Chapter 266: Killing the Franks with the Trailing Sword |
"Have the Moltke retreat at full speed and rendezvous with Horthy's fleet as soon as possible! The Goeben will take two light cruisers and follow me. We're going to keep the Franks occupied!"
Having figured out his next move, Count Spee decisively issued an order that struck many as unbelievable.
The officers aboard the Moltke and the other retreating warships were utterly stunned when they heard it.
But after a brief moment of shock, the Demanians' innate obedience took over. They carried out the order without hesitation, allowing the Moltke to lead a group of destroyers—which had already expended all their torpedoes—in retreating first.
Seeing the Demanians attempt to flee, the opposing Franks hurriedly accelerated, charging forward to pick off the stragglers.
Before the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet had been wiped out at dawn, they had sent out a final position report to their allies.
The reliability of that report was about the same as a dead teammate's callout in a modern battle royale game. The comms were filled with claims like, "The enemy is absolute one-shot! I brought him down to one HP! A single bullet will kill him!"
It would be an absolute sin not to steal a kill on an enemy hanging on by a thread.
But soon, Admiral Bouvet, commander of the Frankish Mediterranean Fleet, realized that there was someone swimming against the current of retreating enemies: the Goeben was charging headlong toward his four Courbet-class battleships all by itself!
Still, if someone was throwing their life away, he had no reason not to accept the gift.
Admiral Bouvet quickly ordered the fleet to shift from a pursuit formation to a line abreast. The four Courbet-class battleships spread out, turning their broadsides toward the Goeben. All they had to do was wait for the enemy to blunder into range, at which point all forty 305mm main guns would focus their fire and obliterate it!
The reason there were forty main guns was because the Courbet-class battleship was a freak of engineering.
Each vessel possessed up to six twin-gun turrets for a total of twelve main guns, matching the Demanians' Nassau-class. However, regarding the main gun layout, the Courbet-class cobbled together the superfiring turrets the Brit Nation had pioneered with the Orion-class, while also integrating the initial dreadnought design of "one main turret on each broadside." The result was a bizarre arrangement of "two superfiring turrets fore and aft, plus one on each broadside, totaling six turrets," which allowed a maximum of ten guns to fire in a single broadside.
This complex layout tried to incorporate a bit of everything, and the end result was a master of none.
Moreover, this was the Franks' first attempt at building a dreadnought. They had never constructed superfiring turrets before. Attempting something so difficult right out of the gate meant that by the time the design work was nearly complete, the designers realized they couldn't overcome the issues of a raised center of gravity and hull instability caused by the superfiring layout.
The final compromise was to flatten the thickness of the main gun turrets and lock the maximum elevation angle of the main guns at a mere 12 degrees. Consequently, the maximum range was a pitiful 15,000 meters.
Today, they were going to pay the price for that design.
The distance between the two sides shrank rapidly. At 5:50 AM, when the gap between the Goeben and the Courbet closed to under 20 kilometers, Admiral Spee gave the order. His battleship quickly and elegantly carved a 120-degree arc across the sea—a maneuver resembling a "Caracole" cavalry tactic. The warship, which had been charging head-on just moments ago, whipped its tail around to adopt a trailing sword posture. Turning its rear quarter toward the Courbet, the crew took a quick rangefinding measurement and opened fire.
In pristine condition, the Goeben sported ten 280mm main guns. But with two turrets already destroyed, it could only bring six guns to bear against the Courbet.
—
On the opposing side, Admiral Bouvet, commander of the Frankish Mediterranean Fleet, initially thought it was a coincidence. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he ordered all four ships to turn slightly to close the distance with the enemy.
But his smile quickly vanished. Spee's next move proved it was no coincidence—the enemy knew his weakness.
The Goeben began to turn as well, constantly keeping its rear quarter pointed at the Frankish ships while unhurriedly measuring the range and firing.
Twenty minutes into the artillery duel, the Demanians scored their first hit.
Because the engagement distance was a full 17 to 18 kilometers—considered extreme long-range shelling in this era—the accuracy rate was terribly low.
It was completely normal for six guns to land only one shot after twenty minutes of firing. Of course, the Demanians weren't firing at maximum speed either; they needed time to slowly observe and adjust. They basically fired one salvo every 80 seconds, waiting for the shells to land, observing the splash to confirm if they were long or short, and calculating the adjustments before unleashing the next volley.
But the effect of this single hit was extraordinary—not because of the physical damage it inflicted, but because of the immense psychological damage.
"The Demanians know our secret weakness! Fuck! Who leaked it? The Demanians know the Courbet-class's main guns have a maximum elevation of only 12 degrees and an extreme range of just over 15,000 meters, so they're hovering just outside our maximum range to unilaterally pound us?!"
Was there anything in the world more devastating to morale than being utterly helpless to strike back, suffering one-sided, free damage?
It was said that when battlecruisers were first conceived, the ideal combat scenario they pursued was: "Faster than the enemy, with a longer range. I can hit them, they can't catch me, and I kite them to death."
On the Earth plane, this ideal state was achieved by the British Navy during the Battle of the Falkland Islands. In 1914, when Count Spee led the armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau against the British battlecruiser Invincible in Argentine waters, he fell into the miserable predicament of being "slower and outranged, unable to hit the enemy, and unable to outrun them," ultimately leading to total annihilation.
In Lelouch's plane, due to the butterfly effect and the absence of the Far East Fleet, Count Spee didn't go to Asia and thus kept his life. He later accumulated merits and was promoted to Admiral. Unexpectedly, two years later, it was his turn to flip the script and employ this very tactic against the Franks.
The unpredictability of fate was truly something to sigh over.
The tragic Admiral Bouvet, meanwhile, had the misfortune of playing the victim.
Originally, the secret that the Frankish Courbet-class's main gun elevation was only 12 degrees could have been kept until the end of the war.
After all, as long as the battleships didn't sortie, the enemy wouldn't know there was a problem. As long as he didn't try to pull off something huge, he wouldn't shit the bed in a huge way.
Who could have known that there was a transmigrator on the opposing side who had read the declassified materials ahead of time? Taking advantage of the previous Battle of Dunkirk, he had exaggeratedly passed this information on to a few Demanian naval commanders he was on good terms with.
It was pure, unadulterated bad luck!
As the battle dragged on past 7:00 AM, Admiral Bouvet finally realized this couldn't continue; otherwise, the morale of the entire fleet would collapse.
After weighing the situation, he finally made a decision: "Brave the Goeben's fire and go after the Moltke! We'll fight Horthy's Austrian reinforcement fleet in a decisive battle! The Moltke has already been heavily damaged by Britannia! Its speed is much lower! It's even slower than our Courbet-class, so it can't keep its distance and fight us at long range!
It's just one Goeben. If it wants to snipe at us from afar, let it! It doesn't have many shells left anyway; even if it empties its magazines, it won't land many hits!
"Also, have the large torpedo boat swarms accompanying us swarm over and take out the Goeben! It only has a few cruisers for escort; it can't handle a massive wave of torpedo boats!"
The Frankish Navy's torpedo boat forces were absolutely unique in the world of the 1910s. This was because, at the turn of the century, the Franks had come up with the "green-water navy" development path, banking on torpedo tactics to settle battles.
By the time war broke out, the Franks had astonishingly built over 160 torpedo boats in total. In contrast, the Demanians only had 105 destroyers and large torpedo boats combined.
In the realm of torpedo warfare, Francia's strength surpassed Demania's, ranking second in the world only to the Britannia Royal Navy.
Of those 160 torpedo boats, nearly a hundred were usually deployed in the Atlantic and North Sea regions. The Mediterranean was allocated five torpedo boat flotillas, totaling roughly over sixty vessels.
For today's battle, Admiral Bouvet had brought a large contingent of torpedo boats for support. Each dreadnought was accompanied by a dedicated torpedo boat flotilla, and each flotilla consisted of a full twelve torpedo boats! Four flotillas meant 48 boats in total.
The Franks brought 48 torpedo boats, but only eight destroyers and a mere four light cruisers, resulting in just a one-to-one escort ratio for the dreadnoughts.
This number was already quite an achievement. When the war started, Francia only had 12 light cruisers and 29 destroyers nationwide, and they had suffered some losses since. These high-speed warships were extremely scarce.
Francia was under so much pressure on land that all their resources had to be diverted to manufacturing army equipment. Thus, they hadn't built any new ships after the war began, only allowing half-built vessels on the slipways to be finished.
They did still possess six Danton-class pre-dreadnoughts, 13 armored cruisers, and around twenty older protected cruisers. A portion of these ships had also been dispatched as reinforcements today, but they were too slow. With a top speed of only 16 knots, they couldn't keep pace with the dreadnought fleet's 21 knots and had been left far behind, having yet to even reach Malta.
Therefore, to avoid being kited to death by the trailing sword maneuver, the Franks' only option was to launch a desperate, suicidal charge with their torpedo boats.
Watching the massive swarm of torpedo boats charging toward him, Admiral Spee's expression turned grave.
Although the trailing sword tactic had dealt a severe blow to the enemy's morale, it was ultimately unsustainable once the enemy was backed into a corner and lashed out.
"Turn immediately and disengage at full speed! We've done enough. Rely on the secondary batteries to stop the enemy torpedo boats from closing in! Have the two light cruisers block them with everything they have! We've delayed long enough; Admiral Horthy should be arriving to regroup with us shortly."
In the end, the Goeben only managed to score three free 280mm hits on the Courbet. The plunging fire destroyed a midships superstructure, a lifeboat crane, and achieved a top-attack that disabled its port-side main turret before hastily pulling away.
The Goeben's forward firepower systems were the most heavily damaged. Because their earlier battle with Britannia had been a furious head-on assault, the shell impacts naturally landed on the forward half.
Now that it was time to play the trailing sword game, its rear-facing firepower was largely uncompromised, with six 150mm secondary guns and nine 88mm guns still capable of firing.
Combined, the two light cruisers also possessed six 150mm guns and 22 88mm guns. Even their 37mm ultra-high-rate-of-fire light guns posed a certain threat to the torpedo boats.
Furthermore, upon realizing the Franks were launching a torpedo boat charge, Admiral Spee immediately corrected course. He issued another order, calling back the destroyer flotilla that had originally withdrawn with the Moltke to return and escort them.
Although the destroyers' 88mm and 37mm light guns were useless in a fleet artillery duel, they were highly effective against torpedo boat swarms.
The remaining destroyers showed no fear. The moment they received their commander's order, they immediately wheeled around.
The sea surface erupted with small-caliber fire. The sheer intensity of the battle seemed to quiet down momentarily—the deafening roar of the 280mm and 305mm behemoths was gone, leaving only naval guns of up to 150mm swatting at mosquitoes.
One charging Frankish torpedo boat after another took direct hits from the rapid-firing 88mm guns and exploded. Every Demanian battleship and cruiser took out at least two or three torpedo boats.
But there were simply too many torpedo boats. After paying the price of over ten sunken vessels, the remaining 37 boats were on the verge of forming an encirclement.
Seeing the critical danger to the capital ships, the two Demanian light cruisers abandoned maintaining a safe distance. Instead, they bravely charged straight into the enemy swarm to execute precise, rapid point-blank kills, which undoubtedly threw them right into the enemy's torpedo firing zone.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
The light cruiser Graudenz intercepted a torpedo boat flotilla attempting to flank them from behind. This flotilla had only lost two boats to long-range fire and still had a full ten vessels remaining.
The Graudenz closed the distance to four kilometers, its 88mm guns firing in a frenzy. On average, it blew a torpedo boat out of the water every two minutes.
While the 37mm light guns had trouble sinking torpedo boats outright, they could shred everything above the waterline, crippling the boats' speed before the 88mm and 150mm guns swooped in for the kill.
Within just 15 minutes, the Graudenz slaughtered over half of this flotilla. The surviving torpedo boats abandoned their pursuit of the Goeben, hastily emptying almost all their torpedoes at point-blank range before breaking away.
The Graudenz maneuvered frantically to dodge, but was unfortunately struck by a torpedo and quickly lost speed.
Once it lost momentum, it was like a man falling into a piranha-infested stretch of the Amazon River. It was swiftly struck by subsequent torpedoes still churning through the water.
Ultimately, after tallying eight Frankish torpedo boat kills and crippling the engines of five more, the light cruiser Graudenz sank heroically.
The other light cruiser, the Albatross, was relatively weak even among its peers.
Because it was classed as a minelayer cruiser—identical to the Nautilus that sank yesterday—it lacked 150mm guns. Its entire arsenal consisted of 88mm and 37mm guns. In a duel against enemy cruisers or destroyers, its combat capability fell far short of the Graudenz's.
Who would have expected that, facing a swarm of low-tier torpedo boats today, the sixteen 88mm guns bristling across the Albatross would be in their absolute element? It fought as fiercely as a cornered hedgehog.
After all, a single 88mm shell was enough to severely cripple a torpedo boat and rob it of its speed. Two or three hits could sink it. And that was for the larger three- to four-hundred-ton torpedo boats.
If it were a smaller boat under two hundred tons, a single 88mm shot could easily punch a hole straight through, flooding and sinking it outright.
When the Albatross plunged suicidally into a torpedo boat flotilla trying to flank them from another direction, it was like a tiger amongst sheep. The 88mm guns covering its hull obliterated five torpedo boats in a staggeringly short amount of time!
Seeing the situation go south, the rest of the torpedo boats gave up on hunting the enemy battlecruiser. Instead, they dumped all their torpedoes directly at the Albatross.
The captain of the Albatross, noticing that the enemy swarm had unloaded their torpedoes from a considerable distance, didn't stick around to brawl. He immediately brought the ship around at top speed to open the gap, completely wasting the payloads of the six enemy torpedo boats. Abandoning those now-harmless husks, the Albatross pivoted and plunged at full speed into an adjacent torpedo boat flotilla.
This time, the Franks finally learned their lesson. Resolving to charge into point-blank range before firing, they endured the godly wrath of the Albatross's 88mm guns. Only after paying a steep toll of eight torpedo boats did they manage to empty their tubes at a desperately close range of 800 to 1,200 yards. Ultimately, the sheer weight of numbers bit the elephant to death, sinking the Albatross.
At the cost of two light cruisers, the Demanians cumulatively sank 22 Frankish torpedo boats, while their 37mm guns crippled the speed of seven others and forced six to prematurely waste their torpedoes.
The Goeben itself sniped four torpedo boats at medium range using its 150mm secondary batteries and 88mm guns. A staggering 38 boats of the Frankish torpedo fleet were rendered combat-ineffective; only the last nine were still capable of charging.
But by this time, the Demanian destroyer swarm that the Goeben had summoned had arrived to protect it. Seeing this, the morale of the Frankish torpedo boat fleet finally broke. Unwilling to throw their lives away for nothing, they emptied their torpedo tubes at a long distance and hastily turned tail to flee.
This final volley of torpedoes did manage to land a lucky strike that sank a Demanian destroyer, but five of those ten torpedo boats were also blown apart, leaving only five to return.
Counting the 13 small boats from earlier that had either lost speed or exhausted their torpedoes, out of the 48 boats, a total of 17 headed back after emptying their tubes, and 31 were sunk. In total, they traded their lives for two Demanian light cruisers and one destroyer.
The brutal slaughter between the torpedo boat fleet and the screening ships finally drew to a close. While these vanguard vessels had been trading lives, the Franks' four Courbet-class battleships had been relentlessly bearing down on the heavily damaged, sluggish Moltke in the distance. At this very moment, they finally closed within main battery dueling range.
However, on the northeastern horizon, Admiral Horthy's Austrian naval fleet had also come into view. Admiral Bouvet, commander of the Frankish Mediterranean Fleet, instantly felt his heart turn to ash. Yet he had no other choice. He knew that turning back now would only lead to them being toyed to death by the high-speed battlecruisers' trailing sword tactics. They could only fight to the bitter end.
Although it was a six-on-four situation, two of the enemy's ships were crippled wrecks clinging to their last breath. In terms of actual combat power, it was an even four-on-four. Since the Frankish warships outweighed the Austrian ones, they still had a chance at a flawless victory!
The Franks' Courbet-class battleships were massive vessels—166 meters long, with a standard displacement of 23,000 tons and a full load of 25,000 tons.
Across from them, the Austrian Viribus Unitis-class were only 152 meters long, with a standard displacement of 19,000 tons and a full load of 21,000 tons.
From every angle, the Frankish ships were twenty percent larger than the Austrian ones.
Although both sides sported twelve 305mm guns and a top speed of 21 knots, since the Frankish ships were 4,000 tons heavier while maintaining the same firepower and mobility, their defensive capabilities obviously crushed those of the Austrian vessels.
The thickest part of the Austrian ships' main armor belt was 11 inches, but their horizontal armor was merely two inches thick—decks almost as thin as those on a battlecruiser. The Frankish ships matched the Austrian main belt thickness, but their coverage was much broader, spanning a full five meters in height. In contrast, the Austrian ships utilized something more akin to an "armor belt," where the thickest section only covered a little over two meters vertically. Regarding the horizontal deck armor, the Frankish ships were also one inch thicker.
A small half of the 4,000-ton displacement that the Austrian ships had saved was scraped from their underwater torpedo protection. The Viribus Unitis-class's underwater defenses were virtually non-existent, and their watertight compartment arrangements mirrored those of obsolete pre-dreadnoughts. That was why, on the Earth plane, two Viribus Unitis-class ships eventually succumbed to torpedoes, both suffering "one-hit kills."
But none of that mattered for today's battle. The Franks had already wasted all their torpedoes on the Goeben and its screening ships. By the time the four Viribus Unitis-class ships entered the fray, the Frankish forces had no torpedo power left to deploy.
"Before the Orio people enter range, concentrate the firepower of all four Courbet-class ships and blow the Moltke out of the water!"
Following Admiral Bouvet's command, the gap between the four Courbet-class ships and the Moltke closed to within 20 kilometers, and then further shrank to 18 kilometers.
The Moltke continued to expose its rear to the Franks, trying to delay them from closing the distance as much as possible. At the same time, it fired back using its four aft main guns.
On the other side, the Goeben had returned to the line of battle, still maintaining its trailing sword posture while plunging fire onto the Courbet from a distance of 16 to 18 kilometers.
Even in the final few minutes before the Franks entered range, the Demanians resolutely executed their trailing sword tactic. Getting even one more free shot off was worth it.
"Boom! Boom!" Within a few short minutes, the deafening blasts of two 280mm armor-piercing shells striking consecutively exploded across the Courbet's deck, adding fresh wounds.
Before its main guns could even reach the Moltke, the Courbet had taken a cumulative total of five free hits (the Goeben having secured three free shots in its first wave). It was incredibly unlucky.
Deep down, the Franks were grinding their teeth in pure hatred over their short-ranged main guns, which had been locked to a maximum elevation angle.
The entire naval crew had silently cursed out eighteen generations of the Courbet-class main turret designers' ancestors more times than they could count.
It was much like how the officers and men of the Beiyang Fleet during the First Sino-Japanese War had cursed the suppliers of the dud shells that wouldn't explode.
"Fuck the Lorient Shipyard Design Bureau! If I make it out of here alive, I'm going to kill those bastard designers! A bunch of armchair engineering trash pulling ideas out of their asses!" This was the true, inner voice of thousands of battleship crewmen.
But regardless, after taking a one-sided beating for so long, the Franks finally opened their account. A few minutes later, the Courbet secured their first dose of revenge. A 305mm armor-piercing shell violently slammed into the Moltke's side armor belt.
With a teeth-aching "Clang!" of tearing metal, the shell failed to completely penetrate the armor belt and exploded as it lodged into the steel plating.
At barely 15 kilometers, it was still very easy for Demanian 11-inch main armor to withstand Brit 305mm armor-piercing shells. During the Battle of Jutland on Earth, numerous Brit 305mm guns had failed to do anything to Demanian main armor; fatal blows basically had to be delivered by 343mm and 381mm guns.
The quality of Frankish armor-piercing shells of the same caliber was roughly the same as the Brits', so they were naturally stopped as well.
Fortunately, the Franks weren't discouraged. Soon, the other ships successively opened their accounts, and all four Courbet-class ships scored hits on the Moltke.
Having absorbed a cumulative 22 large-caliber armor-piercing shells, the Moltke had been blasted into a battered, shattered wreck.
Admiral Horthy's four Viribus Unitis-class battleships finally reached the battlefield and began firing on the Frankish warships, squaring off in one-on-one brawls.
The Courbet, the Jean Bart, and the Francia were successively struck by 305mm armor-piercing shells and began to sustain damage.
