The Twilight of Empire: Starting from Dunkirk

Chapter 157 The Eye of God

"Fire control computer data connection complete."

"Firing data calculation complete."

"Rodney A turret, B turret, X turret, azimuth and elevation angles synchronized."

As the operators reported their findings, a muffled roar of hydraulic machinery echoed from inside the 40,000-ton battleship.

Those were three massive turrets, each weighing two thousand tons, on the foredeck, slowly rotating their muzzles under the automatic guidance of radar data, pointing towards the location 042, which was completely invisible in the thick fog.

Arthur picked up the command phone leading to the main gun turret: "Attention all turrets. Armor-piercing shell loading. Full charge. Self-mark bearing 042, range 18450 yards. Requesting fire once ready."

"Wait!" Admiral Tovey suddenly grabbed Arthur's hand. The fleet commander, who hadn't yet come to his senses, had his palms covered in cold sweat.

"Arthur, are you crazy? Without any optical confirmation, not even a flare, you're firing directly from your 16-inch main guns? That's called blind fire! What if that spot of light isn't the target ship you're talking about, but a British merchant ship veering off course in the fog, or a neutral passenger liner?"

"The Navy has received absolutely no notification of any live-fire exercises scheduled for tonight in this area!"

Marshal Pound was also caught in an extreme internal struggle.

He truly did not know Arthur's specific arrangements for the evening. To launch a salvo from a battleship without being able to see the enemy, relying solely on a glowing glass screen, was a test of "hitting the cow from across the mountain," which completely overturned the old-school navy's traditional view of "killing the enemy on sight."

But their doubts were quickly dispelled. Accompanied by a brief electromagnetic noise, a clear report, slightly whistling with sea wind, came through the high-fidelity loudspeakers inside the combat information center: "Target here." "Repeat, target here." "The ship's boilers have been completely shut down. All crew have evacuated to lifeboats and are moving south to safe waters. Mr. Sterling, you may fire. Good luck to the old man."

As soon as he finished speaking, Arthur pointed with his cane at the PPI monitor that was flashing with a ghostly green light.

"General, please look at the screen."

Tovey and Pound watched as the rapidly moving dot on the radar screen vanished instantly, along with the faint clutter behind it representing wake turbulence. The operator monitoring the data shouted, "Automotive power cut off! Speed ​​is dropping rapidly—20 knots—10 knots—the target has come to a complete stop and is drifting erratically with the ocean current!"

Marshal Pound took a deep breath of the air, which smelled of burning.

The information reported over the radio was synchronized with the target status on the radar screen in real time.

This is more accurate than any optical rangefinder.

At this moment, the First Sea Lord was finally certain that it was not some veered merchant ship, but an old destroyer that Arthur had bought with the Sterling family's wealth and placed in this area. And tonight, the head of the Sterling family was going to set it on fire to entertain everyone present.

"The two entrances to this area have been completely cleared by the Sterling Ocean Shipping Company fleet tonight. That point of light is our prey." Arthur looked at Pound and nodded. "Please give the order to fire, Marshal. If a salvo misses, or proves that this system is just a hoax—then the Sterling family is willing to fully fund the Royal Navy to build a brand new, two-thousand-ton fleet destroyer in the shipyard."

To gamble on the accuracy of a blind firing test with a brand-new destroyer.

At this point, Arthur slightly turned the silver-tipped cane in his hand and turned his gaze to General Tovey, whose expression was solemn.

His tone was half-joking, half-forceful: "However, Admiral Tovey, in a fair gamble, the stakes should be equal. If this system is indeed as accurate as I say, capable of sending that old fellow straight to the bottom of the sea in blind firing—"

"What do you want?" Tovey stared intently at the dot on the screen representing the target ship, his voice hoarse.

"It's very simple." Arthur straightened his suit cuffs. "If I win, it proves my thinking is correct. I hope that in future tactical innovations and equipment upgrades for the fleet, the Royal Navy will set aside its ridiculous arrogance and prioritize the suggestions of this 'army layman'."

Tovey's brain was working at lightning speed.

In those few short minutes, he suddenly realized a chilling truth: the head of the Sterling family possessed the ability to bypass him, the new fleet commander, and even the First Sea Lord beside him, to silently clear two key shipping lanes off the Royal Navy's home port and calmly set up a decommissioned destroyer for target practice. And the two of them, as the supreme commanders, were completely unaware of this.

Undeniably, this was partly because the sudden arrival of the French fleet in the port had drained the two commanders of all their energy for the day, leaving them with little attention to these "minor matters" outside the port.

Even so, the fact that the Sterling family could clear waterways and deploy decommissioned target ships at will right under the nose of the First Sea Lord still made the two men feel uneasy about the deep-rooted infiltration of the Royal Navy.

This almost absolute control left Tovey with no doubt that, if Arthur so desired, he could even use his absolute monopoly on fuel, spare parts, and ammunition, as well as his family's dual control over the House of Lords and the House of Commons, to completely sideline Tovey as the fleet commander in administration and logistics.

If it really comes to that, even if Marshal Pound intervenes, he probably won't be able to save his command.

But instead of resorting to the violence of capital to directly undermine the navy's traditions, Arthur offered this seemingly joking bet. Tovey immediately understood that Arthur was giving the navy's high command a way out.

Even if tonight's blind firing misses, and Arthur loses his gamble, it only proves that this particular "radar" might not be accurate enough. The Royal Navy gets a brand-new destroyer for free, and Arthur only conducts a failed technical test; the relationship between the two sides will not be substantially damaged.

On the other hand, trading some of the fleet's say in future technological development for a potential ultimate power to dominate the night is a deal that the Royal Navy can't lose out on no matter how you look at it in the face of brutal war.

Moreover, as a frontline commander, Tovey craved victory more than anyone else and hated the humiliation of being slaughtered by the Germans in the dark like a blind man. If the screen flashing green light in front of him truly possessed the ability to overturn the traditional rules of naval warfare, as Arthur claimed, then Tovey would definitely be the first person in all of Britain willing to personally smash old-school naval warfare dogmas and completely revolutionize tactical concepts.

He would gladly relinquish even a portion of his say, or even blow up his flagship as Sterling's experiment.

Therefore, regardless of the outcome of this bet, it is entirely beneficial to both sides. This is an extremely high-level power tango between industrial oligarchs and imperial generals.

"Deal." Without any hesitation, Tovey fixed his gaze on Arthur and decisively accepted this gamble that could change the history of the Navy.

Marshal Pound, standing to the side, tapped his briar pipe. A glint of shrewdness and decisiveness, characteristic of the empire's high command, flashed in his cloudy old eyes. He nodded slightly: "As First Minister of the Sea, I am willing to be a witness to this gamble. Now that the contract has been reached—"

Pound gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles clenching tightly.

The perfect correlation between electromagnetic waves and reality has completely shattered his last shred of doubt. He must hold on tightly to this sword that can pierce the darkness for the Navy.

"Tovey, give the order." Pound's voice was as deep as the rumble of boilers at the bottom of a warship. "Fire."

Tovey took a deep breath of the acrid air and, speaking into the microphone, issued the order that would forever end the tradition of battleships with their cannons and be recorded in naval history: "Rodney, main guns salvo. Fire!"

'

Inside the giant turret on the foredeck of the USS Rodney.

The gunner and rangefinder were experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance. Their optical periscopes revealed nothing but a white fog. Yet, the fire control system's dial indicator showed a locked target. Like emotionless cogs in a machine, they could only mechanically press the red firing button, completely unaware of the target's location.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The immense recoil caused the 40,000-ton battleship to lurch sideways several meters across the sea. The bulkheads inside the ship emitted a painful, twisting metallic sound. A terrifying storm of orange cannon fire instantly tore through the thick night fog, illuminating tens of thousands of square meters of sea surface as if it were daytime.

But in just a brief moment, the violent light and smoke were once again completely swallowed up by the endless darkness and thick fog.

In the extremely cramped compartment at the center of the battle, the thirty seconds of ballistic flight time felt like an eternity.

Everyone held their breath, staring intently at the PPI monitor that was flashing green light.

On the screen, a cluster of small, dense peaks representing nine 16-inch armor-piercing rounds is rapidly approaching the bright dot representing the target ship at a speed visible to the naked eye.

20 seconds. 25 seconds. 28 seconds.

Suddenly, the clutter representing the shells and the crest representing the target perfectly overlapped at azimuth 042 and distance 18400 yards on the screen coordinate system.

Almost simultaneously, the loudspeakers in the combat information center crackled with the extremely excited, shaky shouts of the bridge lookout: "My God! Bearing 042! A massive explosion at sea level!"

No visual confirmation was needed; everyone on the warship's superstructure saw it.

Deep within the dense fog, 16 kilometers away on what was once a pitch-black horizon, a blinding fireball, like a miniature sun, rose into the air. The intense light from the explosion even briefly pierced through the fog, illuminating a chilling crimson hue at the base of the clouds.

"Straddle!" the radar operator shouted.

The first salvo, without any correction or searchlight guidance, resulted in a perfect strafing shot from 16 kilometers away!

Not only that.

A few seconds later, as the light from the explosion faded, the bright peak representing the target ship on the PPI screen suddenly split into two faint clutter waves, which then quickly dimmed and disappeared from the screen.

"Target signal lost. Hit confirmed. Target ship—the target ship has been torn in two."

The command center was deathly silent, with only the hum of the instrument cooling fans echoing through the room.

That destroyer was erased.

A single 16-inch armor-piercing shell, weighing one ton, can essentially seal the fate of an old destroyer if it hits directly.

General Tovey glanced gravely at Field Marshal Pound beside him, whose forehead was already beaded with sweat. His own uniform was completely soaked with cold sweat. He stared at the green screen, his eyes filled with a shock that defied comprehension, even with barely concealed fear.

There were no searchlights, no flares, and no testing fire between the two sides.

On the target ship 16 kilometers away, the dummies acting as crew members were unaware that they had been discovered, and they didn't even see the muzzle flash of the enemy's guns before the shells shattered their decks.

Under the glowing green radar light, Arthur walked up to Marshal Pound.

At this moment, he was no longer a skeptical outsider, but a technological god who ruled over this ocean.

"Marshal," Arthur's voice echoed in the cabin, "Dönitz and Raeder of Germany always thought that the night was their natural ally, the perfect shield against the submarine swarms and commerce raiders ravaging the Atlantic."

"But from today, from this blind-fired shell that hits its mark, Stirling Industries will utterly strip the Germans of the right to eke out a living in the dark."

Arthur pointed to the radar cabinet: "We will give the Royal Navy the eye of God. Day or night, fog or torrential rain. As long as the German surface warships dare to leave Wilhelmshaven, as long as their U-boats dare to surface to recharge, they will no longer be ghosts, but prey waiting to bubble and die on the sea."

Marshal Pound took a deep breath; the burnt smell in the air now smelled like the fragrance of victory to him.

As First Sea Lord, he understood the strategic value of this technology better than anyone else. It could instantly erase all of the Royal Navy's disadvantages in night battles, turning them into an absolute advantage of one-sided slaughter.

"This is currently the Imperial Navy's top-level secret." Pound made the decision on the spot and wrote out a check without hesitation. "Commodore Sterling, the Admiralty wants to buy out the entire production capacity of this system. All battleships and heavy cruisers in the Home Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet must be prioritized for installation of the Type 284 centimeter-wave fire control radar!"

Arthur smiled and nodded; this was just one of the anticipated huge orders. But he had come today to sell much more than just a few battleship radar systems.

"Battleships certainly have powerful firepower, but Marshal, the prey on the surface is only half the battle." Arthur walked to a North Atlantic nautical chart on the wall and pointed with his cane at an area marked with dense red shipwreck markers.

That was the "Black Hole of the North Atlantic" that terrified all British captains—the deep-sea area south of Iceland, beyond the cover of land-based aircraft.

"The real threat from the Germans lies underwater. Dönitz's wolf pack is tearing our convoys apart." Arthur looked at the two naval commanders. "Now that we can illuminate the sea with electromagnetic waves, anti-submarine warfare, this vital lifeline of the Empire, must undergo a complete technological and organizational upgrade."

"Sterling, you even know how to say 'shh'?" Admiral Tovey no longer showed any contempt, only an eager thirst for knowledge.

"Traditional ASDIC sonar is too outdated. It can only determine direction, not depth, and it creates a huge blind spot when a submarine approaches. This forces our destroyers to rely entirely on the captain's intuition when dropping depth charges."

Arthur unveiled his second piece of cutting-edge technology, which he had prepared long ago—an anti-submarine weapon used by the Allies in the later stages of World War II.

In the eyes of this heavy industry oligarch, there are actually no insurmountable technical barriers to upgrading this anti-submarine technology.

Don't be fooled by the ever-expanding steel production of that nouveau riche across the ocean. At this point in time, in 1940, the British Empire's acoustic theory, electromagnetic physics research, and precision machining technology were not merely "well-versed," but rather maintained a technologically superior and overwhelming advantage over all the major powers, including the United States and Germany.

All you need to know is that the real game-changer in "radar" and "sound horn"—two revolutionary technologies that changed warfare—was not played by Americans, but by Great Britain.

In the original historical trajectory, even in the later stages of World War II, the core original blueprints, physical formulas, and even the first operational "cavity magnetron" of the centimeter-wave radar, radio proximity fuses, and advanced anti-submarine equipment that the Americans talked about and mass-produced using massive assembly lines were all brought to Washington without reservation by British scientific teams, like a form of technical assistance, and personally handed over to American politicians.

The Americans certainly possessed unparalleled giant assembly workshops, but in the cutting-edge fields of electronics and acoustic physics that truly determined the fate of future naval battles, the United States, like the Third Reich, was at that moment a clumsy student desperately copying from the blackboard in front of the British, who had a centuries-old Royal Academy of Sciences. As for the Japanese Navy, they couldn't even copy it properly.

The British Empire's research institutions had long possessed enough theoretical knowledge to end the war; it was not lacking in technology at all.

The only thing it lacks at this moment is a layer of paper that has been tightly covered by the rigid tactical mindset of the old-school naval commanders.

This is the core reason why Arthur was able to produce so many groundbreaking achievements in just one month, as if by magic.

Facing the world's highest-paid engineers and the most elite in the British Empire at Stirling's Electronics Laboratory, Arthur didn't need to manually craft those complex acoustic formulas and circuit diagrams. He only needed to casually draw a geometric angle of a "downtilt beam" on the blackboard and propose the concept of a "mechanical trajectory recorder" as inspiration.

As long as sufficient funding and direction are provided, everything else will fall into place automatically by Stirling Heavy Industries' R&D machine, which will then forcibly transform the boss's "sudden inspiration" into blueprints, molds, and physical objects that can be directly installed on ships.

"This is a prototype of the Type 144Q search/attack sonar, which Stirling Electronics Laboratory completed in a month. My staff has finished testing it." Arthur's voice sounded extremely confident under the red tactical lights, as if he were reading a death sentence for Dönitz's submarine force. "It not only increases the beam angle downwards, completely eliminating the close-range blind spot when submarines approach; it also integrates the Empire's most mature precision instrument technology and is equipped with a mechanical trajectory recorder."

Arthur looked at Admiral Tovey with a slight smile: "This means that sonar operators no longer need to memorize boring readings. They can directly see the U-boat's underwater trajectory on the paper tape, thereby unreasonably increasing the accuracy of depth charge delivery by more than five times."

But that wasn't enough. Arthur's next words were the strategic concept that truly revolutionized the Atlantic convoy escort tactics.

"But even with the most advanced sonar, our current escort system remains a dead end. Why? Because we will never have enough escort destroyers. Even with the French joining in, even if the Americans were willing to 'give' us those destroyers for free, we still couldn't fill the gap in the entire Atlantic, because they could only passively take hits around merchant ships."

"Once the U-boat pack launches a nighttime swarm attack, the destroyers simply won't be able to handle it." Arthur slammed his cane heavily on the "black hole" area on the nautical chart. "We must free the destroyers from the chains of passive escort and turn them into proactive hunting dogs. To do that, we must provide every merchant convoy with a mobile aviation umbrella."

Pound frowned: "But that's impossible. We don't have that many regular fleet aircraft carriers."

Even with shipyards operating at full capacity, it will take at least two years to build an aircraft carrier; that's inevitable.

We can't possibly send our precious fleet carriers to escort merchant ships carrying potatoes every time.

"Who said we need a regular aircraft carrier weighing tens of thousands of tons?" Arthur sneered. He now resembled a shrewd businessman, and the first step to becoming a businessman is to know how to do the math. "Marshal, this brings us back to the logic of industrial cost accounting. To deal with submarines weighing a few hundred tons, we don't need a fleet carrier with a speed of 30 knots, heavy armor, and carrying dozens of bombers."

"What we need is an escort carrier (CVE)."

Arthur introduced the concept of the ultimate weapon that drove Dönitz to the brink of defeat in the later stages of World War II.

"Requisition existing hulls of bulk carriers and tankers with a displacement of around 10,000 tons directly from Stirling Ocean Shipping Company or the Imperial Merchant Fleet."

"No need for complicated armored boxes, no need for expensive military pressure boilers. Just remove the superstructure, lay a wooden flight deck, and install a simple catapult. Stirling Shipyard can complete the conversion in three months, four months at most."

Arthur pondered for a moment: "A speed of 18 knots is sufficient, as long as it can keep up with the merchant convoy. These inexpensive flat-topped ships can only carry a few old-fashioned Swordfish biplanes or cheap monoplanes. But they are armed with depth charges and small surface radars, providing absolute aerial surveillance of the convoy from sunrise to sunset within a 200-nautical-mile radius."

"As long as the submarines dare to surface, bombs will fall from the sky. It's not necessary to sink them, because once the submarines are suppressed underwater by the aircraft, their pitiful underwater speed simply cannot keep up with our convoy. At the same time, the escort destroyers, freed up, can calmly rush over under the guidance of the aircraft and use the new sonar to gradually annihilate the Germans underwater."

Only heavy breathing could be heard in the war center.

Pound and Tovey were both commanders with exceptional strategic vision. When Arthur pieced together the three pieces of the puzzle—"centimeter-wave radar," "new depth-sounding sonar," and "cheap escort aircraft carriers"—a grand blueprint capable of completely annihilating the German Navy was clearly laid out before them.

This is no longer a knightly duel; it is a highly sophisticated, cold and ruthless large-scale industrial anti-submarine production line.

Arthur didn't speak again. He turned his head and looked out the porthole of the war center at the still deep, dark ocean.

In the original historical trajectory, it wasn't until 1942, two years later, that this "blind firing of fire control radar" tactic was truly developed and completely swept away traditional naval warfare dogma.

In that dark night battle over Guadalcanal, the American battleship USS Washington relied on its advanced SG (Special Purpose Vehicle) system...

Fire control radar, under the cover of darkness at extremely close range, locked onto the Japanese battleship "Kirishima" without warning. With the "eye of God" granted by radar, the American main guns unleashed a devastating barrage within minutes, turning the massive battleship into burning scrap metal before the Japanese night-fighting prodigies could even see where their target was.

But now, it's only the summer of 1940.

The era was abruptly fast-forwarded by Arthur Sterling.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, the future industrial superpower, the United States, still relied on cumbersome, primitive, and highly unreliable CXAM early warning radars on its capital ships. As for microwave fire control equipment to guide the main guns, even the preliminary sketches in the laboratory were not yet complete. The Japanese Combined Fleet, sharpening its swords in the Pacific, had gone to an appallingly skewed technological path. They were still fanatically clinging to those expensive, specially made giant optical telescopes, attempting to dominate night battles by relying on the "cat's eyes" developed by sailors through years of consuming cod liver oil and their absurd Bushido spirit.

As for the Germans across the strait? Their proud Third Reich surface behemoths—the Bismarck and Tirpitz—had early Seetakt radars mounted on their gun barrels. These radars were not only outdated and easily damaged, but their crude resolution was so poor that they couldn't even distinguish whether the echo in front of them was a warship or a thundercloud.

In the end, Raeder's navy still had to rely on Zeiss optical rangefinders to fire their guns.

It was precisely because of this global technological stagnation that, in the original history, the Bismarck was able to display its might in the Denmark Strait, but ultimately it was only managed to be crippled in the Atlantic by the Rodney, which relied on its rudimentary, outdated early radar, in an extremely dangerous close-quarters gun battle. The Allies paid a heavy price, losing tens of thousands of sailors and sinking tens of millions of tons of merchant ships, before they managed to survive the peak of Dönitz's U-boat wolfpacks with human lives and steel.

But now, everything is different.

The British Empire's warships received the script for two years in advance.

The Royal Navy battleships equipped with centimeter-wave fire control radar, the soon-to-be-launched, inexpensive escort carriers specifically designed to hunt submarines, plus the French fleet, which just entered service today and has extremely redundant combat power—

When the home fleet once again sails into the Atlantic and faces the German commerce raiders, it will no longer be a suspenseful and tragic hunt where capital ships gamble on luck. Instead, it will be a one-sided, dimensional-reducing attack, a bloody crushing defeat built on absolute technological superiority and industrial blitzkrieg.

The death knell for the German surface fleet and its wolfpack submarines was tolled two years ahead of schedule by the rumbling gears of heavy industry, amidst the thick fog of the Solent Strait.

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