With Sima Yi's eloquent talk, a magnificent picture of the war slowly unfolded in the eyes of everyone, and everyone listened to it with a shaking heart, as if they felt a strong war spirit rushing to their faces, and they all wanted to be able to immediately devote themselves to this great war and become the heroes who decided success or failure one by one.

The air-dropped mines are only one of the small links, and the purpose is to initially block the mouth of the river in a short period of time, and then a series of actions will be followed to turn this initial and temporary blockade into a complete and long-term blockade.

Then, the Eastern Wu naval forces in each tributary will be eaten away and broken one by one, so as to achieve the goal of completely eliminating the Eastern Wu naval army and finally destroying the Wu State. This set of operational plans is much better than the one drawn up by the previous General Staff.

Not only is the plan more detailed, the things are more comprehensive, the strategic goals are clearer, and the appetite is much larger than the original plan. The original plan was just to block the Soochow water armies in the tributaries and lakes, but this plan was to eat all the Soochow water armies.

Moreover, the feasibility, operability and success rate of this plan are significantly higher than the original plan. Of course, these things are only felt on paper, and whether this is the case or not, no one knows before the war is fought.

There are more things on paper in this world, and the situation on the battlefield is constantly changing, who knows if the people of Soochow will hide any hole cards? Therefore, no matter how good the plan is, it may not be able to catch up with the changes, all the plans must be implemented, and they must be adjusted with the changes in the situation, and in the end, we can know the answer, whether the plan is good or not, and whether it can be successful.

Liu Hou personally named the operation "Snake Fighting" operation. Because the tributaries are like snakes that meander through them. Of course, such a huge plan could not have been started at the beginning, and after another five days, all the logistical supplies, including the ten hot air balloons that had been urgently requisitioned from other places, were already in place. The troops are also ready to attack.

This operation was a large-scale army operation, a mixed operation of various troops, an amphibious operation on land, sea and air, and a night battle, and almost all the operational elements imaginable.

In particular, the command headquarters is responsible for directing and coordinating the various units to cooperate with each other in combat, and the difficulty is not ordinary. On the morning of the attack, the bridge where the headquarters was located was already overcrowded, with people hurrying in and out.

The busy scene set off a solemn, tense atmosphere. Liu Hou was also in the bridge, looking at this busy scene, thinking to himself, if you add the ticking of telegrams, it will be very similar to the group army headquarters in later generations.

It is a pity that the telegraph technology has not yet fully matured and has not yet been applied to the battlefield, but the communication methods that exceed the technology of this era, such as flags and lights, have been widely used on the battlefield.

On the highest mast hangs a large basket shaped like a Nestle, and on the basket are two signal soldiers, who are responsible for communicating with the outside world with flags and lights.

Although it was still morning, and there were still five or six hours before the official attack was launched in the evening, one after another orders had been issued from the headquarters, and those communications soldiers took the orders from the headquarters and quickly ran back to their communications department, handing them over to the person in charge of translating the code.

The man quickly translated the order into a coded flag, and then handed it to another person to check, and after confirming that it was correct, he handed the translated flag to another messenger, who got the flag code, quickly ran under the mainmast, put the flag code in a basket, and then pulled the basket to the "Nestle" hanging high on the mast through a pulley.

The flag soldier on the Nestle basket takes the flag code, selects the direction and object to send, and then according to the above content, typed out the flag one by one, and sends the command to where it should go.

This continued throughout the day, and the communications officer had almost just sent an order to the communications room, and when he returned to headquarters, he received a new order, and he had to run to the communications room again.

At the end of the day, the communications soldiers were running so much that their feet were about to break, and even the translators and coders were numb in their fingers. The flag soldier is even more miserable, it is a very physically demanding work, every time an order is issued, the flag soldier has to dance for a few minutes or even ten minutes, one or two orders do not matter, but dozens or hundreds of orders are enough to choke.

Fortunately, there were more than two flag soldiers, and several groups of flag soldiers took turns to fight, and in the end they were all too tired ~ to finally pass on all the orders in human form. As this order was passed on, the troops of the land, sea and air force were mobilized one by one, ready to attack at night.

Finally, at dusk, the twenty hot air balloons that had already ignited the balloons and swelled the balloons released their cables together, rose from the twenty motherships, and slowly headed east under the cover of night.

In order to conceal their whereabouts, their stoves are covered with light shields, making it difficult for people to see the fire from their stoves from the ground. It was a New Year's Day, the first day of the Lunar New Year, and it was specially chosen to launch an attack for no other reason, there was no moon on New Year's Day.

Although the weather is sunny and the sky is full of stars, the starlight is not as good as the moonlight, although it is not to the point where you can't see your fingers, but the visibility is certainly not as high as that.

This weather condition is most suitable for night raids, no moonlight is conducive to hiding your whereabouts, and a starry sky means that you will not be affected by bad weather such as rain and snow.

Therefore, in ancient times, famous military advisors had to "know astronomy and geography", at least you must know how to choose a good day to send troops. These details are inconspicuous, but they can often increase the probability of victory or defeat, and even become the decisive factor in a war in some cases.

But the question arises again, how can a hot air balloon flying high in the sky know the direction on a night without moonlight? Won't they go off? You must know that there was no GPS system at that time, how to navigate?

Of course, you can use the North Star to navigate, but that can only make you discern the general direction, and the meticulous work of finding the exact location such as air raids obviously cannot be done by looking at the star map.

At this time, there must be a navigation signal on the ground to guide it. This is one of the reasons why the command will issue a large number of orders early this morning. In fact, the command began to issue orders a few days ago, and the spies, special forces, and even the "CIA" personnel who had been lurking in Soochow for many years had all been mobilized a few days earlier.

They had already infiltrated the battlefield and lurked in the designated place in advance, waiting for this time to send a navigation signal on the ground to guide the direction of the hot air balloon's movement.