Chapter 43: Human Sea Tactics

  Pang Zhong also carefully observed the speed and frequency of the rebel army's attacks, in order to determine the speed and frequency at which his soldiers should fire.

  When the number of rebels attacking decreases or slows down, he orders the soldiers to slow down their shooting speed, allowing the generals to temporarily adjust their physical strength. When the number of rebels attacking increases or speeds up, they increase the shooting speed.

  In this regard, he is more experienced than Li Fude, and the physical strength of his soldiers is also better than that of Li Fude's troops.

  When the soldiers shot at the enemy, Pang Zhong and his guards did not idle, they all drew their bows and shot arrows at the enemy.

  Pang Zhong is a tiger general who has experienced many battles. Before garrisoning Tongguan, he followed Gao Xianzhi to fight everywhere and made countless military achievements, rarely losing any battles. Now, as the Right Wuwei General, his position was built up by his own military merits.

  But he, who had rarely suffered defeat, encountered a disastrous defeat after following Geshu Han out of Tongguan to fight. The 100,000 troops he led did not exert their strength well and collapsed. In the uncontrollable situation of defeat, he could only break through with a group of people under the guard of his personal guards.

  This is his eternal shame and unforgettable humiliation!

  Facing the crazy attack of the rebels under the city, he wants to use the arrows in his hand to vent his anger and regain a little bit of face.

  His shooting can be said that every arrow must hit a rebel soldier, and the rebel soldiers he hits are either dead or seriously injured.

  "General, you have shot and killed ten rebels and wounded eighteen!" One of his personal guards reported the results in a low voice after Pong Zhong had fired two quivers of arrows.

  Pang Zhong's personal achievements were brilliant, but this was just his way of venting the anger in his heart by shooting fiercely.

  After shooting the arrows in the quiver, he stopped shooting and paid attention to the development of the battle.

  During the process of careful observation, he also discovered the law of the rebel attack, that is, each wave of attack was carried out on a scale of hundreds of people, and very scattered, one after another. Pang Zhong immediately understood that the rebels wanted to use this attacking method to consume the arrows of our army, exhaust the energy of the soldiers on the city wall, and lay the groundwork for the final large-scale siege.

  As soon as the defenders on the city wall show signs of weakness, the rebels' offensive will immediately become more intense.

  With this in mind, he also made other arrangements immediately, reducing the number of soldiers for each wave of shooting to 200 per team, and ordering the soldiers to aim accurately when shooting, so as to give the rebels greater casualties.

  He prepared to merge the two teams of 200 soldiers into one team when the number of rebels increased and the frequency of attacks accelerated, increasing the density of shooting, causing more damage, and never allowing the rebels to have a chance to climb the city.

  Pang Zhong was very experienced and knew that it would be impossible to win in the end if he didn't take some extraordinary measures against the rebel army, which had a numerical superiority.

  He is more experienced than Li Fude in making strategies!

  There are many people more experienced than Li Fude, and Cui Qianyou, who commanded the siege, is one of them.

  "Reporting to Vice Commander, the Tang army's arrows are extremely dense, our troops have suffered heavy casualties!"

  On a hill about two miles from the Hantangguan City, Cui Qianyou, who was commanding the vanguard, was riding his horse to observe the battle situation in front of the Hantangguan City. A soldier with an arrow wound on his arm and bleeding profusely came galloping up to report the situation to him.

  Cui Qianyou didn't respond, only slightly nodding his head. He had seen the situation of the first wave of impact earlier. The two teams of over 500 people each were now left with less than 200 people, and both directions were roughly the same. The Tang army had only shot three rounds of arrows, which means that the Tang army's three rounds of over 5,000 arrows took away nearly 500 soldiers' lives. The killing power of the Tang army's arrows was not ordinary.

  Choi Gun-woo knew that this situation was inevitable, and he was clear that when attacking Tongguan City, he could only use the lives of his soldiers to fill it up, and even hoped to use the lives of his soldiers in exchange for the defenders on the city wall to shoot arrows until they were exhausted.

  Only then can the soldiers attacking the city have a chance to launch an effective counterattack and climb up the city wall.

  The Tang army will have exhausted its strength and used up all its arrows when they will have their chance to counterattack.

  So he could only grit his teeth and give orders, letting the following soldiers continue to charge forward and wait for an opportunity to counterattack.

  The order was quickly passed down by the military officer, and Cui Gan-yu continued to stand on the hillside watching the battle, his heart also cursing Tongguan this damned place.

  Under his command, there were tens of thousands of soldiers, but now only a few thousand can attack the city from several directions. The rest are unable to charge forward, as the terrain is too narrow. If Tongguan City's terrain was not so treacherous, he believed that the current situation would be completely different, and many of his soldiers would have already climbed up the ladders to enter the city. But now, the number of soldiers who can reach the foot of the city wall can be counted on one hand, and even if someone manages to rush to the foot of the city wall, they are immediately shot dead by the Tang army on the city wall. The ladders brought by the soldiers are scattered all over the place in front of Tongguan City, not a single one standing upright against the city wall.

  Of course, this is also his helpless sentiment. If he could have deployed more troops under Tongguan City, it would not have taken nearly a million troops to attack for nearly six months and still sigh at the city gate. Perhaps Chang'an had already been captured, let alone Tongguan.

  After several months of attacking Tongguan without success, An Qingxu, Cui Jianyu, Tian Qianzhen and other generals formulated a desperate plan while discussing the strategy for attacking the city. The plan was to use hundreds or thousands of troops to continuously attack the city without interruption, thereby exhausting the physical strength of the Tang army soldiers on the city wall, depleting the arrows on the city wall, and waiting for an opportunity to climb the city wall.

  Before the Battle of Lingbao, Cui Gan continued to use this approach in successive siege actions as commander of the vanguard, but it had no effect. Because there were too many arrows stored inside Tongguan Pass, and more were constantly being transported from Chang'an, while the number of Tang soldiers defending Tongguan Pass was very large, they could be constantly replenished and rotated, with the final result being a futile siege for six months.

  They eventually succeeded in luring Gao Xianzhi out of the city through a show of weakness and defeated the Tang forces at Lingbao.

  After the victory of Lingbao, whether it was An Qingxu or Cui Ganjin or Tian Qianzhen, they all thought that the garrison at Tongguan had lost their will to fight. As long as their army arrived under the city walls, if the Tang army did not open the gates and surrender, they would flee like a swarm of bees. However, they encountered the same resistance as before.

  But Cui Gan's mind had already changed greatly from before, he was clear that the number of defenders inside Tongguan City was definitely insufficient, extremely insufficient, and could not withstand consumption. As long as the Tang army's reinforcements had not arrived, launching continuous attacks on Tongguan would make it impossible for the defenders to hold out. He could use the bodies of his soldiers to consume the physical strength of the Tang generals on the city wall, and even use the bodies of his subordinates as ladders!

  Chui Kien-yu also ordered a continuous attack without regard for casualties, using human wave tactics. If there were those who feared to advance, they would be killed without pardon!

  Under Choi Gun-woo's command, the rebels charged forward one after another!