Chapter 34 Expansion of Equipment Purchase

The Beiyang Military and Political Department has been established, and this institution is the real authority responsible for the training, logistics and combat affairs of the new army in the whole Beiyang system, so since its birth, it has begun to affect the modernization process of the Chinese army.

After the establishment of such a real authority, there are naturally a lot of complicated things. The chief officials of each department are extremely busy, and Zhao Dongyun is naturally included here.

The coach is mainly responsible for education and training in the Military and Political Department. Although the main affairs are handled by Feng Guozhang, Zhao Dongyun still holds the title of supervising machine gun affairs. He can't get involved in other things, but he can still do things related to machine guns.

Moreover, his title of supervising machine gun affairs is also a little nondescript. In fact, what Yuan Shikai asked him to do is to 'found'. That is to say, what Zhao Dongyun wants to do is not to supervise others to train machine gun troops, but to personally establish machine gun troops.

And this task is not easy!

After the military and political department officially took office and met Feng Guozhang and had a drink with a group of colleagues of the military and political department, Zhao Dongyun did not go to the military and political department the next day, but went straight to the military camp again.

Today, there are not only a small number of troops stationed in the Dongguan foreign military camp, but also a large number of standing troops stationed there. Zhao Dongyun's new machine gun battalion is also here.

Soon, he brought Lin Yongquan and Zhao Dongping together for a meeting!

"This time, three new machine gun battalions will be compiled, which is quite difficult. The number of personnel and ordnance required are huge. You will have a heavy burden in the next few months. You all have to be mentally prepared!" Zhao Dongyun said so.

According to the usual situation, in fact, the machine gun battalion should be directly trained by each unit, just like the artillery, which should be organized by the towns themselves, rather than concentrating all the artillery troops to train.

But the current situation is a little special. On the one hand, there are still too few machine gun troops in the Beiyang Army, and there are too few people who know how to fight with machine guns. At best, only Zhao Dongyun, and then there are several leaders and sentries that Zhao Dongyun has trained in the past six months.

It is difficult to rely on these people to train a machine gun battalion, let alone disperse them all to train in each unit. If so, I don't know that it will take years to build the three battalion machine gun team, so Yuan Shikai followed Zhao Dongyun's advice and focused on training first and standby. The gun team is slightly completed and then assigned to each unit.

However, even if it is centralized training, Zhao Dongyun does not intend to say that he will train the three machine gun battalions at one time. He intends to gradually expand the scale of training. In addition to the scarcity of talents, it is also due to ordnance and military expenses.

In terms of military expenses, the conversation between Yuan Shikai and Zhou Xuexi yesterday has been very clear. There is money, but the score is given in three months, and the first batch is only 40,000 taels of silver.

The first batch of funds is 40,000 taels, and Zhao Dongyun can't rely on 40,000 taels of silver to build three machine gun camps.

In addition, there are also ordnance factors. Three new machine gun battalions have been built. According to 24 machine guns in one battalion in the past, the three battalions need 72 machine guns. In addition, a small amount of spare and replacement machine guns must be stored, so the number of newly purchased machine guns should be at least 75.

Except for the machine gun itself, which has bullets, everyone knows that the machine gun is a big consumer of bullets, so the number of bullets purchased at the same time is also indispensable.

However, Zhao Dongyun can't get such a large amount of ordnance in a short time, so he can only take his time.

Looking around, Zhao Dongyun said, "Among many problems, the issue of ordnance should be solved first. In addition to machine guns, the newly established machine gun battalion still needs military commanders, machine gun shooters and pistols; there are also rifles used by ammunition hands, guards, logistics teams, etc.; in addition, officers' knives, telescopes, flags, military music, and military engineers. Shovels and so on need to be purchased one by one.

In addition, it has to be taken into account that the subsequent machine gun troops will be assigned, so it also needs to match the scheduled troops.

Although Yuan Shikai asked Zhao Dongyun to concentrate on training machine gun battalions, he did not intend to make these machine gun units independent. After all, they are assigned to the following units. However, the ordnance of each unit in the Beiyang system is different. Not to mention the artillery, it has little to do with Zhao Dongyun. However, pistols and rifles But it has something to do with it.

At this time, Lin Yongquan said, "In this case, in addition to machine guns, I'm afraid we need to buy a variety of rifles and pistols!"

Zhao Dongyun said, "I have told Lord Du Xian about this. According to the words of Lord Du Xian, except for the need to prepare a battalion of Japanese rifles scheduled for the Standing Army Zuo Town, the other rifles used in the newly built battalions use seven or nine rifles."

The rifle problem is not big for the machine gun battalion, because whether it is a pistol or a rifle battalion, it is actually only a secondary weapon for self-defense and preparation. Just like the engineering battalion and the heavy battalion are also equipped with rifles, it is an unprepared need.

And this is also the special situation of the Beiyang New Army. Whether it is reasonable or not, that's what the Beiyang Army did anyway.

"Except for the Japanese guns used in the first battalion, the rest use seven or nine-step guns. If you need to be assigned to the town association of different ordnance in the future, you can directly exchange them. Anyway, you don't need many guns!" The last sentence is the key point. Anyway, rifles are secondary weapons. Now they are trained with seven or nine rifles. In the future, if the troops assigned use other rifles, just change them directly. You don't have to worry about it now!

"In terms of machine guns, you can see how to solve it!" Compared with pistols and rifles, machine guns are the big head.

Lin Yongquan said, "In terms of machine guns, the Maxim machine guns we are using now are good. I think we should continue to buy them?"

Zhao Dongyun listened and said, "Do you mean German or Russian machine guns?"

Although the 20 new machine guns in the machine gun camp are all German-style bodies, the gun frames are divided into German and Russian, and even British gun frames. The reason for this chaos is that when he bought machine guns, Zhao Dongyun couldn't find a way to buy them in large quantities, so he could only find those The arms dealers bought a few, and those arms dealers naturally have nothing to sell. Some are original, some have been changed by various things, and even two of them have only one gun body, and then get a gun mount and sell it to Zhao Dongyun.

So Zhao Dongyun can only stick to the last bottom line in the end, that is, the caliber must be unified, and there is no way to consider the design of the gun frame and other details.

Therefore, although the Markin in the new machine gun camp is 7.92 caliber, the gun frame is different.

Lin Yongquan said: "The Ministry of Service recommends the use of German machine guns. First of all, the performance of the original factory is reliable. In addition, different gun frames also cause many inconveniences in training. In addition to the new machine guns using German machine guns with the same regulations, I also suggest buying another batch of German machine guns to replace many existing miscellaneous gun frames!"

Zhao Dongyun nodded: "I have neglected the gun frame, but it is still necessary to buy a unified standard gun frame. Of course, it is not necessary to buy it from the original factory. Those domestic manufacturing bureaus can't build a machine gun, but it's still okay to build an iron frame!"

With that, he continued, "That's it. Let's continue to buy the seven-nine-caliber Maxim machine gun and form a unified configuration!"

At this time, he looked at Zhao Dongping, who was sitting beside him. Zhao Dongping's military career in the past six months has changed a lot. First of all, he is more energetic. Wearing a military uniform looks stronger than before. He can't see that he is just a young man under 20 years old.

"In terms of the purchase of ordnance, you should continue to deal with Dongping. Don't rush to settle with those small foreign banks. Look more and look for more. Those ocean banks will definitely not let go of such a big list!" Zhao Dongyun personally ordered that Zhao Dongping would not be cheated by those arms dealers.

With so many machine guns plus rifles, pistols, binoculars and matching bullets, the price of the whole batch of arms order is at least 50,000 to 60,000 taels of silver. Although it is less than the large order of more than 1 million taels of silver signed by Yuan Shikai and Yangxing some time ago, it is not small enough for those ocean banks to compete for or even ignore the army. Fire is banned.

Last year, the arms embargo in the Xinchou Treaty was still good, and even Yuan Shikai did not dare to openly break it. At that time, Zhao Dongyun could only secretly smuggle machine guns, but now in less than a year, the arms embargo has existed in name only. Yuan Shikai openly asked the Japanese to buy enough. It is not enough to equip the two divisions, and now it is planned to buy a large amount of German weapons from the Germans.

In this case, Zhao Dongyun naturally does not need to smuggle as small as last year, and he can talk openly with those foreign countries.

There is basically not much to discuss about the purchase of ordnance. They don't have many choices due to reality, and this has little to do with most of the army officers below. What weapons are not used?

However, the next thing is a lot to do for the following officers, that is, the recruitment of soldiers and personnel appointments of several newly established machine gun battalions.

After a silent meeting, Zhao Dongyun said, "Although it is very difficult to train the machine gun team of the four battalions, in order not to take a long time, the four battalions in the early stage must be set up first.

There are new machine gun battalions as shelves, with four battalions. The former front and right teams of the machine gun battalion are transferred to the first battalion, the left team to the second battalion, the rear team to the third battalion, and the fourth battalion is temporarily vacant.

Zhao Dongyun's method is to take the original troops as the backbone and expand them into three battalions, so as not to start all the other battalions, and become a way to recruit old troops and cooperate with the new troops to form a new army. It is also an old trick to expand the Beiyang army. Zhao Dongyun is only using this method now.

The following officers also understand and support this practice, but they are obviously more concerned about Zhao Dongyun's next words, because since there are new first battalion, second battalion and third battalion, there must be relevant chief officers. At this glance, there are three officers. With the position, including Lin Yongquan, seven or eight officers below stared at Zhao Dongyun, hoping that he could say his name next.