I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution
Chapter 280 : Mobile Penetration, Firepower SaturationAs soon as Kurz landed and completed his armament, he received a notification from the airborne airship reconnaissance network: 【Three enemy patrol units have been detected at approximate coordinates X66300, Y47400. Each unit has approximately 30 personnel. Their main force is located 3 km to the rear.】
Kurz replied, “Roger. Coordinates X66300, Y47400. How long until the aerial support force arrives?”
【Estimated time: 25 minutes.】
“The first phase is to eliminate the patrol points and clear a safe airspace for the aircraft. Mission time: within 20 minutes. Synchronize watches.”
After synchronizing their watches and bumping fists with the other squad leaders, Kurz led his squad members off in separate directions to begin the operation.
The armored group's vanguard had been driving the routed soldiers ahead like herding ducks, though it was entirely unintentional—their routes simply happened to coincide.
The routed troops wanted to flee toward neighboring friendly units, while the Alliance's armored group was likewise heading straight for other Allied forces.
The main army, numbering in the millions, had been split into several parts and scattered across every surrounding continent like holes in a sieve. Allied forces were everywhere, allowing them to support one another. If one force was defeated, nearby units could immediately move in and encircle the enemy.
At first glance, it looked like an excellent arrangement.
But once a force of fewer than 200,000 troops failed to mount any meaningful resistance—such as when it encountered the Alliance's mixed armored army spearhead consisting of two tank divisions and one armored division—it would collapse like a row of dominoes, one formation after another being smashed through.
Along the way, routed soldiers who saw the approaching tanks immediately knelt to surrender, only for the lead tank commander to stick his head out and roar, “Get the hell out of the way! Stop blocking the road! I don't have time to take prisoners!”
Beginning from two breakthrough points, the two armored army groups maneuvered like razor-sharp arrowheads, weaving left and right as they smashed through and scattered every Allied force marked throughout the surrounding region.
Reports from the front continuously arrived at the desk of Ashadron, the Supreme Commander in the Luke Region. After conducting simulations on the sand table and realizing the danger,
he immediately ordered the Allied main force to assemble two armored formations, likewise centered around tanks and mechanized soldiers, intending to block those two spearheads head-on and buy time for the rest of the army to react.
As long as they could stall the offensive, those two salients would immediately become isolated forces surrounded on all sides—365 degrees without a single blind spot—by the Allied main army. They would not even have a chance to retreat.
However, this was exactly what the Alliance General Staff had been hoping for.
The armored units that could be concentrated together were basically all combinations of light and medium vehicles. None of them suffered from poor mobility. At the very least, they were incomparably faster than the Allied nations' obsolete relics such as the old Saint-Chamond tanks.
More often than not, the Allied command had only just received news of where the Alliance's spearhead units were and hurriedly dispatched armored groups to reinforce the area. By the time they arrived, all they found were wreckage scattered across the battlefield and friendly forces whose formations had already been shattered. The Alliance tanks had long since disappeared, already hundreds of kilometers away.
Splitting their forces was no better, because it wasn't that the Alliance couldn't fight—they simply didn't want to waste too much time.
If an enemy force was no larger than a single armored division, the constantly maneuvering Alliance armored army groups would immediately reverse course. The two groups would form a pincer attack and counter-encircle the pursuing Allied armored force.
Dive bombers and armed helicopters would then unleash continuous firepower saturation over the entire area, while Little Bun tanks and Sherman tanks used their superior mobility to launch repeated flank attacks and rear assaults.
Relying on flexible maneuvering—firing a shot and immediately changing positions—they would swiftly annihilate the division-sized force with the assistance of the air force.
Once the Allied forces had their armored strength pulled away, their combat capability instantly dropped by an entire tier. Facing the Alliance's tank units, which specialized in surprise attacks, flanking maneuvers, and cutting off supply lines, they collapsed at the first contact.
They couldn't catch up, nor could they outrun them. Once surrounded and cut off from supplies, they had no choice but to lay down their weapons and surrender where they stood.
Although the Allied main army appeared enormous in size, in just two weeks the Alliance had already occupied one-third of Hosas, while the remaining areas were gradually encircled and eliminated by the mechanized infantry and artillery units arriving behind them.
According to rough statistics, at least 700,000 troops had their unit designations erased from the order of battle. They had either been scattered or had surrendered, and the number continued rising rapidly. The longer the fighting continued, the weaker the Allied regional forces became, making resistance increasingly difficult, leaving the commanders so enraged that blisters had begun forming at the corners of their mouths.
The situation on the other fronts developed in much the same way.
Whenever Ashadron ordered his forces to regroup for a concentrated defense and prepare for trench warfare, the defenders who had painstakingly prepared their fortifications could only abandon their defensive lines and withdraw toward the rear.
During that long and seemingly endless journey back to regroup, any force unfortunate enough to encounter the Alliance armored army was almost inevitably surrounded, after which the main force and artillery would move in to wipe them out.
Yet there was nothing Ashadron could do about it.
Because the Alliance never gave him the opportunity to spare any attention for rescuing his allies. Almost as soon as the First and Second Front Armies had driven deep into Allied territory, the Third Front Army had already engaged the Allied elite vanguard head-on in the Luke Region, pinning them in place.
To seize air superiority over the region, nearly ten thousand fighter aircraft and magical beast cavalry from both sides combined battled fiercely in the skies, while the massive armies below likewise encountered formidable opponents.
The first appearance of the Tiger tank, weighing well over sixty tons, gave the Alliance a tremendous surprise. A tank platoon encountered an armored unit from the Allied vanguard while relocating.
The moment the two sides came face-to-face, they immediately opened fire.
A blond-furred Behemoth, standing over six meters tall and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, let out a deafening roar as it charged a Sherman tank before it and slammed into it with all its might. The middle section of the Sherman's hull instantly caved in by more than half, completely immobilizing it. The crew could only rotate the turret, hoping to give the Behemoth a "piece of candy."
But the Behemoth was a living creature, possessing agility and physical strength far beyond that of a tank. With another furious roar, it forcibly flipped the thirty-ton Sherman onto its side. Many tank crews failed to escape alive from their encounters with the Behemoths.
It was only after the Tiger tanks transported from the rear reached the frontline that the advantage was reclaimed.
Their immensely powerful main guns, equipped with shaped-charge armor-piercing shells, could easily shatter the Behemoths' famously resilient skin. Their tremendous carrying capacity also provided the Tiger with an exceptionally spacious interior.
A large magical shield constantly surrounded the Tiger. Even if a Behemoth managed to close into melee range, it found it extremely difficult to destroy the Tiger, which weighed over seventy tons after disabling its anti-gravity system.
Meanwhile, a single 88 mm shell from the Tiger could blast a Behemoth's entire upper body into ashes.
The greatest strengths of the seventy-ton Tiger tank were its stable chassis, overwhelming firepower, and extremely durable magical shield. Its magical explosive reactive armor also minimized the damage caused by magic to the greatest extent possible.
Almost all of these tough opponents were concentrated along the Luke front, facing off against the Allied vanguard. Both sides fought with absolute ferocity across this battlefield.
Nothing else needed to be said—more than a hundred Tiger tanks had been destroyed or crippled, which alone was enough to prove just how intense the fighting between the two sides had become.
The air force suffered especially heavily. With tens of thousands filling the skies—and in fact, the Allied air force numbered not merely in the tens of thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands—the Alliance Air Force endured tremendous pressure.
Whether heavy fighters or ordinary Zero fighters, it was difficult for them to gain much of an advantage in aerial battles on such an enormous scale.
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