The distance from Scapaflo Naval Base in the northernmost part of Britain to the Faroe Islands is 290 kilometres in a straight line, nearly 600 kilometres in a round trip, and twice as much as the journey to Iceland, which is far more than the maximum range of any aircraft currently equipped by the British army. www.biquge.info The British had only two options for efficient aerial reconnaissance of the main waterways in the Norwegian Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in the Norwegian Sea: dispatch airships, or call in seaplane carriers.

At this moment, when the survival of the country is at stake, the British no longer have any stinginess; they have taken a two-pronged approach, on the one hand, they have transferred 12 of the 17 airships from the southeastern defense area, and on the other hand, they have sent 3 of the five seaplane carriers, and they have meticulously divided the reconnaissance area, and even the route of each airship and each carrier has been determined in advance, and with the sea search of a large number of submarines and light ships, theoretically they can clear any blind spots in reconnaissance.

After all, theory is theory, and there is often a big gap between it and reality. At the outbreak of war, the British Navy was not equipped with hard airships with better flying performance but more expensive than the Germans, and although the traditional soft airships were easy to maintain and operate, there was a significant gap between the load capacity and flight speed of the Zeppelin, and the reconnaissance efficiency was naturally somewhat reduced. The same is true for seaplane carriers, once they encounter bad sea conditions, the British aerial reconnaissance will be difficult to continue, but the meteorological conditions in the northern sea area are complicated, and the autumn is rainy, foggy, and windy. In the two weeks from early to mid-November, the British Navy's effective reconnaissance area reached only 40 percent of what was expected, and the vast areas southwest and northwest of Iceland, the southwest of the Faroe Islands, and the central and northern parts of the Norwegian Sea were still blind spots.

This annoyed Sir Jackson, the commander of the British Home Fleet, so before leading the fleet to the Faroe Islands, he repeatedly warned the Admiralty that if naval aviation could not be organized to conduct carpet surveys of the Faroe Islands and the surrounding waters in order to eliminate the potential threat of the German fleet ambushing there, the desperate combat operations of the Home Fleet might become a historic end for the British Royal Navy.

Due to bad weather and unavoidable technical problems, only seven of the 12 airships transferred by the British to the north could be dispatched at this time, and the crews and pilots of the three seaplane carriers gritted their teeth and persevered despite the fatigue of working day after two days, and after two days of hard work, they finally carried out a thorough search of the area around the Faroe Islands within 100 nautical miles.

With the exception of a German submarine in the waters east of the Faroe Islands, British airships and seaplanes did not detect anything suspicious in the waters off the Faroe Islands.

On 22 November 1914, the British Home Fleet sailed east of the Faroe Islands and anchored only 20 nautical miles from its main port, Tórse. According to the territorial sea line of the Faroe Islands declared by the Danish government, the position of the British fleet was already within the Danish territorial waters, even so, on the day it arrived in the waters of the Faroe Islands, the British fleet detained two Danish fishing boats that had intruded into its field of vision, and when the British destroyers forcibly seized them, the actual position of the two ships was only a dozen kilometers from the shoreline!

The British had been unscrupulous in their quest for victory, but they did not expect that the intensive reconnaissance of the Faroe Islands would alert the German naval spies lurking there, and the information was delivered to Reinhardt-Schell and his aides, from which they immediately captured key information.

In the early morning of 23 November, the German High Seas Fleet quietly arrived in the waters north of the Faroe Islands. After dawn, six Hubert-D carrier-based reconnaissance planes took off from the "Prince Heinrich" in one go, and two auxiliary aircraft carriers, the "Göttingen" and the "Kassel," which had been converted from transoceanic cruise ships, each took off three reconnaissance planes of the same type. In the first wave of reconnaissance, the German pilots found nothing, and after returning home and refueling, they set off for a second wave of reconnaissance. At about 10 o'clock, the No. 3 reconnaissance plane, which had taken off from the "Göttingen," saw the British fleet southeast of the Faroe Islands, and a few minutes later it sent a radio signal to its own fleet: On the sea 30 kilometers south of Swain Island, there were 10 to 12 dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, 7 to 8 old battleships, about 10 cruisers, and about 30 destroyers.

First seeing the gray-painted German carrier-based reconnaissance planes, and then monitoring the radio waves coming from close range, the British, who were highly attentive, immediately realized that their whereabouts had been discovered by the enemy, and that the position of the German fleet was not far away. By this time, three seaplane carriers had been included in the support of the British Home Fleet, and Sir Jackson ordered them to send water reconnaissance planes to reversely detect the position of the German fleet. At 11:42 a.m., one of the Schott reconnaissance planes spotted the German fleet on the sea, and before it was shot down by the German carrier-based aircraft, the British pilot promptly sent a telegram, but this telegram was not encrypted, and the German fleet intercepted it and quickly deciphered the contents -- the German main fleet consisted of 18 to 20 large warships, 3 aircraft carriers, 40 to 50 cruisers and destroyers, sailing at a speed of 12 knots, heading due east.

The figures provided by this telegram did not deviate much from the actual situation, since the old battleships such as "Braunschweig" and "Lorraine" and the Scharnhorst-class armored cruisers also fell into the category of "large battleships", while all the light cruisers and large torpedo boats combined amounted to 42. However, the vague concept was likely to be fatally misleading to the British fleet commander -- 20 dreadnoughts versus 10 dreadnoughts plus 10 ex-dreadnoughts, 20 cruisers and 20 large torpedo boats versus 10 cruisers and 30 large torpedo boats were very different combat forces, and the corresponding combat tactics should be very different.

Unlike the atmosphere in which everyone on the German flagship was clasped together and everyone was calm and modest, the British flagship "Iron Duke" was shrouded in a tense and depressing atmosphere from the moment the German reconnaissance plane appeared. On the one hand, people are anxiously waiting for their own reconnaissance planes to find the German fleet hiding in the shadows as soon as possible, so that their own fleet can get rid of the situation of being purely passive; on the other hand, the German carrier-based planes have already shown their ability to attack ships in several important naval battles, and the officers and men of the British ships with a little foresight are worried that the next group of German planes will drop bombs or torpedoes, and with the current air defense capability of the British fleet, it will be difficult to resist the bombing of the German naval air force in turn.

Receiving a desperate telegram from his own reconnaissance plane, Sir Jackson, the commander of the fleet, was like a man who was struggling to find the light in the darkness, and instantly saw the direction of hope, but what made him feel extremely entangled was that the road to the light was full of thorns, and now he had to make a crucial choice in the shortest possible time: attack, how to attack? Retreat, how to retreat?

In the flagship's operational command room, Sir Jackson said eloquently to his officers: "The Germans have the double advantage of strength and psychology, and it is absolutely not necessary for them to cross the Faroe Islands, and to go east around the islands is a two-hour flight, and if we also sail east, the sea east of Swayn Island will be our decisive battle--the Germans must have calculated everything, and their planes will cost us a great deal of strength and our mood before we reach there. So we had to risk it to the end, insert it from the strait between Higashi Island and Borroi Island, and attack from behind the German fleet! ”

The Faroe Islands consist of 18 islands and reefs, the four largest of which are spaced close to each other, only 200 meters narrow and 5 or 6 kilometers wide.

Despite Lieutenant General Madden's warning, Sir Jackson remained stubborn, and the academic theorist General Edward supported Jackson's adventurous strategy.

"But how can we avoid the reconnaissance of the German planes?" Lieutenant General Madden asked rhetorically.

"God, of course!" Sir Jackson pointed out the porthole with his right hand, the clear sky had been obscured by clouds from the north all morning, the sea was getting higher and higher, the seaplane take-off and landing had become very difficult, and the German aircraft carriers were more resilient to the rough sea conditions, but it was impossible to completely ignore the effects of the weather.

General Madden fell silent, knowing that if Betty and Thomas were present, they would have done their best to stop Sir Jackson's adventure, but until the dust settled, no one could be sure that this "delusion" would be a failure, and the sudden change in the weather invisibly gave people a psychological hint that whoever won and who lost, it would be a heroic and tragic battle.

At 11:55, the "Iron Duke" hung out the decisive battle flag that had inspired the British soldiers in the Battle of Trafalgar, this flag signal has a magical magic for the officers and men of the British Royal Navy, can instantly sweep away their worries and fears, so that they can face any strong enemy with a heroic and fearless spirit, which is also the key reason why the British fleet in Jutland and Flanders has repeatedly fallen into extreme tactical difficulties but always makes the Germans pay a heavy price for victory.

On the other hand, despite the fact that the British fleet had more information on dreadnoughts and battlecruisers than the German naval staff, the helmsmen of the German High Seas Fleet were determined to fight. Had it not been for the change in weather, the German fleet would have had the opportunity to use three aircraft carriers to slowly drag down the British fleet and win at a relatively small cost, but providence would have decided the fate of each side in the most typical steel collision of the era of giant ships and cannons.

(End of chapter)