Transmigrated as the Crown Prince

Chapter 494: Bombardment

The German 2nd Parachute Division was launching a fierce attack behind the Dover defense lines.

These rearguard troops were temporarily dispatched by the Dover garrison commander after hearing that German paratroopers had landed in the rear. When these defensive positions were originally built, they all faced the sea. No one thought that the enemy would attack from behind. As a result, they were easily broken through by elite German paratroopers and were beaten back steadily.

Is it surprising that they are about to be surrounded? Just when the commander wanted to ask how many paratroopers were in the attack, a horrified shout suddenly came from the other end of the phone. "Grenade!!"

boom!

The deafening explosion made the commander's expression suddenly change. "Hey! Hey! What's going on?? The Germans are coming??"

After a while, a hoarse unfamiliar voice sounded on the other end of the phone. "Yes, we have attacked. Now that your army's retreat has been cut off by us, we advise you to surrender immediately to avoid unnecessary sacrifices."

The word "surrender" seemed to touch the sensitive nerves of the guard commander, and he yelled hysterically. "Surrender?! Impossible!! We soldiers of the British Empire will fight to the last soldier!! We will never surrender!!"

The German on the other end of the phone snorted disdainfully. "Fight to the death of every soldier? No matter what, you can't ask for it. Although we treat prisoners preferentially, we never mind killing all the enemies on the battlefield. If you are captured, you will be released back. If you are all dead, there will be no such troubles."

After throwing down the phone, the battalion commander walked out of the enemy's command room and gave orders to the people around him. "Reinforce the fortifications. The British say they will fight to the last soldier. No British can be allowed to slip through here."

"Battal Commander, the defenses are all ready and the soldiers have already entered the position."

Just as the Germans took over the British rear defenses and reinforced them, the soldiers in the British second line of defense were huddled in the trenches, shivering.

"Wow!" Accompanied by the sound of a violent explosion close at hand, a recruit felt a sharp pain in his stomach and vomited out, full of blood! He looked at the vomited blood in disbelief. He was not hit by shrapnel, how could he be injured?

Many of these new recruits have not received training and do not know that the destructive power of large-caliber artillery is not only the fragments of the shells, but even more terrifying is the pervasive shock wave! The explosion of the artillery shell would produce a shock wave and huge vibration, enough to cause internal injuries to the soldiers leaning in the trench.

A reconnaissance plane was hovering over the British, watching artillery shells fall on the British positions. But the British, who also experienced the last world war, dug trenches very cleverly. Their trenches were dug into zigzag shapes and made numerous right-angled bends. Even the occasional lucky shell or two that fell into the trench was of little consequence.

The observer in the reconnaissance plane shook his head. "This is a pure waste of ammunition. Replace it with special ammunition! Let the British know that we can pry open its shell even if it shrinks into a turtle!"

It is best to use air burst bombs to deal with trenches. They can effectively deal with soldiers in trenches, and the lethality can be increased by more than ten times. In other words, to deal with soldiers in trenches, it takes 10,000 rounds of ordinary artillery shells to achieve the killing effect. Air burst bombs do not. 1000 rounds is enough.

Air burst bombs are generally loaded with radio proximity fuzes. In the early days of the Pacific War, the anti-aircraft artillery used on U.S. warships mainly used timing fuzes or trigger (explosion) fuzes. To use timing fuzes, you need to accurately calculate or predict the height and speed of the target before launching. First set the delayed detonation time of the artillery shell. If the setting is wrong, even if the artillery shell is accurately aimed at the target, it will be ineffective because it detonates too early or too late. Therefore, the artillery hit rate is very low. When confronting the Japanese high-speed Zero fighter It seemed powerless. On average, it took several thousand rounds of artillery fire to shoot down a Japanese fighter plane.

The US military has developed a radio proximity fuze for this purpose. Its core component is a miniature radio transceiver installed in the fuze. When the device receives the target signal echo and reaches a certain frequency (that is, when it is closest to the target), the built-in circuit ignites and detonates on its own. Cannonballs.

Shells equipped with radio proximity fuses fired by anti-aircraft guns on U.S. warships can explode about 20 meters away from enemy aircraft, which greatly enhances the damage intensity and damage efficiency. Among the enemy aircraft shot down by U.S. anti-aircraft fire, the proximity fuses The shells shoot down 6 times more than ordinary fuse shells. Especially at the end of the war, the Japanese launched kamikaze attacks on U.S. warships. Thanks to the proximity fuze, the U.S. Navy blocked the crazy Japanese attack.

For this reason, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy said proudly: "The proximity fuze helps us fight all the way to Japan."

In addition to being used on anti-aircraft artillery shells, radio proximity fuses are also used on ground-attack artillery. Without the command of artillery observers, the shells will automatically explode at a height of three to twenty meters above the ground. The fragments exploded are very powerful. The pressure can kill unarmored personnel on the ground, even in temporary shelters such as foxholes.

The proximity fuse is surprisingly effective in sea and air battles, and is also extremely domineering in land battles. With proximity fuses, land artillery can flexibly set the air burst height, and its lethality to ground personnel is ten times higher than traditional fuses! However, because it was super secret and for fear of the Germans getting the samples, the U.S. military banned the use of proximity fuses on land artillery until 1945, on the eve of Germany's surrender. The first time proximity fuses were used in land warfare was the Ardennes Counterattack. In this battle, the Germans experienced the power of this "smart" weapon and suffered heavy casualties.

At the K5 train gun position in the Calais area, the gunners who received the order moved in special artillery shells. This artillery shell equipped with a proximity fuse is equipped with thousands or hundreds of 5 mm diameter steel balls in the warhead. A round of artillery fire smashed through, and tens of thousands of steel balls raged over the trenches, beating up the British soldiers hiding in the trenches and causing heavy casualties.

However, air-burst bombs are also preventable. Just digging cat-ear holes in the trench can offset most of the power of air-burst bombs.

Naturally, the Germans also knew the weaknesses of airburst bombs. After a few rounds of shooting, they replaced them with another special bomb, with a thermobaric bomb in the warhead.

Thermobaric bombs mainly rely on high-temperature fireballs and high-pressure shock waves to kill targets, so they are also called thermobaric bombs (HAP) because they have similar explosive effects to air-to-air explosive bombs (FAE), and the two are most easily confused. In fact, as two types of large-area anti-personnel weapons, thermobaric bombs are indeed the ultimate evolution of cloud explosive bombs. However, the shortcomings of cloud explosive bombs such as poor environmental adaptability, complex structure, and high requirements for detonation conditions are too obvious, and they are gradually replaced by thermobaric bombs.

The killing power of thermobaric bombs is not much different from that of cloud burst bombs, but because it is loaded with solid explosives, the shell can be packed with a stronger metal aluminum shell, so it can be used as the killing part of high-speed artillery shells.

The defenders of Dover did not even see a single German soldier, but they suffered heavy casualties.

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