Kurchumov was right, behind him was a mixed formation of 33 Chinese and Soviet fighters led by Prokofiev, and at 9 o'clock flew from Hangzhou 15 **** Type 3 fighters of the Fourth Brigade of the Air Force Fighter Group, led by Mao Yingchu, the leader of the 23rd Squadron who temporarily acted as the captain of the group (Gao Zhihang had served as the commander of the Air Force destroyer colonel and the captain of the Fourth Group, but had already gone to Lanzhou to receive Soviet fighters. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info）。

The Japanese planes flying from the sea were all fighters, and the captain of the Japanese 2nd Air Force, Rear Admiral Rokuro Tsukae, used all the fighters that could be dispatched at one time, and 56 of the 82 fighters were the latest Type 96 fighters, while the others were Type 95 fighters. The opponent should know that the north shore of Hangzhou Bay will be the final breakthrough in the Battle of Songhu, and both sides have air power in their hands that can affect the situation of the war, especially the more than forty heavy bombers in the Soviet Air Force (the classification of the Japanese army) is like a sharp sword hanging over the head of the Japanese army!

To delay the landing offensive of the Japanese army, it is necessary to gain air supremacy, and in order to eliminate the threat of the opponent, the Japanese army must also seize air supremacy -- the same goal has led to another major air battle over Songhu with more than 100 planes.

54 to 82, the Chinese and Soviet armies were obviously at a disadvantage, but no matter what, they could only win this air battle, otherwise the sky over Songhu would be dominated by Japanese aircraft!

According to the original plan, it was estimated that the Japanese carrier-based air force would be eager to fight, and Prokofiev did not adopt the method of pressing on the whole line, but after making peace with friendly forces in the direction of Hangzhou, he divided the Chinese and Soviet aircraft groups into three large formations and waited over the land.

Sure enough, the commander of the Japanese carrier-based plane, who was red-eyed by the idea of revenge, led the Japanese planes to rush over, and more than 130 fighters from both sides became entangled and launched a decisive battle in the airspace of several dozen square kilometers in the air.

、、、、、、

It was only on November 7 that Lin Jun saw Prokofiev, who had been pulled to Nanjing by car, again: his plane had used ramming tactics after running out of ammunition in the air battle, and had knocked down the fourth Japanese fighter he had shot down that day, and he had returned to the colonel factory with the remains of three wounded Soviet soldiers and 15 martyrs.

The great air battle on 5 November lasted more than an hour, and both sides were red-eyed, and many pilots did not pay attention to fuel consumption until the end, and some Soviet pilots adopted ramming tactics after the ammunition was exhausted -- in the end, the Soviet fighters plus the six Yi-16s lost in the early stage, a total of 25 fighters were lost, 15 were killed, 4 were wounded, and 6 were missing.

Only 3 planes came back from the 5th Brigade, and only 7 of the 15 planes from Hangzhou went back in the end. In total, the Chinese and Soviet sides lost 38 fighters, more than half! In addition, most of the fighters who returned to the airfields were wounded, and the heavy losses were unbearable.

The cost was heavy, but the Japanese 2nd Air Force was not comfortable: it lost at least 70 fighters before and after, and it was not able to fully control the sky in the Songhu area after the war.

The missing Soviet pilots had no chance of surviving, and their planes all crashed into the sea of Hangzhou Bay, and finally Lin Jun wrote in the war report: On the morning of November 5, 1937, a total of 60 fighters of our air force and friendly forces encountered more than 90 enemy fighters, and our side lost 21 people, 4 people were wounded, and the air force lost 25 fighters, and it is estimated that more than 70 Japanese fighters were shot down, and friendly forces lost 13 fighters, 11 people were killed, and one person was wounded.

The "disappearance" was unfair, and Lin Jun classified the six pilots as martyrs.

As a result of emergency repairs, by 7 July, 15 fighters of the air force would still be able to take to the skies for combat -- this was already the last fighter capital of the Soviet aid air force at the Dasho Plant.

The losses are not insignificant: the planes can be transported again when they are gone, but the losses of good pilots are not immediately replenished. The Soviet pilots who followed Lin Jun to China were the backbone of the original unit, and although the 21 pilots who died were only a drop in the bucket in the whole Soviet Union, Lin Jun could not afford to lose them -- these people would have been rotated back to China to take up important posts after a period of time in China, but now they are spilling blood.

How can there be no immortal in war! Everyone understands this, but when it is actually put in front of them, decision-makers have to feel a little guilty.

Due to the excessive losses, although the Japanese side was not having a good time, Lin Jun still had to adopt a conservative method of operation in the next stage of the operation: shrink the defense and try not to take the initiative to attack.

On the other hand, the Japanese had no choice but to temporarily cancel the air raids to support the landing, and the aircraft carrier formation was far away from the Chinese coast -- they could not guarantee whether the Chinese and Soviet air forces in Nanjing would make a desperate bet and dispatch bomber groups to attack the aircraft carrier formation; you must know that the 40 heavy bombers were not vegetarians, and if they swarmed out with the remaining fighters and bombed the Japanese aircraft carrier formation at any cost, the consequences would never be what the Japanese commanders wanted to see, and besides, the three Japanese aircraft carriers would no longer have enough fighters to defend them.

Only a small amount of destroyer artillery fire support was left to support the Japanese landing, and tens of thousands of Japanese troops could only fight a "regular" ground battle with the defending defenders on the beachhead.

On November 7, in order to once again support the defenders on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay, Lin Jun sent two squadrons of 24 bombers to attack the Japanese landing force again under the escort of 12 fighters. On its return home, the aircraft formation was intercepted by more than 10 Japanese carrier-based fighters, losing 4 bombers, 11 casualties, and shooting down 6 Japanese planes.

The Japanese army encroached on the position on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay step by step, and Lin Jun, who was in Nanjing, after learning that the defenders of Shanghai had begun to retreat step by step and that the Japanese carrier-based aviation was basically missing, boldly ordered a sortie on November 9 to bombard the Japanese positions and delay the Japanese attack.

On the 9th, there were already 17 Soviet-style fighters available at the Daxiao Factory, and Lin Jun sent 12 of them to cover 40 bombers with solidified ****** to attack, and the remaining 5 Soviet-style fighters and three **** were used as reserve aircraft, ready to intercept the Japanese carrier-based aircraft that might appear after the pursuit and bombing of their own formation.

This time, the bomber formation was dispatched in order to delay the Japanese troops on the left flank of the retreating right wing army on the south bank of the Suzhou Creek along the Beijing-Shanghai railway and highway, and behind the more than 200,000 troops retreating in this direction, the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth divisions of the Japanese army were chasing and fighting fiercely, and the small number of defenders who were responsible for blocking the task could only delay the Japanese attack for a short time.

When a large number of Soviet planes appeared in the sky over the retreating *** army, it caused a commotion among the troops: the retreating troops were most afraid of air raids, and sometimes they could not even understand the course of the planes in the sky. Tens of thousands of people were lying down in unison (it was good not to run away in all directions), and when they found out that those planes were their own planes flying in the direction of Shanghai, the cheers of tens of thousands of people at the same time could be felt even by the pilots on the planes.

Before the bombing began, it had already given a shot in the arm to the low morale of the retreating troops!

However, after discovering the huge group of planes in the air, the Japanese troops pursuing along the line of Qingpu and Baihe Harbor immediately took air defense measures -- all of them found a place to hide, and their very small number of anti-aircraft machine guns were helpless against the aircraft formation at an altitude of 2,000 meters.

This area is all plains, and the "big gift" prepared by the bomber formation for little Japan is that it is useless to lie down and hide, and the 40-ton solidification ****** smashed down in one go, and the bombing area of hundreds of thousands of square meters is a sea of fire. Lin Jun took out most of the solidification ****** of all the stocks, and more than 2,000 Japanese troops were burned to char by this hellish fire.

The loss of more than 2,000 people on the ground in a single air raid was something the Japanese army had never imagined, and this group bombing successfully delayed the Japanese offensive and also dealt a blow to the arrogance of the Japanese troops involved in the pursuit -- when victory was in sight, it was suddenly burned to the brink by a fire, and the nerves of the little Japanese beast could not accept this fact at once. Ordinary Japanese soldiers also know that the 38 big cover grenadier canister has never seen such a terrifying fire raid!

On the night of November 9, the defenders on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay, whose strength was less than one-third of the number before the start of the battle, finally received the order to retreat and retreated in the direction of Zhejiang at night.

On the 11th, Songjiang City was lost, and on the 13th, Shanghai fell.

However, Lin Jun's goal has been achieved, most of the more than 400,000 *** troops have been built and withdrawn from Shanghai, and in this area from Nanjing to Shanghai, the veteran will rely on these troops and the few days he has won to establish two "national defense lines".

The Battle of Songhu came to an end in this way: the First Army successively mobilized 56 divisions, 7 brigades, and two fleets of the Navy, with a total strength of more than 600,000 and more than 250,000 combat casualties; The Japanese army invested 10 divisions and regiments, with a total strength of more than 220,000 and more than 70,000 combat casualties. Among the casualties of the Japanese army, more than 5,000 were reimbursed for the air raids, including the more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers of the Sixth Division who fed the fish before they landed.

Lin Jun was not optimistic about ******'s follow-up campaign deployment, but only he knew that he couldn't hold it at all. But if you can't keep it, you have to defend it, and you can only choose to change Lin Jun to the position of decision-maker: how can the land be handed over to the enemy!

As the commander of the Japanese Army's Shanghai Dispatch Army, Matsui Ishine attempted to encircle and annihilate the *** Army in Nanjing and the surrounding areas, and launched an attack on Nanjing by two routes, with a total of eight divisions, two brigades and one marine, with a total strength of more than 200,000 troops.

However, the Japanese troops who landed on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay were forced to encircle the defenders according to Matsui Ishone's deployment because they were hard pressed by the defenders for 4 days, and the attack of the troops pursuing on the north road was frustrated, so Matsui Ishone had to postpone the plan of a full-scale attack on Nanjing by three days.

On the night of the 13th, Lin Jun had a conversation with Andlupf: "Brother, it is very likely that we will evacuate again like in Madrid. ”

"Andre, I think Nanjing is difficult to hold."

"I also know that if the logistics department is prepared in advance, this time it will be a whole move."

Andlupuf heard a faint sadness in his brother's words.

(To be continued, if you want to know what will happen next, please log in to the WWW.CMFU.COM, more chapters, support the author, support genuine reading!) (To be continued.) )