The Datang Navy has always regarded the Japanese Navy's only aircraft carrier battle group as the greatest threat, and it is difficult to sleep and eat for a day.

It's just that this Japanese Navy aircraft carrier battle group has been under the command of Onodera Itsunori to avoid a head-on encounter with the Datang Navy, and has been playing a game of hide and seek.

When the Tang Army attacked Taiwan, the Japanese Navy hid in the East China Sea to strategically contain the Tang Navy. After the Tang Army seized the island of Taiwan, the Japanese Navy retreated to the Yellow Sea, relying on land-based air forces on the Liaodong Peninsula, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago to cover and maintain a deterrent effect against the Tang Army.

The Japanese were very smart and knew that the only navy Liliang could not compete with the Tang Navy at all, and the decisive battle would be completely annihilated, but if it remained there, it would form strategic pressure on the Tang Army and delay the pace of the Tang Army's offensive.

In a sense, if the Qing Army of that year had been tougher, the Beiyang Naval Division would have been enough to contain the Japanese Navy and exert strategic pressure on it even if it did not go out of the port to fight. Today's Japanese Army is very strong, at least with absolute control of the National Revolutionary Army, which enables the Japanese Navy to cruise peacefully between the Yellow Sea and the Korean Sea.

Zhang Meng has decided to send a navy to Europe, so the war at sea in Asia must end, Onodera Gonori's aircraft carrier battle group must be eliminated, and the Tang Royal Navy has urgent tasks and great pressure.

Soon, the General Staff formulated a jihua for the Datang Marines to carry out a landing operation on the Korean Peninsula to cut off the Japanese mainland from Northeast China. The total of 1.2 million troops of the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Japanese Expeditionary Force were trapped and killed in China.

At this time, a strategic encirclement has only been used by one person since ancient times, and that is the strategy used by Genghis Khan when he destroyed the Song Dynasty. Once the landing of the Don Army on the Korean Peninsula was successful. It will cut off the channel for the Japanese mainland to send weapons, equipment, and ammunition supplies to the Japanese army in northeast China, and the more than one million Japanese troops in northeast China will collapse without a fight.

However, the urgent purpose of the Tang Army was to lead the Japanese Navy to come to prevent the Tang Army from landing in Korea, and to force the Japanese Navy to have a decisive battle with the Tang Dynasty Navy, and the victory or defeat would be decided in a battle.

This jihua quickly got Zhang Meng's approval, and he immediately began to implement it.

On September 13, 1938, the Datang Navy's First Aircraft Carrier Battle Group and Second Aircraft Carrier Battle Group assembled in the East China Sea. At the same time, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Divisions of the Datang Marine Corps in Taiwan have completed their rest and are fully armed. More than 600 landing ships, troop carriers, transport ships, and supply ships also rushed to the East China Sea assembly area.

The Tang Empire handed over Jihua, which landed at Incheon, Korea, to the Nationalist Government, and for the Nationalist Government, this move of the Tang Army would be a huge shock to the Japanese army and a favorable good news for the Nationalist Revolutionary Army to recover the Northeast. It was bound to cause panic in the Japanese army.

It's just that. What the Nationalist Government never expected was that the Tang Army's disclosure of Jihua to them was just an attempt to leak the news to the Japanese army with the help of Japanese spies within the Nationalist Government. After all, the Tang Empire is monolithic, and the counter-espionage operation of the Homeland Security Bureau has already uprooted all the Japanese spies lurking inside the Tang Dynasty, if the Tang Dynasty leaks information to the Japanese army, it will inevitably make the Japanese army suspect the intentions of the Tang Army, but if the national government leaks the information, then the Japanese army will definitely believe it.

Sure enough, it didn't take long for the Jihua of the Tang Army to be known by the Japanese army, causing great panic in the headquarters of the Japanese army and the headquarters of the Kwantung Army. Once the landing of the Don army was successful. It will completely cut off the supply channel of weapons, equipment, and supplies to the Kwantung Army in the northeast on the Japanese mainland, which is equivalent to strangling more than one million Japanese troops by the neck. Slaughtered.

However, the Japanese Navy still resolutely did not allow the Onodera Itsunori fleet to assist in the defense, and demanded that the Japanese Army defend Inchon by itself. At the beginning, the Japanese Army also thought that Inchon had been operated by them for decades, and the defense was like an iron bucket, but now that it had received information in advance that it could be heavily defended, it would be difficult for the Tang Army to realize its desire to land. For the sake of the army's face, the Japanese army decided to guard it first, and then force the navy to help.

As a result, the Japanese Army quickly mobilized a large number of heavy artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, and army aviation units from the mainland to station in Korea and deploy defenses to the Inchon line, preparing to prevent the Tang Army from landing.

However, when the Japanese army mobilized a large amount of military resources to Incheon, the main force of the Tang Army's aircraft carrier battle group advanced to the Liaodong Peninsula, and the focus of the attack was shifted from Inchon to Lushun, the first fortress in Asia.

During the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Empire built Lushun, the first fortress in Asia, but was eventually captured by the Japanese army. After Tsarist Russia sent troops to Lushun, it also built Lushun into the first fortress in Asia at that time, but it was captured by the Japanese army after the Russo-Japanese War. Since then, the Japanese army has occupied Lushun, and as a result, the Japanese army has a soft spot for this fortress, and even rebuilt this fortress into the first fortress in Asia, exceeding the scale of the fortress built by the British in Singapore, they are provoking China and Russia, proving that only the Japanese army can hold this first fortress in Asia.

Once Lushun is taken and the Liaodong Peninsula is controlled, it will not only block the Bohai Bay to prevent the Japanese army's supply and retreat channel, but also directly cut off the Japanese army's connection with the Korean Peninsula along the Yalu River on land, which is much greater than the Tang Army's landing at Inchon to deal with the Japanese army.

The Japanese army occupied Lushun and operated the Lushun fortress for decades, out of the need to attack China, the Japanese army strengthened the defense of the Lushun fortress, deploying more than 1,000 artillery pieces of various types, but it was precisely because China was too weak, so the Japanese army almost did not deploy anti-aircraft artillery in the Lushun fortress, until the outbreak of the Tang-Japanese War, an anti-aircraft artillery regiment was deployed in Lushun.

In the early morning of 15 September, two aircraft carrier battle groups of the Tang Army arrived 120 kilometers off the coast of Arthur, and at dawn, more than 400 Hellfire heavy carrier-based bombers took off with bombs loaded with bombs, escorted by more than 200 Raptor-heavy carrier-based fighters, and went to bomb the Lushun fortress.

Fighters roared in the sky, the Japanese air defense sirens sounded, and well-trained antiaircraft artillery regiments quickly entered combat positions and launched anti-aircraft operations.

However, the Japanese anti-aircraft artillery regiment was limited in equipment and firepower, and the Tang Army's Raptor ships formed a dive formation to take the lead in diving down to launch an attack, which was extremely fast, and after paying the price of five or six fighters being shot down, it was already close to the Japanese anti-aircraft artillery position.

Da-da-da-da! Da-da-da-da!

More than 100 Raptor ships opened fire quickly, sweeping away the Japanese artillery on the air defense positions, and in an instant, flesh and blood flew everywhere, causing their anti-aircraft guns to stop firing.

Immediately afterwards, the Hellfire ships of the Tang Army, which were following and diving, bombed the Japanese air defense positions and threw aerial bombs, blowing up one Japanese air defense gun and completely paralyzing the Japanese air defense capability.

In just a few minutes, the Japanese anti-aircraft artillery regiment guarding the fortress of Arthur had been destroyed. However, the Tang Army only paid the price of less than ten planes and seized air supremacy with lightning speed.

The Japanese troops who entered the various battery positions of the fortress were dumbfounded, their thousands of cannons could only bombard the sea and land, and they could not hit the enemy planes in the sky at all, and occasionally the Japanese troops were unwilling to hold machine guns and fire in the air, but the speed of the Tang army planes was too fast, and the machine guns were difficult to lock, and it was difficult to pose a fatal threat to the thickly armored Tang fighters if they occasionally hit by chance.

Watching the bombers of the Tang Army repeat the dive action over and over again, one after another 1,000-kilogram aerial bombs specially aimed at the strong fortifications of Arthur Fortress fell with a roar, with a terrifying explosion sound, the reinforced concrete fortifications that were several meters thick were destroyed in an instant, the flames were flying, the smoke was billowing, and the Japanese soldiers inside suffered heavy casualties, corpses were piled up, and blood flowed like a river.

The entire Lushun trembled violently, like an earthquake of magnitude eight or nine, and the huge explosion shock wave caused the trees on the Golden Mountain to break off and fall to the ground one by one, and the boulders rolled down and the dust flew up.

The first wave of bombardment by the Tang Army ended in half an hour, most of the Lushun fortress was blown up, hundreds of large-caliber guns were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Japanese troops died.

Soon, the Japanese troops in the Jinzhou direction received a report that more than fifty Japanese fighters from the Jinzhou airfield urgently took off to Lushun. The Japanese air units in the direction of Mukden also rushed to Lushun for reinforcements, and it was obvious that the Japanese army attached great importance to the safety of the Lushun fortress.

However, it took at least two hours for the Japanese planes in the Mukden direction to arrive at Lushun from preparing for the voyage, while the Tang Army's aircraft carrier battle group, seven large aircraft carriers, more than 30 escort aircraft carriers, and more than 20 aircraft-carrying aircraft carriers, a total of more than 1,500 combat planes, could take off a wave of attack aircraft to Lushun in almost half an hour, and by the time the Japanese air force arrived in Mukden, the entire Lushun fortress was already in flames, and most of the fortress artillery was destroyed. More than half of the more than 50,000 Japanese troops stationed in Lushun were killed and wounded, and the rest were all wounded and survived in the underground tunnels at a depth of 100 meters. The Tang Army aircraft carrier battle group had completed the first phase of the bombing mission, and did not engage the Japanese air force head-on, but took advantage of the distance and time difference to drag down the Japanese pilots and make them exhausted, and Zuihou destroyed them in one fell swoop.

After the Tang bomber group finished bombing the Lushun fortress, it evaded the interception of the Japanese air force planes, and successively bombed the surrounding Japanese coastal positions in Dalian and the Japanese river defense positions at the mouth of the Yalu River, causing the Japanese air force to run back and forth and be exhausted.

The range of the Japanese army aviation aircraft was limited, and after arriving in the area around the Arthur fortress, they were forced to return after being in the air for less than half an hour. This time was not enough to expand the search area, so it was not possible to discover the location of the Don aircraft carrier battle group.

Of course, even if the Japanese army was discovered, the Tang Army's aircraft carrier battle group's powerful escort fighter group and anti-aircraft fire were enough to make the Japanese planes go and never return.

The Japanese Fengtian Air Force was tossed back and forth by the Tang Army bomber group until it was dark and forced to return, and the Japanese Air Force was so tired that they almost went back to their dormitories and fell asleep.

On the same night, with the help of the Nationalist Government, the Tang army took off more than 100 Thunder Dragon medium-range heavy bombers to raid the Fengtian airfield, and in order to ensure the air supremacy of the Lushun fortress, the Japanese army mobilized a large number of planes from the surrounding areas to the Fengtian airfield, all of which were densely arranged on the airport runway, and as a result, the Tang army was intensively bombed, losing more than 500 planes, which made the Japanese army feel heartbroken.

For several days, they were unable to participate in the air defense of the Lushun fortress, so that the Tang army planes unscrupulously bombed the Japanese troops in the Lushun fortress. (To be continued......)