The escort mission of the Maritime Resistance Force was mainly to protect the British convoy transporting supplies from Asia. Whether the British fleet was going through the Mediterranean or the southern tip of Africa, Ceylon was a must-stop. The first escort mission that the Maritime Resistance Force took over was to escort British merchant ships docked in Colombo, the capital of Ceylon, into the Arabian Sea and from the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea. After entering the Red Sea, there is no need for the Maritime Resistance Army to intervene. For this, Li Guang felt a little strange.

However, in the eyes of the British, it is normal, Major Smith is not only a liaison officer, but also responsible for communicating with the Naval Resistance Army, and it is naturally Smith's responsibility to explain the battle situation. According to Li Guang's question, Smith was very conscientious and gave a good explanation to the officers of the Naval Resistance Army.

The passage between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea is the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. To the east, the Middle East was now entirely British sphere of influence. To the west of this passage is East Africa, which is obviously at a disadvantage to the British, but Italy, which defeated the British on land, is extremely weak in naval power in this region. That's how the British explained.

Li Guang pointed to a spot on the chart and continued to ask. During the whole escort process, even the British said the truth, but there was one key point that was too strange.

Djibouti, located at the junction of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, was a French colony. And Italy suddenly moved and sent troops from French Somalia to occupy British Somalia, but after hitting Somalia by spell, the French colonial authorities turned into a stronghold of Vichy France, anyway, Vichy France had surrendered to Germany, so naturally it was all the way with Italy, and the two sides were at peace.

To say that this is not surprising, it is strange that the Italians attacked British merchant ships several times. However, the Vichy French forces in Djibouti were indifferent to British merchant ships.

You must know that the narrowest part of the strait in Djibouti is only more than 30 kilometers, and a few warships can block the ocean, not to mention that there are shore artillery batteries facing the strait.

The British explanation for this is fantastic. At the end of the day, Djibouti belonged to Vichy France when the Italians hit it. When British merchant ships passed, the French colonial government in Djibouti was again a Free French de Gaulle. In short, both sides are friendly forces.

After several battles, the British took out Italy's already small navy. On the coast of East Africa, at this time the Italian Navy was nothing more than a few small boats, not even a single gunboat with a displacement of more than five hundred tons. They are now hiding in Mogadishu and several other ports.

Even so, it is a hidden danger for the UK. Now that the British army is now huddled in Kenya, Churchill is preparing to retake Somalia. Transportation to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea is guaranteed.

As a naval resistance force, the task is indeed not arduous on the surface. After all, the few small ships in Italy did not dare to go to sea at all, and even if they did, they were not at all the opponents of the naval resistance army. It looked like only armed German merchant ships and possibly submarine forces were to be dealt with on the surface.

However, Li Guang does not think so, and several Italian bases in East Africa, such as Mogadishu, also have a few fighter jets.

Churchill's ruthlessness was very impressive to Li Guang. Li Guang is ready to nip the danger in the bud.

Therefore, the Naval Resistance Force began to prepare from the moment it arrived in the Indian Ocean, and the Air Force did not go to Ceylon at all, but was already stationed at the British airfield in Yemen in advance. In addition to the six transport planes transporting goods and personnel between Yangon and Kunming, three maritime reconnaissance planes were responsible for mapping the Tang port and guarding the Tang port. Eighty percent of the air power of the Naval Resistance Force is stationed in Yemen.

The anxiety of the British was obvious, and the Naval Resistance Army undertook the first escort mission before they had time to rest. The size of the fleet is quite large, and the port of Colombo in Ceylon has gathered more than 30 ships of all sizes, with a total displacement of more than 150,000 tons. As soon as the Naval Resistance Army arrived, the fleet couldn't wait to set off.

The escort formations of the Maritime Resistance Force were similar to those commonly used by the British. In front of the two Baxia and Jairus open the way, on the flanks are two pickup air defense destroyers, and behind are the battleships Pacific and the seaplane carriers PC .

From Ceylon to the Red Sea, the escort of the Maritime Resistance Army was about 2,000 nautical miles, and it took eight to ten days each way. It is simply overkill to use such a fleet size for escort, but the British are willing to pay for it, and Li Guang naturally will not refuse this kind of training opportunity.

Along the way, the fleet maintained combat alert, and nine seaplanes spread out a warning radius of two hundred kilometers. Curtis's water reconnaissance aircraft had many problems, with low engine horsepower, slow speed, and short range. ARMED WITH ONLY ONE 7.7MM NOSE MACHINE GUN AND ONE REAR COCKPIT 7.7MM MACHINE GUN. The bomb load was only a pitiful sixty pounds.

This seaplane can take off on a catapult, but there is a fatal problem, if there is no headwind on the sea, it cannot take off when it is fully loaded, and if it wants to take off in a windless state, it is difficult to carry even a 60-pound bomb, which is simply garbage in the garbage. However, this is also the only model that can be selected by the Naval Resistance Force, and Li Guang cannot resign. However, this water reconnaissance aircraft has a great advantage - it is cheap, and the purchase price is less than ten thousand dollars.

As for the aerial fighting performance or something, it's simply not worth mentioning. However, the communication facilities are quite good, and the radio station can communicate directly with the battleship within 150 kilometers, and the telegraph can be communicated within 1,000 kilometers.

In fact, even with such a tight escort, Li Guang is still not very relieved, the key is that his fleet is really a rookie.

The battleship Pacific, captained by Lieutenant Commander Zheng Xuechang. From the capture of this warship by the Naval Resistance Army, it has only been seven months in total, and there is still more than a month of maintenance, transformation and upgrading time in between. To say that after six or seven months of training, the battleship is also slightly combat-effective. However, the problem is that due to the shortage of personnel in the early stage, the training is only to familiarize itself with the performance of the warship, and the combat capability is still at a rather weak level. In fact, it wasn't until October that the battleship Pacific was really fully manned. Among them are more than 100 naval officers and men who have just been recruited from China.

From one indicator, you can know how strong this battleship is. The battleship's strongest combat power, the main gun salvo training, was carried out only once in more than half a year.

On the two pickup destroyers, the captain is a veteran, but the actual captain was only a few days before the expedition to Statue Island. The captain of the first pickup is the original Fujian naval captain Huang Qingyi, and the captain of the second pickup is the original captain of the Jianwei naval captain. The captain of the seaplane carrier PC was Colonel Zhang Qianwen of the Northeast Navy. One of the captains of the Baxia and Jianwei is the original Cantonese major Chen Fan, and the other is Lin Zhaoyuan, a naval captain from Nanyang.

From these captains, you can see the talent dilemma of the Maritime Resistance Army. Li Guang didn't know much about four of them, and he didn't know much about their abilities and personalities, just because of their resumes, some of them had served as captains, and some had served as captains of torpedo boats.

The only captain who was more satisfied was Zhang Qianwen, the captain of the PC. Li Guang had little understanding of the Chinese Navy before, but it was only after he came into contact with more than 300 naval officers and men who had defected to Shixiang Island in China that he gained a deeper understanding. It was only at this time that Li Guang did not know that the Chinese Navy, or the Northeast Navy, had already possessed a "Zhenhai" seaplane carrier. However, what is sad is that this seaplane carrier of more than 2,000 tons has sunk itself on December 26, 1937 after the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War. Zhang Qianwen, who is now 46 years old, has been serving on this warship since Zhang Zuolin's service, and has served as a sailor, a gunner, and a mechanic (this position in the Naval Resistance Army is the chief engineer. At the time of the sinking, he was the first mate of the "Zhenhai" at that time. Even so, Zhang Qianwen's command ability for the PC was also very lacking, after all, the PC had a displacement of more than 15,000 tons and a speed of up to 23 knots, making it a large ocean-going vessel. At the beginning, the Zhenhai had a displacement of only 2,700 tons and a speed of only 12 knots, which was a huge gap. Moreover, Li Guang has always attached importance to communications, and the radio stations and telegrams equipped on the PC number have never been seen by Zhang Qianwen at all. Even the seaplane catapult was seen for the first time when it arrived at the Maritime Resistance Army. All this was a challenge for this veteran, and it was not easy to train this seaplane carrier to be combat-ready. However, this veteran soldier in the Northeast can withstand three months of brutal recruit training, and Li Guang is very optimistic. What is more interesting about Zhang Qianwen's experience is that he learned his knowledge of ships and aircraft from the Russians, because the warlord Zhang Zuolin was originally invited by the Russians to renovate and train this warship, but later due to the dispute over the right of way in the Middle East, Zhang Qianwen fought with the Soviet Navy.

And these few naval officers from China have a shortcoming that Li Guang did not expect, so many naval officers and men, not to mention commanding warships, even almost none of them have crossed the equator by warships. That is, I have not experienced ocean training. From this point of view, even the officers of the Chinese Navy can hardly be said to be able to take on combat missions. Li Guang's fleet has a total of nearly 2,000 people, and the officers are in such a situation, and the soldiers can hardly be called elite, especially the technical soldiers, and it is not easy to maintain these warships to normal operation.

This is the fleet of the Naval Resistance Army, and Li Guang knows that this can only be regarded as a fleet at the elementary school level. However, this schoolboy-level fleet also has some advantages.

The officers and men of some departments in the navy are still good, such as the anti-aircraft gunners on the pickup, such as the sonar corps, signal corps, and signal corps of various battleships, and the lookout posts are quite good. This is the situation of the Shanghai Resistance Army in general, and if it does not strengthen its training, it may only be used as an escort fleet.

Although they had shortcomings of one kind or another, Li Guang was very satisfied with the attitude of the officers and men of the navy, and they all knew the gaps, knew hard work, and knew that only by training hard could they have combat effectiveness. Whenever the training was carried out, the slogan of the whole ship was: "Kill all little Japan." ”

Li Guang spent so much energy not to escort this fleet, but to fight the Japanese navy. A fully staffed fleet has a long way to go if it is to be fully combat-capable. To meet Li Guang's requirements, it depends on the escort training in the Indian Ocean in the past few months.

For mobile phone users, please read it on m.qidian.com.