Chapter 494: Bombardment

The 2nd Division of the German Paratrooper Airborne Division was launching a fierce attack on the rear of the Dover defenders.

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

Are they going to be surrounded? Just when the commander wanted to ask how many paratroopers were attacking, a terrified shout suddenly came from the other end of the phone. "Grenade!!"

Boom!

The deafening explosion made the commander's expression suddenly change. "Hello! Hello! What's the situation? The Germans are attacking?"

After a while, a hoarse and unfamiliar voice sounded on the other end of the phone. "Yes, we are attacking. Now 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 shouted hysterically. "Surrender?! Impossible!! Our British Empire soldiers will fight to the last soldier!! We will never surrender!"

The German on the other end of the phone snorted disdainfully. "Fight to the last soldier? Whatever, I wish for it. Although we treat prisoners well, we never mind killing all the enemies on the battlefield. If you are captured, we will let you go back in the future. If you die, there will be no such troubles."

After hanging up the phone, the battalion commander walked out of the enemy's command room and ordered the people around him. "Reinforce the fortifications. The British said they would fight to the last man. We must not let a single British man slip through here."

"Captain, the fortifications are ready, and the soldiers have entered the positions."

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

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

Many of these recruits have not received training. They don't know that the destructive power of large-caliber artillery is more terrible than the fragments of the shells, but the pervasive shock wave! The explosion of the shells will produce shock waves and huge vibrations, enough to cause internal injuries to the soldiers leaning against the trenches.

A reconnaissance plane was hovering over the British, watching the 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 a crooked sawtooth shape, and there were also a lot of right-angle bends. Even if one or two lucky shells occasionally fell into the trenches, there was no big gain.

The observer in the reconnaissance plane shook his head. "This is a pure waste of ammunition. Switch to special shells! Let the British know that even if they shrink into turtles, we can still pry open their shells!"

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 ordinary shells to achieve the killing effect, but it only takes 1,000 air-burst bombs.

Air-burst bombs are generally equipped with radio proximity fuzes. In the early days of the Pacific War, the anti-aircraft artillery used on US warships mainly used time fuzes or trigger (explosion) fuzes. When using time fuzes, it is necessary to accurately calculate or predict the height and speed of the target first, and set the delayed detonation time of the shells before firing. If the setting is wrong, even if the shells are accurately aimed at the target, they will be invalid due to premature or late detonation. Therefore, the artillery hit rate is very low, and it seems powerless when confronting the Japanese high-speed Zero fighter. On average, it takes thousands of shells to shoot down a Japanese fighter.

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 at a certain frequency (that is, when it is closest to the target), the built-in circuit will automatically ignite and detonate the shells.

The shells equipped with radio proximity fuzes fired by anti-aircraft guns on US warships can explode at a distance of about 20 meters from enemy aircraft, which greatly enhances the damage intensity and damage efficiency. Among the enemy aircraft shot down by US anti-aircraft artillery, the number shot down by proximity fuze shells is 6 times that of ordinary fuze shells. Especially at the end of the war, the Japanese army launched the Kamikaze suicide squad to attack US warships. Thanks to the proximity fuze, the US Navy blocked the crazy attack of the Japanese army.

For this reason, the US Secretary of the Navy said proudly: "The proximity fuze helped us kill all the way to Japan."

In addition to being used in anti-aircraft artillery shells, radio proximity fuzes are also used in ground 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 and strong pressure can kill people on the ground without armor protection, and soldiers are not immune even in temporary shelters such as foxholes.

Proximity fuzes are amazing in sea and air battles, and are also extremely domineering in land battles. With proximity fuzes, land artillery can flexibly set the airburst height, which is ten times more lethal to ground personnel than traditional fuzes! However, because it is top secret and the Germans are afraid of getting samples, the US military banned the use of proximity fuzes on land artillery until 1945, on the eve of Germany's surrender. The first use of proximity fuzes in land warfare was the Ardennes Offensive, where the Germans learned the power of this "smart" weapon and suffered heavy casualties.

At the K5 railway gun position in the Calais area, the gunners who received the order brought in special shells. This type of shell with a proximity fuse has hundreds of 5mm diameter steel balls in the warhead. After a round of artillery fire, tens of thousands of steel balls raged over the trenches, causing the British soldiers hiding in the trenches to scream and cry, causing heavy casualties.

However, air-burst bombs can also be prevented. As long as cat-ear holes are dug in the trenches, the power of most air-burst bombs can be offset.

The German army naturally knew the weakness of air-burst bombs. After several rounds of shooting, they replaced them with another special bomb, which was equipped 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 of the similar explosion effect with air-air explosive bombs (FAE), the two are also the easiest to be confused. In fact, as two large-scale area killing weapons, thermobaric bombs are indeed the ultimate evolution of fuel-air explosives, but fuel-air explosives have obvious disadvantages such as poor environmental adaptability, complex structure, and high requirements for detonation conditions, and are gradually replaced by thermobaric bombs.

The killing power of thermobaric bombs is not much different from that of fuel-air explosives, but because they are filled with solid explosives, the outer shell can be packaged in a stronger metal aluminum shell, so they can be used as high-speed artillery shells to kill parts.

The Dover defenders did not even see the shadow of the German army, but suffered heavy casualties.