Just five hours before Xu Jun was talking about his "trap theory" to his subordinates at the headquarters, the largest and most fierce surface battle of this farcical war broke out in the ocean 50 kilometers west of Koh Chang in Siam.

Beginning at two o'clock in the afternoon, the communications office of the Siam Navy Headquarters became extremely busy, and immediately after the news of the departure of the French naval fleet from Saigon, the Navy Command immediately sent an alert to the naval ships sailing in the Gulf of Siam to upgrade their combat readiness.

Although the relationship between the Siamese Navy and the Army is not much different from that of the Japanese, although it is not as extreme as the Japanese, it is not uncommon for the generals of the two armies to quarrel at the conference table and the soldiers to fight in a group in a bar.

This time, the Siamese Navy showed great dissatisfaction with the army's self-defeating attack, not only because the army did it itself without informing them, but also because the Siamese navy was more self-aware and knew that confronting the French Far East Fleet was a self-defeating matter.

If half a year ago, the French Indochina fleet was left with a bunch of old and weak soldiers with no morale, and the Siamese navy thought that it was six points certain to win, but now the two battle patrols were stopped in the port of Saigon, and the possibility of Siam winning at sea was not even half a point.

Although reinforcements from the Japanese Combined Fleet had been contacted, before the Japanese fleet entered the port of Bangkok, everything still had to rely on the Siamese Navy itself, and it could only grit its teeth and hold on.

This time it was pit alive by the army bastards, looking at the reports of ship attacks, the commander of the Royal Siam Navy, Xin. Admiral Komonavin felt his heart flutter.

The Gulf of Siam is served by four busy commercial shipping lanes, and countless Siamese transports ply to and from Southeast Asian seaports every day, transporting rice and vegetables, Siam's largest exports, back to the country's scarce production resources.

But now, on these routes, in just an hour, dozens of Siamese freighters have been attacked and sunk, and most of them have only had time to send out a few SOS codes and ship position coordinates, and they don't even know what they were attacking.

Obviously, there were French raiders in the Gulf of Siam, but knowing that the enemy was attacking their ships, the Siamese Navy could not come up with any solution.

The Siam Navy is a standard yellow-water navy, and although the waters of the Gulf of Siam are very blue, it cannot change the cruel fact that the Siam Navy does not have a combat force in the open sea, and their naval strength is only enough to defend their territorial waters.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of territorial waters was confused in the countries of the world. By British standard, it was within three nautical miles of the coastline to be territorial waters, which was exactly the maximum range of the early breech guns. The French, on the other hand, believe that everything within the eye is territorial water, and they set the standard of territorial sea at 22 kilometers, which is about 12 nautical miles. Because Siam had a lot of contact with the British in the early days, it also adopted British standards.

The Royal Siam Navy is a small but modern navy among Asian countries, but in the face of the old European powers, they are only worthy of some coastal defenses.

At this time, His Excellency the Commander did not know that the coastal defense ship [Yegonghe] had sunk, otherwise he might have suffered a myocardial infarction on the spot. The Siamese Navy felt that it was powerless to deal with the attack on the route, and all they could do at present was to order the national ships in the sea zone to return to Bangkok Bay immediately and concentrate their forces as much as possible to shrink the defense zone.

The navy believed that concentrating the ships in its hands would still give the French a headache, and as long as they held out until the Japanese Combined Fleet arrived, then they could wait for the armistice with peace of mind.

None of the Siam navy's top brass believed that Siam was capable of winning the war, and they now only wanted to preserve as much of the navy's precious blood as possible until the surrender order of the Bangkok government was issued.

Because from the reports of some attacked ships, it looks like they have hit mines laid by the French, so the Siam Navy Command guessed that the French must have secretly laid some minefields in the shallow waters of Siam, and the targets were some ships of the Siamese Navy that liked to sail along the coast.

The two Japanese-made [Thonburi]-class shallow water gunboats, which were cruising near Tata, left their quiet mooring place after receiving the order from the headquarters and began to return to their home port of Sattahip Naval Base.

Accompanying these two Siamese Navy's strongest warships were six small mine-striking ships of the Da Na class purchased from Italy, which were small ships with a full load of 400 tons, three 76-millimeter guns, and six torpedo tubes.

At first, the situation looked good, and the two heavy gunboats with four mine-striking ships sailed south-east first, and joined the remaining two mine-striking ships in the waters off Koh Chang Island in the south of Koh Chang, where there were also two Siamese naval logistics transport ships, and the naval command did not know why they had not been notified of the order to return.

So the captain of the [Thonburi] at that time, Luan. Sail. Lieutenant Colonel Wei Fengan, as the supreme commander of the formation, decided to act together with these two 800-ton offshore transport ships. Wei Fengan may have been reluctant to abandon the two colleagues out of compassion at the time, but it turned out to be a fatal decision.

The maximum speed of the [Thonburi] class was only 15.5 knots, and the speed of the formation was further reduced to only eight knots because of the need to take care of two steam-powered transport ships. However, out of confidence in his own strength, Vifonan did not have much to worry about this voyage, and although the command repeatedly warned him to be careful of the French attack ships, the lieutenant commander believed that the firepower of this small fleet would be enough to repel any attack by the French attack ships.

Then he received another alert from the command, telling him to be careful of the shallow waters along the coast, where the French might have quietly dropped mines. It just so happened that the draft of the two old transport ships was relatively deep and could not sail freely in the shallow waters, so the fleet simply chose a new route, bypassing Kok Chang Island from the west, and then following the offshore route to the destination base of Sattahip.

The route was about 30 kilometers from the coast, and the average depth of the water was more than 70 meters, and with the technology known at that time, it was simply impossible to place mines in the sea area at such a depth.

This small fleet concentrates almost seventy percent of the first-line combat ships of the Siam Navy, which can be said to be the old capital accumulated by the Siam Navy over two generations of dynasties. Wei Fengan organized the fleet into four columns, and the distance between the ships was kept at one hundred and fifty meters from the left and right, and two hundred meters from the front and rear, forming a rectangular array with a width of one kilometer.

Thonburi and Ayutthaya Ayutthaya sailed side by side in the center of the front of the line, with three mine-striking ships on each flank, each followed by a transport ship behind the shallow gunboats. Because of the old-fashioned coal-fired steam boilers, the black smoke coming out of the ship's chimney is clearly visible from 10 kilometers away.

Just after 3 p.m., the Thonburi again reported its position to the command, and at the same time learned that the destroyer Phra Luan Wang had been attacked and sunk by a French submarine fifty nautical miles southwest of Sattahip.

This message made Lieutenant Commander Vifunan nervous, his formation might be able to repel a destroyer-class surface ship attack, but it did not possess any anti-submarine capabilities. Now only a quarter of the way has passed, and at the current speed, it will take at least three hours to reach Sattahip. During these three hours, the fleet was threatened with a submarine attack at any moment, as the coastal airfields were currently under retaliatory attack by the French Air Force, and the fleet had lost the possibility of receiving escort support from the Air Force.

At 3:17 p.m., the Thonburi ordered the formation to halt its advance, and Viphon was ready to release a Siamese seaplane carried by the transport ship Koh Phakam.

This is a biplane small water reconnaissance aircraft specially ordered by Kawasaki Aircraft Factory for the Siam Navy, the production number is MS-103S, on the basis of which Kawasaki also developed the Type 96 small seaplane, which is a small reconnaissance aircraft specially designed for the use of large submarines of the Japanese Navy.

Because it was not equipped with a catapult, the aircraft could only be released by a crane to lift the fuselage to the surface of the water, and then take off from the surface of the water under its own power.

The weather was very good that day, and the sea was very calm, so Second Lieutenant Manpong of the Siam Naval Aviation started the engine and began to glide at high speed on the sea surface against the sea breeze under the watchful eyes of hundreds of colleagues and soldiers of the formation.

After running for almost 1.5 kilometers, the Siamese glide finally left the water and began to climb smoothly upward, and the second lieutenant Mantent looked down from the cockpit probe proudly, and was shocked by what he saw, from the air he could see straight thunder trails in the sea, approaching the formation anchored in the sea at high speed.

PS: After the code is finished with a chapter, there is another chapter in the evening, about nine o'clock.

Thank you for your support and understanding, I will continue to work hard. (To be continued.) )