In the Gulf of Tonkin and on the blue sea, a menacing fleet is sailing with all its sails blazing with its steam engines and moving forward at a rapid pace. The scorching sun overhead could not ease the fleet's cold murderous aura in the slightest. The tall freeboard, the straight and thick muzzles, the momentum is so compelling!

And on the flagpole of each battleship, the red, white and blue tricolor flags fluttering high show their identity!

French Far Eastern Fleet.

Du Bailei stood on the deck of the flybridge in front of the middle chimney of the Basval iron-hulled cruiser, with a calm and contemplative expression on his face, and his deep eagle-like gaze staring at the coastline ahead.

Haiphong – close at hand!

"Boom, boom, boom......"

The gunners spread far inland from the sea, and all eleven French warships, large and small, intervened in the shelling. Haiphong, an important town in northern Vietnam, has now been completely submerged in the smoke of artillery fire.

"Send out the marines, land. Take Haiphong—"

Du Bailei's will was the guideline of the French army's actions. Not long after the order was given, the sampans were released from the battleship by the French into the sea, and groups of French soldiers sat in the sampans. The first landing soldiers, totaling more than two hundred people.

Under the cover of the absolute fire of the naval guns, the sampans rowed towards the shore with all their might.

The four Axe-class iron-hulled gunboats, the Masu, the Turkish Macimitar, the Carbine, and the Javelin, took cover.

In the 60s of the 19th century, the French Navy began to develop ironclad ships, not only large battleships and armored cruisers, but also the French Navy came to the forefront of the world.

The gunboats of the French Navy, marked by a displacement of 250 tons, were divided into two classes, upper and lower. Gunboats of more than 250 tons, mainly positioned to carry out cruising operations, are called ocean-going gunboats, which can go to the far seas alone or with other warships. Gunboats of less than 250 tons, positioned to operate on inland rivers or coasts, are called nearshore gunboats. The four Axe-class iron-hulled gunboats are the result of this development, and they are the most obvious inshore gunboats, or river gunboats.

Behind the four Axe-class iron-hulled gunboats was the military horn of a larger tonnage, but a wooden-hulled gunboat.

This gunboat was the largest of the six gunboats of the French army, weighing four hundred and fifty tons. The small warship with a twin-masted single-chimney layout looks very much like an ordinary steam cargo ship in appearance, the warship adopts the layout of the head and tail buildings, the length of the ship is only 43.43 meters, the width is 7.39 meters, the draft is 2.51-2.74 meters, the power adopts the sail hybrid, there are two steam engines, two-shaft propulsion, and the speed is 8.4-9 knots. The armament of the ship is relatively simple, the main gun is a 5.5-inch caliber forward-loading rifled gun, installed on the first deck, and the secondary gun is a 4.7-inch front-loading rifled gun, installed in the aft building. It's just that because Junle belongs to ocean-going gunboats, the waterline of more than two meters deep is too deep for the Red River, and it can only be followed up and covered.

The Axe-class iron-hulled gunboats were similar to the British mosquito ships. With a displacement of more than 100 tons, it carried a 6.4-inch gun, typical of a small boat carrying a cannon. From the point of view of actual combat, the armament of the four iron-hulled gunboats had a rather fatal flaw, and the ships operating on inland rivers with little room for maneuver did not have any rapid-fire guns for close defense, and once they fell into an ambush on the shore of the inland rivers, their fate would be very worrisome.

However, the French have been rampant on the borders of Vietnam for more than ten years, and they have never encountered such a thing as being ambushed and wrecked by the shore. At most, the Vietnamese, or the Black Flag Army in Beiqi, or the Chinese armed forces, can attack the commercial armed steam ships.

The general of the Nguyen Dynasty stationed in Haiphong was the governor Hoang Yao. I don't know where so many provinces came from in a small Vietnam, and each province has a governor, so that there are governors in the front line of coastal defense.

There were 3,000 to 4,000 Vietnamese soldiers defending the area, and relying on cement purchased from the Qin army, the Vietnamese also built two forts in Haiphong last year. The fort was equipped with all the Han and Yuan artillery of the Qin army. The smallest is also a 12-pounder cannon of the Han Yuan 2 type, the main gun is a 24-pound Han Yuan 4 type, and the secondary gun is an 18-pound Han Yuan 3 gun. As for the pinnacle of the Qin army's old cast cannon, the Han Yuan 5 120 mm front-loading rifled gun, the Vietnamese did not buy any of them. In addition to the fact that the Han Yuan five-style cannon appeared too late [it was successfully trial-cast at the end of last year], the most important reason is that the price is too expensive.

A cast-iron 120-mm front-loading rifled gun cost up to five thousand taels of silver. The maximum life of the barrel is less than 500 rounds, and generally the rifle will wear out when it is about 100 rounds, and the rifle will be worn out if it is less than 300 rounds. The accuracy is not even as good as that of a smoothbore gun. And the rate of fire is a little slower.

Not to mention that compared to breech steel guns, even compared to Armstrong guns, which are also front-loading rifled guns, the Han and Yuan five types are not of the same level. At the same time, this artillery is also known to have the smallest number of cast doors among the artillery produced by the Qin army. Not long after his birth, the Qinnan Iron and Steel Plant was fully put into production, and the output of a large amount of steel provided sufficient raw materials for the Qin Army's modern arsenal.

For a time, breech guns, mini rifles, Han Yuan cannons, and mortar guns have all become a thing of the past. The new arsenal with the Qin Army's Gunpowder Bureau, although its production capacity is far from reaching its own maximum limit, the guns produced have all become the latest breech guns. And when many foreign technicians did not know, the arsenal technicians of the Qin army, under the 'guidance' of Liu Xianam, used the nitrification and fiber invented by Schoenbai, dissolved in ethyl, ether and ethyl and alcohol, and added an appropriate amount of stabilizing agent to it to become glue and form, which was pressed into flakes, cut into strips, dried and hardened, and made the world's first smokeless and gunpowder.

This is the world's first smokeless gunpowder in the true sense of the word. Although Liu Xian's 'guidance' is just a kind of plagiarism, although such smokeless, gunpowder Qin Jun has not yet been able to manufacture on a large scale, because of ethyl, ether and ethyl and alcohol. However, no one knows, does it? No one knows what the French chemist and engineer P. Viely is doing now.

The Chinese technicians who have studied chemistry and technology from foreign lecturers and technicians for many years synthesized TNT, bitters, and acids, created yellow gunpowder, and added nitrate, chemical, and fibers to nitrate, chemical, and glycerin earlier than Nobel, and invented the world's first double, base, and explosive of gums.

It's just that it's not known.

Liu Xian contributed all the knowledge he knew about explosives and medicines. But it can't change anything at all, and the strength and situation of the Qin army can't develop and expand these at all. The Qin army's ammunition is still filled with black powder!

The 12-pound and 18-pound Han Yuan cannon shells that hit the ironclad ships of the Dilxi and Amirin, which are more than 2,000 tons, are completely scratching, and they cannot cause substantial damage at all when they hit the Basval, which is more than 3,000 tons. Only twenty-four pounder guns were capable of damaging the three ships. But if you want to destroy these three battleships, you can't do it with two batteries and four twenty-four-pounder guns.

The wooden-hulled cruisers USS Volda and Fort Reno, the four or five hundred-ton military-hulled gunboats and the Raid, because they had no armor on the outside, were not as good as the Masu, the Turkish scimitar, the carbines, and the javelins in the artillery battle, and the four iron-hulled gunboats of the Great Axe class were 'unscrupulous'.

In the former, a 12-pounder gun can leave a 'scar' even if it is hit, while in the latter, a 12-pounder gun is not exposed at all, even if it is hit by an 18-pounder gun, the shell cannot penetrate the armor. It can only cause 'internal injuries' to the hull.

That's where ironclads come in.

And with the improvement of the level of armor forging, the defense power of iron-hulled and steel-hulled warships will be further improved.

Four 24-pounder guns, six 18-pounder guns, 14 12-pounder guns, and two capped batteries still showed their due 'combat effectiveness' in battle. The Vietnamese soldiers were at least defeated by the French marines after they reached the battery, not by the shelling of French warships at sea, as was the case in the previous war.

The Vietnamese did not die much, leaving less than 200 bodies on the two batteries occupied by the French. The quality of Qin Jun's cement is still very good, with a full one-foot thick cement steel cap, plus the secondary coverage of logs and loess, the protection is quite strong. Even the Basval's eight-inch front-loading rifled main gun failed to lift the lid.

The Vietnamese artillerymen, who did not suffer many casualties, made a mistake that was frequently repeated in the history of the Qing army. He didn't damage the cannon, he just ran away, leaving all the artillery and ammunition intact in the fort. So much so that when the French pushed the artillery out of the fort and turned the direction to bombard the city of Haiphong, the result of the first battle of Beiqi was self-evident.

The two forts built by Vietnam with a great deal of manpower and material resources, and the coastal defense defended by three or four thousand troops, lasted less than two hours, killing and wounding no more than 20 French soldiers, and then the whole army was dispersed.

Four Axe-class iron-hulled gunboats, carrying 200-meter French marines, went straight along the Red River to Hanoi. Before the news of the defeat of the Vietnamese army and the loss of coastal defense reached Hanoi, the French army took the lead outside the city.

Duan Shou, the Vietnamese governor in charge of defending Hanoi, was stunned. He couldn't understand why the French, who were still in Hongji Port yesterday, had been killed in Hanoi today.

Weng Yiqian, the commander of the suppression, immediately reorganized his troops and arranged the defense of the city. Liu Yongfu also withdrew from the original New Army camp with the Black Flag Army. Four iron-hulled gunboats, 200 French soldiers, and the power of the Black Flag Army was not something that the Black Flag Army could resist.

"Sue Lord Sù Weng and Lord Liu, resist it, you must resist Fa Yi!"

Moments of crisis reveal the essence of a person the most. The importance of Hanoi to North Ki in Vietnam is undoubted, but it is a pity that the governor of the defending army, Duan Shou, is now howling and howling. He is not a capable person himself, and he came to Beiqi to follow Wu Zhongping's achievements, and his own talent is really limited.

"Send someone to Haiphong and find Governor Hoang......

"Send someone to Hongji..."

"Go and ask the Heavenly Soldiers to come to the ......'s aid," R1152