It seems that he will finally be able to fight the Japanese at sea.

The Japanese put on a very strange formation, and the battlefleet led by Yamamoto passed through the Osumi Strait and entered the East China Sea. Vice Admiral Ozawa led the Third Sentai Group, including five aircraft carriers, to continue south along the outer side of the Ryukyu Islands. It seems that the Japanese still did not understand the essence of naval aviation tactics and still expected a decisive battleship battle.

Come on!

Maybe it's the battleship plot buried in the bones of every admiral, Wilmots? Admiral Yankel ordered the battleships that were shelling Okinawa to withdraw from the battle, and the German-Chinese air fleet under the command of Sashijun was to deal with the air fleet of Koga Mineichi, while he was ready to command the 15-ship battleship fleet with Admiral Marshall to meet Yamamoto.

Now the battleships were concentrating near Kume Island, marching north in formation, and it seemed that Yankel was preparing for a Jutland-style naval artillery battle with the Japanese.

15 to 8, Jankel is of course full of confidence, and in terms of numbers, he has an absolute advantage. However, he always believed that the "Yamato-class" battleships were equipped with the 420 mm naval guns that the Japanese claimed to the outside world, and if he knew that those two giant ships were equipped with 460 mm main guns, I wonder if he would still be interested in having an artillery battle with the Japanese?

The submarine force had been monitoring the movements of the Japanese, and several long-range bombers taking off from eastern China also circled around Yamamoto's head a few times and dropped several aerial bombs. The aerial bombs did not hit the target at sea, but it made Yamamoto even more anxious.

The two battlefleets were moving in the opposite direction, and Yankel's battlefleet was followed by nine aircraft carriers, and if they were going at the current speed, the two fleets would meet in about 10 hours. Such. Yankel and Yamamoto, the two main opponents in this naval battle, will face off in the ocean about 500 nautical miles apart.

Yamamoto, 55 years old, was a strong-willed and experienced naval veteran, but he was not as proficient in aviation tactics as the Japanese boasted. As a matter of fact. Yamamoto has always used battleships separately from aircraft carriers. If in the Battle of Sumatra, Yamamoto's battlefleet had acted together with Nagumo's air fleet, the Japanese Navy would not have suffered such heavy losses, after all, the battleships were able to provide powerful anti-aircraft fire support for aircraft carriers, and the Axis pilots had much more difficulty in attacking the Japanese aircraft carriers.

There will never be ifs in this world, and after the loss of five aircraft carriers, in fact, the Japanese Navy simply could no longer be an opponent of the Far East Fleet of the Axis powers.

Now Yamamoto's main fleet, consisting of eight battleships and ten heavy cruisers. In addition, there were several light cruisers and destroyers, forming a huge fleet that broke through the blue waves in the Osumi Strait. Among the battleships in his possession were two giant battleships "Yamato" and "Musashi", each weighing 70,000 tons. Both of these giant ships were secretly built in violation of the Navy's arms limitation treaty, and were armed with eighteen-inch cannons that had not yet fired at the enemy.

The Japanese hoped to turn the tide of the war with these two secrets.

In Yankel's fleet, only the "Combined Forces" and "Emperor Franz" and Wilhelm? The two German battleships "Prussia" and "Lorraine" under the command of Admiral Marshall were armed with 410-mm naval guns, and due to the difference in the caliber of the main guns, the Japanese battleships were actually able to hit farther. And it's much more destructive.

In fact, it makes no practical sense to compare these things at all, in today's rapid development of naval tactics. In fact, these battleships were basically reduced to chicken ribs. Aircraft on submarines and aircraft carriers, posing a threat that those artillery can't cope with. Therefore, in Yamamoto's view, everything still depends on Koga's air fleet to lure the enemy. As long as they lured the Axis fleet out of the waters, he might be able to break into the waters of Okinawa and use his cannon to bombard the convoys that were preparing to land in Okinawa.

The aircraft carrier, commanded by the warlike Vice Admiral Ozawa, has already been dispatched. Heading directly south from Kyushu Island to Okinawa, more than 600 land-based combat planes of the Navy's First Air Force under the command of Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda were also concentrated at airfields in southern Kyushu. However, what worried Yamamoto was that the enemy soon discovered the whereabouts of Ozawa's fleet. The Japanese Navy devised a very sophisticated but useless tactic of luring the enemy into the range of the Axis fleet. The 1st Air Force and Ozawa's fleet carried out a two-sided flanking attack to inflict heavy damage on the enemy.

However, the enemy refused to be fooled and continued to hover in the waters southeast of Okinawa, remaining outside the combat radius of land-based combat aircraft taking off from the Japanese mainland. Tsunoda was helpless. They had to reluctantly send air reinforcements to Okinawa, but suffered heavy losses under the enemy's blows.

Ozawa, who had been hovering around the Togara Strait under his command, was ordered to direct the enemy's air fleet to the waters northeast of the Daito Islands by the early morning of June 5 to create the conditions for Yamamoto's fleet to raid Okinawa. But the question is whether he can accomplish such a task, but the staff officers of the Navy Command Department do not think about it at all, or do not want to think about it.

The enemy has built an impregnable sea barrier in the waters of Okinawa, with a total of 18 aircraft carriers, while Ozawa has only 6 aircraft carriers in his hands, and even with the addition of the two modified aircraft carriers "Chiyoda" and "Chitose" in Yamamoto's fleet, it is half the number of aircraft carriers compared to the enemy. The gap in the number of carrier-based aircraft between the two sides was even greater, with the Axis fleet having more than 1,500 combat aircraft, while the Japanese fleet had a total of 430 combat aircraft. In the face of such a formidable enemy, there is very little hope of victory.

However, the Combined Fleet had no choice but to force its way out, and if the Axis forces were allowed to easily occupy the Okinawa Islands, the entire Japanese mainland would be covered by the enemy's air forces, and Japan would not be far from defeat.

Die early and die late, it's all death anyway, and now the combined fleet can only break the jar.

On the other hand, Vice Admiral Sashitoshi, who was opposite Ozawa, was quite sure, and in fact there were not many German and Austrian admirals with such rich experience in naval aviation operations as he was. The experience of several naval and air battles made him realize that the first detection of the enemy and the attack on the enemy in naval and air operations can sometimes play a decisive role in the outcome of naval battles, which also made him very cautious and careful, and never approached the attack range of Japanese land-based aviation on Kyushu Island.

Anyway, the Axis landing force was launching an attack on Okinawa, and in the end it would only be the Japanese who were in a hurry.

Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago, with a total length of 108 kilometers, about 30 kilometers at its widest point, and only 4 kilometers at its narrowest point. The southern part of the island is an open, flat and hilly area suitable for landing, while the northern part is mountainous. In order to strengthen the defense of Okinawa Island, the Japanese army had previously expanded the original Kadena airfield on the island, and also built two airfields, Yomitan and Yonahara, and also built an airfield on Amami Oshima Island and Wamarari on Okinagabu Island, which could accommodate more than 1,000 fighters in total.

The Japanese garrison on Okinawa Island is the 19th Army of the Army, which has two divisions and two mixed brigades, as well as some ground garrisons of the Navy, with a total strength of about 90,000 troops. The commander of the Japanese 19th Army, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, was forced to retreat to the mountains between Kunigami and Nago in northern Okinawa under the blow of naval guns and the loss of air cover, in order to "hold on for a long time."

On 4 June, the day after the Japanese Combined Fleet sorted, the landing formations of the 2nd Marine Division and part of the 2nd Austro-Hungarian Marine Division arrived at the landing area near Lishou under the transportation of more than 30 landing ships and 48 tank landing ships. After more than an hour of firepower preparation, at about 6 o'clock, the first three landing regiments took more than 50 landing craft, more than 300 amphibious landing vehicles, and amphibious tanks to launch a surprise attack on the landing beachhead with a frontal width of about 7 kilometers.

The landing force met only slight resistance, and at 7 a.m. the first landing force came ashore one after another and began to advance in depth. Having cleared the remnants of the enemy near the coast, the first landing forces, under the cover of armored vehicles, began to advance in depth. When the news of the landing of the Sino-Austrian troops in Okinawa reached Tokyo, the headquarters strictly ordered the combined fleet to attack immediately, and Ozawa finally left the protected area of land-based aviation and sailed in the direction of Daito Island. (To be continued.) )