The Rise Of Australasia-Chapter 1129 - 847: Air Raid

Chapter 1129: Chapter 847: Air Raid

Boom! Boom boom boom!

With a series of fierce artillery barrages, the exploding shells’ brilliant fireworks lit up the pre-dawn battlefield.

For the Polish Army hastily deployed along the border, they had never experienced such large-scale, terrifying bombings since their establishment.

This was actually quite normal. Almost 20 years had passed since World War I, and those who had experienced it had already aged, with almost no chance of remaining in the forces.

The few who could stay were part of the military’s upper echelons—either commanding an army group or at the top of the country’s military—and it was impossible for them to appear on the front lines.

These soldiers at the front lines in Poland, though some had experienced war, did not have an enemy that could waste so many shells on them.

Lack of experience made the Polish military slow to respond, and the lower ranks’ panic affected the entire army’s combat operations as well as their speed in counterattacking.

By the time the Polish Army thought to counterattack the German Army, the front line had already been under bombardment for over ten minutes.

Although the Polish Army had stopped the chaos, those ten or so minutes of bombing had caused irreparable losses to them.

Including the casualties of hundreds of personnel, many weapons and equipment were also shattered in the bombings, at least unusable for the time being.

The loss of some weapons and equipment made the already humble Polish military firepower even more embarrassing.

They faced concentrated bombardment from thousands of artillery pieces, yet they could muster less than a hundred guns for a counterattack.

Even worse, with poor visibility at night, it was very hard for the Polish Army to pinpoint exactly where the attacking Germans were.

After finally determining the direction and organizing a counterattack, it wasn’t long before they were suppressed by the enemy’s firearms once again.

Polish officers on the front lines were frantically requesting support from the Air Force. The ground troops’ weaponry was insufficient, and it was difficult to repel the enemy’s attack with the firepower on the ground alone.

Only by effectively damaging the enemy from the air and taking the opportunity to destroy a few of the enemy’s artillery positions could they alleviate the severe pressure the ground troops faced.

Unfortunately, the nearby military airfield soon replied that the Polish Air Force was already engaged with the enemy and that support could not be expected anytime soon.

Since no support was forthcoming from the air, Poland could only adopt the most primitive method to aid the front-line troops, which was to continuously transport new recruits to the battlefield.

It’s worth mentioning that although Poland boasted an army of up to 700,000, nearly 400,000 were deployed along the border with Germany.

Poland generally had a friendly relationship with Britain and France, which also led to Poland’s strong support when the two countries opposed the current Russia.

How the Kingdom of Lithuania came under Polish control need not be elaborated, and it was the reason why most of the Polish forces were stationed along the Russian border—they feared a unified Russia would seek revenge.

Now, such a military deployment was quite unfavorable for Poland, which was suddenly plunged into war.

Due to the sudden ceding of the Polish Corridor, Poland’s border deployment was not yet perfected, and the forces stationed on the front line were only about 200,000.

These 200,000 troops were spread out along the expansive border, and facing a better-equipped German Army, they were undoubtedly at a disadvantage.

Since it was not possible to help the front-line troops from the air, the Polish military decided to continuously transport soldiers to the front lines, at least maintaining a numerical advantage.

In order to ensure that there were no issues on the eastern border and to avoid the possibility of Germany and Russia jointly partitioning Poland, the Poles adopted a method of transporting veterans and new recruits together to the western border.

Though this effectively increased the number of soldiers transported to the front lines, it also indefinitely reduced the front-line troops’ combat effectiveness.

Though it appeared that the reinforcement of 200,000 troops to the front line had effectively strengthened their numbers, over a hundred thousand of them were new recruits, who just a few days before, were ordinary Polish farmers.

To what extent was this exaggerated?

Most of the Polish new recruits might have been bona fide Polish farmers just three days ago. The transition from dropping their hoes to picking up rifles and heading to the battlefield took merely three days, a change of roles which would need at least a hundred times three days for these Polish farmers to acclimate to.

But unfortunately, neither the Polish government nor the war on the front lines could afford to give these new recruits much time to adapt.

Carrying standard-issue rifles produced by Polish military factories and obeying commands from squad leaders they had only just met and might not even know the names of, they arrived on the battlefield.

“Tovaf, do you think we can make it back alive?” In a nondescript train carriage, a soldier wearing standard Polish military gear, holding a long gun, was looking at his fellow countryman, the hot-blooded youth Tovaf, with a face full of worry.

“Of course, Prlak,” the youth named Tovaf said firmly, nodding without a doubt, “We will win this war, Prlak. You and me, and all the guys fighting, we’re all going to make it back safely.”

Quite obviously, Prlak was not pacified by his fellow countryman’s words.

Looking at his equally bewildered compatriots around him, Prlak began to doubt the government and whether they could win this war.

Whirr~

Suddenly, a more distinct buzzing sound came from the sky, immediately catching the attention of these new recruits.

Facing this unusual noise, the recruits were visibly restless and began to whisper among themselves.

“Quiet down!” an old soldier in the carriage spoke up: “It’s just our airplanes, nothing to be curious about. Once you’re on the battlefield, you’ll see even bigger planes and those strangely shaped tanks with every part made of iron.”

Hearing their squad leader’s reassurances, many new recruits managed to calm down. However, their occasional whispering betrayed the fact that their hearts were not as at peace.

Soon, the buzzing sound grew louder, as if airplanes were approaching them.

At the same time, a whistling sound came from the sky, like something slicing through the air, rapidly plummeting towards the ground.

“What is that?” a new recruit suddenly yelled in terror.

Through the glass of the train carriage, a veteran also saw the black dots in the sky growing larger. The larger shaped black dots moved in formation, orderly sweeping across the sky.

The smaller black dots appeared round, expanding more and more in the pupils of all the soldiers.

“Damn it, enemy airplanes! Air raid! Air raid! Stop the train and find cover!” a few veterans were stunned for a moment before they immediately reacted, shouting loudly.

Soon, the veterans in the other carriages also came to their senses, attempting to alert the train’s crew to stop the train.

But a train at full speed is not easily stopped. Even as the wheels screeched against the tracks in an emergency stop, sparking, the train continued to move at a steady speed.

Boom!

With the first bomb falling around the train, trees within a few meters were sheared off at the trunk, small branches blasted to pieces, then hidden by a blast of smoke.

“God save us.” Prlak swore he had never seen such a spectacle in his life, nor had he ever been in such danger.

In the face of such danger, all Prlak could do was to pray sincerely to God for protection.

But clearly, as believers in the same God, today, God was evidently on the side of the Germans.

Boom!

A bomb landed right on the railway track, just a few meters from the carriage where Prlak was.

The explosion of the bomb flipped the carriage over, and the glass of the surrounding compartments shattered.

The powerful shockwave left the recruits inside the carriage dizzy and with ringing ears, their helpless screams and pitiful cries following one after another, echoing the blasts of the bombs.

The good news was that other than dizziness and ringing ears, Prlak was relatively unharmed.

Actually, aside from a few unlucky ones, most of the new recruits in the carriage sustained no serious injuries.

Just as these lucky recruits thought they had narrowly escaped disaster, the real catastrophe came stealthily.

The bomber squadron glided through the sky in a loop, dropped all the explosives they carried, then turned around in the air and headed back, unleashing a fierce attack on the now stationary train with the machine guns they were equipped with.

Although the train carriages were encased in iron, they could not withstand the barrage of fire from several machine guns firing relentlessly.

The thin layer of iron could not stop the sweep of the machine gun fire, causing the recruits near the edge of the carriage to be riddled with bullet holes in no time.

Ah!

If the bombardment had just caused these new recruits to fear, the now even more brutal scene made the mentalities of these recruits, who were originally farmers, collapse.

Accompanied by screams and cries, a great number of soldiers fell into pools of blood.

“Tovaf!” Prlak witnessed his fanatical and confident fellow countryman being pierced by several bullets through the iron.

A bullet passing through the body does not cause merely a small puncture. Due to the high-speed rotation of the bullet, as it moves from front to back, it often creates a cone-shaped wound.

There may only be a small bullet hole in the front, but the back of the body is already blown open into a bowl-sized wound.

The scene was indescribable, with blood streaming out alongside the viscera, a shock to any regular person that no stirring movie could ever match.

Prlak was lucky to survive; he continued his chatter and avoided the first round of bombing and the second round of machine-gun fire.

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But he was also unfortunate. As an ordinary farmer, Prlak’s heart simply could not bear such a shocking impact.

To put it simply, he broke down. This psychological trauma had turned Prlak, who was an ordinary person an hour ago, into a madman in the truest sense.

And in this bombardment, there were many people like Tovaf, just as there were many like Prlak.

This freight train had a total of 12 carriages, each carrying over 80 soldiers.

But after this round of bombardment, less than one-third of the nearly thousand soldiers remained, and even fewer than one-tenth still had the capacity to fight.

The veterans who had already experienced war couldn’t bear such a shocking scene either. And for most of the new recruits, there were only two outcomes after the bombing: physical death or mental collapse.

What did war bring to people? For the Poles at present, what war brought was irrevocable pain.