Chapter 104 Probability
The tanks rumbled forward, and the infantry covered and followed behind. In the blink of an eye, they arrived in front of the British army.
This was the moment when the British army and the German tanks were in close combat.
The British army actually invented many close-range anti-tank equipment, such as sticky anti-tank grenades and Molotov cocktails.
But on the one hand, these anti-tank grenades themselves have great safety hazards during transportation and storage. For example, Molotov cocktails are glass bottles filled with a mixture of yellow phosphorus and petroleum. When used, they only need to be thrown at the target. After the bottle breaks, the yellow phosphorus will spontaneously ignite when it encounters air, which can ignite a fire on the tank and overheat the engine.
The problem is that these fragile bottles are bound to collide during transportation, and they need to be stored together with other ammunition. If one or two of them are broken, it will cause a major accident.
So British soldiers generally don't bring this thing to the battlefield, which is no different from suicide.
The sticky anti-tank grenade does not have these problems. It is like an inverted flask with a spherical sticky substance on the upper part. After being thrown, it can stick to the tank and explode after a delay of five seconds. Its armor-piercing ability is also quite good. It can penetrate 60MM thick armor and injure enemy infantry with shock waves.
The problem is that this thing weighs 2 kilograms. Ordinary British soldiers can only barely throw it 20 meters away, which is even within its own killing range.
What's worse is that this sticky grenade also requires that the target must not have dust, otherwise the bomb cannot stick to the tank and blow it through... This is simply a joke for tanks fighting in the desert, because any tank has a thick layer of dust on its armor.
British soldiers even laughed at this and said, "Oh, great! Why don't they write in the manual that the enemy tanks must be cleaned before throwing this grenade?"
This also shows some defects in the British army's equipment research and development, and these defects are not individual, but common, just like they developed "infantry tanks" and "cruiser tanks" that are not suitable for battlefield coordination.
The reason is actually very simple... The British have been sitting in the world's number one position for too long, and no one in the world can compete with it, so the equipment research and development is naturally not targeted. Many of them are those self-righteous experts who think so and so and then mass-produce them. As a result, when the battle started, they found that these equipment were useless or not as imagined.
On the other hand, the British thought that this battle would not be lost to the enemy tanks... You have to know that it is 50 "Matilda" against the German 15 "Three", which is absolutely dominant in tank warfare, so close anti-tank grenades are redundant, and tanks will solve these problems.
Unexpectedly, the Germans gave them a big surprise... All the "Matilda" tanks were stuck in the sand and could not move or fight.
At this time, it was too late for the British army to regret. They had rifles, machine guns and other things in their hands, and they had no way to deal with the enemy's tanks.
So the German tanks rushed into the British defense line very smoothly, and the sound of machine guns and cannons soon rang out.
The "No. 3" tank is different from the "Crusader" tank. In addition to a parallel machine gun parallel to the main gun, it also has a heading machine gun. While the main gun is aimed at important targets such as British anti-tank guns and mortars, the heading machine gun will randomly fire at the British infantry.
At this time, the German 50MM mortar also played a role... The trajectory of this thing is a curve, and the shells can pass over their own tanks and hit the enemy. The only disadvantage is that the gunners can't see the target.
But it doesn't matter if you can't see the target, because the other side must be an enemy, a dense enemy, just follow the tank forward and keep firing shells forward.
So a massacre began. British soldiers fell in groups under the German machine guns and artillery shells. Qin Chuan, who was following the tanks, could not see the most tragic scene in front, but he could see British soldiers knocked down by bullets and shells on the flanks through the gaps between the tanks, and heard screams and cries for help from the front. What made Qin Chuan even more unacceptable was that he was stepping on the meat mud crushed by the tank tracks, so his military boots turned red and were stained with a thick layer of minced meat after a while, just like walking into the mountains and being covered with yellow mud, and it was heavy to walk.
Soon, the British army collapsed and began to flee. They could not defend.
But it was not so easy for the British to escape from the Germans. The German "Type 3" tanks were not "Matildas" with a speed of only more than ten kilometers per hour. They were "Type 3s" with a speed of more than forty kilometers per hour. They chased the British infantry and shot the fleeing British soldiers crazily. The German soldiers riding sidecars and armored vehicles also consciously caught up with the tanks to cooperate... So in the desert, only the German steel monsters were seen chasing the British like a flock of sheep, knocking them down in groups while chasing.
Soon, the British soldiers found that they could not escape at all, because several tanks on both wings had copied to their front and formed an encirclement, so the British soldiers could only raise their hands and surrender.
In this battle, the Germans captured more than 2,000 British soldiers, 30 cars loaded with supplies, 50 various artillery pieces, and 36 "Matilda" tanks.
The "36" here refers to the tanks that are intact and can be used... Lieutenant Colonel Bolton ordered the tank soldiers to blow up the tanks before surrendering at the last moment, but the fact is that the tank soldiers did not have this opportunity. The tank soldiers themselves could not blow up the tanks in the tanks, and once they walked out of the tanks, unless they raised their hands, they would have been shot dead by a group of German soldiers guarding outside.
The moment the gunfire stopped, Qin Chuan sat on the ground. He looked at the corpses and body parts around him almost numbly, and there were many injured British soldiers wailing in the pile of dead bodies... The injured no longer cared whether the people around them were their own people or enemies, they just hoped that someone would come to save him or give him a quick death.
The German army would obviously choose the latter. Several soldiers stepped forward and pulled out their pistols, and then with a few "bangs", everything was over.
"You have done another great deed!" Bazel sat next to Qin Chuan: "Although they didn't say it, I know this is your idea again, right?"
Bazel raised his head towards the "Matilda" that was stuck in the sand and couldn't move.
"Yes, sir!" Qin Chuan replied.
Qin Chuan didn't feel proud of this, because he felt that the deaths of these British soldiers in front of him were caused by himself.
Bazel seemed to see through Qin Chuan's thoughts. He patted Qin Chuan on the shoulder and stood up, saying: "This has nothing to do with you, sergeant! As long as there is a war, this will inevitably be the result. The difference is whether they die or us!"
Qin Chuan nodded.
Bazel was right. Even if Qin Chuan didn't make any suggestions, these would still happen.
Qin Chuan couldn't change anything. What he could change was only the probability of his survival in this chaotic world.