certainly be defended.

For example, the "radio proximity fuze" is considered a "super weapon". According to post-war statistics, the main force of the US military's ship-borne anti-aircraft artillery, the 127mm gun, used radio proximity fuzes to shoot down each enemy plane on average, and when using conventional shells, it took four times more, that is, 2,000 rounds. Most of the artillery that defended against the attacks of the Kamikaze suicide squad in the later stages of the war had the help of radio proximity fuzes.

Unfortunately, the early proximity fuzes were not very resistant to interference. They would easily explode prematurely if they were below 100 meters above sea level. Alternatively, the simplest and crudest high-intensity clutter interference could also effectively deal with this proximity fuze.

The V-1 missile did cause great panic among the British when it was first put into the war, but it didn't take long for the British to find a way to deal with the V-1 missile. Because the V-1 missile flew at a leisurely altitude, some highly skilled pilots of the Royal Air Force could dive very close to the missile and suddenly fire to shoot it down.

Later, some bold pilots treated the V-1 as a big toy and were too lazy to even fire. They flew their fighter planes side by side at a constant speed under the missile, with the wings under the belly of the missile, and then flipped the fuselage. The wings would flip the V-1 missile over and crash it.

Another example is the acoustic self-guided torpedo. This torpedo was different from the ordinary torpedoes at the time. It could guide itself to the target - the engine of the enemy ship to destroy the enemy ship's power system. This type of torpedo that can turn and track the target caused panic in the British Navy at first, but they soon found a solution, dragging a machine that can make a lot of noise behind the ship to make the torpedo deviate from the course. As a result, this large number of guided weapons did not play a big role. Instead, because of several incidents of turning back to attack the submarine that launched it after launching, this type of torpedo was criticized by officers and soldiers of the submarine force.

So Yannick planned to use those shocking super weapons at the most critical moment to give the enemy the greatest blow.