"Quick, send a telegram to the Revenge and tell Colonel Max that all high-speed torpedo boats must be ready for battle within an hour. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoWhether the British Navy can save the precarious fate of the Kingdom of Great Britain depends on their performance tonight. ”

On the old and sturdy Edward VII-class battleship "Africa", General Calthorpe hurriedly issued a communication command. Like most British admirals, he was an admirer of the doctrine of giant ships and artillery, firmly believing that large warships were the decisive force in the struggle for maritime supremacy, and were the only ships with strategic offensive capabilities, and that high-speed torpedo boats, like traditional gunboats and patrol boats, were only purely defensive weapons, and the Germans' naval strength was at a relative disadvantage, so it was necessary to build a large number of such low-cost ultra-light mine-striking ships. The German high-speed torpedo boats that appeared on the Jutland battlefield made the Betty fleet suffer a lot, and also made the British see the offensive role of the so-called "defensive weapons". After that, the British Navy lost a large number of combat ships in several key naval battles, and the development and modification of aircraft carriers could not be completed in a short time, so they had to search for various ways to deal with the situation, and the conversion of cargo ships into high-speed torpedo boat mother ships was one of them.

Before the Battle of the Faroe Islands, Sir Jackson, commander of the Grand Fleet, planned to lure the German fleet into the waters of the Faroe Islands and use submarines and high-speed torpedo boats to join forces with the main fleet to fight a turnaround battle, but the bad weather greatly limited the activities of submarines and high-speed torpedo boats, and led this fleet duel back to the three-dimensional mode of sea and air that the Germans were good at. Jackson's reluctance to back down led the British fleet into the abyss of disaster.

Due to bad weather, the British torpedo boat mothership, which was scheduled to go north, waited for the opportunity to attack in the fishing port of the Shetland Islands, but the result was the sad news that the main fleet was almost destroyed, and this improvised support formation was once ordered to return to its home base, but as soon as they left the Shetland Islands, they received the opposite order and had to regroup and stand by. Just one day later, Calthorpe's 7th Detachment sailed to the Faroe Islands to shell Tórshavn and cover the landing of Marines on Sood, Mulberry and Vogue Islands. In response, 16 torpedo boat mother ships converted from cargo ships carried more than 70 high-speed torpedo boats into the waters of the Faroe Islands, but the wind and waves for many days made them basically useless, and the German navy, which had won a great victory in the naval battle of the Faroe Islands, adopted a cautious combat strategy, and this promising support formation had to patiently hide in the waters south of Sood Island.

On this night, due to the difficulties of the British troops landing on Vogue Island, Carl Thorpe led the main ships of the 7th and 8th combat detachment fleets north, and the mother ship formation carrying high-speed torpedo boats became his killer weapon. In order to prevent German submarines and planes from harming them, Calthorpe had Colonel David Max take sixteen torpedo boat motherships out to the southwest of Sood Island, which was more than sixty nautical miles south of Vogue Island.

In the history of the British Navy, there were several warships named "revenge", but not once did Britain have a stronger desire for revenge than it does today. Colonel Max's "Revenge" was neither the old man-class dreadnought sunk by the German Navy, nor the twenty-year-old Sovereign-class battleship, but a fast cargo ship that had originally sailed between Britain and West Africa. During the Second Battle of Flanders, the German Navy's "Blucher" and "Gloudenz" slipped into the Atlantic, and then sent two dozen British ships to the bottom of the sea for more than half a month. Soon after, the British government spent 900,000 pounds to purchase more than 220 ships with different performance characteristics from the public for auxiliary operations, and the "Revenge", with a registered tonnage of 4,100 tons and a maximum speed of 15.5 knots with no load, became a member of the British Navy. It was transformed into a representative British high-speed torpedo boat mother ship with a modified cargo hold and a large crane at the Portsmouth shipyard.

Compared with the German Navy's torpedo boat carriers converted from old second-class cruisers, the British torpedo boat carriers modified by civilian ships were heavy on board, low in cost, and easy to be equipped in large quantities, but the shortcomings of slow speed and weak defense were also obvious, and the main fleet was helplessly dealt a devastating blow, and the British Navy officers and men had no choice but to use the fearless spirit they had always praised to confront the enemy's advanced equipment.

Upon receiving Calthorpe's radio command, Colonel Max immediately ordered the Z-shaped flag that Nelson had raised at the Battle of Trafalgar on the flagpole of the Revenge, and just nine years earlier, the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, who admired Nelson, had hoisted the same flag on his flagship, Heihachiro Togo, and led the high-morale Japanese fleet to defeat the powerful Tsarist fleet in the Tsushima Strait.

After receiving the battle order from the "Revenge", the British officers and men on the mother ships of the torpedo boats immediately busied. For safety reasons, whether it is a British torpedo boat or a German torpedo boat carrier, torpedoes, fuel, and torpedo boats are stored separately and will not be assembled until the time of war, and these complicated tasks require a lot of time.

The desire for victory clearly gave a strong impetus to the British sailors on the torpedo boats, who assembled the torpedoes and refueled them with cleaner than usual training, and the sound of cranes running and chain twisting echoed through each mothership. The prepared torpedo boats were lifted to the surface in turn, launched, and sailed to the nearby waters to await the rest of their companions.

At the same time as converting cargo ships into torpedo boat mother ships, the British Navy also converted more than 100 civilian speedboats and yachts into light and ultra-light torpedo boats, but these British torpedo boat mother ships that went north to participate in the war were equipped with regular high-speed torpedo boats, and their technical performance was not inferior to the ships of the same class equipped by the German Navy, and they learned the lessons of the Second Battle of Flanders, all two-person high-speed torpedo boats were strengthened, and the British even moved 25 mm caliber Vickers machine guns. And combat training is carried out day after day. If they were to encounter the German Navy's high-speed torpedo boats again, the British would not at least be beaten like sheep and defenseless.

Just as the group of high-speed torpedo boats under the command of Colonel Max was assembling in the waters west of Sood Island with the last hope of the British Navy, the British Marines trapped on Vogue Island had already ended their historic mission in the bleak form of a white flag raised the white flag of more than 200 British officers and men who had no hope of retreating and had run out of ammunition and ammunition under the ferocious attack of the German Marines and naval vessels. So far, the more than 2,000 British marines who landed on Vogue Island still had only a small number of troops in the vicinity of Sandwag Harbor continuing to resist stubbornly, and in addition to the more than 400 people who had been captured by the Germans before, the casualty rate of the troops landing on the island had reached more than 60 percent, and the battle was as tragic as the bloodiest battles on the Western Front.

If the British Navy can achieve a great turnaround tonight, the British officers and men who killed Vogue Island will also be considered to be dead, but the situation of the Calthorpe fleet is very bad. German planes repeatedly dropped flares above their heads, so that their movements were clearly exposed to the field of vision of the German capital ships, and the "Australia", which was highly mobile but poorly defended, became the key target of the German fleet. After more than ten minutes of hard work under the heavy fire of the Germans, this fish that slipped through the net of the Battle of Jutland finally could not escape, and an 11-inch armor-piercing shell from the "Thuringia" easily penetrated its side armor and fuel tank, and the explosion immediately destroyed the key parts of the British battle cruiser's right engine, and the damaged "Australia" immediately lost its direction and circled in the sight of the four German capital ships. The gunners of the German battleship did not miss such a great opportunity, and before the British sailors adjusted the rudder oars to realign course, the German fleet ravaged the heavy artillery and light armor patrol with explosive artillery fire. In less than two minutes, the "Australia" was hit by five large-caliber armor-piercing shells fired from 7,000 meters away, the power supply of the whole ship was interrupted, the speed of the ship dropped to about 5 knots, the leakage of the hull deteriorated rapidly, the hull began to tilt, and many crew members escaped on their own without receiving the order to abandon the ship......

At this time, even if Calthorpe returned with six ex-dreadnoughts, I am afraid that it would not be able to change the tragic fate of the "Australia", but in doing so, at least it could preserve the fighting spirit that the Royal Navy is proud of, but Calthorpe stood on a rational point of view, he ignored the constantly capsizing "Australia", and did not even give rescue orders to the nearby British light ships, but took six ex-dreadnoughts that were worthy of the First World War to bury their heads in the direction of Sood Island.

After sending the dying "Australia" to the bottom of the sea, the German fleet, which had the advantage of speed, pursued Calthorpe at full speed, and the distance between the two fleets continued to shrink, and the German seaplanes that arrived later locked on the position of the British capital ships from the air and dropped one flare after another - the German fleet hid in the darkness of the night and fired black guns with joy, but the British fleet could not launch an effective counterattack against it, such a battle was completely unfair. If this continues, the British fleet may not be able to reach the waters of Sood Island, and they will all report to Egil, the god of the deep sea.

It was in this extremely unfavorable environment that Calthorpe and his fleet stubbornly withheld, and when a large group of British high-speed torpedo boats rushed out of the darkness, including the "Africa", four former dreadnoughts had been damaged by German ships, and many accompanying light ships were almost left behind, while the German dreadnought fleet had already pursued more than 4,000 meters away, and an accurate salvo was enough to kill any British battleship here.

(End of chapter)