Sword of Light: Humanoid Self-Propelled Artillery

Chapter 322 Coveted Supplies

In response, Wang Gensheng naturally led his assault team to clean up the battlefield and then pursued the enemy with all his might.

However, after several attempts to thwart them, the distance between Wang Gensheng's forces and Smith's ground forces grew further and further.

Of course, more importantly, after crossing the water gate bridge, the altitude drops sharply, from an altitude of several meters to a few tens of meters.

This is natural, after all, the place Smith retreated to was Xingnan Port. If the elevation didn't decrease, how could it become a port?
Of course, another consequence of the decrease in altitude is the increase in temperature. There is no snow on the plains roads near Xingnan Port.

This limited the possibility of Wang Gensheng and his group using skis to pursue them.

After four or five battles and pursuits, the sky began to change from dark black to dark blue. Looking at the dark blue sky, Wang Gensheng understood that this meant the tail-biting pursuit had come to an end.

After all, without the cover of night, for the US military, which has air superiority, to pursue US ground forces would undoubtedly be a suicidal act.

But to be honest, Wang Gensheng was extremely envious of the supplies that the US military had stockpiled at Xingnan Port.

The supplies here are piled up like mountains, with all kinds of food such as canned goods available, but obtaining supplies here is not as easy as at Hagaru-ri Airport.

The dock warehouses at Xingnan Port were a hot potato, or rather, bait placed in a trap.

It should be noted that in order to evacuate the remnants of the U.S. Marine Corps from the entire country, the U.S. Navy assembled a total of 193 ships of various types at Xingnan Port, including as many as 40 tank landing ships, 15 mechanized infantry landing ships, 75 other transport ships, and seven aircraft carriers on standby.

The fact that such a massive force was used solely for retreat makes one wonder if the US military has become a nervous wreck.

Therefore, it is easy to imagine how difficult it would be to seize supplies from Xingnan Port under the protection of such a large fleet.

On December 13, 1950, an exhausted Marine Corps commander, Smith, transferred his troops to the tank landing ship USS Bellfield and directed his forces to begin boarding. Having abandoned most of their heavy weapons and suffered heavy casualties, the Marine Corps boarded much faster than in October. By the evening of the 14th, boarding was largely complete, and they set sail for Mount Fuku on the 15th for rest and recuperation.

After that, the Marine Corps returned to the battlefield during the Fourth Campaign, but the decimated Marine Corps continued to clear out the Chaozhou guerrillas behind the front lines and did not participate in large-scale battles again.

After the Marine Corps 1 Lion withdrew from the battlefield, the US Army forces in Hungnam Port were commanded by the 7th Infantry Lion Commander. Starting on the 17th, all four US and South Korean Infantry Lions were holed up in Hungnam Port, preparing to board ships for their evacuation.

In addition to its massive transport force, the U.S. military not only used carrier-based aircraft for bombing, but also deployed two Baltimore-class heavy cruisers, seven destroyers, and three tank landing ships equipped with heavy rocket launchers to provide 24-hour fire coverage around Xingnan Port.

In addition, 105mm, 155mm and even 203mm howitzer groups were deployed on the land of Xingnan Port. However, these artillery pieces were disposable. The wealthy US military loaded these artillery pieces with explosives. When it came time to retreat, except for the 203mm artillery pieces which were withdrawn, the 105mm and 155mm artillery pieces were destroyed.

This demonstrates just how abundant the US military's war supplies were. The entire withdrawal lasted ten days, during which the US military fired 34,000 naval gun shells and 12,800 shipborne rockets, a level of firepower exceeding that of the Inchon Landing and the Perry Island landings during the Pacific War, and approaching the level of Iwo Jima.

So in the movie about the Chosin Reservoir Water Gate Bridge, it looks like reinforcements arrived and easily drove away the American troops at Hungnam Port.

However, in reality, it was not an easy task to drive away the US forces in Xingnan Port, which were protected by heavy naval guns.

On the 14th, the vanguard of the 27th Army, after several days of forced march, arrived in the Hamhung-ri area and annihilated a company of US Army infantry, the San Shih, which was stranded there. However, the main force of the US Army had already withdrawn into Hungnam Port by vehicle. The 27th Army could only leave three infantry companies to control the high ground and port of Hamhung-ri, while the rest of the troops were dispersed to carry out small-scale harassment of the heavy US forces in Hungnam Port.

There was no other way. With their heavy firepower inferior to that of the US military, they had to break up their forces into smaller units. The large-caliber naval guns of the US military were no joke. A single shot from those 200mm or even 406mm naval guns could cause casualties of over a hundred men in a company.

It should be noted that Xingnan Port is the main logistics supply base for the US Army on the Eastern Front. All maritime supplies of the US Army on the Eastern Front are unloaded here. In order to ensure the needs of the operation, the US Army, which has always attached great importance to logistics, has stored a huge amount of supplies here, which can be described as astronomical from the perspective of the aid army to Chaozhou.

From Coca-Cola to cigarettes and beer, from down sleeping bags to guns and ammunition, everything was available. Now, to prevent these supplies from falling into the hands of the aid-to-Thailand army, the US military was forced to waste and destroy them.

The US military left its warehouses, overflowing with food and clothing, wide open for anyone to take. US soldiers and dockworkers freely picked through the mountains of supplies, with soldiers wasting them like spendthrifts. One soldier might open a dozen cans of luncheon meat to choose a single piece of meat for a sandwich, or several gallon cans of juice for a drink…

A military officer from the U.S. Army combat engineer battalion responsible for destroying these supplies couldn't help but sigh, "We just brought these things here. If the reinforcements continue to advance, we'll have to destroy them all!"

Records indicate that the US military destroyed over 100,000 tons of supplies at Xingnan Port, with a value of 30 million US dollars.

Keep in mind that this was a US dollar from 1950 that was linked to gold; in today's US dollar terms, it would be worth over a billion dollars.

Heavy weapons and trucks were mostly abandoned; the US military needed to conserve its transport capacity for its soldiers. Among these supplies alone, tens of thousands of canned goods, the individual rations for US soldiers, were destroyed or discarded.

This is why, despite historically capturing Hungnam Port, the resources obtained were even less than those obtained from Hagaru-ri.
Wang Gensheng naturally wanted to change this situation. In fact, he believed that these supplies were far more important than the remains of the US Marine Corps' Lions.

However, breaking through the US military's firepower blockade and obtaining these supplies before the US military destroyed them was a technical task.

The most difficult part was figuring out how to drive away the fleet at sea, or how to make the US forces at Xingnan Port believe that Xingnan Port was about to be captured.

Wang Gensheng naturally thought of the Huitian torpedo in response, because only this weapon could pose a significant threat to the US fleet.

(End of this chapter)