Chapter Forty-Seven: Expansion of the Arms Factory, Part One

Night of October 25, 1938
Headquarters of the Temporary 2nd Division in Qifeng County

Previously, the arsenal had only a little over a hundred people, capable of doing little more than simple firearm maintenance, bullet reloading, and hand-crafting grenades. However, with over two months of development, the arsenal had expanded to 641 personnel, comprising 150 craftsmen, 300 apprentices, and a 191-member security company (equivalent in strength to an infantry company).

With the increase in personnel, the output of existing products naturally grew. More importantly, there were new products—not many, just mortar shells, but they could be manufactured in three calibers: 60mm, 82mm, and 120mm. Because of distrust in the quality of cast steel produced by crucible furnaces, the explosive charge was reduced, and the saved weight was used to increase the thickness of the shell body. Although the explosive power of the shells decreased somewhat, they were at least able to be produced.

A chaotic and disorganized approach could never achieve economies of scale. Only a focused and refined strategy was the way out for the small arsenal of the Temporary 2nd Division at the current stage. With a total of only a few hundred people, dilapidated equipment, no supporting factories, and severe shortages of raw materials, if someone told you they wanted to make everything—airplanes and artillery—they must be joking.

To say nothing else, take the humble rifle. Domestic factories had yet to mass-produce the special steel required for Chiang Kai-shek rifle barrels; Hanyang-made barrels were feasible, but you would be mistaken to think having steel was the end of it. You also needed a steam hammer—at least a steam hammer of several hundred tons—just to make the steel billets denser and more uniform. Without this equipment, a rifle barrel's service lifespan was doomed to be drastically shortened before machining even began.

Next came heat treatment. While this could be done using primitive methods, without extremely high technical skill, it could never compare to professional equipment, nor was it conducive to quality control. Poor heat treatment not only affected the service life of the firearm but also compromised its safety.

Following that were a series of difficulties such as chrome plating, bluing, and assembly. Every single hurdle was hard to resolve. Take assembly, which seemed the simplest: components inevitably had errors and flaws, requiring specialized tools and jigs during the assembly process to extend service life and improve mechanical performance. Manual assembly was certainly possible, but the smoothness of the mechanism and its tolerance for foreign matter would be severely compromised. This was why weapons and improvised firearms from many small factories lacked mechanism smoothness, often jamming or experiencing extraction failure during use.

That fellow Du Gui, working with two apprentices, could hand-craft a decent C96 pistol in a day, but what good was that? One pistol a day could not form a scale of production, and the performance remained inconsistent.

Among the reloaded bullets currently produced by the arsenal, the ones with the highest quality were the 7.9mm round-nose bullets and the 10.6x25mm pistol cartridges. As for the rest, they were currently using molds obtained from Li Fugui to reload a small scale of lead-nosed black powder ammunition purely for practice.

The hand grenades were modeled after the "Border Region Manufacture." The arsenal was still unable to mass-produce detonators for grenades on a large scale; instead, pull-friction tubes made of powdered glass mixed with red phosphorus and safety fuses were much easier to produce. The explosive charge used black powder mixed with a small amount of barium nitrate. To ensure explosive power, the shell body was redesigned, increasing the charge by eighty grams. Although the weight increased slightly, the explosive power remained guaranteed.

At a glance, this grenade appeared only slightly longer in the body than the "Border Region Manufacture," but the differences inside were vast. First were the type and weight of the explosive; second was the shell material—the Eighth Route Army used white pig iron meant for farming tools, whereas the Temporary 2nd Division used grey pig iron and cast steel. Finally, there was the shell structure: dense grooves were cut into the back of each grenade body to make the shrapnel fragment more evenly and fly farther. Without machines, this item simply could not be made. Relying solely on manual labor would push the workers to the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Regarding mortar shells, Wang Yue originally wanted to cut one or two calibers, but the items were simply too attractive; he could not bear to give up any caliber. Given the terrain of the Taihang Mountains, mortars were the most suitable choice. To say nothing of barrel artillery, even a 120mm mortar could hardly find room to maneuver. This was also why Wang Yue had not assigned 120mm mortars to his troops—they were simply too heavy to drag. Do not boast about the Type 92 infantry gun; while that thing could indeed be disassembled and carried on the backs of soldiers, it had distance limitations. After all, the physical constitution of the Imperial Japanese Army soldiers still could not compare to pack animals, could it?

Speaking of pack animals, Wang Yue fell into speechlessness. A division with several thousand men had only thirty-odd mules and fifty donkeys. There was no livestock market anywhere around Qifeng County, and a whole county居然 (surprisingly) lacked any decent livestock. Of course, other poultry and livestock were also scarce; in short, it was poor to the point of bleeding urine.

Had Wang Yue not possessed a cheat code, he would have fled in dejection long ago. In such a poor place, even feeding several thousand people was a problem—how could anyone fight a war?

Forget about not having mules and horses; even if there were any, they would be eaten at the first opportunity. That fellow Li Yunlong came over from time to time to deliver prisoners, and he liked to watch the kitchen crew's donkeys turn the millstones. His objective was to inspect the supply situation on Wang Yue's side. Whether it was the former Independent Regiment or the current Temporary 2nd Division, it was a huge piece of fat meat, and people could not help but covet it.

Within the perimeter of the arsenal, Wang Yue had also successively established branches for coking, iron smelting, aluminum smelting, black powder, and sulfuric acid. Compared to making weapons, these were the fundamentals. Without them, even weapon production could not last long.

Coking had already begun over at Laojunguan. It was the primitive coking method that was later completely banned in future generations. Ding Buer had seen provincial primitive coking methods back in the day and knew the ins and outs of it like the back of his hand.

How to increase the charging volume, how to reduce fuel consumption, how to shorten the time, how to collect sulfur, and how to reduce smoke emission were all matters of deep knowledge. Without Wang Yue's guidance, one would have a long wait ahead. High-quality coke and sulfur would be the raw materials for the future.

Iron smelting still used small blast furnaces. While these furnaces could not smelt steel, producing some high-quality iron was not a problem. At the very least, the grey pig iron used for grenade shells could be completely self-produced. Adjusting the formula to forge some cutting tools and mattocks was also good. Of course, the most important thing was providing raw materials for the subsequent crucible steel smelting. The arsenal now possessed eight 100-kg crucible furnaces and seventeen 50-kg crucible furnaces, creating a huge daily demand for raw materials.

Actually, Qifeng County had meager iron ore resources. Aside from coal mines, the place had no mineral resources worth exploiting. However, it did not matter—Wang Yue had a cheat code. Whenever he returned from Jiangcheng during this period, he always stuffed his spatial storage to the brim, often with scrap metal. To say nothing of the long term, having enough scrap metal to last a year or two was no problem. As for the future, at worst, he could continue to figure out ways to "procure goods."