This expedition, unlike the past, was that Bai Zhizhan was not on the "Pu", but on the "Qinling" as the flagship.

In fact, this is giving Li Mingbo face.

Although the officers and men of the 21st Task Force knew who Li Mingbo was, everyone regarded him as the chief of staff, and few people thought that he was the commander.

It would be very embarrassing if Bai Zhizhan remained on the "Pu".

In the eyes of many veterans, Bai Zhizhan is their commander, and only Bai Zhizhan is qualified to serve as their commander.

If you want to say, the current team of the 21st Task Force is the descendant of Bai Zhizhan.

Many officers, especially middle and senior officers at the rank of captain, have given up the opportunity to be promoted many times in order to be able to follow Bai Zhizhan.

Bai Zhizhan stayed on the "Pu", which would only make Li Mingbo's title of commander an ornament.

Of course, the space on the "Qinling" is more spacious and more suitable for serving as the flagship of the fleet.

The most important thing is that there is basically no secret to speak of in this combat operation, and it is certainly a tough battle, and the requirements for secrecy are not too high.

This is the inevitable result of months of dragging.

The Imperial Navy is riveting its preparations, not to mention Nyz and Sp, even idiots can think that the next attack will be on the Howaii Islands.

However, the months of delay were not wasted.

During this period, Bai Zhizhan summoned Wei Jun, Li Jie, Jin Hong, and other commanders of the task force, as well as a group of young and promising staff officers such as Zhou Yongtao, to repeatedly consult on the attack on the Khowaii Islands, and drew up a complete set, or to be precise, several sets of operational plans.

All of these operational plans emphatically mentioned the situation of "forcible attack."

Of course, how to storm it, that's the art.

When he began to draw up the battle plan, Bai Zhizhan had already discovered that the difficulty of attacking the Khowaii Islands was far less than imagined.

This is a credit to the Guards and their understanding, especially the Guards.

When Bai Zhizhan led the fleet on an expedition to Lu Xinhai, Wei Jun and Li Jie did not take idle, seized the limited time, and did enough work on the side of the transit island.

At that time, it was the Guards who proposed to attack the islands of Lysan and Gardner.

If anything, this is also the key to Bai Zhizhan's preference for the guards.

This guy never misses an opportunity to make a difference. As soon as he was on the battlefield, he behaved very actively.

In Liu Changxun's words, it is simply a hound that has been released.

After gaining a foothold on the Transit Island, the first thing the Guards did was to mobilize the Marines to storm the islands of Lysan and Gardner in the east before the Nuland army could make adjustments.

This operation was a very good example of the command style of the Guards.

To put it simply, there is always fineness in coarseness.

Before launching the attack, the Guards assigned a mission to the Marines, who were fighting the Transit Island, to use patrol planes to transport a reconnaissance team to Lysan Island and Gardner Island at night to ascertain the situation on the two islands and determine whether they could be taken by surprise.

It was this arrangement that allowed the defenders to discover that the garrison of the two islands was not large, and the combat effectiveness was extremely weak.

The point is that the Nuland army only used these two islands to support the troops operating at night, and did not think about deploying defensive forces on the two islands.

At that time, the focus of the defense of the Nuland army was on the transit island, and it was believed that if the transit island could not be held, the small island to the east could not be held.

The Nuland navy has been defeated, and its projection capacity has been greatly reduced, and the Nuland army can only abandon the secondary islands and concentrate on defending the large island to the east.

It was for this reason that the Guards decided to raid the islands of Lysan and Gardner.

In order to seize the opportunity, he gave orders to the Marine Corps in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the front line before obtaining permission from the command of the Navy.

This style was obviously learned from Bai Zhizhan.

Of course, his decision has the full support of Li Jie.

It is for this that in the direction of the Khowaii Islands, the Imperial Navy has 3 footholds and 3 large forward bases have been built.

Over the next few months, the Imperial Navy and Army Aviation deployed nearly 1,000 combat aircraft here.

As a rule, long-range fighters arranged by the Navy's shore-based aviation are deployed on Leysan Island, while heavy bombers of the Army's Strategic Aviation are deployed on the transit island, and further west, Gardner Island, a group of fighters is deployed and serves as a backup landing ground for other aircraft.

Months of strategic bombardment have significantly weakened the Nuland army's defenses on the eastern islands.

According to the statistics made by the Imperial Navy, in a total of six months, from October 102 to March 103 of the new calendar, the aviation units deployed on the transit islands made 150,000 sorties, including more than 40,000 sorties by heavy bombers, and dropped about 50,000 tons of bombs on the eastern islands of the archipelago.

Although the total amount of bombs dropped is not very high, the density of bombs dropped is very impressive.

More importantly, about 60 percent of the bombs were dropped on Honou Island, and the bombing of Jumbo Harbour and several naval air stations was concentrated.

As a direct result of the intensive bombing, the Nuland army's investment in the direction of the Khowaii Islands was zeroed.

According to the latest reconnaissance report, the Nuland Navy basically abandoned Jumbo Harbor, not to mention large warships, and even auxiliary ships went to Jotun Harbor.

In order to avoid bombing, all Nuland ships came into port at night, and they used small vessels to ensure that loading and unloading operations could be completed at night.

Obviously, small vessels are much less efficient to transport than larger vessels.

Because Jumbo Harbor had lost its ability to serve as a fleet home port, the Nuland Navy's Guia Fleet moved its home port to San Diego on the mainland.

Also for security reasons, the Nuland fleet retreated to the waters east of the Khowaii Islands.

This was also done to cover the route from the west coast of the mainland to the Khowaii Islands.

In addition, this also involved the Imperial Navy's dismantling operations.

After taking the transit island, the Imperial Navy's ocean-going submarines were able to get supplies on the transit island, thus shortening the round-trip voyage time by half a month.

The extra half a month will allow more ocean-going submarines to carry out activities in the eastern waters of the Wangxi Canal.

As a result, the number of submarines operating in the Guia Ocean has increased from less than 10 to about 50.

As a direct result of this, the route from the Wangxi Canal to the Khowaii Islands became dangerous.

In order to reduce the loss rate of the ships, the Nuland Navy could only let the transport fleet go first along the offshore route to the west coast of the homeland, and then to the Howaii Islands.

In this way, it will be possible to at least get shore-based aviation cover.

It's just that the route from the west coast of the home Newland mainland to the Howaii Islands has become extremely busy.

In any case, when the White Stop War prepared to launch a combat operation to storm the Khowaii Islands, it was actually faced with a group of opponents who had long since lost their fighting spirit under the bombardment.

Although it is not a rabble, the morale of the Nuland army is definitely not as good as before.

It's just that no one carelessly underestimates the enemy.

Even if Nuland's army was only one step away from being defeated, it was not defeated.

More importantly, there are at least 1.5 million armed soldiers on the eastern islands of the Khowaii archipelago, of which more than 1.2 million are combatants.

This will be the most difficult landing operation that the Imperial Navy has faced since the beginning of the war.