It was not that Isoroku Yamamoto believed so strongly in the battleship Yamato, which was still under construction, but that he had lost confidence in the tactics of relying entirely on Japanese naval aviation to gain battlefield superiority. Originally, Yamamoto was a general who was very supportive of the development of naval aviation, and he also relied on this support to agree to the Battle of Pearl Harbor, won the Battle of Wake Island, the Battle of the Marshall Islands, and forced the US Army in the Philippines to sink many British warships in Malacca. This made him even more convinced of his theory and the superiority of Japanese naval aviation.

However, the successive blows made him have to re-examine his trust, after all, the short years of naval aviation invincibility are now gone, and the current war situation has proved again and again that the Japanese naval aviation has lost its original glory.

During the First Battle of Kauai, the force was exhausted, and Yamamoto had to abandon his insistence on a single-shot plan to crush the U.S. Navy. This made Japan give up the opportunity for a decisive battle for the first time, and also put an end to the invincible history of the Japanese Navy.

In the Second Battle of Kauai, the Japanese naval aviation was technologically disadvantaged. The myth of the invincibility of the Zero fighter was shattered by the improved version of the P-40 fighter of the US Navy, and because of the bad relations with Germany, the United States also obtained first-hand information about the Zero fighter from Germany. As a result, in the Second Battle of Kauai, Japan was forced to lose due to huge air losses.

This time, Japan lost the aircraft carrier Ryuchamp in the decisive battle of Midway, which once again proved the decline of Japanese naval aviation. Yamamoto eventually came up with a different tactical idea. He felt that naval aviation was increasingly unable to sustain the needs of the offensive, and that Japan would have to come up with more lethal tactics in the next battle.

As a result, he was influenced by the battleship commanders, who had always made up the majority of the Japanese navy, and began to believe that the battleship decisive battle was a more mature tactic that would have a greater advantage over Japan.

His idea was very simple: since naval aviation could no longer maintain its own superiority, it would be enough to concentrate on entanglement with the US Navy's carrier-based aircraft, and the task of attacking would be entrusted to the Japanese Navy's battleships, which had a certain advantage in quality and quantity, and use the super guns and heavy armor of the new battleships Yamato and Nagato to rush into the US fleet and destroy the US fleet.

It has to be said that this idea is actually a tactic that the Japanese Navy has only been to in another time and space, and it can be said that this set of tactics is actually in line with Japan's national conditions at some times, and the use of this set of tactics when the Japanese Navy is at the end of its rope is not completely whimsical and groundless.

Of course, there is still an essential difference between Yamamoto Fifty-six's idea and the idea of the Japanese high-level in the late World War II naval battle in Leyte Gulf in another time and space, in another time and space, the Japanese Navy used the carrier-based aircraft as a decoy, and Yamamoto Fifty-six's core idea was to use carrier-based aircraft to cover the battleship for a fleet decisive battle.

This set of tactics is a bit like the Soviet Navy's operational thinking during the Cold War in the seventies and eighties -- using the only carrier-based aircraft on the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to destroy US air supremacy, and covering other warships to "fight bayonets" with long-range anti-ship missiles. However, this set of tactics is not an advanced operational concept, but a compromise made by the limitations of the weapons in hand.

On the other hand, the battleship Yamato did give Yamamoto Isoroku the reason for the decisive battle of the battleship, this epoch-making super battleship had the world's best strength at the time, both in terms of armor thickness and cannon caliber, and it was always more reassuring to rely on this battleship that was enough to overwhelm the opponent than to rely on those carrier-based aircraft units that had already lost several times, wasn't it?

At the same time that the Japanese Navy was losing ground on Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, the German Navy's aircraft carrier fleet was sailing the North Atlantic for a week. The purpose of this huge fleet was to cut off the supply lines between Iceland and the United States once and for all.

Lütjans was watching the fighter planes released by his aircraft carrier fleet take off from the deck, except for one German aircraft carrier Bismarck that was repaired in France, the remaining four aircraft carriers were all present, and now there are a total of three aircraft carriers in the fleet, and it is not difficult to release six carrier-based fighters in one go.

"Long live the Führer! Report to the general, the first batch of 18 planes responsible for reconnaissance and patrol have been dispatched, and the news transmitted by the destroyers on the periphery that no suspicious targets have been found in the nearby waters. An officer stood behind Rütjens and saluted and reported to him: "The alert helicopter on the Reich is taking off, and the alert helicopter on the Zeppelin is ready to take off. ”

"Order the entire fleet to remain on alert, and on this route to encounter enemy aircraft taking off from Greenland, and to be careful not to enter the radius of movement of land-based aircraft. Lütjans put down the binoculars in his hand and ordered the officer behind him, "Is there any news about the attack on the detachment?"

The officer flipped through the notebook, looked at it, and said, "Nothing has come from the debriefing telegram that was sent on time. They were maintaining radio silence and, following their pre-fixed course, it was possible to crash into the patrolling British naval detachment. ”

The largest aircraft carrier formation organized and commanded by Lütjens was four, and now Germany had one more battleship, and it was obviously not suitable for the entire fleet to be handed over to Lütjens, so the aircraft carrier Tirbitz and the battleship Marshal Raeder formed the first detachment, which was more than a hundred nautical miles away as a guerrilla fleet to attack the American transport lines.

The commander of this detachment was Vice Admiral Lindemann, a 45-year-old middle-aged general who, like Lütjans, came from the navy's traditional gunboat faction and had a bright future with Lütjans's promotion. Because of his eye-catching performance in the Battle of the English Channel and his tenacious combat, he was eventually promoted to Vice Admiral.

He was originally a gunboat commander, but now he has transformed into an aircraft carrier commander with Lütjans, and because he was first a gunboat commander and then an aircraft carrier commander, this time he was appointed commander of the detachment, responsible for commanding the German attack fleet.

The mission plan of the navy of the Third Reich this time was as follows: to attack and disrupt American transport ships by the attacking fleet, lure the main British fleet to come to support, and then attract the other side to break out of the cover of land-based aviation, and use the main fleet of three aircraft carriers in ambush in the open sea to annihilate the opponent, so as to achieve the goal of inflicting heavy damage on the British army.

It can be seen that the tactics of the German army are almost the same as the decisive battle tactics drawn up by Yamamoto Isoroku, except that the German army used the aircraft carrier fleet for the decisive battle, and the Japanese used the battleship fleet for the decisive battle.

"The modified FW-190 fighters were ordered to carry torpedoes, and the Stuka dive bombers were to be placed on standby in the hangar. "Unlike Yamamoto, the German Navy has never been on a combat mission to seize islands, and to put it bluntly, the German Navy is still a maritime guerrilla force, but the scale of this guerrilla force is a bit large.

It is not necessary to take on offensive tasks, but simply to be responsible for sabotage, annihilation of the enemy's living forces. This is the purpose of the German Navy, and it is almost the purpose of all German military operations today - the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy are the same, but the goal is simply to destroy the adversary's living forces, whether defensive or offensive, but only a means to an end.

Happier than the Japanese Navy, the air-cooled FW-190 was better than the Zero, and after continuous improvement, it was able to speed up to 100 kilometers per hour faster than the Zero. Moreover, the battle losses of the German pilots were much smaller than those of the Japanese. These advantages allowed the Germans to firmly control air supremacy over the Atlantic, and with the exception of Iceland where British secret weapons were used in battle, German naval aviation was uninhabited in the Atlantic.

In terms of the quality of the pilots, the German pilots were also much stronger than the Japanese pilots, at least under the command of Lütjans, the German pilots, including Günter Lahr, were too many aces and even super aces to count. How powerful are these pilots? With less than 300 aircraft, the entire Polish Air Force can be wiped out.

It stands to reason that such a powerful carrier-based aircraft force of the German Navy should have trapped Iceland in the bud long ago. But to put it bluntly, the geographical location of this Iceland really made the German fleet a bit of a hedgehog and couldn't swallow it. Transport ships departing from Canada, as long as they detour some distance to the north, can always sail under the shelter of the Greenland field airfield, which makes the German surface ship force have no good way.

Similar to today, the German navy has been attacking the transport and supply lines many times, and each time it has allowed the German army to take advantage of some small advantages, but it has never achieved the desired strategic effect. After all, the fleet needs a lot of fuel to sail, and returning empty-handed again and again also makes the German Navy have no ambition to fight it.

After all, the large corps on the Eastern Front did not need a lot of fuel to fight, so in order to raise fuel, the surface ships of the Navy had not appeared in the North Atlantic for two months.

"Just wait. After giving the order to stand by, Lütjans looked at the sea in the distance, he did not know if the British Royal Navy would appear as he wished this time, and he did not know how much prey he could find on this hunt. All he can do now is wait patiently.