Reborn as King of South America

Chapter 285 Deployment
The movements of the British troops on the beachhead were reported to the joint command of the 1st Mixed Brigade and the 3rd Guard Brigade. Liu Yongfu and two other officers combined the intelligence reported by Buenos Aires and quickly analyzed the reasons why the British troops were stationed on the beach and did not advance.

"Brigade Commander Liu, Deputy Brigade Commander He, please look at this."

Shen Fushan, commander of the Third Guard Brigade, pointed to the marching map on the table and analyzed, "The British expeditionary fleet is divided into two groups. One group is facing our army near the port of Buenos Aires, and the other group is going upstream along the mouth of the La Plata River, with a tendency to advance into the inland area of ​​the Paraná River."

"We will march along the river, destroy or occupy the areas along the Paraná River, on the one hand, mobilize and exhaust our reserve forces, on the other hand, indirectly support the Argentine local armed forces, and finally join the Brazilian Army support forces to launch a fierce attack on our army.

The British have a big appetite.”

Based on British military intelligence, He Yanliang guessed the enemy's strategic intentions.

"They let go of our heavily guarded inland towns, chose to break through the coastal ports, attacked upstream along the inland rivers, and went straight to the core areas ruled by our army. The British used this trick in the Opium War thirty or forty years ago. Their warships occupied Zhenjiang, and their army approached the city of Nanjing. They used a swift and decisive march to force the Qing government to negotiate and accept peace terms that were favorable to the British army. Now, decades later, the British want to repeat the same trick and use it on us, but it's a waste of effort."

Following up on He Yanliang’s words, Shen Fushan added.

"The present is different from the past. Today's national defense army is not the corrupt and backward Qing Dynasty Green Camp Army. Even if the British use their superior naval military power to attack our army, they will not gain any advantage."

Transferred from Annan to the mainland of Han, and promoted step by step from battalion commander to commander of the main mixed brigade, Liu Yongfu had the deepest understanding of the differences between the National Defense Army and the Qing army.

The Green Camp troops of the Qing army were engaged in various kinds of chaos, such as eating empty guns, drinking the blood of soldiers, and smoking opium. Even Feng Zicai's troops in Guangxi, who had defeated the peasant uprising army several times, were unable to stop this chaos.

On the other hand, in the National Defense Force, the salaries of soldiers and officers are counted and verified by the General Staff, and then paid out to the soldiers' bank accounts by the National Bank. Records of each soldier's salary payment are kept, which completely solves the problem of troop officers embezzling salaries after being taken over by the troop chief.

Economic guarantees such as military pay, soldier casualty pensions, and land rewards for enlisted soldiers are the basis for maintaining the combat effectiveness of the National Defense Force. At the same time, drawing on the experience of later generations, systematically training professional officers and rationally optimizing the troop structure are another important measure to ensure that the combat effectiveness of the expanded National Defense Force will not decline seriously when a major war comes.

Before the outbreak of the Argentine War, the National Defense Army's field troops totaled hundreds of thousands. After the outbreak of the war, including additional field troops, garrison troops, and militia troops, the total number of troops expanded to more than 300,000, including 220,000 front-line troops and about 100,000 troops stationed on the mainland.

Among the newly expanded troops of nearly 200,000, more than half of the grassroots officers were transferred from other troops, while the other part of the officers were temporarily promoted military academy students like Wang Shizhen, Lu Rongting and others, as well as veterans with rich combat experience.

Following the example of Germany's officer corps policy after the end of World War I, a large number of officers were retained as deputy positions in the army during peacetime. This ensured that when war broke out, a unit could be quickly divided into two basic units based on the organizational structure of the skeleton unit, and then supplemented with conscripts to form new combat units.

The combat effectiveness of the newly expanded troops will decline to a certain extent in the initial stage of integration. However, under the model of grassroots officers and key non-commissioned officers leading the new, they can help the recruits adapt to the battlefield environment in the shortest possible time and complete the transformation from a recruit to a qualified warrior.

The main force of the 1st Mixed Brigade was divided into three and sent to other battlefields. The 1st Mixed Brigade directly under Liu Yongfu's command had only more than 1,000 soldiers, while the 3rd Guard Brigade had more than 6,000 soldiers, half of whom were new recruits.

With the combined strength of part of the 1st Mixed Brigade, the 3rd Security Brigade, the engineers, artillery, and logistics units, Liu Yongfu and his two companions had barely more than 10,000 troops under their command. When assigning combat missions two days ago, Liu Yongfu had proposed to Li Mingyuan that he hope to draw young soldiers from the Boy Scout Camp from the rear to strengthen the troops, but his suggestion was rejected by Li Mingyuan.

Inheriting the military traditions of the Taiping Army and major powers in later generations, the National Defense Army also has an organized Boy Scout unit.

However, unlike the Boy Scouts during the Taiping Rebellion, the Boy Camp only recruits war orphans, orphans recruited from the mainland, and some children from civilian families who have a strong desire to join the army.

After several years of expansion, the number of boy soldiers between the ages of twelve and fifteen exceeded ten thousand, and the number remained at around fifteen thousand. There were forty thousand boy soldiers under the age of twelve, and the number was increasing year by year.

The Boy Camp is a supplement and improvement to the education in the Army Middle School. Every year, at least two-thirds of the young students entering the Army Middle School come from the Boy Camp. Therefore, many civilian families regard joining the Boy Camp as a shortcut to becoming an officer and send their boys to study in the Boy Camp.

Among the Taiping Army's later generals, Prince Ying Chen Yucheng, Prince Mu Tan Shaoguang, Prince Hu Chen Kunshu, Prince Xie Tan Tiyuan and Li Mingyuan's biological father, Prince Shi Li Shixian, were all former soldiers in the Boy Camp.

The Taiping Army's young soldiers, who were pure in faith and brave in combat, fought on the front lines of the war, but they were often sacrificed by the Taiping Army's high-ranking officers in their quest for victory. In the battle for Wuhan, Chen Yucheng's Boys' Battalion served as a death squad, suffering heavy casualties. In the battle for Jiading, more than 100 Boys' Battalion soldiers were killed in the battle to cover the retreat of the Taiping Army's main force.

The high-level officials were corrupt, the army was losing ground, the lower-level soldiers in the Boy Scout Camp shed blood and sacrificed their lives for their illusory ideals, but in the end all they got was betrayal and abandonment from the Taiping Army's high-level officials.

The cruelty and ruthlessness of those in power were nakedly displayed in the war. As a South American Chinese leader whose ideals had never been extinguished, Li Mingyuan could not take advantage of the admiration of the boys in the Boy Camp for him and consume them in a brutal war in advance.

Not only was Liu Yongfu's request rejected, but the requests of those generals who came from the remnants of the Taiping Army and requested to recruit teenagers in their teens to form a suicide squad to attack the city according to the old Taiping Army practice were also rejected one by one.

After receiving a harsh reprimand from Li Mingyuan, the pride that had just risen in Liu Yongfu's heart was immediately extinguished. Together with his deputy He Yanliang and a close aide who were familiar with him in the past, Liu Yongfu formed an organizational team. When formulating the battle plan, he was more careful and cautious.

"Your Highness is in charge of Buenos Aires, so it's difficult for the British to break through there. The New Capital is connected to the open sea by the Patos Lagoon, so large British warships cannot approach the port area, and the threat to the New Capital is limited. But if the British warships do not engage with our army, and only leave a part of the army to occupy the beachhead and set up fortifications to contain our actions, while their naval frigates and gunboats give up engaging with our army and go upstream to attack Rosario, Paraná, and Santa Fe, wouldn't that disrupt our combat deployment?"

After calming down for a few minutes, Liu Yongfu expressed his concerns.

"It's not impossible."

He Yanliang frowned, leaned one arm on the table, and pondered.

"Commanders, telegram from the front headquarters!"

While the three were thinking about countermeasures, the officer on duty in the telegraph room hurried into the operations room, took out a telegram and handed it to Liu Yongfu.

"Okay, okay, more than 14,000 mines have been deployed in the Santa Fe and Parana river basins. The minelaying warships of the inland fleet are laying mines in the waters outside Rosario. The front-line headquarters ordered our army to launch an attack on the British landing force tonight to delay the British fleet's advance into the inland river basin and buy as much time as possible for the inland fleet to lay mines."

Liu Yongfu said "good" three times in a row, and handed the telegram in his hand to He Yanliang and Shen Fushan respectively, saying, "Five days ago, the inland fleet transported a batch of weapons to the First Mixed Brigade. I thought they had just completed the inland escort transportation mission, but I didn't expect the navy to act so quickly. Mines have been laid in the waters of hundreds of kilometers in the Santa Fe and Paraná rivers. Mines are also being laid in the waters around Rosario. With the blockage of mines throughout the inland river basin, it will not be so easy for the British fleet to freely pass through the Paraná River."

"Yes, the waters at the mouth of the La Plata River are wide, and it is difficult to lay mines, and the effect is small. We should simply not lay mines within the 300-kilometer area along the La Plata River. This will paralyze the British fleet commanders and make them think that our army acted hastily and did not have time to lay mines in the Paraná River. This will also encourage them to sail boldly to Rosario and experience the power of the Han country's special mines."

Shen Fushan put down the telegram and said with a smile on his face.

Mines, grenades, machine guns, and land mines have relatively low technical content. Li Mingyuan, who was born a mercenary, knew more about these weapons that he often came into contact with in his previous life. When fighting in the field, using existing weapons or equipment, laying booby traps, and discovering and avoiding locally buried mines are all necessary professional skills. Therefore, in certain specific military industrial fields, with Li Mingyuan's intervention and command, the armed equipment of the National Defense Forces was much more advanced than that of Western officers of the same period.

Mines of various purposes, such as pressure-activated, trigger-activated, floating, and electrolyte-activated, are constantly being invented, then manufactured in large quantities after being improved through experiments, and finally stored away until the day they are needed.

Liu Yongfu didn't understand the structural principles of mines, but after watching the simulated mine attack tactics in the navy's exercises, he could intuitively feel the power of mine attacks.

The major strategic guidelines have been formulated by the front-line headquarters. What Liu Yongfu and others have to do is to complete the specific tactical deployment according to the orders of the headquarters.

"Convey the order from the frontline headquarters for officers above the battalion level. All regiments and battalions must be ready for battle before 12:00 and launch the surprise attack at 12:40 a.m.!"

"Yes!"……

(End of this chapter)