Chapter 406 Planning (1)
Although the "Sea Lion Plan" of the original time and space was not successfully implemented, Yannick would not be stupid enough to launch a landing war in such a cold winter.
According to the plan, the new version of the "Sea Lion Plan" will be led by paratroopers and airdropped to the British mainland; if a landing war is launched now, a part of the transportation force will be allocated to deliver various cold-proof materials to these paratroopers to prevent them from freezing to death in a foreign country. This will force the transportation plan to reduce the delivery of weapons and ammunition, and also reduce the number of paratroopers accordingly.
When the infantry on the landing craft jump into the freezing cold sea water, the cold-proof clothing will absorb the sea water and become extremely heavy, greatly reducing the combat capability of the soldiers. And the enemy will not give them a place to change their wading wet clothes.
Therefore, Yannick and the military leaders believe that it will take at least until the end of February next year to implement the landing war.
During this period, on the one hand, they must trap the British mainland as much as possible and hit the morale of the British military and civilians; on the other hand, they must actively prepare for the landing war.
This day, Yannick came to a paratrooper training base accompanied by Curt Student.
As soon as the convoy entered the base, accompanied by the roar of planes in the sky, dense parachutes almost covered the entire sky.
Looking at the paratroopers slowly falling in the air, Yannick asked casually. "Is the pass rate of these parachutes 100%?"
"Uh, no, Your Highness." KurtStudent shook his head. "The pass rate is 9%, but this is already the highest level in the world."
"9%?" Yannick frowned in dissatisfaction. "Each parachute is related to the life of a soldier, and they should be 100% qualified. Pass on my order, and randomly select a few from each batch of new parachutes in the future, and let the factory managers carry them to parachute."
This method was learned from the United States. During the Second World War in the original time and space, the pass rate of the US Air Force parachutes was also 9%, which means that from a probability perspective, one out of every thousand parachuting soldiers will die because of unqualified parachutes. The military requires manufacturers to achieve a pass rate of 100%. The person in charge of the manufacturer said that they had tried their best, and 9% was the limit, unless there was a miracle. The military (some people said it was General Patton) changed the inspection system, randomly picking a few parachutes from the parachutes before each delivery, and letting the person in charge of the manufacturer jump and test them personally. Since then, a miracle has occurred, and the pass rate of the parachutes has reached 100%.
Kurt Student said respectfully with admiration. "Your Highness is wise."
As they spoke, everyone came to the room next to them, and a large table in the middle of the room was placed with various weapons and equipment.
The first one was a "bag".
In the original time and space, the German army could not land at the same time when it landed in Crete in 41 years. The paratroopers could only carry pistols, and the weapons were placed in boxes. After landing, they had to search for the weapon boxes first. But the box is not a person, it will not deliberately control the direction of falling, and can only fall with the wind. Then a group of German paratroopers who had just landed took pistols to attack the British positions that were already ready for battle. The reason why the paratroopers fought so hard was because their supply boxes fell on the British positions!
It is hard to imagine how angry those German soldiers who could not find their weapons boxes were.
Only three years later, in Normandy, the Allies were able to carry basic individual equipment and parachute at the same time. This is because a famous British technician in the Allies invented a device called "leg bag" to solve this problem. It is about a one-meter-long rope connected to a bag. After you jump out, the bag is tied to you, and the belt falls at your feet due to gravity. When you are more than ten meters above the ground, you can untie it or simply fall to the ground together, and then take out the weapons inside to fight.
Another important reason why German paratroopers cannot use "leg bags" like almost all American paratroopers is "poverty".
As the country with the greatest war potential in World War II, the United States can be said to have mobilized the country's industrial power to produce military facilities, and gave the green light to paratroopers who can spread their wings in the blue sky, and equipment is given priority. In contrast, the pitiful resources of the Germans were not only divided up by the army, navy and air force, but even transport aircraft could not be guaranteed to be mass-produced, and they could only equip a certain scale of transport troops to transport necessary supplies. By the middle and late 1943, all available resources were used by the Germans on the army and armored technology. How could they have so much spare time to make more individual airborne equipment for paratroopers?
The "Green Devils" who once dominated the European continent had to "parachute" from trucks to the war zone for reinforcement, either because there were not enough transport planes or because the transport planes were out of fuel, and were used as ordinary infantry, which was undoubtedly a tragedy.
Next to the leg bag is a "big pistol".
This "big pistol" is larger than the current pistols, but much smaller than submachine guns; this is the "Scorpion" submachine gun produced by Czechoslovakia in later generations.
Because the size of this submachine gun is not much larger than the combat pistol, some people think it should be counted as a submachine gun. It was designed as a dual-purpose weapon, which can be fired with both hands against the shoulder like a submachine gun, or fired with one hand without shoulder like a pistol. It can be used as an assault weapon in close combat, or as a personal defense weapon instead of a pistol. Its size is very suitable for being carried or used by a vehicle driver or an airplane pilot.
It adopts the traditional free-style bolt operation principle, with three firing modes: semi-automatic, three-round burst and full-automatic. It adopts a hammer-rotating firing method and a locked bolt to ensure shooting accuracy. The theoretical rate of fire is 1150 rounds/minute, and the effective range is 250 meters (but the bullet has almost no penetration effect after exceeding 100 meters).
After being equipped with this "big pistol", even if the paratrooper loses the leg bag during the parachute jump, he can rely on the gun and 100 rounds of bullets he carries with him to fight, which is much better than the small pistol in the original time and space.
Next to it is a FAL rifle. An automatic rifle designed by Belgium in later generations that uses 62×51mm NATO standard rifle bullets.
FAL is probably the best comprehensive performance of the 62mm NATO automatic rifle during the Cold War (generally considered to be the most outstanding among the three NATO heroes: m14, fal, and g3 rifles). Not relying on the hegemony of the country of origin, nor on the public relations of the manufacturer, the FAL was used by more than 90 countries and produced by more than 10 countries after its launch in 1953, with a production of more than 4 million. For a long time, it has not only been given the resounding names such as "one of the greatest mercenary weapons of the 20th century" and "the right hand of the free world", but also has a good reputation among gun enthusiasts at home and abroad because of the few scandals in its 50-year service history.
However, it also has a very obvious disadvantage, that is, its burst accuracy is very poor. It is difficult to control the point of impact in full automatic or three-shot state. But this is a common problem of automatic rifles that fire full-power rifle bullets.
Therefore, when the UK introduced FAL, it cancelled the burst and changed it to the semi-automatic rifle L1A1.
However, changing to semi-automatic does not mean that the rate of fire is low. Rapid shooting with a tripod is still very brutal. Moreover, at medium and short distances, instead of considering the rate of fire, it is better to consider using more accuracy to bring out the advantages of the high power of 62.
Therefore, the German version of the FAL has also cancelled the continuous firing mode and switched to a semi-automatic rifle; because it is issued to paratroopers, the buttstock has also been changed to a folding type; the gun is 1020mm long when the buttstock is open, and 770mm long when the buttstock is folded.