In the following days, Tan Renhao tried his best to maintain a positive attitude to face all kinds of things that happened, and Gan Yongxing also knew Tan Renhao's mood and did not assign him any important tasks. Tan Renhao tried not to let himself be depressed, nor did he let himself lose his fighting spirit, but any news from the front line affected his nerves, and even the slightest wind and grass made him restless.

Negotiations between the Navy and the major suppliers on the issue of price reductions are still ongoing, because of the intricate production relations, the negotiations are not going well, it can be said that there is no practical significance, nothing more than the personnel of both sides wasting precious time on some trivial matters. At the same time, preparations for the attack on the Hawaiian Islands were in full swing, and the Empire's propaganda agencies even used this as a selling point to publicize the good news of the imminent victory in the war for more than ten days. The effect of propaganda was enormous, as if overnight, all the people of the empire believed that as long as the Hawaiian Islands were conquered, the empire would be victorious.

Tan Renhao spends a lot of time reading newspapers every day, including important newspapers in the imperial capital, local newspapers in Songjiang, Hangzhou and other places, tabloids in Zhoushan City, military newspapers within the navy, and so on. In his eyes, every report advocating victory is a bullet fired at Liao Hanxiang, and when the people's hopes for victory are stirred up, if there is a defeat, even a slight defeat, the consequences will be unimaginable. These reports also made Tan Renhao very painful, because he knew that this battle would not be won, and every propaganda he made now was actually preparing for the prime minister's next move, and those reports were the clarion call for the battle, the clarion call for the battle without gunpowder!

Liao Hanxiang sent back the battle plan on 24 August, and all other units were in the plan, except for the First Task Force, which was excluded because the battleship repair work had not been completed. The 2nd and 4th Task Forces will be responsible for seizing sea supremacy. The artillery bombardment squadron of Task Force 2 and a new group of warships will be responsible for providing direct fire support to the marines. The theater fleet, which was transferred from the southwest Pacific, will be commanded by Huang Xiaotian and will participate in landing operations. Liao Hanxiang planned to attack Nihua Island first, and then use Nihua Island as a springboard to attack Kauai, so as to kick off the attack on the Hawaiian Islands. The entire combat operation was divided into two phases, the first of which centered on the attack on Nihua Island. It is planned to be completed in mid-September, and the most important task in this phase is to film, or destroy, the Fifth Fleet. The second phase will focus on landing and capturing Kauai Island, provided that the Fifth Fleet has been eliminated or severely damaged. Naval supremacy, as well as partial air supremacy. The Marine Corps will be commanded by Han Shaofeng, and the attack on Nihua Island will be handled by Long Zhen, and Liao Hanxiang plans to devote at least 15 divisions of the Marine Corps to carry out these two combat steps.

Tan Renhao got this battle plan from Gan Yongxing, and he didn't pay much attention to the details of the landing operation. He mainly paid attention to two main points, one was the operation against the Fifth Fleet, and the other was the preparation of logistical support.

The core force against the Fifth Fleet is the Second Task Force, and the Fourth Task Force is the auxiliary force. Under the unified command of Huang Xiaotian, Hao Dongjue has a great deal of autonomy. In other words, if two task forces are mobilized and six aircraft carriers are used to deal with the Fifth Fleet, which has only three aircraft carriers, even if Spruance gets two repaired aircraft carriers in September, it will be six to five, and the situation will not do Spruance much good. But Tan Renhao doesn't think so. Spruance was already familiar with Huang Xiaotian's routines, and Hao Dongjue was the chief of staff of the First Task Force before, and most of the aviation combat operations were planned by him, and Spruance would not be too unfamiliar with Hao Dongjue. The most critical thing is that in the duo of Huang Xiaotian and Hao Dongjue, the command authority is not completely clear. The coordination between Task Force 2 and Task Force 4 may not be fully in place. If anything goes wrong with the two task forces, it's Spruance's chance, and maybe it will turn Sprance around in the end.

Relatively speaking, the problem of fleet combat is relatively small, after all, Huang Xiaotian and Hao Dongjue are both battle-hardened commanders, even if they can't defeat Spruance, they will try to escape back and avoid a complete defeat. As long as it can wrap up the aircraft carrier, it will be a heavily damaged aircraft carrier. It's all much better than being killed by Spruance. What worries Tan Renhao the most is the logistical preparations for the battle site. The deployment and delivery of supplies, which were originally planned to begin in early August, were delayed until the beginning of late August, wasting nearly 20 days. Liao Hanxiang planned to launch a campaign at the end of August, and by that time, the war materials hoarded in the Central Pacific theater would be difficult to support a large-scale offensive. Maybe it won't be much of a problem to attack Nihua Island, after all, Nihua Island is so big. However, as long as too much war materials were consumed during the attack on Nihua Island, then Liao Hanxiang would not even have the ability to immediately organize troops to land on Khao Yai, and it would be impossible to complete this combat operation!

It is clear that this is a campaign operation that is difficult to achieve late life, and even partial victory cannot be guaranteed. If Task Force 1 and Task Force 3, which had already completed reorganization and reorganization, were to be sent in, and the campaign was delayed by 20 days, there was hope that the situation would be reversed, and at least it would be guaranteed that the troops would land on Kauai first, and then end the campaign, gather strength, and finally take Kauai. But now, the First Task Force has been excluded, and the Third Task Force is still in Kaohsiung, even if Huang Xiaotian and Hao Dongjue kill the Fifth Fleet on the battlefield, it will be impossible for the Marines to successfully land on Kauai Island in the end. Moreover, the hope of taking out the Fifth Fleet will be very slim.

On the 25th, the day after Liao Hanxiang submitted his operational report, Nie Renfeng formally approved the combat operation and set the time for the attack on Nihua Island to be 29 days, with a maximum delay of three days. Obviously, the rhythm of the battle was too tight, even if Liao Hanxiang concentrated all the attacking forces near Midway Island and let the fleet set off on the 25th, it would be unrealistic to let the Marines land on Nihua Island on the 29th, or even on September 2nd, at least the Marines would suffer extremely heavy losses in the combat operation of attacking Nihua Island!

Indeed, the Marines landed on Nihua Island on 30 August, by which time the Fifth Fleet had left Pearl Harbor. However, the whereabouts of the Second Task Force are unknown, the Second Task Force did not participate in the combat operations to support the landing force, and the support force of the Fourth Task Force was also quite limited, and only the artillery fleet, the theater fleet, and the fire support fleet organized in the landing fleet could provide support to the Marine Corps.

The first day of fighting was quite difficult. The Imperial Navy's hesitation in attacking the Hawaiian Islands actually gave Nimitz plenty of time to prepare. Nimitz's judgment was also quite accurate, he knew very well that the purpose of the Imperial Navy was to capture Kauai, and Nihua Island was an ideal forward base for attacking Kauai, so the U.S. military defense on Nihua Island was weak, Nimitz even transferred some U.S. troops on Necker Island to strengthen the defense of Nihua Island, and he also deployed a Marine Division withdrawn from Wake Island to Nihua Island. So, when Long Zhen commanded the officers and men of the Imperial Marine Corps to rush to the beach of Nihua Island. They had to deal with nearly 40,000 U.S. Marines, more than 7,000 U.S. troops on the beachhead alone, and the first batch of Imperial Marines to come ashore was only two regiments.

The battle continued until the early hours of 1 September, when four groups of more than 20,000 Imperial Marines were able to barely control the beachhead. Begin to advance into the hinterland of the island. However, the US military did not give up resistance, and continued to shell the landing site, as well as the ships that transported officers and soldiers and war materials to the landing site. The U.S. fighter planes deployed on Kauai flew over again, because Task Force 2 had not been able to find the Fifth Fleet, and Task Force 4 had to defend in another direction, so it did not have enough strength to destroy the U.S. airfield on Kauai, and it was impossible to prevent U.S. bombers from bombing the Imperial Marines on Nihua Island.

The first three days of fighting almost made Tan Renhao desperate, and the ground fighting continued until the night of September 2, when the Marine Corps engineers repaired the first improvised pier. At the same time, the artillery bombardment fleet and the theater fleet also basically destroyed the US army's concealed gun emplacements, and did not allow the US troops to continue shelling the landing site. The operation, which was supposed to be completed in one day, ended up being fought for three days! What worries Tan Renhao the most is that the Fifth Fleet still has not appeared, and as a result, the Second Task Force and the Fourth Task Force have to stay outside the landing site and cannot fully support the Marine Corps.

The combat operations at the landing stage had already foreshadowed that the next ground battle would not be too easy. Especially when the U.S. air forces on Kauai Island were still flying to Nihua Island and dropping bombs on the Imperial Marines, it would be impossible for Long Zhen to quickly capture this island, which was only a few square kilometers in area, even if Long Zhen threw all three Marine Divisions in his hands into battle! In fact, the Marine offensive on Nihua Island was faltering, and almost every step forward had to pay a heavy price. By the early hours of September 5, in less than five days of fighting. The two Marine Divisions that have already participated in the battle have killed more than 2,100 officers and men and wounded more than 6,200. The attrition rate is close to forty percent, and most of the companies that have been fighting on the front line have less than one platoon, or even one squad left!

The extremely brutal ground battle is consuming the blood and lives of the officers and soldiers on the front line, and it is also torturing Tan Renhao's nerves. Every day, he would go to get the combat reports of the Marine Corps and the fleet as soon as possible, but what Tan Renhao was most worried about was the Fifth Fleet, which had been hidden and did not appear. The battle has been going on for several days, and Spruance has not yet appeared, which only proves that Spruance is waiting for an opportunity, waiting for an opportunity to send the second task force, or the fourth task force, to the bottom of the sea, at least Tan Renhao will not believe that Spruance has left the battlefield.

Ground fighting lasted until 11 September, and by the twelfth day after the start of the landing, the Marines had only taken control of half of the surface of Nihua Island. Long Zhen had already sent his battle reserves, the third Marine Division, to the battlefield, and Liao Hanxiang had also sent two Marine Divisions to the front, the Marine Division that had originally landed on Nihua Island had been withdrawn, and the Marine Division that had landed in the second batch was about to withdraw from the battle. In the 12 days of fighting, more than 4,700 Marines were killed and more than 18,000 were wounded, many of whom had been wounded a second or even a third time.

It was at this time that a submarine operating in the northeastern part of the Hawaiian Islands spotted a fleet with aircraft carriers sailing westward at high speed. It is possible for anyone to judge that this is the Fifth Fleet, but Tan Renhao intuitively realized that this is unlikely to be the Fifth Fleet, and the Fifth Fleet will not go more than 1,000 nautical miles east of the Hawaiian Islands, because that would make no sense. Tan Renhao guessed that this was another task force formed by the two aircraft carriers that had completed the repair work in San Francisco and were returning to the team, but there was no intelligence at that time to prove that the two aircraft carriers had left the port of San Francisco. In addition, judging from the location of the submarine discovery of the fleet at that time, if the fleet had departed from San Francisco, it would have left San Francisco as early as September 10, and the information previously obtained was that the two aircraft carriers would probably not be repaired until September 15, and perhaps they would not be able to return to service until the end of September. Therefore, Tan Renhao is only guessing and doubting, and he has no way to prove that the two aircraft carriers departed from San Francisco.

That night, Tan Renhao called Liao Hanxiang and asked Liao Hanxiang to warn Hao Dongjue not to make any risky moves. At that time, Hao Dongjue's second task force was the closest to the U.S. fleet. After receiving Liao Hanxiang's assurance, Tan Renhao also went directly to the communications center of the headquarters and sent a telegram directly from the naval headquarters to the Second Task Force, and then he thought that the Fourth Task Force might also encounter danger, and in the second half of the night, he sent a telegram to the Fourth Task Force.

That night, Tan Renhao stayed at the headquarters, and asked Duchenne to go to the communication center every half an hour to see if there was any new news sent back, and in the second half of the night, he even asked Duchenne to run every fifteen minutes. At this time, the sky on the eastern battlefield should have lit up, although it was thousands of miles away, but Tan Renhao felt a huge threat, he was too familiar with Spruance, and this was definitely the opportunity that Spruance had been waiting for!