For the allied fleet that is fully prepared for battle, a small stronghold with only a few hundred people stationed is just a very ordinary one of the many combat missions this time, and there is no fundamental difference in the combat method and process between solving Shipu and other pirate dens, and the only thing that is more special is the identity of the defender. Pen Fun Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 Of course, in the eyes of Qian Tiandun, a high-ranking Haihan general who had commanded the Battle of Qiongbei, in fact, the Ming army did not have any particularity at all, and when it first attacked the cities of Qiongbei, the Annan militia troops disguised as pirates were never polite to the stubborn Ming army, and they fought as they needed to fight - for the Haihan militia group, the enemy is the enemy, and only the dead enemy will make people feel at ease.

The Combined Fleet doesn't care about the feelings of the Ming army, but it still needs to save some money on its own military expenses. Even if these 3,000 troops were not in combat condition, the daily cost would be around two or three thousand taels of silver, and this number would probably double or triple during the battle due to the consumption of ammunition and casualties. The cost savings will be no small if you can reduce the unnecessary waiting time of one and a half days during the operation.

Of course, the main reason is that Qian Tiandun and Shi Diwen agreed that a small Shipu station does not need to spend too much time preparing for war, and the fleet used to seal the channel in and out of Shipu Port, and then the infantry landed, the artillery opened the way, and directly terminated this small stronghold. Launching an amphibious landing operation from sea to land to attack the enemy's coastal strongholds was a set of tactics that Haihan practiced the most and was most proficient in the past year. From the attack on Penghu to the capture of the two Spanish strongholds in Taipei, they are all concrete examples of this tactic. The border guards of the Ming army, who were negligent in training and backward in equipment, wanted to resist the attack of Haihan, not to mention the chance of victory, and it was unlikely that they would even have a chance to keep the peace.

However, although strategically they despise their opponents, they will not pull down what they should prepare tactically. The commanders of the various combat units received their tasks on this day and each carried out the pre-war mobilization of the troops under his command. After all, compared with the pirates they fought a few days ago, the Ming army in Shipu was the first professional army encountered by the coalition fleet since it entered Zhejiang, and the officers of the coalition army still attached great importance to it.

In the early morning of 14 April, the Combined Fleet left the Yushan Islands in batches and headed for Shipu Port in the northwest. The voyage from the temporary camp on Beiyushan Island to Shipu Port was only more than 20 nautical miles, and with the speed of the Haihan warship, it took three or four hours to arrive. However, with the size of this fleet, it is probably unlikely that it will be able to quietly enter the port of Shipo without being detected.

Among the Haihan militia troops that went north this time, the special operations battalion participated in the war as an amphibious force, and the landing operation part was naturally also the area they were responsible for. In the Taipei Campaign from the end of February to the beginning of March, the special operations battalion, as the main combat unit, also summed up a lot of experience in siege warfare from the battles of attacking two Spanish strongholds, and gained a better understanding and application of artillery siege, a combat method that they were not good at in the past. In this operation against Shipu Sojo, Qian Tiandun still handed over the command of the front to Takahashinan.

After the previous Taipei operation, although the approval of individual combat merits and the subsequent rewards have not yet been introduced, the special operations battalion has already received a collective third-class meritorious service award jointly issued by the Central Military Commission and the Executive Committee for its outstanding performance in the campaign. Since the troops were already on their way to Zhejiang when the award was issued, the commendation order was only transmitted to the fleet through the radio, and it is said that the military already intends to raise the establishment of the special operations unit again, from the battalion level to the regimental level. In addition to the expansion of the personnel of the entire special operations force, the benefits brought about by this upgrade are that the officer positions and ranks in the corresponding posts will also be upgraded with the rising tide.

Gao Qiao Nan is currently the commander of the special operations battalion, if the establishment of the special operations battalion is upgraded, then his position as battalion commander will naturally go up further, and because he has won Qian Tiandun's trust, there will be no second person in the army who can compete with him for this position, so although the official notice has not yet come down, his colleagues have already congratulated him on his promotion in advance.

According to the blockade plan formulated by Shi Diwen, the coalition fleet was divided into two fleets, east and west, and acted separately. The west road cuts between Nantian Island and Gaotang Island, and enters Shipu Harbor by taking the waterways of Linmen, Limen and Wuyan, which is located in the middle of the narrow harbor, and the coalition forces can cut off the channel from Shipu in the east to the Baijiao Waterway in the west, so that there is no need to send ships to block several access channels on the west side of the harbor. However, due to the fact that this waterway was too narrow and crooked, Shi Diwen was worried that the big ships would have difficulty in moving, so this detachment was composed of "exploration-class" warships with relatively small hulls. The place where they entered the port of Shipu was about twenty miles away from the predetermined place of engagement, and it was unlikely that they would engage the Ming army first, and their main task was to carry out the execution of the outer part of the area to intercept all local ships trying to pass through the blockade line.

As the main force of the attack, the fleet on the east route was more complicated, and the three waterways of Tongwamen, Huangnibang, and Xiawanmen respectively entered the eastern end of Shipu Port, and then formed a siege of Shipu City on the coast. Fortunately, these three waterways are not far apart, and it is not particularly difficult to achieve synchronized actions on the battlefield.

When the Donglu fleet approached Shipu Port, some fishing boats outside the harbor also discovered the fleet of unknown origin and quickly fled to the harbor. It's not that these fishermen are vigilant, but that the shape of the Haihan warship is too unique and the size of the fleet is too large, so the fishermen will inevitably be alert at first sight. However, the coalition forces were not afraid that these fishing boats would go back to report to the garrison of Shipu, and even if such an army that had been absent for a long time knew that the enemy was coming, it would be difficult to organize decent resistance in a short time.

At ten o'clock in the morning, all the fleets had arrived at the predetermined location, and the attack point on the western road was the first to move because it was far from Shipu. More than a dozen warships rushed into the nearly ten miles long winding waterway, and a few small sampans that had been moving slowly on the water quickly rowed desperately to the shore to make way for this fleet of ships that fell from the sky. The fishermen watched in amazement as the odd-looking sailboats swept across the water and headed for Seokpo Harbor.

At the same time, the Huangnibang waterway on the east side of Shipu Port. The main force of the fleet led by Shi Diwen has arrived here, completely blocking the narrow entrance and exit of nearly 200 meters at the junction between the waterway and the East China Sea. The other two fleets had also reached the mouth of the waterway several miles apart from each other on the north and south sides, and Qian Tiandun and Xu Yuzhuo served as commanders of the other two routes.

"Fire the cannon, start moving!" Shi Diwen gave the order with a serious face.

The two 24-pounder guns in the bow of the "Enterprise" sounded one after another, then sounded the ship's whistle and took the lead towards the waterway on the west side, followed by more than 20 warships. As the main warship of the coalition fleet, the "Enterprise" entered the port of Shipu closest to the port of Shipu, and after entering the port of Shipo, you can see that the voyage is less than three nautical miles, which is really an instant for the "Jinqun" equipped with steam-powered propulsion.

The two detachments on the north and south sides heard the sound of artillery coming from the sea in the distance, and they also gave their own orders to enter the port of Shipo. The route to the south is about five or six nautical miles, while the route to the north from the Tongwamen waterway is similar to that of the middle route, but it takes a U-shaped bend to reach Shipu. Each of the three fleets left two boats to guard the entrance and exit of the waterway to prevent any fish from escaping from breaking out.

The Ming army in the harbor actually got the news not too late, and before the coalition fleet could fire its guns, some fishermen had already reported the abnormality outside the harbor to Shipu. Ma Mingling, a thousand households surnamed Ma Mingling of Shipu Institute, is also an old fritter who has served in Changguowei for many years, and his first reaction after hearing about this incident was that he thought that a certain good man from Zhoushan had gone south to do business. However, the Ningbo government and the pirates in Zhoushan have always had a tacit understanding, and the pirates will never approach the location of the Ming army's garrison, if these suspected pirate fleets plan to enter Shipu Port, Ma Ling can only think that they need to enter the port to avoid the limelight because of some bad conditions at sea. But looking at the weather today, it really doesn't look like a day with strong winds and waves, so why are these ships blocked at the waterway entrance in and out of Shipu Port?

Before Ma Ling could figure out the reason for this, someone came in and said that a moment ago, he heard two cannon shots coming from outside the Huangnibang Waterway, which seemed to be some kind of signal from the fleet outside the harbor - such as attacking Shipu Port. Up to this point, Ma Ling still did not fully believe that the Shipu Harbor would be attacked from outside, because in his opinion, the pirates did not have a good reason to attack the Shipu Harbor.

Most of the inhabitants in Shipu Harbor are fishermen, and there is not much oil and water to speak of, so it is better to rob this place directly than to rob Xiangshan County, which is fifty miles to the north, at least there are some squires and rich people who can squeeze some silver out. What's more, there is the existence of Shipu here, and those pirates who rob with harpoons can not do anything better than the Shipu garrison with guns and cannons. Even if there is a third of the empty establishment in Shipu, the professional army is by no means such an easy target to bully.

No matter what the reason for these guys blatantly intruding into Shipu Port is, Ma Ling feels that it is necessary to give them a note of Ma Wei, otherwise this Shipu Port will be messed up and will not be easy to manage in the future. At that moment, Ma Ling ordered the land and water armies to gather their men and prepare to meet the "pirate" fleet that invaded the harbor without permission.

The naval division of the Shipu Institute was relatively small, with only two Fu ships and a few sentinel ships. However, these two ships are equipped with the Franc cannons purchased by the Zhejiang Navy in the early years, which is more than enough to deal with the kind of earthen cannons that can only fire broken stone nails and have a range of only ten zhang on ordinary pirate ships. Although he heard that there seemed to be a large number of ships waiting to move outside the port, it still did not attract enough attention from Ma Qianhu, and he thought that as long as these inadequate and unmeasured guys hit a nail and let them know how many catties and taels they weighed, they would naturally withdraw.

This mistake was quickly proven, when the huge figure of the "Enterprise" appeared in Shipu Port, the Ming soldiers who were originally going to give the invaders a little color to take a look at were immediately shocked, this huge strange ship spitting white smoke was definitely not something that the pirates of the East China Sea could build, such a sea behemoth is only in the classic records about the Three Treasure Eunuchs, how can there be such a big ship in the world.

Immediately after that, a large number of sail shadows unfurled behind the "Enterprise", and a menacing fleet finally revealed its true face. The commander of the Ming army knew that he was invincible, and immediately ordered the ship to be turned around—not to return to the pier of Shipu, but to sail west to the other end of Shipu Harbor, hoping to get rid of the evil stars behind him by means of a complicated waterway.

Ma Ling naturally saw this scene at the head of Shipu City, and while he scolded the hundred households who took the lead in escaping, he ordered all the personnel to return to the city and prepare to resist the pirate invasion. Until this time, Ma Qianhu still thought that this group of invaders who fell from the sky were pirates from somewhere in the East China Sea, and he didn't think that they actually had another identity.

The allied fleet did not divide the ships to pursue the two Ming warships that had run, and the fleet that cut into Shipu Harbor from the west should have blocked the other party's escape route at this time, and these two ships could not escape from this blockaded harbor in the end, no matter how they ran.

Dozens of warships converged on the coast near Shipu from the north and south, and Ma Ling, who had been a thousand households in Shipu for five or six years, was also the first time he encountered such a situation. Looking at the dense sailing fleet on the sea, Ma Ling slowly began to come back to his senses, this number of pirate gangs near Ningbo Mansion, but none of them have such a large formation, especially the big war ship in the center, if any pirate can create this kind of thing, I am afraid that it will already dominate the Zhoushan Islands.

Since he is not from Zhoushan, Ma Ling has to rethink the origin of the other party. These sailing ships are obviously different from the common style of fortune ships and wide ships in the south of the Ming Dynasty, and they are also very different from the shape of the Japanese Hachiman boats, and the dense gun windows on the side sides are a little similar to the armed sailing ships of the Western Franc man, but the sail mast is completely different. Looking at it, Ma Ling couldn't even figure out what kind of sacredness this was.

Seeing that he had formed a siege of Shipu City, Shi Diwen did not rush to launch an offensive at the moment, but asked his officers to dock in a small boat and projected a letter into the city with a powerful slingshot. To the effect that the Haihan fleet was passing through this place, it needed to dock for supplies and rest for a few days, hoping that the local garrison would cooperate. Both sides can take what they need, and don't hurt the harmony. At the end of the letter, he also asked Shipu Sojo to send an envoy to contact the Haihan side outside the city in order to resolve the misunderstanding as soon as possible.

"Haihan people?" Ma Ling was stunned for a moment after reading the letter, and then scolded: "These Nanban are not good to stay in Fuguang to enjoy happiness, what kind of demon did they come to Zhejiang!"