"Four hundred meters away, keep right...... Isn't that the house, and it's going to be on the right again, see? Lieutenant Colonel Baker lay behind a mound and looked at the village in front of him with a telescope.

They were only one step away from the city of Dover, and the infantry of the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment could already see the towering Victorian rock and the crumbling fortress wall above. Originally, they should have seen the magnificent castle and towers, but now those buildings have become a pile of construction debris, and the German artillery has erased those historical relics from the world forever with hundreds of tons of ammunition.

"It's a tank, it's supposed to be Matilda II, it's not something we can deal with, we should call for backup. Didn't we have an assault gun battalion on our left flank, in the sixties? Private Miguel lay beside the battalion commander with a telescope in his hand.

"Shut up, I don't need your advice right now. Listen, all you have to do now is keep an eye on the enemy here, set up your machine gun right here, block the area from here to the tree, and shoot me at any movement. By the way, what about your company commander? ”

Lieutenant Colonel Baker really lost his temper with this machine gunner with a missing brain, but this guy was lucky, he was unscathed in the whole battle of France, accumulated a lot of combat experience, and now he is also the backbone of the company's operations, if it weren't for the inexplicable situation from time to time, Baker actually likes this simple-minded guy.

"Captain Gaines is in the house in the back, do you want me to call him?" The Heavy is pulling an infantry shovel down from his belt, ready to dig a machine gun bunker with the two sub-marksmen.

"No need, you just stay here, I'll go by myself." Baker saw through the Heavy's desire to be lazy, and he glanced at the crew. Then he bent down and climbed down the mound, and led his adjutant to a prefabricated house not far away.

"Our flanks are going well, there is not much resistance at all, why are we still holding our ground here." Captain Gaines shouted loudly over his walkie-talkie.

"We advanced two kilometers last night and have broken through three British lines, and the morale of the soldiers is very high...... What the? Let me personally ask the battalion commander? The battalion commander is here? ”

"Captain Gaines. Any questions? The order of the regimental headquarters was for the 2nd Battalion to temporarily halt its advance and consolidate the defensive line on the spot. Lieutenant Colonel Baker stood in the doorway, slapping the dirt on his uniform.

"Sir!" The officers and non-commissioned officers in the room hurriedly stood up and saluted.

"I understand your thoughts, but an order is an order. I just went to the front to take a look, and the British are also reinforcing their defensive lines, and you still have to fight the battle in the back. Baker walked into the makeshift command post, and a non-commissioned officer hurriedly brought a chair, and the orderly brought freshly brewed coffee.

"You guys look good here, much better than Erlian. How was it last night. ”

"It was a good fight. Although the British resistance was stubborn, their fortifications were too rudimentary to withstand artillery fire, and we broke through three lines of defense in succession, killing 30 enemy soldiers, taking 140 prisoners, and destroying three enemy light tanks and two armored vehicles alone. Three trucks were captured, and a portion of ammunition and weapons were seized. The exact number has not yet had time to be counted. Gaines loudly reported to the battalion commander the results of last night's battle.

The German night raid hit the weakness of the British, and because the handover of the command structure was too hasty, there were contradictions in the orders of the British command, some troops were ordered to go forward, others were ordered to retreat, and the troop movement was once in chaos. So after nightfall, the British were still busy arranging their outer defenses.

St Margaret's Beach was shrouded in a curtain of light all night, and the air battle over that beach eventually turned into a meat grinder-like massacre, a death charge of Balaclava light cavalry in the air, where the last of the RAF's elite long-range strike force was almost exhausted.

For the first time, the Luftwaffe's day fighter unit took part in night operations. Under the reflection of the ground lights, the British bombers were like silhouettes on a white curtain board, clearly exposed to the eyes of the German fighters hovering at high altitude, and were shot down from the air one by one by the German planes like flies, and finally there were not one of the planes that could reach the target area in their entirety.

Moreover, due to the interference of ground smoke and searchlights, the bombers could not even find ground targets, let alone any bombing effects, and the bombers often threw away the bombs on the planes as soon as they entered the village and town, and then immediately turned around and fled, and no one wanted to stay in this anti-aircraft hell for a second longer. Eventually, most of the bombs were dropped on the hillside, and some were thrown into the waves of the strait, causing only minor damage to the German targets on the ground. Reichenau was so impressed by the excellent camouflage of the Germans that he claimed to have discovered another of his talents, which is a strong evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race.

On that night, the RAF bomber units had almost bled their blood on this sad beach, and only one-third of the planes flew back to their bases, half of the planes that returned were judged to have been badly damaged after landing, and some of them had suffered various minor injuries. Less than 10 percent of the total number of aircraft were intact, including some of the aircraft that did not reach the target area at all and returned halfway.

In addition to participating in the massacre over the beach, the German night fighters also advanced into the interior of the United Kingdom, they launched ambushes on several British bomber routes that had been detected by long-range radar, intercepted and shot down some British bombers, many British bombing squadrons dropped the bombs in the cabin in panic after being attacked suddenly, and as a result, they had no ability to continue the attack after highlighting the German ambush circle, so they could only turn around and return home, still worried along the way, afraid of encountering demonic German night fighters again.

In fact, the loss of the plane was not the most serious blow to the Royal Air Force, the most serious injury was actually mental, this night raid that could be called a bloody massacre almost destroyed the last remaining blood and courage of the British bomber pilots, some of the crew began to talk about morality, many squadron pilots began to do everything possible to evade the mission, and even deserters who left the team without permission in the future. This was unimaginable in the past, but it happened at the time.

The British garrison at Dover had watched the bloody battle over the beach, and at first, like the Scottish troops, thought that the Luftwaffe was bombing the British garrison, and they cheered that the anti-aircraft guns had shot down enemy planes. It wasn't until a badly wounded British bomber crashed into the streets of Dover that the British realized something was wrong. You may have completely reversed the object of support.

The hapless Wellington broke a wing on the roof of an apartment and crashed headlong into a blacksmith's shop, causing a serious fire. An infantry company witnessed the whole accident, and they recognized the crashed plane at a glance, only to realize that it was the British Royal Air Force that had been shot down.

Over the next hour, dozens of British bombers were shot down, some of the pilots chose to make a forced landing on the sea, and some crashed directly around St. Margaret's Beach, lighting dozens of valuable bonfires in the open field. Others crashed into residential areas of Dover, where fuel from planes and bombs dropped in time to devastate the city's transport system, which had already been overwhelmed. Many neighborhoods were cut off by fires, and many of the materials that were rescued in the urban area were once again burned into flames, and countless casualties were lost.

In the midst of this chaos, the German Army suddenly launched a night attack on the outer lines of Dover, and the consequences can be imagined. The British were completely powerless to fight back, and the outer lines of defense were broken through one after another. Dover's defensive circle is in an emergency across the board. The heavily armored tanks, which had been expected to be highly anticipated, did not play much of a role in night battles, as the British tanks had a common design problem, which was that they had a very narrow viewing angle and would have poor visibility during the day, let alone at night.

Although both the British and the Germans fired a lot of flares, but for the British tanks. The situation was worse than it had been before the lighting, and the driver and crew were blinded by flashes of various colors, unable to make out what was happening in the distance.

These heavy tanks were placed behind the infantry trenches as infantry support fire, but the infantry did not even have time to consolidate their fortifications. There was no time to dig bunkers for the tank vehicles, and as a result, the tanks were completely unsheltered and left alone on the open plain.

Illuminated by flares, the German tanks hiding behind bushes and walls easily slipped the steel behemoths into their scopes and then smashed them into scrap metal with a single round of Rheinsteel or Krupp armor-piercing or semi-armor-piercing grenades.

The Matilda series of tanks had thick skin and flesh, and left many bad memories for the German tank units during the French campaign. These slow-moving tortoises were so hard that the German anti-tank gunners couldn't penetrate the steel shells even if they pushed their muzzles against the front armor. Rommel was defeated by this tank attack and killed on an unnamed mound in France, where he became the apostle of God and became famous there.

However, now the feng shui is turning, and the dominance of victory and defeat is in the hands of the Germans, and the German armored forces have the weapons to defeat the enemy, and the 48 times the diameter of the long-barreled 75 mm main gun can penetrate all the existing tanks in the world, even if some of them still exist only on paper. Tank No. 4 and No. 3 assault guns, equipped with such main guns, were almost like no one on the battlefield, with people blocking people and tanks blocking tanks.

The German tankmen were almost insane, and the more than 30 Matilda tanks left on the outer line of the 1st Panzer Division were slaughtered in one night, and the British infantry tank battalion was wiped out, leaving no survivors.

All accounts of the unit's battle that night are derived from surviving British infantry and German field records, and have been the subject of a century-long debate among historians of the war due to their many contradictions.

The main point of contention is whether the British tank battalion had a tank battle with the German tanks, the German record is that there has never been a similar battle at all, the Germans said that they were happily shooting targets the whole time, and the tankers and assault gunners chose to aim and fire from a distance of 500 meters.

The British said that it was impossible to do this in the combat environment of the night, and that the British infantry tanks were broken in close combat with the German tanks, because everyone knew how tragic Matilda's mobility was, and these brave tankmen still fought bravely in the face of the elite enemy troops, which can be called a model among British warriors, and these people should be posthumously awarded the Cross as a consolation, and inspire future generations not to forget the martial spirit of their predecessors.

In fact, both of these situations happened that night, because the British tanks were scattered, so that some lines had only one platoon of tanks, while others had a company of tanks. The British called a tank platoon a squad and a tank company a squadron.

That night, a Matilda II squadron and a German company of dive tanks No. 4 engaged in a real tank battle, which had never happened since the outbreak of the war. (To be continued......)