"My dear Margaret, my dear, sorry for taking so long to write back to you. I am writing to you in the barracks outside Dover, where the situation is a bit bad, but we have not lost our courage, and the Germans cannot defeat us. I miss you and our children very much, and I really hope that this damned war can be ended soon. I don't know ......" At this point, the ink of the fountain pen seems to have dried up, and the sharp tip of the pen leaves only a faint mark on the letterhead.

"Oh God, don't ...... like that" Lieutenant Colonel Edwood shook the pen vigorously, then swiped the official document next to him, finally confirming that the pen had indeed used up the last drop of ink.

"Henry, do you have ink here?" Ed Wood asked aloud to the lieutenant who was crouching behind the Matilda II turret, rummaging through a pile of backpacks piled on top of the engine housing.

"No, sir, I don't have any ink, I'm looking for my amenity bag, I remember there's half a cigarette in it." Ensign Henry lowered his head and tore open the strapping rope of a canvas duffel bag, opened the mouth of the bag and looked inside, and laughed happily. "Found it, it turned out to be in this bag."

"What a mess, I need a bottle of ink now, Second Lieutenant." Lieutenant Colonel Edwood stood up and gave orders to his adjutant.

"Obey sir, I'll go to Master Chief Henderson and ask, he might have some ink." Ensign Henry slung his spare satchel on his back, tightened the mouth of the duffel bag haphazardly, and then jumped out of the tank.

"If you don't have ink, you can find me a pen."

"Got it, sir."

Edwood carefully folded the half-written letter and put it in the map bag around his waist along with the rest of the letter.

Edwood's situation is not as bad as he writes in his letter home, but it is terrible. The 1st Panzer Division was in disarray, all because of Churchill's strict orders.

In order to reach the port of Dover within the time stipulated by London, the 1st Panzer Division abandoned almost half of its troops. Because only vehicles with off-road capabilities can leave the road for marching. The 1st Panzer Division threw away all its heavy tank transports, the entire baggage logistics regiment, two mechanized infantry battalions, and truck-drawn anti-aircraft and heavy artillery regiments, and marched along the country dirt roads with only tanks, tracked armored vehicles, wheeled off-road armored vehicles, and a part of off-road trucks.

Since separation, the division headquarters had not heard from these follow-up units, which Edwood estimated were still making their way along the road towards Dover. The problem is that the tank division's baggage supplies are all in those units, and the whole division is now in a state of total shortage of fuel, spare parts, and food.

For the sake of the march, the various armored squadrons also abandoned their respective wheeled transporters. Only a portion of the supplies and personal luggage were carried with them. The interior of the British tank was very small, and the tankers had to stack as much supplies as possible on their tank vehicles, which they had never thought of before, and they did not even have cargo straps, but had to use knots with knots to secure them. Because of the off-road march, too many supplies could not be piled up on the roof of the car, so each car group carried a day's worth of emergency food and personal luggage, leaving tents, ammunition, clothing, and food all on the road, and followed the march of the baggage troops. They also abandoned their field cooking carts. Leave them in the baggage squad with the cooks. So far, the whole group can't even drink a mouthful of hot soup.

By the time the Germans launched the bombardment of Dover, the 1st Panzer Division had arrived at Dover less than two hours earlier, and after a long and high-intensity cross-country march, the soldiers and equipment were already in a state of extreme fatigue. Quite a few tanks have worn out their travel systems to the point where they must be replaced immediately. The vehicle's engine also needs to be serviced and maintained due to heavy loads. Originally, these tasks were scheduled to be completed during the day of the next day, because the people in the division headquarters were optimistic that the logistics supply troops would arrive before noon the next day, and with the addition of those new forces, the maintenance and rearmament work would be completed quickly.

The only concern among the division at that time was that the Germans might launch a landing before the arrival of the follow-up troops. However, the Dover Fortress said that the defense of the Port of Dover itself was strong enough, with more than a dozen defensive forts and shore artillery positions in the fortress and its surroundings. More than 100 cannons of various calibers in the front and rear could hold back the German landing fleet for at least 24 hours, which was enough time for the Panzer Division to rest.

The 1st Panzer Division's mission in Port Dover was very simple: to use these tanks as mobile fortresses in street battles, and these tanks would be scattered throughout the city, building firing positions in the streets and alleys, and using the superiority in armor and firepower to wipe out the German landing infantry in the city.

According to British estimates, the first German troops to land must be light infantry, and it is impossible for the Germans to transport their armored forces ashore until the landing situation is opened and a stable landing zone is mastered. The British tanks were only faced with regular German infantry armed with infantry weapons, at most a few small-caliber mortars and grenades, and if the tank commanders were careful and the army infantry was firepowered, the German infantry would have suffered a massacre in the city of Dover.

Edwood agrees, and his tank regiment is equipped with a wide variety of models, but it comes in handy at this time, as some of them are well suited to these narrow roads and alleys, which means they are well suited for street fighting. At first, he was more worried about encountering the German armored forces, and his seventh queen's private cavalry team was just a bluff, and he didn't expect to rely on this group of rookie tankers and a bunch of tanks turned out of the reserve warehouse to confront the elite German armored troops.

Edwood's tank regiment is placed in the German Army, which is only the size of a battalion-level unit, because the British Army has only three kinds of divisions, battalions, and companies, and other regiments, teams, and other formations are more just an administrative unit title, and in essence, there is still only one battalion.

Lieutenant Colonel Edwood's unit has a very glorious title, the Seventh Queen's Private Cavalry, the earliest record of this ancient unit dates back to the 17th century, when it was a cavalry unit converted from Scottish mercenaries, because of the oath of allegiance to the British crown, so it was initially awarded the title of Princess of Wales Private Cavalry by George I, until King George II ascended the throne. At that time, there were no princesses in the British royal family, so they were given the name of the Seventh Queen's private cavalry team (in English, the queen and the queen are the same name, and some descendants do not understand the background of this army, so they are just called the queen's personal cavalry team literally).

This unit served in India for a long time, and at one time fought with the Turks in Baghdad during World War I, and returned to India for another 12 years after the war, and four years ago the unit was transferred to Egypt, where it was reorganized into an armored unit, all of which were reequipped with Matilda II tanks, and trained for several years. It can also be counted as an elite division.

However, Edwood was only commanding the appearance of this glorious number, the original Seventh Queen's private cavalry was still eating dirt in the Egyptian desert, and the British had no way to transport them out of the Mediterranean, and the corpses of the eight battalions of elite infantry that had been drawn before were still waiting to be found by fishermen on the French coastline. At the same time, because the Italians have been on the verge of making a move recently, Egypt's forces are already under the cordon, and now the main defense force of this long line of defense is actually a group of Australian infantry, which really can't be drawn out.

The British Army decided to settle for the next best thing and continue to use the name. They believed that the Germans must know the name of this elite armored unit, and if it appeared in the homeland defense war, it would cause great trouble to the other side, or at least confuse the German army. It is believed that there is a hole in their naval blockade.

Edwood's regiment had 62 tanks divided into three squadrons, the first of which was an infantry tank squadron with twelve Matilda I and five Matilda II. The second squadron was the cruiser squadron with eighteen A9 cruisers and three of the latest Crusader cruisers, and the third squadron was a light tank squadron. Equipped with all seven models known to Edwood, the Vickers light tank, from the early 6-ton to the rare MKVI experiment, is a museum of Wickers tanks, and these weakly armored little tanks will be vulnerable to the enemy's regular tanks or anti-tank guns, but slaughtering lightly armed infantry in small alleys is precisely the strength of these little ones.

Just when the 1st Panzer Division was full of ambition and preparing to kill in this battle, the German large-caliber heavy artillery gave them a blow to the head and made them sober up from their rhapsody, it turned out that the war could still be fought like this.

Tank squadrons scattered in barracks, open spaces and streets in the city suffered heavy losses in the shelling, the tankmen were torn to shreds along with the houses where they lived, and even the strongest Matilda tanks were as vulnerable as eggs under large-caliber shells.

Of the three tank regiments in the division, only Edwood's regiment was completely withdrawn, mainly because his regiment had too many tanks out of the army, and in order to wait for the waste wood, the whole regiment circled in the suburbs for two hours, delaying the time to enter the city. So when the shelling came, the 7th Cavalry Regiment was just beginning to enter the city. The group escaped twice as fast as they entered the city, while the two remaining regiments of the division had lost at least twenty percent of their equipment, and the casualties were incalculable, and two of the poor squadrons had disappeared into the burning alleys in formation.

An artillery shell of more than 300 millimeters smashed on the ground of the divisional communications company parked in the central square, wiping out three large off-road communications trucks and the officers and men of the communications company who were sending reports on the vehicles. Now the whole division can only rely on the experimental armored command vehicle of the 1st Tank Regiment to keep in touch with the outside world, the radio on this vehicle is not powerful enough, and the terrain around the port of Dover is complicated, so it can only barely receive some signals from London, and it is said that all the messages sent out are like mud cows entering the sea, and no response can be received. However, they were finally able to get in touch with the Kent command post and save them from the panic.

Lieutenant Colonel Edwood pulled the kettle out of his waist and shook it slightly, feeling the liquid still shaking inside. His regiment was now parked in a long row on a road outside Dover, with the head of the car facing in the direction of Dover. Tanks are parked on the right side of the road, and armored vehicles are parked on the left.

The second squadron of the 12th Lancer Regiment originally had twenty-four armored vehicles, half of which were Bren machine gun vehicles, eight Cadon Royd tracked transporters, and the most rare was six dingo reconnaissance vehicles.

The squadron of armored vehicles now had only ten or two Bren machine gun trucks and two Cardenroyds left, and the dingos all ran out intact, giving Edwood a new understanding of the speed of such small cars.

Because the formation of this squadron is the most well preserved, the division assigned it to the strongest cavalry team of the Seventh Queen, which will become the fist of the armored division and be put into the most critical battle, so the division headquarters will constantly try to enrich the strength of this detachment after dawn.

The team is now parked on an asphalt road called the Canyon Road, which, as the name suggests, runs right through the bottom of a canyon. It's a two-lane country road flanked by a gentle 50-foot slope on which local farmers have cultivated fields filled with alfalfa and wheat.

"Sir, I found the ink you wanted, and Ensign Condi brought his oil painting kit with a complete set of stationery." Ensign Henry shouted loudly from the side of a Caddenloyd tracked car in the distance, holding up a bottle of ink and gesturing to Edwood.

At this moment, a two-wheeled motorcycle roared from the side of the valley and rushed towards the convoy, it flew past Ensign Henry, almost knocked off the inkwell in his hand, the rider skillfully pulled the handlebars, stepped on the brakes of the rear wheel, and the motorcycle slid sideways for half a meter, and stopped in front of the lieutenant colonel.

"Lieutenant Colonel Edwood?" The rider asked loudly.

"Yes." The lieutenant colonel stood up and stepped forward.

"Urgent order from the divisional headquarters, sir." The herald took out a piece of paper from the paper bag on his jacket's chest and handed it to the lieutenant colonel, saluted the lieutenant colonel, and then twisted the accelerator again and sped away the way he came.

"What a gruff guy." Edwood shook his head as he looked at the distant motorcycle, he flattened the paperwork in his hand and looked at it carefully.

"Henry!" The lieutenant colonel yelled loudly.

"Gather all squadron commanders to me at once, we're going to war." (To be continued......)