In early May, about a month after the Battle of the Pearl River Estuary began, Britain, France, and the United States in the western Pacific once again assembled a fleet of no small size, and then launched a counteroffensive against Hawaii under the banner of Carvahameha V.

The combined fleet of Britain, France and the United States on the opposite side is attacking again, and the Hawaiian task force of the Imperial Navy has no choice but to resist head-on!

On May 4, the Imperial Hawaiian Task Force, with two Zhenguang-class small offshore ironclads and three wooden cruisers as the core, faced the combined British, French, and American fleet outside the port of Honolulu.

Thus, the Second Battle of Honolulu officially began!

This time, however, the Imperial Navy's Hawaiian Task Force did not continue its previous good fortune, and after only half an hour of fighting, the wooden battleship Shaoxing was severely damaged, and the whole ship was forced to abandon the ship, which was also burned on the surface of the sea an hour later, leaving only a little wreckage floating on the sea.

After another two hours of fierce fighting, the Task Force Commander Guo Yi's ship, the Taiyuan, was also severely damaged and was forced to withdraw from the battle to extinguish the fire.

Two wooden battleships were sunk and one was seriously damaged, leaving the Hawaiian task force to rely on two small ironclads to support it.

By the early afternoon, the Hawaiian task force was defeated by the combined British, French, and American fleets, and was forced to voluntarily retreat to the port for the final port defense operation.

The reason why the Hawaiian task force was defeated in this battle was not that the Hawaiian fleet was weak and the officers and men were not named, but that the enemy was too strong.

There were as many as eight British, French, and American warships attacking Hawaii this second time, and the Americans alone sent five warships, in addition to the British two. The French have one.

The only thing to be thankful for is that there are no large ironclad ships in the combined fleet of Britain, France and the United States!

After all, large ironclads are not something that can be drawn out casually. Britain and France did not have many warships in the Pacific waters, and it was even more impossible to send large ironclad ships. Some of the colony's small gunboats were also difficult to cross the Pacific Ocean, and more importantly, the port of Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands was controlled by the Imperial Navy, and they did not have a port to replenish.

However, the Americans sent an offshore ironclad ship of more than 800 tons, and it was this ironclad ship that posed a serious threat to the Hawaiian task force and contained two small Zhenguang-class ironclad ships, otherwise, with the strength of the two Zhenguang-class ironclad ships, it was enough to inflict heavy damage on those wooden warships, and it was unknown who would win and who would lose at that time.

The enemy has twice as many ships as yours. And with an ironclad ship of more than 800 tons in charge, it is not surprising that the Hawaiian task force failed to intercept it in the open sea.

And this second Battle of Honolulu can be regarded as the first time that the Imperial Navy has lost a frontal naval battle.

After the failure of the interception at sea, Rear Admiral Guo Yi, the commander of the Hawaiian task force, who had been promoted to rear admiral, was unwilling, but he still withdrew a large number of sailors ashore, and at the same time directly moved the naval guns on the Taiyuan, which had been heavily damaged and needed to be overhauled, and then deployed them on the port batteries.

Next. The British, French, and American combined fleets carried out a large-scale artillery bombardment of the batteries in Honolulu Harbor, and under the tense battle, Rear Admiral Guo Yi gritted his teeth and once again led the remnants of the fleet to rush to the port. Raid the combined British, French-American fleet under the cover of battery fire.

This time he had better luck, using the wooden battleship Wuchang as bait, and then sent two ships, the Zhenxi and Zhenhu. Besieged and inflicted heavy damage on an American wooden warship that had advanced and advanced.

This battleship was heavily damaged, plus the Hawaiian fleet lost two ships in yesterday's decisive battle. But also sank one of the American battleships, so it was. Of the five battleships of the Americans, two out of five are already gone, but the three warships of Britain and France are still in good condition.

However, this did not discourage the British, French, and American combined fleets from counterattacking Hawaii, and they could not destroy the batteries or enter the harbor, so they simply fought in a roundabout way.

They landed on the shore about six kilometers south of Honolulu Harbor, and sent more than 2,500 troops in one go, and then slaughtered Honolulu Harbor.

Seeing that they had really landed, Major General Guo Yi was relieved!

Although its own fleet is inferior to the combined fleet of Britain, the United States and France, Hawaii's land forces are not weak.

The Hawaiian garrison currently has one Army infantry battalion, two Marine infantry companies, and a total of three artillery batteries, totaling about 1,200 troops.

In the past few days, due to the defeat of the fleet, Colonel Guo Yi has transferred many sailors, especially the sailors who have lost their battleships, to go ashore, and a total of three sailor companies and two heavy artillery companies have been temporarily formed.

The above-mentioned troops were commanded by the commander of the Hawaii garrison regiment, Army Colonel Chen Ketong.

Although the current commander-in-chief of the defense of the Hawaiian Islands is Rear Admiral Guo Yi, the commander of the Hawaiian Task Force, there is a difference between land and sea, and Rear Admiral Guo Yi is naturally responsible for this naval battle, but the land war is still handed over to the army, and he Guo Yi will not interfere.

In addition to being in charge of the Marine Corps of the Chinese Army's Navy and Army, Colonel Chen Ketong also had a temporary conscripted Native Hawaiian unit under his command.

The official name is the 'Guards of the Kingdom of Hawaii', but although the name sounds very lofty, there are more than 1,600 people, and the weapons equipped are not bad, in order to increase their combat effectiveness, the Chinese army issued them with breech-loading rifles for free.

But after two months of emergency training, these people can only barely distinguish between left and right, but they can't even walk in formation, and during shooting training, few soldiers can hit the target, God knows where they shoot.

Although the number and equipment of this 'Guards Army' are okay, the actual combat effectiveness is absolutely unsatisfactory, and if they are allowed to go to the battlefield and fight hard with the West, it is estimated that they will run away in a swarm as soon as they encounter them.

In this regard, Colonel Chen Ketong can be said to be quite disappointed!

Hawaii is thousands of miles away from the Empire, and every soldier and soldier for this reinforcement will have to pay a great price, otherwise it would not have sent only one infantry battalion of the Army in the first place, is it because the Imperial Army does not have enough troops? How is it possible, the Imperial Army's hundreds of thousands of troops can be drawn over at will.

But this distance of tens of thousands of kilometers became a huge obstacle for the empire to send troops over.

In this case, every soldier deployed by the Empire in Hawaii was invaluable.

Due to the small total number of troops, the Chinese army naturally started to think about the local aborigines, and various countries established indigenous armies in the colonies, which is a good tradition with a long history, and the North African cavalry of the French and the British Indian army of the British are typical representatives.

In Southeast Asia, the British also established a large number of indigenous armies in Lower Burma, and the French also established a large indigenous army in Nam Ki, Vietnam, and although these indigenous armies were weaker in combat, they were able to fight anyway.

However, after arriving in Hawaii, the Chinese army tried to support the indigenous army but it was difficult, on the one hand, because the natives of these island countries in the Pacific Ocean were lazy by nature, and on the other hand, the natives were natives and had not yet been civilized, except for a small number of upper-class nobles and officials in the Hawaiian Kingdom, ordinary people were basically barbarians, which was very difficult to educate.

This is completely different from the situation in North Africa, the Middle East, India, the Indochina Peninsula and other places, although the above-mentioned areas are poor and backward, but they still belong to human civilization, and they are not savages, and the natives on these islands in the Pacific Ocean are wild people in nine out of ten, and there are many cannibals.

If you want to train a barbarian into a qualified modern soldier, the difficulty is not ordinary!

Therefore, although Chen Ketong still has this 1,600-strong indigenous army in his hands, he has never expected them to play any role.

Chen Ketong simply used them as coolies, and let them dig and build various fortifications, especially forts.

As for resisting the British, French, and American coalition forces during the battle, they had to rely on the Chinese army itself.

After the British, French, and American forces landed, they soon launched an attack on the port of Honolulu!

And Colonel Chen Ketong naturally will not be indifferent, he commanded the troops to take the battery group as the core of the defense, and started a defensive operation!

Many of the soldiers in the coalition were Americans, and most of these American soldiers had participated in the Civil War, perhaps because they were overconfident, so they launched a fierce offensive.

The result?

These soldiers, who did not die on the battlefield of the American Civil War, were shot one by one by the dense bullets of the Chinese army on the way to charge!

After many years of the American Civil War, due to the use of rear-loading rifles, their tactics have also changed, and there is a trend towards the development of modern skirmisher tactics, but they do not have the vision of Lin Zhe, a later generation, who can unswervingly support the development of new tactics.

In fact, in the American Civil War, line tactics were still the mainstay, and although skirmish tactics also appeared, they were not the mainstream.

Different from the traditional line tactics, the distance of engagement between each other has increased from tens of meters to between 100 meters and 300 meters.

However, there is also a very big feature that the casualty rate is very high!

In an offensive operation, it is very common for the infantry to attack by using line tactics to achieve a casualty rate of 50 percent, and in some specific cases, the casualty rate is often as high as 80 percent or more, and it is not uncommon for the entire army to be wiped out on the way to the charge.

Historically, the American Civil War was dominated by Minnie rifles and front-loading smoothbore guns, with about 750,000 killed and 400,000 wounded. However, during this time and space, the large-scale use of rear-loading rifles and front-loading rifled guns in the American Civil War and the improvement of weapon performance did not lead to large-scale innovations, which further increased the casualty rate of soldiers.

According to incomplete statistics, the number of casualties in the American Civil War in this time and space reached at least 1.1 million, and more than 600,000 were disabled.

The overall casualty rate is much higher than that of the original plane. (To be continued.) )