As we enter July, the weather begins to improve.

On July 2, it was cloudy and windless.

The squadrons took off from Trincomalee airfield in Ceylon to rendezvous with the aircraft carriers that had already departed.

When a torpedo plane landed on the "Guangxi," it crashed into the rear flight deck of the aircraft carrier, and immediately turned into a pile of debris and tumbled headlong into the sea. The escorting destroyer sped to the accident site, busy rescuing the pilots who had fallen overboard. Rear Admiral Sa Shijun, commander of China's Second Air Fleet, stood on the bridge and looked at the incident in front of him with a frown, although it was not uncommon for various landing accidents on aircraft carriers, but when he set out for the expedition, he still felt a little bad omen.

This feeling was very strange, and it had always made him feel very uncomfortable in the bottom of his heart.

The Austro-Chinese Combined Fleet was ordered to go to the waters near the Bentawe Strait to support the landing operations of the Marines in the Bengkulu area. Soon after the pilots of the Chinese air fleet landed on the aircraft carrier, the blackboard in the waiting room wrote the battle order to intercept the actions of the Japanese fleet outside the Sunda Strait, which caused a burst of excited cheers among the pilots, and after more than two years of grievance, they finally had the opportunity to fight the Japanese fleet in real time. For the next three days, the crew's discussions revolved around how to bomb Japanese warships and the humiliation of the Chinese Navy since the First Sino-Japanese War.

By noon on 5 July, the fleet had sailed to the western part of the island of Ngano, which was essentially south of Sumatra. The swells on the sea were very strong, and the weather was not very good, and from time to time there were large areas of cumulonimbus clouds over the fleet.

The entire Austrian-Chinese fleet formed a circular air defense formation, circled around the sea, and waited for the German task force to come and rendezvous. Now almost the entire Axis expeditionary fleet was dispatched, leaving only two Italian converted aircraft carriers to carry out a vigilance mission in the Bay of Bengal.

In the center of the fleet, the ten aircraft carriers were spaced about 10 chains apart, led by the "Grand Duke of Istria" and "Queen Irene", followed by the "Bosnia" and "Macedonia", and the "Albania" and "Dalmatia" with smaller displacement were mixed into three columns with four Chinese aircraft carriers, and there were six large supply ships behind. Around these aircraft carriers was an inner ring of four battleships, four heavy cruisers, and six large anti-aircraft light cruisers, and in the outer layer of the fleet, an anti-submarine and anti-aircraft warning circle of eight light cruisers and sixteen destroyers.

In the southern part of the Mentawai Islands, General Marshall's flagship "Prussia" was moving at full speed on the sea, and finally came into sight of the Austrian-Chinese fleet. Behind the flagship was a large convoy of transports, and according to the plan, the Austro-Hungarian 1st Marine Division would first carry out a landing operation in Bengkulu, and the German fleet would provide sea support and air cover for this landing operation, while attracting the Japanese fleet to dispatch.

The Austrian-Chinese combined fleet lay in ambush at the predetermined ambush site behind it, waiting for the Japanese fleet to appear before launching an attack immediately.

The battleship "Prussia" with a standard displacement of more than 46,000 tons looks majestic and majestic on the outside, which is very in line with the image of the capital ship in people's traditional consciousness. Viewed from a distance of about 4 or 5 nautical miles, the battleship's heavy body and 10 410 mm guns still give a strong shock. The aura of the old sea hegemon is fading, but the influence on the battlefield is still incomparable to that of aircraft carriers.

Looking at this sea area with rolling black waves, about half of the surface ship forces of the Axis navies have been concentrated, and there is practically no country in the world that can withstand their attacks. The German Navy's "York-class" aircraft carriers and the Austro-Hungarian Navy's "Istria-class" and "Romanian-class" aircraft carriers have a standard displacement of more than 40,000 tons, and are equipped with more than 100 carrier-based aircraft, which is the most powerful aircraft carrier in the world, while the other 8 "Graf Zeppelin-class" aircraft carriers, although the standard displacement is 27,500 tons, are classified as medium-sized aircraft carriers by the German-Austrian Navy, in fact, they have 76 carrier-based aircraft, The combat effectiveness was not inferior to the main aircraft carriers of the countries of this period.

Rear Admiral Sa Shijun took the Jiao Tongshu to the "Archduke Friedrich" for a regular pre-war meeting, while in the war room of the Guangxi, the combat staff officers were boredly discussing how many planes would need to be sent if they wanted to sink a heavy battleship like the "Prussia". The German Navy's "Deutschland-class" battleships were quite strong in defense, and had quite a few watertight compartments and large reserve buoyancy. It is impossible to sink such a heavy battleship if any three watertight compartments on either side are penetrated, and it is estimated that the battleship can withstand six aerial torpedoes on either side. If it is a single ship, the "Guangxi" only needs to send a wave of attacks to get rid of it, but if it is to act with the fleet, the Chinese fleet needs all four aircraft carriers to be dispatched at the same time to level the fleet.

The results of the war games made the personnel in the aircraft carrier's war room very excited, and at least if the "Guangxi" had a one-on-one confrontation with the German super battleship, it would have an eighty percent chance of winning.

The fleet continued to cruise the waters bordering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with rolling waves and hot and humid conditions. The absence of the annoying cumulonimbus clouds in the sky, the scorching sun in the sky, made it even more sad, and the crew working on the warship felt as if they were about to be scorched. At a depth of more than ten meters inside the warship, the temperature also exceeded 30 degrees Celsius.

The water is almost opaque, showing the black-blue of the current of the bay, and the USS Guangxi, like any other warship, is navigating the heat and humidity of summer on the equatorial ocean. The steel plates on the outside of the warship are covered with salt grains, and the inside of the ship is filled with distilled water formed by water vapor. The tropical scorching sun scorched the flight deck, the superstructure and anti-aircraft artillery, the pillars, the railings, all the superstructures were so hot that the skin would burn if they touched it.

I don't know if it was because of the sun or because the harsh sunlight would dazzle the lookouts, but in the next hour or so, the fleet issued two enemy alarms in succession, and the news of the discovery of enemy submarines or enemy planes came out, so it was necessary to come to the old scrambling emergency evasion operation: all the ships made a sharp turn, the flight deck was desperately tilted to the side, and the sailors hurried to catch up with the gun positions and aim at the target. The escorting destroyers splashed and crossed the sea, speeding forward, searching for suspicious targets; Then comes the tiresome waiting, disarming the alarm, retrieving the plane, and resuming the daily routine.

This scene has been repeated many times in the past few days, and in the end it turned out to be a false alarm, and the Japanese submarines did not appear in the waters of the area, but the Axis fleet had deployed more than 30 submarines in and around the Sunda Strait to carry out vigilance and surveillance activities.

Admiral Sa Shijun returned to his flagship, and the entire Austro-Chinese task force circled and circled the southern part of the Mentawai Islands on the sea, and Admiral Yankel's battle plan was no different from the naval battle in the North Atlantic, with the German fleet protecting the landing fleet in Bengkulu and the Austrian-Chinese combined fleet in ambush behind it.

Will the Japanese fall into the trap this time, just like the British? R1152