At 6:20 a.m. on June 14, Sir Forbes's British fleet, led by the flagship HMS Ark Royal, quietly arrived at the entrance to Oran Harbour.

They lined up between the fjords and encircled the port of Oran, where the main force of the French fleet at Darlan was located.

At this moment, the encircled French fleet is still unaware of the crisis.

"Report to the Commander! Between the fjords, we found a large number of British warships. ”

In Darlan's office, an operations staff officer was methodically reporting to his commander.

Although the sudden appearance of the British fleet was something that Darlang had not received any news from before.

However, after all, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already made a clear statement, swearing with the glory of the British Royal Navy and his own credibility that he would not do anything against the French fleet. The promise of the British Empire must not be too useless.

Moreover, the British would not now disclose their military operations to Vichy France, and Darlan and his officers and men understood it perfectly.

After all, Vichy France was no longer an ally of the British, and they were now nominally following Germany.

Although Darlan's fleet, now with the colonial army of Bironte, was practically not under German control and remained relatively independent.

But after all, they were all troops under the name of Petain, and theoretically belonged to the Vichy regime.

The British were understandably concerned that Darlan was sharing intelligence with the Vichy regime, that is, with Germany in disguise.

"I see." Darlan smiled and nodded, motioning for his staff to step aside.

In his opinion, the British navy, which had already suffered from the German fleet in Narvik and the North Sea, was now overstretched even by sending warships to escort its own convoy.

The submarine force of the German General Dönitz can be described as an existence against the sky.

In the propaganda of the German social worker newspaper, because the battle on the road has come to an end, Germany's recent enemy has become a maritime power - Britain.

Therefore, their propaganda page has also changed from boasting about "lightning tactics" and armored forces some time ago to "wolf pack tactics" and submarine forces at the moment.

Under German propaganda, Dönitz's "wolf pack tactics" have become as famous as Guderian's "blitzkrieg", and have been called the two "magic weapons" of the Third Reich on land and sea.

The essence of the wolf pack tactic is actually to concentrate on using the weak ships of the German Navy to destroy the enemy's large fleet.

Because of its late start, the German Navy has always been no better than an old power like Britain in terms of the number of large warships.

Speaking of Germany's naval development history in the past 20 years, it is almost an adventurous process that relies on a crooked technology tree and takes a biased sword.

They gave up the deliberate pursuit of large warships, and bet on the aircraft carriers with the heavy responsibility of surface warfare.

For this reason, the German High Seas Fleet has so far only had only three battleships in the true sense of the word.

You must know that the French Navy under Darlan now has a huge presence of 7 battleships and 2 battle cruisers.

In other words, measured only by the strength of surface artillery warfare, the French fleet now controlled by Darlan is almost twice as strong as the German Navy.

This was also an important reason for Churchill's concern about Darlan's descent.

Because once the French fleet merged with the German fleet, the number of battleships of the German High Seas Fleet would immediately triple, and the shortcomings of its low artillery strength would be completely compensated.

At that time, the British Royal Navy really could no longer find a usable advantage in a confrontation with the German Navy.

After all, Reinhardt's aircraft carrier tactics were maintained by sacrificing the number of battleships. It's a trick, but it's also a risky gamble.

If you are not careful, the German navy, which is close to you, will become a live target for large British warships.

As for the "wolf pack tactics" that are now being hyped up by the social worker newspaper, in the final analysis, it is not a method that can be used to counter the British fleet.

The essence of the wolf pack tactic is to concentrate a large number of weak ships to destroy the enemy's large transport fleet, rather than against the enemy's combat fleet.

During the operation, the "wolf pack tactic" called for sending several submarines to go on safaris and reconnaissance at sea.

And the time of their safari is usually at night.

There is no other reason, just because it is good to run away at night, and it is good to dodge when you can't beat it.

And the reason why we have to consider running away and thinking about dodging is not because of our lack of strength and we dare not fight hard.

In the "wolf pack", as long as there is a submarine that is secretly scouting and discovers the British escort fleet, it will send out a radio to find all the submarines that are closer and launch a surprise attack on the enemy at night.

It is common practice for ships to stealthily pass through gaps or flanks of the opposing convoy when they are spotted, evading their fire barriers, and approaching the target.

If it was the British fleet that was discovered during the day, then the German submarines would occupy advantageous attack positions in all directions and hide underwater.

It is only at night that they suddenly rise to the surface and fire torpedoes at the target at the same time to achieve a surprise effect.

Because Britain's anti-submarine measures were only at a better than nothing level at this stage in 1940.

So Dönitz's "wolf pack" can almost be said to be in a heavenly environment.

To put it bluntly, they can hit others, but they can't hit them.

Judging from the information that Darlang knows, Dönitz, who invented the "wolf pack tactic", has been promoted from major general to lieutenant general some time ago.

After the Germans occupied northern France, they also quickly transformed the ports on the west coast of France and the Bay of Biscay into German submarine bases, established German submarine production lines at full capacity, and delivered a batch of new submarines to Dönitz's submarine force.

As for those old German pre-production submarines, they have now been transferred quite a bit and are going on safaris in the Mediterranean near the Darlan fleet.

After all, in the Vichy government, Reinhardt's hint to Petain also reached Darlan's ears, letting him know about the existence of German submarines in the Mediterranean.

This information that Reinhardt deliberately sent to Darlan was only intended to reassure him.

Although there were German submarines in the Mediterranean, their goal was to clean up the British fleet and not accidentally damage the French ships in Darlan.

Today, however, Darlan mistakenly linked the German submarines to the British fleet that appeared here.

For a while, he thought that the British fleet was appearing in the Mediterranean Sea at this moment, near them, in order to round up the surrounding German submarines.

"Bring me the map."

Darlang thought about it for a while, but decided to take a look at the map, and maybe he could guess more information.