The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 58: Sweeping North America
By the end of October 1779, the Manhattan military camp was almost out of food.

The food and drink consumption for more than 20,000 people was already very huge, and the British army originally planned to arrange more than 8,000 people to fight southward.

The food reserves were not originally prepared for 20,000 people, and now it is impossible to obtain food from the surrounding areas.

Henry Clinton, the commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America, was already feeling despair about the situation in North America when he learned from the navy who had escaped that the Ming Dynasty had joined the war just after the Battle of New York Bay.

Clinton was not afraid of fighting the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming homeland is on the other side of the world, and it is impossible for the Ming Dynasty to exert its full strength in the battle in the North Atlantic on this side of the world.

However, the power that the Ming Dynasty can now exert is enough to tip the balance of war.

Now, unless the British Navy is desperate and allows its homeland to be conquered by France, it will immediately come to the rescue of North America with all its strength.

Otherwise, New York would have been lost, North America would have been lost, and the entire war would have been a failure.

But there is no way the king, the prime minister and the parliamentarians will abandon their homeland.

All I can do now is to retain my last bit of dignity as much as possible.

However, what Clinton could not understand was that there was no conflict between Britain and the Ming Dynasty, so why did the Ming Dynasty take action against Britain?
Even if it is for the purpose of competing for overseas colonies, we can join forces with Britain to seize Spain's colonies.

Going from Ming Dynasty to South America should be much faster than coming to North America!

So why is that?

Clinton could only conclude that it was the French who were behind this, and that France had secretly promised some unknown benefits to the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty had more than a hundred warships and hundreds of cannons bombarding intermittently for a month.

The supplies in the Manhattan Island military camp were completely exhausted, and everyone's spirits were tortured to the point of collapse.

Henry Clinton finally couldn't hold on any longer and surrendered.

On the morning of December 1779, 12, on the open plain in the middle of Manhattan Island.

Qin Nanxing, admiral of the Ming Dynasty's North American fleet, Li Anbang, governor-general of the North American Expeditionary Force, Washington, commander-in-chief of the United States Continental Army, Lafayette, representative of the French Expeditionary Force, and representatives of American militia from Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other places were all present.

Witnessed by the guards of honor from both sides, Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America, took off his sword.

Clinton looked at the crowd around him, not knowing to whom to give the sword.

A group of North American military officers were a little excited. Accepting the surrender of the commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America was an unprecedented and great honor.

Especially Washington, who once lost the New York area due to weak military strength, wanted to find an opportunity to regain his honor.

But this great victory, from layout to battle planning, was led by the Ming army.

So everyone finally looked at the several officers from the Ming Dynasty.

As the commander-in-chief of the Ming Expeditionary Force, Li Anbang waved to a guard of honor beside him.

The guard, who was less than 20 years old, stepped forward and grabbed Clinton's sword.

Clinton could see that the other person was not of high status, so he subconsciously grasped his sword tightly, unwilling to hand it over to an ordinary soldier.

But this persistence did not last long, and Clinton soon gave up his dignity under the dark guns around him.

He let go of her hand weakly and walked aside dejectedly.

After a simple battlefield surrender ceremony, the Ming, American and French allied forces began to receive British prisoners.

More than 20,000 British troops in Manhattan dropped their weapons at designated locations one by one under the supervision of the Ming Army, the United States Continental Army, and local militia.

Then they were led by the militia to the wasteland outside the city to set up camp, and built temporary houses with straw or wheat stalks, mud and wood.

From now on, they can no longer occupy the houses originally owned by Manhattan residents.

It's winter now, and the weather in northern United States is still relatively cold. Many people may freeze to death if they camp in the wild in winter.

The British homeland is being threatened by France and Spain, and they will not have the energy to arrange enough transport ships to pull them back in the short term.

They can only fend for themselves temporarily under the supervision of the US militia.

The prisoners at New York, together with those at Newport, and those in the navy, totalled more than thirty-two thousand.

Simply feeding them, as well as providing them with food and fuel to prevent them from freezing to death, is a huge expense.

But they are also bargaining chips for the subsequent formal peace talks, and at the very least they cannot be allowed to die here.

At this time, the North American War had not yet completely ended. Li Anbang left 20,000 Ming army troops to control the major cities in the northern United States.

Another 10,000 Ming Dynasty land troops, led by 40,000 mixed American Continental Army soldiers and militia, followed the Ming Dynasty navy to fight southward.

The main force of the British Army in North America has surrendered, and the main force of the navy has been defeated and fled back to the homeland.

At this time, the entire North America was ruled by the Ming army.

The North American militia had just won a great victory, so their morale reached an unprecedented high and their numbers also increased spontaneously.

Therefore, the following battle can only be described as a sweep.

The British strongholds in Savannah and its surrounding areas in the south were quickly eliminated one after another by the Ming army and the North American militia.

East Florida was also quickly occupied by North American militia led by the Ming army.

Then came the small islands in Central America, including the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, etc., which were also taken over one after another by the Ming-US coalition forces.

In the spring of the following year, on April 1780, 4, the Ming and American allied forces captured British Jamaica.

The British Governor of the Caribbean, Baron George Macartney, led local soldiers and officials to surrender to the landing Ming-American coalition forces.

In the history of Zhu Jianxuan's previous life, Macartney should have been captured by the French Navy a year later.

Then ten years later he would be sent as an envoy to the Qing Dynasty to congratulate Emperor Qianlong on his birthday.

Finally, the Ming-American coalition began to attempt to seize British Belize and British Nicaragua on the Central American continent.

This required the assistance of Spanish colonial troops.

Now that spring has arrived, the Ming Dynasty's land forces left in the north have also received new tasks.

Li Anbang sent out two bicycle units.

Heading north, they seized land along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

They marched westward along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, seizing the British colonies in the interior.

With the support of the navy, the attack on the Canadian coastline was relatively smooth, but Canada's inland garrisons were obviously more difficult to attack than those on the coast.

Because a large number of royalists from the Thirteen Colonies had fled to Canada, there were more local residents who were loyal to the British king.

Moreover, the Americans had already attacked Montreal and Quebec before they declared independence.

The Americans captured Montreal but were unable to hold it.

When the Americans retreated, they caused a lot of damage in Montreal, leaving a very bad impression on the locals.

So the local people’s will to resist is even stronger now.

The Ming troops were pure outsiders in the local area and had basically no mass base.

In addition, without the absolute advantage of naval support in the inland, the advancement speed naturally became slow.

Li Anbang figured out the situation, discussed it with his staff, and quickly changed his strategy.

Abandon densely populated towns such as Montreal and Quebec, and use the mobility of bicycles in the inland to quickly capture small inland settlements.

The bicycle soldiers were responsible for the attack in the front, and the North American militia were subsequently arranged to follow up and take over the captured settlements.

However, at least one Ming Army Division must be left in every settlement.

The North American militia still serves and rotates on a one-year cycle, but the Ming Dynasty's land division will be stationed for a long time.

The basic goal was to capture all settlements near the northern coast of the Great Lakes and incorporate the entire Great Lakes region into Ming's occupation zone.

During the subsequent ceasefire negotiations, the ownership of these enclosed territories will be clarified.

After the Ming army changed its strategy, subsequent combat operations went quite smoothly.

The bicycle soldiers had an obvious advantage in mobility. The Ming Dynasty's bicycle soldiers also used percussion rifles and revolvers on a large scale, and there were also a large number of hunters using rifled rifles, giving them an advantage of more than one generation in weapons.

Britain's support to Canada has also stopped completely. The inland settlements are limited in size, with a village possibly having only a few households, and they are no match for the Ming regular army.

The Ming Dynasty's bicycle soldiers continued to advance and successively captured a large number of strongholds on both sides of the Great Lakes.

(End of this chapter)