The battle was fierce, and the pickup had already been hit by three shells, and although the hull was not damaged, five more wounded were added.

Su Qing reminded Zheng Xuechang: "After the war started, the devil ran away with a merchant ship. ”

Yes, the devil is five merchant ships, but as soon as the war starts, there are only four merchant ships against each other. The fifth merchant ship has left the battlefield, and Zheng Xuechang has seen all these situations.

Now the devil has put on a turtle fight, and he is stubbornly resisting. It is absolutely impossible to say that the devil has no brains at all, and the combat formation that the little devil put forward when he started the war is still correct, but because the merchant ship is too slow to really exert its power, it was sunk by the pickup.

This shows that there is a commander on the Devil merchant ship, and maybe a full-fledged naval officer. In this case, the little devil can see that the remaining three merchant ships are absolutely impossible to support until the reinforcements arrive. Then the answer is coming out - the devil is using four merchant ships to drag the pickup and cover the escape of another merchant ship.

Zheng Xuechang is definitely not stupid, all he lacks is experience. After Su Qing reminded him, he immediately realized his mistake. The little devil is willing to protect a merchant ship at the cost of four merchant ships, which is enough to show that the escaped merchant ship either has important goods or important people.

The fugitive merchant ship must be killed. Now Zheng Xuechang is faced with two choices, the first is to sink the three merchant ships in front of him and then pursue, and the second is to give up the three ships in front of him and start the pursuit directly. You must know that half an hour after the start of the war, the mast of that merchant ship can still be faintly seen on the sea at this time. If it escapes twenty nautical miles, the vast sea has nowhere to search, and the era without radar is like looking for a needle in a haystack, there is no hope.

Zheng Xuechang's brain was running fast, and then he gave a very brutal order - melee combat.

It was obvious that Zheng Xuechang wanted to use torpedoes, and only by using torpedoes could he sink the opponent's three merchant ships as quickly as possible. But the risks immediately proliferated. In the previous battle, the distance between the two sides has been five or six kilometers, and the accuracy of the cannons on the merchant ship is extremely low, while the accuracy of the 88mm guns on the pickup is extremely high.

Once they got closer, the four guns had no advantage over the twelve guns on the merchant ship.

The Pickup quickly approached the merchant ship as the four guns began firing continuously, and the rate of fire of the 88mm guns was extremely high, reaching 15 to 20 rounds a minute. But at this speed, the aiming becomes extremely hurried, and the accuracy is greatly reduced.

The guns on the pickup appear to be double-packed, but in fact they are fighting separately. Due to the close direct distance between the two guns, the gunner can only shoot about ten rounds at the highest speed in order to cooperate, and the normal rate of fire is only about five rounds.

Now the four guns are no longer very concerned about accuracy, and they continue to fire at the merchant ships, so that the firepower is strengthened, and the shooting of the devil gunners poses a great threat.

Zheng Xuechang's estimate was right, the fleeing merchant ships were extremely important, and the four ships left behind really had commanders.

Ben is similar to the United Kingdom in many ways, both are island countries. At the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, he vigorously developed the navy, and almost all of the wars he experienced over the decades were victorious. All this has cultivated and reserved a large number of talents for the navigation industry.

The last time the pickup attacked, the captain of the Sakura was a naval officer. The captains of four of the merchant ships encountered this time were retired naval officers. Therefore, it is said that the merchant ship has shown extraordinary combat effectiveness.

Now that the Pickup was approaching the merchant ship, the commander of the merchant ship immediately realized that danger was coming, but the opportunity had also come.

With the order of the commander of the merchant marine, more than a dozen 75mm guns opened fire non-stop. At a closer distance, the 37mm and 47mm guns on the merchant ships also joined the counterattack.

The pickup almost burst into a hail of bullets, shells constantly falling on the side of the ship, and the water column in the sea was like a forest. It only took 10 minutes for the pickup to reach a distance of 2 kilometers from the merchant ship, and in these 10 minutes, the pickup truck hit more than 20 shells. Casualties are increasing rapidly. The Pickup was not a regular destroyer, it was not armored, but relied on 19 mm thick marine steel plates for protection.

At a long distance, it is impossible for the devil's 75mm gun to penetrate this thin steel plate. However, at a distance of two or three kilometers, although it is still difficult to penetrate by a violent explosion, the violent explosion can already deform the steel plates of the hull and cabin, and even crack the welds.

The gun emplacements of the pickup were too simple, just surrounded by a ring of steel plates, and there was no roof on it. This protection protects personnel from shrapnel, but when the explosion point is too close, the gunner avoids the shrapnel but cannot avoid the shock wave generated by the explosion. In just ten minutes, the gunners were replaced by nearly 20 people, and although there were not many killed, more than 10 were unconscious. It is equivalent to the gunner has been changed, which shows the tragedy of the battle.

But it's all worth it. At a distance of less than three kilometers, the pickup fired six torpedoes in succession.

The torpedo was still crossing the sea, and Zheng Xuechang ordered the pickup to turn around and pursue. There is almost no need to look, at this distance, six torpedoes, if you can't kill the devil's merchant ship, then it's a miracle.

Unlike warships, merchant ships are simply impossible to continue floating on the water if they are torpedoed, even if they are not important.

Although the electric thunder has a short range, there is no sound, no water waves, and the vision under the sunset is not clear. Whether the merchant ship is a warship or not, in order to maintain the formation, the three scarred merchant ships are moving at a speed of less than five knots at this time, and for such a slow target, a dry torpedo soldier and the student soldier in charge of calculation are almost shooting a fixed target, and it is almost impossible for the heavy merchant ship to detect and dodge. What's more, Zheng Xuechang used double insurance, and each merchant ship was given two torpedoes.

The pickup turned around and drove for less than three minutes when a violent explosion was heard. Four torpedoes hit.

At this time, the explosion scene is extremely spectacular. The three merchant ships sank as quickly as collapsed building blocks, and the flames soared dozens of meters into the sky, as gorgeous as fireworks on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month.

The crew was still cheering, and Zheng Xuechang had already gone down to the command room in the bottom warehouse. As mentioned earlier, the Pickup has a peculiar design, in a sense more like a submarine. The command room in the bottom compartment is actually the command compartment of the submarine. This was specially set up by Li Guang in order to train a group of submariners earlier. On a normal destroyer, this is a matter of adding to the problem, but for Li Guang, it is the best way to train troops, and it is also the most cost-effective way.

In this era, a two-thousand-ton destroyer generally had a crew of one hundred and twenty or thirty people. But someone else's destroyer often has twenty or thirty guns, and these gunners alone need fifty or sixty.

And there were only four guns on the pickup, and the allocation of twenty gunners was already seriously overnumbered. But this time the pickup went to sea, in addition to the sixty marines, the crew of the crew was hundred. All these arrangements are for the purpose of training the crew and submarine crew.

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