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Chapter 18 Alas, He Does Not Belong to Britain (Four)

  Chapter Eighteen Alas, He Does Not Belong to Britain (Four)

  "The first squadron has already opened up a distance with the British again, but why hasn't the second squadron even completed a simple southeast turn?"

  "At 7:51, Helgoland hit the Dreadnought with one shot, and a large fire broke out at the bow of the Dreadnought!" The dark clouds on Schmidt's face instantly disappeared, and he kept praising the officers and men of Helgoland, as if the commander who had just been blaming Helgoland for delayed information was not himself.

  Wolfgang Wegener let out a long, unconscious sigh. The High Seas Fleet was a young navy, with well-made and large-scale main battleships, well-trained sailors, but in the end, this fleet had no time to accumulate experience, and lacked experience. Battle cruises could not replace cruel actual combat, let alone the first battle of the First Squadron being the unprecedented North Sea Convention against the Royal Navy that had invaded the essence of the ocean.

  Fortunately, these did not hinder professional soldiers from finding the rhythm of war. The German Navy was young, but it was not a fish belly that could be trampled!

  "Commander, I'm going to urge Major Kurt Freiwald to repair the signal cord as soon as possible..."

  One of the twin jewels of Imperial Navy's strategic prowess, Weigand pulled out two snow-white gloves from his pocket and left with a faint smile. Fritz-Sokel, who temporarily took over as Deputy Chief of Staff, still remembered ten years later during the interwar period that Colonel Weigand had a habit of lowering his right hand to adjust his hat brim before leaving, elegant and gentlemanly.

  Gripping the icy ladder, Wagner rushed across the bridge wing at the after end of the command tower to the flying bridge of relatively safe funnel No. 1. At this moment, Colonel surprised to find that the signal lock on the mainmast was cut off by a British 12-inch shell and was running wildly like an unbridled wild horse, while Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt-Freiwald, the damage control officer, led a group of sailors on the swaying bracket of the mainmast, trying to fix and dismantle the unusable signal halyard, and another set of steel cable signal halyards were hoisted high with pulleys.

  "Major, how much longer? We need another tactical maneuver to give the British a taste of our strength. The signal flags are crucial for us!" The cannon fire boomed and the smoke from the gunpowder made it hard for Wiegand to keep his eyes open. Colonel von Litzow clutched the handrail of the flying bridge, raised his head and yelled with all his might.

  "Staff officer, give me..."

  Kurt Freiwald, riding on the mainmast, naturally lowered his head, but the corner of his eye inadvertently swept over a cluster of rapidly moving flowing fire. Freiwald's blue pupils suddenly enlarged dramatically, and his body balanced, anxiously gesturing something on the mainmast!

  This was the third time that Derfflinger had hit Westfalen. The first two armour-piercing shells Rodman could still explain away as poor spotting, but the repeated fact made Lieutenant Commander Rodman realize with growing unease that either the German defensive armor was too strong or the Royal Navy's 12-inch armor-piercing shells were faulty!

  "It can't be a problem for the Royal Navy! The Bellerophon-class battleship is a mass-produced ship of the Dreadnought, it's the world's first dreadnought!"

  In Rodman's mind, tempered by the storms of the North Sea, Invincible had a special meaning: it was the world's first modern battleship, rendering all existing, completed and commissioned, even those still on the drawing board, obsolete.

  At that time, the Americans were still enthusiastically building a fleet of all warships uniformly painted in a gorgeous and festive white color, known as the Great White Fleet, and were using it to intimidate the British Empire's followers - Japan; The French people who were confused by the concept of green water navy finally came back to their senses, but at that time, whether technically or financially, the French were not prepared enough, until 1909 they were still building Danton-class semi-dreadnoughts with inconsistent performance and tonnage. After the Battle of Tsushima, the Russians who "no longer had a navy" built ships as much as possible, but their technically backward people could only be in a state of panic and helplessness; The Italians proposed the concept of "all-heavy artillery" not later than Germany's Heidekamp and Britain's respected Admiral Fisher, but these Roman descendants had already lost the glory of the Roman Empire for thousands of years, leaving behind only the lazy ones who had penetrated into their bones. except for the loud slogan "thousand autumns, unified Mediterranean", delicious food with a variety of flavors. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was even more unbearable, the Habsburgs were guarding the gold and silver treasures accumulated by their ancestors but gradually weakening, from the start date of construction of the Tegetthoff-class ships earlier than the Italian Dandolo-class, but the completion date was later than the Italians.

  "Nothing but Nassau for the Germans!"

  Thinking of the four Nassau-class battleships flaunting their might in a 12-inch hail of shells at 15,000 meters outside the Royal Navy, Rodman's annoyance was multiplied.

  It was as if a carefully laid trap had been sprung, for when the Invincibles were being built, the Germans quickly produced their own response in the form of the Nassau class.

  The shell hit the Rudel! The explosion left Rodman temporarily deaf, and bold Corporal Allen poked his head out of the observation tower, one hand pointing at the X turret below the command tower, the other hand covering his mouth in utter disbelief.

  Rodman asked a question, but he couldn't hear any echo at all. The surroundings were eerily quiet, quietly terrifying, and suffocatingly still. Rodman stumbled forward in the direction of the private, his head spinning and his vision blurry. At this moment, an even more intense tremor shook the ground beneath his feet, and a nauseating smoke began to rise, its color a pale yellow!

  "Cough, cough... Command tower, the Germans have hit our x turret, the ammunition depot must be on fire, there's bitter smoke everywhere... I can't find my gas mask, I'm trying to move towards the middle of the explosion, cough, cough... God, what am I seeing? The top of the x turret has been blown open, I see many bodies, and the damage control team is rushing over..."

  The mainmast of the tripod was shaking and tilting, Rodman's eyes were bleeding at the corners, but he remained oblivious, struggling to stay on the lookout tower, making a final report to the command tower regardless.

  Seaman Allen survived, the young man fell into the water, the huge impact knocked him out directly until he was rescued by a German destroyer collecting bodies. Rodman died, he was thrown off the observation tower by the last explosion and withered like a summer flower in the fire smoke. The more heartbreaking fact is that the telephone line between the mainmast and the command tower was cut off by the first explosion, and the command tower couldn't hear Rodman's last words:

  "Another great flame burst out, cough, it nearly singed my eyebrows off! The mainmast was giving way, I saw Allen flung from the crow's nest, good luck to him, young fellow! And may the naval designer who put sloping armoured tops on turrets be hanged at the yardarm! God save the King, God save the British Empire!"

  The captain of the Reckless's brain was a mess until the third, and most violent explosion brought him back to his senses. But, cruel as it was, the captain would have rather remained in a daze.

  "Abandon ship! Let those sailors who can retreat withdraw first!"

  A violent explosion from deep within the hull sent the massive ship jumping on the high seas, accompanied by a towering pillar of fire, choking black smoke, iron debris and flesh fragments. The captain stumbled into the control room, gave the steering wheel a fierce kiss, and raised his gun to his temple.

  "This naval battle was nobody's fault. Not Davy Beatty, not General Jellicoe, nor the tens of thousands of sailors in the Royal Navy. The ones who should be dead are those designers!"

  This was the last words of Captain Ruan's, and also the most frequently mentioned and carefully considered by the world's navies after the war.

  As the captain's judgment, the front armor of the turret of the Bellerophon-class battleship was 11 inches, and the seat was 10 inches. The twin-mounted 280/50 type main gun equipped with Nassau class could only penetrate 212 mm at a distance of 12 km, which means that German armor-piercing shells could not penetrate the front armor of the British turret. However, when the hit position is the top armor of the turret, especially the turret armor, the situation reverses.

  The turret top armor of the British tank was 64 mm. This level of armor was originally sufficient against a 280 mm AP shell, but to save on armor and reduce tonnage, the British designed the top armor as sloping frontal armor.

  This is not the effective sloping armor of later tanks that reduced the effectiveness of anti-tank projectiles, but rather **bare front slope**, so when this 280mm armor-piercing shell arrived at a shallow angle and touched the top armor, it unexpectedly formed an almost vertical angle with the sloping surface.

  The horizontal armor was penetrated by the 11-inch shell, and the 64mm armor of the gun turret could not stop it. The German armor-piercing shell exploded inside the turret, and the fire spread along the open ammunition hoist hatch to the magazine, igniting the bitter-smelling cordite propellant. Even though the electrical fire suppression system was activated automatically, the fire floated on the water surface, stubbornly refusing to be extinguished. About ten seconds later, the underwater magazine finally detonated, and this last blow thoroughly sent down the Rashen.

  In less than a minute, the 18,800-ton standard displacement ship was nowhere to be found on the surface. The value of 12 tons of gold sank into the icy bottom of the Skagerrak Strait, leaving behind fewer than seven surviving sailors who continued the legend.

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