Winter Warriors

CHAPTER THREE: COLD WIND RISING

“You’ve gone brown.”

Inanna looked up, rather apprehensively. “How does it look Nammie?”

Naamah inspected Inanna’s dyed hair with an authoritative eye. There had been a time when she’d made hair colorings from plant extracts but those days were long gone. “Your eyes don’t match, but there’s nothing you can do about that. I should know.” Naamah’s eyes were a dead, slime-green, frightening to the point of being repulsive. “For the rest, only your hairdresser will know.”

Inanna giggled at the reference to the advertising slogan used by Clairol for their range of home-coloring products. The company held a national competition to select an advertising slogan for their new product. ‘Only your hairdresser will know’ had been the alleged winner. On paper, it was a reference to the quality of the product that could match salon hair products. In reality, a veiled reference to the fact that it offered blonde women a way to look less German. Looking German was neither sensible nor safe. The newspaper on Inanna’s desk proved that. “You heard Tommy Lynch sent in an entry to that competition?”

“Oh no, what did he say this time?”

“It read ‘mix up a double batch and give yourself a matching snatch’. It won too, only the company management vetoed it despite the fact it would have doubled their sales. Does it really look good? Coloring jobs in salons are getting too expensive these days; this way is a little less costly. I thought I’d try it out first and if it works fine, we’ll make sure all the blondes in our family get supplies. We’ll dip into the reserves for it.”

“That bad, Inanna? I knew there was trouble up in Boston and New York but I thought it was confined to there?”

“What do you think?” Inanna flipped a copy of the Boston Globe over to Naamah. The front page picture was a sagging figure, tied to a streetlight post, the head and upper body covered with tar and feathers. “They ripped her coat and blouse off, hacked up her hair and then did that. Nobody bothered to call the police, she was there for twenty minutes in this weather before the cops found her. She’s in hospital; emergency ward. Pneumonia and burns to her face and head. What sort of animals are these people?”

“Frightened, angry, frustrated ones.” Naamah very carefully kept the anger out of her voice. “I’ll bet you any money you like; in normal times, the people who did that would have risked their lives to help a woman in distress. But now, they’re trapped in a situation they can’t understand or control. They want to slaughter the people who are killing our boys over in Russia but they can’t. So they displace that anger onto a scapegoat.” Naamah’s mouth twisted in disgust. “The normal scapegoats are blacks, Jews, any minority. Even having that thought makes people see themselves as being what they hate, being too close to the Nazis. So they pick on somebody else. In this case women with blonde hair. I’ll bet if the FBI picks up the group who did this, they’ll find in the background somebody who had a grudge against this particular victim and got everybody else worked up. Not all brutal sadists are German. They’re everywhere, here as well; you know that. Over the years, we’ve seen them often enough in more than enough places.”

“That’s the line the Globe are following. That the woman was the innocent victim of a personal vendetta and the people who were did it were no better than Nazis themselves. Problem is, look at the other story on the front page. More massacres in Ireland, entire villages in County Limerick just gone. Everybody. Men, women, children, animals, crops, everything. Boston is an Irish-American city. A lot of people had folk back ‘in the auld country’ and they want to hit back any way they can. This country is getting ugly. Nammie, it’s in the big cities now, but it’s spreading. We need to protect our family.”

Naamah nodded. “OK, I’ll talk to Lillith and Nefertiti, they’ll work out how much we need.” She grinned; the picture on the newspaper made it forced and unnatural. “It’s lucky we invested in the aircraft and electronics industries a few years back, isn’t it.” She looked at the picture again and even the forced grin faded. If she ever found the people responsible for that atrocity, she’d take them out for a drink. A very final drink.

Even the big Forties were rolling in the seas. Huge waves; long, swelling ones that rocked the battleship. Every so often there would be intense vibration as the waves exposed the screws aft and caused them to race before plunging into the deep again. Lindemann looked behind him. The second in line, immediately behind Derfflinger, was Moltke. Lindemann watched her drive her bows in, taking green water up to Turret Anton. All eight battleships had the “Atlantic bow,” raked and flared to improve bad weather performance. It was a great improvement on the flat, vertical Taylor bow the German designers had preferred earlier. It wasn’t helping Scharnhorst and Gneisenau though. They were badly overweight, sat much lower in the water than planned and they wallowed badly. Moltke was taking water over her bows, but the two light battleships at the end of the port column never seemed to get their bows out of the green swells. Turret Anton was awash more often than not. As if to hide the two ships’ distress, the rain closed in again, shrouding them from view.

Lindemann sighed and went back to the chart table. According to the weather people, once this storm front was past, the weather should be a lot better. By North Atlantic standards anyway. They’d be close enough by then to close on the big convoy and overwhelm it and its escorts. Then, they’d turn on the carrier group and overwhelm that.

After all, nobody had ever sunk a battleship on the high seas with aircraft. As long as the battleships could maneuver, they could avoid the airstrikes. Once the carriers had shot their bolt, it would be all over. Some were even cautiously talking about the rest of the American fleet, probably pounding England or France, coming to the rescue and being added to the pot. Too much to hope for of course. But they would get the big supply convoy and there was word of another smaller convoy, a fast troop convoy. That would be worth the risk of adding to the bag.

The rain squall eased off a little and the visibility improved again. Lindemann looked out the starboard bridge wings, towards the destroyer screen. He could see Hipper running ahead of the formation. Z-23 was steaming just behind and to starboard of her while Z-24 was clearly in sight, sailing almost parallel with Derfflinger. Behind her, Z-25 was having a much easier time of handling the heavy waves. She should, the designers had finally admitted the heavy twin turret forward on Z-23 and Z-24 was a bad idea and replaced it with a single shielded mount. Four 15cm guns, not five and all the better for that. Lindemann swung his binoculars back towards Z-24. Another one of those great swells was approaching and he watched the destroyer dig her bows in before she was hidden by the mountain of green water. He watched, waiting for her to reappear, waiting to see her fight her way clear of the wave. To his mounting horror she never did. Z-24 had vanished.

Lindemann was frozen, watching the scene through the ghostly shroud of mist, spray and rain. A three and a half thousand ton destroyer couldn’t just vanish. In the background he heard the message from the radio room arrive. ‘Destroyer Z-24 has foundered. No survivors.’ Eventually he forced his voice to work. “How?”

“If I may Sir.” One of the young lieutenants was speaking very tentatively. “I was training to be a naval architect before I was for …. signed into the Navy. There were many doubts about the Z-23 class even then. That big turret forward is a lot of weight; too much for the structure of the bows. Worse, there is a large compartment underneath the turret. That makes the whole bow structure extremely stressed. Finally, the trunk for the turret is too close to the hull sides. Gunnery was told, Sir, but they insisted on that twin turret forward. I think when Z-24 dug her bows in, the weight of the wave pressing down combined with the bow rising up was too much for the structure. I think her bows just tore off forward of her bridge. A battleship or cruiser, they might survive that Sir, but a destroyer won’t. Her own engines will drive her under and there is nothing to stop the flooding. Nothing at all; she probably sank in less than 20 seconds.”

Lindemann stared at the young officer who flushed and turned bright red. “I’m sorry, Sir.”

The Admiral slowly shook his head. “There is no need for apology. You had information I needed and gave it to me as was your duty. Communications, send a message to all the destroyers. They are to abandon efforts to hold station and maneuver as necessary to avoid damage.” Lindemann raised his binoculars to his eyes again and looked at the patch of sea that had claimed Z-24 with so little warning. For the first time, he had a very bad feeling about this operation.

“The German fleet is out.” The young torpedo-bomber pilot made the remark with complete confidence.

“How do you know, George? The German High Command in your pocket? Giving you tips?” The other pilots on the gallery were jeering. The Adie pilot had an air of smug, condescending confidence that set people’s teeth on edge. Coming from a family with money could do that.

“That’s the fifth pallet of torpedoes that’s come aboard in the last half hour. There’s five-inch rockets and 12-inch Tiny Tims coming aboard from the aft station. We’re offloading 500 and thousand pounder HEs and taking on sixteen hundred and two thousand-pound armor piercing. We had a lot to start; now we’ve got more. We’re going to be taking on other ships for once, heavily armored ones. So, that’s the German fleet. They’ve got be coming out.”

Although the other pilots hated to admit it, he had to be right. They watched as Kearsarge swung another pallet of the massive Tiny Tim rockets on board. At the same time, a pack of 22.4 inch torpedoes was being hoisted over to Intrepid. Between the two carriers, the ammunition ship Firedrake was working to keep the stream of anti-ship munitions flowing. A day earlier, it would have been impossible; the storm had still been at full force. Now, it had passed in the night and the weather was fine, as good as it was ever likely to be in the North Atlantic in November.

Not far away, the aircraft carriers Reprisal and Oriskany were bombing up from the ammunition ship Great Sitkin. The carriers were helpless, their decks were cleared, their aircraft struck below or parked forward, out of the way. Riding guard was the fifth carrier in the group, the light carrier Cowpens. She was the guard carrier, responsible for providing air patrols over the group with her three squadrons of F4U-7s. Five carriers with over 400 aircraft in this task group alone, and there were four more groups just like it. Well, not quite like it, Task Group 58.1 had the new CVB Gettysburg in place of a light carrier. That gave the group more than 500 aircraft. No wonder “Wild Bill” Halsey had made that group his flag.

Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush looked away from the flat-tops, towards the other shapes in the weak, gray sunshine. The biggest of them were the battleships New Jersey and Wisconsin, then the heavy cruisers Albany and Rochester. There had been three but Oregon City had suffered bad storm damage and been forced to head back. There were bad whispers about the ‘Orrible Titty.’ Some said she’d been built wrong, her spine twisted. Four light cruisers, Fargo, Huntingdon, Santa Fe and Miami. Eighteen destroyers filled out the group. They were DDKs, Gearing class ships whose job was to hunt and kill submarines. Protecting the carriers was the job of all those other ships. They shielded the carriers while the carriers smashed everything they took a dislike to.

And there were four more carrier task groups just like this one. Then there was the battle line, the support groups, the munitions groups. The ASW hunter-killer groups. All intended to keep the carriers safe and fighting.

Below them, another pallet of torpedoes swung onto the flight deck. The munitions men down there swarmed over it, striking the extra torpedoes down to the magazines. Up on the Goofers Gallery, the other pilots had to admit Bush was right; this many torpedoes, this many rockets, this many armor-piercing bombs meant they were going after the big ships of the German Fleet.

“I’ll tell you this guys. When we find the Huns, I’m going to get me a battleship.”

It was too much. With one accord the pilots started beating the young Lieutenant over the head with their caps. Eventually they paused for breath and the ring-leader of the attack pushed his battered cap back on. “Yeah right, George. And one day you’ll get to be President, won’t you?”

“Ready for launch.” Lieutenant Pace braced himself for the slam in the back of a catapult launch. The Stalingrad had two F8F-1 Bearcats ready to go. Not far away, her sistership, the USS Moskva had two more. They’d fly as two pairs towards the contact one of their picket destroyers had spotted. If the analysis of the target’s flight pattern was right, Hunter-Killer Group Sitka had hit golden paydirt. For today, anyway.

“Target is cruising at Angels 26, speed 200. Bearing 135 degrees. Range 165 miles” The situation report was as complete as possible to cut down radio transmissions after the fighters were launched. If this was one of Germany’s few remaining Me-264s, they wanted to give it as little warning as possible.

Ahead of him, one of the deck crew made a winding-up motion with his hands. Pace pushed the throttle forward; the R-2800 engine picked up power, making the Bearcat shake. There came the expected thump and he was hurtling down the deck as the catapult fired. He cleared the Stalingrad’s bows and pushed the nose down. One always traded altitude for speed; no matter how little of the former one had, the latter was worth more. Underneath him, the undercarriage doors thumped closed. He sank below deck level, then he soared upwards. The Bearcat was in its element again.

The cruise out took a little under an hour; time for the target to move roughly 200 miles in any direction. Fortunately, the German pilot was doing the north-to-south leg of a sweep. Probably checking to see what was following the storm front. It was an open question if he’d seen Hunter-Killer Group Sitka. Probably not; German radar wasn’t that good and surface search conditions were still pretty bad. He hadn’t deviated from his course yet. He, almost certainly, didn’t know the Bearcats were coming.

“You’re on top of him.” The fighter controller’s voice from Stalingrad was cold, unemotional. The pair of Bearcats from Moskva had already peeled away, they’d gone to full power and moved to get between the Me-264 and its base. “There are RB-29s operating. Make sure of target identification before opening fire.” With its smooth glazed nose and four radial engines, the Me-264 looked a lot like a RB-29. It was whispered that there had already been some unfortunate accidents.

Pace spotted their target below them. The large twin tailplanes were clearly visible even though the aircraft’s dappled light and dark gray paint job blended with the sea far below. Time to open the dance. “Confirm, Me-264. Take him.”

The two Bearcats accelerated into a long dive. Unlike the midnight blue aircraft on the fleet carriers, escort carrier group planes were painted light gray with a gloss-white belly. It cut the shadows down making it much less likely that an alert gunner would spot them. Pace was coming in from high seven o’clock; his wingman from high-five. The Me-264 had a single 20mm gun in a turret above its rear fuselage. It could fire at one attacking aircraft, not two widely-separated ones. Suddenly, the German aircraft accelerated and black smoke trailed from its engines. They’d been spotted; and the pilot had cut in his GM-1 boost. For five minutes, the bomber would be almost as fast as the fighters chasing it.

Between dodging the stream of tracer 20mm shells from the rear turret and the GM-1 boosted engines powering the bomber, the two diving Bearcats were hardly closing the gap. It didn’t matter. Moskva’s Bearcats soared up and fired. They hit the Me-264 with long bursts of .50 caliber gunfire, from below and to the right and left. The thin black stream of smoke from the inboard port engine was suddenly transformed into a billowing cloud of black flame and dense smoke. The Me-264 abruptly slowed. The two Bearcats behind were able to close the range at last. Pace took careful aim. His .50s lashed the aft fuselage of the bomber. The 20mm tracers stopped abruptly. Gunner killed.

The Me-264 still had a 13.2 mm machine gun in the forward upper turret, a 20mm gun firing under the belly, two more 13.2mms, one in each waist hatch and a fixed 13.2 firing forward. For all that, the loss of the 20mm gunner was critical. It meant the German aircraft was virtually defenseless against attacks from above and behind. That’s where Pace and his wingman made their next runs, raking the bomber’s aft fuselage, walking their bursts along the structure into the wings. The gray beast below them was threshing, trying to defend itself but its fangs were being methodically drawn by the four fighters. Moskva’s two planes made another pass, this time for above and on the beam. Their streams of .50 fire raked the forward fuselage. That left the other upper turret silent. The aircraft was defenseless.

Pace was reminded of a history lesson he had once listened to, of a game when times were harder. A pack of dogs would be let loose on a blinded bear and the crowd would place bets on how long the bear would survive and how many of the dogs it could kill. This was different of course. It was possible, normal, to feel sorry for the bear. Nobody would feel sorry for the bomber below.

Pace swept in again, his aim undisturbed by defensive fire. His .50s streamed tracer, raking into the wing roots and walking sideways towards the engines. The starboard inner engine erupted into flames as his gunfire shredded its nacelle and the Me-264 angled downwards. As Pace’s aircraft pulled away, Moskva’s team made another pass. It was the killer. One of the long wings crumpled just inboard of a burning engine and the 264 went into a helpless spin. It fell from the sky and crashed into the sea. There, it exploded; its death watched dispassionately by the gun cameras on the Bearcats.

“We need bigger guns.” Pace’s voice was unemotional.

“They’re coming. The new ‘Cats will have 20mms, according to the scuttlebutt.”

“Hope they work a bit better than the last ones.” The Navy’s previous attempt at a 20mm gun had been a fiasco. The weapons usually jammed after a round or two. “Let’s go home.”

An hour later, the Bearcats were sitting on the hangar deck being rearmed and refueled. Their gun camera film had been taken and was being flown back to Washington. There, the kill would be confirmed. Inanna would take a file from her cabinet and delete another Me-264 from Germany’s shrinking maritime reconnaissance aircraft fleet.

Every reduction in the Luftwaffe’s small maritime reconnaissance fleet meant the fast carriers operating out in the Atlantic were that much safer. Without the aircraft to steer them to their targets, U-boats, even the Type XXIs, were virtually useless against the fast carriers. They would have to rely on luck to be in the right place at the right time. In the North Atlantic, that just didn’t cut it.

“We have a problem.” Major-General Klaus Marcks was not given to stating the obvious but there were times when a situation merited it.

“Captain Wilhelm Lang.” Colonel Heinrich Asbach also thought this was one of the times when stating the obvious was entirely justifiable. “The question is, how do we get rid of him? And should we?”

“We can’t, Heinie.” Marcks had a small group of officers who had been with him since the heady days in France, five years ago. The number was growing smaller as the Russian Front whittled them away, but he still depended on the survivors for advice and insight. Only a fool trusted his own feelings when there were other, better sources available. “The man has served on probably everybody’s staff over the years. He has powerful friends, the sort who could be very dangerous for this whole unit. He got us six brand new, fresh from the factory, self-propelled 150mm howitzers with a single telephone call. Do you want to take the chance that another call would send us to Archangel’sk? While he was assigned to a new post in the opposite direction?”

Asbach shook his head. It was not a chance worth taking. Even the name Archangel’sk had a horror associated with it, something quite unlike anything else on the Russian Front. There was a legend in the German Army. Archangel’sk didn’t actually exist anymore; it had become a gateway to Hell. That the units sent there just marched into the mist covering the city and vanished as if they had never been. It was pretty close to the truth. Being ordered to Archangel’sk was the nearest thing to a mass death sentence that could be given without actually ordering up the mobile gas chambers. He reached out and took another slug of brandy. His family owned one of Germany’s oldest brandy producers and he managed to keep the officer’s mess well stocked.

“Anyway, he isn’t actually a bad officer, Klaus.” Marcks lifted an eyebrow at that. “He knows the regulations inside out. He knows his duties and performs them well. It’s just that he has absolutely no experience at all. I guess that back in’38 we were just like him. Only, we spent all our time out here learning the reality of the war we’re stuck in. He spent that time in comfortable headquarters units, writing regulations and sending memos. He doesn’t know when the rules and regulations apply and when they do not. And he doesn’t really understand how the veterans think or listen to their experience. You heard the story about his nickname?”

“No?”

“He started off as being the ‘Perfectly Perfumed Prince’ and it got abbreviated to ‘Prince.’ When he heard about it, he assumed it was a term of respect, ‘Prince amongst men’ or something like that. A normal officer would know when to turn a blind eye. Not our Captain Lang. It was against regulations, so he forbade its use.”

“What do they call him now?” Marcks was genuinely fascinated.

“Well, the men started calling him ‘The Officer Formerly Known As Prince’ but that was too clumsy for general use so now they call him ‘Still’ because he’s still a Perfectly Perfumed Prince.”

Marcks barked out a laugh and shook his head. “Well, that’s all very fine but it doesn’t solve our problem. We’re kicking off as soon as this storm is over. It’s clearing from the west which is apparently very significant for some reason or another. The engineers have been checking the ice. The lakes and rivers are frozen hard enough to take the strain of our lighter vehicles. The heavy traffic will have to thread its way through as best it can. That includes the artillery, both the towed stuff and our newly-acquired self-propelled guns. Can we be sure than Lang won’t get carried away and drive them into a lake or something?”

Both men sighed and inspected their brandies. As they had both suspected, the levels in the glasses were inadequate to permit deep contemplation. Asbach topped them up again.

“I don’t think we have much choice, Klaus. If we move him out, who gets the battery instead of him? His lieutenant has even less experience and nowhere near the same level of knowledge. I think we’re going to have to leave Lang in place and just watch him carefully.” Asbach thought for a second. “There is one possibility of course.”

“Do tell.”

“My part of the attack is pretty close to a raid. An armored infantry column going in to try and seize those big railway guns north of here. Preferably capture them. If that’s not possible, destroy them. We’ve built the raiding group out of the recon battalion; used its halftracks and reinforced its infantry component. It’s short on tank killing power though, its armored cars have only 75s or long 50mm guns, and artillery. Only, we now have some self-propelled artillery we can take along. So if we attach Lang and his self-propelled guns to that force, it does two things. Beefs up the raid to the point where we can do useful things and put Lang in a position where he’s both under a group of experienced officers and in a prime position to get some battle-lore of his own under his belt.”

“You’re happy to take such an inexperienced man along?”

“Happy is the wrong word, Klaus, but I think it’s the best solution.”

“Agreed. I’ll issue the orders. After we’ve finished supporting your family business.”

“Your ten o’clock Mister President. Senator Stuart Symington.” President Dewey’s secretary spoke quietly on the intercom.

“Thank you. Send him straight in please.” There were those whose services merited immediate access and those who deserved a long, long wait in the Presidential anteroom. Symington was one of the former.

“Senator. Pleased to see you. How goes work on the Air Material Production Subcommittee?”

“Thank you for seeing me so promptly, Mister President. It’s one aspect of our work I wish to see you about. Particularly one aircraft, the C-99. On the face of it, the aircraft appears to be a scandalous waste of resources. I wanted to discuss the matter with you before the subcommittee investigates the program. In case there is a reason behind this program that I and my committee are not aware of.”

“You have doubts about this aircraft Senator? If you could enlarge on them, perhaps I can set your mind at rest.”

“Sir, put at its most basic level, the aircraft seems to perform poorly and demand excessive amounts of support. It is slow. It flies at around 200mph. That makes it appear to be even slower than a C-47 and much slower than a C-54. It is restricted in altitude. My understanding is that it cruises at around 10,000 feet. We have reports that it can’t climb above bad weather, so it is often grounded. Worst of all, it uses six of the R-4360 engines that are in such short supply. The Navy is crying out for F2G Super-Corsairs and the Air Force desperately needs F-72 Thunderstorms to replace the old F-47s. Yet the production of both is restricted by the shortage of engines. If we cancel the C-99, we could free up engines for those aircraft.”

“Senator, put like that, you make a strong case. If I might show you some pictures, they might put a different light on the matter.” Dewey had been anticipating a problem like this and he had the files waiting in his office. Symington’s Air Material Production Subcommittee dealt mostly with the components for aircraft; engines, weapons, most recently radar and other electronic systems. His point had been a good one. It was just he didn’t, couldn’t, mustn’t know the whole picture. The President opened the file and handed some 10 x 18-inch prints over to Symington.

The Senator gasped. The pictures, obviously taken from a high-flying RB-29, were of a port. From the size and scale, he guessed they must have been taken from almost 30,000 feet. The port showed clearly. What was even clearer was the mass of shipping that surrounded it. Symington was irresistibly reminded of ants swarming around a leaf. A mass of shipping that engulfed the port, obviously swamping its facilities.

“That’s Vladivostok Senator. Of all the supplies that go to Russia, 25 percent goes via the northern convoy route to Murmansk and Archangel. Another 25 percent uses the southern route, via Iran and the Afghan Railway. The other half, all of it, goes via the western route to Vladivostok. And you can see the result. The congestion off the Russian port is terrifying. I’m told Admiral King has woken up screaming in the night when he imagines enemy submarines or surface ships getting loose into that mass of shipping.”

Symington nodded. In his mind he could see the exploding ships; enemy warships running through the tightly-packed merchantmen and the burned bodies of seamen washing up on the cold shores. Just like they had back in the bad days of 1942. It could not be allowed to happen again.

Dewey was still speaking. “Of course, we’re doing what we can to solve the problem. We’ve got engineers expanding the facilities at Vladivostok. They’ve doubled the capacity of the port since 1943. We’ve moved a whole new prefabricated port over there, called a Mulberry, and that helps. We’re even unloading cargoes directly over the beach where we can. They’re all only marginal solutions. We’ve achieved a lot more by building support factories in Russia. There’s iron ore, copper, nickel, lead there, oil as well, a lot of it. We used to ship crude oil back to California, then ship refined products back. That blocked the port twice per cargo. Now, we have refineries in Siberia and that saves us a lot of shipping. Only, it’s still a marginal solution.

“It’s not just Vladivostok. The backlog of shipping is causing congestion in all the ports down the West Coast. Rail yards are full because the trains can’t unload until they have a ship to unload them into. The ship can’t take the cargo because it’s still waiting to unload the previous lot at Vladivostok. Then, we’ve got the railway problem in Siberia itself. We’re double-tracking the railway and building relief lines as fast as we can but we still can’t get the job done fast enough. For all that, the equipment needed to enlarge the railways comes by sea, and the ships are backed up all over the place.

“One final thing. Take a look at the map. Look how close that shipping thrombosis is to Japan. Bombers in the Japanese home islands could take off, bomb the stacked up cargo ships and return home without ever leaving sight of their bases. Do you know what it’s costing us to persuade the Japanese not to interfere with that lifeline? A free hand in China’s just the start of it.”

Dewey sighed again. “Look, Senator, I’m sorry if I’m ranting at you, but this shipping problem is keeping everybody awake. The C-99 is the solution to the whole problem. It may fly low and it may fly slow but it has the range to take off from anywhere in the western United States and fly to an airbase in eastern Russia. It can carry 400 men, or 100,000 pounds of cargo per flight. The C-54 carries 50 men or 10,000 pounds of cargo. That means that a single C-99 can carry the human payload of eight C-54s and the cargo payload of ten. It can do all that while flying three times as far. And it doesn’t stop there. The C-54 and the C-69 are basically passenger transports. They have small doors and that gives them problems handling bulky cargoes. The C-99B onwards have clamshell doors in the nose that are big enough to handle whole vehicles. We could fly tanks to Russia if we had to, and deliver them directly from the factories in Detroit to the troops waiting on the Volga. And they can back-load troops from the Volga to the United States. Think on it, Senator, because of the C-99, a soldier with a five day pass can come home and see his family instead of drinking too much in a ‘rest camp.’

“Senator, don’t think of the C-99 as a slow, low-flying aircraft. Think of it as a very fast, amphibious, high-sailing merchant ship. In the time a Victory Ship takes to get from the West Coast to Vladivostok, unload, and come back, the C-99 can lift the same weight of cargo and bypass the ports completely. All it needs is an airstrip and we are building those by the score. It bypasses the ports, bypasses the rail system and means we can route supplies far away from Japan. We’ll still need merchant ships. There are some bulk cargoes that even a C-99 can’t handle but, for the rest, the C-99 is it.”

Symington thought over the whole situation, his eyes fixed on the picture of the mass of shipping piled up outside Vladivostok. It would be easy to create a scandal over the C-99. It was a big, expensive aircraft and its performance figures didn’t look good. But, what he had just been told made sense. It left him with a choice between making political capital for his party by embarrassing the Government or supporting the interests of the country. He was a Democrat, a holdover from the Roosevelt administration. To a party political man this was a gift. But, to Symington, that wasn’t a choice. No honorable man would put his party before his country.

“Thank you Mister President. The situation is quite clear to me now and my initial impressions were quite wrong. I must ask your forgiveness for wasting your time. My committee will say nothing about the C-99.”

“Senator, may I ask a kindness of you? Obviously the problems we are having with port congestion must remain completely secret but it would do much good for public morale if the capabilities of the C-99 were publicized. The good with the bad, low speed: low ceiling but great range and payload. Perhaps some color pictures might be released. I understand the orange and silver color scheme used by the Air Bridge aircraft photographs very well. I think the people would be encouraged and cheered by the news that your Committee has expedited the aircraft that brings their boys home on leave. There’s nothing secret about the C-99 itself. We could even have some newsreels made.”

Symington smiled broadly in response. This was true politics, two men resolving their differences and coming to an agreement that benefitted both. “I think that is an excellent idea, Mister President.”

After Symington left, Dewey relaxed in his chair. The case made for the C-99 was a powerful one. It was true, but it was only part of the picture. It was also important that people be taught to see any six-engined aircraft with orange markings as just another transport from the Air Bridge. That brought another thought to mind. Senator Symington was an honest man and an honorable man. This meeting had proved that. He was a good candidate to be informed of the real secret that lay behind the C-99. When the time was right, of course.

“Well, that was unexpected.” Captain Bob Dedmon closed the cockpit canopy panels and settled comfortably into his seat. The cargo manifest was on a clipboard in front of him. Ten spare R-4360 engines for an F-72 group and a mass of spare parts, propellers, tires and electronic gear. Plus ammunition and drums of lubricants. Enough to keep the group going for a week or more. A total manifest of 35 tons.

Outside, a cinema newsreel crew had been filming the apparently endless column of trucks bringing up equipment that vanished through the giant clamshell doors in the nose and into the belly of the C-99B. She was a new bird. This would be her first flight to Russia and that was the apparent subject of the newsreel. It had been a well-made piece. The news crew had wound up the tension as the weather reports came in. Would it be possible for the C-99B to make the flight? The plane was too slow and didn’t have the ceiling to climb above bad weather so a good forecast was critical. Then, the message had come in from Anadyr in Russia. All clear, good weather all the way. The flight was on.

Dedmon had never expected to be the subject of a newsreel; privately, he’d thought the interview he’d given was a disaster. He’d tried to explain what flying the big transport was like. How the huge double-deck fuselage acted like a sail and caught every hint of a crosswind. How flying it felt like steering a house from its front porch. But also what the flights achieved; tonnage delivered directly to the people who needed it, troops brought back for the short leave with their families that they had all so richly earned. He’d tried to say how much getting the supplies through and bringing the people back meant to the pilots on the Air Bridge, but he’d made a complete stumbling mess of it. He didn’t realize that the emotional, semi-articulate explanation of how the C-99 crews thought and felt had the ring of truth that a polished, professional, effort would have lacked.

“Never thought we would be movie stars. Engineering, ready to go. Full power engines three, four, two, five, one and six in that order. Nose doors closed. Check cargo secured.” Dedmon glanced out at the transport. The C-99A had its cockpit buried in the contours of the nose and the pilot couldn’t see much of his aircraft. Modifying the design to include the nose loading doors had meant the cockpit had to be moved to a bubble on top of the fuselage. From there, he could see the whole aircraft. Arctic Express was bright silver except for the outer wing panels and tail surfaces. They were orange-crimson, a high-visibility color in case the bird went down in the snow. It is one pretty color scheme Dedmon thought.

“All engines full power. Ready to taxi out.”

The big transport moved slowly onto the taxiway and waddled down towards the runway. Sitting so high off the ground gave the crew a tremendous sense of power; they overlooked everything. It was as if they were watching the working of the airfield from a moving control tower. Dedmon glanced down. There was a little C-94 in front of them. It was a small utility bird, the military version of the Cessna Skymaster. He could hardly see it. That was a safety problem worth bearing in mind. “Navigator, got the flight plan?”

“Sure thing Captain. North to Alaska, over the Bering Straits to Anadyr then inland to Khabarovsk. Flight time, estimated 20 hours. Assuming we don’t open her up properly.” The C-99 was quite a bit faster than the published data suggested although there were strict orders against revealing that fact. The explanation was that the unrevealed extra speed was their ace in the hole, to get away from fighters annoying them.

“Radio message sir, from the C-94 in front. He asks what our plans are.”

Dedmon snorted. Viewed from the perspective of the tiny utility aircraft, the C-99 must look like a massive monster towering high in the sky. The thought gave him an idea. “Cargo deck, start opening the clamshell doors. Radio, patch me though to the C-94. Dedmon waited until the connection was made and the rumble of the nose doors showed they were opening. Then he spoke to the C-94 pilot, “I am going to eat you!”

The blinding snowstorm that had grounded pretty nearly everything north of Petrograd had eased off a little but the white stuff was still coming down hard. It was a matter of great personal satisfaction to Flight Lieutenant George Brumby that his little detachment of antiquated biplanes, the only Australian aircraft operating this far north, were flying while the sophisticated Canadian and American aircraft were grounded. Not that it surprised him. He had come to the conclusion that the Americans couldn’t fly unless they were surrounded by every technical luxury known to man. The Canadians were being dangerously contaminated by their close proximity to the Septics. Brumby sighed. Poor Canada, so far from civilization, so close to America.

He leaned forward, bringing his nose closer to the glass paneling that made up the nose of his Dragon Rapide. It didn’t really help him see better through the falling snow; but it gave him a comforting illusion that he was. In any case, he was flying largely by instruments. Looking through the snow was an effort to warn him of trees and other obstructions. He quickly spared a thought for the four Russians sitting in the passenger compartment behind him. They were squeezed in with a load of supplies and ammunition. A Russian ski patrol, a bunch of Siberians, had hit problems and lost some men. They’d also been caught by the storm and had to hole up, so they were short of food. A few hours earlier, they’d got a message through. They hadn’t asked for help but simply reported their situation. Brumby had been asked to take his Matilda down, deliver the supplies and replacements, pick up a wounded man and bring him back. It was what the little Dragon Rapides did all the time.

According to the map, he was nearing the target coordinates now. It was hard to know for sure. The snow flattened out the landscape and destroyed the contours that would have helped him find his way. Brumby wasn’t that worried. He’d been a bush pilot for years before he’d volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. In that time, he’d done everything from flying cargo to taking part in the Flying Doctor Service. He had one of the new navigation gizmos the Septics had come up with. Gee, it was called. A master transmitter and two slave transmitters created a grid on a cathode ray tube in his cockpit. It allowed him to plot his position within two or three miles; that was far better than anything he’d had before. With a little luck, the troops on the ground would hear his engines. It was hard to believe but sound carried well in the snow. They would signal him in.

Brumby strained his eyes and peered harder through the snow. Was that a flashing light? Matilda was barely a hundred feet up and doing less than a hundred miles an hour so the weak flash seen through the whiteness was more than adequate warning. With the aid of experience and Gee, he was practically dead on. He cut the two engines on his wings back still further and allowed the Dragon Rapide’s skis to touch the snow in a perfect landing. The little transport kissed the snow, bounded slightly and then came to a stop.

“Everybody Out! And take the cargo with you!” The four Russians didn’t understand the words but they understood the gestures and the urgency in the words. Around Matilda, figures on skis had loomed out of the whiteness and surrounded the aircraft. Brumby clambered out and picked out a figure who seemed to be in charge. He was the one who was telling the four new arrivals what to do and where to go.

“G’day, mate. Got a wounded man for me?”

The figure looked at Brumby in confusion. “Please. Officer come.”

Another figure joined the group. “Tovarish Lieutenant. I am Stanislav Rnyaginichev. Lieutenant also. Please, call me Knyaz.” Knyaz looked at the Dragon Rapide in amazement. It seemed such a flimsy aircraft to be flying in this foul weather. But the biplanes had established an incredible record for doing the impossible. This one was painted gloss white except for a rippling of very pale gray and even paler blue. Even the circular markings were vague and indistinct; just a slightly darker shade of the pale gray. Or was it blue? It was hard to tell. The colors seemed to run into each other.

“Thanks mate. You got a wounded man for me to take out?”

“Yes. We bring him now. He is badly hurt and needs help very much. And we have some papers and documents we captured from the same ambush.” Knyaz looked at the aircraft again. This was something that had come with the Americans, the determination to get the wounded out and to the best treatment they could provide. There were those who said the Russian Army didn’t care about its wounded. That wasn’t true; they’d always done the best they could. The truth was that a poor army with massive casualties didn’t have much it could do. Then the Americans with their wealth of equipment and treasure had arrived. It was overwhelming. Knyaz almost resented it, but he reminded himself that, when he had gone down with pneumonia, he’d been flown out on an aircraft just like this one.

“Right mate, put him in. Need to get out fast.”

Knyaz nodded. His sergeant barked out a string of orders. To one side, Kabanov watched with satisfaction. Now, the ski group had four new Drugs. Even though he was the lowliest of the Brats, their presence meant that he wouldn’t be doing the humblest and most unpleasant details any more. Then he saw something quite unexpected. Under the cockpit of the C-66 was a dark gray maltese cross. A kill mark? In this aircraft? Knyaz had noted it as well.

“Tovarish, you have killed a fascist aircraft?” In this was the unspoken part of the question.

“Aye, my friend. About three weeks ago. Tilly and I were doing a delivery to a Partisan unit when we got hit by this Fokker. Well, the Hun tried to do us in, but we turned inside him and headed for the deck. Anyway, that Fokker followed us down, right down to the deck. I slowed Tilly right down. We were doing about sixty and that gave the Fokker real problems. Every time he tried to hit us, he overshot. We were thirty, perhaps forty feet up when we saw a valley and went down it. That Fokker, he was a real determined bastard. He wanted us dead, no mistake about that. He kept trying and we kept swinging out of the way. Tilly here drove that Fokker mad I can tell you. Couple of minutes into the valley, there was this line of pines, the tall ones. We flew straight at it. The Fokker saw his chance and came barreling in. Last moment, Tilly stood on her wingtip and turned out of the way. That Fokker, he couldn’t match the turn and he plowed straight into the trees. Brass back up top are still arguing about whether it was a kill or not. But Tilly and I are here and that Fokker isn’t, so I know who won.”

Knyaz had lost track of the bulk of the story but he got the essentials. “He was a Fokker D.XXI? That would be an Finnish aircraft then. To kill one of those treacherous fascists is very good.”

Brumby laughed and clapped the Russian lieutenant on the back. “That is as may be, me old mate. But that Fokker was a Messerschmitt.”

The weather was changing. The howling wind that had driven the rain in blinding sheets had dropped and with it the seas that had rolled the Graf Zeppelin dangerously close to her inadequate stability limits. That was the good news. The bad news was that the temperature had dropped as well as the wind. That combined, with the movement of the ship north, changed what had been rain to a mixture of rain and slush. It froze into a sheet of ice when it touched anything. Overhead, the gray masts and yards were turning white with ice. Ice was heavy, it weighed tons, and it added weight in the worst possible place. High up, it reduced Graf Zeppelin’s already precarious stability reserve.

The weather expert said that this was a temporary stage, a transient condition that marked the trailing edge of the storm. Already, they were crossing the boundary between the storm system itself and the clearer weather that followed it. Captain Erich Dietrich hoped the weather forecast was right. If it wasn’t Graf Zeppelin would be in trouble.

“Captain, when can we launch?” Admiral Ernst Brinkmann snapped the question out. It was one that needed an immediate answer. The Scouting Group was supposed to find the convoys that were the objective of this whole mission. The battlefleet was following a few hours behind them to the south and east. They were still laboring through the full force of the storm. When they emerged, not so far in the future, Admiral Lindemann would want to know where his targets were. He was not a man to wait patiently for the information. As if in partial answer, the sun broke through the thin clouds overhead. A weak, watery, indistinct sun, but the sun none the less. Dietrich took this as an omen.

“We can start bringing the aircraft up to the flight deck right away, Sir. They have to be loaded and armed on the hangar deck, and they have to warm their engines up here. That should not take long. I can have a deckload ready to go in.” Dietrich paused, calculating the times needed. “For a scout mission? I can have twelve Ju-87s on the deck, each with a 250 kilogram bomb and two 200 liter drop tanks, ready to fly in 45 minutes.”

“Very good. Communications. Order the Werner Voss to ready a force of 18 aircraft to launch at the same time. Same load. Also to have their remaining twelve Stukas loaded with a 1,000 kilogram bomb for anti-shipping strike. Have them ready six Ta-152s as escort. The Boelcke will prepare eight of her Ta-152s for immediate launch as our combat air patrol. Then she will prepare six Ju-87s and two Ta-152s as her contribution to our strike force. Got that? Transmit it. Captain Dietrich, you will ready an anti-shipping strike of your remaining eight Stukas and four of your Ta-152s. That will give us twenty six anti-ship configured bombers escorted by twelve Ta-152s as a strike while thirty of our Stukas look for the enemy.”

“An anti-shipping strike Sir.” The question wasn’t even hinted at in Dietrich’s tone but the Admiral knew it was there.

“The Amis are out there with carriers. They always have a carrier group covering their big convoys and this one will be no exception. So we need to be able to strike at them before they find us. Carriers are weak, vulnerable. What matters most is getting in the first blow. If we have our strike ready to launch, then we have the edge. We will still have twenty six fighters and four bombers left in reserve. The Scouting Group will adjust course to 270. We need to get clear of this ice as quickly as we can.”

Brinkmann watched from the bridge as the aircraft carrier started to boil with action. Despite the change in course, she was still rolling badly. Up ahead, the Werner Voss was making much easier passage through the seas. On paper, Brinkmann would have preferred her as his flagship. She was larger, more powerful and had much better flag facilities than the Graf Zeppelin, but he couldn’t stand the stink that seemed to permeate every niche of the ship and the infuriating faults in her construction drove him mad. So, he’d made Germany’s first carrier his flagship and put up with her deficiencies instead.

His thoughts were interrupted by the whine as the aft elevator brought the first of the reconnaissance Ju-87s to the flight deck. Its wings were folded; he watched, the flight deck crew started to winch them down. Once, it had been proposed that electrically-folding wings should be installed but that scheme had been dropped along with so many others. It weighed too much and the performance of the Ju-87 was critically inadequate anyway. Still, it was better than the only alternative, a Fiesler biplane. On the deck, one of the wings on the lead aircraft had jammed; something was stopping the hinged joint from working. Brinkmann watched a deck crewman jump up; he grabbed the wing and jerked it down into place. It worked; whatever had been obstructing the movement gave way and the outer wing panel slammed down.

It dropped into place so hard that the enterprising deck crewman lost his grip on the wing and was deposited, abruptly and unceremoniously on his rear. Brinkmann could almost hear the laughter from his comrades as they saw his inglorious reward. The laugh was very quickly choked off for the Graf Zeppelin was rolling and she had started one of her sways to starboard just as the unfortunate crewman hit the ice- and slush-covered deck. Brinkmann had no doubt about hearing the result, the crewman screamed in raw terror as he started sliding towards the deck edge. Two of his fellows tried to grab him; their only reward was to lose their footing and fall also. They were only saved for the same fate by those nearby grabbing them. The stricken crewman was scrabbling, hopelessly, uselessly for a grip as he made his inexorable slide towards the deck edge. Then he was gone, over the side into the gray water below.

“Communications. Man overboard. Order Z-20 to break position and pick him up.” Brinkmann snapped out the orders. Z-16 and Z-20 were the two trailing destroyers, one of them could surely pick the man up?

“Message from Z-20, Sir. He’s already passed. Are they to turn, stop and lower a boat?”

Dietrich spoke quietly. “It’s no good, Sir. That will take them at least five minutes. The water temperature, it’s below one degree. That man will be dead by the time they get to him. If he isn’t dead already. The fall might have killed him, or the sheer shock of hitting water that cold. By the time Z-20 has picked up his body, they’ll be far behind. It’ll take an hour or more for them to catch up.”

Brinkmann nodded. It was a hard decision but a necessary one “Order Z-20 to belay the previous order and hold position. There will be no rescue.”

He went out onto the bridge wing and took the great pair of high-power binoculars, the ones used by the lookouts. He could see the body floating motionless in the wake of the two destroyers bringing up the rear. Seagulls were already gathering to feast on it. They knew that anything floating motionless in the icy water wasn’t living any more. It was just food for gulls. Already the more adventurous gulls were diving down to snatch the choicest morsels from the unexpected meal.

Brinkmann sighed and went back inside the bridge. Work on the flightdeck was going on, more of the Ju-87s being brought up and prepared for launch. Then, he was shaken by a white blot that appeared on the glass. Not more snow, surely? No, it wasn’t. It was a tear-drop shaped, whitish blob with a green-brown center. Seagull droppings. Brinkmann looked up, the gulls were circling Graf Zeppelin as well.

It was a nuisance not being part of the formal carrier airgroup. The detachments, night fighters, radar search aircraft, utility birds, tended to come last on the priority lists. They fitted in after everybody else had grabbed the places and positions they wanted. But, once in a while, the detachments were supremely important. This was one of those times. There was a line of AD-2W Skyraiders spaced out across the sea. Each was dozens of miles from the next. Their job was to find the enemy and report on their position. Then, they were to continue to track that enemy, reporting so the strike aircraft didn’t waste fuel hunting for their targets. Every pound of fuel they saved meant more warload, more fuel saved for the trip home in what could easily be a critically damaged aircraft. Of course, the problem was that the enemy group would realize the significance of the thin line of Adies and send out fighters for them. Just as the American fleet was watching for the equivalent enemy scouting force and send out fighters to deal with them.

Unlike the AD-1s, the AD-2Ws were two-seaters. Superficially, they didn’t look like it. The pilot sat under a bubble canopy identical to the AD-1s. The immediately obvious difference was the mushroom-shaped bulge under the aircraft’s belly. That was the search radar, the latest variant in a family whose development had started back in 1942. Then, the intention had been to spot U-boats running on the surface. Over the years, the function had evolved. First to pick out the snorkel heads of a submarine charging batteries while submerged. Then, more added functions, searching for surface ships and monitoring aircraft movements. The radar operator sat inside the AD-2Ws cavernous fuselage, without windows to distract him from his radar screen or to let in light that would dim the displays.

On Eye’s A ‘Poppin, the screens showed the picture the searching Adies were looking for. Over to the east, a jumbled mass of chaotic returns marked the position of the storm that had swept across the Atlantic. Now they concealed whatever was still within it. As it had cleared to the east, another contact had emerged. A hard, distinct contact whose slow movement revealed it to be a formation of ships. Around it were some faint, yet still clear marks; ones moving in an arc that ran from due north of the enemy formation to south west. It was the German’s own picket line. The Germans didn’t have surface search radar, not on carrier aircraft. Only the big maritime reconnaissance birds, the Me-264s and the Ju-390s carried them. Whittling those down had been a Navy priority for a long, long time. The enemy search would be visual.

“We got them boss.” Sergeant Kudrich passed the word up to his pilot. “Surface units, medium sized formation, with air activity. It’s the carriers.” It was the golden strike, the jackpot. Battleships were obsolete, floating targets; it was carrier aircraft that were the center of an enemy fleet. Destroy them and the battle was over. “I’m radioing in the position now.” That was another bit of doctrine. The American carriers were running blacked out; not a light showing, not a radio transmission made. All the communications were to them, never from them.

“Any sign of enemy fighters coming out?”

Kudrich shook his head, then remembered nobody could see him in this black pit. “Search aircraft only. No sign of interceptors. Uh, Boss, there’s a hunter-killer group south of us, they’re in the search arc of the enemy aircraft. Better give them a head’s up?”

“Call Wild Bill on Gettysburg first, then let the hunter-killer group know what’s heading their way. Threat says the Kraut carriers have only Ju-87s for search; they’re not fast enough for a threat to develop that quickly. You know Wild Bill; he gets really upset if he’s the last person to find out what’s going on.

“Sir, message from the scouts. Enemy warship group spotted, 220 nautical miles east south east of our position, Medium sized group with air activity. Scouts believe it is the enemy carriers Sir.”

“Confirmation?” Admiral William “Wild Bill” Halsey was not a trusting soul at the best of times.

“Multiple Sir. Three of the Adies out there got solid radar hits. They’ve spotted the enemy scouting aircraft fanning out. They’re monitoring the enemy formation, undisturbed as yet.”

“Anything else?”

“Sir, a Rivet Joint, an EC-69 out of Keflavik has been picking up a lot of communications. The Krauts are using TBS radio pretty freely. Probably think they can’t be picked up if we’re over the horizon. There’s chatter between the ships in the group the Adies spotted and another location still within the storm line. Traffic analysis and some intel Washington sent us confirms it; the Hun battleships are out.”

“Battleships. Ain’t that just like the Krauts. Bringing their fists to a gunfight. Right. Signal Biloxi to launch a seaplane to TF58.5. They’ll take the enemy carrier group down. They’ve got the moxie to do it by themselves. That way, the Hun main force will think it’s just the group we normally have screening a convoy. The rest of us will get bombed up and ready to go as soon as the battlewagons stick their nose out of that storm. Strike waves will launch at 15 minute intervals from lights-on.”

Halsey knew well how the maths ran. Five carrier groups, two deckload strikes per group, a total of ten waves. The last wave would be on its way two hours and thirty minutes after TF58 switched its radios and radars on and started to launch aircraft. An hour out, 15–20 minutes for the strike an hour back and then a few minutes to recover.

It meant that the first wave would be returning just as the last wave of the strike would be on its way. Half an hour to rearm and refuel the survivors of that first wave, push the aircraft too badly damaged to reuse over the side and the whole process would start again. A continuous stream of attack aircraft that would swarm all over the enemy fleet until nothing was left. Once, when Wild Bill had been a child (something his staff refused to admit as a possibility), he had put the stream of water from a hose on a pile of dirt and watched the mound crumple and washed away under the unrelenting jet of water. Now, he was going to do the same thing again; only this time with the dark blue fighter-bombers on his carriers.

At least the weather had cleared. The met guys said the storm would pass to the east and that there would be relatively mild seas in its wake. They’d been right. Aircraft operating weather about as good as it was going to get for the North Atlantic this time of year. Gettysburg was still making heavy weather of it though. She was pitching badly due to her extra length and taking a lot of water over her bows and amidships. Halsey had heard that the second group of CVBs would have a their bows redesigned with the hull plating carried up to the flight deck. It was supposed to be a big improvement.

“Send a courier to Task Force 50.” That was the support group of escort carriers bringing up the rear. Their melancholy job was to supply replacement aircraft and crews to offset the losses from enemy fighters and anti-aircraft guns. “Warm up the replacements. Priority will be Adies, then Mames, then Corsairs. We’ll have to eat our Flivver losses.”

“One more thing Sir. There’s a hunter-killer group, Sitka, south of us. They’re in the enemy search arc. The Adies have tipped them off. They’ll be launching Bearcats to get the enemy scouts.”

Halsey nodded. “Add a warning to all messages. There’ll be gray and white Bearcats around; make sure of target identification before shooting them down. Try to make sure the Corsair drivers realize not everything with straight gray wings is a Ta-152.”

“Got it!” The comms Lieutenant was exultant. They’d seen the seaplane land and be recovered by the USS Montpelier. It had been a few minutes before the signal lamp had started to flash and the message it had transmitted had been a long one. “It’s the enemy carrier group. Roughly 180 miles out, bearing 129 true. There’s a wave of Kraut search planes coming this way.”

“Right. Order San Jacinto to launch her dash-sevens to intercept any that annoy us, and any others that they run into of course. She is to get her dash-fours ready for combat air patrol. Boxer and Macedonian are to ready their Flivver squadron and an Adie squadron each for the first wave, Valley Forge, their Flivver Squadron and a dash-4 squadron, we’ll do the same. Second wave. Two squadrons of dash-fours from Boxer and Macedonian. Valley Forge will send both her Adie squadrons; we’ll send both our Mames. That’ll leave us with a squadron of dash-sevens each for CAP and one squadron to assist Sitka. Clear?” Admiral Peter Knudson knew it was a rhetorical question. This was a well-rehearsed drill. The first wave, the Flivvers to sweep any enemy combat air patrol out of the way plus a light strike of fighter-bombers and some Adies to soften up the target. Second wave the heavy strike with fighter-bombers to suppress flak and a heavy punch of Adies and Mames with torpedoes. More than 250 aircraft in total.

“Orders going out by signal lamp now, Sir.”

“Very good.” Knudson waited for the ‘message received and understood’ acknowledgments then gave the order he’d been waiting all his professional life to give. “To all ships. Battle stations.”