On the other side, the German aircraft carrier fleet.

Not long after the anti-aircraft guns of the Leipzig light cruiser opened fire, the scattered German carrier-based fighter groups in the sky swooped down on the British carrier-based aircraft group, but they were quickly blocked by a group of escorted Sea Spitfires.

Although the German pilots did not want to be too entangled with the Sea Spitfire, the British carrier-based fighter group was biting the tail of the German fighters, and there was no other way, so the German fighter pilots had to turn around and give priority to the fighters that could threaten them behind them.

While the German fighter group was busy fighting with the British fighter group, the British bomber group took the opportunity to bypass the interception of the German fighter group and flew over the German six aircraft carriers in the face of the ferocious anti-aircraft fire of the German fleet.

But then, which aircraft carrier to attack first became a headache for them.

“shit！ How do each of their aircraft carriers look the same! "Owen flew an American-made SBD dreadnought dive bomber and circled the German aircraft carrier fleet several times.

The SBD dive bomber he piloted was directly transported to the British mainland by the United States some time ago with the seaplane carrier USS Langley and the aircraft carrier USS Raider, and with them, there were also two squadrons of TBD ravaging torpedo bombers.

The reason why the United States will specifically deliver these carrier-based aircraft to Britain is that Britain has profoundly realized how much naval aviation can play in naval warfare after several naval battles, and the most important thing that determines the strength of naval aviation is the performance of carrier-based fighters, in addition to aircraft carriers.

However, it is very embarrassing that although Britain is a pioneer country in the world of aircraft carriers, their carrier-based aircraft development is not good.

The first is the carrier-based fighter, not to mention the most advanced Do.38 Corsair fighter of the German army, even the previous generation of ME109T fighters can not compare, whether it is the maximum speed, roll radius or climb rate, ME109T can hang the pipenose swallow with a hammer.

So after realizing the mistake, the Royal Navy immediately made the Sea Spitfire, although the performance of the Sea Spitfire is still a cut behind the Do.38, but it is no longer like the pipe nose swallow how to fight and lose, the previous record of shooting down 5 Do.38 over the home fleet is enough to tell the problem.

The second is the problem of carrier-based bombers, which is the most troublesome.

The problem of carrier-based fighters is easy to say, because the Air Force has ready-made good planes, which can be used to modify them and get on the ship, although the Sea Spitfire has problems such as difficulty in landing on the ship and short range, its performance in combat is not ambiguous at all.

However, carrier-based dive bombers and carrier-based torpedo planes are not readily available in the Air Force, and these two types of aircraft are professional aircraft, which need to consume a lot of time and money, and are specially designed and finalized for flight test flights before they can be produced on ships.

In peacetime, these two conditions are not a problem, with the capabilities of the British aircraft industry, it is only a matter of time to design two excellent fighters, but now is wartime, because the British fleet may be ordered to go out to the North Sea to meet the German fleet at any time, so time is the biggest problem.

After thinking about it, Churchill set his sights on "Cousin Tom".

"Cousin Tom", like Britain and Japan, also developed aviation before World War I, but Cousin Tom was not like the British, for various reasons had to choose biplanes as carrier-based bombers, they were dissatisfied with their Martin BM-2 and Great Lakes TG-2 as early as 1934, and tendered new aircraft to major aviation manufacturing companies, and finally Douglas and Great Lakes submitted proposals and produced a prototype with the permission of the Navy. The all-metal lower wing XTBD-1 and the cloth-skinned double-wing XTBG-1 are respectively.

Great Lakes had previously worked with the Navy, but their XTBG-1 prototype had its own problems, with the only major innovation of the XTBG-1 being the fully enclosed cockpit and retractable landing gear compared to the soon-to-be-phased TG-2.

In addition to the unsightly shape and backward construction that was doomed to obsolescence, the performance of the XTBG-1 was equally unsatisfactory - it had a maximum speed of 297 km/h and a ceiling of 5,000 meters.

In addition, what is even worse is that although the plane appears to be large and heavy, it is very unstable to fly, and it is not suitable for the role of torpedo bomber at all.

As a result, the U.S. Navy Department unsurprisingly set its sights on the XTBD-1, which was also superior to the XTBG-1, and Douglas successfully defeated Taihu Company.

On February 3, 1936, the XTBD-1 was given the official designation TBD-1 by the Navy, but it was not until October 5, 1937 that the first TBD-1 was officially delivered to the front-line combat unit, the VT6 torpedo bomber squadron belonging to the CV3 "Saratoga".

The main carrier-based bomber SBD of the US military, like the TBD-1, was developed by the Douglas company.

Also in 1934, in order to unify the chaotic dive bomber models and further enhance the combat effectiveness of the U.S. Naval Aviation, the U.S. Naval Aviation Administration opened a tender to the aviation community for new models.

Unlike carrier-based torpedo bombers, the news of the Naval Aviation Administration's tender for a new dive bomber attracted a number of well-known aircraft manufacturing companies such as Brest, Martin, Walter and Northrop.

However, at that time, most aircraft manufacturing companies believed that the carrier-based aircraft with a biplane structure was the most suitable for the US aircraft carrier fleet, because the biplane structure had good low-speed performance and high lift, and could easily take off on a short and narrow aircraft carrier.

But there is one person who thinks otherwise, and he is the founder of Northrop Airlines, John Northrop.

He believes that the requirements for aircraft take-off and landing performance of aircraft carriers are actually not as strict as imagined, and as long as they are properly designed, faster monoplanes can easily take off and land on aircraft carriers.

After some comparison, the Navy took a fancy to Northrop's design and asked him to build a prototype, the XBT-1, but at the same time asked the Walter Company to design a metal underplane as an alternative, which was later the SBU-2 dive bomber.

On September 18, 1936, the Navy officially recognized the XBT-1 and ordered 54 production aircraft under the BT-1 designation, mainly equipped with the VB-5 carrier-based bomber squadron on the Yorktown and the VB-6 carrier-based bomber squadron on the Enterprise.

Surprisingly, the highly-anticipated new aircraft was put into service with serious maneuverability flaws: the vertical stability of the aircraft at low speeds became very poor, the efficiency of the aerodynamic wing surface was greatly reduced, which was very dangerous when the aircraft landed, and the aircraft had a violent rolling tendency when the pilot increased the horsepower urgently, which led to a series of serious crashes.

A series of accidents made the Navy begin to lose confidence in the BT-1.