The i-line, which broke through the clouds at 288:15 local time on January and suddenly appeared over the German Ocean Fleet in the port of Kiel.

In order to achieve the effect of a surprise attack, the British did not hesitate to trample on the neutrality of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the huge first attack wave group actually attacked from a position close to the Danish territorial waters, crossing the Jutland Peninsula in the Danish part from west to east in the hazy morning light, entering the island of Ars and then breaking south into the Gulf of Kiel.

The Danish army, with its weak air defenses, could neither raise the alarm in time, nor was it able to stop such a powerful air strike force, and in fact, when the royal palace in Copenhagen urgently convened a royal meeting to confirm the situation and study countermeasures, the British fleet that had ended the raid had long since moved away from Danish territorial waters.

For the time being, it seemed clear that the Germans had not been able to defend themselves, and the port of Kiel lay quietly under the fleet of aircraft in Hull, with no German aircraft and no anti-aircraft gun nets.

The first attack wave consisted of a total of 96 carrier-based aircraft that took off from the aircraft carriers of the 3rd Fleet of the 1st Carrier Squadron, including 36 fighters and 54 mine-strike aircraft

A third of the fighter fleet (12 aircraft) carried out purely air supremacy missions, and the remaining (24 aircraft) carried small bombs and were responsible for assaulting an army aircraft near the port of Kiel

However, when the anchorage formation of the Ocean Fleet was really displayed in front of Hull, he found that the column on the west coast of the three columns (that is, the second squadron of battleships composed of old battleships) was too close to the shore, in shallow water on the chart, and under the protection of the two columns of ships to the east, it was impossible to attack at all, and the column between the east and west columns, which was obviously composed of the largest and newest warships (the third battleship squadron). Only the last two ships were likely to attack due to the lack of ground protection for the western side of the ship (the old ships of the 2nd Squadron were shorter and 1 ship less than the 3rd Squadron).

The column on the east side of the anchorage (3rd Battleship Squadron 8) was far enough from the east shore to launch a lightning strike, and it was in deep water on the chart, so it was difficult for the torpedoes to reach the bottom - so the focus of the attack was on this column.

Three green flares rise from Hull's hand one after another, and the attack begins!

Almost at the same time, the first 77-millimeter air-burst shells of the day were fired from a vantage point on the west coast of the port of Kiel.

In contrast to Wilhelmshaven, which was directly facing the North Sea and had been the main standby base of the Ocean Fleet since the beginning of the war, the port of Kiel, deep inland, did not seem to be in great need of air defense, and by January of that year, Wilhelmshaven was equipped with 33 anti-aircraft artillery batteries. Armed with more than 12,065 m balloon guns and anti-aircraft guns, 24 of the latest 40 mm guns and ~.2 mm machine guns, the port of Kiel has only 15 anti-aircraft batteries armed with 56 77 mm anti-aircraft guns and 840 mm guns

However, these figures are more significant than they are in practice, and all anti-aircraft artillery units are poorly trained, especially in defense against aerial torpedo attacks, because they can only be trained on army aircraft, which is really ignorant of naval warfare.

The German Navy was obsessed with large, long-lasting, long-range hydrogen airships, and the vast majority of its investment in the sky was spent on building lighter-than-air floating units, with few aircraft purchases and no interest in building aircraft carriers, and the construction of naval aviation units stagnated. So much so that after the start of the war, there was not a single practical carrier-based aircraft. Even seaplanes that can only rely on the base to carry out missions are very few.

The top brass of the navy did not care about this, since the German navy had adopted the strategy of "having a fleet," there was no need for the ocean fleet to venture into the depths of the ocean to confront the superior British fleet, but only to obediently hide in Helgoland Bay, which was protected by minefields, submarines, and torpedo boats, and wait for an opportunity to bite the opponent's weak points from time to time, so as to consume the opponent's strength and morale little by little......

Since the battlefields are scheduled to be in the coastal waters, and there are large airships that can cruise the sea and the sky for more than a dozen hours or even dozens of hours in a row, what is the point of developing such obscene short-legged small aircraft?

As for the air defense of the coast, it would not be nice to hand it over to the anti-aircraft artillery units and the army aviation. What the? The Lesson of Pearl Harbor? Well, the lesson of Pearl Harbor is that there are not enough anti-aircraft guns and not enough planes, so they will pile up anti-aircraft guns at the military port. In addition, the army air corps was stationed at the military port and airfield, and all kinds of guns that could be fired into the sky were temporarily loaded on the warships, and the personnel were trained. The methods of training and the compilation of air defense combat regulations for bases and fleets can all be explored slowly and done one by one......

As a result, most of the air defense units in the port and the air defense gunners on the warships are still in the stage of "slowly exploring," and they are really unable to do anything except frantically launch ground-to-air explosive bombs with artificial timing fuses with a hundredfold spirit other than the "Dujuan" lightning strike planes they met for the first time and the large formation air raids they have seen for the first time

Reactions like composure and confidence.

On the other side of the dimension, there is a record that at the beginning of the First World War, an average of 20,000 rounds of anti-aircraft artillery shells could shoot down one aircraft, and it gradually dropped to an average of 5,000 rounds in the later stages of the war.

After signaling the "all-army assault," Lieutenant Colonel Hull noticed that each German capital ship was hung with a cumbersome mine protection net, covering most of the two sides, and couldn't help but laugh.

Since the 70s of the last century, with the rapid development of torpedo weapons, the British Emperor .= has developed a kind of anti-mine metal mesh installed on warships, which can resist all kinds of early torpedoes when at anchor and at low speed.

The torpedoes, which appeared later, were equipped with anti-mine net cutters on their heads, which again posed a serious threat to the fleet. To counter the emergence of new cutters, heavy mine nets with denser mesh appeared, and in the Royal Navy and the German Navy, heavy mine nets were still considered a barrier for torpedoes. As far as other naval powers are concerned, the French stopped using mine nets after some of their early experiments, Russia only equipped them on a small number of ships, Italy used them for a short time on a few warships, and the Americans and Chinese thought that mine nets were not useful and never adopted them.

By 1907, the heavy lightning protection net on the new type of whitehead .+ with multiplied power, correspondingly, the design and equipment of the Royal Navy's lightning protection net to the end, the battleship "George V" was the last main battleship equipped with lightning protection net, and the lead ship of the "Iron Duke" class battleship "Iron Duke" had been installed with lightning protection net during the sea trials, but it had been removed during service. Mine nets never appeared in the design of later ships, and the original equipment of ships was gradually dismantled, and by the time the war began, the Royal Navy had completely abandoned the mine nets that had been necessary for capital ships.

Only the German admirals who had solidified reinforced concrete in their minds would stubbornly retain this kind of heavy equipment that could only become a burden in actual combat with a "maybe a little useful" attitude of riding the wall.

In fact, it is recorded in the history books of another time and space: by the time of the outbreak of World War I, except for the capital ships of Britain and Germany, all other countries had eliminated the equipment of mine protection nets. At the beginning of the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, when the British were dreadnought~, they were sunk by a small Turkish torpedo boat under the command of a German officer. Subsequently, a German submarine launched the former dreadnoughts Achievement and Solemnity to the bottom of the sea. All three battleships were equipped with mine nets, but the new torpedoes proved that mine nets had become ornaments.

In addition, the stubborn Germans kept the mine nets until the Battle of Jutland, but during the battle they found that the nets were easily damaged by artillery fire and had no value in retaining them. The chief gunner of the battlecruiser "De Fllinger", recording the combat damage of the ship, wrote: "The rear mine net was hit and hung above the port thrusters, and we had to stop for a few minutes in the battle **, and we cursed over and over again for nothing to throw away these hundreds of tons of burdens before the start of the battle." In any case, such nets will only partially protect the battleship, and at the same time, since we almost never anchor at sea, this thing will be of no use to us, on the other hand, sooner or later, the damaged mine nets will become entangled in the thrusters, and the speed will be drastically reduced, which means that our ship is doomed. For these reasons, the British dismantled the mine nets long before the war began, and we did not think of removing them until we suffered a loss at the Battle of Skagerrak (i.e., the Battle of Jutland......"

Hull was fully confident in the MK2A 18-inch air-launched torpedo under the belly of the Sopway "Cuckoo" mine-strike aircraft.

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This kind of airborne weapon, which weighs much lighter than a ship torpedo of the same caliber, focuses on ensuring the power and speed of the warhead at the expense of range. In order to ensure the penetration of the heavy mine protection nets still equipped by the German capital ships, a new type of mine protection net cutter was specially installed on the mine head, which would automatically fall off after the torpedo broke through the mine net, so as to ensure that the mine head hit the target and triggered the fuse.

Since the beginning of the war, the 1st Aircraft Carrier Squadron has secretly assembled on the west coast of Britain to practice aviation attack techniques, focusing on the use of MK2]+ in real mine targets, most of which are MK2 >: Shows considerable reliability.

However, at that time, the target of the "cuckoo" was a dead fish that had been heavily damaged by its own war patrol and had no power to fight back.

Arrogant Germans, see the power of the world's largest Royal Navy!