"Boom! Rumble! Rumble! "The ship's side and bridge were hit by shells one after another, and the waves of fire exploded and gushed, and the cruiser Königsberg, with a full load displacement of 9,300 tons, shook violently, and a large steel hull shattered and rushed away, like a metal storm. The captain, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt, looked out of the observation window and saw that the warship seemed to be sailing in a jungle of water columns; The British cruisers in the distance were shining brightly, and all the large and small guns were firing at themselves!

The air wave exploded, the fire was dazzling, and the originally smooth and neat side side had been broken and twisted by the shells, and it was a mess. The superstructure was hit by 6 shells, and 1 quadruple 40-mm anti-aircraft gun and the 200-square-meter officer's quarters instantly turned into distorted and charred pieces; The seaplane was burned to the bits and pieces, and the flames soared into the night sky dozens of meters high.

What worries Schmidt the most is the flooding of the warship. At this time, the port side of the Königsberg No. 7 water-lock room had been blown open with a number of dense holes, and more than 100 tons of seawater had been poured in, and the damage management personnel were unable to deal with the leakage at the side hull in a hurry, so they could only close the hatch to minimize the loss of reserve buoyancy.

The officers in the command tower were furious, but they were helpless against the enemy's ferocious artillery fire. The British light cruisers had more than four times the density of their firepower, and the 152-mm and 102-mm shells were enough to wash away any area of the German ship except the core area, including the key command instruments and the central fire control room. Once the fire control core is damaged, the effectiveness of the German ship's 210 mm guns will drop sharply, and in the end, it can only be defeated and sunk by the opponent as if it were accumulating advantages.

Although the K-Class Heavy Cruiser was so protected against 203mm armor-piercing shells from a distance of 14 km that 152mm shells could not penetrate at very close range, the German officers were obviously not foolish enough to think that they could rest easy. There is an eternal truth in the Navy: a stick without the tip of a gun can stab a person to death. Even if the British shell could not penetrate the armor normally, the kinetic energy and explosive power it carried would have a high probability of causing the connection of the armor plate of the German ship to be misaligned, or even fall off as a whole. This will lead to serious flooding of the core module. Not to mention the light armor of the warship with only shrapnel defense at the bow and tail, and this position is flooded, which will only turn the warship into a faltering cow completely!

"Boom!" The hull shook violently again, and a red fireball exploded on the port side near the sea, and the 140mm thick case-hardened armor withstood the test, but the nearest splicing weld was torn apart in the explosion shock, causing a gap in the originally flat main armor belt. The icy waters rushed in, forcing the sailors in the anti-aircraft artillery ammunition depot to evacuate. The damage management team members who rushed to hear the news hurriedly sealed the gap in the cabin with a rubber sheet, which prevented seawater from pouring into the boiler room from the side.

"Isn't this the way to go, hasn't the flagship signaled to release torpedoes freely?" Schmidt wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead and shouted.

By this time, the German light ship group was completely in a bitter battle, and although the main guns of the Königsberg also observed 3 hits, the enemy ships still had undiminished fire and did not seem to have suffered much damage. In fact, for large warships with a displacement of more than 10,000 tons, 8-inch (203 mm) shells are inherently destructive. Unless you can hit the propellant depot with a single shot and cause a detonation, it will be extremely long and costly to sink the opponent with artillery alone!

Because of this, the K-class heavy cruiser kept a quadruple 610 mm torpedo tube in the stern of the ship for harvesting human heads. With the strong performance of carrier-based aviation in the war, the Navy already had plans to cancel this part of the mine equipment, but before it could be officially finalized, the "Berlin operation" began. Schmidt was glad that he now had this weapon, an unrivaled weapon of mass destruction in night defense.

The situation of the 2 K-class heavy cruisers is only difficult, and the 8 Z-type destroyers next to them are even more dangerous. Their armor could only withstand 5-inch (127 mm) shells at normal engagements, and they were completely incomprehensible to the 152 mm shells of the British light cruisers, and the dense fire of enemy destroyers was completely suppressed in an instant. By this time, the entire forward bridge of the 1st Z drive had been engulfed in a sea of fire, the bow of the ship was almost level with the sea, and the British gunfire was still slamming down on her, and the deck was full of twisted steel and flesh and stumps.

"Captain, I have received a message from the flagship, all ships are free to attack!" There was silence for about half a minute, and suddenly the sound of the signalman roaring came from the other side of the intercom. After a few moments, the lookout also reported seeing a flickering light in the night on the southeast side, the content of which was a repetition of the wireless telegraph just now. Schmidt's eyes condensed, and he roared and ordered: "Aim at the British cruiser in the direction of 254, immediately fire a salvo!" ”

The hull of the ship shook, the cannon roared like thunder, and a group of sailors with torpedo shields on their chests rushed out of the aft compartment and strode towards the combined launch tubes at the very end of the warship. The waves of water surging from the near miss, swept across the aft deck with a bone-chilling head, but Fischer, the soaking wet torpedo, did not flinch and stood firmly by the slip like a javelin. Holding a flashlight in his right hand, he checked the working condition of the entire set of equipment as quickly as possible, and several subordinates around him also quickly took their own positions and worked together to transfer the 18-ton launch system to a combat state.

"Target azimuth 257, speed 27 to 31, heading...... 42 to 58, distance ...... 3300 to 3800! Hearing the parameters reported by his subordinates, Fischer's weather-beaten face couldn't help but frown. As a veteran sailor who had worked on torpedo boats in the last war, Fischer immediately judged that this was a data deviation that could not be accurately struck by lightning: even if 20 torpedoes were fired in a fan salvo, it was difficult to guarantee a hit.

"Damn the night, is the light completely affecting the normal reading?" Fischer gritted his teeth, reached out and pushed the spotter away, personally incorporating the long and narrow shadow of the ship into the instrument. Under the illumination of the searchlight, the initial position of the target relative to itself has nothing to hide, but the calculation of its speed, course, and distance is seriously affected by various point light sources on the battlefield. For shells at least twice the speed of sound, this distance is almost impossible to aim, and direct flat fire is sufficient; But for torpedoes, even oxygen torpedoes with a speed of up to 50 knots, if they want to hit the target, they must follow the Basic Law!

Fischer stared at the change in the shadow of his target, and the knowledge and experience of his past service flashed through his mind at an unprecedented speed. In the midst of the lightning, Fischer found some eyebrows in his confusion. During the night breakthrough of the Battle of Jutland, the torpedo boat he was on shot two mines, which was deeply regretted by all members. I have thought more than once that if the torpedo chief used another correction mode at that time, the result might be very different!

Thinking of this, Fischer immediately deduced a set of initial parameters, combined with the speed and course of the current ship, and substituted the trigonometric calculator on the side of the launch tube to find the result. Although the success rate of this approach is estimated to be less than 50%, it is still much more reliable than casual blindness. Fischer suddenly regretted that he had chosen to serve in the K-class cruiser for the sake of the living environment, and if he was now commanding 10 torpedoes on the Z-drive, the hit rate of this lightning strike should be more than 7 percent.

On Fischer's orders, the German sailors readjusted the firing angle and quickly activated the compressed air valve cover at a predetermined point in time. With a thunderous "bang" sound, a cylinder more than 9 meters long and weighing 2.7 tons jumped into the water from the tube, and the torpedo stirred up huge waves and disappeared into the sea in a blink of an eye. The night wind on the deck blew several soaked torpedo soldiers like they had fallen into the ice cellar, but Fischer and the others had no intention of returning to the cabin to take refuge, and their eyes were staring motionless at the cruiser that was shooting at itself.

The stopwatch ticked, Fischer silently counted, the violent tremor under his feet and the columns of water on the surrounding sea seemed to be far away, only the invisible torpedo, rushing under the dark sea. About two and a half minutes later, a waterfall-like wave suddenly rose from the starboard side of the target cruiser, and the sea water rushed up hundreds of meters high, like a towering wall of water suddenly rising from the sea!

Due to the fierce fighting on the sea, the large and small guns of the British light cruiser "Newcastle" were all firing at the German ships, coupled with the extremely high concealment of the oxygen torpedoes during the voyage, so that no one on the starboard side of the hull saw the approach of underwater death in the dark.

When the fuse at the top of the torpedo hits the hull and triggers, it explodes like a landslide and tsunami. Nearly half a ton of high explosives was four times more than a 450-mm high-explosive bomb, and it swept thousands of cubic meters of underwater hull space in an instant; Before the British sailors in the boiler room and the main generator room could react to what was happening, they were directly swept away by the roaring waves!

The steel beams creaked and broken, and the tooth-souring sound was like a death knell song for the British, and in just a few breaths, the Newcastle's water ingress was completely out of control. Nearly all of the ship's hull was de-energized, and the sea rushed madly into the adjacent compartments, first the engine room, and then the former ammunition depot. The sailors inside the hull struggled to climb the deck, and the members squeezed and trampled each other in the narrow and dark passageway, leaving dead and wounded in one place. The warship's rightward tilt continued to intensify, and seeing that it was about to capsize within ten minutes, the first mate had to take the place of the unconscious captain and order the ship to abandon the ship, and then snatch the scarce number of life-saving valves as fast as possible.

The lightning strike of the Königsberg was just a prelude. Within minutes of that, four more German destroyers fired torpedoes. The water column on the surface of the sea was all around, and the waves were surging, and it seemed that it was as usual as before, but only under the strong light could it be found that countless white lines were rushing towards the British ships like soul-chasing hooks......