Munitions Empire-Chapter 1980 - 1860: Crawling Forward

Broken bricks and rubble filled the once bustling street, fractured steel bars protruding from the concrete slabs like the fangs of a beast, the air thick with choking smoke and dust.

A few Laines soldiers crawled laboriously through the ruin. They clutched their weapons tightly, heads buried deep amidst the debris, fearing they might become victims of the dreaded legend at any moment.

The legendary Tang Army sniper, like a phantom, roamed these ruins, reaping every soul daring enough to expose itself. No one knew where he hid or had seen his true face; everyone only knew that those who met his gaze had already met their death.

Fear spread like a plague among the soldiers, they didn’t dare to breathe loudly, relying on gestures and eye contact to communicate. Their mission was to support the building by the barricades, a structure with all windows shattered and walls full of scars.

From afar, it resembled a monstrous creature, clawing at the gloomy sky, exuding a chilling aura of death.

"Damn it, is that guy still around?" a young soldier cursed under his breath as he struggled to crawl over a pile of collapsed sandbags, his heart feeling like it was about to leap out of his throat.

Crawling while holding a rifle was not easy, especially considering they had to carry the weight of three people’s worth of hand grenades, and over 600 bullets... Moving each time was no easy task.

This kind of supply should have been managed by specialized personnel, but the blockade by the Tang Army was so tight that supply personnel couldn’t possibly carry large amounts of ammunition to positions close to the front line.

There was no choice; the losses were too great, so the frontline soldiers had to carry the supplies on their shoulders and in their hands. As for the quantity, it was pitifully small.

In fact, when supporting the front line, a soldier, in most cases, could only carry one more person’s worth of ammunition besides his own. If pushing to the limits, perhaps they could bring a little more.

Like now, each of them carried two or three additional hand grenades; this was already the limit they could bear while crawling.

The good news was that among the bullets they carried, there weren’t many rifle bullets; most were pistol bullets used predominantly in urban combat. These bullets weren’t intended for pistols but for the increasingly numerous submachine gunners at the front line.

In close combat situations, submachine guns remained highly effective weapons. Though not as precise at the extreme compared to assault rifles, they were cheaper and less precise, making them one of the infantry’s favored choices.

Of course, such weapons were generally not distributed to new recruits, because in tense situations, they would often hold down the trigger and quickly empty the magazine. So, to avoid wasting ammunition, submachine guns were prioritized for experienced veterans.

However... on the harsh battlefield, it’s really hard to say how much combat experience the veterans in the Coalition Forces truly had. Some veterans had participated in a few battles, but they mostly witnessed the overwhelming artillery fire of the Tang Army and some peculiar killing weapons.

When it came to facing off directly with Tang Army soldiers... all Coalition Forces soldiers had pathetically little experience. Even if a close-range fight erupted, the Tang Army would quickly resolve it with gun grenades and snipers, giving the Coalition Forces soldiers no chance to counterattack.

In close quarters combat, the bulletproof plates equipped by the Tang Army greatly reduced the effectiveness of submachine guns; pistol bullets were definitely impotent against Kevlar Armor.

"I really can’t crawl anymore..." loaded with so much ammunition, this Laines Empire soldier was not a seasoned veteran; he hadn’t even been enlisted for half a year.

During these six months, most of his time was spent serving in a new training camp, then being transferred to another training camp... In short, he seemed more like an actor rounding out the numbers.

Indeed, an actor. In fact, many soldiers like him had similar experiences: serving in troops for about two to three months, then the main forces of that troop were withdrawn, and the remaining ones were reassigned to other new troops for ongoing training.

With this sort of transferring, they became so-called cores, so-called veterans... because they had stayed in the camps the longest, everyone regarded them as pillars to rely on.

The problem was, they themselves knew their true worth, and because of resource shortages, they had hardly participated in any proper shooting training, let alone compare with those who had long been sent to the front lines to fight.

In reality, all the combat capability of the Coalition Forces was on a downward slope, and the overall troop numbers of all organized troops continued to decrease.

Initially, nearly all countries modeled their organizations after the Tang Army structure, with a battalion having over 500 officers and soldiers. A regiment commanded three or even four battalions. But as the war dragged on, these Coalition Forces began reducing their numbers to maintain the organizational count.

Some newly formed troops had a regiment with only two battalions, and a battalion with only 400 people. Others retained the three-battalion organization but only had 300 people per battalion.

In essence, it was a play on words, turning an infantry division originally consisting of three regiments into one with two regiments and an independent battalion, or changing an army with three divisions into one with two divisions and two regiments...

In the end, an infantry division that should have more than 10,000 personnel had only about 8,000 or even just 5,000 to 6,000 men. How much combat power such troops actually had, only heaven knew.

This reduction in size did have some reason, as preserving organizational integrity posed real challenges: with the ongoing war, the Coalition Forces’ heavy weapons production clearly lagged behind the pace of consumption.

Before, when the entire Eastern Continent’s five empires united, energy and resources could more or less compete with the Great Tang Empire. But now, having consecutively lost the Ice Cold Empire, Poplar Empire, and Suthers Empire, the Coalition Forces were left with only "half of the country."

Under such circumstances, the production capacity of heavy weapons like artillery, tanks, armored vehicles, and anti-aircraft guns fell woefully short, and the replenishment speed dropped to a lamentable level.

Without these heavy weaponry, maintaining similar organizational structures seemed somewhat laughable. They couldn’t possibly maintain an anti-tank gun company without a single anti-tank gun in the equipment, could they?