Steel Reign

Chapter 4

Kapitan Falkenrath and the Goeben steered south until they were certain they had evaded their enemies, then slowed to 12 knots. On the night of the 27th of February, he turned east, intending to creep silently towards the coast of Africa again, which he approached on the fateful morning of the 28th. He had a sense that something was amiss, a strange quavering in the air that day, and an unaccountable disturbance that he could not put his finger on. It was the initial eruption of Krakatoa, and though he was much too far away to hear it, the shock wave that shook the atmosphere was something perceptible to all the men on the ship. One thought he felt an odd vibration, another was strangely seasick, thinking it no more than a bad bit of beef at breakfast.

Now the ship turned northeast, following the coast up toward the German airfield at El Aioun, which promised to have air support up to cover his approach. In the meantime, Captain Sanders had searched fruitlessly to the north and west, until he ran up close to the island of El Hierro in the Canary’s. His quarry had eluded him, and Tovey ordered his cruisers to return to the Azores to have a look at the damage put on Sir Lancelot by Hans Rudel’s dramatic attack.

As for Rudel himself, he turned and headed for the African coast, even though he knew he would not have the fuel. What he wanted to find now was a U-boat, for if he had to ditch in the sea, that was his only chance at being rescued. With the weather bad, his chances were slim. A lot of U-boat Kapitans would submerge to avoid the pounding heavy seas could deliver to their boats. So Rudel knew his best chance was to find clear skies, and luck was with him that day. He broke out of the worst of the storm, continued east, and found a nice wide glistening patch of open sea.

If anyone was in the vicinity, this would be a perfect place to surface and take on fresh air after the storm, and that was what Kapitan Karl-Friedrich Merten was doing that hour. Rudel spotted the U-boat, and made a slow approach, but he knew he had to get them on the radio before they saw him. He managed to do that just as the top watch spotted his plane, and was reporting the alarm to the Kapitan.

“Aircraft spotted sir! Coming in low from the west.”

His first Officer, Oberleutnant Albert Lauzemis, made ready to order the dive, but Merten stopped him. “It’s one of ours,” he said, and sent 2nd Warrant Officer Werner Happe up with a team of divers to see about fishing the pilot out of the sea.

Rudel overflew the U-boat, his wings wagging in greeting. Then he flew a slow, lazy circle before he opened his canopy and bailed out, landing very near the u-boat, his parachute a wet deflated jellyfish on the sea. The divers got to him in a small inflatable rubber boat, and he would live to fight another day.

“What in the world are you doing out this far?” asked Merten.

“Hunting the British,” said Rudel. “What else?” He told them his story, and all the men listening were quite impressed.

“Well,” said Merten. “You can hunt with us for a while if you like. Our mission is to interdict the waters in the approach to Lagos further south.” Rudel was going on his first, and last, U-boat patrol, but a signal was sent to Group West informing them of the rescue operation.

Marco Ritter had been very glum for a few days after he made landfall, thinking Rudel had met his fate in those stormy seas. He eventually transferred to the Prinz Heinrich, operating east of Lanzarote, and that was where he heard the news.

“They found your protégé,” said the Kapitan. “U-68 picked him up and he’ll be on patrol with them for some time. But he gets a nice free ride all the way back to Lorient, assuming that U-boat makes it safely home.”

Ritter smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Kapitan. With Hans Rudel aboard, that boat is charmed. They’ll make it home.”

And they did….

The Goeben made it safely to the German controlled coast as well, and Falkenrath took it quietly north to Casablanca, arriving with barely enough fuel to keep his screws turning. He was very pleased to see the Kaiser Wilhelm anchored in the port, and they also had news that Detmers on the Kormoran was still at sea, undiscovered, but making steady progress north.

Now the Germans had two of the three great prizes they had obtained in the deep South Atlantic, and days later Admiral Raeder sat down to his dinner with Kapitan Heinrich, soon to learn the world was not what he thought it was.

Raeder was quite surprised to see the material Heinrich had in that brief, reports, charts, logbooks from an American ship, the USS Norton Sound. He would make a point of looking it up, and if it was not found in the index of known enemy warships, he would ask Naval Intelligence to look deeper. What was odd about the material were the dates.

“These can’t be accurate,” he began, even as Detmers had initially dismissed the possibility that the information could be authentic. Heinrich did not argue the matter. Instead he merely placed more and more material on the table, like a man revealing one piece of some elaborate puzzle after another. As time passed, and Raeder continued to study the documents, he saw how completely consistent every page was, every report and chart.

“1958?” he said with a wry grin. “Someone has a ripe sense of humor.”

“That is what I first thought,” said Heinrich, “but the documents were all stored where one might expect them, Chart Room, Log Station, Captain’s Ready Room. If it was all theater, it was certainly an elaborate performance. There were no other documents but these on that ship. Nothing ‘normal’ to offset the sheer weight of all this material, which is entirely consistent in depicting the date and time of the events described as occurring in 1958.”

“I could have a clerk type up more of the same in half an hour.” Raeder was not yet convinced, preferring to conclude this was some Allied special operations ruse. But there was more to the story Heinrich was telling him now. “You say you fired on this aircraft carrier.”

“We did, and Schirmer could not miss at that range.”

“Then you hit it?”

“I saw the hit with my own eyes, and the fires we started. Then… something very strange happened. I thought it was Saint Elmo’s fire at first, all around the ship.” He could see it all so clearly in his mind’s eye. The strange lights in the heavens seemed to descend and surround the ship, finally collapsing inward to a scintillation of jade green phosphor, and then fleeing into the night. Yet his greatest surprise was in finding that the target of Schirmer’s guns had vanished. He could still hear the echo of the ship’s guns, a quavering, hollow sound that seemed as though it was being stretched thin.

“Then it was gone,” he said. “The carrier was not there any longer.”

“Blown up?” asked Raeder.

“I hardly think that possible. The hit was good, but not enough to sink a ship of that size in one blow. Besides that, we would have heard any explosion powerful enough to sink it, and all I heard was the report of our own guns. Furthermore, there was nothing whatsoever on the water. Suddenly the seas were completely calm. It was… Most disturbing.”

“Your first Officer corroborates this?”

“He was standing right beside me. Then, seconds later, the watchmen spotted another ship.”

“The ship you boarded—this USS Norton Sound?”

“That is correct, Admiral. And what you see now before you was taken from that ship, along with the rocket we delivered, and all the other equipment, including the radar sets. There is a second missile on the Goeben, and Detmers has the ship itself, underway with a prize crew aboard. These are facts that simply cannot be dismissed.”

Raeder shook his head, a perplexed expression on his face. “But why litter such a ship with these false documents? And what would a ship like this be doing out there without any crew aboard? This is a real mystery, Heinrich.”

“Indeed it is, sir. Now kindly have a look at this… I hope your English is good enough to read it.” He reached in to produce the Life Magazine, again dated October 13, 1958, which he pointed out to Raeder immediately. Then he opened it to the article on Montgomery.

“What’s this?” said Raeder. “Montgomery?” he leaned forward, studying the cover photograph closely. “I did not know he was quite so old.”

“I know it will seem impossible,” said Heinrich, but that is supposed to be a photograph of the General as he appears in 1958. Look at the article, it all speaks to his great accomplishments in the desert war against Rommel.”

“Our comedian at work again?”

“Possibly, yet I will tell you that the longer you sit with that, the more disturbed you will become. It was one of several such magazines we recovered, and this next one is quite revealing. We found it in a sea locker below decks. Apparently someone kept it as a memento.”

He produced yet another copy of that same magazine, only this edition was much earlier, but still impossibly dated, October 29, 1945, and this time priced at 10 Cents. Its cover showed a black and white photograph of a man out hunting with his dog and shotgun in the woods, with the subtext “AUTUMN.” Heinrich quickly flipped to the relevant article, a two page spread with many photos, and the headline struck Raeder like a cold slap in the face: “Allies Indict 24 Top Nazis For War Crimes – Hitler’s aides are mugged like common criminals before trial by Allied Military Tribunal of Big Four.”

There, spread out over the whole two pages, were pictures worth thousands of words, faces, shown dead on and in profile, of all 24 men. They were faces Raeder knew well, names that were now riveted in the highest echelons of the Nazi power structure. There was Reichmarschall Hermann Goring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, General Albert Kesselring, only this time without the smile on his face that was his trademark. Every face seemed harried, lost, deflated, the eyes vacantly staring at the inevitable fate that had befallen them. It was astounding, photos of Franz von Pappen, Generals Wilhelm Keitel, and Alfred Jodl, and there, last of all in the lower right hand corner of page 39, was a man he had spoken to only two days ago, Admiral Karl Döenitz.

“Commander in Chief of the German Navy? Why, they’ve given Döenitz my title! And this is accusing him of crimes against persons and property on the high seas. Well that is certainly true, if they also want to convict themselves of that same offense.”

“May I, Admiral?” Heinrich took up the magazine and began reading… ‘Less than six months after the end of the war against Germany, the victorious Allies made the first move to punish the leaders of the defeated Axis. In the white-walled chamber of Berlin’s People’s Court, an indictment against 24 top members of the Nazi hierarchy was presented before the International Military Tribunal. All 24 were charged with participating in a common conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace by using the German State as an instrument of war….’ Look at them sir, accused of crimes against humanity; lined up like common criminals.”

Raeder smiled. “That is not too far from the truth.” The Admirals disdain for the Nazi mentality was well known. Heinrich handed the magazine back to him, and Raeder continued reading further. “We must make it clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.” He turned the page. “Yes, we certainly did. Where could they have possibly obtained all these photographs? My God, look at the expression on that face.” He pointed to Döenitz. “I wonder why they left me out of this little club?”

“Who can say, sir?”

“Why would they concoct something like this?”

“Is it a concoction Admiral? A Fabrication? That is certainly the question. Turn the page—there’s much more.”

Now Raeder stared at a large full page photo of men on cots, spread out, as the article caption claimed, on the hanger deck of the carrier Enterprise. The title was: “The Long Voyage Home—Having won its war in the Pacific, the Navy returns to have its day.” There followed photos of US Navy sailors arriving in Panama, and a dancing girl entertaining a group of enthusiastic seamen in their dress whites. The following page showed an eerily authentic looking photo captioned: “The U.S.S. Enterprise, sunk six times according to Jap claims, enters New York Harbor by the dawn’s early light.”

Kapitan Heinrich could see just the hint of discomfiture in the Admiral’s eyes now. “Every page of this magazine is consistent in its depiction of the time as 1945—just like this other magazine dated to 1958. The message they both convey is quite obvious: from the perspective of those years, this war has ended, and Germany was utterly defeated, our leaders trotted into a courtroom and tried for war crimes. I first entertained the thought that this was all propaganda, but here we find a ship that I believe you will not locate in the registry of American vessels, and with rockets pulled from its hold like teeth from a shark, and all the other equipment—advanced radars, radios, other equipment that we do not yet understand. I suspect, Admiral, that upon closer inspection, we will find this equipment is much advanced. We even noticed serial numbers dated to 1952 or later. Certainly we have nothing to match these rockets now. Yes, as preposterous as all that seems, read further. It leaves you with a terrible yawning doubt, page after page…”

Raeder flipped through the pages. Even the silly advertisements all conspired to speak the same message. One for the New York Central Train Line spoke of how ‘wartime travelers made post-war travel news.’ Another from a baby food company was showing an infant born in ‘The Year of Victory.’ Swift & Company proclaimed: ‘Final, complete victory has, of course, hastened the day when there will be plenty of meat for everyone.’

Raeder would find a most interesting article a few pages on: ‘The Atomic Scientists Speak Up – Nuclear Physicists say there is no secrecy in Atomic Bomb and no defense against it.” He knew something of that, but said nothing. There was even an article with photographs near the end that featured the broken and bomb damaged statues of Berlin, which gave Raeder a shudder.

“Heinrich… You are suggesting that these documents and magazines may be authentic? Why, they would have to have come from…”

Heinrich did not finish the Admiral’s sentence, it simply wasn’t necessary. The photographs spoke their silent truth. Raeder took up the issue dated October of 1958. There, in the table of contents, was Montgomery’s portrait, led by a haunting quote from the English poet T.S. Eliot: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…”

It was going to be a very long night.

Chapter 5

He joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, a society for space travel, at the ripe age of 17, to begin his first foray into rocket design in 1927. There he met Max Valier, who saw applications for rocketry in driving cars, trains, gliders and even snow sleds. By 1930, select members of the society had co-opted an abandoned ammo dump near Reinickendorf and saw it the perfect place to begin testing their designs. They called it the Raketenflugplatz, or Rocket Airfield, and their first major test model was called the Mirak-1, which used a mix of a liquid oxygen and gasoline. After one successful test, the second model exploded, sending the team back to the drawing board to consider a less volatile method of fuel.

Early variants designed by the group produced modest results, achieving altitudes of 200 feet and ranging no more than a kilometer. Eventually the altitude reached one mile, which was when the Army stepped in when the group approached it looking for funding and support. With an Army proving ground site available at Kummersdorf, the young Wernher Von Braun soon found himself working for the Army. There he met the famous Major von Richthofen and Ernst Heinkel, who wanted him to work on designs for rocket assisted aircraft.

Von Braun also helped developed the A-Series rockets, (A-1 and A-2) which he nicknamed Max and Moritz. It wasn’t until 1937 that a dedicated testing site was set up at a top secret underground location called Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. It started with the A-3 design improving on earlier models, but had little real support until a strange ship appeared and began flinging lethal rocket weapons at German Navy ships. Suddenly Hitler was all ears. He wanted to know everything possible about these rockets, how they worked, how they were guided to their targets, how far they could fly and what payload they might carry.

Soon von Braun found himself leading a team of very talented scientists, among them designer Walter Reidel, Rudolph Hermann conducting wind tunnel testing, Dr. Mader in materials, Dr. Ernst Steinhoff working on guidance and telemetry, Arthur Rudolph in the fabrication lab, Klaus Riedel conducting testing, and Hermann Steuding handling aeroballistics. Their designs were many: the Wasserfall and Schmetterling, The Waterfall and Butterfly, remote controlled AA rockets, Germany’s first attempts at building a functional SAM. The Taifun followed, conceived as a weapon that could be fired in massive waves against high flying Allied bombers.

These and other designs got support from Goring, who was also looking for an anti-aircraft rocket for the Luftwaffe, but Germany never really saw a development path leading to much success with them… until two mysterious rolling chassis were delivered to Peenemünde on the night of May 5, 1942. Von Braun was among the first to get a look at them, his eyes widened with delight and awe when he saw them.

“We’ll name them Max and Moritz,” he said with a grin, hearkening back to those early days of testing. They would become schoolmasters for the well educated minds who were now there to study them, and one day they would be twin terrors for the Allied cause. There, sitting on those horizontal carriages, were solutions to all the problems they had been muddling through. They had samples of materials, and engine design, for the X-17A was using three different engines made by Morton-Thiokol. They had the solid fuel propellant used in each engine, something that was not achieved in Fedorov’s history until 1948, and most of all, they had the design, noting the presence of two small rockets on the first stage that had been added to impart a desired spin on launch.

Beyond that, they had something in the nose of each missile that was truly perplexing—two fully functioning low yield atomic warheads. It would be many months before they could even begin to grasp the full magnitude of what they had before them, but in that time, the examples would serve to guide and instruct the entire German rocket program. The only dilemma von Braun and his cohorts faced was the fact that they could not see the missile actually fire without losing it forever. They could only probe, measure, analyze and speculate, and so their first effort would be to try and reverse engineer what they had in front of them by building their own models. To adequately achieve the same scale, they would need to first understand how the powerful solid fuel propellant was made.

Up until that time, most German rocket models had used volatile liquid fuel combinations of oxygen and alcohol, but this was something entirely different. By removing tiny samples for analysis, they determined that the oxidizer here was being embedded in a rubbery matrix that was cast right into the motor design as an integral part, much unlike a liquid fueled rocket that could be fueled on the launch pad. A solid propellant also produced a steady burn, which was much more difficult to throttle than a liquid fueled system, where the thrust could be determined by the amount of fuel being injected into the combustion chamber.

The German scientists quickly realized that once this rocket was ignited, it could not be shut down, which even prohibited a test firing of the engine to determine its thrust and characteristics. Once it was fired, it was lost forever as a working model.

‘Yet solid fuel has many advantages,” said von Braun, “particularly from a military standpoint. It is very dense, allowing us to get a lot of thrust from a very low volume of material, and that saves weight. It ignites immediately, requiring no pre-fueling operation prior to launch, which would be completely impractical on a ship. And my experience tells me the reliability of such fuel will be much better than liquid fuel, and the shelf life is indefinite. From a logistical standpoint, it is much to be desired in a rocket weapon for military use—no fuel trucks and supporting crews, quick deployment and firing, easy transportability.”

“But is this the weapon that struck our ships?” asked designer Walter Reidel. “Look, it clearly has three stages, the largest being that wider first stage. We have estimated the burn time on the volume of propellant there to be about two minutes. The other two stages, being much smaller and narrower in diameter, might burn for just a few seconds. From my perspective, I would say this design was intended to achieve very high altitudes, and very quickly if the first stage burns so fast.”

“Perhaps it is not the ship killer,” said Rudolph Hermann. “We are working on an exact model of the three stages for wind tunnel testing soon. This may be the anti-aircraft model—that is my suspicion.”

“The key will be to first replicate the solid fuel propellant,” said von Braun.

“We are only just beginning to understand its component chemistry,” said Dr. Mader. “We have identified acrylic acid, ammonium and potassium nitrates, perchlorates. The fuel is actually in granular form, embedded in a kind of rubber like asphalt, and these grains have a very specific shape to maximize burning characteristics.”

On and on it went, until the actual warhead itself became a central focus of German interest. They did not know exactly what they were looking at in the beginning. Every preconception they had would lead them in the wrong direction. When they actually removed it to make a closer inspection, they were stunned to see there appeared to be no explosive material there at all, no amatol, TNT, or anything else. What good was a rocket with no explosive warhead?

It was then that a man named Werner Heisenberg was brought in to take a closer look, who immediately sent a request for nuclear physicist Kurt Diebner, Paul Hartek, a nuclear chemist, an done Otto Hahn, who had pioneered the discovery of nuclear fission. When they finished their analysis and told the research team what they thought they had, there was hushed silence. Max and Moritz were no ordinary rockets, but highly advanced ballistic missiles that had been designed for high altitude flight paths, fast reentry, and they were delivering a lethal warhead that was based on the arcane principle of nuclear physics, and not simply chemical explosives. Germany had also been pursuing enrichment and nuclear physics at its Uranprojekt, with noted physicists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

“Theoretically,” said Heisenberg, “The amount of fissile material in that warhead might be the equal of one or two kilotons of conventional explosives. But what is amazing here is that the mass of the fissile material is much smaller than I envisioned. I’ve been over calculating the critical mass required. This changes everything. Where in the world did you get these monsters? They certainly were not built here, of that I am certain.”

Now it was clear that these were not the naval rockets that had been the bane of the Kriegsmarine in recent months, but something much more sinister….

Weeks after Kapitan Heinrich delivered that cache of documents and magazines, and those remarkable missiles, both he and Kapitan Falkenrath were called to Gibraltar. There, in an office building overlooking the former Governor’s Parade, Admiral Raeder sat with a stony expression on his face.

“Gentlemen,” he began. “I have just received a report from Peenemünde. They are convinced that the weapons we delivered are not the naval rockets that have been used against us at sea.”

“Then what are they?” said Heinrich, clearly surprised.

“Ballistic missiles, and it appears that initial assessments believe they have a very long range, and a most unusual warhead. We now believe that what you may have stumbled upon in the South Atlantic was a secret American test project. Given the fact that such a weapon has not been used against us thus far in the war, we conclude that these two rockets are prototype designs—but very dangerous prototypes. I must therefore impress upon you the importance of secrecy in this matter. Nothing whatsoever must be disclosed about these weapons. Understand? As far as you are both concerned, they do not even exist. Furthermore, I want the names of each and every member of your crew who may have set eyes on those rockets. They are to report directly to me at once.”

“I understand,” said Heinrich.

“Detmers finally got through to Casablanca, and he had the ship in question with him as well. I have already had this conversation with him. As for the reports and other documents you have obtained from that ship… The conclusion they lead us to believe is clearly preposterous, but you are to say nothing of them either—not a single word to anyone. Even Hitler himself has not been fully briefed as to the nature and presumed capability of those rockets.”

“What about the radar sets and other equipment?” asked Falkenrath.

“They have been turned over to appropriate authorities for further testing and analysis. It is apparent that our enemies have developed a much higher level of technical proficiency than we believed. This little cache you discovered will prove absolutely invaluable, and for that…” The Admiral reached into his desk drawer, producing two small felt covered boxes, “you are both about to receive the Knights Cross with Oak Leaves. Congratulations! One day soon, the weapons and equipment your daring sortie delivered to the Reich will make a great difference in this war.”

Yes, thought Heinrich, a very great difference. But knowing these weapons were already in development in the United States was most disturbing. And there were so many things about that mission that remained utterly perplexing. After that meeting was over, Heinrich and Falkenrath had a little chat of their own.

“This is all so very strange,” said Falkenrath. “What happened to that aircraft carrier you hit with a 15-inch shell?”

“Should we be discussing this?” said Heinrich.

“What, you just want to take your medal and go back to business as usual? Look, Heinrich, this is just between the two of us. There’s something odd about this whole affair. Do you know that Raeder had all my ship’s logs confiscated?”

“Mine as well.”

“Well let me tell you what he will soon learn, if he doesn’t already know it. We lost contact with you right at the outset of that encounter with those ships down there. My watch logged it at 02:45.”

“The weather was miserable. Why is that surprising?”

“Because we took a good long while searching for you. I doubled the watch, had the radar sets working, everything, but there was no sign of your ship—for almost two hours….”

“Two hours?”

“Our log reported sighting Kaiser Wilhelm again at 04:10, nearly an hour and a half later, and we did not get positive recognition from your lamp signals until 04:18. Where in God’s name were you all that time?”

“That cannot be right,” said Heinrich. “I’ll admit that one gets pulled into the heat of the moment, and that contact was very sudden, but I am certain the whole incident took no more than five or ten minutes!”

“Two hours, Heinrich, or nearly so. We couldn’t use the wireless, but I was even considering launching a seaplane to get up and look for you. All we saw were those strange auroras, and the empty sea. Then there you were, but well off our original course.”

Heinrich narrowed his eyes. “Since you tell me this, I will say that those documents no one is supposed to know about tell quite a different story. Raeder has said I am not to ever speak a word of it again, and he’s taken the whole lot, every report and file we found on that ship. Detmers and his entire crew from the Kormoran have been pulled from that duty and sent somewhere. Something tells me that the men we send to Raeder will all end up being replaced.”

“What’s going on here?” said Falkenrath. “None of this adds up.”

“I think we had better not be too eager to do the math,” said Heinrich. “Can’t you see what has just happened? We are both senior officers—not so easy to get rid of without others in the fleet taking notice. So Raeder just called us in, pinned a nice shiny medal on our chest, and told us to keep our mouths shut. Frankly, I don’t know where we were all that time, Herr Kapitan, or where in the world that enemy aircraft carrier went, or why we should then find that American ship with these rockets, but not a living soul aboard. But I’ll tell you this—if the Allies have these weapons operational now, we are doomed, Germany is doomed. It would take us years to catch up, even with those prototypes.”

“That is what is so confounding. They have these rockets—the damage they put on Hindenburg and our other ships was plain to see. Yet they only seem to be in very limited deployment. Raeder may be correct. These may only be prototypes, perhaps limited to a very few ships. They haven’t been seen in use anywhere else. Hell, we took Moscow from the Russians and not one such weapon was ever directed against us. This is quite bizarre, Heinrich.”

“Yes…. It certainly is. Well, good day, Kapitan Falkenrath. I hope we sail together again one day soon. In the meantime, enjoy your medal.”

Heinrich saluted, turned, and walked away, his footsteps sharp and brisk, his mind still inwardly dwelling on those magazine articles. Detmers was the only other man besides Raeder who knew about them. Something told him that the three of them would end up being the only ones who ever really knew. Really knew what? What is it you think you know, Kapitan, he said to himself? Did you stumble across a ship from another time, from the future? Nonsense, just as Detmers said it best.

But deep down, there was a quiet inner mind that would simply not believe that, and this would not be the only time Heinrich would be presented with clear evidence that this impossible notion as presented in those magazines was really truth. And if it was the truth… The faces of those 24 Ministers of the Reich, all lined up in a double spread, were so very haunting.

I wonder what Raeder thinks about that? He’s probably going to wonder a good long while why his own face was not there among that rogues gallery, and why that photo of Döenitz listed him as the Fleet Commander. Yes, he’ll be thinking about that for a very long time….

Chapter 6

Raeder was thinking about it, and it fell like a shadow over his mind, a grim realization that the story being told in that strange magazine was a real possibility. I should be elated with this find, and in one sense, I am. We finally have our hands on prototype weapons that the enemy was undoubtedly testing in the deep South Atlantic. But that entire incident was most unusual, most disturbing.

I have read the log books from each ship, and they simply do not agree. Now I know Heinrich and Falkenrath to be sensible, reliable men. I’ve had my eye on Heinrich for some time now, ever since we lost Admiral Lütjens. He has amassed a most impressive kill record in the few sorties he’s been on, and now this astounding find that no one expected.

What really happened down there? How could Kaiser Wilhelm stumble on an aircraft carrier, hit it, and yet allow it to slip away? The weather must have been very thick. That is the only thing that can account for it. The Goeben actually lost contact with Kaiser Wilhelm for well over an hour, according to the logs there—but those on Heinrich’s ship tell a completely different story. Very strange.

And what about those fabricated reports Heinrich littered my dinner table with—those odd magazines? Why would the Allies concoct such nonsense—to use as propaganda tools? It makes no sense. And what happened to the crew of that ship Detmers brought in—what an amazing find that was. How could something so valuable be abandoned and set adrift like that at sea. Heinrich says the ship was actually underway at about ten knots when they encountered it. Two precious missile prototypes aboard, and all that advanced equipment, on a derelict ship with no Captain or crew….

It’s as if the enemy intended for us to find that ship, which means they intended us to find those missiles as well. Could that be the solution to this puzzle? Are those missiles simply dummies? They know we are aware of their rocket technology, and therefore know we will be stopping at nothing to get these weapons ourselves. So they just leave a few there, on an empty ship. What if they were intended to mislead our technology teams—lead them down false pathways in their research? What if that ship was nothing more than a Trojan Horse? It is clear those rockets can never be fired to prove they even work. Surely the Americans would know that. No. They can only be studied, analyzed, reverse engineered, and there is never any guarantee that our models will work either.

Look how they went to such elaborate lengths to rub our nose in this assertion that Germany loses the war. How very clever—trot out old General Montgomery, reminiscing on his victory over Rommel; line up all the top ministers of state like common hoodlums. Yes, they were certainly giving us the middle finger in those documents. Here they went so far as to date every log and report to the year 1958, as if to say that is how far ahead of us they are with their rocket technology. Then they leave us a pair of poison pills… I wonder…

Yet those were not the naval rockets that have been used against us. They couldn’t be. They are simply too big, and Peenemünde thinks they are multi-stage ballistic missiles, like our own V project designs, yet even more advanced. My god… we’ve got to find a solution for these naval rockets. Look at the damage they have inflicted on the fleet!

We have lost Nürnberg, Prinz Eugen, and watched Admiral Scheer chastened in the far north—naval rockets. The Graf Zeppelin was utterly destroyed, along with destroyers Loki and Siegfried—naval rockets. Gneisenau was sunk by enemy torpedoes in that engagement with the Rodney, presumably by an enemy submarine, and Hindenburg has also suffered three torpedo hits, though I built that one very well. Bismarck sustained so much damage in that duel off Fuerteventura that it will be laid up for at least another nine months.

Thank god we got hold of the French fleet. Their losses are even more staggering: Bretagne, Lorraine, Provence, Richelieu, Strasbourg, Dunkerque, and now Bearn in the Pacific. Their entire battle fleet has been gutted, not to mention the loss of eight cruisers! Yet that entire fleet was always expendable. As it stands now, the presence of the Normandie and Jean Bart, mean a very great deal to our chances at sea now, and their destroyers are worth their weight in gold. Alas, the French Admirals are getting squeamish, though I suppose I cannot blame them.

So many things concerning these new weapons do not make sense. What caused that massive explosion at sea in that earlier Atlantic engagement? What kind of ordnance could the Allies be using? It towered up thousands of feet in that terrible mushroom cloud. Could it have been something like the secret atomic project our scientists have been working on? I was afraid we would see it again off Fuerteventura, but nothing of the kind was used against us there. Could that earlier explosion in the Atlantic have been the deployment of another prototype like the missiles Heinrich found? If so, and these rockets are the real thing, then that Trojan Horse had a real terror within it. What have we taken within our gates by sending those rockets to Peenemünde?

It took some doing, but a Grand Admiral has some clout after all. I managed to get hold of the preliminary assessment by the technical team at Peenemünde. That is how I knew those were not naval rockets, but ballistic missiles. And now I also know that their warheads were most unusual, possibly the same as the weapon that caused that terrible mushroom cloud in the Atlantic. God help us if the Allies have such weapons now—if they ever have them at all! Then the things they taunted us with in that strange magazine would indeed come to pass. Germany could never win this war, and I am well aware of how our ring leaders in the Nazi Party would be regarded. Thank God I am not a Party man. Is that why my picture was left out of that gallery, or was there some other reason?

The Admiral shook off these impossible thoughts. They could only lead him down inexplicable corridors, into shadow and uncertainty. He had to focus on the here and now. Yet those odd magazines were pretending to know the future, to predict Germany’s inevitable fate. They were so utterly persuasive, every photo, every line of text, right down to the silly advertisements. What would I do differently now if that was our future?

That might be a long list. In the meantime he had another list in front of him, and it needed his thought time and attention.

I must get Hindenburg back into fighting trim as soon as possible. The superstructure repairs can finish up at Toulon, but after that, I need a good dry dock to look at the hull and see to that torpedo damage. It will be no good trying to run the ship home to Germany. Hindenburg is a serious threat right where it is in the Med, or at Gibraltar. Thankfully, the Normandie Dry Dock at Saint Nazaire can easily accommodate the Hindenburg. So as soon as we tidy up Kaiser Wilhelm and the Goeben, I will send all three out to that port.

That will be a strong knife at the throat of the Western Approaches, and I will use that task force exclusively for commerce raiding now. Then, in the south, I stage Normandie, Jean Bart and Prinz Heinrich at Casablanca with strong French destroyer escorts. Another knife to support our continued efforts in Operation Condor.

To keep the British spread thin, I must see that our operations at Trondheim are given high priority. The Nordstern base there must be complete as soon as possible, a city of a quarter million citizens of the Reich, and a strong naval / air base—our North Star. It will be our Singapore of the north, only we will not squander such a marvelous base, like the British did in the Pacific.

From Nordstern I will stage Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, the fast cruisers Rhineland and Westfalen, and our new destroyers. To that I can add the carrier Peter Strasser, another star in the north to plague the British. And I still have the two older pocket battleships there as well. Once Nordstern becomes a self-sufficient naval base, that entire fleet can be staged there, freeing us of the necessity to transit the North Sea. It will be tasked with shutting down the Allied convoys to Murmansk. Doenitz will have his own u-boat bunker there as well—Dora 1.

But what about Operation Condor? That is my most immediate concern. I could dearly use Heinrich and Falkenrath down there now, but Hindenburg will need a good escort to Saint Nazaire. He sighed, thinking about the stalemate operation in the south.

We have taken Arecife, Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria, yet the naval engagement was so costly to both sides that a lull has fallen over operations. It has taken us much more time than we realized to move in fresh supplies, and to repair the airfields and get aviation fuel, munitions, and service crews there. My use of Prinz Heinrich as an aviation fuel ferry ship was quite clever, but we need more tankers. The loss of Ermland was difficult to bear. I must get another tanker into the Atlantic as soon as possible.

Then what? We have enough troops to proceed with Operation Condor, even though Rommel still has one of the Mountain Regiments I requested. Now he is bellyaching about our use of ‘all his planes’ to support Operation Condor. He will undoubtedly say the very same thing to Hitler as an excuse for being pushed out of Cyrenaica. That is a dangerous omen. He cannot advance, and now it seems that he cannot even stop the British. If we lose Libya, then the Enemy will be poised to invade Tunisia, and all because the Führer is still so obsessed with the campaign in Russia. Five divisions would settle the matter in the Mediterranean…. If we could only keep them supplied.

At the moment, Rommel is still holding on to Benghazi, but that port will soon come under attack from Allied air power. The Americans are shipping the British a lot of aircraft now. Rommel will soon want ‘his planes’ back, but those Stuka squadrons are the key to maintaining our hold on the Canary islands. We’ve caught that bird, but now we must swallow it. The British will undoubtedly attempt to use their sea power to interdict our supply operations to the islands. Against that, my great trump card is air power.

Now we have good airfields on the islands. The British have already had to re-route convoys well out into the Atlantic, and Doenitz is already asking me to get a U-boat pen set up there, perhaps on Fuerteventura. The British won’t like that, and the hard fact is that they can make bombardment runs by night to attack those airfields. That was where they inflicted the most harm to the Luftwaffe, when they shelled that damn airfield down south. So I must fight for each and every squadron, and what we need now is the development of a good long range night fighter, and more planes for my aircraft carriers.

Look what the Japanese have done in the Pacific! Here we struggle to support the occupation of these islands, while their navy has overrun the entire South Pacific! They are in a very good position to cut off Australia now, and I wonder if they can manage it. But I could take good lessons from their conduct of naval operations in these last several months. Their ability to project power and sustain it with their navy is absolutely superb, the equal or better of the Royal Navy, and that says a great deal.

The key to all their operations is the aircraft carrier. My god, they brought over 300 aircraft to strike Pearl Harbor. They only use their battleships to support amphibious operations, and as escorts for their carriers, and their cruisers are fine ships. What would the Royal Navy do in the Atlantic if they had to face a fleet built like the Japanese Navy? Yes, I was a fool to dream of 70,000 ton super battleships, though the Japanese have them. They are probably wishing they had invested that money and steel in more aircraft carriers, just as I am now converting the hull of the Oldenburg to a new carrier, and renaming it Brandenburg. The island superstructure and deck armor is now complete. Soon we will be installing the cranes and hanger elevators. Building a carrier is far easier than constructing a ship like the Hindenburg.

Yes, Brandenburg will be my Ace in the hole. It will be a marvelous ship, 175 feet longer than the American carrier Enterprise, and more than 60 feet wider abeam. Without having to install all those heavy barbettes and turrets, and most of the superstructure, the displacement lightened up considerably. The battleship would have displaced well over 60,000 tons, but the carrier no more than 38,000. Since the power plant and propulsion systems were already finished and built to drive the heavier ship at 30 knots, the much lighter carrier will achieve even faster speeds. All that interior space now gives Brandenburg a massive series of hanger decks, and plenty of room for aviation fuel. The ship will have very long legs, tremendous endurance at sea. And now we believe we can get at least 90 aircraft aboard, possibly even more. We can crate spares and easily store them below the hanger deck. The American carrier Enterprise carries that many, and it is a much smaller ship than Brandenburg.

The design for this new ship is also very ingenious. The Americans had the right idea when they built those two light scout carriers. Since those ships retained forward turrets as hybrids, they decided to give their flight deck a slight angle so the guns would have clear arcs of fire. As Brandenburg already had its Anton turret fully installed, I suggested that we simply leave it in place, and then use that marvelous wide beam on the ship to create a second angled flight deck. It looks to be progressing very well, heavily camouflaged under all that netting so the British can’t see it from above. This opens up some new possibilities for carrier operations that not even the Japanese have thought of yet.

Yes, all the Japanese, and American carriers as well, have one long straight flight deck. The British build their carriers this way as well. So when they operate, they can only do one thing at a time, either recover or launch planes, but not both. That will not be the case with Brandenburg. That angled flight deck will allow us to recover aircraft even while we launch, and I am insisting on steam assisted catapults, four of them. Two will be mounted at the end of that angled deck, and another two on the bow of the ship. That big 16-inch turret will be flanked by a pair of fighters, always ready for takeoff.

At the moment, I can put 42 planes at sea aboard Peter Strasser in the north, another 40 on the Prinz Heinrich, and 12 on the Goeben. When I get Brandenburg, I can double that, and if we manage to convert Seydiltz and commission that ship as the Wesser, then I get 20 more. The DeGrasse conversion looks to be too far off to contemplate. But those other four ships will give me over 200 planes if I concentrate the carriers like the Japanese. That is real naval air power. That is how the Japanese and Americans operate, and we can do the same… that is, if I can keep Goering’s fat hands off the planes earmarked for naval assignments. He’s likely to demand control of the carriers personally! He has it in his mind that anything with wings belongs to him, and any place those planes are based comes under his thumb. Well, I must be very firm, but also very cautious.

Hitler told me to discontinue the Oldenburg, and I have obeyed that order. But wait until the Fuhrer’s birthday next year. Wait until I invite him to stroll with me on the deck of the Brandenburg. I am risking my entire career on this.