On the eve of the fall of Liaodong, he led his troops in a remonstrance against the young marshal.

"Broncos! Attack!"

Zhu Wudi took the lead, followed by ninety-one Mustang fighters, divided into three huge wedge formations, which lowered their noses one by one along the dive path he had cut.

The first echelon consisted of 32 aircraft, personally led by Zhu Wudi, with their target being the three aircraft carriers at the core of the Combined Fleet formation: Akagi, Kaga, and Ryujo.

The second echelon of thirty aircraft spread out from the right flank of the formation, targeting the heavy cruisers and battleships escorting the aircraft carrier.

The third echelon of thirty aircraft flanked from the left flank, tasked with clearing the anti-aircraft fire from the destroyers and light cruisers.

The three formations drew three arcs in the air, like three silver fingers reaching out from the clouds and grabbing at the fleet on the sea.

Zhu Wudi's dive angle reached forty-five degrees, and the speedometer needle had already surpassed the six hundred kilometers per hour mark.

The warships on the sea rapidly magnified in his field of vision.

"Enemy aircraft detected!! Anti-aircraft defense! Immediately launch anti-aircraft defense!"

"Fireball! Attack immediately!"

"Give me a duck! Give me a duck!"

On the flight deck of the Akagi, ground crew were still desperately pushing the damaged aircraft into the sea, while on the bridge of the Kongo, lights were flashing urgently.

On the decks of each warship, gunners frantically cranked the handles of their anti-aircraft guns, trying to aim the muzzles at the silver death descending from the sky.

But they were too slow.

The Type 89 anti-aircraft gun was designed to fire 15 rounds per minute, with an effective firing altitude of less than 5,000 meters, while Zhu Wudi's Mustang fighter jet was diving down from an altitude of 3,000 meters at a speed of nearly 200 meters per second.

The time window between entering the effective range of the anti-aircraft gun and flying over the warship is less than fifteen seconds.

For the Type 89 anti-aircraft gun, which requires manual loading and aiming, fifteen seconds is only enough for them to fire three or four shells.

The probability of those three or four shells hitting a fighter jet diving at 600 kilometers per hour is not much higher than using a slingshot to shoot a sparrow.

Zhu Wudi leveled off at an altitude of 800 meters, aimed the nose of the plane at the row of anti-aircraft gun positions on the port side of the Akagi, his eyes turned cold, and then he pressed the firing button on the control stick hard with his thumb.

Six .50 caliber machine guns opened fire simultaneously.

"Da da da da!"

"Da da da da da!"

A dense barrage of tracer bullets drew six straight lines of fire in the air, stretching from 800 meters away all the way to the deck of the Akagi.

The first volley of fire hit the anti-aircraft gun emplacement on the port side, tearing the bulletproof steel plates around the emplacement apart like paper with .50 caliber bullets.

Two gunners who were loading shells were instantly blown to pieces by bullets. Before the third man could turn around and run away, he was caught up by the barrage of bullets. Flesh and blood flew everywhere, leaving behind a pool of dark red minced meat.

Zhu Wudi pulled the stick and soared into the air, the silver fuselage whizzing past less than two hundred meters ahead of the Akagi's bridge.

The thirty-two Mustangs behind him followed in succession, like thirty-two silver falcons lining up to pounce on the same prey.

The first formation's tactics were simple: sweep along the aircraft carrier's flight deck, from bow to stern, section by section.

Each Mustang was responsible for a section of the deck, and the firepower of the six machine guns covered a width of about twenty meters. Thirty-two aircraft could plow through the decks of the three aircraft carriers from bow to stern three times.

Bullets rained down on the aircraft carrier's deck.

The port-side anti-aircraft gun group of the Akagi was silenced within half a minute, and not a single person was left alive at the gun positions of the twelve Type 89 twin-mounted anti-aircraft guns.

The gunner was shot dead right there at his gun position, his body still in the position of cranking the handwheel.

The secondary gunner was thrown from his gun position by the impact of the bullet, crashed onto the deck, and slid for more than ten meters, leaving a long trail of blood on the steel plate.

Several other tax collectors tried to run towards the hatch and escape into the ship's interior, but their legs couldn't outrun the muzzle velocity of 800 meters per second of .50 caliber bullets, and they were cut down row by row by the pursuing bullets outside the hatch.

Immediately afterwards, the second squadron of thirty Mustangs cut in from the right flank and used the same tactic on the battleships.

The starboard anti-aircraft gun array of the battleship was more densely packed than that of the Akagi, with sixteen anti-aircraft guns mounted on each side.

But no matter how dense the protection, at a speed of 600 kilometers per hour, it's just a bunch of fixed targets in front of it.

The second formation took two minutes to render all the anti-aircraft gun positions of the battleships and heavy cruisers mute, leaving piles of corpses and debris everywhere on the decks.

The third formation simultaneously attacked the destroyer and the light cruiser.

Thirty-two Mustangs swept the decks of the light cruisers clean in less than two minutes. By the time the last plane took off, there was not a single person standing on the decks of these light cruisers.

But this is only the beginning.

After taking off over the Akagi, Zhu Wudi did not look back. He led the remaining planes of the first squadron and turned around in mid-air, heading straight for the battleships and heavy cruisers of the second echelon.

At the same time, his voice came through the radio, short and clear:

"Li Changkong, second wave, go!"

Li Changkong, who had been hovering at an altitude of two thousand meters in preparation, was overjoyed to receive the order.

"Brothers, charge with me!"

More than a hundred fighter jets simultaneously lowered their noses and followed behind Li Changkong's aircraft, advancing towards the joint fleet in four waves.

If Zhu Wudi's ninety-two Mustangs were a precise scalpel, specifically designed to remove the most fatal thorns from the Combined Fleet, then Li Changkong's more than one hundred fighters were a sledgehammer.

Their mission is not precision strikes, but saturation coverage.

Four waves, each with about forty aircraft, were deployed, primarily targeting battleships and heavy cruisers, using airborne machine guns and cannons to strafe all targets exposed on the deck.

The first batch of forty fighter planes cut in from the bow of the Kongo-class battleship, sweeping along the port side all the way to the stern.

The Kongo was equipped with sixteen Type 89 anti-aircraft guns and an even greater number of Type 96 25mm machine guns.

In Zhu Wudi's first wave of attacks, these artillery positions were suppressed to some extent, but many gunners still persisted in fighting back in the ruins.

After the first batch of forty aircraft came crashing down, the remaining anti-aircraft firepower on the Kongo was completely silenced within five minutes.

The Type 96 machine gun's magazine was empty, but it still failed to shoot down a single enemy aircraft.

The Type 89 anti-aircraft guns, which were manually loaded, overheated and deformed during continuous firing. One gun even exploded, and the flying shrapnel knocked down all three gunners around it.

The second wave of forty aircraft targeted the Hiei, the third wave dealt with the Haruna and Kirishima, and the fourth wave focused on clearing out the two heavy cruisers, the Mogami and Mikuma.

The captain of the Mogami-class ship watched helplessly from the bridge as forty fighter jets, lined up in a dense horizontal formation, pressed in from the bow.

The flashes of gun muzzle flashes beneath the wing formed a line of fire, as he later wrote in the survivors' report:

"The scene didn't look like an air raid; it was more like a sandstorm sweeping across the sea, with every grain of sand killing people."

twenty minutes.

From the moment Zhu Wudi pressed the firing button until Li Changkong's fourth batch of fighter jets fired the last bullet and pulled back, a full twenty minutes elapsed.

In twenty minutes, the anti-aircraft firepower of the three aircraft carriers, six battleships, four heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and twelve destroyers of the Combined Fleet was mostly destroyed by the strafing of more than two hundred fighter jets.

The gun emplacements were littered with corpses, and the decks were covered with shell casings and bloodstains. The surviving ground crew and gunners crawled inside the ship and dared not show their faces again. The decks of some ships were so quiet that they resembled ghost ships.

But this is not the final blow.

Zhu Wudi confirmed the results from high in the air. He saw that there were almost no anti-aircraft guns still firing on the decks of the ships in the combined fleet. The density of anti-aircraft firepower had decreased by at least 80% compared to before the war.

He knew the time had come.

"Bomber formation, torpedo bomber formation, all units launch!"

Zhu Wudi's voice rang out over the radio, filled with murderous intent.

"Attack the aircraft carriers first: Akagi, Kaga, and Ryujo. We can't let any of them escape."

"After sinking the aircraft carrier, we'll attack the battleships and cruisers. Today, I want not a single Japanese warship to leave here alive."

On the northern horizon, groups of de Havilland bombers and torpedo bombers began to descend.

The bombers descended from 3,000 meters to 1,500 meters, which was the optimal bombing altitude for horizontal bombing of de Havilland.

It can ensure a certain level of accuracy without exposing oneself to the fire range of the remaining anti-aircraft guns.

Torpedo bombers descend even lower, needing to fly horizontally at a height of about fifty meters above the sea surface to drop their torpedoes.

This altitude is a matter of life and death for torpedo bomber pilots; if it's too high, the torpedo will disintegrate upon entering the water, and if it's too low, the aircraft itself may crash into the sea.

However, the combined fleet's anti-aircraft firepower had been crippled by this moment. The remaining anti-aircraft guns fired sporadically, and the shells exploded in the sky, creating wisps of grayish-white smoke. The density was so sparse that they could not form an effective barrage.

The first wave of bombers flew over the Akagi.