When the battle in the northeast was raging, the summer harvest on the Jiaodong Peninsula had already ended, and autumn crops such as corn and sorghum in the fields had produced tender green seedlings. In the countryside near Lancun on the Jiaoji Railway, the villagers and peasant women are busy in the fields, and from time to time they look up at the huge airport with a length of more than ten miles not far away and the hundreds of huge planes neatly parked on the airport apron.

The peasants of Jiaodong had seen airplanes, and in Qingdao, the Germans had built airfields in Sifang and Lishan very early, and opened civil aviation routes very early. However, since last autumn, the people in various parts of Jiaodong have been mobilized, and in less than half a year, more than a dozen large military airports have been built on the entire Jiaodong Peninsula.

After the completion of these airfields, several rows of huge warehouses, buildings and barracks were erected next to them, and the Wehrmacht also drove over, laid a cordon around the airfield, and deployed a number of artillery positions in the vicinity. The barrels of these guns were long, camouflaged with branches, and the long barrels were pointed at the sky like a grove.

When all this was done, from spring onwards, a group of huge planes of the swarm type fell from the sky, and these planes were so huge that man stood under the planes, not as tall as his wheels. By comparison, the dozen or so fighter jets on the airfield are like children's toys. When these planes are dispatched, a loud roar can be heard for dozens of miles.

"Look! That's the SMB41 heavy bomber of our own production and manufacture! This may be an epoch-making weapon, enough to make the Strategic Air Force an important force alongside the Army and Navy, and now it is time to show its strength. Standing on the hillside near the airport, the director of the aviation administration, Ba Yuzao, said with a proud look on his face to the head of the German military advisory group, General Falkenhausen, who was beside him. According to the plan, tomorrow these bombers will take off. Go bomb the Japanese mainland.

The reason why I personally accompanied the German-Austrian military delegation to inspect the preparations for the airport in Jiaodong was to witness this historical moment.

Looking at the rows of huge bombers in the airfield, Admiral Falkenhausen was also lamenting the tremendous progress of China's aviation industry and manufacturing technology. Although the SMB41 heavy bomber was a technology that caused the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was well aware of the difficulty of manufacturing this heavy bomber, which was already in Germany, and only a few large aircraft manufacturing companies could make it. The fact that the Chinese can imitate it is enough to show that their aviation industry has finally caught up with the world-class level.

The heavy bombers on the airfield below the hill began to line up in front of the runway with the help of tractors, and the service vehicles had already driven to the planes, and the ground crews were loading the fuselage with new aerial bombs weighing more than a ton. In the past year, the Chinese side has built several large air bases on the Jiaodong Peninsula, from which SMB39 or SMB41 heavy bombers can bomb almost the entire territory of Japan, and the entire Japanese archipelago is within the combat radius of the air force's strategic bombers.

Tomorrow's bombing will be the largest bombing campaign launched by the Chinese Air Force since its establishment. Nearly a thousand heavy bombers took off from airfields on the Jiaodong Peninsula, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, targeting the Japanese industrial zone centered on Tokyo. Such bombing campaigns would continue in the coming days, aimed at destroying Japan's industry and economy and undermining the confidence of the Japanese people to resist.

In the European theater, because they have not been able to seize air supremacy, the results of the strategic bombing of the British Isles by Germany and Austria are not very satisfactory, but the bombing of the Ural industrial areas of Soviet Russia has achieved quite good results. The industrial capacity of the Soviet army has been greatly weakened.

After more than a year of hard work and preparation, especially after the capture of several military airfields in the Ryukyus. The fighters taken off by the army air force have been able to escort the bomber units throughout the entire journey, and the conditions are finally ripe for a large-scale strategic bombing of the Japanese archipelago. With the approval of the General Headquarters of the Far Eastern Theater and the General Staff of the Chinese National Defense Forces, the joint strategic air force units of China, Germany and Austria began to carry out bombing against Japan.

According to the operational plan, the primary targets of the bombing were Japan's steel, aviation, and shipbuilding military industrial centers centered on Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, with iron and steel plants, aircraft factories, and shipyards as the focus of attack. Incendiary bombing of targets with napalm.

"It's finally time for you to show what you can do." Colonel Gao Zhihang, captain of the 12th Bomber Group, looked at the behemoth on the tarmac and was in a very happy mood. He commanded one of the three most advanced SMB41 strategic bomber groups of the Chinese Air Force, which had just been successfully trial-produced and then introduced into China for production. With the help of Austria-Hungary, the country quickly rebuilt three SMB41 aircraft manufacturing lines in Beijing, Xi'an and Wuhan. And at the end of last year, the trial production was successful. However, due to the manufacturing technology more than ten times more complex than the previous fighters, the production of SMB41 is frighteningly low, only less than 10 can be produced per month, relying on this domestic production, plus 36 SMB41 assisted by Austria-Hungary, the Chinese Air Force finally formed three SMB41 bomber groups.

There are currently four bomber groups at Lancun Airport, in addition to the 36 B-41s of the 12th Bomber Group, 36 B-39s of the 5th Bomber Group, and 76 heavy bombers of the two bomber groups of the German-Austrian Far East Joint Air Force. A regiment of guards was deployed around the airport, as well as four anti-aircraft artillery batteries with a total of 48 anti-aircraft guns of various types and 32 twin anti-aircraft machine guns.

The entire airport was busy, with ground crews refueling, loading ammunition and doing final checks on the planes, while pilots gathered in the war room to study and simulate flight paths. The mechanic reported that two planes had mechanical problems and could not go into battle tomorrow. The SMB41 is a very good aircraft, but due to the heavy load, the engines are prone to problems.

Gao Zhihang frowned after receiving the report and did not say anything, "Maybe the latest jet turbine engine can solve this problem, but the reliability of that kind of engine is also a problem now." He said inwardly, glancing up at the route map hanging on the wall.

"After dinner, all the captains and navigators met in the war room to assign combat missions." He gave the order to the combat staff officer, although he appeared calm on the surface, but his face still showed some excitement, the war of resistance had been going on for six years, and now it was finally the turn of the Japanese to taste the bombing. The Chinese Air Force could drop bombs from the sky with impunity, destroying Japanese factories and cities, and felt no guilt for attacking civilian facilities.

In the war room, Lieutenant General Li Zaolin, commander of the Chinese Strategic Air Force, Major General Zhou Xiangqian, chief of staff of the Air Force, and Major General Kukoc, commander of the German-Austrian Joint Bomber Wing in the Far East, were still discussing the combat plan around the flight map. The bomber units that took off from Jiaodong and northern Jiangsu did not fly directly to the Japanese mainland, but first headed southeast, joined up with the bomber units that took off from Zhejiang and the fighter units that took off from the Ryukyu airfield, and then turned north and flew to the Japanese mainland.

The focus of the bombing campaign was not on Tokyo, but on strategic targets such as the Nakajima Aircraft Factory in Nagoya, the Yasan Iron Works and the Kawasaki Aircraft Factory on Kyushu Island, the Nagasaki Shipyard, the Kure Navy Shipyard in Hiroshima, and the Sasebo Naval Base, ship repair yards, and oil depots. This bombing plan was jointly formulated under the auspices of Major General Kukoc, Major General Ding Jixu, Colonel Gao Zhihang, and others, and it drew on some of the experiences and lessons of past bombing against Japan, and the main change was that according to Japan's characteristics, the bombing method was mainly napalm.

Now, the flames of war are finally about to burn on the heads of the Japanese. (To be continued.) )