Chapter 1015 Axis Attack (4)
"Onboard!"
On the evening of September 6, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the division commander, and tens of thousands of officers and soldiers of the 2nd Guards Division raised their arms and shouted.
After two days and three nights of fierce fighting, under the cover of naval guns and aircraft, Tadamichi Kuribayashi finally broke the resistance of the 6th Marine Division (minus one regiment) on Christmas Island and completely occupied the island.
In this desperate battle, the 6th Marine Division fought very tenaciously. Although it lost its air cover and artillery advantages on the second day, they made full use of their sufficient supplies, fierce infantry firepower, and familiarity with the terrain of islands and reefs, and inflicted heavy casualties on the opponent. The 2nd Guards Division paid a heavy price, with more than 3,000 casualties and more than 80 tanks lost.
This price surprised Tadamichi Kuribayashi himself, and the 2nd Guards Division from top to bottom also put away the mentality of underestimating the US military.
The 2nd Guards Division was not an ordinary army unit. It was reinforced with firepower and armor before departure. Even the Tiger tanks that ordinary troops did not have could be found in this division. There were many other cutting-edge weapons, such as half-track armored vehicles, Himmler organs, and Jagdpanzer tank destroyers imported from Germany. The tank regiment was mainly equipped with the newly produced Japanese Type 4 tanks - Chito.
Chito is called a new tank, but it is actually a Japanese facelift version of T-34. It uses a 75mm/L48 tank gun. It is more like a hybrid of the T-34 chassis with an improved German No. 4 turret. Compared with Sherman, it is just the same.
Other infantry weapons are not bad either. All members are equipped with Type 99 infantry machine guns, such as STG43 assault rifles and American Browning heavy machine guns. They are also equipped with a batch of recoilless guns, which are very rare for the Japanese Army. They completely crush ordinary army divisions in terms of technical equipment.
However, this equipment still has some difficulty in dealing with American troops, especially in close combat. Although the Type 99 rifle is much stronger than the previous Type 38 rifle, the Type 99 rifle and machine gun combination still cannot suppress the American combination of M1 Garand + BAR. As for the Browning heavy machine gun, the Americans also have more. If it were not for some STG43s and a small number of MG42s removed from armored vehicles, they would not be able to beat the Americans in night firefights.
Of course, the Americans can only passively take the beating during the day. The naval guns of the Combined Fleet and the attack aircraft circling overhead provide great fire suppression for Tadamichi Kuribayashi.
Quickly taking Christmas Island is Tsukahara's only requirement for the Second Division. Every day of delay, the Combined Fleet faces the threat of the US Army Aviation. Although the US military does not dare to attack the mobile fleet or the bombardment fleet in a big way, it does not mean that it will not attack the transport forces, especially the tankers. The mobile fleet commander Kakuji Kakuta has suffered a lot of losses in carrier-based aircraft, and now it has to cooperate with the ground attack. The strength of covering the transport fleet will only decrease and not increase. The longer the time drags on, the more disadvantageous it will be for the fleet - Tsukahara is fighting a landing battle at the risk of losing tankers!
The top US officials were also shocked: in just 60 hours, a Marine division with more than 14,000 people was wiped out. This was the fourth Marine division that was defeated by Japan.
The Marine Corps has so far been organized into 6 active divisions. The 1st Marine Division was defeated by Hori Teikichi with hundreds of naval guns on Guadalcanal. It has not recovered yet and is still in fear; the other two Marine divisions were severely damaged in the Battle of Tarawa; now the 6th Marine Division has also suffered a bad fate. Except for one regiment, the entire army was destroyed (nearly 4,000 US troops were captured).
In order to make up for the losses of the Marine Corps after the Battle of Tarawa, Admiral King not only supplemented personnel, but also trained the 7th and 8th Marine Reserve Divisions. Now these two forces have not yet been established, and the front-line teams have been severely damaged. Now there are only 2 divisions of the Marine Corps that can be pulled out to fight.
But Washington had no time to sigh over the loss of Christmas Island. Losing the island was within the Joint Chiefs' expectations. It was just a matter of time.
Although the speed of loss was a little faster, the results were even more optimistic than the initial estimate. In the face of the achievement of sinking 400,000 tons of Japanese warships of various types, the Army Air Force, whose morale was fluctuating, was slightly stabilized. Everyone acknowledged a reality: the Army Air Force made great sacrifices and achieved great results. The results of these 400,000 tons of warships exceeded the Navy's sinking results in the South American battlefield! (Of course, the quality is not the same)
Therefore, Truman's big pie for the Army Air Force - building an independent air force after the war was praised and agreed by all parties.
What worries the Joint Chiefs of Staff the most now is the increasingly worsening situation in South America:
The main force of the South American Allied Forces is the Fifth Army of the US Army, which originally had a total of 11 division-level units (some divisions were not fully staffed) and more than 200,000 people. Later, 3 division-level units were added, with a total of nearly 270,000 people. It is the largest army of the US military and its combat effectiveness is also second to none.
After the Pearl Harbor incident, the US Army has been expanding at full speed. At present, it has been formally organized into nearly 80 divisions (excluding the National Guard Division), and more than 20 divisions are being organized. Among the 80 divisions, there are 14 armored divisions and 2 cavalry divisions (actually also armored divisions), and the Fifth Army alone has 14 division-level units, including old-brand forces such as the 1st Red Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, and the 3rd Armored Division, as well as new army units such as the 12th Armored Division.
In addition to the 20,000 people who rushed to the front of the Roosevelt Group, the rest were roughly distributed as follows: Ecuador had more than 20,000, Colombia and Venezuela had nearly 40,000, French, Dutch, and British Guiana had a total of nearly 20,000 (and the three allied forces had a total of more than 8,000 people), El Salvador was the main force of the US military, with more than 110,000 officers and soldiers, and Recife had more than 50,000 people. Together with the troops of the various allied forces, the total strength of the ground forces in the South American theater has exceeded 300,000.
But the advantage in manpower did not translate into an advantage on the battlefield.
After the German army raided El Salvador, the first unit to collapse was the Brazilian division. The defeated army not only broke up the U.S. army, but also created an atmosphere of panic to the extreme. Clark then commanded a part of the troops that had lost their heavy equipment to retreat, and asked Roosevelt's group to quickly close in.
Before Patton arrived in El Salvador, the U.S. army there had become more than 90,000, and another nearly 20,000 troops were retreating from El Salvador to Recife. As soon as Patton accepted the command of the army group, he immediately asked all units to stabilize their positions, and even had a quarrel with Clark - the latter insisted on a quick retreat, believing that it was meaningless to defend or counterattack, while Patton held a completely opposite view.
Marshall and most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with Patton's opinion - the U.S. army in El Salvador was nearly 100,000, and the German army was less than 10,000, so why didn't they attack but choose to retreat? After the order was issued, Clark unhappily handed over all the command to Patton, and flew to Recife with a part of the division.
But this fleeting opportunity soon turned into a bubble: Rommel, who had a keen sense of battlefield, immediately deployed an infantry division, two marine brigades, a heavy armored battalion and an air force wing with more than 30,000 people to El Salvador, and ordered Schocken to launch a desperate attack.
The reinforcement prevented El Salvador from being recaptured by the US military, and Schocken's attack exacerbated the panic of the US military on the southern wing.
Four days later, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. With the annihilation of Roosevelt's group and the failure of Patton's counterattack against El Salvador, the situation of the Fifth Army became very bad.
The total number of the Fifth Army, which had been fighting fiercely with Rommel's troops for several days, dropped to just over 80,000 (including three battalions sent by Roosevelt to cover the navy and more than 4,000 people from Hewitt's navy). At the joint request of several division commanders, Patton finally issued a retreat order.
To prevent the German army from pursuing them, Patton divided the retreating troops into three waves and rolled them back in sequence. The naval group and the rescued aviation officers and soldiers followed the army group headquarters, and the three Roosevelt group infantry battalions became the only direct troops of the headquarters.
But Rommel just stuck to it and beat the US rear guard with fierce and short assaults, like a ferocious hyena, unable to strangle the whole elephant, but repeatedly using his flexibility and ferocity to pounce on the opponent and tear off the flesh until the opponent was covered with wounds and scars.
Patton surrounded Rommel's armored forces more than once, but it was useless to just surround them. The US armored forces could not bite the spearhead of the heavy armored battalion with Tiger 2 as the core. Once the time was prolonged, the German follow-up troops and the huge attack aircraft group would immediately fly over to support. The German battle group in the encirclement was very calm and seemed to be very experienced in encirclement. The US military could not swallow even if its teeth were broken, so it could only give up in dissatisfaction.
Rommel knew that Patton's soldiers had no fighting spirit and used this method to kill them - I just like the way you are unhappy with me but helpless.
Patton now realized that the reason why the commanders of the Fifth Army asked to retreat together was not to better preserve their strength, but because everyone was afraid of being left alone to cover the rear! - That means the destruction of the entire division. If a division commander's troops are wiped out and he survives alone, how can he return home with a face?
These division commanders also disagreed with Patton leading his troops to cover the rear. The risk of covering the rear is too great, not to mention that there is no army commander to cover the rear for the division commanders? Once Patton died in battle, the furious Marshall would definitely take action against them - everyone didn't know that Marshall was seriously ill and hospitalized. A step back, even if Patton covered the rear, he would still need troops. Although the army's direct troops still have a reputation, they have lost all their heavy equipment. It's impossible to let three battalions of infantry and naval battle groups go into battle, right?
Now these senior officers were unwilling to die themselves, nor were they willing to let Patton die, so the entire army could only choose the second-best retreat method in this tacit helplessness. Although the speed was not fast, much slower than a part of the army leaving behind and the main force advancing, it was obviously much more orderly than fighting alone and fleeing in a mess, and morale and supplies could be barely maintained. Washington acquiesced to this approach and only hoped that Patton could bring most of the main force back to Recife.
But Rommel would never let the Fifth Army go back so easily. In the early morning of September 7, the landing interception operation code-named "Right Hook" was launched. The German naval transport unit transported the 2nd Armored Grenadier Division to prepare for landing in Alakarlu, with the goal of cutting off the US military's retreat...