It was past midnight, and Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, was brightly lit, and heavily armed German naval infantry were boarding the protective cruisers and the large torpedo boats of the 1898 class that were docked at various piers. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoThese old ships built at the turn of the century used old coal-fired boilers and reciprocating steam engines, and the stokers had already burned enough steam, and the gunners removed their gun jackets early to move spare ammunition from the ship's ammunition depot to the vicinity of the gun emplacements. Because it was foreseeable that this was a one-sided amphibious landing attack, the possibility of encountering British warships in the battle was very small, and the mood of the crew was generally relaxed, while those naval infantry wearing new steel helmets and life jackets over winter clothes were relatively serious, after all, with the fierce battle on Vogue Island ahead, no one dared to underestimate the combat effectiveness of the British marines.

At this time, on the sea outside the harbor, large torpedo boats with simple appearance and light posture were cruising back and forth vigilantly, and all the German submarines had already sailed out of this sea area, so as not to interfere with the vigilance and judgment of their own light ships, and the British submarines would take advantage of the loopholes. Two powerful battle cruisers, "De Fllinger" and "Seydlitz", had sailed to the waters of Sood Island with their combat command crews a few hours earlier.

On the island of Little Dimen, more than 20 kilometers away, the German naval commandos who had quietly landed on the shore successfully seized the commanding heights on the island. In a short battle, they killed 9 British soldiers with daggers and bayonets without firing a single shot, captured 6, and several others escaped from the chaos. According to the confession of the captured British soldiers, 26 people were originally deployed on the island, and patrol teams were arranged day and night to prevent the Germans from landing on the island, that is, a total of 11 people escaped the net, but they did not have additional communication equipment, and they could only use small motor boats parked on the beach at the southwest corner to leave the island. Despite the relatively simple terrain of the island, it was a difficult and dangerous task to search the entire island at night with the strength of the German commandos. The commando commander made a quick decision, and while sending half of his combat strength to the shore where the motor boats were parked, he ordered the signal corps to use arc lights to send signals in the agreed direction.

By the time the commandos arrived at the beach, the remnants of the British troops on the island had evacuated by motorboats, but the severe overloading made their motorboats sail very slowly, and they were caught by the German submarine transporting the German commandos to the island.

On Little Dimen Island, the German naval commandos annihilated the British troops stationed on the island relatively smoothly, and the whole process was always in a surprisingly "silent state", but the abnormal lights they used to contact the submarine still attracted the attention of the British sentries on Sood Island, and the British army then sent a light code signal to ask, and the German commandos forced the captured British soldiers to confess the contact light code, but they did not expect that these low-spirited guys actually had the courage to stumble and deliberately gave the Germans a suggestive light code signal, The British troops on Sood Island immediately realized that the island of Little Dimen had already been occupied by the Germans. Although the British commander did not judge from this that the Germans were about to launch a landing attack on Sood Island, the location of Little Dimen Island was of great tactical value for the defense of Soud Island, and he immediately issued a battle order to some battalions and companies stationed in Sandwich, asking the soldiers camped in the rear to assemble in the harbor.

At this time, the German task force members who had landed on the island disguised as British marines had already re-meted, and some of them took the collected military information along the same route to the landing site, and rendezvoused with their own submarines at the appointed time, so as to use radio to send this important information to their own combat headquarters. The rest were divided into two, some of them remained in Sandwich and waited for an opportunity to disrupt the British defenses after the landing attack began, while the other went to the British heavy artillery positions and waited for the German planes to bomb and use smoke batons to indicate the targets to their own planes.

When the German naval commandos captured the island of Little Dimen, the night raid of the German army on the island of Great Dimen, located between the islands of Soud and San, was met with stubborn resistance from the British. The island is nearly three times the size of the island of Little Dimen, with two peaks of more than 300 meters above sea level, complex terrain, and beaches for small ships to dock, and a more important strategic location than the island of Little Dimen, where the British deployed nearly 100 soldiers and set up observation posts and radio communication stations. To capture the island, the Germans brought in more than 200 naval infantry in three large torpedo boats of the 1906 class, which carried arc lights and transmitters in addition to conventional combat equipment and engineering equipment. In the course of the battle, they contacted their own ships cruising in the nearby sea several times, and with the direct support of naval guns, they captured the commanding heights of the island, while the remnants of the British army withdrew to the northern tip of the island, relying on the terrain to resist the German attack.

In the northern winter, the days are exceptionally short. At 5 o'clock in the morning, the sea was still dark, and Hipper's flagship "De Fllinger", the battleman "Seydlitz", one light cruiser, and seven large torpedo boats sailed to the sea northeast of Little Dimen Island. With the bombardment fleet in place, the landing ships sailed out of the Strammer-Knoll waterway under the protection of the combat ships, deliberately avoiding Mulberry Island and the surrounding small islands controlled by the British, so it took an hour and a half to reach the waters of Sood Island.

In the officer's conference room of the "De Fllinger", Natsuki and the senior officers of the Marine Corps were already fully engaged in the upcoming amphibious landing operation, and all the pre-war deployments were proceeding in order. In the eyes of ordinary people, an amphibious landing operation that requires a large number of officers and men needs to be fully and thoroughly deployed, and it takes a lot of time to prepare for the preliminary stage alone, but the situation on the battlefield is not static, and it has not been more than half a month since the outbreak of the naval battle of the Faroe Islands, and although the ships and troops participating in the battle on both sides have been adjusted due to casualties, they are on the front line, and most of them are mentally and physically suitable to return to the battle.

Now the British Navy has suffered successive defeats in the Faroe Islands, but as long as it can hold Sood Island, it still has a chance to form a strategic containment of Germany's military forces in the north, so the British can either completely abandon Sood Island and abandon the northern front, or actively mobilize the existing forces to invest in Sood Island, and try by all means to block the landing attack that the German army will inevitably launch. Judging by the busy night routes between Sood Island and the British mainland, as well as the growing size of the garrison on the island, the British top brass was still reluctant to bow to the Germans.

As time passed, the gunfire on Dadimen Island gradually subsided, and the sound of messy gunfire explosions suddenly came from the direction of Xiaodimen Island, and the light of cannon flames was faintly visible on the island and the nearby sea. The German fleet soon received a radio report from the German troops on the island: several British gunboats were firing on the nearby sea, covering the landing of soldiers on the west side of the island.

The Germans easily captured the island of Little Dimen, and the British quickly launched a counterattack, and such a script did not exceed Natsuki's expectations. It's just that judging from the current situation, although the battle on the island can contain and disperse the British forces, it also puts the British troops stationed on Sood Island on alert in advance, which seems to be a bit more than worth the loss, but Natsuki doesn't understand it that way. As far as objective conditions are concerned, the offensive and defensive sides are not fully prepared at this time, and the German army has taken the initiative and can relax its mentality, but the British officers and men stationed on Sood Island are basically in a situation of fighting on their backs, and from officers to soldiers, they all know that this vicious battle will come sooner or later, so they can enter the battle position in the shortest possible time, regardless of whether the battle starts during the day or at night, and there is not much difference whether they are on guard in advance. Even if it is inferred from the German occupation of Little Dimen Island that the opponent's landing place is Sandwich, the island is not large, the terrain is very complicated, and the transportation is very inconvenient, and in order to temporarily adjust the defensive deployment, the soldiers have to leave the trenches and rush over the mountains to a new position, and a wise commander will not make such a risk. Moreover, with all the German ships anchored in Tórshavn, it was difficult for such a large-scale military movement to conceal the British submarines deployed near the Strammer-Noll waterway, and since the British were likely on guard, they simply "set fires" more to confuse their vision and make them unclear how the German army was going to fight this battle.

According to the original battle plan, the Germans sent additional combat forces to the islands of Dadimen and blocked the nearby waters with light cruisers and large torpedo boats. On the island of Dadimen, the German battleships were attacked by a number of British high-speed torpedo boats, but this time there were no British battleships behind them to support them, and the searchlights and flares of the German ships dazzled the British crew, and the torpedo attack naturally ended in failure; On Little Dimen Island, two large torpedo boats loaded with naval infantry brought in more than 160 naval infantry, and two other large torpedo boats in cover spotted several armed speedboats in the direction of Sood Island and quickly fled.

There was still more than an hour before the scheduled landing time, and the sky gradually turned white, and new ship shadows appeared on the sea northeast of Xiaodimen Island, and one large warship, one medium-sized warship, more than 10 light warships, and many other transport ships could be distinguished.

In the officer's conference room of the "De Fllinger", Natsuki and a group of officers looked out of the porthole at the sea, and the approaching fleet was responsible for transporting a new batch of combat troops and equipment and supplies, but there was an extra expectation because of the flagship and the big men who flew on the flagship.

"Is it there? It's so punctual! Natsuki muttered. Regardless of the fact that the British army had a maximum of 1,000 or 2,000 people in Sandwich's defense, and the German naval infantry preparing to attack was far less than 10,000, it seems that it is not worth mentioning compared to the battle of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people on the European continent, but it will become an amphibious landing battle of great significance in the history of modern warfare. Because before that, whether it was the Qing-Japanese War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, or the Italian-Turkish War, there had never been a landing campaign in which a fierce beachhead battle was fought, and the landing force basically chose to land on an undefended coast or port under the cover of naval artillery. A few weeks earlier, the German Navy had launched an amphibious landing operation on the coast of Flanders, and at that time, the Allied forces concentrated their defensive forces around the port and fortifications, and only a few guards were deployed on the open beaches, and the landing operations of the German marines on several beaches were met with only symbolic resistance, and the German naval tank units appeared for the first time in a real landing operation, and the beach fighting did not get much opportunity to perform, but only played a large role in the battle to capture Ostend.

(End of chapter)