On Sood Island, the southernmost tip of the Faroe Islands, the beleaguered British officers and soldiers finally survived until dark. www.biquge.info According to Greenwich Mean Time in the same time zone, it was only 4 p.m. in the same time zone. In the depths of the night, the moonlight casts a hazy silver veil over the islands and the sea, and the Sandwich coast becomes a veil of freckles. Here, almost everything that could be burned was charred, and there were cold remnants and remains everywhere, except for the smoke-filled ruins and the dragged prisoners of war.

The British officers and men deployed south of Sandwich were as anxious as the devastated Sandwich coast, overwhelmed by the rapid German onslaught, and deeply worried about the existing defensive arrangements. They originally thought that the German army would stop the large-scale attack after nightfall, so that the British army on the island would have a chance to deal with it, but the Germans did not play their cards at all. Under the guidance of the ship's searchlight, hundreds of German soldiers stepped over the bodies of the British soldiers killed in the shelling, and attacked the southern side of Sandwich with great determination, and the British troops stationed here only held out for more than 20 minutes before collapsing.

The British thought that the Germans had stormed the heights to protect the landing grounds, but they were wrong. After a short rest, the German army descended like a tiger and pounced on Kvalbard. When the Germans had just started the Sood Island landing battle, the British army had more than 3,000 troops in Kvalbard, which was the strongest defense line on the island, and in order to guard against the shelling of the German fleet, the British Royal Marines built a large-scale defense system here, digging more than 40 kilometers of trenches alone, and the length of the trenches dug by each soldier on average was nearly 20 meters. However, during the day's fighting, the British commander sent more than 1,000 soldiers from Kvalbard to the aid of Sandwich, and as a result, this force was destroyed by the German fleet as soon as it crossed the ridge, reducing the strength of Kvalbar's defenders by a third and greatly shaking the morale of the army. The German troops descending from the mountain rushed into the British lines, and the two sides engaged in fierce melee combat along the trenches, although the Germans were not supported by naval guns and aircraft in such battles, they were clearly superior to the British in momentum, and they had much more automatic and semi-automatic weapons than the British marines, and the offensive combination of pistols, light machine guns and grenades was invincible in the battle for position.

In less than an hour, more than half of the British positions at Kvalbard were lost.

Sir Grierson, the British Marine Corps commander and commander-in-chief of operations on Sood Island, was present to oversee the battle and brought reinforcements from the island's southern defence. These new forces were engaged in tactical counter-assaults in time, which contained the momentum of the German offensive. The British Marines wanted to use this counterattack to drive the outnumbered Germans out of Kvalbard, but the German naval infantry switched from attack to defense at a fast pace, and the combat units cooperated tacitly, and soon relied on the trenches dug by the British to stabilize their positions, and with dense gun fire, the British troops who counterattacked excessively paid a heavy price.

By this point, the British troops under the command of Sir Grierson had suffered nearly half of the casualties, and the German reinforcements were still landing on Sood Island, and the situation on the battlefield was extremely unfavorable to the defenders......

In Sandwich's near-shore waters, landing craft and small transport ships busily shuttled between the German fleet and the harbor to transport combat personnel and equipment to Sood Island. The German landing force advanced the forward front to Kvalbard, and the British could only threaten the German landing ground at Sandwich with sporadic artillery fire, in addition to the battle echelon transferred from Tórshavn, the Marine troops from the German mainland also went directly to Sandwich Harbor to assemble - although the German officers and soldiers of this era were known for their perseverance and hard-working will, but after all, they were not bodies made of steel, they were bumpy and physically and mentally tired, and according to normal circumstances, they needed at least one or two days of rest and recuperation. At best, we should understand that it is not confined to conventions, and at worst, it is an expedient measure to deal with the shortage of landing troops.

Whether it's good or bad depends on the commander's strategy.

The vast majority of German ships that transport troops and equipment for landing one after another have a small tonnage and shallow draft, and under the direct protection of large and small ships, they are not easy to become targets for enemy submarines or high-speed torpedo boats, but troop carriers and transport ships carrying combat units and combat materials are different. The first dozen or so ships to unload their cargo had already returned to their homes, but there were still more than 20 medium-sized ships of various types on the sea more than 10 kilometers offshore, and the heavily armed German soldiers climbed down the side of the ship along the rope ladder, boarded the small boats waiting nearby, and then headed for Sandwich, where the cranes on the cargo ships continued to transfer boxes and bags of war materiel to the light ships, which were transported to the landing shore. Around these busy ships, the German Navy's large torpedo boats laid out an all-round, multi-layered maritime defense, among which there were almost no aging class of 1898, not even the class of 1906, which was known as the "naval war horse", and the class of 1911, which was not very active in shore support operations, and even the most recent class of 1913, added up to ten. The difference between the old and new warships is not only in the tonnage, speed and number of weapons, the latter two because of their large size and load, after technical modification or at the beginning of the design of the role of multi-purpose ships, they are equipped with the first model of underwater detection instruments, and equipped with depth charge delivery vehicles, can carry 10 to 40 depth charges. Since the outbreak of the war, the German naval ships and aviation units have sunk 37 Allied submarines, which accounts for only a small proportion of the huge submarine group of the Allied countries, and the Allied ships sank 41 German submarines during the same period. In the past four months, the German navy's ships and aviation units have engaged in more than 200 antisubmarine operations, consuming tens of thousands of artillery shells and more than 3,000 antisubmarine bombs. More than half of the German submarines sunk were lost in the North Atlantic, and a significant proportion of them were killed by enemy ships due to mechanical problems. The submarines of the Entente countries were basically sunk during combat missions in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, and the number of submarines sunk in the submersible state was 29 in the Entente countries and only 11 in Germany.

In order to guard against night attacks by British submarines and high-speed torpedo boats, the German light ships on the duty of guarding and escorting the ship always maintained a high degree of vigilance on the surrounding seas, and the searchlights of the large torpedo boats deployed in the outermost part were bright, and the gunners had loaded their shells and were able to fire at suspicious targets that appeared nearby at any time. Despite this, the German warships' defensive network was far from being airtight, and the loopholes that existed with the naked eye kept the hearts of the conscientious officers and men hanging in the hope that their transport ships would end their missions as soon as possible.

At about 5 o'clock, a German large torpedo boat that was on guard in the northern sea of Little Dimen Island found a periscope on the sea surface, because the German submarines deployed in this area had a relatively fixed position, the sea conditions on the sea surface would not let the experienced German captains strayed into the forbidden area, so the German large torpedo boat of the 1911 class immediately fired with 105 mm guns to warn, the gunners fired very accurately, and several shells fell near the periscope, but unless the ship gun of this caliber happened to break the periscope, Otherwise it is difficult to pose a direct threat to a submarine whose main body is about ten meters underwater. The periscope quickly disappeared, and the nearest large German torpedo boat rushed to see where the periscope appeared and dropped several depth charges, which was completely different from the dull roar of the shell explosion and made thousands of German officers and men nervous.

Forty minutes later, the most pessimistic situation that the Germans could have predicted appeared, the 4,600-ton fast freighter "El Sai" was hit by a torpedo that quietly attacked, and the violent explosion tore its rudder, propeller and a large piece of the tail hull apart, and in just two minutes, the cargo ship with more than 800 tons of ammunition and 30 military motorcycles in its cargo hold sank to the bottom of the sea with its bow straight up, and nearly half of the 49 crew members failed to escape in time.

The sinking of the "El Sai" was a shame for the German naval officers and men involved in the escort, and the two large torpedo boats immediately followed the torpedo track in reverse, but their passive detection equipment found nothing underwater - which meant that the British submarine cunningly turned off its engines after the attack. In the face of cunning attackers, the German captains had their own way to deal with them, they calculated the approximate location of the target based on the torpedo track and the combat habits of British submarines, and then cut the area into several pieces, and called friendly ships to "hunt" by signal lights. As depth charges were dropped into the water, the dull sound of explosions continued to rise, the surface of the sea continued to roll and foam, and when the ninety-ninth depth charge was dropped, oil stains and debris finally appeared under the beam of the searchlight.

The frenzied siege of the German escort ships did not deter the British submarine forces from venturing the attack, and at 6:52 and 7:25 a.m., two more British submarines waited for an opportunity to fire torpedoes. Night was an excellent cover for a submarine attack, and no matter how careful the German ships were, they could not stop the British submarine attack. The troop carrier "Gazelle" and the ocean-going freighter "Manniu" have been victimized one after another; the only thing to be thankful for is that more than 200 of the more than 300 marines on board the "Gazelle" have already landed in transit through small ships, and a considerable number of the remaining soldiers were quickly rescued after falling into the water, only 39 people were killed or drowned in the ship, and 67 other crew members and sailors of the two ships were unfortunately killed.

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