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Chapter 1169 Basra City
As the saying goes, a bystander sees more clearly. Although it was Zhao En who commanded the battle and was injured, the ones who felt the most were not him, but the army staff who kept an eye on the battle situation through the lookout.

This is not to say that Zhao En is confused, but the angle he is standing at is different. He can only see the scene covering a few dozen meters around him, while the lookout can see the whole battlefield from a high vantage point, a bit like a God's perspective.

For more than a day, with the assistance of the staff, the Warrior Battalion used the cabin as a trench and practiced two new tactics specifically for targeting the enemies in the trenches.

The first set is called fire suppression. The principle is very simple, which is to use the firing rate, range and accuracy of the needle rifle to suppress the firepower of the enemy in the trenches in turns, approaching layer by layer to 30 meters.

At this distance, grenades can be used to kill the enemy hiding in the trenches, and then take advantage of the brief chaos caused by the explosion to quickly break into the trenches and enter the close combat stage.

At this time, the second set of tactics can be activated, called alternating cover. Three people are divided into a group, the long gunner is responsible for providing fire cover, the grenadier waits for the opportunity to throw bombs at corners and possible hiding holes, and the short gunner takes advantage of the smoke of the explosion to clean up the remaining enemies.

If you encounter a large group of enemies, several nearby groups can combine as appropriate to fight the enemy together. Usually, try not to gather in a group in the trenches to prevent being killed in large numbers by gunpowder cans.

In fact, these methods have been used by the Warrior Battalion in the course of combat, but they were not standardized or universal, and were spontaneous individual behaviors. Now that they are promoted as fixed tactics, it is different and must be universally and strictly implemented.

However, these two tactics were useless, as there was no trench area outside Basra. As the Ming army arrived too quickly, the Ottoman defenders found the pursuers before they had time to dig, so they could only retreat into the city and rely on the city walls for defense.

Although Basra is a relatively large city, the local building materials and population size mean that the city walls will not be very strong, and the difficulty of siege is reduced accordingly.

However, in the spirit of prudence, the first wave of attack was fully prepared with artillery fire. The army's field artillery bombarded the nearly 8-meter-long wall in the southeast corner of Basra for more than half an hour, and then sent out 300 vans inlaid with thick steel plates, which slowly approached the wall under the cover of army sharpshooters.

At this time, the Ottoman defenders no longer had the fighting spirit they had at the port of Faho. No matter how elite the army was, it would be difficult to immediately boost morale to its highest level after suffering a defeat and having to retreat.

When they found that their artillery was far inferior to the enemy's in terms of range, rate of fire and power, and they could not cause effective damage to the vans with the guns in their hands, their fighting spirit began to slacken.

Even if the Guards had never seen it, they could imagine what the boxcars were used for. In fact, they would use similar tactics when attacking the city. Seeing the vehicles loaded with gunpowder cans getting closer and closer, once they got close to the city wall, they would cause a huge explosion, and despair spread immediately.

However, as the vans arrived at the moat, the tense atmosphere eased. The defenders agreed that the situation was not as bleak as it seemed, and at least they could hold out for a while thanks to the moat.

As a result, the defensive firepower that had just been suppressed by the artillery shells suddenly increased again. Although lead bullets of various calibers could not penetrate the thick steel plates, they made a clanging sound that was very scary.

Until a stone ball shot from the city directly hit a van, smashing it and causing great harm to the people inside. The morale of the defenders reached its peak, and waves of roars drowned out the endless explosions.

But the situation did not change at all because of the scrapping of one van. After a short stop, the remaining seven vans slid along the shore into the moat.

What was even more incredible was that the carriage, which looked so heavy that even a heavy musket operated by three people could not penetrate it, could actually float on the water and finally reach the other side safely. The defenders, whose morale had just been boosted, were immediately confused. Many Ottoman soldiers could not resist their curiosity and wanted to take a closer look at what the carriage was. As a result, as soon as they stuck their heads out, they were accurately shot and killed by the Ming army sharpshooters who were crawling more than 200 meters away.

"Your Majesty, I dare to plead for the navy of the Toungoo Kingdom. If they capture more people, they should be treated as prisoners. If the person who invented this thing is found, he should be given an important position!"

On the flagship, Army Chief of Staff Ding Shun put down his telescope and made a serious suggestion to the emperor. It sounded a bit confusing, but he was actually talking about the siege vehicles used by the Warrior Battalion.

This tortoise-shell-like siege weapon is called a tortoise car. It was not invented by the army or navy, nor was it developed by the military research department. Its origin is quite accidental. It was plagiarized from the navy of the Toungoo Kingdom in Lower Burma.

Ever since Tharyan Port became the base of the Navy's East India Fleet, wars have never stopped over the years, and the threat mainly comes from the water.

The navy of the Toungoo Kingdom knew that they could not defeat the Ming navy equipped with cannons with real swords and guns, but they were unwilling to let such a big fish bone stuck in their throats forever, so they launched continuous sneak attacks.

The most common method was to use small boats to drift downstream along the Irrawaddy River, specifically choosing foggy nights to approach Ming naval ships and carry out sabotage.

These sneak attack boats would carry a special device that looked like a turtle shell, with a top made of tough vines and tree bark, a wooden frame underneath, and three or four people pedaling in the water to control the direction.

If the sailors on the warships failed to find out in time and let the turtle shells get too close and out of the range of the deck guns, they had no choice but to hoist the sails and leave. Muskets could not penetrate the turtle shells and could not hurt the people below.

After suffering several losses, the Indian Ocean Fleet had to install thousands of wooden stakes around the port area to prevent the turtles from sneaking in.

However, the staff officers of the Marine Command saw a new use for the captured turtle shell. After several modifications, an amphibious siege vehicle was born.

It has a wooden frame and a steel plate like tiles on the outside, which can be more or less depending on the need to resist different weapons. It is operated by 4 people, and it moves forward on land by pushing the wheels, and in the water, it paddles with its legs like swimming.

The key to the car's ability to float despite being invulnerable to swords and guns and covered in steel armor is not the wooden frame, but the two rows of wooden barrels fixed inside the car. In large rivers, this thing will most likely be overturned by the waves, but in a moat or a small river with a slow current, it can be safely swam across.

What's the point of crossing over? Are the four people in the car the only ones who can attack the city? Obviously, it's unlikely. In fact, the four soldiers in the car are all engineers, with average combat skills and even less command ability.

What they practiced most on a daily basis was not how to use firearms, but how to dig holes in various materials and stuff explosives into them, and how to use the most appropriate amount of explosives to collapse, smash, or blow up a wall, a cliff, or a large rock.

(End of this chapter)