The Rise Of A Billionaire 1943-Chapter 160 - 172: The Great Sweep of the Rhine

The greater the hope, the greater the disappointment.

Things often turn out this way. Although Pierre was eager to claim those 500,000 chemical shells for himself, once he learned their location, he immediately fell silent.

The shells were stored in an armory on the opposite bank of the Rhine, a place still under German occupation.

Well then.

He’d just have to wait a bit longer.

He decided to wait until Patton’s Third Army had crossed the Rhine before making a move!

While waiting, Pierre didn’t sit idle. Instead, he reestablished contact with Berlin. What for?

Simply to solve two problems—one was ammunition for the STG44 assault rifle, and the other was chemical weapons.

As for the former, Berlin couldn’t do anything either. Due to limited production, even the German army itself didn’t have enough. Because of the ammunition shortage, the Germans had even issued orders that frontline soldiers could only use automatic fire in emergencies.

However, the telegram from Berlin did reveal one piece of information: the ammunition shortage at the front was a transportation issue—there were large stockpiles in the Ruhr region’s armament factories. As for chemical weapons, the answer was the same—they were all in German-controlled areas.

Although Berlin’s reply was hardly different from not replying at all, Pierre still reminded him to pay attention to his own safety and specifically emphasized that he looked forward to meeting him.

For the next half month, Pierre remained at the front lines. But unlike before, he now specifically included several factories producing STG44s, MG42s, and their ammunition in the "search plan"—even including artillery shell manufacturers.

"What if the Allies try to stop us from dismantling the machines?"

"They’re too busy to care right now. What we need is to take advantage of the time gap. Our position is right between the front and the rear. By the time those civilian officials come to take over the factories, it’ll be at least a week later. Offer those German workers high wages and organize them to dismantle and transport the machinery. Once we get these machines back to Borneo, they’ll be extremely useful!"

As long as there’s bread and cigarettes, those Germans definitely won’t refuse to help. After all, for them, bread is the most important thing right now. With the help of German technicians and workers, dismantling and transporting the machinery shouldn’t be a problem.

After all, for those Germans, bread is the top priority now—not anything else. Besides, the machinery doesn’t belong to them anyway, but to those German industrialists who will soon be labeled as war criminals.

After thinking for a moment, Pierre added,

"If you don’t have enough manpower, I’ll transfer some people from North Africa for you. In the next few days, a batch of people from back home will be arriving. Even if they undergo training, it’s too late for them to join the expedition, but supervising the dismantling and transport is still doable. In short, we need these factories!"

Recruitment back home was going very smoothly. After all, Borneo Company offered great benefits, and paying directly in US dollars had already become well-known throughout the country, even being widely reported in the newspapers.

Some young people from the occupied areas, upon hearing the news, even made their way to the rear. After all, nobody could refuse the chance to earn a high salary.

As for transportation, the Hump air route now had a monthly capacity of over 40,000 tons. Bringing back over ten thousand people on the return trip was a breeze.

Manpower would definitely not be a problem.

As it turned out, Pierre had clearly overestimated the efficiency of the American and British civilian officers in charge of supervising the factories. After the Allies entered Cologne and other parts of the Ruhr, many enterprises were left in a vacuum without any supervision for as long as a month.

Why was this?

Because those civilian officers were worried there might still be resistance fighters in the occupied areas. They wanted to wait until public order was fully restored before going in, and the advancing troops clearly weren’t going to waste their forces guarding factories.

Thus, the search teams, which closely followed the frontline troops, managed to exploit this time gap. During this window, not only did they dismantle and transport tens of thousands of pieces of machinery, but they even packed up and shipped out the semi-finished products from the factories.

To determine which factories were worth dismantling, Pierre even contacted the US Army Air Forces to request a dossier of German factories and enterprises that was over a thousand pages thick. This intelligence, originally compiled for the bomber forces, included not only the original production capacity of the factories, but also their capacity after being bombed. With this information, the task force’s operations became much more efficient.

While the task force’s intelligence department was drawing up the "search plan" based on various sources, on the night of March 12, George Patton’s Third Army crossed the Rhine.

"Cross the river!"

At 3 a.m., with Pierre’s order, more than 25,000 task force members, riding over a thousand jeeps and trucks, followed in the Allies’ footsteps and crossed the Rhine.

The task force’s targeted actions were extremely swift. They rushed into the German armories almost immediately, even foregoing searching the battlefield itself. After all, abandoned weapons wouldn’t just sprout legs and run away—no German would take a gun home and risk being arrested as a soldier. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Compared to scattered weapons, the search teams were far more interested in the weapons and machinery that hadn’t yet left the armories and factories.

In the days that followed, the task force swept almost the entire east bank of the Rhine. One by one, the German armories were sealed off, and non-

Even so, even the trains abandoned by the Germans at the railway stations were directly sealed and taken over, since compared to transporting goods by truck, trains were far more efficient—especially when it came to moving factory machinery, which was simply inseparable from rail transport.

While the task force fanned out to sweep the entire Rhine region, Pierre made his way to an armory that stored 500,000 chemical shells. Built into the mountainside and hidden within the terrain, the armory had long been deserted by its German guards, who had vanished without a trace. Nearby, there were also discarded German uniforms and weapons left behind.

Over an hour later, after confirming that the armory was secure and that there had been no chemical leaks, Pierre and his team finally entered the ammunition depot. Inside, the shells were stacked bare on five-tiered racks, row after row stretching into the distance.

Half a million shells!

Chemical ones!

According to an inventory found by Cheng Peng’an and his team in the management office, the depot contained a total of 500,000 shells in three different models. Although the chemical agents varied, all were of 150mm caliber.

Running his hand over one of the shells, Pierre’s lips curled up into a seventy-degree smile. With these hundreds of thousands of shells, what was there to fear from the tens of thousands of Japanese troops in Borneo?

In truth, he had never worried that his troops would be unable to defeat the Japanese; what he wanted was to minimize casualties as much as possible. Doing everything possible to reduce losses was what mattered most—what weapons were used was of secondary importance.

Chemical weapons... The Japanese had used themwithout care for international laws, Even if he now used them in Borneo, it was simply repaying them in their own coin.

"Destroy the inventory list. Take as many shells as we can. As for the rest..."

Of course, there wouldn’t be any "rest." No matter how many shells they managed to haul away, Pierre would still load all the remaining chemical shells into his spatial storage and take them with him.

How could one leave a treasure mountain empty-handed?

Just as Pierre was overseeing the loading and transport of the chemical shells, he suddenly received a report from another search team.

The unexpected report left Pierre with no time to worry about the shells in the depot. He immediately led a small squad to another location.

Along the way, Pierre seemed visibly unsettled. Sitting in the jeep, he tapped his knee with his fingers, muttering to himself.

"How could this be? Is it really true?"

Thinking about what the other search team had discovered, his palms began to sweat involuntarily. Yet the faint smile on his face and the corners of his mouth, curled up beyond seventy degrees, could not be hidden.

---

March 24.

After entering Germany, every step had to be taken with caution, as anyone could be an enemy—almost every German man had been mobilized into the Volkssturm, from white-haired elders to barely grown boys.

At any moment, a Panzerfaust could be fired from a corner, or someone could open fire from a hidden spot.

Kang Guowei shifted gears, carefully steering the jeep around a pothole on the dirt road and onto a long stretch of grass. After turning off the engine, he grabbed a newspaper from the passenger seat and got out. Lighting a cigarette, he walked along, flipping through the "Qinglong Banner News"—the task force’s military newspaper—until he reached the sports section. He scanned the headlines, searching for the scores of various teams. Although the inter-unit football matches were simple affairs, to each search team, the honor of beating the others was a matter of pride.