Starting with the smashing of Dunkirk

Chapter 54 Cutting off the main artery of the Bu army
December 24, 1914, 7:12 p.m.

The snow, which had just stopped a couple of days ago, started falling again this afternoon, gradually increasing in intensity. The sound of the wind and snow drowned out most of the surrounding noise, leaving the world a vast expanse of white once more.

"If I hadn't transmigrated to a time of war, and if this were Christmas Eve in my previous life with such beautiful weather, I would have definitely had some kind of romantic encounter..."

Lelouch looked at the snow that hadn't melted on his leather gloves. The thought of spending his first Christmas Eve after transmigrating in the trenches still made him furious. He was determined to kill a few more Indians tonight to vent his anger.

These leather gloves were ordered from a military uniform company he found in Munich, along with camouflage uniforms and work boots—the bolt weight of the first batch of MP15 submachine guns hadn't been adjusted yet, so it was better to be lighter than heavier. The breechblock leaked a lot of sparks and smoke when ejecting the spent cartridge, and not wearing gloves would burn your hands.

These gloves are well-made and made of high-quality materials; the leather is thin and elastic to prevent fingers from being too large to fit into the trigger hole. However, the soldiers still complained somewhat, often feeling that it would be more comfortable not to wear them at all.

But today, with the sudden heavy snowfall and rapid drop in temperature, the advantage of soldiers wearing leather gloves immediately became apparent.

These submachine gunners were in high spirits. Before the battle, they drank a whiskey or two and smoked a cigar, waiting for the order to charge.

Meanwhile, in the enemy trenches opposite, countless soldiers from the subtropical South were shivering from the cold.

Even though the quartermasters issued cotton-padded coats, they couldn't withstand the harsh climate. In addition, none of the South Asian soldiers had gloves, and some even suffered from frostbite on their fingers—some South Asian soldiers kept their fingers on the steel triggers of their rifles in the freezing cold.

If you leave it for too long and then try to take it off, you'll tear off at least a layer of skin and flesh if you try too hard, and if you're unlucky, you might even lose a section of your knuckle. It's like licking an iron railing with your tongue in the dead of winter in Northeast China.

After many such examples, the soldiers no longer dared to patrol or stand guard with their guns in hand. Instead, they would leave their guns in the corner and tuck their hands into their sleeves.

Adding to the problem was the fact that the soldiers from Kannada and the South Asians were at odds with each other, with one side wanting the other to do more work and the other feeling bullied. As a result, the morale of the Burkina Faso colonial army was low and the management was chaotic to an alarming degree.

Lord Kannah was all holed up in the city of Stenford, keeping warm, celebrating the holiday, and enjoying a Christmas Eve feast. The outer defenses of the city were left entirely to South Asian soldiers for patrols.

From 5:00 to 5:30 p.m., the Germans prepared for a fierce artillery barrage for half an hour, but as usual, there was no ground attack after the shelling, so the defenders thought it was just a routine shelling to put on a show.

No one bothered to repair the defensive structures that had been bombed on the front line. Everyone thought that even if they were repaired, they would be bombed again in four hours, so they might as well wait until dawn. They figured the enemy wouldn't actually attack anyway.

……

"It's 7:30. Execute the infiltration order as planned!"

When the time came, Major Bock and Major Lundstätter immediately ordered that each assault battalion split into two companies, dispersed in platoons, and infiltrate forward in small groups.

The Germans did not choose a point of attack directly facing Stenford. Instead, they bypassed the city from the western outskirts as usual, attempting to cut off Stenford from the railway line behind it by making a half-circle, rather than hoping to directly attack the city in the dark.

Without any artillery support, they just went up in the dark.

Lelouch's company was also in the first wave of attack, with Platoon Leader Model leading two platoons in the charge.

Platoon Leader Dieter led two other platoons, mainly armed with light machine guns, to provide support from the second line.

Lelouch and Schweinsteiger guarded the radio station together, with a dozen grenade launcher squads gathered around them, ready to provide fire support for their comrades at the front.

After the Battle of Bayole a few days ago, everyone agreed that Commander Lelouch was exceptionally talented at commanding artillery and grenadier troops. He was an architecture graduate, excelled in mathematics, especially geometry, and was also quite good at physics.

It's not that his aiming was particularly accurate, but rather that he always managed to make the most of various unexpected favorable conditions and create advantages based on the circumstances.

This afternoon, Lelouch noticed that the weather had suddenly turned cold, and on a whim, he did something clever—he had hot water brought in and poured it into the front trenches of several sections that had been selected as grenade launcher positions, melting the snow on the ground slightly.

But the subsequent fresh snow and severe cold will quickly refreeze into a self-leveling ice surface, which is perfect as a horizontal reference surface for deploying grenade launcher groups.

Regardless of how effective this action is in actual combat.

The mere fact that his actions aroused the curiosity of the soldiers, who then spread the word about the brilliance of his move, gave them extra confidence: "With such a smart commander, we can definitely defeat those stupid enemies!"
Lieutenant Model led his groups of submachine gunners, breaking into smaller groups and cautiously advancing through the snow. Several barbed wire fences they encountered along the way had been breached by repeated shelling during the midday and afternoon sessions, and any booby traps that might have been hidden within them had been completely cleared by prior artillery fire.

Barbed wire is difficult to break because the area exposed to force is very small. If the defending troops are proactive in repairing it, they can easily plug the gaps by immediately rebuilding a few sections after the wire is destroyed.

But who told them they wouldn't be attacked on Christmas Eve, so they were too lazy to fix it properly?

Model simply used wire cutters to make a few necessary cuts, and somehow managed to cross the standoff zone and reach the first line of trenches on the other side without any major incident.

"Who is it? What are you doing in this cold weather... Ugh—"

Several sentries with curry accents were momentarily stunned by the commotion. They stood there, hands still tucked into their sleeves, looking nonchalant, peeking around, their Lee-Enfield rifles still resting on the trench wall beside them.

The night sentries were immediately shoveled open by the engineers, their hot brains splattering all over the ground. Their screams were cut short before they could even finish, the sound drowned out by the wind and snow, failing to alert many of their comrades.

Lieutenant Model even personally used an entrenching tool in one hand and a C96 Mauser pistol in the other to kill four enemy soldiers from the Lahore Division with the entrenching tool.

His original intention was to use a pistol to reinforce his attack if he missed, but he ended up slashing five people before failing to kill one with a shovel, forcing him to implement the backup plan.

With sporadic "pop" sounds, the position of the 7th Division in Lahore gradually became lively, as the German infiltration and assault had been discovered.

But when the South Asian soldiers tried to drive the enemy out of the trenches, they discovered that the enemy in front of them was so powerful, disciplined, fearless, and well-equipped.

The sound of submachine gun fire quickly echoed through several nearby trenches, stretching for one or two kilometers, and at least a dozen breach points were in danger.

"Enemy attack! Enemy attack! Organize a counterattack immediately!"

"How could there be an enemy attack? We didn't even hear any artillery fire!"

"Where is the enemy?"

Countless South Asian soldiers and a small number of Bretonnian supervisory troops rushed to the damaged defensive line. In the chaos, groups of soldiers frantically searched for rifles abandoned in the corners of the trenches, and some even trampled each other.

Some of the soldiers who managed to pick up rifles were so anxious and moved too roughly that they tore off a layer of skin and flesh when they wiped their guns!
These guns had been left in the freezing cold for a long time and were completely frozen solid.

The German commandos stormed along the trenches, quickly capturing several key communication trenches and expanding their gains amidst the chaos, leaving the Burgundy positions in a state of panic.

"Hurry! Don't stop! Seize the opportunity to expand our gains and completely destroy the enemy's defenses!" Model led a large group of submachine gun squads, advancing like mercury across the ground, launching a fierce attack deep into the enemy's lines. "Light machine gun teams, don't stop! Charge into the trenches at full speed and deploy to the flanks! Suppress the enemy reinforcements coming to counter-attack!" Lieutenant Dieter followed not far behind him and quickly entered the enemy's first few layers of trenches.

Moreover, Lieutenant Dieter was very clever and immediately ordered his men to set up light machine guns horizontally along the trench to control all the key points.

In the darkness and chaos, the enemy, not knowing which positions had been lost and which had not, would rush in haphazardly to reinforce.

As squads of South Asian infantry rounded the corners of the trenches and entered those sections of trench that they had clearly lost but were unaware of, the German light machine guns would teach them a lesson.

"Da da da da—" The licking flames swept away the South Asian soldiers marching along the trenches without warning, and blood flowed along the trenches, turning them into a bloody ditch.

The Burghers' heavy machine gun positions were not to be outdone, firing haphazardly in the darkness, venting their fear and preventing the assault team from getting close. But these blindly exposed firing positions were quickly suppressed by the German assault team's grenade launchers.

With a high trajectory and relatively accurate firing angle, the grenades landed at the junction of the trenches and on the tops of the rammed earth bunkers that were spitting fire, blowing away one fire support point after another.

The 7th Division's defense zone in Lahore quickly descended into chaos.

Its division headquarters was quickly blocked by messengers on horseback, and all sorts of contradictory bad news and enemy reports left the command system completely bewildered.

Major General Walter Betting, the division commander, was sleeping when he was suddenly awakened by a series of messages and was momentarily confused about the situation.

The divisions from South Asia were smaller than those from the native region, with only 12 battalions and 12,000 men per division. To ensure the combat effectiveness of their troops, the Britannians did not dare to use only native South Asian soldiers, so they often mixed in one-third of the colonists, which was about four battalions of white men.

On Christmas Eve, most of the white soldiers in the Lahore Division had drunk a little, and some even secretly deserted to celebrate. Major General Betin could only muster a couple of thousand white soldiers in a hurry.

He could only grit his teeth and hope that these white people could control the situation and prevent the collapse from escalating.

But this number of people is still less than the two assault battalions on Lelouch's side, and their elite status is far inferior.

The firefighting team that was trying to plug the leak had just been pulled up when they were half-crippled by the suppression of light machine gun fire and forced back into the trench, unable to lift their heads.

From time to time, grenades fired from grenade launchers fell from above, landing in the trenches with extremely high trajectory, splashing up sprays of blood.

Major General Walter Betting and several white officers of various ranks leading the group were wounded one after another, and the group subsequently lost control.

The German troops stormed into the positions of the ragtag Indian rabble, frozen to the bone, like tigers among sheep. Groups of bewildered, dark-skinned soldiers scattered like birds and beasts, fleeing in terror.

In just the middle of the night, the German army swiftly broke through and tore through several kilometers of defensive lines, advancing from the western outskirts of Stenford and cutting off the railway line connecting the northwest of the city to the rear. This scene was remarkably similar to the earlier Battle of Bayole.

The only difference is that tonight the German army took advantage of the enemy's complacency on Christmas Eve, and exploited the unimaginably low morale and appallingly weak fighting capacity of the South Asian soldiers. This is why the Burkina Faso army fell into the same trap a second time.

After discovering that the railway line had been cut off, Bu's army attempted to launch a temporary counterattack to retake the position.

Soldiers from the 1st and 2nd Divisions, who had just finished their Christmas Eve feast and were fast asleep after drinking too much, were woken up by their officers in the middle of the night.

Tell them to quickly put on their uniforms, grab their weapons, and launch a counterattack in the winter night, taking advantage of the enemy's unstable foothold to recapture the positions and railway lines lost by the Indians.

However, when Lord Kanna organized his offensive and launched a counterattack, they were met by an enemy assault battalion that had already established a foothold in the positions around the railway and set up MG15 light machine gun positions.

Because of the darkness, the main German force was unable to follow up immediately. They feared that a large-scale nighttime troop movement would lead to friendly fire and coordination errors.

However, it is still possible to hold the newly captured position for a few hours with just two assault battalions.

Moreover, not all of Lord Kanna's counterattacks arrived on the battlefield at the same time. In such a chaotic environment, it was perfectly normal for troops to arrive one after another and to adopt a piecemeal tactic.

Groups of Kanna men, who had never experienced the baptism of war, mechanically and rigidly launched repeated charges against the light machine gun positions, eventually falling in heaps of corpses before them.

Light machine guns with their barrels buried in the snow had almost the same firepower and endurance as heavy machine guns. In the end, the German assault battalion was forced to abandon a small section of the newly captured position in exchange for space and time because the troops simply didn't have enough ammunition.

"Company commander! We've run out of ammunition for all 32 light machine gun squads! Most of the riflemen's five-round clips have been temporarily inserted into the machine gun belts!"

When Lelouch heard his subordinate Dieter report the situation to him, he couldn't help but feel a bit overwhelmed.

Surprisingly, these Kannas are quite stubborn! Although they lack combat experience, their courage is certainly commendable.

This reminded him of World War II on Earth, when the Kannons were betrayed by their comrades to participate in a probing landing operation that was merely a way to silence them and send them to their deaths. The lives of six thousand Kannon soldiers were sold out by politicians of the colonial power in the same way.

Unexpectedly, in this world, Lord Kanna's first battle, in which his sworn brother was betrayed and killed by the suzerain state, also ended in his own hands.

Lelouch was still somewhat unwilling: "A machine gun squad has 800 rounds of ammunition belts, plus the riflemen's temporary ammunition load, which can be more than a thousand rounds! If that's not enough, then let's borrow some from Company Commander Rommel next door!"

Dieter smiled wryly: "It's really not enough! The whole company has fired at least 30,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition! Even Company Commander Rommel's machine gun is out of ammunition!"

"Unfortunately, I never imagined there would be a day when we would run out of machine gun ammo and have to retreat!"

Looking at the corpses of at least a thousand Lord Kanna in front of him, Lelouch could only sigh and retreat a few hundred meters for the time being, allowing the submachine gunners to provide cover and cover.

Fortunately, his core tactical objective has been achieved. Tonight's attack has cut off Stenford and the railway line behind them.

The troops in the entire Ypres Heights salient were no longer able to obtain new supplies by train.

The assault battalion held out until dawn, when the main force divisions in the rear finally filled in and consolidated all the captured positions.

Lord Kanna and the South Asian soldiers finally gave up their counterattack and were completely blocked by the German army.

-

P.S.: If there are similar ways to defeat enemies later on, and the progression is not innovative, I will write about it briefly. I won't pad the writing, so don't worry.

(End of this chapter)