At the same time as the locks were blown up, explosions rang out everywhere in the position, and the Marine Brigade blasted all the heavy equipment and then boarded the destroyers with the Japanese naval officers and sailors on the Mitsu and Hiei to retreat. The pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info it is Japan's implicit talent to engage in night transportation, and at the beginning there was the "Tokyo Express", and later there was the smuggling of Kuah Island, and what the Marine Brigade had to do was to destroy the weapons and board the ship.

Watching the destroyer leave with a full load of landing teams and naval officers and sailors, Cao Lu Yi frowned and asked, "Sir, the mission is complete, but how to retreat now?" ”

The route of retreat had been studied more than once, but there was no particularly good strategy, and it seemed that everywhere there was a danger of danger: the Caribbean Sea was a semi-enclosed sea, and the north-west bend to Florida was a road, the north-east from the Strait between Haiti and Cuba, or between Haiti and Puerto Rico, and finally only to the east, between the waters of the Windward Islands.

Originally, there was an option, that is, not to destroy the canal first, and then destroy it after retreating through the canal to the Pacific Ocean, but after hearing that it would take at least 6 hours to cross the canal, Horikichi gave up this idea: there are still 2 locks in the Pacific direction, and once the United States knows that it will use the canal to retreat, what if it directly destroys it? That would mean that the entire fleet was locked inside, so it was still necessary to find a way to retreat in the Caribbean.

To the northwest, it would be strangled by Nicaragua and the Florida Peninsula, and to the northeast, it would be attacked by Puerto Rico and Florida, and Horikichi always believed that the US Atlantic Fleet would soon pounce -- from the fact that the Combined Fleet had broken diplomatic relations in the Antilles and exposed its dependence, it was impossible for the US Atlantic Fleet to remain idle and stay far away, and from the analysis of time, it should be very close, and if it retreated from the northeast or northwest, it would be difficult to ensure that it would crash headlong into this fleet.

Horikichi may not have been afraid of the Atlantic Fleet in the event of a decisive battle with the fleet, but it would be very disadvantageous to engage the main force of the enemy fleet when the enemy can be supported by a large number of land-based air forces, so he thought twice, agreed with Tsukahara's suggestion, and moved east overnight.

"Sir, tomorrow will be a tough battle."

At 3 o'clock in the morning, looking at the destroyer formation that was full of personnel and speeding away, Cao Lu said bitterly.

If you make this analysis and retreat to the east, the enemy will certainly come to a similar conclusion from the analysis, and the only hope is that the aircraft carrier formation, which retreated in the afternoon, will have enough luck to be able to postpone the attack by enemy aircraft for a longer time.

At 7:15 a.m. on 20 April, Brooke led the 1st Strike Wave of the U.S. Army, uncharacteristically not attacking the Axis Fleet shelling formation near the Canal Zone, but spanning more than 900 kilometers and heading straight into the Panama-Colombia triangle, preparing to attack the Axis aircraft carrier formation discovered here yesterday. According to Brooke, the enemy did not necessarily know that he was coming to attack here, because it was so far away from Nicaragua that it exceeded the normal strike distance of the American fleet, and it seemed that nothing but the B-25 would work.

He hoped that the enemy troops would have this kind of luck, but when he arrived at the battlefield, he was still disappointed -- the scene was empty, except for a few destroyers, there was not even a single aircraft carrier, and he did not want to waste time and experience on these small targets, and not long after he gave the order to disperse the formation and search for the enemy fleet, a large number of enemy planes suddenly poured out of the clouds, numbering more than 90 planes, all of them Bf-219s, only to see them throw away the auxiliary fuel tanks and fiercely pounce on the American planes.

After the second special replenishment order was executed last night, the number of fighters in the mobile fleet was restored to 128, but all the fighters on the Commander Duster that could be used to replenish were exhausted, and there was no more replenishment except for the eight parts on the two hydro-engine carriers.

Tsukahara made a big decision in the early morning: to ambush a large number of aircraft in the sea where the fleet was yesterday, and the fleet quickly retreated, leaving only 36 direct cover aircraft in the sky over the fleet, and all the rest were sent out to carry out the mission. This was a very serious gamble, and if the US attack aircraft group did not attack the triangle as he expected, but continued to attack in the canal zone, it would mean that Horiyoshi's artillery formation would not have any cover, but now it seems that such a venture was clearly successful.

When Ryunosuke Kusaka asked him why he concluded that the U.S. military would come to the air raid and was not afraid that he would not be able to return, he smiled faintly: "If you can't go back, don't go back!" ”

"Doesn't that mean that the Americans won't push for a decisive attack?"

"No, it won't! If there was such an order, the pilots would most likely refuse, but the United States did not actually need to carry out a decisive attack. Tsukahara tapped the map to the south, "This is Colombia, after they finish the air raid, just find a Columbia airport to land, and if you can't find the airport, you can just parachute over Columbia to escape - do you think Colombia has the guts to detain the American pilot?" As for the plane, which has the potential to fall into the hands of Colombia, the Americans will not give a damn ......"

This idea echoed Brooke's in no turn: it was the result of his and Cohen's deliberations, which Washington agreed to overnight. So he led a large formation of 16 F4U, 24 P-47, 36 SBD, 24 TBF and 32 B-25 to attack.

More than 200 planes fought to the death in the skies, and the battle situation showed a one-sided trend: The US pilots came after a long journey of more than three hours, but the Axis fighter pilots only had to wait for work in the skies, and their numbers were not much different from those of the US troops, and there were no targets below them that needed to be scrupulous, so they could completely give free hold to a large-scale attack.

"The enemy's planes are here, their aircraft carriers must not be far away, quickly, disperse the search, disperse the ......" Brooke exclaimed in the plane.

But it is useless to disperse, and the SBD and TBF are still being shot down by Japanese and German planes one after another -- at present, the army aviation on the east coast no longer has the pilots to fly the TBF to carry out anti-ship attacks, and today's batch is all drawn from the HNA and the central states are not able to dispatch TBF mine fighter pilots because they are not near the sea, and the pilots on the west coast have not yet been assembled. But HNA also has a hard time, and they don't have many TBF pilots, except for this batch, only carrier-based aircraft pilots are left, but that is what Admiral Kim sternly refused.

At 7:30, the artillery formation received the news that the aircraft group was fighting fiercely, and at this time the main force of the fleet was retreating in the direction of Aruba in Venezuela at a speed of 23 knots. (To be continued.) )