There were only five of Ling Kaiyue's former comrades-in-arms in this platoon: Mao Wu, Zhang Zhaohan, Xu Jin, Yu Xuebin, and Chen Jianchao, and the others were either sacrificed or transferred to other units. Most of the recruits in the company were recruits, and most of the platoon were from Central Asia, two from the Caucasus, one from Armenia, and one from the Kurdish Autonomous Region called Vaziz.

Ling Kaiyue leaned on the carriage and smoked, if it went on like this, it would be difficult for the whole group to sleep at this station. It's not a good taste.

The two military vehicles loaded with heavy Marine equipment beside them had not moved, the train remained in place, the infantry could still find some shelter from the sun, and some simply climbed under the train to sleep. Others tried to climb into the flatbed cars and hide under the tarpaulins of the tanks or armoured vehicles, but were spotted by the officers and driven down.

Two regiments of several thousand people waited by the railroad tracks for more than four hours, and it was not until mid-afternoon that a battered passenger train arrived. Much of the paint had peeled off to reveal dull planks, and the glass on the windows had long since disappeared, and the windows had been nailed with a few wooden slats.

Ling Kaiyue suspected that the carriages were recovered from some garbage dump by the Don Corps Command.

The train started, moving very slowly, through the steppe strip of the central Kuban, full of swamps and mangroves, to send this unit to the Donets region, which was being fighting.

……

The top brass of the War Department was very unhappy with the insistence of the Supreme Headquarters on promoting a Marine Corps general who lacked seniority and prestige to be the important supreme commander of the Don Corps, and they believed that this position should be filled by a more qualified army general. For example, General Ge Tianfu, General Long Xiaoyun or General Sun Mingren.

However, the Supreme Base Camp held that operations along the Black Sea coast were very dependent on the navy and sea supply and transportation, and in fact the entire combat operation should still be dominated by the navy, and if an army general was sent to be the commander of the Don River Corps, then the army and navy would inevitably have to fight each other for command in future operations, and it would be better to put an officer who lacked prestige and rank was not high enough to command land operations, so that the supreme command would have to constantly have a headache over the contradictions between the army and navy generals in the future.

In a sense, Admiral Sun Henian's luck is indeed good.

Although in the Battle of Donets, the Frankish army in the Middle East was routed and pushed back more than a hundred kilometers, the situation remained tense. Anti-aircraft balloons float over cities, anti-aircraft guns are on standby, and craters left by enemy bombs can be seen in many parts of the city and countryside.

The war had been going on for a year and a half, the Don Army had temporarily stabilized its successes, the enemy's plan to capture the whole of Eastern Europe in one fell swoop with a "blitzkrieg" had failed, and the strategists of the East Frankish army were forced to accept that there would be a long and protracted war.

Similarly, the Tang Empire also needed time to readjust and organize production, form and train new strategic reserves, and in addition to the Tianzhu states and the Samanid Kingdom and the Abysian Empire, the whole of Europe and the Great Food Empire united to oppose the rule of the Tang Empire.

In addition to the Abysian Empire, which contained some of the enemy's forces in North Africa, the Tang Empire needed to rely on its own strength to deal with the entire European Union.

Before the start of the counteroffensive, Marshal Xia Ting, Chief of the General Staff of the Imperial Navy, and Senior General Liu Zhen, Chief of Naval Operations, rushed back to Luoyang together to formulate a new Atlantic operation plan with Admiral Chen Shiying on the orders of the Supreme Command.

The intention of the High Command was to divide half of the capital ships of the major fleets of the empire into the Caribbean and form a new Atlantic Fleet with the North Atlantic Fleet, which would be mainly responsible for conducting maritime operations against the European Union. In addition, the submarine forces began to approach the coast of Europe and block the enemy's sea transportation lines, as for how many transport ships to sink is still secondary, the key is to show the presence of the imperial fleet in the coastal waters of Europe, which will greatly deal a blow to the enemy's will to resist.

As long as the Atlantic transportation line is cut off, it means that the enemy can no longer effectively control its maritime rights and interests in the Atlantic, and in addition, it will block the foreign aid of the "independent forces" in the Americas, which is completely different from the effect achieved by the submarine force. Without the military assistance of the European Union, these separatist forces will be a source of no origin and it will be a matter of time before they are eliminated.

The Navy's original plan was to counterattack Iceland, but this plan was rejected by the High Command in order not to provoke the Europeans too early. In fact, now only with the strength of the North Atlantic Fleet of the Imperial Navy, it also has the confidence to fight with the combined fleet of the European Navy. However, out of overall strategic considerations, the Supreme Command decided to first transfer part of the forces of the North Atlantic Fleet and first capture the ports along the West African coast.

On May 17, 307, the main fleet, led by the newly commissioned "Kunlunshan" class battleships "Altai Mountains" and "Andes", left the Luda Naval Base and crossed the strait into the Nagasaki military port in the Tsushima Sound. On 23 May, a surface assault fleet consisting of the aircraft carriers "Yongzhou," "Yuzhou," "Youzhou," and "Bingzhou," the fast battleship "Hengshan," and the heavy cruisers "Beiting" and "Anxi" also arrived from Dengzhou Naval Base to rendezvous. With the other two "Kyushu" class aircraft carriers returning to the shipyard in a state of repair and maintenance, and the latest battleships "Kunlunshan" and "Qilianshan" still undergoing sea trials, this is already the strongest combination that the Imperial Navy can send to the North Atlantic Fleet.

Admiral Chen Shiying, commander of the North Atlantic Fleet of the Imperial Navy, who was eager to fight, took up the position of commander of this fleet.

Since the beginning of the war, the losses of the Tang Navy have been about the same as those of the Combined European Fleet, and so far the Imperial Navy has lost the aircraft carrier "North Island" modification, two battleships (sunk in Port-au-Prince, the other three were salvaged and began to be repaired), two armored cruisers (it was sunk by torpedoes fired by the submarine forces of East Francia during the Icelandic campaign), in addition to 3 old light cruisers with a displacement of 6000 tons and 5 destroyers. And the European navy has so far lost two light aircraft carriers, three battleships, four heavy cruisers, 7 cruisers, and 17 destroyers, which can also be described as a serious loss of vitality.

Half of this was wiped out by the Imperial Army Air Corps, and air superiority was a major reason for the Imperial Navy's success.

Although the European Navy has two Zeppelin-class aircraft carriers and two Triumph-class aircraft carriers in urgent service under such circumstances, their current strength is still not enough to compete head-on with the newly formed imperial fleet led by Chen Shiying.

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