While four Italian light cruisers under the command of Colonel Macina were ravaged between Sardinia and the Balearic Islands by the carriers of the New Kingdom Navy, the fleet of Bironkelly, rendezvous with the Aquila, was heading east with the wind west of Sardinia. -Le-Wen-Small-Say--lxs520-com

As the largest tonnage aircraft carrier built by Italy, the hardware facilities and performance parameters of the "Aquila" are first-class, with a standard displacement of 37,240 tons, a full load displacement of nearly 48,000 tons, and a maximum number of aircraft designed to be 124+4, but after the Italian Navy updated the carrier-based aircraft, the ship's carrier aircraft configuration is usually "433" or "442", that is, 4 combat / reconnaissance squadrons, 3 dive bomber squadrons, 3 torpedo bomber squadrons or 4 combat / Reconnaissance squadrons, 4 squadrons of dive bombers, 2 squadrons of torpedo bombers, 10-12 units each, and the total number of carrier aircraft is usually around 110 units.

In the middle of the 40s, the Italian Navy finally decided to replace those "classic aircraft" that had been in service for more than ten years and carry out a comprehensive rearmament. According to the carrier-based aircraft replacement plan submitted by the Italian Navy Command, the new generation of carrier-based fighters should be mainly jets, supplemented by piston machines, and dive bombers and torpedo bombers should be fully generalized. In 1947, Fiat's G.59 carrier-based fighter won the competition and won an order for the production of 240 aircraft, and although the MC.301 carrier-based fighter of Markey lost the competition of carrier-based fighters, it unexpectedly got the "big surprise" of transforming it into a carrier-based dive bomber and producing 200 units. As expected by the most authoritative technical officer of the Italian Admiralty, the MC.302, which was converted into a carrier-based dive bomber, could carry various types of aerial bombs up to 650 kilograms, and in case of a critical situation, they only needed to drop the bombs and fly back with all their strength to keep the enemy fighters in the dust.

Based on the fact that the bomb-carrying capacity of the MC-301 is only suitable for carrying light aviation torpedoes, the Italian Navy, which has a lot of "experience" in airborne lightning strike tactics, selected the Ba.133 torpedo bomber developed by Breda as the standard configuration of naval aviation through two rounds of bidding, and issued a large order for a total of 400 land-based and carrier-based models.

At the outbreak of the war, the Aquila was being repaired at the shipyard, and the Italians had hoped to completely solve its transmission system problems through a major overhaul, but with the outbreak of war and the sharp turn for the worse in naval warfare, the Italian naval command had to urgently transfer the Aquila to the war.

Despite the "war signals" on the German side, the Italian top brass underestimated the determination of the new United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary to start a war, so much so that there were few decent preparations before the war. After the "Aquila" was docked for maintenance, all the 10 flight squadrons assigned by the ship were transferred to land bases and stationed, not only did the daily training volume be reduced by half, but many pilots took advantage of this opportunity to take a long vacation, and 14 of them held weddings alone, and many of them left Italy for their honeymoon, and when the smoke was lit, the Italian army urgently recalled the personnel on leave, and some people were still unable to return to the unit within the specified time limit. When the "Aquila" set off from ******, the arrival rate of pilots and ground crew was only 92 percent and 93 percent respectively, and the vacancy of the former was filled by the temporary transfer of alternate pilots, while the vacancy of the latter could only be barely met by the temporary transfer of posts on the ship.

Although this technical general is 57 years old, he is not as complacent as some high-ranking officers who have achieved fame, but he has devoted himself to the development of naval aviation technology and tactics, and has written and published military books such as "The Age of Large Aircraft Carriers", "Over-the-horizon Warfare", and "The Experience and Lessons of the Philippine Sea Campaign", especially "The Experience and Lessons of the Philippine Sea Campaign", which was published at the end of 1948. It has not only been selected as a military textbook by the Italian naval academies, but has even been popular in the naval circles of the United States and Japan.

Unlike those in the military hierarchy who are blindly confident or blindly pessimistic, Major General Mandragora has always taken a proactive approach to the war. Before the "Aquila", he managed to obtain the battle report of the first two days of the war from the Italian naval command, so as to study in detail the combat strategy and technical performance of the opponent, and in his own unique way, he built a wargame model and conducted tactical deductions. Although the conclusion of the war games was not optimistic, he calmly and objectively worked out several sets of operational plans, and then summoned the staff officers and flight squadron leaders to personally explain and deploy to them.

Knowing that the light patrol group commanded by Colonel Macina was ruthlessly ravaged by the carrier-based aircraft of the new United Kingdom Navy in the waters ahead, Vice Admiral Billangelli impatiently ordered the "Aquila" to send carrier-based fighters to the rescue, but Rear Admiral Mandragora did not blindly follow the decision of the fleet commander, but put forward his opinion based on his own judgment: instead of wasting time and energy to intercept the enemy's carrier-based aircraft, it is better to turn the passive into the active, find the enemy's aircraft carrier and launch a powerful attack.

In response to Major General Mandragora's suggestion, the pressured Biankelly quickly replied in the affirmative.

Not long after, the "Aquila" released the first batch of six G.59 carrier-based fighters with reconnaissance missions. Because of the later production time, the G.59 improved the aerodynamic layout on the basis of the land-based fighter G.55 and installed a more powerful piston engine, but this does not mean that the G.59 is a simple upgrade of the G.55, its biggest improvement is the use of short-wave airborne radar, which has over-the-horizon / all-weather reconnaissance and combat capabilities. According to the detection radius of the Ambrosini airborne radar, it is enough to send 3-4 G.59s at a time to cover the area of potential activity, and Rear Admiral Mandragora dispatched 6 of them in one breath, which not only improves the reconnaissance efficiency, but also enhances the anti-jamming capability.

Shortly after the first batch of 6 G.59s sorted, the second batch of 6 also took off. Unlike their previous companions, who only carried auxiliary fuel tanks and did not carry rockets, the second group of carrier-based combat reconnaissance aircraft was heavily armed - in addition to the inherent machine guns and machine guns, they each carried a set of 80 mm air-to-air rockets.

After dispatching an entire squadron of combat reconnaissance planes, Rear Admiral Mandragora gave a face-to-face lecture to the pilots on standby in the combat duty room. At the same time, 18 G.59s, 18 MC.302s, and 10 were transported to the take-off area at the rear of the flight deck in accordance with the bridge's instructions, and the remaining fighters and bombers in the hangar were refueled and loaded with ammunition.

Everything is ready, only the forward reconnaissance force is required to report the exact location of the enemy carrier.

The G.59 has a top speed of 660 km/h when flying with a drop tank, while the lowest fuel consumption is 475 km/h. The first six G.59s set off in groups of two and carried out a 75-degree fan-shaped reconnaissance at a speed of 550 kilometers per hour to the northwest seas. After more than half an hour of flight, they gradually approached the Balearic Islands in Spain. During this period, the airborne radar detected a number of targets, but after manual screening, these were either small islands and reefs, or fishing boats and freighters, and no trace of the enemy aircraft carrier was found. As a result, the Italian pilots followed the operational deployment and bypassed the largest islands of the Balearic Islands and dispersed for 120-degree sector reconnaissance.

The second batch of G.59s, six planes dispatched in a concentrated formation, gradually narrowed the distance with the advance reconnaissance planes at a speed of nearly 600 kilometers per hour, so as to provide rapid support when they were intercepted by enemy planes. According to Rear Admiral Mandragora's speculation, the enemy aircraft carrier is likely to take advantage of the complicated conditions in the waters of the Balearic Islands to deploy, and when the advance reconnaissance planes did not discover the whereabouts of the target and dispersed reconnaissance, the six G.59s did not choose any direction to follow up in depth after arriving in the waters of the Balearic Islands, but instead circled the waters of the Balearic Islands at a cruising speed with the least fuel consumption, and carried out aerial reconnaissance of every island, every fjord, and even the ports of Spain, which were still neutral.

Just as Rear Admiral Mandragora and the "Aquila" were anxiously waiting for news from their reconnaissance planes, the ship's high-power anti-aircraft detection radar suddenly discovered that a group of unidentified planes were flying south-west. In this era, militarily powerful countries have basically adopted friend or foe identification technology on aircraft and ships, and Italy is no exception. Judging from the results of daily training and combat exercises, no matter how bad the weather conditions, there will be no accidental hits between fighters and between warships, but the fly in the ointment is that the Italian navy and air force have chosen a friend-foe identification system that operates in a different way, resulting in a technical obstacle to the identification of friend or foe between the navy and the air force. This question was raised four years ago, and in the past four years, the Italian Navy and Air Force have each proposed more than one solution, and the Italian General Staff has also realized this hidden danger, but has been slow to reconcile the interests of all parties. As many critics have criticized, Italy's bureaucracy is certainly not as hopeless as that of the Ottoman Turks and the Austro-Hungarian duality, but at some point and in some links, the bureaucracy's procrastination has reached such an intolerable level that some technological inventions and innovations that could have brought huge profits to the country and the army have become "flowers blooming inside the walls". In the long run, the Kingdom of Italy will inevitably go downhill.

Rear Admiral Mandragora did not dare to slack off in the slightest against a strong enemy, and while he assigned two G.59 carrier-based fighters on duty over the fleet to go at full speed to find out the situation, he ordered the combat alert level of the "Aquila" to be raised to red, the fighters were in place, and all emergency damage control measures were pre-activated.

After about a cigarette, the fighter pilot on duty sent back a report that the Italian Air Force group was flying from the front, and judging by their flight paths, it was supposed to be a return flight to Sardinia. A short time later, the fleet's flagship, the Emanuele II, signaled that they had identified the group of aircraft ahead, and that these Italian Air Force fighters had tracked the tracks of two enemy cruisers and launched an effective attack on them.