Le Havre, France.

It is a seaport located about 300 kilometers northwest of Paris, directly across the channel from the British seaside city of Brighton.

The strait between Brighton and Le Havre is about 60 nautical miles wide and has relatively gentle currents, making it ideal for large fleets to cross north-south. Brighton is only 70-80 kilometers from London, Portsmouth and Dover, and has large sandy and stony beaches, so the British regard this place as another important anti-landing area in southern England in addition to Dover, and the Germans have been considering the difficulty and possibility of landing here, and at the end of November they cleared the mines between Le Havre and Brighton.

At 7 p.m. on December 18, 1914, when the dinner in Berlin, Germany, entitled "Long Live the League", officially began, the Second Detachment of the German High Seas Fleet stationed here was slowly sailing out of port. The main forces of this detachment were the King-class battleship "Frontier Governor", the Caesar-class battleships "King Albert" and "Louitpol Regent", the Helgoland-class battleship "Thuringia", the Nassau-class battleship "West****", the Braunschweig-class ironclad ships "Hesse", "Braunschweig", "Alsace", the newly restored battlecruiser "Von Brown". Morality. Tann", as well as the heavy cruiser "Blucher". In addition to the above-mentioned capital ships, 7 airships, 5 light cruisers, 18 destroyers, and 9 large minesweepers were used as auxiliary warships for reconnaissance, anti-submarine and minesweeping.

After the departure of the Second Detachment under Admiral Schell, the German airship base on the eastern outskirts of Le Havre was also busy. More than a dozen large zeppelins painted in gray were tethered to the ground close to the ground and looked like huge clouds from a distance.

The ground crews were busy preparing for the airship to take off, and when several groups of soldiers with rifles and large backpacks and large windbreakers boarded the airships one after another, they only glanced at them in a hurry, and the recent day-and-night airborne training had become accustomed to the people here, so no one noticed the grim expressions on the faces of these soldiers hidden under their trench coats and hats.

After about two hours, the ground crew untied the cable to the airship, and the massive Zeppelins took off one after the other. With a faint hum, the airships turned and flew due north. The sailors were no strangers to the place they were heading to, and several bombardments a week had made them familiar with many cities on the south coast of England, but this time it was not bombs that they were going to drop, but these strange soldiers.

On one of the naval airships, L-27, twenty-three soldiers sat squarely at each other on either side of the airship's pod, and the other five crew members looked at the strange soldiers curiously from time to time, but each was ordered not to talk to them until they reached their destination.

"Let's check our gear and take a break, we're about two hours away from our destination!" The ones who spoke appeared to be the officers of the group, their black trench coats making it impossible to identify their ranks.

The soldiers still didn't speak, they silently packed their bags, and then began to close their eyes and recuperate. The rifles of these people were packed in a large black case, and no one opened the sleeve before or after boarding, and those who are particularly familiar with the rifles can only find from their length that these are not the Mauser 1898 of the German standard weapon, but the British Lee. Enfield rifles. Not only a rifle, but each soldier here was equipped with a British-standard Wilbury revolver.

By this time, the Scheer fleet, which had departed earlier, had sailed to the middle of the strait. Forty-two large and small ships marched in three columns at a moderate speed of 15 knots, and destroyers armed with sonar and depth charges were distributed in front of and behind the fleet, responsible for escorting the central battlefleet. After the German Navy became more and more large-scale and put into more and more ships, the British Navy's mine production and deployment could no longer keep up with the speed of German mine-sweeping, so the British had to transfer more than half of their submarines to protect the southern ports and harass the German ships in England and the Strait of Dover.

At the forefront of the Scheer fleet were six standard-class destroyers, and these destroyers built at the Königsberg shipyard were among the first to be refitted. When Russia joined the Central Powers, the Baltic Fleet was left with only a few pitiful patrol boats and gunboats, and all ships above the destroyer level were transferred to the North Sea region.

In the sonar room of the destroyer Saito, several sailors wearing microphones were watching the situation under the surface of the sea. At present, German destroyers are generally equipped with 2-4 sonars, including passive sonar and active echo ranging sonar. Passive sonar mainly searches for sound waves from the target, which is characterized by concealment, good confidentiality, strong ability to identify the target, and long reconnaissance distance, but it cannot reconnoiter the static and silent target, nor can it measure the target distance; Active sonar can make up for this shortcoming of passive sonar, but the active emission of acoustic signals is easy to be listened to by the enemy and expose itself, and the detection distance is short. Under normal circumstances, the German passive sonar has a detection range of about 2 nautical miles, while the active sonar is only 1 nautical mile.

"Sir, there's a situation!" A sailor suddenly shouted, and the officer on duty immediately took his earpiece, and for these German naval officers and men, who had only been in contact with sonar for a short time, the mistaken target was something that often happened, so the officer listened carefully for half a minute before he was sure that it was a noise from a submarine.

"Sonar No. 1 continues to monitor, sonar No. 2 calculates the target location as soon as possible!" After the officer finished speaking, he picked up the phone next to him and reported the situation to the captain.

"It's not going to be our own submarine again!"

Thinking of this problem, many officers and men of the German destroyers, including the captain of the "Saito," were very depressed, because although sonar is a very good tool, they have not yet been able to take the initiative to identify enemy and enemy targets. In order to prevent accidental hits, the captains of German submarines were told that if they spotted a surface ship nearby, they would send a special signal by rhythmically tapping the wall of the boat, and the German surface ship equipped with passive sonar would know that it was their own. The disadvantage of this is that after the destroyer discovers the submarine, it needs to repeatedly wait for the other side to send signals to identify friend and foe, and as a result, the British submarine slips away from time to time.

"Knock...... Knock Knock...... Knock Knock...... Knock ......"

When this sound came from the sound, the sailors finally breathed a sigh of relief, and this was indeed the signal of the week's friend or foe. In the face of frequent British spies, the German Navy had to avoid the British submarines from getting through by changing their identification signals frequently.

The closer they got to the British coast, the more focused the attention of the German officers and men in the Scheer fleet became, and it was not only the British submarines that could pose a threat to them, but also the small British torpedo boats that hid near British ports or small fishing villages, often evading the air raids of German aircraft and airships, and loitering close to the British coast in the dark.

In Berlin, Germany, a grand banquet is underway.

Ambassadors, military attachés and dignitaries from Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria and other countries dressed in different colors and styles decorated the banquet hall in colorful colors, and people who did not speak the same language still chatted happily, and the theme was to laugh and compliment, drink glasses and beautiful skirts.

Chentian and Tirpitz hid in the corner of the hall whispering like two hermits who don't eat the fireworks of the world, and Lisa and Mrs. Tirpitz chatted happily about something.

Chen Tian glanced around vigilantly, and then asked in a low voice, "Your Excellency the Admiralty, there should be no problem with tonight's actions!" ”

"With the current strength of the British Navy, I am afraid it will be difficult to cause us any trouble. I was a little worried about the commando force, after all, more than 200,000 square kilometers of the British Isles were gathered more than a million regular troops and an even larger number of militia, and the British must have been very heavily guarded. ”

During the invasion of the British mainland, Tirpitz was to be based in Berlin, and the specific operations of the navy were handed over to Heydrich and other admirals. What made Chen Tian curious was that as a traditional army power, Germany had many excellent naval generals in this era, and he was much luckier than Xiaoxi in this regard.

"Hmmm! There is a certain amount of risk in sending such a commando team, but with our spies lurking in Britain, they should have a lot to do, and maybe turn the whole of Britain upside down! ”

For people who have watched too many World War II movies, it is a dangerous and exciting thing to carry out sabotage activities by parachuting deep behind enemy lines, and if Chen Tian is just an ordinary soldier, he will definitely ask to join this kind of operation.

"If all goes well today, we'll have three more operations as planned in the next week! I think the British will be so bewildered by us that they can't tell where the main landing place of our troops is! "Tirpitz's support is important, after all, the airships used for the airdrop are supported by the Admiralty. As for the War Office's airships, the crews took part in the bombing of Britain far less often than the ace crews of the Navy airships.

"If I were Kitchener and Haig, I'd have lost sleep all night!" Chen Tian felt a little sorry for Field Marshal Kitchener, the Secretary of War in charge of the defense of the British homeland, and Field Marshal Haig, the commander-in-chief of the home garrison.

In fact, it was not only Kitchener and Haig, who had been sleepless all night, that after receiving information from British spies about the departure of the Second Detachment of the German High Seas Fleet, most of Britain was enveloped in an atmosphere of panic, and Fisher, the British Admiral and commander of the Home Fleet, ordered the submarine forces to wait for an opportunity to launch an attack on the German fleet, while the main fleet hung up a free battle card in the port of Plymouth.

After the nightmare of Operation Doomsday, the British were no longer willing to risk their only fleet with the German Navy, and more people were looking forward to the arrival of the American fleet. Britain and the United States have formally signed a secret agreement on exchanging land for fleets, but on the question of who will return the fleet to the British mainland, which is the after-sales service, the US Government believes that it will not be able to guarantee the lives of American sailors at all in this process, so it insists that Britain send people to the United States to receive them. So far, more than 1,000 British sailors have been sent to the United States after losing their ships in naval battles, but this is a drop in the bucket for that large fleet, and the Canadian government has provided nearly 2,000 sailors in kind, but those men have largely never served on a warship. Under these circumstances, the fleet would have to be reluctant to sail back to England after at least three months, but the combat effectiveness of the fleet in this case is really not flattering.

......Shh

The naval airship that was opening the way for the Scheer fleet suddenly dropped several flares a few nautical miles in front of the fleet, and in some dazzling and dazzling light, a small group of British torpedo boats appeared on the sea in the distance. Although the airships did not have a good view at night, they were able to detect enemy surface ships outside the sonar range of German destroyers with their keen sense of hearing when their engines were turned off at mid-altitude.

Only half a minute later, red meteors drawn from the destroyers at the very front of the German fleet began to fall towards the British torpedo boats, which were constantly exposed to the sight of the German fleet by the flares dropped by the German airships. Soon after, the main guns of the German battleships began to rain large-caliber shells, and the poor British torpedo boats swayed helplessly like leaves in a storm amid a roar that resounded through the clouds.

By the time the lead L-48 dropped its 23rd flare, there were only a few lonely floating debris left in front of the Scheer fleet, and the Germans even spared the trouble of stopping and capturing the British sailors.

Before the flame of the last flare was extinguished, a special airship formation had already appeared behind the Scheer fleet. The commando soldiers did not show much curiosity about the thunderous shelling that had preceded them, for they were destined to fall from the sky against the backdrop of this thunderbolt of the night and become the first German troops to land in England.

When the special airship formation flew at full speed, the naval airships escorting the Scheer fleet also began to accelerate and climb, and two huge airship formations appeared one after the other over the ignorant British coastline. After this, the special airship formation continued to fly inland in the United Kingdom, while the escort airship formation stopped over Brighton. Brilliant flares once again illuminated the night sky, illuminating large swaths of the British coast, and then thunderous noises were heard again in the clear night sky, and the British beachhead fortifications were soon engulfed in exploding flames and smoke. According to the information sent back by German spies before, the artillery fire of the Scheer fleet will also extend to the depth of the British position.

At the time of the artillery bombardment of the battlefleet, escorting cruisers, destroyers and minesweepers formed a cordon around the battleship. The British on the coast were not without a defense, and their various artillery guns soon began to return fire, and dense columns of water were constantly rising on the side of the German battlefleet near the coast. However, the British had to admit that their various land artillery had no advantage in front of the Germans (historically, until the end of World War I, the British Army's artillery barely caught up with the German Army), the newly built naval fortress was reasonably defensive, but the fortress guns inside looked a little old and shabby, and the artillery positions in the rear were used to kill and injure the landing fleet and the landing troops, and the German battlefleet in the distance could only stare dryly.

While the British were busy confronting the German fleet or evading the powerful German artillery fire, the special airship formation silently flew into the wilderness 20 miles from the coast. After determining the direction, the hatch of the airship was opened, and the commandos jumped out of the airship one by one, and gray flowers silently bloomed in the night sky of England.

On the ground, Sigurt and his companions silently watched the beautiful scene, and the symphony of artillery fire in the distance made them feel the beauty of war for the first time.

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