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Part One Twenty Years Chapter Thirteen Mutiny (5)

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    (I will go back to my hometown in the afternoon, so I may not be able to update tomorrow.)

    "Silem, I think our navy should also join in and fight for the rights and status that the navy deserves"

    In Wilhelmshaven, Navy Chief of Staff Raeder was persuading Wang Heidi.

    At the end of July, the German political situation became increasingly strange.

    Regent Max, Prime Minister Hedlin and Army Chief of Staff Field Marshal Hindenburg did not miss any opportunity to slander the congressional election and fully attacked Ludendorff.  The Social Democratic Party, which was being used as a weapon, could not take back its previous generous words of praise for Ludendorff, but it still seemed to be frustrated.  Ludendorff, on the other hand, is sitting firmly on the Diaoyutai. His Fatherland Party has been developing rapidly in recent times. Leaving aside the northern regions where the Social Democratic Party has the strongest strength but does not have the right to vote, William Gerard, the leader of the Fatherland Party and the number one man in the army, is Ludendorff¡¯s most capable subordinate.  Ren¨¦l has moved closer to becoming caretaker prime minister.

    In this cruel political contest, the navy, which plays an important role in the empire, remained silent from beginning to end due to the constraints of its naval leader Wang Heidi.

    After the Orkney Islands naval battle, Wang Heidi did not deliberately pay attention to the disturbances in Berlin. Instead, she stayed quietly in Wilhelmshaven and planned a new maritime war.  Wang Heidi knew very well that the Navy was not qualified to participate in the competition. The Navy actually did not lack supporters, but the power of its supporters was too scattered and mostly distributed in the middle and lower levels of the political pyramid, which meant that the Navy did not have many resources.  Heidi Wang did not think it was necessary for the Navy to participate in this inexplicable power struggle.

    If the Army is the winner of this dangerous power game, the Army's traditional enemy, the Imperial Navy, may not have anything to lose.  In the third year of the war, no one would think that the extremely tired army was still capable of completely wiping out France's counterattack on the British mainland. Only a navy with relatively complete combat capabilities was the only effective means for the empire to win, not to mention the army that had just come to power.  Naval support was also needed to deal with conservative counterattacks.

    If conservatives are the winners in this dangerous power play, the Navy may gain even more.  After the conservatives who lacked military support came to power, they had no reason to believe that the unruly army and the navy, which was accustomed to guarding its own territory and was indifferent to politics, were more trustworthy than the army on the Eastern Front.

    In other words, no matter how the King's Flag in Berlin changes, the Navy will not be the final loser.  This is not only Wang Heidi's confidence in her strategic vision, but also her confidence in the navy's three-year bloody battle.

    "Raeder, sinking the British Isles is more affordable than any political exchange. Besides, we still have General Tirpitz and Mr. Wolfgang Kapp in the Congress" Silem grabbed a thick coat  Folding documents, he angrily walked around the not-so-spacious chart room of the base headquarters. The two small bottles of rum in his trouser pockets made clinking sounds from time to time, constantly irritating Wang Heidi, the supervisor in the chart room who was ordered to not drink alcohol.  The fragile nerves of the staff officers.  "Also, why hasn't General Hoffman from the Eastern Front come over yet? I have a big plan here. It has to be him!"

    Reidel couldn't help but rolled his eyes at his old friend who was addicted to alcohol, until General Hoffman, wearing an army uniform, pushed open the door and walked in.

    "Silem, I also have a big plan here, and you have to do it!"

    ****

    "We encountered the Germans' new battlecruisers. They came through the smoke, rushed towards us at a high speed of over 26 knots, and opened fire on us at a distance of 17,000 yards A shell hit the front of the A turret,  And went through it, and I never saw a single person come out of the turret alive.¡±

    ¡ª¡ªExcerpted from the memoir "Sight in the Mast" by Essek Rosewell, the former lookout on the Queen Elizabeth

    After the Battle of Orkney Islands.  The Royal Navy, whose backbone was broken, was disorganized and had to adopt a comprehensive contraction strategy.

    The British first deployed them in northern France. Their current main function is to maintain the authority of the French government and suppress the mutiny. The elite army was transferred back to the British Isles to guard the eastern coastline of the British Isles and suppress the Irish revolutionary movement. Later, the remaining members of the Grand Fleet were  A dozen capital ships are deployed on the North Atlantic side of the British Isles, leaving the defense of the open east coast to the pocket army - the disgraced and dying British Empire no longer cares about the Germans copying the Battle of Dogger Sands and the Battle of Portsmouth  In the attack on the British mainland, they were more concerned about how to use the weak fleet to protect the long sea transportation lines of the empire where the sun never sets.  Finally, in order to trap the Ocean Fleet at its peak, the British ignored the opposition of the Netherlands, Russia and the Nordic countries.  Directly use mines and submarines to block the international waterway between the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands.

    However, mines and submarines were not enough to hinder the German navy's movement in and out of the North Atlantic. At the end of July, just as the Germans were falling into an unspeakable intermittent anxiety and mania due to the upcoming parliamentary elections.At that time, half of the elite army divisions drawn from the Eastern Front Army and a Marine Corps that had just completed training by the Navy totaled more than 16,000 officers and soldiers, and the Imperial Navy had a total of eight battleships, seven battlecruisers, and twelve light ships.  Under the cover of cruisers and twenty-four destroyers, they made a mighty move towards the Shetland Islands.

    Before the outbreak of World War I.  The British set the Orkney Islands south of the Shetland Islands as the main base of the Grand Fleet and invested a lot of energy and time. After the Orkney Islands Battle, the strategically shrinking British had to abandon Scapa Flow and would guard the  Most of the warships here are scattered to the Firth of Forth, northern Scotland and the North Atlantic coast.

    Losing the cover of the Orkney Islands' heavy troops.  The first step of the German Sea Lion program was completed extremely smoothly.  After dispersing the small number of British soldiers in the Shetland Islands almost without blood, the Germans planted the Iron Cross flag on the main island of the Shetland Islands.  Claim to the Shetland Islands.

    The occupation of the Shetland Islands became a remarkable victory in the history of German wars. It was not only the largest landing war in Germany's history, but also gave Germany a strategic fulcrum that could support the ocean fleet to freely enter and exit the North Sea, and completely eliminated the British concept of long-range blockade.  Bankruptcy.  In the end, Germany successfully included the Shetland Islands, an overseas enclave of great strategic significance, into the empire's bloated territory through the Treaty of Amsterdam, even though the British threw out "Shetland" at the 1918 Amsterdam negotiations.  The plan to separate the islands from the Commonwealth and accept international trusteeship failed to regain Shetland.

    The occupation of the Shetland Islands was only the first step.  The Germans built the Shetland Islands into an unsinkable maritime supply point for the Ocean Fleet. They first relied on the Shetland Islands to carry out continuous raids and mine clearances against the minefields laid by the British in international waterways, and then sent out battlecruisers, including battlecruisers.  The diplomatic breakup unit and the underwater wolf pack unit repeatedly harassed the British's main offshore waterways.

    Thanks to the efforts of the Germans, the British lost more than 20 10,000-ton ocean-going cargo ships in the third week of July alone.

    Faced with the extremely arrogant Germans, the British Admiralty also planned several maritime operations to encircle and suppress German battle patrols. However, the unsatisfactory Royal Navy dragged its opponents to the North Atlantic and still could not defeat them.

    In a classic small-scale battle cruiser duel on July 23, 1917, three British modified Queen-class battle cruisers encountered three German Mackensen-class battle cruisers. After a steel duel like sparks hitting the earth, the British lost  The HMS Queen Elizabeth retreated into the Irish Sea in embarrassment.

    In early August, the German navy had begun to threaten the Orkney Islands, trying to make the British lose their huge investment in the desolate Orkney Islands.  Almost at the same time, the U.S. government, which had reluctantly sent the third and fourth wave of aid troops to Europe, totaling 100,000 troops, could not withstand the huge losses in maritime transportation, and had to interrupt the blood transfusion by the French again.

    Faced with the United Kingdom, which kept sending its army back to the mainland, the United States, which blatantly stopped supporting France, and the Paris rebels who were entrenched in Paris and ignored the safety of maintaining the regime, the isolated French had no choice but to hold on to a small number of French guerrillas and militiamen in the southeastern battlefield.  They were comforted by the battle report of the defeat of the Italian regular army, and waited cautiously for the massive German attack on the Western Front.

    The French waited from the end of the Battle of the Orkney Islands to the end of June, from the first flashes of fire in July to the storms of August, but in fact, the German Western Front Army in the French mind was secretly embarking on the road to the north.

    In Ludendorff's plan, this army was given the power to take control of Paris, eliminate certain conservative forces that "threatened" and "tampered with" the parliamentary elections, and then continued to advance northward, using thunderous means to completely clean out the Workers' Party rebels entrenched in northern Germany.  military.

    "Germany needs victory, and the Army, which is responsible for the empire, has the unshirkable responsibility! Any force that hinders the Army's continued advancement must be swept into the garbage dump of history!" In the dim room, the Army had just been given the task of "catching enemy elements and foreign spies."  Ludendorff, who was sweeping away the conservative forces in the city in the name of "power", looked ferocious.

    With the first gunshot and the screams of Berlin citizens, William Grenell rushed in with a pale face and said in a trembling voice:

    "General, the election results are in. The winner is not our Motherland Party, but Albert's Social Democratic Party!"
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