The Gulf of Bothnia, which is close to the Arctic in summer, does not feel very hot, but rather chills at night. After more than 10 days of intense training at sea, the pilots were obviously much more proficient in taking off and landing on the aircraft carrier, and this was mainly due to overcome some tense psychological obstacles, and the plane needed to quickly complete the entire process of landing on the aircraft in a landing area with a length of only about 70 meters on the flight deck, which was not large in itself.

After completing the navigation training in the Gulf of Bothnia, the fleet returned to East Prussia to conduct a live-fire target to test the results of the recent training.

Towards the end of the training, the entire fleet conducted a round of ship-to-ship attacks and anti-aircraft confrontation drills, which took place on the western side of Saaremaa Island, near the Gulf of Riga. The Gulf of Riga fell into the hands of the German Empire during World War I, and Lithuania and most of Latvia were ceded to Germany under the Soviet-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and then in the post-war civil war, Latvia and Estonia gained independence from Russia with the support of the Germans.

Immediately after the outbreak of the war, German troops entered Latvia and Estonia to "defend" these two countries from aggression. It is strange that the Soviets and Germany, which had declared war, never started a war on the front line of East Prussia, and the Soviets and Germans tacitly maintained a state of mutual non-aggression in the border areas between the two sides, and the war was limited to Ukraine.

Soviet Russia left a way back for itself, and [the Germans clearly had no intention of destroying them, and the two sides were tacitly engaged in a "limited war".

The dive bombers and torpedo planes that took off from the two aircraft carriers formed in small formations and were divided into groups of four to continuously carry out "air attacks" on the formation composed mainly of battleships from high, medium, and low altitudes, while the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers in the battleship formation set up air defense formations to conduct fleet air defense exercises.

A jury composed of senior officers from the Training Directorate of the German Navy Command and officers from the Fleet Staff evaluated and summarized the results of the exercise. During the confrontation exercise, it was revealed that the air fleet did not cooperate well enough in the attack and was unable to maintain its formation. The battleship formations, on the other hand, had the problem of slow response to 127 mm and 105 mm large-caliber anti-aircraft fire, especially the lack of proficiency in operation.

These problems cannot be solved overnight, and can only be solved slowly in future training.

At the end of the confrontation training, a real combat target shooting was carried out.

The command of the East Baltic Fleet sent several torpedo boats towing target boats, several transport aircraft towing red target barrels. The air fleet first conducted bomb dropping training. The fighters carried training bombs filled with sand or soot and threw them at the target ship again and again, and although the results were not satisfactory, they remained within the normal range. Then the battlefleet began to fire live ammunition, and the turrets of the warships spewed large clouds of white smoke and fire in the rumbling sounds, and the whole warship shook and shook on the sea.

The rumbling of cannons on the surface of the sea is staggering to watch.

Sa Shijun, who was standing on the bridge of the "Guangxi" and watching the shooting training, could not help but sigh that the first-class navy was really made out of money, and the price of a 410-mm high-explosive bomb was exactly a year's salary for him, a rear admiral, even with training bombs. With a flash of the muzzle, his month's salary burned out in an instant.

Without sufficient industrial level and financial resources, the navy is not something that any country can afford. There is not enough training in peacetime, how can these sailors fight accurately and fiercely on the battlefield?

After finishing the confrontation training, the fleet entered the port of Memel for a short rest and began to return home. On August 3, the entire fleet lined up in a long line. The battle flag fluttered, and demonstratively returned to Germany in the Baltic.

The cruisers "Guangxi" and "Qinzhou" and "Guilin" returned to the Beihai shipyard. The final commissioning and assembly of the equipment, which took almost a month, followed by the German fleet began its war journey in earnest.

Sa Shijun is always thinking about how to return to China as much as possible, but from the Baltic Sea to Qinzhou Bay, there are more than 10,000 nautical miles. During this period, there were also many blockades set up by the British and Japanese navies, which was not easy.

With a depressed mood, he was invited by Han Yuheng to visit the Flanders shipyard in Lübeck to visit the commissioning ceremony of the newly ordered submarine of the Chinese Navy.

The humid sea breeze blowing from the Baltic Sea made people feel extremely refreshing, and Sa Shijun was accompanied by Han Yuheng. Visited the submarine production line at the shipyard. Germany accelerated the construction of submarines, and Sa Shijun saw a long row of six submarines being built simultaneously on the slipway of the shipyard's dry dock. The heavy smell of engine oil fills the slipway, and the slow sliding of the heavy crane overhead lifts sections weighing hundreds of tons into the slipway and closes them.

Sparks flew and groups of goggles, hard-shelled hats, and oil-stained workers were standing on scaffolding or hulls welding the completed hull together. The slipway is supported by logs, which are already half completed, and soon they will be launched.

The car stopped at the outfitting dock, where a long row of submarines had already been parked that had finished outfitting and painted black. There are 10 of the latest ocean-going attack submarines, four of which are submarines that are ready to enter service and built for China. Colonel Wang Zhiguang, who is the director of China's submarine construction, and some technicians are in the process of final acceptance work before the handover.

Four Chinese submarines were moored in a row on the pier, and the decks were connected by a pontoon bridge made of cables, and Sa Shijun and Han Yuheng, accompanied by Major Wang Rongbin, who was the submarine construction engineer, and Captain Zhu Zaowen, the captain, went to the deck of the "1018" submarine through the rickety pontoon bridge.

The Chinese sailors trained in Germany had already taken over the submarines and were doing some cleaning work.

Major Wang Rongbin briefed several officers on the situation of some submarines as he walked.

The "1018" boat belongs to the latest VII.d/40 ocean-going attack submarine developed by the German Navy, with a standard displacement of 1,680 tons on the water and nearly 1,900 tons underwater. Powered by two 5,600 hp MAN diesel engines and two 1,200 hp electric motors, the submarine is equipped with underwater snorkels and is capable of reaching a maximum speed of more than 20 knots when sailing at periscope depth.

The VII.d/40 ocean-going attack submarine eliminated the deck guns and was equipped with only one 37-mm anti-aircraft gun and one twin 20-mm shooter on the bridge, and two retractable six-barreled 210-mm rocket launchers were installed on the deck. This was developed on the basis of the construction of Chinese engineer Lin Huiping, who had studied rocket artillery manufacturing technology at the Austro-Hungarian Skoda Arsenal and had asked the German side whether he could install a powerful but small rocket launcher on a submarine after serving as a weapons supervisor for submarine construction.

His construction was taken seriously by his German counterparts, and through the efforts of the designers, a box-shaped 6-tube 210 mm rocket launcher that could be retracted and rotated with brackets was installed on the front and rear decks of the submarine. The rocket artillery equipped with the Navy is different from the army's short-barreled rocket artillery, and in order to increase the range, the long-range rocket engine has been redeveloped, so that the range is double that of the army's rocket artillery, reaching nearly 18 kilometers.

In this way, in addition to torpedoes, submarines also have a certain ability to attack ships, especially land ports.

For this, Lin Huiping was awarded a Blue Max Service Medal of the First Class by the German government. (To be continued......) R1292