Another day and a half later, Li Su's army pioneer Shi Shiran rushed to Caojun Water Village at Chaohukou.

Because of the large number of people and the powerful warships occupy a majestic land, the 60,000 people along Li Su were dragged into a long snake formation that stretched for dozens of miles in the Ruxu Water.

Especially when the Five-Tooth Battleship passed by, it could basically only pass in a single row, and at most there were a row of boats on both sides to cover the whistle. When the vanguard of the fleet arrived at Hukou Shuizhai, the tail of the team had just been attacked by fire just a day and a half ago.

Li Su is in charge of the largest giant ship today, which weighs more than 800 tons, and is also the flagship of the fleet. In the cabin at the top of the ship building, he personally used a binocular with a golden lens tube to look out of the enemy's situation through the observation hole.

This flagship was the one used in the Battle of Punishing Jiangdong three years ago. After the Wu and Yue land was pacified, there was no more powerful hostile naval combat power on the land of China. Li Su was not a wasteful person, so he would not ask for a more powerful inland warship, just use old goods.

Of course, in order to get a good start and get some new atmosphere, during the preparation period for the Northern Expedition this spring, some of the cabins of this flagship were renovated.

After all, as a ceremonial flagship, better decoration is also a way to show the dignity of the Han Dynasty.

In later generations, those naval powers in World War I and World War II, which did not have luxuriously decorated battleships, were specially used to visit the world.

In addition to decoration, the protection of the hull has also been symbolically improved, mainly to remove rust from the hull wrapped in iron sheets, and reinforce the boat building where the head coach lives on the top floor, and install all the observation holes and shooting holes with iron windows that can be opened and closed.

(Only Li Su's shipboard is full of iron sheets, while the other five-tooth warships are just waterline armored iron sheets)

When Li Su saw the Cao Jun water camp in front of him appear in the telescope's field of view, he looked at the shape and scale of the water camp, and his mentality became more certain, and his confidence soared for no reason.

Putting away the telescope, Li Su shook the folding fan and chatted with Zhuge Liang and laughed: "Aliang, do you know what your teacher remembers?"

Zhuge Liang had meticulous thinking. He recalled Li Su's experience and said:

"I heard that my mentor and General Guan were ordered to go south to recruit Danyang soldiers. By chance, they made great contributions here. I just observed Cao's water camp and suddenly gained something. Could it be that he remembered the achievements of that year?"

Li Su nodded: "Tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk, A Liang, if you have meticulous thoughts, there are few people who are better than you today. That's right, I really remember the situation of the past.

There is no way, who made Cao Xiu’s water village uninnovated? It feels similar to the Hukou water village of Zheng Baoli, the hero of Danyang, who died fourteen years ago.

Since this is the case, we easily broke through more than ten years ago. Now even if the enemy's strength has increased several times, our army has become stronger. It is not as strong as Mount Tai, but it is all about powder!"

Zhuge Liang also smiled relaxedly: "A great victory is inevitable, but we must also see the changes in the situation. When the mentor and General Guan fought with Zheng Bao, there were only a few thousand soldiers on both sides, so the narrowness of Ruxu Water had little impact on both sides, and they could fully deploy their troops.

Although our army is even more numerous now, there are many cumbersome ships, which stretches dozens of miles along the river. Looking at Caoxiu Water Village, it is quite deep, as if he intends to put our army in Chaohu one after another, and then he can attack our army from three directions east and west."

Li Su: "So what? A Liang, you can see his plan, which means he has no other terrible backup plan. As for blocking Hukou, there are more and fewer attacks on the local battlefield, I have seen such adversity and war situations before.

In the final decisive battle against Wu three years ago, our navy followed Niuzhu, Zhongjiang, and broke into Taihu Lake from west to east. At the mouth of Taihu Lake, Zhou Yu was still ready for battle in advance, attacking our vanguard from three sides, trying to form partly to defeat the more and defeat each one.

Later, the Taishi Jiang Army and the Old General Huang rushed out a bloody road by relying on the five-tooth warships on the iron armored waterline. As long as the number of warships in our army was gradually increasing, Zhou Yu quickly collapsed. Today, when Cao Xiu met, his ability was definitely far inferior to Zhou Yu."

The more Li Su said, the more confident he became. After all, it was Cao's research on water wars that he had been disconnected for too long and always used the old version of his understanding to arrange tactics.

Well, it is estimated that when all the water forces on Cao Cao's camp were destroyed, they would not have the chance to learn it.

...

After Li Su thought that after observing the enemy situation, he ordered the vanguard to continue to march immediately and rushed directly into Chaohu with a dignified army.

However, no matter how confident the plan is, it will still be difficult to solve the problem of minor accidents when it is actually implemented.

Look, not long after the front army advanced, a small problem was discovered:

Cao Xiu's deployment was more advanced than the Shanyue Manzi more than ten years ago. He also knew that conventional defense could not beat Li Su, so he arranged reef obstacles at the estuary of Chaohu Lake, which were composed of shipwrecks, a large amount of stone and iron cones on the ship.

Who asked Cao's army to control the Yellow River control of the northern line? The Liaodong navy who had just used a reef to intercept Tianchou a while ago?

Cao's army also summarizes and exchanges successful experiences, and this kind of communication is always very efficient. Therefore, the method that Lu Xun had temporarily worked, Cao Xiu also did not care whether the situation was fully in line with the actual needs, so he first tried to seek medical treatment and deployed it.

Li Su's vanguard fleet was not very cautious during the first wave of reconnaissance. He slightly sank two or three small boats and injured a fighting ship.

Fortunately, the river surface is narrow and it is daytime, and there are no casualties. Basically, you can swim ashore or move to the ship behind.

Cao Xiu, in the water camp opposite, saw that several ships of the Han army vanguard had hit the reef, and tried to tentatively counterattack and harvest a wave.

As a result, they killed a hundred Han sailors who had not yet established a foothold and landed on the shore. However, the Han army's supportive forces responded extremely quickly. The cavalry troops searching for advance on both sides of the Taiwan Strait immediately entered the counterattack and fought with the Cao army's counterattack troops who had left the village to find the bargain.

Cao Xiu had just harvested the results of a hundred people, but he could not retreat. He was strangled by the Han cavalry and retreated. Both sides suffered casualties, but it was obvious that Cao Xiu's army was even more miserable.

Cao Xiu had only had less than two cups of tea, and he lost the little sweetness he had just tasted, with the capital and the profit. After returning to the camp, he counted it again, and lost more than a thousand people. The most important thing was that there were three or four hundred tigers and leopards.

In history, Cao Xiu also helped the Cao family take charge of the Cao family for a while, and some of the tiger and leopard cavalry were now dead due to the butterfly effect, so the proportion of tiger and leopard cavalry reassigned to Cao Xiu is a little higher.

Of course, the total number of tiger and leopard cavalry in the Cao army was only four or five thousand, and Cao Xiu deployed only more than a thousand cavalry here.

In comparison, the Han army on the opposite side suffered less than 500 losses, 40% of whom were killed when they had just landed in a shipwreck swimming.

After the two sides pulled each other apart, Li Su had to arrange the work of breaking the barriers step by step.

The combat process and fortifications in this aspect are also very mature, so just follow the construction plan.

After all, Li Su has read so many historical books, and even knows how to deal with the "Iron Cable Crossing River". These mere obstacles in front of him are just delaying his construction time of at least three or five days, up to seven or eight days.

There will be no impact on the final direction of the battle results.

Li Su doesn't have to worry about defeating Cao Xiu and Cao Ren. Anyway, Cao Cao has no reinforcements to send back to the Huainan battlefield. Li Su fights fast and slow, so there is no need to seize the critical time nodes.

If he could even take the opportunity to work harder, the Cao army felt that "Cao Xiu was still saved", and Li Su would be more comfortable to surround and support some people, just treat it as a rabbit.

Cao Xiu, who was opposite, became very cautious after suffering several times. During the construction process of the Han army leisurely, Cao Xiu did not dare to harass him anymore, for fear that it would be Li Su or Zhuge Liang's trick to show weakness and lure the enemy.

...

A few days later, on the fifth day of June, the construction of the Han army's obstacle breaking has been completed.

During this period, Li Su really got several good news in succession, giving his subsequent attacks an opportunity-

The main reason is that Li Su's offensive posture is very firm and he won two small victories in front, which led to the old Sun Quan's subordinates who were only "rebel against Cao and become independent" a while ago, gradually seeing the situation clearly.

In order to pursue a better outcome in the future, those people were not satisfied with preventing Cao's army from counterattacking at the beginning, but began to find ways to make contributions to the new master and support the Han army's offensive.

Therefore, two days ago, Li Su received a messenger sent by Zhu Zhi, the prefect of Lujiang, from Wan County, to express his intention to surrender to the Lujiang area of ​​the Sun family.

He also said that he could help the Han army, as long as Prime Minister Li agreed to let them command their old subordinates to participate in the war, and not to break up the organization or even cut off military power.

In order to fully show sincerity, Zhu Zhi's surrender also took the initiative to provide an important military intelligence:

He said he was defending Wan County. Ten days ago, when Cao Ren just heard that Lujiang was in a trend of unstable situation, he tried to divide his troops south and send a light fast mobile unit with a size of nearly 10,000 people to destroy Zhu Zhi's rebellion.

The commander of the Cao army was Li Dian. Zhu Zhi didn't need to inform him of this, Li Su knew it.

Zhu Zhi fought the first offensive and defensive battle with Li Dian four days ago and temporarily repelled Li Dian's siege. Then the news of the Han army driving straight into Lujiang River spread throughout Li Dian. Li Dian was worried that there would be any mistakes in the rear and his flank would be threatened, so he had to give up the recovery of Wan County, temporarily retreating north for dozens of miles, and retreat to Shiting north of Wan County.

Originally, the easiest route to retreat from Wan County, the heart of Lujiang, to Huainan County, was naturally to retreat down the Yangtze River to Ruxukou, and then head north along the Ruxu River, so that there were abundant waterways and rivers throughout the journey.

But wasn’t this road cut off because Li Su’s lonely army went deep into the water and penetrated into the water?

Li Dian and others could not walk on the plain by the river at all. They could only cross a short section of the Dabie Mountains from Shiting to the north and retreat north on the mountain valley road.

After passing the ridge north of Shiting, the water flows from the valleys on the northern slope of the Dabie Mountains will naturally converge, forming a tributary of the Xifei water west of Hefei, and finally converge to Hefei City more than 200 miles away.
Chapter completed!