Wild North America 1846

The deputy director, Zheng Huai'en, went down after a report. This is an experienced middle-aged official, who was born in a family of royal retainers, and his body reveals the shadow of the former director Zheng Yuan.

The report is concise and to the point, never adding your own opinions.

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

Inside the Royal Study Room
Emperor Richard also listened to the briefing on the military operations in the East Indies just now. Generally speaking;

The military operations in Sumatra and Kalimantan are advancing steadily, and the follow-up road and factory construction has also been fully launched. The immigration work has started, forming an orderly rotation of occupation, construction, immigration, and digestion steps.

The military operations on Kalimantan Island have occupied the East, South, and North Kalimantan provinces, leaving only the joint attack on the Dutch heavily assembled area on the line between Sampit and Palangkaraya, and won it in one fell swoop.

In other parts of the island, the expeditionary force forced about 7.3 indigenous laborers into hard labor camps, and fully launched the construction of the road around the island, which is a road around the island along the coast.

The closest place to the sea is only 300 meters away, and you can see the magnificent and beautiful seaside scenery, and the farthest place is tens of hundreds of kilometers away.

The geographical conditions along the coast of islands located in tropical regions are very complicated. Many places have large swaths of wetlands and mangroves. When the tide is high, the sea water backwashes them, which is not suitable for the construction of road infrastructure.

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

With the advancement of a large number of labor forces, all difficulties and obstacles were easily resolved.

More than 7.3 indigenous laborers are divided into more than 30 teams, each team has two to 3000 people, and the front is the wasteland burning team.

The burning team used a large amount of inflammable materials such as gasoline and thatch to ignite wildfires in tropical jungles.

Because the tropical rain forest is quite humid, it is difficult to ignite wildfires. Even if they are ignited, they will be extinguished quickly and naturally. At most, some messy shrubs and large trees will be burned, and they can only be burned one by one.

Immediately behind the burning team was the logging team. They formed a team of 8 to 10 people and had to cut down two big trees and dig out their roots every day in order to complete the assigned task.

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

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

All the weeds and branches were cleaned up to form a flat field for the following team to enter.

Behind the sorting team is the transportation team, which generally uses cattle and tractors to drag the felled trees away section by section and transport them to the stockyard of the wood processing factory.

Then use a tractor to deep plow the field, rake it after several days of exposure, clean out the root system of weeds and shrubs, various sundries and stones, and then tamp and level it.

Behind is the road construction team. They first draw a lime line on the road, then lay a layer of plant ash for compaction, then a layer of lime for compaction, then a thick layer of stones for compaction, and then a thick layer of fly ash for compaction , and then put a thick layer of stones for compaction, and finally a thick layer of dry soil for compaction.

In this way, the gravel road is roughly completed.

After the road construction team left, the ditching team followed along both sides of the road, opened neat drainage ditches, and set up road mileage stone monuments, and the main body of the 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 build houses and villages with wood.

Most of these villages and towns are set up along the larger rivers, which is convenient for water and daily necessities. They were originally camps for hard labor camps and bridge work teams.

in these villages
In the area planned by the Lime Line, a dozen or dozens of decent wooden houses are often built in the center of the town for commercial purposes such as telegraph offices, police stations, bank post offices, town offices, shops, restaurants, teahouses, etc. Often the center of a small town.

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

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

In the future, after the departure of the aboriginal service camp, the Chinese immigrants who arrived one after another will be allocated the same kind of flat-panel houses, and they need to spend their own money to tidy up.

At the very least, buy a few large nylon mosquito nets to cover the flat-panel workshop to prevent the infestation of tropical rainforest mosquitoes, and to avoid tropical malaria, diarrhea, skin ulcers and other diseases. That is the next step.

Thanks to the large number of people, the project progressed quite quickly after sufficient indigenous labor was invested in the construction of the road around the island.

Each project site can often send hundreds of logging teams to fell two or three hundred big trees and advance thousands of meters in one day.

Judging from this advance speed, if the campaign to annihilate Sampit and the Dutch defenders on the front line of Palang Karaya, the capital of Central Kalimantan Province, progresses smoothly, the main body of the road around the island will roughly take shape 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 its forces to launch the Battle of Sampit on a certain day in mid-July, kicking off the prelude to gathering and annihilating the Dutch heavy army group.

It is planned to take 1 to 2 months to completely defeat and eliminate the recalcitrant enemy. After more than a month of repair, it will be transferred to the next step of clearing and suppressing operations.

The Kalimantan Corps has about 5.5 members. In addition to the troops left behind in various places, the main force of the Corps that can participate in the Battle of Sampit is nearly 4. It has a four-fold advantage in strength over the approximately 4 Dutch troops around Sampit.

There are a total of 3.2 Dutch defenders in the local area, distributed along the perimeter of more than 330 kilometers from Sampit to Palangkaraya inland.

This area is also a key development area for the Dutch colonists. The farming conditions are good. There are more than 3700 Dutch plantations and farms densely distributed, and [-] to [-] Dutch whites live there.

Some early white families have been passed down for more than ten generations in the local area.

In this well-developed area, there are still hundreds of thousands of local aborigines living. Most of them are plantation or farm workers who have been squeezed by white colonists for decades.

According to the latest information

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

There are indications that the Dutch are not reconciled to failure and will make a dying struggle.

Emperor Li Cha has secretly ordered the commander-in-chief to strangle the local Dutch with a net. Depending on the specific situation, measures can be taken to completely eliminate the hidden dangers at once.

Since you are a new conqueror, don't talk about benevolence and righteousness.

Emperor Richard knew that these Dutch whites had very strong bones. Even though the total number was only over a million, their resistance was quite fierce and very difficult to tame.

This was the case with the Boers faced by the British army in South Africa. The Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State combined had a total of just over 40 people.

In the original history.

In order to conquer these two Boer countries, Britain invested a total of more than 40 troops, with more than 22000 casualties, and spent a huge military expenditure of more than 2 million pounds. It took three years to temporarily subdue the Boers.

In fact, it didn't take long for the Boers to regain the mainstream in South Africa by virtue of their numerical advantages, and the British could only adopt a soft policy...

So, can the Dutch whites cause big troubles for the Tang Empire in the East Indies?

From the current point of view

The Dutch whites do not yet have such abilities. The total number of Dutch whites in Sumatra and Kalimantan is less than 30, and the rest are concentrated in the Java Islands.

Due to the geographical fragmentation of the archipelago, this gave the imperial army a huge advantage in defeating each of them, and could eliminate hidden dangers through a series of tough military means.

In this regard, the Datang Empire has rich experience.

Although it is inevitable to be criticized in a short period of time, it has attracted strong criticism from some European countries and bears a lot of international pressure.

But in the long run, it's all worth the effort.

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

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

The Aceh war lasted for 25 years, because the rebels were able to hide in the rainforest for so many years because of the silent support of the local Aceh people.

The Dutch do not have such conditions at all. After the local white farms and plantations were unconditionally expropriated, the Dutch hiding in the tropical rainforest had only a dead end.

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

Although the military advance was slower, the victory was steady.

in comparison

The Sumatra Corps, dominated by the Second Corps of the Royal Guards, fought several fierce battles with the Dutch army in the Battle Monument area. Although they won the victory, the losses were not small.

After several battles, more than 4000 officers and soldiers were killed or injured.

The Dutch army's will to resist is quite tenacious, and its tactics are also flexible. It frequently uses flanking raid tactics, and crosses the front to attack transport teams and ports. It is indeed a tough bone.

On the frontal battlefield and the flanking battlefield, more than a dozen battles broke out 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, that is, the Imperial Armored Division commanded by Brigadier General Tang-Li Yi (Note, who used to be aliased as Lei Xiao), the 71st son of the emperor, is expected to arrive in early August.

In addition to the Armored Division, the Royal Guards also increased the Second Mindanao Division, and the size of the troops further increased from 8.9 to 11.2. The real decisive battle began.