PS: The update during the Spring Festival is not coherent enough, sorry. Here, I would like to thank all the book friends who rewarded during the Spring Festival: Lazy Qi, Mr. Wuliu 888, Bealonge, Lao Gourmet, Lao Wang Arthur and other book friends voted for the monthly ticket.

Since receiving information from Singapore, the General Staff has been operating at a high speed.

At seven o'clock in the evening, Li Guang was about to eat when he again received a piece of information about the Japanese reinforcement fleet -- this information was sent back by Colonel Zhang Qianwen, who was on a mission to set fire.

Zhang Qianwen completed the task of setting fire to Sumatra on 21 July, and the seaplane carrier PJP began to return home.

On the way back, Zhang Qianwen did not forget about aerial reconnaissance, and as long as the weather permitted, one-third of the water reconnaissance planes carried out uninterrupted air patrols and vigilance. This method of using air alert to ensure the safety of the fleet has become a regular practice in the naval resistance forces. However, for seaplane carriers, this approach also has a little side effect. The water reconnaissance planes landed on the sea, and it took a long time to recover the fighters, and if the situation went smoothly, it would take about an hour to recover the four water reconnaissance planes. Such frequent operations will delay the fleet's trip. But compared to the security of the fleet, these reconnaissance activities are completely worth it.

On the evening of 23 July, Zhang Qianwen's diligent reconnaissance activities paid off. Zhang Qianwen's fleet sailed from east to west, and the north of the fleet was the island of Sumatra, and the south side was the vast sea. From the point of view of reconnaissance, the proximity to the Sumatran side and the front (west) of the fleet was the focus of reconnaissance, so the four water reconnaissance aircraft were deployed in both directions of the fleet.

After searching the northeast direction of the fleet, reconnaissance aircraft No. 4 made a circle to the south on its return. As a matter of fact, this was an impromptu action by the pilot of the No. 4 reconnaissance plane, and the pilot, Xue Chunyi, was the leader of the flight team on the PJP. In fact, it was only to maximize the effectiveness of the reconnaissance operation.

The weather conditions on the 23rd were really good, and although there was no radar on the reconnaissance plane, the visual range of the naked eye could reach 30 kilometers away, so he was sure that there were no Japanese ships in the sector area he searched. Therefore, he felt that he should search the rear area of his own fleet by the way when he returned.

At 6:50 a.m., on the No. 4 reconnaissance plane, Xue Chunyi's partner, Second Lieutenant Fang Shuang, a telecommunications officer, discovered the Japanese reinforcement fleet led by Vice Admiral Okawauchi Fu 7, commander of the Japanese Southern Fleet.

Fang Shuang saw through the binoculars that there were two "aircraft carriers" in the Japanese fleet, so he immediately sent a report regardless of the danger.

Xue Chunyi was bold when he discovered that the Japanese fleet was large and there were aircraft carriers. However, there were no Japanese fighters in the clear sky, so he boldly flew the reconnaissance plane over the Japanese fleet.

He took great risk and slipped a corner over the Japanese fleet, and the anti-aircraft guns of the Japanese fleet that he seduced opened fire one after another. And then walked away. At the same time, the telecommunications officer Fang Shuang took more than a dozen photos of the Japanese fleet.

Zhang Qianwen was frightened by the sudden intelligence and was covered in a cold sweat. Zhang Qianwen has been in the army for more than 20 years and has rich experience. But the more this is the case, the more he is afraid. You must know that Xue Chunyi found that the position of the Japanese fleet was only more than 150 kilometers away from the rear of the PJP. If the Japanese sent reconnaissance aircraft. There is little chance of getting out of the PJP.

Luck, pure luck.

To say that it is Zhang Qianwen's luck. And that's not wrong. If Zhang Qianwen knew. The Japanese fleet had been dangling behind him for two days, and it was not just a cold sweat that was scared, but a waterfall sweat.

In fact, Zhang Qianwen's luck was purely caused by Vice Admiral Fu Qi Okawauchi, commander of the Japanese Southern Fleet. As mentioned earlier, this Vice Admiral Fu 7 Okawauchi is more unusual in the Japanese Navy.

In the Japanese Navy, there are big ships and huge artillery factions, and there are aviation factions. But Lieutenant General Fu Qi of Okawauchi is not a faction. This guy is a navy, but he is a land faction.

The navy is all fighting at sea, how can there be a land faction? This is related to the experience of Lieutenant General Okawauchi Fuqi, or rather, the reason why Okawauchi Fuqi was able to hang the rank of lieutenant general.

This Dachuan Fu Qi was in the Battle of Songhu in 813 in the third and seventh years. At that time, he led several Marine Corps groups of the Japanese Navy to fight against the Chinese army, and with the support of naval guns, he resisted the Chinese army's attack like a tide with weak forces. If it were not emotional, Major General Fu Qi of Okawauchi at that time, as a naval general, commanded the battle in Shanghai really well, and it can be said that he was no worse than several well-known army commanders of the Chinese army at that time.

When Li Guang was in Shanghai, he saw the Japanese naval artillery bombarding Shanghai, which was the order given by this guy. In this sense, this Lieutenant General Fu Qi in Dachuan can be regarded as the sworn enemy of Li Guang, Su Qing, Bao Gang and several other officers of the Naval Resistance Army who were dug up from the German Armament Division.

Okawauchi Fuchi also became famous because of this, and was also promoted to vice admiral of the Japanese Navy. However, this Vice Admiral Fu 7 Okawauchi has not commanded the fleet since very early on. However, in his decades-long naval career, Fu Qi Okawauchi also started as a destroyer, and went through the positions of cruiser, heavy cruiser and even battleship captain, not that he lost his basic tactical literacy. However, its thinking is aging, and it is even more serious than the traditional large ships and huge artillery school of the Japanese army, and it does not pay any attention to the role of air power in naval warfare.

The Japanese army general on Ceylon Island, Nishimura Takuma, kept urging reinforcements, and Lieutenant General Fu Qi Okawauchi had been in China for a long time, but he really knew that saving troops was like fighting fires, and in order to avoid delaying the trip, the fleet left the Sunda Strait and entered the Indian Ocean, and the Japanese fleet did not even release a reconnaissance plane.

In fact, Vice Admiral Fushichi Okawauchi's extreme contempt for the role of aircraft in naval warfare was not a special case in the Japanese Navy. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway made many Japanese naval commanders see the role of aircraft carriers, but they also made some Japanese naval generals see the fragility of aircraft carriers, and thus went so far as to attach importance to the opposite of the new type of weapons of aircraft carriers. Okawauchi Fuchi is one of them.

Specific to this mission, Lieutenant General Okawauchi Fu Qi is actually not too worried, in his opinion. A simple supply and reinforcement mission doesn't need to be a big deal at all. This time, the fleet led by Vice Admiral Fu 7 Okawauchi used two heavy cruisers as the main combat strength.

Although it is difficult for him to win a real aircraft carrier, it is not that he cannot win the support of battleships, you must know that there are still two battleships moored in the port of Singapore.

An extremely important reason is that he does not pay attention to escorts at all. In his opinion, the escort of ten transports with fourteen battleships is simply a waste.

Okawauchi's mathematics is very problematic, although the Japanese fleet is indeed twenty-four, but it is actually this configuration: two heavy cruisers, two: aircraft carriers. Six destroyers, one tired cruiser, five minesweepers, six merchant ships, two tankers.

Schoolchildren can figure it out: this is obviously sixteen warships escorting eight merchant ships and oil tankers. How is it fourteen ships to escort ten? It turned out that Vice Admiral Fu Qi Okawauchi did not treat the two aircraft carriers as battleships at all. Rather, the two aircraft carriers were treated as transport ships.

Of course. These two aircraft carriers of the Great Eagle. The carrier Yunying is actually similar to an aircraft carrier. Compared with the PC aircraft carrier of the Maritime Resistance Army, the two Japanese aircraft carriers have a larger displacement and are fully loaded with more than 20,000 tons. However, due to the stinginess inherent in small Japan, the transformation was not complete at all. Although the PC aircraft carrier of the Maritime Resistance Army cannot fly fighters, it can carry sixty or seventy fighters, while the two aircraft carriers of the little devils can only carry about 30 fighters.

And the Japanese two aircraft carriers. The strange design of being able to fly fighter planes but not recovering them is too strange for any country's navy to understand. Is it after the release of the fighter plane. Don't care if the pilot lives or dies?

That's the thinking of the little devils. The Japanese generals have always used pilots as machines, which is already quite enlightened. The use of pilots as one-time consumables is the evil heart of many Japanese generals, and it is estimated that Onishi Takijiro carried out a kamikaze suicide attack at the end of the war.

However, Vice Admiral Fu Qi did not attach importance to these two aircraft carriers, but these two aircraft carriers really frightened Zhang Qianwen, who did not know the details, and also attracted Li Guang's attention.

The more attention the Naval Resistance Army attaches to it, the more dangerous the escort mission of Lieutenant General Fu Qi of Okawauchi becomes. By the middle of '42, the number of merchant ships lost by Japan in the Pacific Ocean was close to one million tons, but the Japanese still did not realize the difficulty of escorting convoys. This kind of cognitive error doomed the Japanese army to suffer a big loss. This kind of great loss was not only in the Indian Ocean, but also almost simultaneously in the Solomon Sea and the Coral Sea, where the Japanese and American forces fought fiercely.

The task of Lieutenant General Fu 7 Okawauchi was to escort the transport ships first, and first, to assist the Japanese land forces in attacking Tang Port. How about the two firsts? It is not surprising that little Japan has always been like this, and the Japanese products of later generations have been refined, and every detail has been done very well. During the operation, the same was true of the thinking of small Japan, and both tasks had to be completed, so these two tasks were tied for first place.

Convoy escort is definitely not a simple matter, and the British army has recently carried out two convoy operations, both of which were to support the Allied forces on the small island of Malta in the Mediterranean. For the first time, the British dispatched cruisers, destroyers, submarines, a total of forty-three warships, escorted eleven transports, and even threw an old battleship as a decoy, and the ratio of battleships and transports reached exactly four to one, but the result still ended in failure under the sneak attack of the Italian Navy. The second time, the British army dispatched nearly 100 warships, including two aircraft carriers, to protect six transport ships to supply Malta. But in the end, only two transport ships reached Malta. However, these two ships of arms played a huge role in ensuring that the Allies stabilized the situation in Malta and laid a solid foundation for the victory of the Allies.

The two aircraft carriers in the hands of Lieutenant General Fu Qi in Okawauchi, if they were real aircraft carriers, maybe the escort mission would have been better completed, but they were only two aircraft carriers with missing functions, and they were destined to suffer a big loss in the hands of the Maritime Resistance Army. However, on the evening of the 23rd, Li Guang's mood was not so relaxed -- he did not know at this time that the two Japanese aircraft carriers were actually just goods.

The Naval Resistance Army was the first to spot the Japanese fleet, and the PJP was even more fortunate not to be attacked by the Japanese air. It should be said that the Naval Resistance Force has already taken the lead.

The first strike was very important, but due to the existence of two "aircraft carriers" in the Japanese fleet, the naval resistance forces seriously lacked air strike power, and the effectiveness of the first strike was seriously weakened. The so-called discovery is to destroy, but the discovery is to discover, and it is almost impossible to break through the Japanese air defense with the twelve water reconnaissance planes on the PJP alone, and the water reconnaissance planes are not fighters, let alone bombers, so they cannot be fatal blows to the Japanese fleet.

It is estimated that it will take another five to six days for the 7th fleet of Okawauchi Fu to reach Ceylon. The two pieces of information obtained by the Maritime Resistance Army won Li Guang five to six days of deployment time, and these five or six days were a big preemption for the Naval Resistance Army.

During the Battle of Midway, Li Guang repeatedly marveled at the intelligence capabilities and reconnaissance capabilities of the US military. In the upcoming naval battle of Ceylon, whether it was due to the sacrifice of the Nanyang guerrillas or Zhang Qianwen's luck, the intelligence and reconnaissance of the naval resistance army achieved fruitful results. Earn a big first move for the Naval Resistance Army.

As soon as the information was confirmed, Li Guang quickly began to mobilize all the forces at hand and began to deploy the fleet intensively. (To be continued......) (To be continued......)