The Luftwaffe's massive bombing continued until sunrise in the early morning, and groups of bombers slowly flew towards mainland France against the rising sun, leaving behind a burning ruin.

It was an unprecedented air raid in the history of human warfare, and the Luftwaffe once again set a historical record. From 9 p.m. on the 19th to 6 a.m. the next morning, in the nine-hour period, the Luftwaffe flew 2,300 sorties of various types to bomb 27 cities, villages, towns, military bases, and ports along the southern coast of Britain.

In this air raid, the Germans made full use of the air and ground radar systems to monitor the movements of each aircraft group, and the ground command center used radio navigation systems and long-range radio stations to guide all the bombers on the bombing route, and finally the time for the aircraft group to reach the target was accurate to the minute. In this operation, the Germans showed the paranoia and rigor in their character to the fullest, the whole battle was completely digitized, they made a list of every action, every feint action or surprise attack, the entry and exit of each aircraft group, the Luftwaffe ground command controlled the rhythm of the entire air raid, and played the British Royal Air Force at will.

At that time, no one could have imagined that this air raid would directly affect the entire battle of England, and that the final defeat of the British Empire began on this night.

Never before had the Germans dropped force directly on civilians as they did on this night, and although some civilians had been killed in previous bombings, they had been caused by stray bullets in the vicinity of military targets, not targeted attacks on civilians.

This time, however, it looked like a massacre of civilian targets, with the city centers of more than a dozen cities reduced to ashes and several coastal towns wiped off the map, killing tens of thousands of civilians in one night. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless, with direct economic losses amounting to tens of millions of pounds, and even more indirect.

The cold-blooded bombing launched by the Germans not only dealt a heavy blow to the British government, but also had a serious impact on the hearts of ordinary British civilians.

Until that day, the British had only seen the destruction of the city in newspapers and novels, and had never seen it as real as it is now. The morale of the British was once high, because in those novels, the brave British united in the face of the fire of the evil enemy, and against all odds, they always won the final victory, and the good always triumphed over the evil, and the Germans were always on the evil side. Isn't it?

The Germans did bomb a lot of British coastal targets, but most of them were military targets and airfields far from the suburbs of the city, and occasionally a few bombs would fall into the city, blow up a certain building or collapse the attic of a certain house, and one or a few unlucky people unfortunately became victims, and the newspaper would usually paste a blurry photo on the second page or entertainment page, which became the talk of the citizens after dinner, and after drinking a glass of whiskey, they could take a newspaper and curse the Germans.

London's East End, which was hit hard by German bombers, was densely populated with factories, workshops, and countless rudimentary shacks and shacks. Mile-long warehouses lined the banks of the river, piled high with flour, foodstuffs, raw silk, weapons and ammunition ready to be transported.

In residential areas, thousands of London's low-class poor live like rats. A single German bomb could destroy an entire shack, and these planks burned as easily as matches. Hordes of poor people died like ants in the flames, or were buried or burned to death. The fire brigade and the police are always late to the scene, and their job is simply to pour water on the houses that are not on fire so that the flames do not spread to other high-end neighborhoods. Then they waited for the flames to extinguish themselves, and then collected the remains of the victims in the charred fire, put them in pulp board coffins that had been prepared long ago, and dragged them out of the city for burial. Avoid causing epidemics.

The ladies and gentlemen of London stood on high rooftops or towers and watched the smoke billowing from the East End, cursing the brutality of the Germans and admiring the magnificence of the fire, knowing that someone was dying there, but who cared if the rats lived or died.

The East End is the black hole of London, where most of the poor are at the bottom of society, full of hooligans, thieves, robbers, liars, gamblers, either drunkards or opiums, the people there are illiterate, deceitful, greedy, morally corrupt, shameless, against the government, defying authority, except for the mechanical labor in the dark factories, that is, gangs run rampant in the dark streets and alleys to do all kinds of unsightly illegal business, and there are dozens of fights or murders every day in those dark back alleys. A noble gentleman entering those lots will not live more than an hour.

The disaster in London's East End did not make it into the fourth page of the newspapers, with a sketch and a few interviews with the district sheriffs suggesting that the fire in a certain neighborhood was under control and that the London police were ready to protect the lives of every Londoner.

But this time, it was no longer the tiny and filthy rats that were attacked, but the inhabitants of the entire town, rich and poor, good and bad, good and bad, men and women, young and old, all of them became the targets of the Germans, and tens of thousands of ordinary people were burned, blown up, stoned, and suffocated to death in just one night, and the number of injured was ten times as many, and many people received terrible burns, which may not last more than a week, and the death toll will soar exponentially.

The Germans' bombs blew off the roofs of houses, blew down tall gables, set entire neighborhoods on fire, and reduced countless people to ashes along with their accumulated wealth, while those who survived suffered even more, losing their property, their homes, their loved ones, their careers and their jobs, and all that was left was a set of clothes and scars. The government organized the first wave of relief activities early the next morning, and in addition to medical assistance, some food and clothing were also put out, but given the huge base of victims, it was completely overstretched, and even there were not enough tents on site, so the poor people could only sit in the fields with each other.

The news spread like lightning throughout the South, and for the first time the British really felt the horrors of war, and most of them were frightened, and they could take up arms and shoot at the German infantry, but they could not stop the catastrophe that fell from the sky. The Air Force has proven their incompetence with facts. They were no longer able to defend the British sky, and the Germans could attack any British town from the sky at will, destroying everything they wanted, while the British civilians could only watch it happen, completely powerless.

So, from noon on the 20th, the terrible wave of refugees suddenly broke out in the cities of southern Britain.

Townspeople brandished ration cards and pounds sterling and looted all the food, fuel, clothing and groceries still on the market. People either live in their own homes or make friends. Riding on all the means of transportation they could find, carrying all the belongings they could take with them, they hurried to escape from the city where they were.

On the highways leading from the southern coast to the northern interior, the convoys of fleeing people stretch for dozens of kilometers, and a large number of vehicles and people continue to pour out of the villages and towns along the road to gather into this huge migration procession, and there are serious congestion in many areas.

Some people piled up all their possessions on top of their vehicles, piling up a hill of everything from pots and pans to trendy furniture, cages, and food and drink. It severely obstructed the view of the vehicles behind it, which caused many traffic accidents.

On this chaotic road, all class divisions have been blurred, whether you drive a Rolls-Royce or a half-ton Ford. Heaven treats everyone equally, and does not run faster because of who is noble.

Many of the fleeing citizens were armed with weapons, and many of them even had military rifles. They were all former National Guardsmen.

The bombing by the Germans last night completely destroyed the self-confidence of the members of the Self-Defense Army, and these people have only now realized that they did not join the Self-Defense Army to defend any government or king. They don't care about the life or death of the king's family and Churchill's fat man, they care about their homeland, their property and their families, they will join the self-defense forces to protect them, take up arms, protect these things that must be protected, and fight to the end against the evil Germans who want to take away these treasures.

But now they found that the situation was not the same at all, and the bloody facts of the destroyed towns revealed the terrible fact that the Germans did not need to land, and that they could take away everything they wanted to defend by bombing alone. Of course, they did not want to sit idly by, and they could not withstand the German air raids on the beach with rifles on their shoulders. It seems to be a matter of luck that I was able to stay with my family again, and who can guarantee that the Germans will not carry out such a horrific attack again tonight, and who can guarantee that it will not be their own city that will suffer next.

Then, another unconfirmed piece of news shattered everyone's last hope, and London issued a circular "Cromwell". Although this phrase was only conveyed to the Army, there were many people in the Self-Defense Forces who had connections within the Army, and soon everyone knew about the secret order, and the Germans had begun to invade.

While the Self-Defense Forces were at a loss, there were even more terrible rumors, such as that a German infantry division was already landing at Folkestone, that the Germans had dropped a paratrooper division in Heizer, that the German Navy had landed at Portsmouth, and that the British Army defenders at Dover were fighting the Germans and had suffered heavy losses.

The little morale left of the National Guard was suddenly gone, the Germans had gone ashore, so what was the use of wandering around these fields, most of the Self-Defense members chose their families in front of their families and the country, and those improvised companies immediately disintegrated on their own, and the team members returned home with their equipment, and then fled to the north with their families, all of them had a common idea, the farther away from those cities and villages before the next bombing by the Germans, to the north, Go where neither the Luftwaffe nor the Army can reach.

By two o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th, most of the surviving coastal towns and towns had been turned into empty cities, and in the panic wave of refugees, the local national guard forces all collapsed on their own, and the local defense organizations in various places also collapsed and disappeared into the formations.

The refugees fled all the way north, and no one dared to blow up roads and bridges, set up barricades and landmines on London's orders, which was the way for the refugees to escape, and those who did so were killed on the spot.

By the time London finally learned of this, the influx of refugees had spread across the southern road network, and the situation was completely out of control. What made Churchill vomit even more blood was that the flow of refugees blocked most of the high-level roads, blocking the support troops that were moving to the coast, especially the reorganized 1st Panzer Division, which could now only get off the heavy carriers, climb down the road, and slowly advance along the road at a walking speed towards the designated area, and the commander said that if all went well, he should be able to reach Folkestone the next morning.

Churchill deduced from the area bombed by the Germans that the Germans could land at the two harbor cities of Folkestone and Dover, and perhaps a stretch of beach between Heizer and Hastings, in this air raid these areas were attacked extremely fiercely, the buildings in the city were seriously damaged, a large number of soldiers were killed in the barracks, and the proud large-caliber coastal guns and train guns were also hit hard, and the tracks of the coastal train guns were completely destroyed and were held alive in the air defense tunnel.

The coastal artillery positions in Dover were attacked by incendiary bombs, which detonated the propellant stored in the dugout, completely destroying one 380-mm gun, slightly wounding the other, and a battery of anti-aircraft guns on anti-aircraft duty was burned to metal residue on the spot.

The most painful thing for Churchill was that all the poison gas bombs he stored in secret warehouses in various coastal towns were burned in the warehouses, and the Germans seemed to have super luck, many of the towns they attacked were poison gas storage sites, and 450 tons of mustard gas became a fierce accelerant in the flames, and this poison would produce violent explosions when it met open flames, and these towns were burned to ashes, and there was no lack of credit for these things.

Churchill initially thought that maybe someone had leaked the secrets, but many of the cities and towns in the bombing targets were ordinary material reserves and arsenals, and in the end he could only think that it might just be a tragic coincidence, and God did not bless the British Empire.

At the moment he could not do anything about the torrent of refugees, which was hundreds of thousands of people, and could not order the army to clear the field with weapons, but could only order the troops who were rushing to leave the road, and advance by other side roads or directly off-road, and must reach Dover and Folkestone at midnight on the 20th, and enter the predetermined position. At the same time, he ordered the surviving garrisons around Dover to move into first-class combat readiness and enter coastal blocking positions, striving to delay the first wave of German landings and wait for reinforcements to arrive. Finally, he gave an order to the British Navy, and the Home Fleet was immediately ready to enter the strait, attacking all water targets, making sure not to let a single German plank float through the strait. (To be continued, please search, the novel is better and updated faster!)