Wild North America 1846

Deputy Director Zheng Huai'en made a report and then left. He was an experienced middle-aged capable official who came from a family of royal retainers. He had sixty-seven shadows of the former Director Zheng Yuan.

The report should be concise and concise, and never add your own opinions and biases.

This is a very important quality for a royal secretary. His Majesty the Emperor has a unique understanding of the current situation in the world. There is no need for a secretary to talk too much, which will cause unnecessary interference.

Inside the royal study room of the palace

Emperor Richard has just received a briefing on military operations in the East Indies. Overall;

Military operations in Sumatra and Kalimantan are advancing steadily, and subsequent road and factory construction has been fully launched. Immigration work has begun, forming an orderly rotation of occupation, construction, immigration, and digestion steps.

The military operation on Kalimantan Island has occupied the provinces of East, South and North Kalimantan, leaving only the heavily concentrated area of ​​Dutch troops entrenched on the line of Sampet and Palangkaraya, which was defeated in one fell swoop.

In other areas of the island, the expeditionary force forced about 73,000 indigenous laborers into hard labor camps and fully launched the construction of the Ring Island Highway project, which is a coastal road ringing the island.

The closest place to the seaside is only two to three hundred meters away, where you can see the magnificent and beautiful seaside scenery. The farthest place is tens or hundreds of kilometers away.

The geographical conditions along the coast of islands located in the tropics are very complex. Many places have large tracts of wetlands and mangroves. When the tide is high, seawater flows back, making them unsuitable for building road infrastructure.

Engineers and technicians chose areas with a solid inland foundation to open up mountains and forests to open up a main highway artery. Most of them are in inaccessible rainforest areas, so the construction is quite difficult.

With the advancement of a large number of labor forces, all difficulties and obstacles have been overcome.

The more than 73,000 indigenous laborers were divided into more than 30 teams, each with two to three thousand people. At the front was the wasteland-burning team.

Burning teams use large amounts of gasoline, thatch and other flammable materials to ignite wildfires in tropical jungles.

Because the tropical rainforest is quite humid, mountain fires are difficult to ignite. Even if they are ignited, they will naturally extinguish quickly. At most, they will burn the surface of some messy shrubs and large trees, and they can only burn through them piece by piece.

Immediately behind the burning team is the logging team, which consists of a team of 8 to 10 people. They must cut down two large trees and dig out the roots every day to complete the rated task.

This is by no means an easy job. Each logging team works from morning to night, so they can barely complete it. Sometimes they have to work overtime in the dark when encountering giant trees in the rainforest.

Behind the logging team is the clearing team. They are responsible for cleaning up the branches of the fallen trees with axes or saws, sawing the trunks into sections, and stacking them aside in an orderly manner.

All weeds, branches and vines have been cleared away to form a flat site for the subsequent work teams to enter.

Behind the sorting team is the transportation team. The transportation team usually uses oxen and tractors. They drag away the felled trees section by section and transport them to the stockyard of the wood processing plant.

Then use a tractor to plow the site deeply, expose it to the sun for several days, then rake it flat, clean out the roots of weeds, shrubs, various debris and stones, and then compact and level it.

Behind them is the road construction team. They first mark the road with lime lines, then put a layer of plant ash and tamp it, then put a layer of lime and tamp it, then put a thick layer of gravel and tamp it, and then put a thick layer of fly ash and tamp it.

, then put a thick layer of gravel and tamp it, and finally put a thick layer of dry soil and tamp it.

In this way, the gravel road is generally completed.

After the road construction team left, the ditching team that followed them dug neat drainage ditches along both sides of the road and set up road mileage stone monuments. The main body of the sand and gravel road was completed.

Every ten to twenty kilometers, a wood processing factory, sand and gravel field, and limestone factory will be set up, and a large area of ​​flat land will be opened around these factories to use wood to build houses and establish villages and towns.

Most of these villages and towns were established along larger rivers for easy access to water and daily necessities. They were originally hard labor camps and camps for bridge work teams.

in these villages and towns

In areas planned by lime lines, a dozen or dozens of decent wooden houses are often built in the center of the town, which are used for commercial purposes such as telegraph offices, police stations, banks and post offices, town offices, shops, restaurants, teahouses, etc.

Often the center of a small town.

In other areas, there are large areas of simple flat-panel workshops, basically four columns and a roof, mainly used by hard labor prisoners.

Such a simple workshop can provide shelter from wind and rain, but it leaks from all sides and cannot resist mosquito infestation. It can only initially solve the problem of accommodation.

After the aboriginal labor camps leave in the future, the Chinese immigrants who arrive one after another will be assigned such flat houses, and they will need to spend their own money to tidy them up.

At the very least, buy a few large pieces of nylon mosquito net cloth to cover the flat-panel workshop to prevent the mosquitoes in the tropical rainforest from contracting tropical malaria, diarrhea, skin ulcers and other diseases. That is the next step.

Thanks to the large number of people and strength, and sufficient indigenous labor force invested in the construction of the ring-island highway, the project progressed quite quickly.

Each project site can often dispatch hundreds of logging teams, which can cut down two to three hundred large trees in one day and advance thousands of meters.

Judging from this advancement speed, if the battle to annihilate the Dutch defenders on the front line of Sampet and Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Kalimantan province, proceeds smoothly, the main body of the ring road will be roughly formed by the end of the year or early next year.

In terms of military deployment

The Kalimantan Corps led by Lieutenant General Fan Pengfei will gather forces to launch the Battle of Sampet on a certain day in mid-July, kicking off the campaign to annihilate the Dutch heavily armed group.

It is planned to take 1 to 2 months to completely defeat and eliminate the stubborn enemy. After more than a month of repairs, we will move to the next step of the clearing operation.

The total strength of the Kalimantan Corps is about 55,000. In addition to the troops left behind in various places, the main force of the Corps that can participate in the Battle of Sampet is nearly 40,000. It has a strength advantage of 4 times over the approximately 10,000 Dutch troops around Sampet.

There are a total of 32,000 Dutch defenders in the area, distributed along a route of more than 330 kilometers from Sanpit to Palangkaraya deep inland.

This area was also a key area developed by the Dutch colonists. It has good farming conditions and is densely populated with more than 3,700 Dutch plantations and farms, and is home to 50,000 to 60,000 white Dutch people.

Some early white families have been here for more than ten generations.

In this maturely developed area, there are still hundreds of thousands of local indigenous people living, most of whom are plantation or farm workers, who have been exploited by white colonists for decades.

According to the latest information

The Dutch are doing their best to arm these indigenous men and distribute some swords, guns and cold weapons to them to use as cannon fodder to resist the imperial army.

There are various signs that the Dutch are not willing to accept defeat and will make a desperate struggle.

Emperor Richard has secretly ordered the commander-in-chief at the front to carry out dragnet-style strangulation of the local Dutch. Depending on the specific situation, thorough removal measures can be taken to solve the hidden danger at once.

Since we are new conquerors, we should not talk about benevolence and righteousness.

Emperor Richard knew that these Dutch whites were very hard-boned. Although there were only a million people in total, their resistance was very intense and difficult to tame.

This was the case with the Boers that the British army faced in South Africa. The two countries of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State together had a total of only more than 400,000 people.

In the original history.

In order to conquer these two Boer countries, the British invested a total of more than 400,000 troops, suffered more than 22,000 casualties, and spent a huge military expenditure of more than 200 million pounds. It took three years to finally subdue the Boers temporarily.

In fact, it didn't take long for the Boers to regain their dominance in South Africa with their numerical advantage, and the British could only adopt a soft policy...

So, can the white Dutch cause big trouble to the Tang Empire in the East Indies?

From the current point of view

The white Dutch do not yet have such capabilities. The total number of white Dutch in Sumatra and Kalimantan is less than 300,000, and the rest are concentrated in the Java Islands.

Due to the geographical fragmentation of the archipelago, this gives the imperial army a huge advantage in defeating each one, and can eliminate hidden dangers through a series of tough military measures.

In this regard, the Tang Empire has rich experience.

Although it was inevitable that it would be criticized in a short period of time, it attracted strong criticism from some European countries and put it under considerable international pressure.

But in the long run, all this effort is worth it.

Due to the complex geographical conditions of the tropical rainforest in the East Indies, it is difficult for the delicate horses in the area to survive. The local white people generally do not know how to ride horses, so there are no cavalry raids that frequently take place thousands of miles like in South Africa.

The so-called guerrilla warfare can only be done on foot.

The Acehnese War lasted for 25 years because the rebels had the silent support of the local Acehnese people and were able to hide in the rainforest for so many years.

The Dutch did not have such conditions at all. After the local white farms and plantations were expropriated unconditionally, the Dutch hiding in the tropical rain forest had no choice but to die.

Emperor Richard knew that Lieutenant General Fan Pengfei, the commander of the Kalimantan Corps, was an extremely experienced veteran. Judging from his military deployment, he was solid and had almost no weaknesses for the enemy to take advantage of.

Although the military advance is a little slow, the victory is steady.

In comparison

The Sumatran Regiment, dominated by the Second Regiment of the Royal Guards, fought several fierce battles with the Dutch army in the Battle Monument area. Although they won the victory, they suffered considerable losses.

After several battles, more than 4,000 officers and soldiers were injured or killed.

The Dutch army's will to resist was quite tenacious, and their tactics were flexible. They frequently used flanking raid tactics, and crossed the front line to attack transport convoys and ports. They were indeed tough.

On the frontal battlefield and flank battlefield, more than ten battles broke out continuously between the two sides, which brought a lot of pressure.

In view of this

The Imperial Military Department urgently deployed the only armored division to reinforce the Sumatra battlefield, namely the Imperial Armored Division commanded by Brigadier General Tang-Li Yi (note, once aliased as Lei Xiao), the 71st son of the emperor, and it is expected to arrive in early August.

In addition to the armored division, the Royal Guards also added the Second Mindanao Division, further increasing the strength from 89,000 to 112,000, and the real decisive battle began.