Neither the cover of night nor smoke, nor the strong support of their own fleet, these very weakly defended British light ships still rushed towards their opponents without hesitation, a situation reminiscent of the Battle of Sadowa, the decisive battle of the Austro-Prussian War, in which the Austrian cavalry bought precious time for the infantry retreat with a near-suicidal charge, when the Prussian army was equipped with breech-loading firing rifles for the first time, and the dense fire eventually inflicted extremely heavy casualties on the Austrian cavalry......

Judging from the scene, the British mine-striking ship group attacked 4 German battle cruisers and 4 light cruisers with 5 cruisers and 17 destroyers, which was a great advantage in numbers, but the effective tonnage of 22 British battleships added up to only 4. What is even more fatal is that the German fleet has superb combat qualities and has made careful operational arrangements, and the officers and men have not been chaotic and have carried out fierce, accurate, and rapid shooting under the organization of the "Seydlitz." Almost from the first minute of turning their guns, they were mercilessly slaughtering British light ship groups.

- The first shot fired by the German battle cruiser "Blucher" after turning its main guns found the target, and the column of water stirred up by the shells happened to form an amazing wall of water in the middle of the British ship group. The second rapid firing at an interval of 40 seconds was still surprisingly lucky, a shell directly hit the bridge of the British destroyer "Lance", killing several officers including the captain on the spot, and the violent explosion also caused a fire on the whole ship, and the speed of the ship was also sharply reduced, forcing the follow-up ships to make a detour.

-- Although the German reconnaissance cruiser "Stralsund," which had been bombarded by heavy artillery from British battlecruisers in a sentinel battle, had lost one of its main turrets and had its bilge filled with more than 200 tons of seawater, it returned to the battle after emergency repairs and fired an unusually fierce succession, and its 150-millimeter shells quickly damaged the British destroyer "Legion," causing it to burst into flames, and then damaged the "Cardinal," forcing the two ships to withdraw from the battle one after another.

- In contrast to the Blücher, which had the help of God, the Goeben with its four triple main turrets made up for its lack of luck by firing 420 rounds of 280-mm shells and 366 rounds of 150-mm shells, with an overall hit rate of about 2 percent. After adjusting the target, the crew made persistent efforts, and before the two rounds of fast and accurate "right-rafter fire" were finished, an armor-piercing shell hit the British light cruiser "Blonde Man", and the shell weighing more than 300 kilograms directly tore through the frontal armor of this turret like an open can. Under the effect of the time-delay fuse, the shell exploded only after piercing two decks in a row, and the huge chemical reaction easily overturned the turret, and the smoke and dust composed of inadequately burned particles rushed straight into the air fifty or sixty meters into the air.

Immediately after that, the "Goeben" slightly adjusted the firing parameters, and although the new round of fire did not directly hit the "blonde", the excited column of water almost swallowed the entire battleship in an instant. The force of the explosion carved out irregularly shaped holes in the outer wall of the lower part of the "blond man", and seawater quickly poured into these breaches, turning the bottom bilge of the battleship into a water tank.

Before the sea water drowned the boilers inside the ship of the "Blonde", another salvo of the "Goburn" came to life. A 280 mm caliber armor-piercing projectile hit the armor belt on its port side, with huge kinetic energy, the armor-piercing projectile easily penetrated its layers of decks like tearing paper, and finally triggered a large explosion of the ship's ammunition depot, the battleship of more than 3,000 tons was like a hydrogen balloon ignited by a spark, and the whole body was instantly engulfed by a blazing fireball, and only one officer and soldier of the whole ship survived.

After killing the "Blonde", the "Goburn" turned its guns on the British destroyers that were speeding forward, and through continuous, non-attritional rapid fire, the battle cruiser sank the 1,200-ton British destroyer "Defender" in one fell swoop. As a result of the detonation of the ship's torpedoes, which were in a state of readiness for launch, the "Defender" was blown into countless fragments in an instant like a barrel of wood, and also caused some interference to several nearby British destroyers.

- In the Hipperf fleet, the "De Fllinger" is undoubtedly the most technologically advanced combat power, its turret maneuver is driven by water pressure, each main gun is independently pitched, each tube is equipped with an electric motor, equipped with an electric bullet pusher, a hydrostatic rotary bomb machine and a bomb shifter, the propellant cartridge is stored in the brass cartridge as usual, and it is taken out of the cartridge when used, which reduces the risk of ammunition detonation, and the theoretical rate of fire of its main gun reaches 3 rounds per minute; The turret-constructed 150 mm secondary gun is equipped with an electric loaf machine with a feed rate of 18 rounds per minute, and although the transfer, reloading, and shell throwing are still manual operations, the effective rate of fire and sustained rate of fire are significantly better than those of the battleship's gun emplacements that are fed by manpower. After the previous stage of warm-up, the gunners' shooting accuracy and firing efficiency gradually improved, the ship flashed with the flame of artillery fire from time to time, and the smoke of the propellant made its new and powerful hull always shrouded in gray-black smoke. In the process of turning with the fleet, the two twin main guns in the stern of the ship carried out seven rounds of rapid fire in a row, and the shells were all ordinary shells, one hit the British light cruiser "Nottingham", almost blew up its bow entirely, two of them caused close damage, and the other shot landed on the starboard side of the British destroyer "Cardinal", leaving a hole more than a meter long in the outer wall of its hull.

Due to the large radius of the German fleet to the right, the British light ships that launched the torpedo attack needed to sail a longer distance to enter the effective range, and the first 5 minutes were basically in a passive situation, after the distance was closer, these high-speed assault light ships could still only shoot at the German fleet with bow and part of the broadside guns, at this time Hipper's battle cruiser had turned from the southeast to the north, and the four battle cruisers of Betty were in a parallel state. It's just that the distance between the two has widened from 9,000 meters at the closest to 22,000 meters, which is basically beyond the effective range of the naval guns of both sides.

After the turn, the four German battle cruisers still maintained their original order, that is, "De Fllinger" took the lead, "Moltke" and "Goeben" were in the center, and the domineering and exposed "Blücher" was behind, and the combat distance between the ships was maintained at 300 meters, and more than 500 meters behind the starboard side of the "Blücher" was the German light cruiser "Strasbourg", followed by "Magdeburg", "Stralsund" and "Rostock", and as for the other two light cruisers of the Hipper's reconnaissance fleet, "Mainz" The ship was still supplying the water reconnaissance planes in the distant sea, while the "Fort Col" sailed with the "Seydlitz" to the west of the battle patrol formation.

"Torpedo! Enemy ships fired torpedoes, and two were found in the sea 2000 meters behind the port side! ”

High-decibel shouts sounded almost simultaneously on German battleships, especially those battle cruisers. After paying an extremely heavy price, the British mine-strike group, consisting of light cruisers and destroyers, finally crossed the "death zone" in the center of the battlefield, and as soon as it was close to the torpedo range, the first batch of torpedoes was fired by the leading ships. The impetus of the second industrial revolution has led to the rapid development of mechanical technology, various designs compete with each other, surface ships equipped with underwater torpedo tubes are still the mainstream configuration in the naval field in this era, and surface torpedo tubes placed on decks or sides of ships have appeared on some small and medium-sized ships. In the British Navy, both the latest and strongest George V-class battleships and the fastest and fiercest Lion-class battlecruisers are equipped with a number of underwater torpedo tubes, and the newly commissioned Danton-class in France, the newly built Count Cavour class in Italy, the combined forces of Austria-Hungary and the Kongo battlecruiser ordered by the Japanese Navy from Britain have also retained this configuration, and among the great powers, only the United States and Germany have chosen an "alternative" design idea, and they resolutely excluded torpedo launchers from the list of weapons of capital ships. Devoted to the development of naval guns and sighting equipment.

The underwater torpedo tube operates in concealment, and the water torpedo tube operates flexibly, both of which lead the way, but the British white-headed torpedo or the German black-headed torpedo, all of which are thermodynamic torpedoes, that is, steam gas torpedoes, which use fuel and water combustion to generate steam to drive the thermal engine and drive the propeller to rotate to produce thrust, which has the characteristics of stability and efficiency, but the discharged steam forms a clear wake in the water, regardless of the fixed depth of 3 meters, 5 meters or 10 meters. These trails are easy for the ship's lookout personnel to observe and evade or intercept in advance.

The ships of the formation issued torpedo warnings one after another, and the bullet-riddled "Seydlitz" seemed useless, but in fact it was no hindrance, and seeing that Betty had fled in panic with four battle cruisers, Hipper was no longer secretive, and he decisively led the flagship to move closer to the battle patrol formation. When the fleet in formation is attacked by torpedoes, it is difficult for the flagship to play the role of unified scheduling, and it is often up to each ship to display its passive defense skills, in this case, the fleet is very easy to lose the array, if there is carelessness, there may be a collision between the ships, but if the tactical arrangements are made in advance, the commanders of the ships can strictly implement the established strategy in the tense and complex battle, and they can increase the active factor in the passive defense skills, so as to form a more effective defense, and try not to give the enemy ships a chance to take advantage of it.

In order to avoid the incoming torpedoes, the four German battlecruisers turned to the right. At first glance, their tactical maneuver narrowed the distance between themselves and the British mine-striking ship group, facilitating follow-up attacks, and in fact, the lowered 150-mm and 88-mm secondary guns were making full use of the German-made rapid-fire guns. As the distance closes, the German battle cruiser hits the target almost one out of every three shells, and in terms of naval guns, a frontal assault British reconnaissance cruiser usually has only two 4-inch guns in effect, the diagonal dash can be increased to 6, and some small-caliber machine guns can be put into battle, a British destroyer in the same condition has roughly two-thirds of the firepower of the reconnaissance cruiser, even if the shooting accuracy is not considered, a reconnaissance cruiser is the leader, The firepower output of a lightning strike detachment, including 4-5 destroyers, was not enough to compete with the broadside fire of a German battle cruiser. Within two minutes, four German battlecruisers and four accompanying light cruisers had blasted one British battleship after another into flames and black smoke with a storm of ferocious artillery fire.

It took almost two minutes for the British torpedoes to swim over a distance of 2,000 meters, during which time the German ship's side guns spared no effort to intercept the torpedoes that were trailing their wake. In order to guard against torpedo attacks, the capital ships of the British Navy adopted the strategy of combining movement and static with anti-torpedo nets and small-caliber machine guns; although the capital ships of the German High Seas Fleet took the trouble to assemble and use mine nets during training exercises and sea parades, they dismantled these cumbersome equipment in wartime, and pragmatically used the ship's own mine-resistant armor belt and mine-proof compartment to enhance survivability. Around the bridge and chimney, there are a large number of 88-mm secondary guns with a semi-enclosed turret structure and 37-mm secondary guns with a gun shield structure. For torpedoes with a fixed depth of more than 2 meters, ordinary bullets can hardly do anything, and small-caliber rapid-fire artillery can play a role, not to mention that in this era when torpedo technology has not yet been improved, the speed of torpedoes in various countries usually does not exceed 35 knots, and the uniform speed of sailing in a straight line makes it easier to intercept.

(End of chapter)