The Twilight of Empire: Starting from Dunkirk

Chapter 171 The Night Watch

Our gaze returns to the underground command bunker in Axbridge.

The time jumped to 08:30 AM.

The air battle at the front had lasted a full fifty minutes. The first wave of mixed interception, composed of Polish, French, and domestic squadrons, had indeed proven remarkably effective. The Poles' reckless, brute-force tactics of directly ramming into German escort formations had significantly slowed the advance of the first wave of German bombers.

To the Hans' surprise, the Royal Air Force, which they had been fighting for a week, had not only not weakened, but had become even more reckless.

However, the Germans were simply too numerous, and gaps remained in the defenses.

Beneath an explosion-proof concrete dome eighteen meters underground.

"General Parker! Dover and Rye's 'Home Chain' radar stations have intercepted a new signal!"

An intelligence officer in charge of overall coordination abruptly ripped off his headset and strode out from behind the plotting table. His tone was extremely urgent: "The second wave of attacks! It's an unprecedentedly large formation! Approximately two hundred He-111 and Do-17 bombers, escorted by at least one hundred Bf-109 fighters, have crossed the Dover Strait centerline! They're advancing at full speed inland into Kent! Their targets are expected to be the Thames Estuary and the East End docks!"

Major General Parker slammed his fist heavily on the table. The battle-hardened New Zealand-born general's eyes were now bloodshot.

Silk, like a trapped beast cornered in a dead end.

He was trapped in a desperate tactical dead end.

"Most of our squadrons in the air have already engaged in at least two rounds of firefights!" Parker roared hoarsely, pointing to the green wooden blocks on the map representing our Spitfire and Hurricane fighters. "Those four 7.7mm guns on the Spitfire's wings..."

The Browning 15mm machine guns only have a paltry 15 seconds of firing time! Their ammunition boxes are completely empty! They can't even fire a single tracer round!

Parker, panting heavily, stared intently at the red arrows representing the German forces: "We're running out of fuel! After the climb and over forty minutes of intense fighting, our lads have run out of fuel. They've reached the BingoFuel! If they don't land immediately, their engines will stall in mid-air, and those young men will crash en masse into the farmland of Kent and the mudflats of the Thames!"

"Where is the 12th Squadron?! Where is that bastard Leslie Mallory's winged squadron?!" Parker turned around angrily and questioned the liaison officer.

"They've sent word that they're still assembling over Duford!" The liaison officer, sweating profusely, checked the telegram. "General Mallory and that legless madman Douglas Budd insist on assembling at least five squadrons, a full fifty fighters, into a massive tactical formation before heading south. But their assembling speed is too slow; their air formation is a disaster! It will take at least twenty minutes to reach the engagement zone, far too late to intercept the second wave of Germans!"

"Bang!"

General Dowding's ceramic teacup shattered violently on the wooden floor. Scalding hot tea splashed onto his old World War I boots, but he didn't even glance down.

He completely snapped.

"To hell with massive formations! To hell with the 'big wing' theory!"

Dowding roared like an enraged old lion, the furious roar bursting from his withered chest echoing under the blast dome, making all the staff officers' eardrums tingle: "This is fucking war! It's a meat grinder filled with human lives! Not some bullshit parade over Buckingham Palace!"

The German bombs are about to hit central London, and Leslie Mallory is still slowly lining me up in the air?!

Dowding strode over the drafting table and grabbed the liaison officer by the collar: "Send a telegram immediately! In plain text! Bypass the Dukesford command post and call those squadron leaders in the air!"

Dowding's eyes practically burned with murderous intent, as if he wanted to devour the dozens of planes along with them: "Tell that idiot Mallory that if even one German bomber manages to fly unscathed into the 11th Group's defense zone because of his aerial circus performance, I'll strip him of his general's uniform before sunset today! I'll court-martial him! I'll dismiss him outright and send him to the Scottish Highlands to count sheep!"

"I mean what I say!"

The entire underground command bunker fell into a deathly silence. Everyone held their breath, stunned by the Commander-in-Chief's thunderous rage. Only the teletype machine in the corner continued its inopportune "clattering" sound, as if it were counting down the final days for the fate of the British Empire.

No reserve force was ready to take off immediately.

Those local and foreign squadrons in the sky, having run out of ammunition and with fuel gauges hovering near zero, were like crippled wrecks in the air, their teeth pulled and blood drained. To forcibly issue a death order, sending these exhausted Spitfires and Hurricanes to crash into the German Great Wall of Steel, consisting of two hundred bombers and one hundred fighters, would be a crime.

But Arthur was different. He didn't just stand there staring at his advisors; time was precious, and he had to make the right decision.

To Major General Parker, General Dowding, and their bewildered staff, the tabletop was a chaotic mess of colorful wooden blocks and coordinate grids, a countdown to the impending destruction of the British Empire.

But in Arthur's retina, there was only pure data.

The red enemy advance arrows in his mind transformed into the product of vector velocity and mass; the green friendly berth reserves transformed into a cooldown time progress bar; the Merlin engine's fuel consumption per minute (gallon/minute) at rated power transformed into a precise survival countdown; the coolant temperature threshold of the Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine in the Bf-109 fighter under full-throttle dogfighting conditions transformed into a probability distribution of mechanical failure; the pilot's physiological fatigue index and optic nerve reaction delay after 50 minutes of overload, reaching a maximum of 6G, were transformed into the error rate of tactical execution —

In 1940, without any artificial intelligence assistance, Arthur's brain was the coldest and most efficient computer.

All the complex data, industrial parameters, and human physiological limits were frantically intertwining, colliding, and filtering in Arthur's brain.

The calculation ended a few seconds later.

A tactic that abandoned all military honor, chivalry, and human compassion was born.

As Parker, drenched in sweat and closing his eyes in agony, prepared to issue the cruel, do-or-die order to the communications officer—"force the returning squadron to turn around and use the propellers to strangle the German bombers"—Arthur's cane shot out.

He gently tapped the map above the Kent inland area, pressing a green wooden block representing his own fighter jet.

"Order all remaining Spitfires and Hurricanes in the air from the 11th Squadron to immediately disengage. Allow them to land and refuel and replenish their ammunition." Arthur's voice was completely flat.

"Are you crazy?!" Parker whirled around, his eyes bloodshot as he stared at Arthur. He found this utterly absurd. "Send hundreds of fighter planes to land? What about the second wave of two hundred bombers?! Open up an eighty-kilometer-wide unobstructed air corridor so they can bombard London's East End docks, destroy our arsenals, and raze Westminster Palace to the ground?!"

"They can't bomb London. They can't even touch the edge of the Thames."

Arthur ignored Parker's anger, took out his pocket watch, and looked down at the second hand that was moving steadily across the dial.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

"Bring over that slow-moving 'Big Wing' from Dukesford."

Arthur looked up, his finger tracing an arc along the grid lines of the map. This arc didn't point to the approaching German bombers, but rather to the sky behind them—the area where Kent meets the Channel. "But not to have them intercept them now. Have Mallory's fifty planes climb to full speed immediately and get to this coordinate—over the British side of the Channel. Set their altitude at absolute vantage point, 25,000 feet (approximately 7600 meters). Have them stand in formation, sheltered from the direct glare of the morning sun, and maintain radio silence—not a single static tone is allowed."

Parker was stunned.

He opened his mouth, but the profanities he was about to unleash caught in his throat. This seasoned air force major general, a veteran of World War I, simply couldn't comprehend this deployment, which blatantly violated all of the Royal Air Force's tactical doctrines.

"Send the last, and only, fully-equipped reserve force to stand idly over the strait? Hide behind the Germans?" Parker slammed his hands on the table, staring at Arthur in disbelief. "To completely expose the frontal anti-aircraft positions to two hundred bombers? Mr. Sterling, this isn't tactics, this is crime! This is a mad gamble with the fate of the nation on a roulette table!"

"This isn't a tactic, General Parker. This isn't a gamble."

Arthur snapped the pocket watch shut, looking at Parker with no concern for the fall of his country in his eyes: "This is what I calculated."

Arthur turned away, not even touching the pencil on the table. In this critical moment, every second counted; lengthy tactical deductions would only be a waste of time.

He placed his hands on the table and stated a set of data in an extremely confident tone: "Four hundred liters. That's the limit of the internal fuel tank of the German Bf-109E."

"Twenty minutes to assemble across the sea, twenty minutes to climb at full throttle, and then deduct another twenty minutes of fuel that must be reserved for survival across the sea. These Germans are in our airspace, and we only have a pitiful twenty minutes of escort time. And that's not even counting the battle with the Poles just now—"

Arthur raised his wrist, glanced at the second hand of his pocket watch, and delivered the death sentence: "65 minutes after takeoff. That's their 'BingoFuel.' After that time, the fuel warning lights in their cockpits will invariably come on. If they don't turn back, they'll become two-and-a-half-ton iron coffins and plummet into the English Channel."

The bunker fell into dead silence instantly.

They staked the last remaining air defenses of the British Empire, and the lives of millions of London civilians, on the fuel gauges of enemy aircraft.

This sounds utterly absurd, even tantamount to treason.

But Major General Parker and General Dowding still stared intently at the man in front of them, who was wearing an army brigadier general's uniform.

From the precise prediction of radar anti-jamming capabilities to the assembly-line-like fighter jet maintenance network, and then to stuffing those foreign desperados into the cockpit to act as meat grinders just a few hours ago—every decision this guy made ultimately proved to be the truth of war.

In this man, they saw a war intuition colder and more precise than Clausewitz's dogma. This intuition had pulled the Royal Air Force back from the brink of disaster countless times.

Parker's Adam's apple bobbed awkwardly.

The bloodshed and miracles of the past two weeks had instilled in him a near-instinctive, blind trust in Arthur. Instinct triumphed over dogma, and he was willing to stake his life on this man.

Arthur put away his pocket watch, gave a cruel sneer, and pointed to the coordinates above the Strait of Dover on the map: "The moment those one hundred Bf-109s ran out of fuel and were forced to jettison their bombers, shoving their noses off like stray dogs and fleeing back to France—that was the perfect moment for Mallory's fifty fighters, fully fueled and armed, to plummet vertically from 25,000 feet into that group of 'naked' German bombers."

"Don't fight the mad dog head-on. Wait until the mad dog is so hungry that it tucks its tail between its legs and rolls back to its kennel, then we'll come out and slaughter that fat, sluggish herd of pigs that has lost the protection of its sheepdogs, cleanly and thoroughly."

Arthur straightened up, looked coldly at Parker, offered no further explanation, and instead uttered his final words with the commanding presence of a superior: "No sacrifices are needed, just execution."

"Give the order, General."

Inside the underground bunker, all the staff officers, radar operators, liaison officers, and even the usually rigid General Daoding gasped in shock.

The hum of the exhaust fan sounded unusually jarring at that moment.

This sounds ridiculous; most of them are still figuring out the feasibility of this tactic.

In this man's eyes, the things flying in the sky are not soldiers, but just a bunch of consumables made of aluminum alloy, aviation kerosene, and calorific value.

But Major General Parker knew that in this moment of impending doom, the British Empire didn't need knights, it only needed butchers. And Arthur Sterling was that butcher with precision calipers.

"Execute—execute Sterling's advice!"

Major General Parker whirled around and roared at the stunned communications officer. The general, his voice trembling, had finally made up his mind. He didn't know how many Germans or British would die after this order was given, but he wanted to know.

"Send a top-priority coded message to the 12th Battalion! Get Mallory to 25,000 feet with his big wings and eat ice shards! Without my order, they are not to fire even if the Germans drop bombs on Downing Street!"

As commands were transmitted through encrypted underground cables, the already battered and nearly depleted 11th...

The squadron of fighter jets breathed a sigh of relief. Abandoning their hopeless climb and interception attempt, they plunged downwards, trailing black smoke and bullet holes.

Fang's field airfield.

Meanwhile, over Dukesford, north of London, a massive formation of fifty Spitfire and Hurricane fighter jets, resembling a giant metallic cloud, was struggling to ascend to the edge of the oxygen-deprived stratosphere.

The temperature outside the cockpit had dropped to minus fifteen degrees Celsius, and a layer of white frost had formed on the edges of the pilots' goggles.

Major General Leslie Mallory's 12th Group was not lacking in the courage to fight to the death. On the contrary, these young men spent at least twenty minutes each time assembling that damned "big wing" formation in the air, which meant that almost every time they arrived at the Dover Strait, the fierce fighting had already ended.

All they could ever see were burning oil slicks on the sea, broken aluminum sheets, and the exhaustion and mockery of their comrades from the 11th Squadron as they returned to port.

They were jokingly referred to on the front lines as "the belated corpse collectors." This filled these young falcons, eager to see blood, with extreme humiliation and anger.

This time, they not only completed their assembly ahead of schedule, but were even able to see the dark mass of German bombers at the mouth of the Thames from 20,000 feet in the air.

They made it.

The prey was right in front of them, and the Germans' unsuspecting flanks were directly facing them.

The team leader, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Budd, the legless ace, had already pushed the throttle valve hard, ready to charge into the flock like a hungry wolf and wreak havoc.

However, just minutes earlier, the radio headset had been pierced by General Hugh Dowding's unyielding, direct order: "Cease contact. 12th Group, climb to 25,000 feet, concealed and await orders with your back to the sun. No one is to fire. Watch them fly past."

The channel instantly erupted in chaos.

"Sir! This is blatant betrayal! The Germans are right below us!" Lieutenant Colonel Bud roared furiously into the channel, slamming his prosthetic leg onto the rudder pedal. "Let's charge down and tear them to shreds!"

"Shut up, Lieutenant Colonel! Execute orders!" Dowding's voice cut through the static, offering no further explanation, simply stating, "These are the Night's Watch's instructions. Execute orders, Lieutenant Colonel."

An eerie silence suddenly fell over the radio channel.

The "Big Wing" formation, or rather, very few people in the Royal Air Force, knew who this suddenly appearing Night Watchman was. This codename didn't even exist in the Fighter Command's official organizational charts.

But they had all heard their colleagues from the 11th Battalion, who had just escaped the meat grinder, mention this name in a tone of almost awe in the bar at the front-line airport.

It is said that he was a ghost-like theater guide. Any squadron that flew in the direction he gave could always pinpoint the Germans' blind spots; and any interception order he gave always yielded a surprise.

That man was like the Grim Reaper, looking down on the entire English Channel chessboard from a higher dimension. If you were lucky enough to hear his emotionless guiding instructions directly through headphones full of static noise, you could simply close your eyes and pull the trigger.

Because the interception coordinates he provided were more precise than the Germans' calipers, he never made a single second's mistake in calculating the Germans' death.

If the Night Watch makes you wait, you'd better hold your breath.

Lieutenant Colonel Bard gritted his teeth, staring down at the group of German bombers swaggering into the British interior. His fingers trembled violently on the machine gun firing button, but he finally pulled up the nose of the plane with extreme reluctance: "12th Group, rank. Climb to 25,000 feet and take cover."

Fifty fighter jets disappeared again into the blinding morning sunlight, like the Sword of Damocles gathering its last bit of energy.

What followed was a long and suffocating wait.

Inside the bunker in Axbridge, the clock hands seemed to be soaked in viscous engine oil, ticking at an abnormally slow pace. Everyone stared at the massive, unobstructed, and unstoppable red arrow on the map.

The second wave of German bombers had already passed Dover and Canterbury, and were less than ten minutes away from the heavy industrial area in southeast London.

Air raid sirens wailed across the skies of England. Ground-based 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns began to indiscriminately unleash a hail of ammunition into the air, sending up plumes of black smoke, but to the massive formation of aircraft flying at 20,000 feet, it was nothing more than a negligible display of firework.

Half an hour later, the time came to 09:05.

This is the "dead point" moment that Arthur deduced in his notebook.

Everything unfolded exactly as predicted by Arthur's "human computer," down to the last detail.

At an extreme altitude of 20,000 feet south of the Thames Estuary, the escorting German Bf-109 fighter squadron was gripped by unprecedented panic.

In the cramped cockpit, the German pilots stared in horror at the instrument panel. The red warning light, indicating low fuel pressure, was flashing in succession in the cockpits of one hundred Bf-109s, like a contagious disease. The Messerschmitt's excellent DB 601 engines, due to prolonged high-load, full-throttle operation, had their coolant temperature nearing boiling point; white steam was spewing from the nose radiator, and the engine nacelle emitted the acrid smell of overheated metal.

"Low fuel! Damn it! My main fuel tank is almost empty!"

"My engine is overheating! The radiator is leaking!"

"Where are the British interceptors? Why aren't they showing up? This is a trap!"

On Germany's encrypted radio channels, the arrogant Aryan knights unleashed desperate curses. The glory of the Greater Germanic Empire was worthless before its empty fuel tank.

The German wing commander clenched his teeth in anguish. Ahead lay London, unprotected by anti-aircraft fighters, a place where dropping bombs would bring the unparalleled honor of receiving a medal personally from the Führer. But his reason told him that if they flew two more minutes, his entire wing would be wiped out—not shot down, but starved to death in the air.

"Attention all escort fighters!" The German commander was forced to issue that humiliating order, "Jail over bomber formation! Push down noses! Return to Calais immediately! Repeat! Return to Calais immediately!"

The formation in the sky collapsed instantly.

Hundreds of Bf-109 fighters, which had originally looked menacing, were like dark clouds receding from the tide. After a desperate climb and leveling off, with extreme reluctance and even a touch of humiliation, they pushed down their noses, broke away from the overhead cover positions of the bomber formation, and glided desperately toward the other side of the strait, trying to use gravitational potential energy to save the last few drops of fuel.

And in the airspace a thousand feet below them.

Those two hundred He-111 and Do-17 twin-engine bombers, laden with high-explosive and incendiary bombs, flying slowly and cumbersomely, suddenly discovered with horror that the indestructible protective umbrella above their heads had disappeared.

Through the He-111 bomber's iconic massive all-glass nose, the German aircrew could only see a hazy, gray sky.

They had thought this was the road to victory, but now they found it to be a one-way street to the underworld.

At this altitude, a bomber group without escort fighters is like a group of fat babies stripped naked and thrown onto an icy plain full of hungry wolves.

At that very moment, in the cloud blind spot five thousand feet above them.

"Tally-ho! Enemy planes below! A huge number of enemy planes! No fighter escort! Repeat, absolutely no escort!"

Radio silence was completely broken.

On the channel of the Royal Air Force's 12th Group, came the shouts of the "Big Wing" formation pilots, a mixture of relief and extreme excitement, bordering on hysteria.

Fifty Spitfire and Hurricane fighter jets, which had been lying in wait at an altitude of 25,000 feet for some time and whose pilots' goggles were even covered with a thin layer of frost, revealed their menacing fangs.

"Target directly below! All hands on deck! Hunt begins!" Legless ace Douglas Bard roared into the channel.

Fifty fighter jets simultaneously lowered their wings. Facing away from the glaring morning sun, they converted their potential energy into kinetic energy without reservation. The speedometer needle instantly broke through four hundred miles per hour (approximately 640 kilometers per hour).

They were no longer airplanes, but rather fifty heavy guillotines, like the Grim Reaper wielding them from the heavens. Accompanied by a chilling, piercing shriek as the air was torn apart, the fifty fighter planes hurtled vertically toward the unsuspecting German bomber formation with overwhelming force.

This was a one-sided, large-scale industrial massacre that was without any suspense.

There was no longer the high-G dogfight between the 11th Squadron and the Germans, no room for maneuver or evasion, and not a shred of human compassion.

Spitfires and Hurricanes, taking advantage of their superior speed, easily locked onto the He-111's wide, rear-end hemisphere, which lacked tail defense firepower. British pilots did not need to perform complex lead calculations at all.

Without the annoying Bf-109s interfering nearby, they calmly aimed their sights at the German bomber's most vulnerable parts—the fuel tanks at the wing roots and the exposed Jumo 211 engine nacelles—as if they were shooting at a stationary target on a firing range.

His fingers gripped the launch button tightly.

Eight Browning machine guns, .303 caliber (7.7 mm) (A-type flamethrower), roared at a rate of 1,200 rounds per minute.

In a short burst lasting less than five seconds, hundreds of rounds, a mixture of armor-piercing, tracer, and extremely lethal Dwight guns, were fired.

The metallic storm of Wilde incendiary bombs poured down like a torrential rain onto the German bomber's fragile aluminum alloy fuselage and all-glass cockpit.

War has once again demonstrated its cruelty.

The Dwight incendiary bomb easily penetrated the unarmored wing fuel tanks of the He-111, and the white phosphorus inside exploded violently upon contact with the aviation gasoline.

One after another, enormous orange-red fireballs, each over twenty meters in diameter, burst into the sky. Shockwaves raged at an altitude of twenty thousand feet.

The right wing of a He-111 was ripped apart by the violent explosion, causing the entire aircraft to lose lift balance and enter a frenzied death spiral. The immense centrifugal force flung the German bombardier and navigator out of the shattered nose of the aircraft.

Another Do-17 "Flying Pencil" bomber was slammed into its back by Hurricane fighters from directly overhead. The crew was instantly turned into mincemeat by the dense barrage of bullets, and the high-explosive bombs loaded with it detonated in the fuselage bomb bay, causing the entire aircraft to disintegrate in mid-air.

Thousands of burning metal fragments.

Broken aluminum alloy wing spars, engine fragments engulfed in flames and billowing black smoke, broken propeller blades, unexploded aerial bombs, and the German crew members engulfed in flames, who didn't even have time to open their parachutes, rained down like black hailstones from the apocalypse, crashing down on the turbulent waters of the English Channel and the mudflats of the Thames Estuary below.

The entire public communications channel was in chaos. Only the mournful, desperate cries for help from the German bomber crews before their crash, their frantic calls for fighter support in German, and the bloodthirsty, fanatical roars of British pilots and foreign avengers as they witnessed the enemy planes explode.

"Die! For Warsaw!"

"Go back to your Bavarian homeland, you Nazi pig!"

In the oppressive underground bunkers of Axbridge, the feedback from the battle was immediate and direct.

As reports of the massacre came from high above, the red wooden blocks representing German bombers on the drawing table were being swept away in large quantities by young female auxiliary soldiers using long poles with hooks at the ends, with a sense of vengeful pleasure from Xi Jinping. The blocks were then thrown into the waste bins under the table.

The previously oppressive bunker space erupted into deafening cheers. Staff officers tossed their documents into the air and embraced one another; Major General Parker removed his cap and slammed it hard on his thigh; even General Dowding, whose face had been ashen, had tears of excitement welling up in his eyes.

Amidst the frenzied celebrations, only Arthur Sterling remained calmly standing there.

He neither cheered nor smiled; not even a speck of dust clung to his uniform. He was like an engineer who had just finished debugging a large, precision instrument, coldly watching the machine operate at high speed according to a pre-programmed sequence, shredding the meat inside.

He simply pulled a black leather notebook from the inside pocket of his breast pocket, drew a custom-made Montblanc pen, and opened a page filled with dense data and battle damage statistics.

He drew a line under today's math problem about fuel, distance, and time of death, and wrote down the answer: The second wave of assault groups was destroyed, and the fatal flaw in the Bf-109 escort mechanism was successfully verified.

"Mathematics is the only thing in the universe that doesn't lie."

Arthur muttered to himself, closed the notebook, and the metal clasp clicked crisply.

He looked up and, through the thick concrete ceiling of the basement, seemed to be able to see directly the clouds high in the sky, stained red with blood and engine oil.

"It seems that more German blood was shed today."

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