In the afternoon sun, a light gray Hubert-D reconnaissance plane flew lonely over the waters north of the Netherlands. www.biquge.info There is not a single ship on the once busy route, and only an occasional seabird flies by, as if it has reached the end of the world.

The war had been going on for more than a month since the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia. It is not just a regional conflict in the Balkans, as most people expected, with France in Western Europe, Russia in Eastern Europe, Jutland in the north, and the Mediterranean in the south......

Seeing that more than half of the plane's fuel was consumed, but there was not even a trace of smoke on the sea, the German pilot pilots flying this two-plane two-seat reconnaissance plane had no choice but to turn around and return home. After flying some distance back, he suddenly spotted a floating submarine off the coast of the Netherlands. These guys are powered by internal combustion engines, unlike ships that emit conspicuous smoke as they walk, and they are small enough to be far away from each other, so it's not easy to spot without looking closely.

The German pilot immediately lowered the flight altitude and reminded his partner to be combat-ready.

The Hubert-D reconnaissance aircraft attached to the German Navy were armed with a Madsen light machine gun and could carry a number of small bombs depending on the mission, and the rear seat observer was usually equipped with a flare pistol for firing pyrotechnic flares. Despite their weak combat effectiveness, they dare to bully the enemy's large surface ships, let alone submarines with a displacement of only a few hundred tons and protection capabilities that are no different from ordinary ships.

The submarine on the surface of the sea is painted in dark gray all over its body. It did not fly a flag, and its shape was very different from that of German submarines - the hull was full of lines, the conning tower was low and wide, and the fore and rear decks were smooth, unlike German submarines, which gave people a rough and violent feeling at a glance.

A plane was found approaching, and the crew on the deck was extremely unfriendly. They raised their rifles and opened fire without waiting for the comer to identify themselves. A few moments later, several more crew members came to the deck from the bilge, armed with pistols and rifles, to join the futile design.

Seeing such a scene, the German pilots immediately realized that this must be an Allied submarine that had broken down and could not dive. He made a bomb gesture to the observer in the back seat, then adjusted the flight angle and flew head-on towards the submarine.

The back-seat observer held one hand on the edge of the cockpit, his eyes fixed on the target on the sea, and the other hand held the lever next to the seat, and when he reached his estimated position, he pulled violently and dropped a 20-kilogram bomb using a trigger fuse.

The pilot poked his head out of the open cockpit and joined the observers to watch the bomb fall.

The black bomb silently drew a parabola and landed on the surface of the sea more than 20 meters away from the submarine, and the explosion stirred up a column of water that looked larger than the entire submarine.

The two of them retracted their heads in unison, and there was neither joy nor disappointment on their faces.

The plane quickly circled and rushed diagonally down from the direction of the submarine's tail.

The backseat observer once again took the same gesture, but he was clutching another lever this time.

In recent training exercises, the hit rate of bomb dropping by planes that switched to bomb pylons to load bombs was 10 percent higher than that of flight personnel throwing bombs manually. Therefore, the reconnaissance planes on the "Bismarck" have all been equipped with this simplest mechanical bomb-dropping device, and the catapult-type seaplanes carried by the battleship are still using the old manual bomb-dropping device for the time being.

This time, the bomb fell on the front of the submarine. After the explosion, two crew members fell on the deck of the submarine.

The guns fired by the crew had not yet caught the fur of the German reconnaissance plane.

The back-seat observer on the plane cocked his machine gun with a blank face.

The proportions of the truncated Madsen with a shortened barrel looked incongruous, but this did not prevent it from being the first aviation machine gun to be put into practical use.

The reconnaissance plane came back, and instead of flying directly above the submarine, it opened up a slight lateral distance to allow the machine gun mounted on the recoil mount to strafe.

With each shot, the backseat observer must have run out of bullets in the magazine.

This went back and forth four times, and the deck of the submarine was already stained with blood.

If it weren't for the fact that the fuel was running out, the back-seat observer would probably have shot the flares from the flare in the flare gun as well.

The ravaged submariners had also almost used up all their bullets, and they roared angrily, but this did nothing at all except to let their opponents know that it was a British submarine.

The German reconnaissance plane finally flew away. What the submarine commander was thinking about at the moment was not how to enhance the submarine's air defense capability, but the fate of the submarine and the officers and men on board -- the German land airfield was far away, and the army reconnaissance plane would not be interested in a target more than a dozen nautical miles offshore, this was obviously a German naval reconnaissance plane, and the German port was hundreds of kilometers away, and its appearance meant that the German fleet was not far away.

A submarine that had a drainage failure and could not dive would certainly not be able to defeat the German surface ships.

The submarine commander hurriedly ordered to send a telegram for help.

An hour later, the British 10th Lightning Strike Fleet, stationed in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, received an urgent order to go to the Dutch waters to rescue the troubled C-22 submarine.

Located in northeastern Belgium, Zeebrugge is an important port and shipbuilding base after Antwerp. It was only 50 miles from Brussels, but after the capture of Brussels, the Luke's corps on the right flank of the German army did not continue to advance towards northern Belgium, but turned around and rushed towards France, with the furthest end of the German right flank line stopping at about 20 miles from Antwerp and Ghent. The German rearguard units formed a strong field defensive position and successfully repelled a repulsive Belgian counteroffensive.

After the Battle of Flanders, the British Navy began stationing guard ships on the Belgian coast to protect the English Channel. The newly formed 10th Minestrike Squadron was led by a half-worn destroyer and consisted of four medium torpedo boats and 24 small torpedo boats, what the Germans called high-speed torpedo boats. According to the principle of shortcomings, the effective combat radius of this lightning strike formation is only 50 nautical miles, while the trapped C-22 is 80 nautical miles away.

The commander of the British 10th Lightning Strike Squadron, Colonel Short, was a retired veteran who had been recalled to the front line after the Battle of Jutland. He served as Chief of Staff of the Destroyer Fleet and Commander of the Detachment and excelled in torpedo operations.

Having an important combat mission, Colonel Short ordered the only destroyer under his command to be on standby day and night, and half of the boilers were burned with enough steam to be ready for discharge, a strict order that played an important role at a critical moment. Receiving an operational order from the Naval Staff, it took him only twenty minutes to lead all the ships out of Zeebrugge.

During the voyage, Colonel Short pored over the charts and found that the C-22 was located only a hundred nautical miles from the nearest British port. Why let it retreat to the Belgian coast and not return to England?

Speculating on the reason, Colonel Short decisively ordered all small torpedo boats to stop at once, leaving a medium torpedo boat equipped with a radio station to stand by here, and he continued to move forward with the destroyer and three medium torpedo boats with a long endurance.

About two hours after leaving Zeebrugge, Colonel Schott finally saw the C-class submarine in the distance, which was unable to dive due to a malfunction, and two German planes attacked it in turn like a vicious vulture.

Seeing the reinforcements of the British Navy coming, the two German biplanes with wheeled landing gear quickly stopped their torture of the C-22, they flew around a few times curiously, realized that there were only four light ships, and turned back to continue to strafe the British submarine with machine guns, and the deck of the C-22 was actually empty.

Colonel Short ordered his ships to approach his submarine at full speed and use their guns to dispel the German reconnaissance plane.

The two vultures then left in a huff.

Standing on the bridge of the destroyer, Colonel Short looked without a word at the blood stains on the deck of the submarine and the clearly visible bullet holes in the bulkheads.

This class of submarines is a small combat submarine improved by the British on the basis of the "Holland 6 submarine", and it is also the main submarine of the British Navy in service at the outbreak of the war, with a total of 38 submarines in service. They followed the single-hull design of the Holland submarine, equipped with a Vickers gasoline engine, single-shaft propulsion, equipped with two 450 mm torpedo tubes, carrying four torpedoes, and a maximum speed of 10 knots on the surface and 7 under water. 5 knots.

In terms of overall performance, the C-class submarines were already far behind the German Navy's active main submarines, and with the outbreak of war, Britain had decided to build newer and stronger E-9 submarines, but they would not be added to the naval combat sequence until 1915 at the earliest.

An officer emerges from the hatch and signals to the friendly ship that the ship is in urgent need of personnel and medical support.

The destroyer quickly lowered the transport boat, boarded the submarine with a medic officer and a small team of sailors, and then transferred four wounded men.

In conversation with the wounded, Colonel Short carefully inquired about the situation. The C-22 was subjected to three more air strikes after sending a telegram for help, the first two with only one German aircraft, the last one with two, and the interval between each attack was constantly reduced.

Due to the continuous air raids by the Germans, 4 of the 16 crew members on the submarine were killed and 7 wounded, and the personnel could barely control the submarine, but in the last air attack, the bombs dropped by the German aircraft blew through the walls of the boat, causing the engine room to enter the water, and the submarine could no longer sail on its own power.

Colonel Schott then ordered his destroyers to tow the submarine with cables, and radioed to the naval staff the exact position of the fleet and the information he had, and added speculation about the movements of the German fleet to the telegram.

In the towed state, Colonel Short's destroyer could only move at a speed of 16 knots. Only half an hour later, three battleships with light gray paint appeared in the sea behind.

Colonel Short very calmly sent two medium torpedo boats to intercept the attack, and by the way to probe the enemy.

As a result, the two captains were a little too brave, and their torpedo boats rushed all the way to a distance of only a few hundred meters from the enemy ships, each of them suffered a few shots, lost some personnel, and the torpedoes fired by both boats were unfortunately missed.

According to the close observation of the crew on board, these three German battleships were all large torpedo boats of the 1913 class, and they not only had strong lightning strike capabilities, but also had fierce gun firepower, and were cutting-edge speedboats with strength comparable to those of the main British destroyers.

(End of chapter)