Finally, at 3 p.m., because of the high concentration of oil and gas and the inadvertent sparks caused by the personnel on board, the Hyuga caught fire in the ship, and at the same time detonated the ammunition depot, causing a series of large explosions in the belly of the battleship Hyuga, so that Rear Admiral Watanabe had to abandon his flagship, Hyuga. At this moment, Admiral Tochiuchi Sojiro had moved to the heavy cruiser Haguro, but its communication facilities were far from sufficient to serve as an important position in the flagship. At the same time, due to the confusion caused by the transfer, His Excellency did not know the tragic fate of the other non-capital ships. At 18:28 on the same day, the Fuso also sank with the Hyuga in the waves of the East China Sea.

Just as Admiral Tochiuchi Sojiro had lost four of his capital ships (the Ise was seriously wounded and returned to the ship by the destroyer, and the Hyuga, Fuso, and Yamashiro sank), the six captured Russian armored ships of the Fourth Fleet of the Japanese Combined Fleet were still on their way south to the South China Sea, and they were still dreaming of going to Mawei, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou to carry out an artillery raid trip, and the Japanese Fourth Fleet did not smoothly pass through the Taiwan Strait, and what was waiting for them was six Dolphins of the first submarine detachment and 32 Swordfish-class torpedo boats of four squadrons.

"Ozawa-kun, our ship found Chinese torpedo boats, there are a lot of them, they, their speed exceeds 35 knots, and they continue to increase speed, they have launched torpedoes * , four, each ship has four torpedoes. Evade, left full rudder, left full rudder, damn it, mine prepared. With a noisy explosion, the voice of his classmate Nojiji in the headset stopped abruptly. Ozawa and Captain Morikawa Shigemige looked at each other, and it seemed that the Hizen armored ship was already unlucky.

Hizen is the lead ship of the entire Fourth Fleet, and the other warships are lining up in a formation and accompanying less than three nautical miles behind, although due to the faint sea fog and the obstruction of the Hizen, the other warships can't see the enemy's speedboats, but Ozawa is still very clear that the other party must be using the complex islands and reefs of the Penghu Islands to cover the attack of the speedboat group, and then follow the influence of the sea fog, quickly rush out and fire a salvo of torpedo, that is to say, the Hizen in the mine was definitely not hit by a torpedo, The appearance of Hizen, which was emitting no less than three puffs of smoke, in the field of view of the telescope, also confirmed Ozawa's guess.

At this time, the order of Vice Admiral Takasu Shiro, the commander of the fleet, came from the fleet radio station, in order to prevent another attack by the torpedo boats, the warships immediately disbanded the dense formation and formed a detached mine-defense formation, and at the same time the front main gun began to measure the range, ready to fire at the high-speed escaping torpedo boats in the distance, but looking at the speed of these old hairy second-hand goods, even the destroyers of the other side can easily outrun their old guys.

"Our ship was shot, torpedo * torpedo, it was a torpedo * pedo, there were submarines, enemy submarines." A loud bang sounded in the fleet, and the Iki at the end of the second attack, two of the four torpedoes shot at him hit the stern of Iki and the rear of the port side, and suddenly the flames rose, and the blades of a propeller were blown into the air by an explosion from the sea like a boomerang, and pierced into the sea more than 300 meters on the left side in an arc. The Iki had to stop, and at the same time, a large amount of water in the tail compartment made the front and rear balance of the hull extremely fragile, under the gravity of the seawater, the front of the hull gradually lifted, and the hull rose at a strange angle of 30 degrees, and finally the Harvey steel decades ago could no longer bear the bow of several thousand tons, and bought one and two in the creaking and tooth-aching sound of metal friction and breaking, and the broken ship's weight slapped heavily on the sea, and the stern and middle section of the ship were like a steel bar, quickly standing upright, The rod then plunged to the bottom of the sea, and the bow of the ship slowly sank after the remaining sailors swam out for a few hundred meters, and finally disappeared into the sea.

Faced with the dual threat of submarines and torpedo boats, Vice Admiral Takasu Shiro did not have much to deal with, unlike naval battles, formation, position, and even their own firepower and protection did not play much role, the only useful thing was speed. However, compared with the torpedo boats with a speed of more than 40 knots, these four old armored ships with a maximum speed of less than 20 knots are no match at all. Although destroyers and frigates frantically began to patrol around the capital ship, and depth charges were thrown into the water one by one without money, but there were no oil stains and debris in the water column that everyone expected, and the other party's submarine was either far away or simply sat at the bottom, but in front of the depth charge with a depth of 80 = 120 meters, what is the maximum depth of the submarine?

"The destroyer cruises at high speed, engines, starts, maintains a fixed depth, one-third power, and has a heading of 160." On the No. 037 submarine underwater, Captain Hua Jianmin ordered the engine to start, and the submarine began to quietly leave the enemy's patrol range from a depth of 200 meters using the power of the battery. If the other side has active sonar, then this is purely looking for death, but the other party's destroyer only has passive listening equipment, not even sonar, and the submarine is polite, and it is the best policy to take the opportunity to slip away. Even the sound device must be used in the range of its own noise of less than 80 decibels, otherwise the noise of the machine and the roar of depth charges alone will be enough to perforate the eardrum of the sound soldier.

Just as the second batch of 32 torpedo boats appeared on the horizon in the direction of Penghu, the observation posts of the Fourth Fleet sounded a sharp air defense alarm, and the blackened fighters in the western sky obviously did not come to admire the majesty of these second-hand warships. Although there is no support from the 100,000-ton "cement aircraft carrier" in the East China Sea, the HNA fighters taking off from Putian and Penghu can easily besiege the Japanese fleet in the narrow Taiwan Strait without worrying about their own fuel, and they do not even need to carry conformal fuel tanks, but are replaced with a 500-kilogram heavy deflagration bomb.

Soon Dango became the third armored ship to be recruited, this Poltava-class armored ship that joined the Japanese Navy in Lushun has been in service for more than half a century, and the degree of metal fatigue of the hull can be imagined, after being hit by two 250 kg armor-piercing shells and a 500 kg deflagration bomb, it quickly broke in two, and then capsized and sank in less than five minutes, sinking into the coral group of the strait with more than 200 Japanese naval officers and men.

Next is the Sagami, the Russian armored ship Peresvet, which was also in Arthur, was hit by a torpedo fired by a speedboat, and then was injured on the starboard side by a 250-kilogram miss, but the commander on the Sagami was the Japanese gunnery expert Sadao Fujino, under his command, the fourth salvo of the 280 mm main gun of the Sagami finally paid off, a fish * pedo boat was directly hit and disintegrated on the spot, and the other was also hit on the port side and burned. At this moment, a scene that surprised the Chinese and Japanese naval officers and men occurred, the Swordfish-class speedboat with the ship number 332 suddenly accelerated from five thousand meters away, with fireworks all over its body, rowed an S-shaped track, rushed towards the Sagami, and after being hit by two 150 mm secondary artillery shells, it sank into the waves with full unwillingness, and at this time it was less than 300 meters away from the Sagami, and the deck sailors on the Sagami could clearly see a Chinese naval officer wearing a snow-white naval uniform, holding the mast, After pulling out his pistol and firing several shots at the Sagami, he fired the last bullet into his temple, but his arm never let go of the mast, and as the speedboat sank into the sea, the Japanese sailors of the Sagami did not fire at him, but silently watched him sink into the sea. However, the next Sagami simply became a torpedo magnet, more than half of the torpedo boats and two squadrons of A1 Howling Eagles gave bombs to the warship, which had been slightly damaged, and finally after being hit by four bombs and six torpedoes, the Sagami completely disintegrated and sank less than 500 meters in the sea area where the 332 boat sank, and only 4 of the 270 officers and men of the ship were rescued.

The commander of the Japanese Fourth Fleet, Takasu Shiro, had to order the whole fleet to turn due east and sail towards Taipei Harbor, relying on the Taiwan garrison and the batteries in Taipei Harbor to block the all-round attack of the Chinese Navy and Navy that were already crazy, and finally at the cost of the Iwami armored ship being slightly damaged, four destroyers sinking, and two destroyers being seriously injured, the remnants of the Fourth Fleet fled to Taipei. In the event of a mine and bomb attack, a powerful battle line will not work at all, and in the future, the enemy of the Navy's artillery giants will no longer be the enemy's capital ships, but those unguarded submarines and dive bombers that will flood the sky (he did not yet know that most of the First Fleet has been lost in the hands of torpedo planes). That night, in the Taipei Military Port Town Guard Mansion, Vice Admiral Takasu Shiro committed suicide by caesarean section to apologize to the emperor and naval officers and men.

Two days later, the Taipei Military Port Town Guard Office sorted out the loss report of the entire Fourth Fleet, in addition to the Zhoufang armored ship where Ozawa was located was slightly injured by a near-miss bullet, the four armored ships Iki, Tango, Hizen, and Sagami sank, and the Iwami was again attacked by the No. 021 submarine of the First Submarine Detachment before being towed into the port. Hit four torpedoes, beached outside the harbor, but can be repaired after salvage.

At this point, the great showdown between the entire Chinese and Japanese navies ended with a result that all the admirals and experts in the world could not understand, and the four new super dreadnoughts on the Japanese side were sunk three times and one was seriously damaged, four of the six old armored ships were sunk, one was beached, and one was slightly injured, in addition to three former dreadnoughts were sunk and one was seriously injured, and ten destroyers and two auxiliary ships were sunk. However, the Chinese Navy only lost three torpedo boats, a submarine (sunk by accident) and seven fighters of various types, and the loss of officers and men was even lower than three digits, compared with the Japanese Navy, which had nearly 4,000 officers and men under Vice Admiral Takasu Shiro killed and wounded, it can be regarded as cheap, and the most surprising thing for everyone is that the Chinese Navy did not fire a single main gun shell, and completely relied on torpedoes, mines, and aerial bombs to complete this earth-shattering record. This made the British, American, French, and Italian naval powers, which were intoxicated by the myth of cannon giant ships, have to reflect on their own naval construction ideas, which also indirectly contributed to the conclusion of the Washington * Fullton naval reduction agreement in the future.

But what is now in front of Japan is not reflection, but after losing the powerful Combined Fleet, will the Japanese Empire be able to defeat the huge Central Empire? What will the defeat mean for the Japanese and Japanese society? From the emperor to ordinary Tokyo citizens, they had to face this problem that they had never thought of. When the bad news of the Combined Fleet came, Japan collectively lost its voice.