Chapter 15: New Weapons
In that instant, Li Huamei knew she had truly become a captain with no crew. Although Li Ying had only been with her for a short time and wasn’t exactly a confidante, she was still someone Li Huamei had personally recruited. Now, a smiling “female orderly” had been assigned to her—a spy from the Australians, no doubt.
And her crew, sent to the “quarantine camp”… with the Australians’ talent for indoctrination, would they still be loyal to her when they got out?
Suddenly, Li Huamei relived the terrifying feeling of being watched while she bathed, the sense of being utterly exposed, with nowhere to hide.
Having come this far, she could only take things as they came. There’s always a price to pay for trust, she comforted herself. She was assigned a two-person bachelor officer’s quarters in the Zuoying base. As the only female officer, she had the room to herself, which was convenient.
But her freedom was confined to these eight square meters. Pushing open the window, she could see the patrolling sentries in the base and the forest of masts in the bay. Although she could move freely through most of the base, she could not leave the Zuoying facility without permission, and requesting leave involved so many regulations that she gave up the idea entirely.
This is no different from being in prison, Li Huamei thought.
However, amidst this helplessness, there was some good news. First, the modifications to the Hangzhou, which had been rejected in Lingao, were approved in Kaohsiung. This included improvements to the ship’s handling and an enhancement of its firepower. Aside from the slightly more complex installation of a steering wheel, the modifications were relatively simple and could be handled by the Kaohsiung shipyard.
Second, as if to relieve her boredom, on her third day in the camp, she was notified to attend “Surface Fleet Officer Training.”
The training took place within the Zuoying base, and all the participants were naturalized officers of the First Fleet. At first, Li Huamei scoffed at the idea. She had spent many years at sea, encountering all sorts of people and situations, but she had never heard of a naval battle being won by sitting at a table, moving little models around on a sand table. And as for teaching navigation theory—were there any Australians more skilled at sailing than she?
Still, it was an excellent opportunity to probe the Australians’ secrets. She put on an enthusiastic act, arriving first to the classroom every day. Soon, she was captivated by something: an album of ships. It was beautifully bound. It was kept on a special reading stand in the classroom, and one had to wear gloves to look through it.
The paper was thick and heavy, and the album felt substantial in her arms. Inside were illustrations of all sorts of ships—some she had seen, some she hadn’t; some she had heard of, some she hadn’t. Each vessel was meticulously labeled with its name, country of origin, and detailed specifications, including tonnage, sail type, speed, armament, and crew complement, all laid out in a dense yet orderly fashion.
What shocked her most were the large three-view and cutaway diagrams, which detailed the structure and internal workings of each ship. Li Huamei couldn’t believe the Australians could so thoroughly and visually represent every detail of a ship on paper. She knew European shipbuilders had detailed plans, but those were the secrets of the master builders and ship owners, inaccessible to ordinary people.
Since the book was not allowed out of the classroom, she would arrive early every day to pore over it, mesmerized by the vessels of all shapes and sizes. A small hope kindled in her heart that one day, she might have a ship of her own from this album.
Later, it wasn’t just the album that astounded her. The Australian on the dais, using a flood of incomprehensible jargon, diagrams drawn on a blackboard, and a few simple models, led her into a world she had never known. She could not have imagined that what she learned in this classroom would, in the near future, set her life on a completely different course.
During class, they would occasionally hear the rumble of cannons. No one paid it any mind. A large fleet had assembled in Kaohsiung. Normally, ships came and went in a constant stream. But now, although vessels still frequently entered and left the harbor, the Lichun and the several steam-powered gunboats had not been deployed. They only occasionally went out for short trips into the nearby waters for live-fire exercises, returning within a day or two at most.
But one day, the instructor announced that all trainees would be observing a Marine Corps amphibious landing exercise.
The exercise took place on a beach outside the Zuoying base. In addition to several warships from the First Fleet, there were also many large, medium, and small landing craft.
It was a standard beach assault: special forces marked targets and landing zones on shore and destroyed command centers; ships closed in to bombard the beach; troops transferred to landing craft, stormed the beach, secured the port, and unloaded artillery… The whole operation was a seamless, dazzling display of coordination.
For someone like Li Huamei, who was there to gather intelligence, the gap in her knowledge made her perceptive abilities too low. The entire exercise was little more than an exciting spectacle to her. Although she saw many new things and special tactics that she found novel and shocking, she failed to grasp their deeper significance.
However, observing the landing exercise allowed her to draw one very clear conclusion: the Australians were about to launch a landing operation, and the target was very likely Zheng Zhilong.
This piece of intelligence was crucial. But she had no way to pass it to her sister. Besides, the survival of the Zheng family was of little consequence to her. And seeing the overwhelming power of the Australian army and navy, there was little doubt as to who would win. Even her mistress would not bet on a losing horse.
She remembered what her mistress had said a few months ago: “Liu Xiang is finished. He’ll be destroyed by Zheng Zhilong and the Australians sooner or later. There’s no need for us to do business with them anymore.”
Now, she could say the same: “The Zheng family is finished. They’ll be destroyed by the Australians sooner or later. There’s no need for us to do business with them anymore.”
For the elders in Kaohsiung, the landing exercise meant that all-out war with the Zheng family was imminent. The two special forces teams brought in before the summer were for preliminary intelligence gathering; the arrival of the Marine Corps from Hong Kong signaled the deployment of a formal combat force.
Shi Zhiqi had arrived quietly in Kaohsiung. With him came a newly formed Marine unit from Hong Kong, publicly known as the “Shi Detachment,” but officially designated the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit. This expeditionary unit was a new formation, with a new structure and new weapons.
The entire Marine unit was no longer equipped with the standard-issue Minie rifle of the Fubo Army, but with a new, more powerful rifle: the Hall breech-loading rifle.
The Hall rifle was an early version of a breech-loader. It had a tilting breechblock. To load, an entire paper cartridge was placed into the breech, which was then closed. A percussion cap was placed on the nipple. In effect, it was a firearm with a fixed metallic cartridge case.
The Hall rifle’s rate of fire was much faster than a muzzle-loader’s. Its disadvantage was gas leakage from the breech, which reduced its range and power, making it inferior to the theoretically more primitive rifled muzzle-loader. In truth, all breech-loading rifles had this problem before the invention of the metallic cartridge. However, against a 17th-century enemy lacking effective long-range projectile weapons, this was not a major issue. Furthermore, the Machine Works claimed they could mitigate the problem by improving machining precision, using brass mating surfaces, and employing a curved locking mechanism. Besides, the machinists were getting tired of churning out identical Minie rifles. It was a common impulse for those in their line of work to want to build more advanced weaponry.
The idea of enjoying the speed of a breech-loader without needing metallic cartridges was very tempting. While the Minie ball had solved the difficulty of loading, the process for a rifled muzzle-loader was still the same as before: tear the bottom of the paper cartridge, pour the powder down the muzzle, ram the bullet down with the ramrod, cock the hammer, place a cap on the nipple, aim, and fire. The 2-3 rounds per minute rate of fire for a muzzle-loader referred to this method. In an emergency, the entire paper cartridge could be shoved down the barrel and fired directly after placing the cap, but since the powder was still wrapped in paper, this increased the rate of misfires and hang-fires, a common occurrence in training and combat. In contrast, a Hall rifle using paper cartridges could achieve a rate of fire of 7-10 rounds per minute. With high-quality granulated black powder, a Hall rifle could even fire over thirty consecutive shots without needing to clean the chamber, another advantage over the Minie rifle.
Of course, the biggest benefit was that the Minie rifles currently in widespread use by the Army and Navy could be easily converted to Hall rifles by modifying the breech, and the production lines would not require major adjustments. Aside from a few extra components that required slightly higher machining precision, the basic production process was similar.
Although the Hall rifle was not a huge technological leap—only a small step in the development of military industry—the cost of this small step was low, while the increase in power was significant. This fit perfectly with the Executive Committee’s philosophy of low-cost improvement.
Thanks to the continuous lobbying and advocacy of Lin Shenhe, this small-scale upgrade was finally implemented before Operation Engine Start. A batch of rifles was converted and issued exclusively to the Marine Corps. Shi Zhiqi, using the Hong Kong detachment as a model, proposed creating an experimental Marine unit with independent amphibious strike capabilities, which coincided perfectly with Lin Shenhe’s proposal to establish a new standard test unit.