81_81266"Boom!" A shell struck a building in central London, and the explosion caused the already crumbling building to finally collapse in the dust, and the dust filled the air, and the ground shook clearly from a few blocks away.

In the basement, a few wisps of dust had fallen from the violent tremors, and Churchill leaned back in his chair and looked lonely at the huge map of London, where he could really see what he was looking like now, and really know where he was now.

When he was away from the battlefield, he always complained about why the troops at the front were so unbearable, and they were defeated in a few days under the German offensive. Now that he was there, he remembered the world war he had experienced, and how tormented and painful it was to spend an hour in the flames of war.

London is a very huge city, and the German attack on the outskirts of the city is actually more than ten kilometers away from where Churchill is, but some long-range artillery can still patronize the block above his head now, and those cannons are all captured weapons from the British ** team.

An hour after the garrison headquarters called, the Germans were less than 300 meters away in a straight line, and some German grenadiers were attacking buildings near them with "building demolivers", and the earth-shaking explosions could be heard on the phone.

The imaginary scene of a large number of citizens dying with grenades and the Germans did not happen, but the sound of suicide with grenades could be heard from time to time in all corners of the city. The Germans had long been aware of the attacks carried out by the citizens with hand grenades, so they were especially cautious with the British citizens of London.

Whenever a citizen surrenders, they are required to raise their hands at a distance, and then undergo a body search to confirm that there is no problem before being escorted to the rear, but there are still various records that the German ** team randomly shot and killed the surrendered London civilians for convenience.

After receiving a telegram from Accardo, Lundstedt developed a new attack tactic in London, which consisted of a rapid assault into the city, and then retreated back to its original defenses, giving back to the opponent the ruined area.

Then use the advantage of artillery and aircraft to repeatedly suppress this area, and annihilate the British soldiers who rushed out to retake their positions in the terrain they were already familiar with. It seems to be slowed down, but it is effective in killing and injuring British soldiers. Repeatedly attacking a corner of the city in this way consumes the entire city's defensive forces and achieves the combat goal of depleting the opponent's vital forces. And the area that was repeatedly let out has long been a ruin, no different from the field, and there is no so-called advantage in street fighting, and the combat method is more suitable for the German troops.

However, the British were not fools, and after repeatedly fighting for a few blocks, they began to stop their senseless counterattacks, and did not try to recapture the lost positions, and the two sides continued to go back and forth for a whole day.

The difference is that there are fewer casualties among the German ** teams, and more casualties among British civilians. And about a fifth of London, the capital city of the United Kingdom, one of the largest cities in Europe, is in bare ruins.

It is not to blame that the British civilians cursed their government, France, which was also a defeated country, Paris was still there unharmed, and the citizens had to endure nothing more than the nuisance of German patrols, and England London was now ruined, and only God knows how much is left to end.

The British are not fools, and neither are the Germans. The German infantry on the front line became more and more proficient, and the training plan of the High Command was carried out in an orderly manner, and about 20,000 veterans familiar with urban combat had been transported back to their home countries to serve as instructors and backbone of the newly formed units.

And the Germans began to use all kinds of methods to close the gap in street fighting. They used "building demolitionists" to smash buildings suspected of having British troops, and used Frederick rocket artillery to carry out a cold arrow salvo on a certain area, this suppressive play caused the British defenders to suffer a lot of losses, because of luck, at least three battalions of British soldiers were once covered by German rocket artillery, and lost at least 700 veterans.

Originally, this kind of urban combat was to add pressure to logistics, but Germany captured a lot of British artillery, at least in Britain to make up for the shortcomings of artillery firepower, and the fuel obtained allowed German transports to save a lot of space to transport Frederick rocket artillery shells, so the German ammunition for attacking London was quite sufficient.

On the contrary, it was the British who began to run out of supplies. Because the British royal family fled to Canada, the United States suspended some of its aid to Britain, which completely put the defenders of Britain in an embarrassing situation of not having supplies -- the bullets were not to be said, and there were still some stocks that could be used for emergencies, and the source of heavy weapons and equipment was completely cut off.

The U.S. M3 tanks were completely out of stock, and the lack of heavy anti-tank weapons in Britain directly led to the fact that the perimeter of London could not be defended, and the armored units of Army Group A swept around the border of the suburbs of London, easily completing the encirclement of the British capital. Smoke billowed from the Thames, and the British capital was in danger.

Churchill was not busy escaping, he was still under the Underground in central London, in his underground office. The British had about 100,000 war-worthy defenders in London and about 100,000 improvised rabble. These men guarded Churchill's London, the last line of defence of the British Empire.

What did the war bring to the city? The glass of the hospital was shattered and cracked by the artillery fire, and although it was already March and it was not too cold outside, the elderly and wounded lying on the hospital beds could only wait helplessly for their final moments. German shells don't have long eyes, more than one hospital has been hit by shells, and more than one room full of civilians has shaken and collapsed.

The British soldiers, like moles, searched for food in the ruins and dusty buildings, and they ran carefully from one side of the street to the other with their rifles, and then they got into the doors of the buildings, step by step, up the creaking stairs, smashed the locked doors with the butts of their guns, and rummaged through what they could use.

Blankets to protect against the cold, some condiments or money that the owner did not have time to take and some much-needed ammunition - many of them left the grenades distributed by the government at home, they did not intend to die with the Germans, and many more chose to leave and flee or surrender outright. The expected scene of death in the city did not appear, but more ordinary people with yellow faces and thin muscles and dying struggles squatting in the air-raid shelter waiting for their final fate.

The British defenders who searched the homes were no different from thieves, dodging German shells and snipers, then taking what they needed and trying not to risk their own lives. Sometimes they were unlucky, and when they kicked open the door, the air was filled with a foul smell, and the body of the owner of the house had been decomposing for so long that it could make people vomit for hours.

Even more unlucky, they kicked open doors or opened drawers and were blown up by grenades or mines, sometimes by mines planted by other British defenders, sometimes by traps set up by German special forces days earlier.

But like everyone else, they need to live, and to live they need food, necessary supplies and supplies. Unfortunately, they were much more miserable than the Germans, who had timely supplies, and although they were often late, there were always some, and they had to find them on their own.

Churchill had been staring at the map for almost three hours, and it had been marked with a red pen the buildings that had been destroyed into ruins, but now the poor map of London was bright red because of the increasing number of red marks. At the bright red edge, divisions of several formed British infantry divisions were distributed in several directions, but closer to where he was. He got up slowly, only to find that his feet were a little numb, and he hadn't seen the gray sky of London for several days.

"Secretary!" he shouted, but no one answered. He was slightly stunned, then limped out of the door and saw a second lieutenant officer staring at him with a confused expression.

"What about Miss Jones, didn't she come to work to-day?" asked Churchill, staring at the second lieutenant officer, in a slightly hoarse voice.

"Prime Minister...... I didn't see her, and I didn't see her yesterday......" The second lieutenant said nervously: "Many people can't find her, Miss Benny in the engine room died yesterday in German shelling, and Major Tony left this morning without saying anything." ”

"What about you, why don't you go?" Churchill knew the young lieutenant from the telegraph room, responsible for sending and receiving telegrams from the Prime Minister's office.

"Sir...... I was not ordered to leave. The lieutenant replied in a whisper.

Churchill nodded, very pleased with the answer. It was perhaps the most comforting thing he had heard in so many days, so he smiled and patted the young man on the shoulder, took the telegram from the young lieutenant's hand, and asked, "Where did the telegram come from?"

"Sir, it's a telegram from Canada from the royal family. The young lieutenant's voice was lowered, and Churchill felt a little uncomfortable in his tone.

He hurriedly opened the telegram, saw the contents of it, and after only a few words, he felt the world spinning, and he fell to the ground as soon as it was dark. After the young lieutenant's anxious cries for help and shouts, the telegram slowly landed.

The above is indeed a heart-wrenching statement: You have suffered unprecedented losses and crushing defeats in the British Empire during your tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and therefore, as King of the British Empire, I declare that you are relieved of your duties as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom