Winter Warriors

CHAPTER FOUR: FIRST SNOWFALL

He was hunting reconnaissance aircraft again. This time his prey was a very different type of scout bird with a different mission. The Me-264 he’d taken part in killing earlier had been a maritime patrol aircraft out searching the Atlantic for whatever was out there. Now, he was hunting scout planes from a carrier; launched to find his floating airbase for a follow-up strike. He and the other Bearcat pilots were being steered in by radio from the scouts of Task Force 58 to the north. A professional courtesy, really. Given the number of fighters TF58 had available, a few scout planes were hardly anything for them to worry about. For Hunter-Killer Group Sitka, with a total air group of 32 Bearcats and 22 Avengers split between the two CVEs, even a small strike was a significant threat. More than half those Bearcats were up now, trying to bring down the German scouts.

One scout was below Eleanor. A Ju-87 cruised below the clouds, looking for an enemy task group. It was a reasonable certainty that it was hunting bigger game than a pair of CVEs and a handful of destroyers but that wouldn’t matter too much. Even experienced naval pilots had a hard time telling the difference between one class of a ship and another. There were too many stories of cases of mistaken identity, some amusing, others tragic. The German pilots were skilled and well-trained, but they weren’t naval pilots. To them, one aircraft carrier would look much like another and there would be precious little difference between a destroyer and a battleship. The little jeep carriers and their destroyers would look like much bigger game. So, the Ju-87s had to go.

Pace took his Bearcat down in a long sweeping dive. The Ju-87 crew was scanning the sea below for the tell-tale wakes of the formation. They never saw the threat coming from above until it was almost too late. The rear gunner woke up to the two fighters closing in on him and grabbed his twin machine guns in a hurry. The first streams of tracer went wild, more of a threat to the gunner’s own aircraft than anything else. The second burst was much better aimed. It licked around the two diving Bearcats; tracers passed beside and between them. Pace aligned his pipper carefully, just ahead of the German aircraft’s nose, and squeezed off a burst. To his frustration, just as he fired, the Ju-87 slid to one side and appeared to drop out of the air. It was still as a dive bomber; diving was something it did well. Pace’s burst of fire went wild. A split second later, his wingman laced the air with his .50 calibers as well, equally unsuccessfully. That left only one option.

The Bearcats followed the Ju-87 down. It pulled away from them in the wild dive but no matter how skilled the pilot, there was an absolute limit to how long an aircraft could dive. The German pilot left his pull-out as late as he dared and his plane skimmed the sea surface when he was in level flight. That was the idea of course, to get as low as possible so that the American fighters couldn’t get at him from below and behind. Pace was less reckless about how late he left his pull-out. Since he was going to be coming in from above again, there was no point in cutting things fine. Once again, he lined the pipper in his gunsight ahead of the Ju-87s nose. It was different now, the German aircraft was wallowing in the aftermath of its dive. His tracers stitched into the target’s nose and then Pace walked them along the fuselage, first shattering the glasshouse cockpit, then marching back towards the tail. The Ju-87 didn’t have far to go, the sea was only a few feet below.

The ditching was good. The fixed undercarriage broke off on impact and the plane came to a halt bobbing on the waves. Pace and his wingman swept past then arched up and away, coming around for a strafing pass. They held their fire, there was no sign of movement from the settling aircraft. Before they overflew it, the aircraft rolled to port, one crooked wing lifting in a last gesture of defiance before the Ju-87 sank.

“Sitka-One. This is Eagle-Three. Bandit is splashed. Say again, bandit is splashed.”

“Acknowledged Eagle-Three. Return immediately to rearm and refuel.” Pace’s eyebrows went up at the message. Hunter-Killer Group Sitka was transmitting. That meant lights-on had been given and the group was radiating. Radar, radio, whatever was needed. Including the homing beacons which was a relief. However, lights-on meant the group had been spotted. That was very definitely not a relief. Stalingrad, aka Sitka-One, was calling her fighters home to face an expected attack. That was more than a lack of a relief; that was downright disturbing.

“Sir, we’ve lost contact with six of the scout aircraft. The ones covering the arc 240 to 312 degrees.”

“That gives us a rough fix. They didn’t spot anything I assume?” Admiral Ernst Brinkmann didn’t have much hope of that. All too often, the rough fix given by their destruction was the only information a recon aircraft gained. That’s why it was called a flaming datum.

“Sir, Metox reports enemy radar transmissions. Airborne radars; a lot of them. Same frequency as their search radar, the one the U-boatmen hate.”

Brinkmann winced inside. That was news he didn’t want to hear. Back in ’43, the snorkel had been the great hope of the submarine fleet. It would allow the U-boats to run submerged all the time and avoid the air patrols that had decimated them. Then, the Americans had brought in a new radar; one that could pick up a snorkel head at ranges of dozens of kilometers. Of course, that meant it could pick up larger targets at much longer ranges. There had been whispers that American scout planes had the same radar so they wouldn’t have to close with an enemy formation and die the way the German scout aircraft were dying.

Brinkmann damned the Americans. Ever since they had entered the war, things had changed. They had an avalanche of material: tanks, guns, planes, ships. Everything needed to fight in such profusion it didn’t matter how much was destroyed. A division of tanks gone? Call up Detroit and double production for next month. Need a radar for every scout aircraft? No problem, call the factory and tell them to get moving. There isn’t a factory? No problem, build another one. Brinkmann had heard that Eastern Siberia was being filled with American-built factories; whole towns and cities created out of the open steppes, peopled by the refugees from the west. It was so unfair. We went to war with Russia knowing that Russian industrial might was in the west. Destroy or capture it and the war would be over. How were we to know that the Russians would move it? Or that the Americans would replace what had been lost ten times over.

The Americans had even done the impossible; they’d rammed a railway through Afghanistan to feed munitions directly to the Russian troops fighting in the South. Oh, Brinkmann knew that the newsreels had shown the Afghan railway being built by the Indians alone. They’d shown tens of thousands of Indian laborers digging their way along the rivers and through the passes to build the tracks but he didn’t believe it. An engineering feat like that had to be the Americans; the Indians just didn’t have that ability. An uneasy thought stirred in his mind. If the Indians had built the Afghan Railway by themselves, if they did have that ability, then what did that say about Germany’s claim to Aryan supremacy? He squashed the thought down, even having such ideas was dangerous.

“They’ve seen us. Get the strike off now. Tell the pilots to head out on course 270, find the enemy and attack. Once the strike is off and our decks are clear, get the reserve fighters up and off.”

“Sir, we don’t have time. If the enemy have spotted us, they must be launching now. They’ll be with us within the hour. By the time we’ve launched our strike, got the fighters up on deck, warmed up their engines, and started to launch, they’ll be right on top of us. If

we’re caught with armed and fuelled aircraft on our decks….”

There was no need for Dietrich to complete the thought. Fire was the great fear of every aircraft carrier. German newsreels had been full of the U-boat’s greatest score. The American aircraft carrier Enterprise had been torpedoed almost within New York harbor itself. The pyre of smoke from her death-blaze had towered over the city. Great propaganda but also a terrible lesson. Fire killed carriers.

“Then launch them cold.”

Dietrich’s face froze. Launching the aircraft with cold engines meant that some wouldn’t make it. They’d lose power at the wrong moment, go into the sea and be ran down by the carrier they’d just left. The order to launch the aircraft with cold engines meant condemning some of their pilots to death. “But Sir….”

“Not buts. Launch them cold.” Brinkmann softened; he knew what he was asking. “There is an Ami task group out there. Four carriers, almost 400 aircraft. We have to get our blow in first. We also have to have every fighter we can up. If our fighters are not up in time, they will be destroyed in their hangars. Launch them, Erich. We must have them up in time to meet the Americans. Whatever it costs.

“What are the plans if it all goes wrong Admiral?”

Captain Charles Povey had every reason to be concerned. There was no pretence about the situation out here. Troop Convoy WS-18, Winston’s Special 18, was bait. Only part of the bait, that was true. The main portion was supply convoy PQ-17, no less than 250 merchant ships packed into a box 16 ships wide by 16 deep. Not all the ships in that box were merchantmen. There were two battleships in there, Arizona and Nevada. PQ-17 was a slow convoy; it could afford to have the battleships along. WS-18 was a fast convoy, very fast by merchant ship standards. The five liners, carrying the 40,000 Canadian soldiers that were the whole reason for the convoy, were holding a steady speed of 25 knots. That was fast enough to give even the German Type XXIs a very hard time. Only, that meant no battleships as escorts, only cruisers and destroyers.

“We scatter the convoy of course. The liners will run for it, they’re faster than the battleships anyway. Then, we take Quebec and the destroyers to attack the German fleet. Buy the liners time to get clear. God willing, it won’t come to that. Not with all the carriers and planes the Yanks have waiting.”

It sounded hopeful; it was a reasonable hope. The Americans had their entire carrier striking force moving into assault the German fleet. If nothing went wrong, if the strikes found their target, the German ships would never see either of the two convoys. Even if they didn’t, the Germans would run into PQ-17 and its battleships first. Not that those two ancient battlewagons would stand much of a chance against the German monsters. They’d die fighting, just like WS-18’s escort would die fighting, if they had to.

Ontario had a score to settle. She’d started life as HMS Kenya and had ran for Canada as part of the Great Escape. There had been two sister-ships for the Canadian Navy building in British yards, neither complete enough to make the run. The original Ontario had still been on the slips at Harland and Wolff: she’d been very thoroughly blown up. The original Quebec had a more unusual fate. She’d been fitting-out at Vickers-Armstrong’s Tyneside yard when the Germans seized her. They’d fussed around her for a few days while the dockies carried on with their work.

Then, the Germans had ordered them all off; apparently intending to tow her to Germany for completion. She’d left under tow. A few hours later, she foundered, sinking beyond any possible recovery given the resources available. Nobody knew officially what had happened. She’d been in the hands of a prize crew who had supposedly secured her for sea. There had been courts-martial over that. The rumor was that the rivets fastening the hull plating under her engine rooms had been drilled out, replaced by soap and painted over. As the ship moved, the paint peeled away, the soap dissolved and a large section of the bottom of the hull had dropped off. It was only a rumor of course.

Anyway, the Royal Navy had offered the Canadian Navy Kenya and Fiji to replace the lost ships. The Canadians had accepted; the Royals had too few men to provide them with crews. But there was a strange air about Kenya that her Canadian crew had noticed as soon as they had taken her over. The ship had an atmosphere of bitterness; as if she knew of tasks left undone. Ontario was a good ship. She seemed pleased to put to sea, reluctant to return to port. Povey just hoped he wouldn’t have to take his ship in to fight the whole German battlefleet. Finishing off a few destroyers, or pounding a German cruiser to scrap, that would be good. Perhaps it would make Ontario feel better.

Admiral Vian looked at the five stately liners plowing through the waves behind him. If everything did go wrong, he would have to come up with a battleplan that gave two light cruisers and a dozen ASW destroyers a fighting chance against the whole German Navy. That was a interesting professional challenge.

The last of the German fighters never really made it into the battle. They were still climbing after launch, their cold engines laboring with the effort, when the American FV-2s slashed into their formations. The American pilots had already firewalled their throttles. In terms of initial position, they had the speed and height advantage. The price they paid was that they were fighting with one eye on their fuel gauges. The gas-guzzling jets had nothing like the endurance of the piston-engined birds. The Shooting Stars were designed to carry wingtip tanks, the FV-1 had small ones that actually made a slight improvement on the performance of the aircraft in addition to the fuel they carried so the pilots had kept them on when dogfights started. Range was still too short though; so when the FV-2 had arrived, the smaller tanks had been discarded in favor of an improvised “Thule Tank.” Those had twice the fuel capacity but its length and weight over-stressed the wings. So the American aircraft had dropped their tanks as they approached the German ships. That left them short on fuel compared with the Corsairs but there were plenty of those bent-wing, piston-engined birds following behind. They’d finish the job if the Flivvers left anything behind them.

The German CAP had 32 aircraft up. Two had been lost when their engines had faltered on takeoff. One pilot had drowned under the Voss as she plowed over the sinking Ta-152. The other had better luck. He’d managed to swerve to one side and the destroyer Z-16 picked him up. Those 32 aircraft were hit by twice that number of FV-2s. Protecting the ships underneath was quickly forgotten as the German pilots fought to survive.

The odds against them, bad to start with, were escalating fast. The FV-2s picked off the weakest and most vulnerable of their foes. The days of chivalry, of a seeking a ‘fair fight,’ had long gone. The Navy pilots in their dark blue Flivvers did what all skilled fighter pilots did; they picked out the most vulnerable of the possible targets, separated him, then swept in and scored the kill. Twelve of the Ta-152s died that way, their aircraft ripped up by the concentrated firepower of the six .50 machine guns closely grouped in the Shooting Star’s nose.

The fighters that hit the climbing Ta-152s had scored big, but their dive had taken them out of the battle. It would take the more than two dozen FV-2s time to climb back up and rejoin the dogfight. In the meantime, the remaining American fighters were on their own. Lieutenant James Talen was painfully aware of that. His section of FV-2s had picked out a group of four Ta-152s and tried to bounce them but they’d been spotted on the way in. The German pilots had hit their throttles and kicked in the GM-1 and MW-50 boost that made up for some of the performance deficit inherent in trying to fight jets with piston-engined aircraft. Ahead of him, the section of Ta-152s had split, trying to scissor the attacking FV-2s. Well, there was an answer to that. Talen dipped his speed brake causing the jet to slow sharply. Then he yanked his bird around in a sharp, savage turn that made his vision start to gray out. The gray went red as he reversed his turn and through the changing colors he saw a Ta-152 drift across his nose.

The German fighters were going for the lead section of FV-2s and had already scored, their heavy cannon armament tore two of the lead FV-2s apart in mid-air. Talen’s section evened the score on the spot. His own machine guns shredded a Ta-152s from nose to tail as it flashed past. His wing man scored a less spectacular but equally deadly kill. His burst was short and sharp and it scored exactly where it mattered most. The enemy cockpit disintegrated in shower of shattered Perspex and ripped metal. Somewhere in that mess, the German pilot died with his aircraft.

Talen heaved back the stick and poured on as much power as he had, climbing out of the dogfight. Nobody hung around in a furball, none who wanted to live anyway. The smart guys got in, scored their kills and got out. That’s what Talen did. His FV-2 outclimbed the Ta-152s by almost 1,000 feet per minute and they were left behind. His section was out and clear. Time to look for another victim.

Jets were fast, but they had a problem. Their speed and their wing loading meant they were less agile than the Ta-152s. Lieutenant Meissen was well aware of that. He also knew that the surging power from his engine wasn’t going to last much longer. He had five minutes worth of GM-1 boost and about twice as much MW-50. Once that was gone, his Ta-152 would be weighed down by the empty tanks and now-useless boost equipment. Most skilled German pilots preferred the older FW-190D-9 to the Ta-152. When both aircraft were without the engine boost, the Dora-nine was a lot more agile. The problem was there were so few skilled German pilots left. The experten, Hartmann, Marseille, Molders, were all gone, swallowed up by the Russian Front. So, the novices and the average pilots who were left, they flew the Ta-152 and hoped its engine boost would let them survive. The boost also wrecked the engines but Meissen had a shrewd suspicion that wasn’t going to matter too much.

Some of the dark blue Ami jets had set off after a group of Ta-152s that were coming in from the west. In doing so they’d lost track of Meissen’s group. He couldn’t chase them. Even with GM-1 his fighter as too slow for that. He could arrange a near-head on match. There, his cannon would tell. He had four 20mm guns in the nose and wings and a 30mm firing through his engine block. He saw the FV-2 racing towards him, allowed for deflection and squeezed the trigger just so. The Shooting Star blew up, turning from an aircraft into a ball of fire, spewing parts and fragments. The Amis walked into the ambush beautifully, the section had been torn apart by the heavy guns of the Ta-152s. Four down, no loss. The aircraft from the Voss and Graffie were in the fight. What was left of them anyway.

Jim Nichols was trapped. His FV-2 was in the middle of a group of German fighters that had boxed him in. He was unable to climb out of the formation and unable to break clear without giving the lethal cannon on the Ta-152 a clean shot. That left him fighting to survive. Nichols barrel-rolled his aircraft then flipped away; a wingover that lead to a steep dive. That was a mistake, the Ta-152 was aerodynamically clean and its low drag meant that it picked up speed fast in a dive. Too fast, an inexperienced pilot could stall his aircraft out. Then, that low drag meant it picked up speed so fast in the post-stall dive that it hit compressibility. At that point, its controls locked and it dived straight into the ground. The pilot was no more than a helpless spectator.

That didn’t happen here. The German pilot was good; he allowed his aircraft to build up enough speed to close the range on the diving FV-2 and no more. Nichols saw the Ta-152 sweep in behind. Its nose and wings started to flash just before the blows of the cannon shells started destroying his aircraft. Starbright burned as it spun out of control, Nichols felt the searing agony as the cockpit filled with fire. Then the jet exploded in mid-air.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hans Braun saw the Shooting Star explode. He swept around to try and emulate the feat. It was hard, terribly hard. The FV-2s were all over the German fighters; slashing at them, ripping with their fast-firing .50s. As soon as he got into position to take a shot, another pair of FV-2s would dive on him. They forced him to turn and leave his prey. Agility was all very well but only the Ami novices were hanging around to dogfight with the German fighters. The experienced pilots made slashing passes through the formation. They picked their men and shot them out of the sky. Braun had no idea what the losses were like. All he could see was the skies filled with the midnight blue jets. Glimpses of Luftwaffe gray were getting rarer.

Another FV-2 was heading away from the fight, trailing black smoke from the fuselage. A cripple waiting to be killed. Even better it is below me. Braun racked his Ta-152 around and started to dive on the damaged fighter. Then he cursed. A section of four Ami fighters had seen him and streaked in to protect their crippled mate. Braun hung on for a few seconds, hoping to finish the cripple off. The Ami jets were too fast. They reached out to him with their tracers. He had to turn, to escape the flashing lights that surrounded his aircraft. It was no good. There were too many Ami fighters. Braun realized the days of attacking were over. Now, he was desperately trying to survive.

Clear of the swirling furball below, Talen breathed a sigh of relief. He was wringing wet, sweat running down his face, puddling in his G-suit. At least, I hope it is sweat. He wasn’t sure. He’d found the slaughtering match with the Germans so terrifying that he had an honest feel that he’d lost control of his bladder sometime during the wild gyrations. Still, he had escaped and had a split second or so to think. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t done that before. He’d been flying by instinct; reacting to the maneuvers without conscious thought. He realized something else. Somehow, he knew exactly where every aircraft in the wild furball was, both absolutely and in relation to his own aircraft. He dismissed it as a freak, as something he needed not worry about Talen didn’t understand that the two characteristics together made him a natural fighter pilot.

Below him, a Ta-152 had tried to pursue a damaged Flivver but been forced to turn away as a quartet of FV-2s closed in on him. The pilot is watching the new threat, not the hawks poised overhead for the kill. A chance, a vulnerable enemy. He pushed his nose down and started the streaking dive towards the twisting German fighter. Talen carefully lined up his guns. Then, he squeezed off a long burst. He saw his wingman did the same, and as if in slow motion, he saw the streams of bullets intersected with the doomed Ta-152.

Braun twisted away from the FV-2s behind him. Jets or not, they couldn’t match his ability to turn. He had a chance. They are committed to their dives, they can’t match or respond to my turns. All I have to do was reverse mine and the Ami would go straight past my nose. With his battery of heavy cannon, that mistake would be fatal. Braun started to reverse his turn. Then flashes started to appear all around him. His fighter echoed with the drum-like roll of bullets smacking into the airframe. Above and to one side, two FV-2s were diving on him, closing the range terrifyingly fast. Braun realized his mistake, a novices mistake. I was so concentrated on pulling my ambush that I’ve become the hunted. Now I’m paying for it. Then, he felt heavier, more painful thumps. Somehow the sky seemed to turn red.

A dead pilot at its controls, Green-Five flipped on its back and dived straight into the sea.

Meissen knew it was over. He was dizzy from the constant maneuvering and frustrated from his inability to line up for a shot. All he could see were the dark blue Ami fighters swirling round him. As soon as he tried to line up on one, three more swept down on him and forced him to break away. He’d survived this long because they were afraid of hitting each other in the chaotic scramble. His GM-1 boost had run out. His MW-50 would do the same any moment. Once that happened, he would be easy prey. His cannon ammunition had to be running out as well. The fighter didn’t carry that much to start with. Big shells and a small airframe meant it couldn’t. He’d been firing almost constantly. Any second now, he’d press the firing buttons and be rewarded by the “clunk” of empty guns. With almost fatalistic despair he swung after an FV-2. With resignation saw it accelerate and separate from him. What he didn’t see were the two formations of FV-2s diving on him from behind. He, quite literally, never knew what had hit him. The hail of bullets from more than two dozen .50 caliber machine guns caused his Ta-152 to explode in mid air.

It was over. Try as he might, all Talen could see were the dark blue Flivvers forming up. No light gray German aircraft anywhere. Over the radio, pilots were calling in status. Their relief at surviving was obvious. Some voices were shaky. Talen counted them all; twenty Flivvers never answered. Eight more were heading home with damage so bad it was doubtful they could make it back to the carriers.

“Do we strafe the carriers boss?” Talen didn’t know who had asked the question, he was rather afraid it might have been him.

“Negative. All hawks return to the carriers. We’re on Bingo fuel already. Leave the strike to the Corsairs and Adies. We’ve done our job.”

Had it been a mistake to get the strike off? It had delayed the launch of the fighter reserve and the last dozen off the carrier had been shot out of the sky without standing much of a chance. Had those casualties made the difference between the slaughter of the fighter cover and staging reasonable defense? Brinkmann was uneasily aware that his orders had been specific, use his fighters for cover, use his dive bombers for scouting. He’d disobeyed them to set up his strike. If he hadn’t, he’d have had 48 fighters up ready to intercept the Ami fighter sweep, it would have given his fighter pilots a fighting chance at worst. But his way, he’d at least got a punch in at the Ami carriers, that had to count for something.

“Admiral, Sir, another wave of Ami aircraft approaching. They’ll be starting their runs in minutes. I can’t raise any of our fighters.” Was there a note of accusation in that report? “Admiral, Sir, another wave of aircraft behind this one, a big wave. I’d estimate it at least another hundred aircraft, probably more. As large as the first two waves put together.”

Brinkmann nodded as he digested the information. It made sense, the American Task Group probably had five carriers, well, I’m absorbing their air groups here. My fighters had mauled the jets that had conducted the fighter sweep, now my aircraft can hit the Ami carriers. While they do that, my anti-aircraft guns will chew up the inbound strikers. We will hand over a nicely weakened enemy to the battleships.

“Contact Admiral Lindemann, tell him that we’ve found the enemy, they’re on bearing 270. We are engaging their aircraft now and our divebombers are attempting to attack the Ami carriers. Get that off, highest priority.”

There were three types of CVE. There were the ones built on a freighter hull, the ones designed by Kaiser from the ground up as jeep carriers and there were the ones built on oil tanker hulls. Only the oiler conversions were really satisfactory for the North Atlantic. The first group bounced around too much and the Kaiser class were too small. The converted oilers had the advantage that they still had great fuel capacity and could refuel the destroyers that worked with them. The other advantage they had was that their flight decks were much larger. Today, every square foot of deck was needed.

It wasn’t because the Stalingrad was retrieving damaged aircraft. She’d done that often enough. There had been a time when the U-boats had been seized with the notion that staying on the surface to fight it out with attacking aircraft was a good idea. That delusion hadn’t lasted long but while it had, the U-boats had gone down, taking an honor guard of Wildcats and Avengers with them. The cripples had come back and found the larger flight deck a savior in times of desperate need.

But that was then, this was now. The big flight deck was useful today because the Bearcats were being rearmed and refueled on the deck as they landed. The pilots weren’t even shutting their engines down. They just let their R-2800s idle while the deck crews frantically poured fuel into the waiting tanks and fed new ammunition belts into the guns. It was against every regulation in the book, but the radar screens were an absolute answer to that criticism. They showed a German raid coming in. It was still 45 minutes out, but threatening nonetheless. The fighters didn’t just have to get up. They had to climb to meet the inbound attack and do so far enough from the carriers to protect them. There were 16 Bearcats up to meet that raid. The 16 more on the decks of Stalingrad and Moskva were needed as soon as they could be launched.

Lieutenant Pace saw another example of regulations being broken as he made his final approach. His was the last Bearcat in. The batsman gave him the “chop” signal just as another Bearcat started its take-off run. The two aircraft missed each other, somehow, Pace’s aircraft snagging a wire to come to an abrupt halt just as the other Bearcat accelerated out of the way. The grapes in their purple shirts were over his aircraft before it had stopped moving. They had it down to a fine art. They opened the bays in the wings, hooked the end of the old belt to a new one and fed the ammunition back into the tanks. Pace felt his aircraft rock as the fuelling crew pumped gasoline into his tanks. It seemed only to take a few seconds before there was a bang in the fuselage as a crew chief slapped it with his hand.

“GO!” Pace gave him a thumbs-up and slammed his bubble cockpit shut. Then throttles forward, brakes off and his Eleanor ran down the flight deck. She picked up speed and rotated with tens of feet to spare. Just eight minutes after he’d touched down, Pace pulled his undercarriage up and formed up with another late-comer from Moskva. The two jeep carriers had thrown everything they had into the fight. Now, they would see if they had enough air defense assets to survive.

“Sitrep?” The question was a grunt. The truth was that Captain Alameda was getting worried. The little jeep carriers had somehow got themselves mixed up in the middle of a fleet action and they hadn’t been designed for that.

“Inbounds are 35 minutes out Sir. We estimate between forty and fifty aircraft. I’m vectoring the fighters we have up to take on their escort. The one’s we’ve just rearmed and launched can take on the bombers. Oh, I’ve advised COMFIFTHFLEET of our situation. TG58.5 is sending a squadron of Corsairs down to help us out. They’re burning sky to get down here in time but it’s a toss-up whether they’ll make it or not.”

“One squadron? I’d have thought Wild Bill could have spared a few more than that.”

“I guess he’s tied up Sir, TG58.5 is engaging the enemy carrier group and the Kraut main force will be sticking its nose out of the weather any minute now. Anyway, the Corsairs will be dealing with the rest of the scouts. They’re converging on us as well. That’ll add another twenty of so Stukas to the raid but they’ll be arriving in ones and twos. Those that survive that is.

Alameda nodded and gazed at the plot again. It was almost like a lightening flash. In the middle were the enemy carrier group and Hunter Killer Group Sitka, about a hundred and sixty miles apart. To the south and east of the enemy carrier group, forty to fifty miles further out was the enemy main body, the High Seas Fleet. And to the north and west, the long line of five American carrier task groups, TG58.1 through to TG58.5. That long line of carrier groups was the formation known throughout the Navy as “Murderer’s Row.”

The 32 Corsairs from Valley Forge and Shangri-La had moved ahead of the Adies. That was the plan. The job of the F4U-4s was to suppress anti-aircraft fire and soften up the German defenses. That process was about to start. The Corsairs were cruising at medium altitude. The ships below were small lines at the end of the white streaks of their wakes. As formation leader of one of the eight four-plane sections making up the wave of fighter-bombers, it was the job of Lieutenant Calvin James to give the signal. He rocked his wings, then rolled his F4U into its long dive. As he did so, the sky erupted into a maze of black flowers. The anti-aircraft guns on the ships had opened fire.

It was a pretty mediocre display by U.S. Navy standards. The Navy philosophy was to fill the sky with so many shells that if they didn’t hit the inbound aircraft, the inbound aircraft would hit them. The German barrage was thin by those standards but it could still be deadly. James watched one of the Corsairs from Valley Forge develop a thin stream of black smoke. It thickened and spread until it had swallowed the whole rear of the aircraft. Then, it tumbled and fell from the sky. Another Corsair lost a wing. The aircraft seemed to fold up on itself, the aircraft’s remaining wing wrapped around its fuselage. Then it came apart in mid-air. There may have been more, James guessed there were, but now he had other things to do.

The F4U-4 wasn’t a dive bomber. It couldn’t manage the screaming, near-vertical dives of the old SBD. James was bringing his aircraft down in a 45 degree dive, still steep enough by any standards. It made his wings tremble with the onset of the dreaded compressibility. He’d picked his target already. His dive had been left a little late for a destroyer, but there was a larger target off to his left. As it grew in his sights, he took in the details. Two triple turrets aft, one forward, a light cruiser. There was something odd about her, the aft turrets weren’t center-lined, they seemed pushed out to the ship’s side. Most of the heavy anti-aircraft fire was came from the area just in front of them so James ran the red dot of his sight to coincide with the area. Then, he gently squeezed one of the firing buttons on his joystick.

Six five inch rockets streaked out ahead of him, leaving the Corsair standing still in the sky. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of his wingmen firing almost simultaneously. The rockets headed down leaving trails of black smoke that wreathed the dark blue Corsair. The rockets wobbled and weaved as they closed the gap between the F4Us and the cruiser underneath. Nobody would ever accuse the American five inch rocket of being accurate. James saw his six vanish in orange flashes and clouds of smoke. At least two had hit the ship, the rest had either hit or gone off alongside. A split second later, the cruiser’s bridge vanished under more orange flashes and clouds of black smoke.

James’ fingers moved slightly. He squeezed the firing button for his .50 caliber machine guns. All six roared. The brilliant streams of tracer lashed at the center-section of the cruiser. Now was the dangerous bit. Pulling out. All too many pilots got so intent on lashing their targets with gunfire and rockets that they forgot to pull out. Not James. He timed his pass to perfection. By the time he was in level flight, he was skimming barely a hundred or so feet above the sea. Behind him, the cruiser was covered in smoke, some from the rocket hits, more from its own guns. There were bigger flashes on her as well. James guessed that some of the Corsairs that had followed him in had dropped their 1,000 pound bombs on her. If so, she would be hard put to survive. Early in the war, before Halifax had pulled his treasonous coup, a group of British dive-bombers had sent a German light cruiser down with just three 500 pound bombs. How many thousand pounders had hit the one behind? Two? Four? Plus all the rockets of course.

James looked ahead. The sheer sides of an aircraft carrier were approaching frighteningly fast. Anti-aircraft lashed out from the gun positions down her sides but they were manually-swung weapons. They were hard put to track the racing Corsair. James stared at his bombsight intensely, his fingers shifting again on the control column. This would take timing but if it worked, the effects would be deadly. His machine guns fired again, raking the anti-aircraft positions. More black smoke trails from rockets shot past. Some of his wingmen must have held their rocket fire on the cruiser in order to drop bombs on her instead. Now those rockets tore into the carrier’s anti-aircraft guns amidships. The streams of fire slacked as the gun crews were cut down.

Any second now. James held his breath and pressed the bomb release. Two one thousand-pound high explosive bombs arced down towards the sea below. James guessed the Germans might be sighing with relief at that point. The bombs were falling short, they’d hit the sea not the carrier. He hauled the stick back, leapfrogging over the deck of the ship. His machine guns burst back into life, peppering the bridge with fire. Then he felt the blast of his two bombs. They’d hit the sea all right but had bounced off it and slammed into the ship’s side. Skip bombing, the way all good fighter-bomber pilots attacked ships. He saw the explosions rising behind him. It wasn’t mortal damage but that wasn’t the point. The two bombs had landed in the anti-aircraft mounts that lined the port side of the carrier.

There was another carrier, off to his right. Its guns pumped out fire at the Corsairs that were raking the formation with their bombs and rockets. James felt his aircraft lurch as something struck home, with a dull ringing noise. Whatever it was, it wasn’t lethal, Switchblade was still flying, carving her way through the German ships towards a destroyer. Off to his left, another Corsair suddenly erupted into flames. It rolled over onto its back and was still rolling when it hit the water and vanished into a cloud of spray.

James thumbed the button that controlled his machine guns again. The tracers floated out and lashed the platform between the funnels. If the pictures they’d trained on were right, that’s where the quadruple 20mm guns were. The Germans had two light anti-aircraft guns. The 37mm was pathetic, a slow firing, short ranged, weapon. It was nowhere near the lethality of the American Bofors guns. The other was a 20mm. It was bad as a single mount and hideously dangerous when installed as a quadruple, as most of them were.

The enemy ships were behind him at last. He’d made his pass across the formation and it was time to take stock. As James climbed out from the attack he could see the German formation scattering. It was breaking under the sledgehammer blows of the fighter-bombers’ strafing passes. James laughed quietly to himself. If the Krauts think that was bad, they should see what the Adies can do. They won’t have to wait long.

It came as a complete epiphany to Commander Micael Riedel. His ship, his Z-7, was obsolete. The logic was quite inescapable. His main guns were useless. They could only elevate to 30 degrees and couldn’t even begin to fire on the bent-wing demons diving on him. His 20mm quadruple mounts amidships and aft couldn’t bear on them either. The Ami jabos were coming in from ahead. All he had to defend himself was a single 20mm gun that had been mounted in the bridge wings. Its fire was pathetic in reply to the murderous hail of heavy machine gun fire from the Ami carrier planes. Four of them had picked Z-7 and were diving on her. Their machine guns lined their wings with fire. His lovely Z-7 was nothing more than a target, a loose end waiting to be tied.

Riedel’s position was suitable for an epiphany. He was sprawled on the deck of his bridge in a desperate attempt to escape the hail of bullets that were scything down his crew. Anybody not behind armor was doomed by the blast of bullets. That included his antiaircraft gun crews. For some inexplicable reason, the flak mounts didn’t have shields or splinter protection. The murderous strafing had slaughtered his crews as they fought their guns.

The hail of fire seemed to slacken slightly. Had one of the Ami fighters been shot down? He chanced a quick look over the edge of his bridge plating. Ahead of him, Z-6 was surrounded by towers of water and explosions. The cruiser Koln was in far worse state, belching black smoke and already listing hard. She was slowing down too, losing her position in the formation. Riedel winced at the sight. That will be fatal, her pitiful state will draw the Ami jabos the same way a crippled stag draws in the wolves. Then, a hand grabbed him and hauled him down again. It was just in time. Z-7 rocked and threshed viciously as a quartet of explosions added to the deafening noise of gunfire, high-powered aircraft engines, gunfire and the demented screams of the rockets.

The explosions left Z-7 feeling wrong, a soft, squirming sensation in the water. The sounds faded away as the formation of jabos swept past to give the Oswald Boelcke the benefits of their fiendish attentions. There was a smoking mass in the water off to one side of Z-7. Obviously one of the jabos had been shot down but who had done it? Riedel guessed that nobody would ever really know. Then he looked back at his ship. The midships section was a tangled mass of wreckage, strafed, rocketed and bombed. It looked wrong as well as felt wrong but Riedel couldn’t work out why. Then it sunk in on him; the stern was moving separately from the bows. Not much but it was definitely shifting from side to side.

“Sir, Sir, we must abandon ship!”

“How dare you! Order damage control crews to work immediately. Abandon ship indeed.”

“Sir, it’s no use. We took a single direct hit on the aft funnel but that isn’t what has killed us. There were three near misses, very close but alongside. One to port, two to starboard. Right beside the engine rooms. The welding is failing. The ship’s back has broken. Can’t you see how we’re losing speed? In a few minutes we will break in half and nothing can stop it. Can’t you feel it?”

The tone was insubordinate but Riedel knew the speaker was correct. He could see the ship was sagging in the middle; the bow and stern rising as the center section flooded and sank. He knew what would happen next. The motion and sagging would increase until the stress levels in the metal passed critical levels and the structure failed. Then, his Z-7 would indeed break in half and go down, probably very fast.

“Sir.” Another officer was speaking. “We can’t abandon ship. The strafing has destroyed the life rafts and ship’s boats. The water is so cold, the men will only last a few minutes if they go in it. If somebody can’t take us off, we’ll all…”

The thought was unfinished but Riedel knew how it would end. The water is too cold to allow us to survive. The ship’s life rafts have been destroyed. Even if they weren’t they are no guarantee of survival. U-boat crews report that American aircraft will strafe life rafts in the water if they can.

Once, there had been talk of how the Americans were weak and soft, how they couldn’t stand the horrors of war. Perhaps that talk had been in the mind of the fool who had machine-gunned the crew of a torpedoed Coast Guard cutter. Then, at the Battle of the Kolkhoz Pass, the Army, or the SS, nobody knew whom, had massacred a large group of American soldiers who had been taken prisoner. Rumor was that it was an SS commander, who had wanted to stop any of his men surrendering to the Americans. Whatever the reason, that act and many more like it, had finally added cold hatred to rage. The old expression ‘reaping what one had sowed’ passed through Riedel’s mind. Why had nobody understood that somebody else could watch German displays of Schrecklichkeit and turn the doctrine on its creators?

If his crew stayed on board, they would drown. If they abandoned ship they would freeze. The only option left was for another ship to come along side and take the survivors from Z-7. Riedel looked out to port. Racing in above the waves was another formation of forty or so Ami aircraft. Larger ones, coming in with the low steady pass that branded them as torpedo bombers. No, no Captain will hazard his ship by slowing down in the middle of a torpedo bomber attack. Z-7’s crew had only one chance. Their ship had to hold together long enough for the torpedo attack to pass and that another destroyer would come back for them. If that didn’t happen, Riedel thought, then the Ami jabos would have killed them all.

“Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.”

Lieutenant (JG) Marko Dash had a personal tradition of singing to his aircraft as he made his ran towards the line of enemy ships. He did now. The Corsairs had busted the enemy formation wide open. The cohesiveness of the anti-aircraft fire was gone. As the Krauts had swerved to avoid the bombs and rockets, they’d straggled all over the sea. By sheer chance, the eight Skyraiders of his flight were approaching a perfectly placed pair of ships. A destroyer with a carrier behind it. The orders were to take the destroyer with rockets and then torpedo the carrier. They had the equipment to do it, each Adie carried four Tiny Tims, two under each wing, and a 22.4 inch torpedo under the belly. That slowed them down, but the punch was awe-inspiring.

The Tiny Tims might have the hitting power of a 500 pound semi-armor piercing bomb but accuracy wasn’t their strong point. The destroyer had increased to maximum speed and was turning frantically to avoid the oncoming onslaught. The Adies responded and pushed in to point blank range. Perhaps because of the ship’s maneuvers, the flak coming up was going wild. All the Adies had made it through. Clementine lurched as the rockets dropped clear but the flare that took place when they fired up was spectacular. That’s why they had to be dropped first; fire them from the wing racks and they’d incinerate the whole wing. They streaked ahead, snaking and dipping but more or less heading for the hapless destroyer in front of them. The explosions seemed to blanket her but they all seemed to be the white columns of near misses, not the black and orange eruptions of direct hits.

Then Dash saw the four black-red explosions as the rockets plowed into their target and exploded deep inside her. Dash watched a forward gun hurled into the air by the explosion of a rocket that had struck just behind it. Another blast ripped through the three aft turrets. A third hit the waterline between the funnels. The last hit the aft funnel itself, blasting it into a wreck. What had once been a trim fighting destroyer had been transformed into a shambles. Her superstructure was twisted and blackened. Fires from blast and burning rocket propellant were already taking hold.

Dash had no time to think about his handiwork. The eight Adies were already lining up for a torpedo run on the carrier. Her automatic guns were firing. Alongside Dash, an Adie suddenly lurched and went into the sea in a long sliding splash. A quadruple twenty, there was no mistaking that storm of tracer, got another one. Suddenly Dash, who had started as number six nicely in the middle of the group, was now the extreme left. Then he saw something else. The carrier was already swinging, knowing the torpedoes were coming and trying to comb their tracks. Almost by instinct, he threw his Clementine into a tight left hand curve and parted from the group at an angle of almost 45 degrees.

“Get back in formation, you yellow rat!” Dash’s flight commander screamed in rage as he thought he saw Dash break away.

Dash ignored him and held his angled course for a few seconds. Then he threw his bird back over in an equally tight right turn. As he did, he could see his guess had been right. The carrier had turned to comb the torpedo tracks. Dash could see three. Had two more broken up on impact with the water? It didn’t matter. His turns had put him dead ahead of the carrier and it was committed to its portside turn.

Dash made sure his wings were level, his speed right, and he dropped. The carrier was looming larger by the second. He thumbed the switch, raking the bridge with the 20mm cannon in his wings. Behind him, he saw what he had been praying for; the massive column of water. A torpedo, his torpedo, had torn into the aircraft carrier. Just where the flight deck structure met the hull sides, about a hundred feet back from the bows.

“Well done Dashy.” The flight commander’s voice was contrite now. He’d seen what Dash had seen and understood what Dash had done about it. An important lesson, one that needed to be got back to the fleet as quickly as possible. The doctrine of dropping torpedoes in large tight groups wasn’t as effective as it should be; better to split into two smaller groups and hit the target from two different angles. Still, they’d got a hit on the carrier and they’d know better next time.

The Adies skimmed the seas between the ships. Tracers from the anti-aircraft guns licked round them. It was a sure bet some of those shells were hitting other German ships, cutting their gun crews down. With a little luck, a 4.1 inch crew will get careless and smack one of their shells into a ship that could really get hurt by them. Stranger things had happened after all.

Another destroyer was ahead. The six surviving Adies had fired off their heavy weapons but they still had their cannon. Their tracers laced the target, sparks of hits flashing all over its dull gray paint. Then they were out and clear. Unlike the Corsairs, they wouldn’t be going back in. The bent-wing beasts would continue their strafing passes until the last of the heavy bombers was clear. They’d make their passes even if they were out of ammunition; because anti aircraft guns firing at them, weren’t shooting at the Adies. That’s why the Corsair pilots got paid the big bucks. Dash repeated the time-honored cliché to himself as he swung Clementine around for the trip home.

Oswald Boelcke had always been unlucky. In many respects she’d been cursed since the day she had been laid down as a heavy cruiser. Her construction had been slowed by the outbreak of the war. Then, when 95 percent complete, orders had been given for her to be converted into an aircraft carrier. That had been an insane decision. It would have been quicker and cheaper to build a new ship rather than rip apart a virtually complete cruiser. But, the orders had come from above and those orders were not to be ignored. So torn apart and rebuilt she had been.

It was bad luck that had placed her as the portside member of the triangle of three carriers in the Scouting Group on a day when the waves of Ami aircraft had come from the west. Oswald Boelcke had been the first carrier they had seen and eight of their torpedo bombers had concentrated on her. She’d shot down two and dodged the torpedoes of five. One had hit her and oh, how that torpedo had hurt.

Oswald Boelcke was a converted ship, her internal arrangements were far from optimal. In fact, they were very, very bad. The designers had done the best they could but it had been impossible to do better. They’d been aware of the dangers presented by the storage of aviation gasoline and had elected to use the magazines of Bruno and Caesar turrets as the gasoline storage. These were situated where the hull was wider so there was more space to absorb any explosions. Anton and Dora magazines had been adapted for munitions storage. It was judged that their contents were less subject to exploding so situating them where the hull was narrower was acceptable. Perfectly correct, perfectly logical decisions; the sort any competent design team would have made.

What beat them was Oswald Boelcke’s thoroughly rotten luck. Marko Dash’s torpedo hit directly abreast Bruno magazine. Worse, Oswald Boelcke was turning sharply to port when the torpedo struck. That turn, combined with her excessive topweight to cause her to roll severely to port. This had lifted the starboard side of her hull high. Instead of striking the ship’s side and exploding on the armor and torpedo protection system, the 22.4 inch torpedo ran under the turn of the bilge and struck the underside of the hull some 20 feet inwards from the side. The hit bypassed the torpedo defense system completely and exploded directly under Bruno magazine.

It was a tribute to the ship’s engineers that the blast didn’t cause an immediate fire or explosion. The problem that had faced the designers had been to fit the fuel storage and delivery system into the space normally allocated to an 8 inch magazine. Getting the components in had left the fuel delivery system severely compromised. It was contorted; full of bends and misalignments. These had already caused problems. Fuel couldn’t be pumped to the aircraft as quickly as the capacity of the pumps indicated. Given the maze of piping, that level of pressure would cause bursts. The piping wasn’t shock-insulated either. The blast waves from the torpedo hit shattered the maze, burst the pipes and ruptured the walls of the tanks. Oswald Boelcke had used only a small proportion of her aviation fuel. The rest was pouring out of the tanks in Bruno magazine and into the ship’s bilges. It was only a few minutes before the crew in the forward part of the hull started to smell the stench of gasoline.

On the bridge, Ensign Zipstein picked up the ship’s intercommunication system. The strafing from the Corsairs and Skyraiders caused havoc amongst the ship’s officers. Many were dead; more wounded. The Chief Damage Control officer was one of the dead. His deputy had taken an armor-piercing incendiary .50 caliber bullet in the stomach. He wasn’t dead; if he came around from the morphine that had been pumped into him, he’d wish he was. That left Zipstein in charge of damage control when the phone had rung and a Petty Officer had told him of the spreading smell of gasoline.

Zipstein was young and inexperienced; he really shouldn’t have been where he was. However, he was intelligent and quick enough to associate the smell with the torpedo hit forward. Also, he was quick to realize what had happened. He knew that the danger of gasoline vapor was many, many times worse than that of liquid gasoline and a smell that was spreading meant the fuel-air explosion risk was high. That vapor had to be got rid of fast. Zipstein made his decision and ordered the ship’s ventilation fans turned on full power.

“It could have been worse. A lot worse, Admiral.” Dietrich was trying to put a brave face on it. The Ami strike was over, leaving more than a dozen stains on the sea surface where their aircraft had been shot down. The cost had been high; not yet critical, but high. Z-7 had broken in half and sunk. Her sisters Z-6 and Z-8 were burning pyres of smoke and orange flame. It was obvious neither could survive. Z-16 and Z-20 were moving alongside to take off survivors. The light cruiser Koln had been bombed, rocketed and torpedoed. She was a burning shattered wreck, sinking fast. Nurnberg had been hit by rockets from the Corsairs. She had fires but was in good shape overall. Most of the other ships had got off relatively lightly. The strafing had caused serious casualties to their crews but they were otherwise sound enough. It was the carriers that had been hit.

Oswald Boelcke had been torpedoed forward; she’d been slowed and was down by the bows. Graf Zeppelin also taken a single torpedo hit amidships but the torpedo defense system had taken care of it. An engine room had flooded but that was all. The Graffie was a fast ship, the damage wasn’t that worrying. She had a five degree list but, then, her design meant she always had. Now she had a good excuse for it. Werner Voss was in a different category completely. She’d taken at least six heavy bomb hits, dozens of rockets, including some of the big ones fired by the torpedo bombers, and two torpedo hits. She was listing badly; the reports from the damage control crews showed hints of desperation.

Brinkmann drummed his fingers. It wasn’t too bad he told himself. The key factor was the state of the Oswald Boelcke. He picked up the short-range radio, called over and demanded to speak to the damage control officer. Zipstein answered, and called down to the damage control teams forward for the latest reports. As Brinkmann listened to the call being made he had a strange mental picture, a ship’s internal telephone system making the connection, and emitting few minor sparks as it did. In an atmosphere that contained a lethal percentage of gasoline vapor.

Brinkmann didn’t hear the explosion. He saw the shock wave of the fuel-air explosion form into a ball and race outwards. Pieces of steel were hurled hundreds of feet into the air. Others scythed out laterally, lashing at the other German ships. He heard the dreadful hammering as some of those pieces sprayed Graf Zeppelin and decimated her gun crews more thoroughly than the Ami strafing. By the time his senses had recovered from the awesome blast, the shock wave had gone. It had left the Oswald Boelcke no longer recognizable. Above the waterline, she had been reduced to a pitiful shambles of tortured steel. Her plating had been thrown around so that they resembled the scrambled remains of a destroyed city. The damage below the waterline must have been equally bad. Brinkmann guessed that the blast had ripped huge holes in her bottom. She was going fast, rolling over so quickly that even the fires weren’t getting a chance to take hold. It took less than a couple of minutes for what was left of the 13,000 ton carrier to slip beneath the waves. Al that remained was just three figures struggling in the water.

“Another wave of American aircraft approaching fast Admiral.”

The Admiral’s Bridge was crowded for Gettysburg was the Flagship of Task Force 58 as well as Task Group 58.1. She was also the flagship of the Fifth Fleet but, today, that was just an added inconvenience. This was the fast carrier’s battle. Even so, in addition to Admiral Halsey and his staff, Admiral Marc Mitscher and his personnel were vying for the facilities of the bridge. It was fortunate Gettysburg was a big carrier. In fact, the two staffs worked very well together, a legacy of prewar service and more recently the first carrier raids on France and the UK. When Spruance had the Fast Carrier Force, it became part of Third Fleet as Task Force 38. He preferred to command from a battleship. Halsey preferred to be with his carriers.

“First wave report in, Admiral. The pilots are claiming seven destroyers, four cruisers and two carriers sunk; five more destroyers, two more cruisers and two carriers damaged. Eighty enemy aircraft shot down.”

Halsey grunted. “That’s more ships that the Krauts started with. We’ll wait to the camera gun film’s ready. Losses?”

“Twenty Flivvers shot down in the air battle with the CAP Admiral, they’re recovering at 58.5 now. Four more were too damaged to make it home. Knudsen says eight Flivvers are on the hangar decks, too damaged for immediate use. Corsairs, eight down; we don’t know yet how many won’t make it back to the carriers or how many are damaged. Adies, nine down, same comment. Total 41 lost; probably closer to fifty by the time the cripples ditch. Out of Halsey winced. That is getting close to fifty percent casualties. The redeeming feature was that the bulk of the losses were due to the German fighters and they‘d gone. The butcher’s bill should be less from now on.

Or would it be? The plot showed the German attack on Hunter-Killer Group Sitka was getting close and the fighters he’d sent down to reinforce the jeep carriers were still heading down. There was potential there for another bloody bill.

“Admiral, 58.5’s heavy strike should be hitting the German carriers any minute now.” Halsey nodded absently; his mind still with the two CVEs to the south.

The 12 Ta-152F fighter escorts and the 16 Bearcats hit almost head-on in what was almost the traditional opening to an air battle. The Bearcat pilots were at a distinct disadvantage. They’d spent their careers hunting submarines and lumbering maritime reconnaissance. Aircraft. The pilots in the Ta-152s had always been fighter pilots who had some experience, even if it was very little by fighter standards. Half the Bearcat force was already fighting for survival, skidding all over the sky in an effort to avoid the heavy guns of the German fighters. Four of them didn’t make it. They’d left their evasions too late; the five cannon on the Ta-152s took them out. The odds were evened though, One section of four Ta-152s was so intent on hunting the Bearcats that they failed to notice a second section slotting in behind them. Within the first few second of the battle starting, eight fighters had gone from the fight.

This was the sort of war that only a white man could come up with. Formations of fighters hurled head on at each other with no regard for subtlety or finesse. Given his choice Lieutenant Simon Darkshade would be out on his own, hunting the enemy through stealth and ambush as his nation had always done, not this wild, furball where collision was as much a danger as anything else. He’d only just escaped the hammering of the German guns a few seconds earlier. Now he pulled the stick back and pulled a vertical bunt, leaving the Ta-152F behind. The Ta-152 was fast and agile when its boost was running. Even then, it couldn’t outclimb a Bearcat.

Darkshade rolled at the top of his climb, pushed the nose down and dropped. He plummeted in the way the eagles and buzzards on the reservation had shown him. The Ta-152 was still below him, he hadn’t reacted fast enough to the bunt. Darkshade swept his gunsight along the enemy fuselage. When it coincided with the enemy cockpit, he squeezed the trigger. His gunfire ripped the enemy pilot apart. The Ta-152 spun out of control and headed down.

Across from his kill, four more Bearcats pulled the same ambush on the last remaining Ta-152s. Four stubby little F8Fs had climbed out, positioning themselves over the battlefield. Four more had stayed down below. They engaged the German fighters, then extending so the Ta-152s followed them. That was the cue for the Bearcats above to plummet down and rake their enemy with bullets. A few seconds of slaughter and the fight between CAP and escort was finished. The Bearcats called in. Six of the original 16 were gone. The rest set off after the Ju-87s. Would they would catch up in time? It was debatable, the dogfight with the Ta-152s had caused them to drop far behind.

The Ju-87s closed up for mutual protection. The aft gunner’s twin 7.92mm machine guns might not be that effective individually, but the close formation allowed the gunners to mass their fire. That did the trick. The second group of Bearcats swept in to meet massed machine gun fire that sprayed their ranks. Two of the gray and white fighters spun out of control, and headed for the seas below. Two more broke off, their engines belching black smoke. The twelve survivors relearned the infuriating experience Lieutenant Pace had suffered before. The ability of the Ju-87 to slip sideways made it a difficult target to kill. With their first pass, the twelve Bearcats scored only four kills. One was Pace’s. He’d learned his lesson, he’d come up from underneath where the Ju-87 crew couldn’t see him, and killed them before they could dodge. The other pilots watched and noted. In their second pass at the formation, most of them tried the same trick. Eight more of the accursedly-evasive dive-bombers spun out or exploded as the .50 caliber machine guns picked them off.

Pace knew that the problem was; they were running out of time. There were still 14 dive-bombers left and they were approaching the anti-aircraft zone of Hunter-Killer Group Sitka. He also knew there was another formation of around twenty Ju-87s approached from the North. They were the survivors of the scouting line and they converged on the target they obviously thought was the American carrier group. Even while the thought ran through his mind, Pace swung around, hunting another Ju-87. Again, a pass from underneath. An eruption of black smoke signaled another Ju-87 dying. His third for this battle. Added to the one I shot down earlier that gives me four kills. Just one more and I’m an ace. Over the radio, orders called the Bearcats off, sending them to intercept the new formation that was coming in from the north.

Pace’s formation joined up with the survivors of the dogfight with the Ta-152s. He hit full throttle to try and engage the second formation of bombers. On paper, it was a one-to-one match but the Bearcats were running low on ammunition. Two passes, Pace guessed, that’s all. The accursed defensive fire from the bombers didn’t help. The gunners sent two more fighters out of the battle before it was even joined. The first pass was a complete bust. The two formations of Bearcats got in each other’s way, causing near collisions and lost sight pictures. Pace cursed. He’d had a beautiful shot at a Ju-87 but a Bearcat had lurched in front of him and blocked his line of fire. Chastened, the Bearcat pilots sorted themselves out and tried again. This time they got it right. The Ju-87 formation shattered. Twelve of the dive-bombers went down, either exploding, burning or just falling apart in mid air.

Pace wasn’t concerned with that. He’d got his fifth kill. He was officially an ace with the gun camera footage to prove it. He’d exploited the blind spot under the tail again and killed his man with style and finesse. The problem was that his burst had ended early as his guns ran out of ammunition. By the way the other Bearcats were behaving, he wasn’t the only one. Eight of the twenty dive bombers had got through. Pace guessed that wasn’t good. Then he looked up and saw a formation of 16 Corsairs diving out of the sun on the remaining Ju-87s. That would do it. Then Pace looked again. One group is behaving oddly; it’s as if they are coming straight at me.

Lieutenant Commander Frederick Kellen brought his 16 Corsairs down at maximum speed. That had burned inordinate amounts of fuel to get to the battle and his fighters were in critical condition. He took a glance at the formation below him. A small group of Ju-87s, eight by the look at it, surrounded by fighters. Straight wings, gray paint, radial engines, bubble canopy, Ta-152s. The strike must have had a heavier escort than we thought and they‘d beaten off the defending fighters. He did a wingover and lead the long dive that hit the unsuspecting fighters, achieving almost complete tactical surprise. The targets didn’t even try and evade as the Corsairs screamed down on them and the concentrated blasts of .50 caliber machinegun fire shredded them in mid air. Six spun out and started the long fall towards the sea. Amongst them was Eleanor, her pilot dead at the controls. Lieutenant Pace had been an ace for less than 15 seconds.

The American blunder had been a miracle. Captain Joseph Brandt believed the game was up when the wave of dark blue Corsairs had arrived. He had watched in incredulous amazement as they attacked the Bearcats. By the time the Americans had got themselves sorted out, the Stukas were approaching their target and about to go into their dives. Below them, the two carriers were clearly visible, surrounded by a ring of eight destroyers. For a moment he’d thought the ships were already on fire. They seemed ringed with orange flame, then he realized they were firing. Photographs that had escaped censorship showed the sides of the carriers were lined with anti-aircraft guns and it was rumored the battleships were even worse.

The Ami anti-aircraft fire wasn’t just intense. It was deadly accurate. Somehow, their shells always seem to explode at just the right time. Soon the approach of the dive bombers was marked by the trails of smoke as the bombers had been hit. Three aircraft in Brandt’s formation went down before they even got into position for their runs. Four more had gone down from the other group. The way the Stukas had approached the formation meant that they split naturally into two groups, one taking each carrier. Two carriers? He’d thought there were supposed to be five in an Ami carrier task group. Mentally Brandt shook his head and blessed the fact that the reports were wrong. If two ships could put up this hailstorm of flak, what would five do?

The anti-aircraft fire was deadly. Of the five surviving dive bombers that attacked the carrier below, only Brandt’s survived. The others all died; hit by the heavy and medium anti-aircraft guns that poured fire at him. Brandt saw the deck of the carrier getting larger and larger. It was painted light gray, with the number 107 painted in darker gray. Brandt had only a 250 kilogram bomb on board. It had never been intended to turn a recon mission into a part of a strike but this battle was escalating out of all control. He had to place that bomb exactly where it would do the most damage. The forward lift that filled his bombsight looked good. Brandt squeezed the release, then jerked the stick back in the savage pull-out that ruined a dive bomber pilot’s health. Behind him, he saw the ball of fire rise from the deck of the carrier.

The formation attacking the other carrier had better luck. Two of the eight aircraft survived to release their 1,000 kilogram bombs.

Perhaps because of the anti-aircraft fire, perhaps it was the evasive maneuvers of the ships that caused both bombs to go wide. They straddling the carrier but not actually hitting her. The carriers point defense guns opened up. The rows of 20mm weapons sawed both of the Ju-87s out of the sky. In point of fact, they’d have done better if they hadn’t bothered. One Ju-87 was hit as it pulled out. The blazing aircraft cleared the deck by feet before crashing in the sea just over the side of the carrier. The second was hit earlier, before it had started its pull-out. It crashed into the carrier dead amidships.

Out to sea and running clear, Brandt started to climb so he could radio a report. It was succinct and to-the-point. The American carrier task force had been heavily defended by fighters and his was the only aircraft to have survived. But, the critical part of the message was that the rising clouds of black smoke showed that both carriers had been hit hard.

The sirens were blasting. Damage control crews poured across the decks to the scene of the hit. The 550 pound bomb had scored a direct hit on the forward elevator. It had penetrated through it and exploded in the elevator well. The elevator itself had been blown into the air by the blast leaving the well itself as an inferno. The accumulated of oil and grease fed the flames but the rest of the hangar deck was sealed down and the fuel lines inerted. The Avengers were all unloaded and had been parked aft. It was never good to be hit by a bomb but this one had done less damage than it could have done; less damage by far.

Across the way, Moskva was in a different situation. Stalingrad’s fires were subsiding as the damage control teams isolated the blaze and poured foam and water fog onto it. Captain Alameda saw the ball of fire rise where the dive bomber had plowed into Moskva. She was still burning. Three of the destroyers came alongside to pour water from their own pumps into her. Her damage control crews faced a nightmare; a crashed aircraft on the hangar deck with the fuel from the tanks feeding the blaze. Thinking about it, Alameda came to the nasty conclusion that the aircraft was actually a more dangerous weapon than the bomb it carried. He shuddered at the thought. That way lay madness.

“Damage control here, Captain. Fire in the forward lift well is contained and controlled. We’re dumping foam to smother it and the crews are pouring water on the bulkheads around it to cool them off. We’ve got teams up to, patching the hole where the lift was, the flight deck will be operational, sort of, in thirty minutes.”

Alameda nodded. “Can we land planes now? We’ve got crippled birds need to come in, four Bearcats at least, and the orphans from Moskva. She won’t be landing anybody soon.”

Below Lieutenant Holcombe looked across at Moskva, belching black smoke from her amidships section. She most certainly wouldn’t be landing anybody any time soon. “We can land them, Sir. Make sure the pilots know they have to catch a wire the first time or they’ll be on the hangar deck faster than they expected.”

Alameda made up his mind. “CAG, how many birds to come in?”

“Eighteen, Sir. Eight of them damaged, two very badly.”

“Right, get the intact birds down first, then the less damaged ones. If the shot-up aircraft can’t wait to last, they’re to ditch by the plane guard destroyer. She’ll pickup the pilot.” If he survives was the unspoken add-on.

“Sir?” The question mark was very audible.

Technically as Captain, Alameda’s word was law. In reality, on a carrier, Captain and CAG were a partnership. “We must get the intact birds down first, Joe. If anybody is going to crash and block the deck, it’ll be one of the cripples. So they have to wait.” It was a hard decision and Alameda didn’t like it. He made it anyway.

The two men stood and watched as the Bearcats started landing. They had the net stretched across the deck to stop any that lost the wires but the fighters managed their landing neatly. The fifth of the damaged birds didn’t. The pilot either lost it at the last second or his controls failed. Whatever the reason, he touched down on one wheel, cartwheeled and lodged firmly in the gallery that ran alongside the deck. There was a dull whump noise as the fuel left in the Bearcat’s tanks ignited. They could see the pilot in his seat struggling to get free as the aircraft started to burn, but his harness had jammed or something.

Then, a man ran out from the gallery. He passed the tail that stuck out of the fire, and jumped onto the burning wing. Oblivious to the flames, he reached through the shattered bubble canopy and slashed at the harness. Whatever he did, it must have worked because he dragged the pilot out, through the flames licking around the wings and onto the deck. Other crewmen were waiting with extinguishers and fire-fighting kit. The two men staggered clear of the fire, their flight suits and coveralls already burning. The deck crew sprayed them both with foam. Then, the medics carried them down to the sickbay. If they were lucky, their suits would have protected them; they’d get away with minor burns. If they weren’t….

“CAG, get me that crewman’s name.” Alameda’s voice had a catch in it. “If he doesn’t get a Bronze Star for that, I’ll order a strike on the Navy Department.” Below them, a jeep rammed the burning Bearcat and tipped it over the side.

“A Bronze Star, Captain?” In CAG’s mind, a higher decoration was merited. The thought was interrupted by an orphaned cripple from Moskva landing. He recognized it; the Indian Chief nose art was very distinctive. “That’s Darkshade’s aircraft. One of the planes shot up by the F4Us. You know, I wouldn’t care to be a Corsair pilot on an Apache reservation any time in the next twenty years.”

There was a gaping hole overhead, ripped clean through the flight deck. That wasn’t altogether a bad thing. The bad part was that it allowed a constant supply of air to the fires from the crashed Ju-87. The good part was that it also allowed the heat and smoke to escape. That made the jobs of the firefighting crews much easier. Another good thing was that the damage was contained within and above the hangar deck. The tough tanker design of the Commencement Bay class had stood Moskva in good stead. The bad news was that the hit was much further aft than on Stalingrad among the parked Avengers. Most were destroyed or so badly damaged that they were fit only to be pushed over the side. Men had been working on those aircraft, getting them defueled and sealed down. They’d almost succeeded and their efforts made the fire much less catastrophic than it could have been. More than fifty of those men had paid the price. They’d been caught in the explosion and fires as the wreckage of the Ju-87 had crashed down on top of them.

Chaplain Frank Westover was working his way through the chaos. He was helping where he could, keeping out of the way where he couldn’t. Mostly he was keeping out of the way because the area of the fire was reserved for those with the right gear. Westover concentrated his work far forward, away from the heat of the fires, where the casualty evacuation station had been set up. Most of the men caught in the explosion and fire were dead. They’d died quickly but agonizingly as they had been soaked in blazing gasoline. Any Chaplain who’d served on a carrier knew the terrible burns caused by raw gasoline. These were as bad as any he’s seen.

Two medics were working on a hideously burned man. They’d pumped him full of morphine and were trying and keep him alive even though it was obviously hopeless. Westover saw them losing the battle and he slipped in to administer the last rites. He had no idea who the man was, which religion he belonged to or anything else about him. The burns were far too bad for that. He knew that the words would be a comfort to the dying man no matter who he was and the just and merciful God that Westover believed in wouldn’t refuse a man absolution because the words weren’t quite the right ones. As Westover finished, the man gave his last sigh, a little puff of smoke coming from his mouth.

“Any more mortally wounded?” Westover asked quietly.

“No, we’ve got the ones who have a chance down in sickbay and the rest didn’t make it. I’m not sure how to say this Father, but you might have a word with Smitty. He’s over there, by the bow 40mm quad. His friend bought it and he’s taking it real bad. You know why.”

Westover nodded. He made his way forward, where the hangar deck led out to the quadruple 40mm mount on the bow. The dead had been moved there, out of the way of the battle against the fires further aft. In one corner a sailor was knelt over a burned corpse, the charred head cradled in his lap while the man prayed over him.

“Mind if I pray with you, sailor?” Westover spoke quietly.

The man, Smith, started at the voice. Westover looked down at the burned body and marveled at the love that could lead one friend to tolerate the hideous sight of what had once been another. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you, but I’d like to pray with you, if you don’t mind.”

“He was my friend Father. Now he’s gone.” It could have come out wrong, a rejection of either Westover or the truth but it didn’t. It came out as what it was, an anguished plea for help and understanding.

“And your love honors him. And us.” Westover knelt quietly beside the body, made the sign of the cross and started to pray quietly.

“You don’t understand, Father. Nobody does. He was my special friend.” There was almost defiance in the word special.

“I know. Smitty, everybody knows. Just because nobody said anything doesn’t mean they didn’t know. And your shipmates care enough about you to make sure I came over to help you in your time of grief.”

Westover left it there; more words would have been meaningless. There were many things he could have said, many that he would not; it was neither the time nor the place. Instead he quietly started to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, hearing Smitty pick up the words and join him. The prayer might be a comfort; it might not. At least Smitty knew now that he hadn’t been left alone, that he was part of a crew who looked out for him.

Only the pumps were keeping the Voss afloat. The damage control crews did everything they could but the situation had been dire even before the last strike had put three more torpedoes into the Werner Voss. Rockets and bombs had added damage but it was the torpedoes that were doing for her. To be more precise, the ship’s appalling construction hindered all attempts to control the flooding that had finished her.

Lieutenant Commander Siegfried Ehrhardt felt for the damage control crews. He’d seen their frustration as they closed and dogged the “watertight” hatches, only to see water leaking around the supposed seals or spraying through cracks where the hatch didn’t fit its frame properly. As a result, flooding spread constantly. Nowhere in any great amounts; just enough to slowly and surely eat away at the ship’s stability. Even worse, all the torpedo hits had been on the same side. She’d taken at least five torpedoes; only one had been amidships where it directly threatened the engine rooms. That torpedo had struck the cemented armor of the lower strake of the ship’s side protection. The armor had been brittle; it had had fractured under the stress of the heavy explosion. Pieces of plating were blasted right through the torpedo protection system and into the portside boiler room. Needless to say, the room was flooding. The spread into the machinery spaces was proving impossible to stop.

Two more hits had been up by the bows; the remaining pair dead aft. The ship’s stern and screws were gone; now a tangled mass of wreckage, her shafts bent and twisted beyond repair. The Good Lord alone knew how much damage they’d done before their rotation could be stopped. From the way the ship was settling by the stern, a lot. A bent shaft could rip a ship’s guts out. Ehrhardt had an uneasy feeling they had.

“List has reached 30 degrees, Sir.” The talker in the engine rooms gave the message but his voice was shaking. A 30 degree list meant a sinking ship. Ships might make transient rolls to greater degrees than that, but a set list that great meant that the game was up. As if in answer to his thoughts, the internal phone rang again. Ehrhardt answered it then put the phone carefully back in its slot.

“The order to abandon ship is to be given. Internal communications have broken down. One of the officers called us in case we did not get the word when the order is made. We are to secure down here, set the scuttling charges, and then make our way out.”

“The pumps, Sir?” With the screws gone, the pumps and generators were the only things left of value.

“Forget them, the Vossie is done for.”

“How are we going to get out?” The stoker’s voice had an air of panic in it; discipline in the engineering spaces was breaking down fast. There was a reason for the question. Water was already seeping through the overhead hatches and down the bulkheads. That meant there was flooding above them. Ehrhardt could guess what was happening. The uptakes from the port and center boiler rooms ran across the ship to the funnel on the starboard side. As the Werner Voss settled and rolled, water flooded those uptakes and then poured down into the machinery spaces. At a guess, rockets and bombs from the Ami jabos had lacerated the sections above them and that flooding was spreading uncontrollably. Still, there was an answer.

“We will use the trunked access. Open the hatch.” The British had built the Werner Voss with trunked access to all her machinery and magazine spaces. An armored tube ran upwards, unpierced and uninterrupted, to an upper deck so the men down below had a chance to escape a sinking ship. The trunking was even lagged with asbestos so it could be used when the decks above were burning.

The access hatch to the escape trunk took only a second to release. Ehrhardt was mildly surprised by that. The Voss had so many sly defects in her construction, he’d half expected the hatch to be jammed. But, the dockyard workers who had built the carrier were men of the sea as well. They wouldn’t deprive a fellow seaman of his last chance to escape from drowning. They wouldn’t leave him trapped deep inside a sinking ship.

“Charges set? Delay five minutes. Everybody follow me.” The charges would blow the valves off the seacocks and open the engine rooms to the sea. The Voss would go down fast after that. There were rungs set in the steel oval that formed the trunked access tube. It would be a long, exhausting climb, but better that the alternative. Ehrhardt took a deep breath and started to climb the trunk that bypassed all the decks in between and eventually would end on the main deck. The escape route.

Halfway up, Ehrhardt heard the dull thud of the charges going off. It was strange how the trunked access tunneled all the noise upwards. That included the roar of water entering the machinery spaces and starting to flood the trunking. He’d ordered the bottom hatch closed by the last man in, but there wasn’t a watertight hatch on the Voss and he didn’t see why that one should be any different. The upper hatch was in reach now. Ehrhardt grabbed the wheel and spun it, undogging the hatch. Then, he pushed up.

The hatch opened a few centimeters. Three, perhaps four, no more than that. Then it jammed. Ehrhardt banged at it desperately but it would not move. Then, he got up close and peered through the crack. There was a metal block welded just so. It prevented the dogs on the hatch from opening properly. There wasn’t much holding the hatch shut, just a centimeter or so of steel, but it might as well have welded the whole hatch closed. He’d been right. The dockyard workers had been men of the sea; they’d known just what to do. A tiny modification, so small that it could hardly be noted, but one superbly designed to punish the men who had taken this ship away from its rightful owners. Ehrhardt was trapped in the trunked access, his men strung out beneath him. They were doomed to die one at a time as the waters rose and drowned them. And he would be last, having had to listen to them die. Ehrhardt wept in frustration and despair. Just for a moment, somewhere tucked away in a buried part of his mind, he thought he could hear a peal of laughter echo through the steel structure of the ship.

The first wave had been bad enough. The second had been hideous. Just as many of the bent-winged jabo-devils as before, but three times as many of the big torpedo planes. Some of them were a new type, one nobody had seen before. They carried an even deadlier load. Two torpedoes each and of the first eight that had attacked Graf Zeppelin, one had put both of its eels into her. They’d hit so close together that the holes they had blasted in her hull had merged into one. The torpedo defense system had failed; and the aft turbine rooms had flooded, bringing the Graf Zeppelin to a shuddering halt. That had done the inevitable. It had attracted the rest of the group and they’d swarmed her the way flies swarmed honey; leaving their attack on poor, shattered Leipzig to turn on the crippled Graffie. Another sixteen torpedoes dropped. This time the Graffie had lost the speed and agility that had helped her survive the previous attacks. Seven hit her, three right aft, three amidships, one in the extreme bow. Two of those torpedoes ruptured the aviation spirit stores and the carrier was turning into an inferno.

Brinkmann looked around at the shattered bridge. Dietrich was dead; most of the bridge crew were dead. The strafing had been ruthless, relentless. Once the jabos had dropped their bombs and fired their rockets, they’d come back to lash the ships with their machine guns and cannon. Even the men trying to abandon ship hadn’t been spared. The jabos hosed them with bullets and shells just the same.

By the end, it had been pure slaughter. The ships’ gun crews were dead; the ships themselves battered and broken by the relentless attack. Voss was going down fast. Leipzig, gutted by bombs and rockets, had already slipped beneath the waves. Nurnberg would follow her soon. Sixteen of the older torpedo planes had concentrated on her and scored two hits. One had blown the bows off; the other opened her engine rooms. Four more of them had dropped bombs on her. Big ones, thousand kilos? At least that. They’d stoved her sides in. Brinkmann was reminded of a street riot back in Dortmund many years before. He and his fellows had cornered a communist. After they’d knocked him down, they’d kicked his ribs in. Now he’d watched the Amis do the same to one of his cruisers. I wonder if Nurnberg cried for its mother while it died, the way that communist had when we left him bleeding to death in the gutter?

The destroyers had suffered badly as well. Rockets had done for them, mostly the big ones from the torpedo planes. Z-10, Z-14 and Z-15 had been hit hard and early. The bent-wing jabos hammered them with 500 kilo bombs and rockets, then the torpedo planes finished them off. Z-16 had been torpedoed. Brinkmann wasn’t certain whether it had been intended for her or whether she’d just caught a stray. It didn’t really matter which, it had broken her in half and sent her down in less than four minutes. He hadn’t seen what had happened to Z-4 and Z-5; they’d been up front but now they were gone. Only Z-20 was left. By a miracle she’d survived with severe topside damage but her hull and machinery were untouched. She was coming alongside to pick up the survivors from the Zeppelin.

Brinkmann looked around again. Sinking ships. Burning ships. Shattered ships. All doomed. The Ami airstrikes were ferocious beyond belief, beyond anything we had conceived. They’d never stopped. They‘d just hammered us over and over, with every weapon they had; no mercy, no hesitation. While they’d had ammunition, they‘d used it. Then, he picked himself up from the deck where he had fallen. The mine stowage aft must have exploded. He was surprised it hadn’t gone earlier. It had been surrounded by fire from the ruptured aft aviation spirit tanks. Odd, I can’t remember the explosion or being thrown down. It had been the last straw though; the Graffie was sinking fast by the stern. Z-20 was coming alongside now, it was time to leave.

Overhead, the seagulls circled the dying ships.

This was the time that the railway guns came into their own. For days, the snowstorm had grounded all the tactical aircraft. The big guns, the U.S. Navy’s 14 and 16-inch weapons, the Russian 12-inch and the German 11-inch took up the burden of supporting the troops. Not that there was much direct support to be done. The same foul weather that grounded the air forces also pretty much froze the ground troops in place. Froze was the operative word, literally and metaphorically. Only the ski patrols had been out, but when the storm was at its height, even those had hunkered down to wait it out. The big units, regiments, divisions, had retreated into their cantonments and stayed put. Perfectly sensible; any sort of serious military operations had been impossible.

“Supporting the ground troops” really meant firing harassment and interdiction missions. A couple of times, they’d been lucky and they’d had a fix on a major enemy position. Then, the three great guns had fired dozens of rounds at the location. Mostly, though, they’d fired single rounds at predicted enemy positions. In other words, wasted ammunition. The German Army wasn’t stupid. They knew what looked like a good cantonment position on the map, knew that the enemy could read maps as well, and avoided likely targets. The same foul weather that grounded the tactical aircraft had also grounded the Rivet Rider communications intercept planes. Mostly they were converted C-47s and their all-weather ability was very limited. That left, Larry, Curly and Moe firing almost blind. Frustrating.

Still, the worst of the storm had passed; the howling blizzard of snow had settled back to a steady fall. The teams who had been trying to keep the railway tracks clear for the guns were on top of the task at last. All was well with the world, or would be sooner or later. Commander James Perdue shuddered slightly at the thought of how long the task might take. He surveyed the mess on his plate. According to the label on the can, it was Dinty Moore’s beef and vegetable stew. Perdue had eaten so much of this particular stew that he was beginning to take a strong dislike to Mister Moore. More particularly, he was taking an even stronger dislike, bordering on hatred, to Mister Moore’s beef stew. The worst part of it was he couldn’t just throw it away. Since the German breakthrough to the White Sea last year, every scrap of food for the armies in the Kola Peninsula was being brought in by convoy from Canada. Wasting food was a court martial offense. Commander James Perdue had already decided that when he got home, he was going to devote the rest of his life to eating chicken.

He’d washed out his mess kit; with all this snow around, water wasn’t in short supply. He was making his way forward to his gun when the alarms went off. That was a measure of just how much the weather had improved. When the storm had been at its height, the radars around the artillery battalion had been useless. This time, they’d picked up the inbound artillery fire. The crews were already trying to locate the guns that were firing. They had to be Schwere Dora, the German 11 inch railway guns. To the west, they were known to the American crews as Petrograd Pete. Long ranged and deadly accurate, they made up for their smaller shells with precision. Perdue dropped all other thoughts and sprinted through the carriages towards the fire control center. He knew he wouldn’t make it, he could hear the express train roar of the inbound shells through the steel of the carriages.

“INBOUND!” The warning yells were all around him. People struggling to get the three guns of the 5th into firing position. To Perdue’s relief, the shells passed overhead. Their explosions were muffled by the ridge behind him. The train shook slightly with the distant impacts, then violently as the locomotive started to move them forward. By the time he reached the fire control center, Curly was moving into its fire position. The tracking radars had already come up with a crude position for the enemy guns. The fire control team had plotted the circle on a map and compared it with the known railway lines in the area. Not many, unless the Germans had built more sidings.

“What have we got?” Perdue snapped the question out.

“Two shells, Sir. They hit somewhere behind us. The Germans overshot us by miles. Two shells, two guns. Petrograd Pete has arrived, no doubt about it.”

Perdue looked at the map and tapped a portion of railway line with his finger. “Here? Range and angle is right?”

“That’s our guess Sir.” The telephone rang and Perdue answered it. “Battalion agrees as well. Hit it.”

Perdue felt the train creak slightly as men alongside the wheels made tiny adjustments in position. There were more creaks and groans as the traverse of the gun was finely adjusted. In the fire control center, Perdue couldn’t hear the crashing as one of the great shells was pushed forward followed by the bags of powder. This would be a supercharge shot, no doubt about it; Curly could only just match Petrograd Pete for range. The way the train lurched back on the rails confirmed that impression. A split second after the concussion of Curly’s shot; Larry and Moe added their shells to the return fire.

The sirens on the trains went off again; five minutes after the first pair of shells had arrived. The German gunners were getting better; Perdue braced himself for the impact, only to hear the train like roar, again passing safely overhead. It hadn’t faded before it was drown out by the crash and shock of Curly firing. The German Army gunners might have improved but they still had a lot to learn from the American Navy artillerymen. Then, the telephone rang and Perdue took down another string of numbers. The tracking radar had backtracked the last pair of shells and provided a new set of coordinates and error circle. He transferred the figures to the plot. The new circle mostly overlapped the old but not quite. There was an area common to both and that area was significantly smaller than the circles on their own. The suspect rail line was right in the middle of the shared area.

“Same again.” Ten minutes after the alarm signal, Curly hurled its third shell towards the German lines. The train had hardly returned to its original position when the alarms sounded for the next pair of German shells. Another set of overs. To Perdue’s practiced ear it sounded as if they were heading over on an almost identical trajectory. That worried him. The German railway gunners were good, it wasn’t like them to make mistakes like that.

“Error in positioning?” Warrant Officer Phillips was obviously thinking the same thing. A positioning error was the great fear of all railway gunners. It didn’t take much to throw the aim hopelessly off. Perdue was saved from answering by the telephone. Another string of numbers; another fix; another circle. This one made a cloverleaf with the first pair and the shared area was much smaller. There was only a single candidate railway stretch in it, not the one they had been firing on. Perdue telephoned in the change. It was confirmed and that meant Curly had to be moved slightly.

“We can fire at will.” Perdue passed the order through.

“Why, whatever did Will do to us?” An old joke; but the fire control center laughed anyway. Underneath their feet the train shifted forward to make the firing correction. The fine adjustment crews swung the barrel a little further. Then, there was another crash and lurch as Curly hurled a projectile at the new target area. Once again, the responding German shells hurtled overhead to explode somewhere in the hills behind the American guns.

Perdue reflected that the duel between railway guns was a slow-motion affair. The exchanges of blows took so long they almost seemed like separate events. The American gun crews were tiring; their rate of fire had dropped to four minutes between rounds, then to five. The German gunners seemed to be holding theirs at one pair of rounds every six minutes; their shots still screamed far overhead, into the hills. After nearly an hour, the German salvoes dropped to single rounds. Had one of their guns been hit? Or malfunctioned? Their 15th salvo was the last. After it had roared overhead, there was silence. The three American guns fired a last salvo and then they too fell quiet.

Warrant Officer Phillips added up the figures on the log. “27 rounds inbound Sir. 12 double salvoes and three single rounds. We fired 21 rounds Sir.” Perdue nodded and telephoned in the information. “Larry fired 20 and Moe 18, making it 59 rounds total went out. I wonder if we got Petrograd Pete?”

Perdue shook his head. “Doubt it. Long range duel like that, we’d have to be damned lucky to get him.”

The telephone rang again and Perdue picked it up. He listened for a few minutes then put the receiver down. “That was the battalion command. We’ve got a problem. Those rounds we thought were overs? Well, they’ve smashed up the railway line and a bridge behind us. The Russians are getting a work team on the tracks right away but the bridge is looking pretty sick. They doubt if it can take the weight of the trains, not without a lot of work. So, we’re cut off for the time being.”

Phillips shrugged. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere, Sir. And we’re well stocked up with food. A supply train brought in a load just a few days ago. Mostly canned beef stew but that isn’t so bad.”

Phillips paused and looked at his officer. Just for a moment he’d thought Commander Perdue had whimpered.

“The fascists are moving already, Tovarish Lieutenant?” Sergeant Batov sounded doubtful. The storm had lessened greatly and was now no more that a minor background irritation for the Siberians but the Germans weren’t so used to the wind and snow. Even now, going into their fifth winter in the Rodina, the Germans had still not adapted to the rigors of the Russian weather. Yet, this time they were moving before the storm had cleared.

The firefight had been brief and vicious. Neither side had been expecting to make contact. The Germans weren’t expecting to find a Russian unit so far behind their nominal front line while the Russians hadn’t anticipated that the Germans would be on the move so soon. It had been a classic meeting engagement. The two groups of skiers had emerged from the snow; for a moment, both had been frozen, partly with disbelief at the meeting, partly with confusion. Who were these people? Friend or enemy? They all wore white uniforms, had skis, carried guns. It was the sight picture that had done it. The curved magazines on the German rifles were just that bit more recognizable than the Russian rifles and submachine guns.

That had given the Russians the tiniest edge, an almost invisible edge in the pause that had lasted for brief seconds before the fastest-reacting soldiers on either side had opened fire. When using automatic weapons at point-blank range, even an advantage so small it couldn’t be measured was enough to make a vital difference. All four Germans and two Russians had gone down in the brief blast of gunfire. The PPS-45s had scored again; their phenomenal rate of fire literally cutting the Germans in half. It had been over so fast that the men carrying SKS rifles hadn’t had a chance to open fire.

One of the four Drags that had been brought by the transport earlier had carried a PPS-45. He’d emptied a 71-round drum at the Germans and now wore the blood-marks of a Brat on his forehead and cheeks. Two of the four looked at him with envy. They were carrying SKS rifles and had missed their chance. The last of them had also carried an SKS but hadn’t missed his chance. He’d been killed in the savage exchange of fire. His body was already being stripped of weapons and identification. The ski group couldn’t bring his remains back, so they had to make sure they held nothing of value. Other members of the group were stripping the German bodies.

“Bratishka?” Stanislav Knyaginichev had been looking at his map and trying to work out what was going on.

“The fascists, Tovarish Lieutenant. It is very early for them to be moving.”

“I have been thinking the same thing. And such a small unit as well. When did we ever run into a detachment of just four men?”

“Only when they were the flank guard for a larger unit. Oh.” Batov saw what the Lieutenant was driving at.

“Exactly. I have been looking at the map. We are here, just under this ridgeline. It looks to me as if those four were paralleling the road down here. Perhaps looking for a patrol like ours. They left early to catch us before we could move in but forgot we are Siberians, not pampered Leningraders or soft, feeble Ukrainians. We caught them, not them us. So what is moving on this road that requires flank guards?”

“A supply column?”

“Perhaps, but I have a sense it is something more important. We should check that road, see what it has to tell us. I will take a group of four men down, you stay here with the rest of the men. Get ready to cover us if we need it.

Knyaz picked his four men and skied down the hill to the road that lay half-buried in the fresh snow. Half-buried perhaps, but the tracks there told him everything he wanted to know. The area was still quiet when he rejoined the rest of his unit.

“Bratischkas, we must move back quickly. There is information we must relay to our headquarters.

“Not supplies than.” Batov’s observation was almost superfluous.

“Not supplies. Tanks and armored infantry carriers. I would say in at least battalion strength. Half tracks certainly, the tanks are Panzer IVKs I think. With Ostketten.”

Batov nodded. The fascist Panzer Vs, the Panthers, had the reputation but the Panzer IVs were still the backbone of the fascist tank units. Especially here on Kola, where the heavier tanks had grave difficulty moving. Fitted with the specially-designed Ostketten wide tracks, the IVKs were almost as agile as the T-34s, A lot more so than the heavier fascist tanks. Their interleaved suspension usually clogged with mud and snow, then froze solid. If German armor was on the move, that was something their headquarters needed to know fast.

That was when Knyaz heard something he hadn’t for months. Not since Nikolay Dmitrevich Dyatlenko had been killed by a fascist sniper. Dyatlenko had not been a particularly good soldier but he’d had one unequalled virtue, an ability to emit sustained farts of unparalleled volume and duration. In one competition, the artillery had produced a worthy challenger; he’d been routed by Dyatlenko, who’d managed a remarkable 47 seconds. The artillery unit had offered a double or quits on whether Dyatlenko could beat a minute. He had, with five seconds to spare. It had been agreed afterwards that nobody should light a match in the dugout for at least 30 minutes.

Only, this wasn’t the sound of a soldier passing gas. The noise came from high overhead, passing from the south on its way north. The rumbling growl grew as it neared, Knyaz mentally begged it not to stop until it was past his little unit. Everybody knew that when the engine on the fascist Fi-103 flying bomb stopped, the little unmanned aircraft was about to crash to earth. To his relief, the engine kept working. The flying bomb passed on its way to wherever it had been sent. In the silence that seemed to follow after its passing, Knyaz listened hard. He was rewarded, in the distance he could hear other flying bombs on their way north. This also was something that needed to be passed back soon, but he had a feeling that headquarters would find out about the flying bombs before he could tell them.

“Well, you were right Stuyvesant. We’ve had a brief message from Wild Bill. The German fleet is out, he’s exchanging strikes with it now. Next time you have plans for my fleet, tell me before telling the President. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir. My apologies. The information we had came out of our economic and industrial espionage contacts and was relayed to President Dewey as such. It sort of grew from there. I should have raised the matter with you first.”

King stared at Stuyvesant and grunted. At first, the man had headed a relatively small section of the great strategic planning apparatus of the U.S. military forces. In the early days, it had seemed unimportant; a group tasked with assessing German economic strengths and weaknesses. Then, the whole war had turned out to be a matter of economics, industrial strength and production. Soon, it had become apparent that enemy moves could be predicted by a study of their industrial production and how that production was allocated. What had been a small, insignificant operation had quietly grown into a very influential part of the whole strategic planning system. That had been helped by the demonstrated ability of Stuyvesant and his team to predict German strategic decisions months before they were carried out.

“Do that. I don’t appreciate being blindsided.” King glared at Stuyvesant. He seemed remarkably unfazed by the attention. That was another reason why King disliked the man. It just wasn’t natural the way he absorbed everything that was thrown in his direction. Stuyvesant was probably the coldest fish that King had ever met and that the Admiral did not like. King accepted that Stuyvesant was the right man for the whole United States Strategic Bombardment Commission business. He’d seen the film of the Trinity test at Alamogordo. If ever a job needed a man who was as cold as a dead fish, planning the use of those hideous things was it. That didn’t change the fact that Stuyvesant made his skin crawl.

“Sir, is there any word on the progress of the battle?”

“None. There won’t be until it’s over. Wild Bill has better things to do that keeping us informed of tactical minutia. Filling the airwaves with that rubbish is a German specialty. Thank God. Anyway, what did you want to see me about?”

“Admiral, the President has advised you that we can expect to see the war continue until at least mid-1947?”

“He has.” That was another thing Admiral King disliked. 18 months more, at least, of this futile slaughter. His carrier air groups were being battered by the losses incurred in the strikes on Western Europe. The factories were keeping pace with the attrition but there was little margin for the unexpected. If the battle in the North Atlantic butchered the Navy air groups badly, it might take months to recover.

“Well, Sir, we need to put together the naval construction plans for that period. The 1940/41 and 42/43 production programs are well advanced. The last Essex class carriers are entering the fleet now, the second group of Gettysburg class ships are proceeding well. They won’t be finished by mid-47 though. The last Iowas are completing, the first of the Des Moines and Roanoke class cruisers should be entering service in ‘47. The question is, where do we go from there? Assuming Germany doesn’t exist anymore of course.”

King leaned back and thought. The prospects of post-war naval construction hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d been 64 years old when the war had started but it already seemed as if it has lasted for his lifetime. Peace seemed a far-off and distant thing. Briefly, he thought of the round trip his railway pass his father, a railway mechanic, had given him when he’d been appointed to Annapolis. “In case he changed his mind” his father had said. King had never used the return portion although he still had it. Suddenly, he felt tempted to make that return trip.

“The new focus of our operations will be the Pacific, obviously. That’ll require a new fleet train.” King settled back in his seat and allowed his mind to run over the differences between the current war being thought in the Atlantic and a likely war against Japan in the Pacific. Slowly, he began to piece together how his Navy would have to change to meet the new environment. In the back of his mind, he still pictured the battering match going on somewhere south of Iceland.