Chapter 40: The Return of the Combined Fleet (Part II)

Tokyo Bay, Yokosuka Town, temporary anchorage of the U.S. Halsey Expeditionary Fleet

This naval fortress, which once guarded the imperial capital, has been planted with the Stars and Stripes since the end of last year and has been turned into a forward base for foreign invaders, but the piercing air raid sirens continue to sound as always: only the incoming enemy has changed from American planes to Japanese planes. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

Well, but in fact, the enemy planes that came to Yokosuka to bomb the American fleet were also American goods......

“…… Note! Note! Azimuth 020, defense zone 143, distance of eighty miles, eighty large aircraft! ”

On the hill on the outskirts of Yokosuka Town, in the ground radar station that has just been completed, David Brown, a rookie radar soldier who had only completed his training a month earlier. Clinton, unusually carefully staring at the dots of light and jagged ripples on the two radar displays, reported loudly to the observer.

“…… Altitude 30,000 feet. The more skilled altimeter quickly reported the altitude.

“…… Command post, azimuth 020, defense zone 143, eighty miles away, thirty thousand feet high, eighty mainframes, please confirm your identity. ”

The observer held the bakelite microphone on his chin and repeated the data, while the cartographer marked it on a map board on the wall.

-- The radar of this era can only indicate the relative position of the aircraft in the air, that is, the light point on the circular display stack, and has no ability to distinguish friend or foe. Accurate identification can only be made by the naked eye, and it is almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe by echoes only on foggy days or at night with poor visibility.

However, before the cartographer could finish marking the data, a heart-rending alarm suddenly sounded outside the door - it was clear that this time it was the enemy! Next, Captain Johnson, the commander on duty at the radar station, grabbed a submachine gun and violently lifted the curtain and rushed into the room: "...... Get out of here, boys, the Japanese planes are coming right in front of us! Grab the report and map, don't forget to put on your helmet and go! ”

All of a sudden, the radar officers and civilians rushed out of their improvised huts with notebooks and maps. Outside the door, more soldiers were carrying heavy ammunition boxes, panting for anti-aircraft gun emplacements with camouflage nets.

However, these things had nothing to do with the radar operators, they just hurriedly fastened the straps of their steel helmets and rushed to the air-raid shelter left by the Japanese dozens of meters away.

“…… Hide inside, don't come out, take care to protect yourself and your files, and don't be a hero! That would only add to the chaos of anti-aircraft artillery! ”

After Captain Johnson finished speaking, he turned his head and ran towards another bomb shelter, "...... Good luck, boys! ”

Just as the radar crews were crawling into the air-raid shelter, the US anti-aircraft guns on the ground were already firing one after another. Not far away, in the port area of the town guard, rows of anti-air balloons have already been raised. However, all of this is basically useless work, just to give yourself a boost.

Just as the vast majority of the anti-aircraft guns currently equipped by the Japanese army cannot reach the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the US Army's 20-mm Erly anti-aircraft guns and 40-mm imitation "Bofors" anti-aircraft guns also have no way to take the high-flying B-29 "Super Flying Fortress", and even the firing range of the 90-mm M1 anti-aircraft gun is not enough, and only the 120-mm M1 anti-aircraft gun can pose a certain threat to the B-29. It's a pity that such a large-caliber anti-aircraft gun, even in the US Army, is equipped with a small number, and it is even more of a drop in the bucket on the front-line battlefield......

Wait a minute? The incoming Japanese bomber was the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress"? Is there something wrong?

That's right! The incoming enemy aircraft is the B-29 Super Flying Fortress bomber! Pure American products!

Therefore, the ripples on the radar display of these enemy planes are exactly the same as those of the US military's own planes, and if one is not careful, there will be a mishap.

-- After sending aircraft carrier formations to attack Japan on several occasions, but always being attacked head-on by the Japanese Navy, the US Pacific Fleet, which was almost driven crazy by the pressure of public opinion, simply began to act brutally in early '44 and played a "one-way bombing" campaign against the Japanese archipelago, that is, the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" four-engine heavy bombers took off from Midway Island or Pearl Harbor and flew to the Soviet Union's Vladivostok military port to land after bombing Japan.

Because the Soviet Union did not declare war on Japan, the Soviets would not return the planes and pilots to the United States, but would treat them as "illegal immigrants", and the B-29s would be left for their own use on the Western Front, and the pilots would be stuffed into detention centers and released after the war was over. But even if there is such a method of fighting dogs with meat buns and no return, in order to be able to slap the face of the Japanese Empire, the Americans with deep pockets are desperate to fight.

Because of such a bombing that will never return, it is also extremely painful for the US military to cut flesh and bleed, and it can only be done occasionally, and they dare not do too much. The bombers that attacked each sortie were more than a dozen to twenty, and there were even a single sneak attack, which was probably about the same as a mosquito bite to the huge war machine of the Japanese Empire, as long as the actual significance of propaganda and mobilization was ...... However, over time, the Soviet Union gradually accumulated more than 300 B-29 "Super Flying Fortresses," and after deducting the losses on the Western Front, there were about 200 remaining by the end of 1945.

Therefore, after the establishment of the Hokkaido Soviet Republic, the Soviet Union sent the remaining 200 B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" bombers to the "Japanese Red Army" in Hokkaido as "military aid" to disgust the Yankees. In order to allow the Japanese army to get started as soon as possible, the Soviet side also thoughtfully provided instructors and a full set of ground crews, plus a large number of sarin gas bombs, cloud burst bombs and incendiary bombs......

Relying on the very advanced Norton sight at that time, the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" could accurately drop unguided ordinary bombs into a circle with a diameter of 50 meters at an altitude of 8,000 to 10,000 meters, of course, this also requires good weather conditions as a prerequisite to have such accuracy.

Unfortunately, it's daylight, and the weather in Tokyo Bay today is a beautiful daylight...... So, the Yankees are out of luck.

-- Before the F6F "Hellcat" and P-51 "Mustang" fighters that were ordered to intercept took off from the ground and climbed to a sufficient height, the Japanese bomber formation had already turned several radar stations and barracks strongholds on the periphery into a sea of fire. All of a sudden, I saw the "sizzle" of incendiary bombs, and the "sizzle" whistle sounded horribly in the sky, and a large number of dazzling fireworks fell into the sky, and the American GIs on fire rolled all over the ground with a scream.

Next, the bomber group approached the water in the port area, and the intercepted "Hellcat" and "Mustang" also fought with the escorting purple electric fighters. For a time, the smoke clouds of tracer shells and anti-aircraft shells from aircraft guns covered the sky, and the sky was also dyed with the cruelty of war.

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In Tokyo Bay, at Yokosuka anchorage, on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the flagship of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Halsey held his binoculars with a blank face and watched as one aircraft carrier after another was ejected into the air to meet the incoming Japanese bomber group.

- In the late World War II, it was difficult for carrier-based aircraft to take off from a stationary aircraft carrier, but it was still possible to eject the aircraft with a catapult.

The entire harbor was filled with smoke and fire, and a huge column of smoke had risen from the ground airfield in the distance.

Not far away, above the dock on the shore, there are many silver-white balloons, tied to the ground with wire ropes. This is an anti-air balloon used to defend against low-altitude bombing by enemy aircraft, and if the plane accidentally collides with it, the plane will be destroyed and killed, and it is a relatively common air defense facility in the early stage of World War II.

However, this kind of tethered anti-air balloon can only deal with the low-altitude raids of dive bombers and the strafing of fighters at best, and is of little use against the high-altitude bombing B-29 "Super Air Fortress". Therefore, both the warships on the surface and the officers and men of the US Navy and Army on the shore are desperately dragging out smoke canisters one after another, releasing clouds of smoke one after another, hoping that this will somewhat interfere with the sight of some enemies.

All the US soldiers on the shore who did not have air defense tasks were rushing to the air-raid shelters as fast as they could, and all around them, whether it was the Japanese civilian houses requisitioned for barracks or the simple board houses built by the US troops themselves, they were painted with yellow and green camouflage paint, and every glass window was also covered with rice-shaped tape. In addition, all ship-based and shore-based anti-aircraft guns, regardless of caliber, are firing with a bang, and even if they can't hit the planes, it is good to be able to scare the enemy or give it a bang to give themselves courage.

- No way, for the US Pacific Fleet stationed in Tokyo Bay, such a big bombing is already a common thing.

Since landing in Japan and stationed in Tokyo Bay, the Halsey Fleet and the US Air Force and Army Air Force that followed it have indeed possessed several forward airfields capable of covering the entire territory of the Japanese archipelago, and can dispatch bombers to destroy any Japanese city at any time. But on the other hand, Japanese planes of all stripes could bomb the anchorages, oil depots, and cargo depots of Halsey's fleet in Tokyo Bay and Sendai Port at any time—as far as Halsey knew, the nearest airfield for the Japanese army was set up in Utsunomiya in the north, just over a hundred kilometers from the Yokosuka Castle in Tokyo Bay!

With such a short straight-line distance, not to mention today's cutting-edge bombers, even the old biplanes of the last world war, can be used for air strikes.

When the Halsey Fleet first entered Tokyo Bay last year, the entire chain of command was paralyzed because the capital, the wartime base camp, and the emperor had just been bombed into the sky, and the Japanese troops in various parts of the country were still in a state of ignorance that had just been beaten with a stick, so the American fleet had not been harassed at that time. By the time the Halsey fleet had gone to Chinese mainland and had walked around the Korean Peninsula and entered the Gulf of Tonkin again this year, the Japanese Red Army had already emerged...... As a result, the Halsey fleet, which was originally going to rest in Tokyo Bay, was suddenly tossed by the endless air raids and was about to go crazy.

-- The various "land attack" and "ship attack" critique planes developed by the Japanese Empire itself, as well as the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" and "Il" series of aircraft aided by the Soviet Union, rushed to Yokosuka almost day and night to report. Even some of the old biplanes with canvas skins from more than 20 years ago were pushed out by the crazy Japanese to paint them in gray-black camouflage and let a group of old grandfathers pilot them to play night raids. Because this kind of biplane with a canvas wooden frame structure flies slowly and low, and there are few metal components, the radar often cannot detect it, and it really allows the Japanese to succeed several times......

Although most of Japan's elite pilots were on the South Seas front, and the pilots who stayed on home were relatively unskilled, if they were to attack American warships with strong anti-aircraft firepower like a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, it would be like a broiler sent to the door. However, the Japanese commanders were obviously well aware of this, and instead of forcing their rookie pilots to storm the battleships, the main bombing targets were changed to radar stations, merchant ships, barracks, airfields, and docks with relatively weak defense forces, especially oil depots, which made the US troops overwhelmed.

What is even worse is that the military supplies provided by the Soviet Union to the "Japanese Red Army" were not only all kinds of aircraft and fuel bombs, but also a large number of V1 and V2 missiles produced using technology captured from Nazi Germany...... Among them, the V1 missile is a cruise missile with a range of 240 kilometers, similar in appearance to a small aircraft, and due to its slower speed, it can also be intercepted by fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The V2 missiles, on the other hand, are true ballistic missiles, flying up to four times the speed of sound, and are simply impossible to intercept with World War II technology – and the Japanese have been using them to attack the Yokosuka Shofu anchorage!

As a result, since February this year, there has not been a single night in Yokosuka where the US Pacific Fleet is stationed that has not sounded an air raid siren, disturbing the peace of all officers and men. Although the accuracy of these two missiles is very low and the failure rate is very high, even a blind cat can meet a dead mouse when there are many of them. The day before yesterday, an escort aircraft carrier full of planes was accurately hit on the deck by a V2 missile because of its poor character, and it exploded into popcorn on the spot......

In order to get out of this bad situation of being passively beaten, both Admiral Halsey, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, and Admiral Patton, who was ordered to succeed MacArthur and urgently transferred to the Japanese battlefield to command the army, have been trying to organize bomber groups to launch air counterattacks in an attempt to weaken the opponent's air attack capability by bombing enemy airfields. But the problem is that this is the homeland of the Japanese, and field airfields can be built everywhere from south to north. Even if the US military invested tens of thousands of military planes of various kinds on the battlefield in Japan, it was never able to seize air supremacy, let alone completely eliminate the threat of Japanese planes.

In short, today's Japanese army is fighting on its own, and the Soviet Union is vigorously transfusing blood behind it, from fuel to planes to ammunition, as long as the airfields in the entire territory of Japan have not been destroyed, as long as the Japanese nation still has pilots who are willing to work hard, they can continue to fight endlessly.

Every plane, every round of ammunition, and every barrel of gasoline had to be transported across the entire Pacific Ocean, and the gap in national strength between the two sides was greatly flattened. If we insist on fighting with the Japanese here, with the strong industrial capacity of the United States of America, it is not necessarily impossible to fight, but it will definitely be very, very painful, even to the point of overdrawing the national strength and unbearable......

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Just as Admiral Halsey was thinking so differently and thinking wildly, the incoming enemy planes began to drop bombs at high altitude in the port area! I saw that the wide belly hatch of the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" was wide open, and a series of aerial bombs were neatly dropped like dumplings. After a few more moments, orange and red fireballs began to rise on the smoke-filled ground, small at first, but soon growing larger and faster, and finally exploding in mid-air, turning into countless tiny sparks, which fell one after another, igniting a large area of houses and trees around it.

And the air-proof balloons that the US military tied to the ground also became an accelerant for even larger fires during the air strikes - the airbags of the anti-aircraft arrest balloons are sewn from a layer of rubber-coated nylon cloth and filled with flammable hydrogen. Under the wave of incendiary embers, one after another anti-aircraft arrest balloons were reduced to flaming fireballs, carrying heavy steel cables that crashed from the sky and caused more fires on the ground.

Although the Japanese bombers did not pay a price, there were constantly unlucky bombers in the "Hellcat" and "Mustang" fighter guns frantically sprayed smoke from the tracer barrage, rolling and stalling and crashing, but compared to the huge damage on the ground, it is not worth mentioning at all.

Indeed, the US ground-based air defense units have advanced early warning radars, combat experience that has been repeatedly summed up and practiced, and a new type of radio proximity fuse -- it enables antiaircraft artillery shells to explode at a distance of 70 feet from enemy planes, which is several times more powerful than instantaneous fuses and fixed-range fuze shells, but the range is insufficient, and the shells basically cannot reach enemy planes at an altitude of 10,000 meters, and no matter how advanced the fuses are, they are useless.

Although the B-29 "Super Flying Fortress" is not suitable for bombing maneuvering targets such as warships, large warships such as aircraft carriers and battleships that are parked at the dock take more than an hour just to fire and heat the boilers, and they cannot make any maneuvers without power, and they are simply fixed targets for Japanese bombers. For a time, the aircraft carrier Enterprise shook violently in the water column set off by the bombs, and even threw off a carrier-based plane on the deck that had not had time to fly, and crashed into the sea amid the screams of a certain ground crew.

As for the destroyers, torpedo boats, and traffic boats, which were relatively small, they quickly started their engines and sailed out of their berths, but unfortunately, due to the haste of the incident and the lack of coordination and command, several collisions occurred in succession in the chaos. Admiral Halsey stood on the bridge of the USS Enterprise and saw two destroyers collide head-on, and a torpedo boat was overturned by a jet of water from a near-lost missile......

Immediately after that, an even greater catastrophe struck: a heavy bomb accurately hit the escort aircraft carrier "Corregidor" moored at the dock, smashing from the flight deck all the way to the ammunition depot or gasoline tank. All of a sudden, only a loud "boom" was heard, and the entire aircraft carrier was bathed in flames! Before the sailors on the anti-aircraft gun emplacements on the deck of the aircraft carrier could figure out what was going on, they were swept into the sea by the shock wave, and then, the bombs and torpedoes loaded on the aircraft carrier were ignited one after another, and one violent explosion after another quickly sounded, quickly shattering the poor aircraft carrier. The planes on the ship were thrown into the air like toys in this violent explosion, the skin, wheels, and fragments of the fuselage were torn apart by the shock wave, the unprepared sailors and pilots were blown away like ragdolls, and the fuel, cloth, and human fragments were all burning and flying outward.

Even the Enterprise, where Admiral Halsey was in charge, was hit by two aerial bombs, destroyed a lift, and caused a fire along the oil road. Fortunately, the well-trained U.S. military damage management team members on the USS Enterprise were dispatched urgently, risking the risk of being burned by the fire and shattered by the air waves, and sacrificed their lives to control the fire, and finally did not let Admiral Halsey lose his beloved flagship......

However, a massive air raid of this magnitude is nothing more than a daily situation that the US Pacific Fleet has to endure at least once a week in recent times.

In fact, during the "rest" at the Yokosuka town guard in Tokyo Bay, the number of casualties in the Halsey fleet was much higher than during the previous three-month period of continuous operations, and the ships and ships, large and small, were not properly repaired but were even more damaged because they had to dodge bombing every day. And all the sailors were also frightened three times a day and unable to sleep at night by the endless air raids, and their physical and mental strength were on the verge of collapse...... Of course, no matter how miserable it is, the army on the shore, at least it does not have to wear gas masks all day long on the warships and worry about the nerve gas bombs dropped by Japanese planes.

So, looking at the Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy, Ernest . Joseph. Admiral Halsey's expression on Admiral Kim's face was one of bitter smile and annoyance in the telegram sent by Admiral Kim ordering the Pacific Fleet, which had an "overwhelming advantage," to complete its rest as soon as possible and then wait for an opportunity to engage in a decisive battle with the Japanese Combined Fleet, which had returned home.

“…… Damn it! Bullshit break! What overwhelming advantage? I was bombed every day from Monday to Sunday, and I couldn't live this day at all! If we want my fleet to fight a decisive battle with the Japanese Combined Fleet in this state, is the Pentagon dreaming or looking for death? ”

Admiral Halsey hatefully crumpled the telegram into a ball of paper and threw it far out of the ship's side, then turned to look out of the porthole and found that the Japanese bomber group and escort fighters were far away, and the flagship aircraft carrier was full of devastation, and a large number of sailors who had been blown up by the air wave of the bombs were still lying motionless on the deck, and I don't know whether they were blown unconscious or killed......

A little farther away, in the harbor, there were more ships that were smoking, or had turned over like dead fish, revealing the bottom of the ship overgrown with algae and shells, a thick layer of heavy oil floating on the water, and groups of soldiers shouting and struggling.

Faced with this tragic scene, which seemed to be another attack on Pearl Harbor, Halsey gritted his teeth and pondered for a moment, and finally made a difficult decision.

“…… No, this place really can't stay any longer, and it must be withdrawn to Hawaii as soon as possible, or the entire fleet will collapse! ”

-- So, in the midst of Admiral King's angry scolding, the Halsey fleet resolutely lifted anchor on 1 March, withdrew from the Japanese archipelago, and returned to Pearl Harbor to rest and prepare for war...... There was a great uproar in the US public opinion circles, and the condemnation of Halsey as a "war-avoidance general" rose wave after wave, saying that this brute bull only dared to take advantage of the absence of the Combined Fleet to play a sneak attack, but it did not have the demeanor of a brave man who would fight in the face of the enemy. And there was also jubilation in Japan, thinking that once the invincible combined fleet returned, the United States and Britain and the white animals who bullied the weak and feared the hard fled in embarrassment......