Winter Warriors

CHAPTER FIVE: THE BLIZZARD

“Sir, we have final loss figures from TG58.5. First wave was 64 FV-2s, 32 F4Us, 32 AD-1s. Losses including those that didn’t make it home or are too badly damaged to repair and were pushed over the side, 26 FV-2s, 12 F4Us, 11 AD-1s. Second wave, 32 F4Us, 64 AD-1s, 32 AM-1s. Losses: eight F-4Us, six AD-1s, nine AM-1s. Grand total, 72 aircraft lost out of 256. The pilots are claiming five carriers, three battleships, four cruisers and twenty destroyers.”

Halsey snorted. “28 percent loss rate. How many pilots picked up? And what do the radar search planes say?”

“We’ve got floatplanes and Mariners out of Iceland looking. They’ve reported a few pickups. As for the Germans? It’s a wipeout Sir. Intel says three carriers, and 12-15 support ships were in the Scouting Group. Whatever was there, it’s pretty much all gone. We’ve won that one Sir. As for Hunter-Killer Group Sitka, both carriers were hit. Stalingrad has minor damage and is operational. Moskva has had a serious fire, its out but she’s too chewed up to operate aircraft. Air losses were heavy; most of their fighters are gone, all of their ASW birds. Sir, the Corsairs we sent down? They screwed up, badly. Very badly. They hit the Bearcats and that let the divebombers through.”

“Who commanded the Corsair group?” Halsey’s voice was pure ice and acid.

“Lieutenant Commander Kellen, Sir.”

“Tell Mister Kellen I wish to see him the moment his aircraft has landed. Find out who is the best replacement as commander for that particular group.”

A shudder ran around the bridge at those words. Halsey scowled. He’d given specific orders that the fighter pilots were to beware of the Bearcats operating around the two CVEs. Then he dismissed the task of eviscerating the Lieutenant Commander until later. There were more important things to be done.

“Any sign of the German main body?”

“Came in a few moments ago, Admiral. The scouts have them on radar. They’re clear of the weather front now, about 200 miles almost due south of us. We can launch any time you give the order.”

Halsey grinned. “Lights on. Break EMCON. Radio and radar as needed. All carriers to swing into the wind we’ll launch as planned. 58.2, 58.3 and 58.4 to follow suit as ordered. 58.5 can miss the first wave strikes, give them time to catch their breath.”

There was a gentle rumble under their feet as Gettysburg picked up speed and swung into the wind to launch her contribution to the waves of strikes that would soon be heading south.

“Any word from the Scouting Group?”

“No Admiral. Communications have been trying to raise them for the last thirty minutes. Ever since we came out of the storm. The last message we had was that they were engaging the American aircraft carriers.”

“What does that fool Brinkmann think he’s doing? His orders were to use his aircraft for scouting, not to go charging off after the enemy. He’s left us blind. We need to know where the convoys are.”

“He did find the enemy task group, Sir. It’s to the west of us. And if the transmissions we’re picking up are true, he’s got at least two of their carriers.”

“Two carriers? Out of five. And he’s lost his aircraft doing it? That’s no excuse. Even if he has finished them.”

“Sir. Message from destroyer Z-20.” The Comms Lieutenant’s face was white.

“From Z-20?”

“From Admiral Brinkmann, on Z-20.” If ghostly bells had started to toll at that point, the message couldn’t have been clearer. There was only one reason why an Admiral would be reporting from a destroyer. Nothing larger was left afloat.

“What has he to say for himself.”

“He regrets to report, Sir that all three carriers, three cruisers and nine destroyers have been sunk by American air attack. He says the attacks were ferocious. They were carried out by very large numbers of aircraft and were sustained until the attacking aircraft ran out of ammunition. All his aircraft are gone, either shot down or ditched in the sea when they ran out of fuel. He repeats his claim of two carriers hit in retaliation and over two hundred American aircraft shot down. That’s all Sir.”

Lindemann felt like hurling his cap to the deck. The Scouting Group was the heir to the famous battle cruisers of World War One. Now it has gone without telling me where the enemy convoys were. All it had achieved was, possibly, weakening the screening group. Still, it was possible that they’d depleted their air groups and carriers without aircraft were helpless.

Two carriers, if they were Essex class, and there isn’t any reason why there should be others would make 200 aircraft. Their air groups could be so badly mauled that they couldn’t fight any more. That would make it possible to hunt for the convoys with the spotter planes from the battleships. He had enough of them, more than 30. They were a trump card to hold for later. Lindemann linked his hands behind his back and stared forward. The convoys have to be up there to the north somewhere. The troop convoy was fast, it could slide right across our nose. That thought decided him.

“Order all ships, full speed, course due north.”

He resumed his position, feeling the vibration build up under his feet as Derfflinger accelerated. He barely noted the disturbance on the bridge behind him. The gasp that followed it did gain his attention.

“Admiral, Sir, enemy radars. Long range air search sets.” The report from the signals officer cracked slightly. “It’s the radars on their carriers.”

“Where are they? Make a proper report, damn you. Bearing and number”

“Due north Sir. Metox is picking them up all along the northern horizon. Sir, there are dozens of them. The Americans must have their whole fleet out there.”

Lindemann stared at the officer. He was about to ask for confirmation but shook his head as he changed his mind. There was no need for confirmation, the intercepts of so many radars couldn’t be ignored. Suddenly, he was seized with a desire to turn, to head south, but there was another shake of the head as that plan was negated also. If there were that many carriers up there, their aircraft could easily outrun my battleships.

“Are we being tracked?”

“By airborne radars. There are at least twenty, in an arc, north to west of us.” That decided it. If my ships are already being tracked there was no point in running.

“Maintain course, the radars mark the convoys. We will head straight for them.” Nobody has ever sunk a battleship at sea with carrier aircraft before.

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. A radar contact. Long range certainly but positive. A large formation of aircraft heading straight at the battle fleet.

The German flak barrage was incredible. The great battleships seemed to be outlined in fire as they hurled shells at the incoming formation. The first wave of American aircraft, from TG-58.1, hadn’t known about the German formation’s turn north until mid-way through their flight. The news had made them make a swift change of course. Now, they were coming in from behind the German force, hitting it in the left rear quarter. The two FV-3 squadrons dropped their tip tanks and hit full throttle, streaking ahead of the rest of the formation. They had the speed to duck the worst of the anti-aircraft fire, so it was up to them to clear the way for the piston-engined aircraft

Lieutenant Alan Bolte saw the gray shapes stretched out before him. The destroyers surrounding the back of the formation could be ignored. Their 20mm quads were lethal only at short range and the German destroyers lacked the fire control necessary to handle crossing targets. The ship at the back of the line seemed smaller than the rest. As Bolte closed on her, he could see her triple turrets. That meant a cruiser, German cruisers had triples, German battleships had twins. According to the briefing, the battleships were top priority. Bolte was a man who believed in obeying his orders. The next ship up the line had a single twin turret aft. It filled his gun sight as he raced towards the formation. Bolt from the Blue shuddered as the flak shells exploded around him. Right above the big twin guns was an antiaircraft mount, Bolte could see the gunners loading and firing as he closed on it. They‘II do.

He’d already closed to close range for his five inchers. Bolte thumbed the button that sent the black smoke tails streaking out before him. The anti-aircraft mount was blotted from sight as the explosions from the warheads rippled around it. There wasn’t time to do much more, the German battleship, it had to be either Scharnhorst or Gneisenau, swelled up in his gun sight. He lifted the nose a little and squeezed the trigger of his six nose-mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The stream of tracer swept across the aft superstructure, bounced off the crane in a spectacular display of ricochets, then tracked across the three portside 4.1 inch twin mounts. He could see the crews working their guns, then being scythed down.

The battleship was still passing him. Its gray structure flashed past to his right. Bolte left off the burst for a second, then resumed as a group of 20 millimeter mounts, some by B turret, others on the turret itself, swept into view. Another long burst, the tracers slashed at the crews at their open mounts. Incredible! The Germans didn’t give their anti-aircraft gunners shields? Had they never heard of strafing attacks? Or did they really believe they were the invulnerable supermen their propaganda claimed?

Bolte flew past the smaller battleship. He still had no idea whether it was Scharnhorst or Gneisenau. Ahead of him were the monsters in the other column. When dealing with a poisonous snake don’t stamp on its tail, crush its head. Bolte angled his Bolt from the Blue for a run on the lead battleship in the second column. To his surprise, the flak from the bigger ships was no worse than the mass he’d already flown though. Every American ship that left the building yards had more anti-aircraft guns than its predecessor. Another odd thing about the German fleet. Perhaps they thought everything should be standard and identical. Just by ze book ja? Bolte thought to himself as he emptied his .50 calibers into the superstructure of the German ship. His eyes took in the details quickly, the 4.1s were in turrets, not the open mounts that had got their crews slaughtered. So, his .50s wouldn’t be taking them out. No matter, he’d done his best. The Corsairs and Skyraiders had better tools to handle them. He flashed in front of the German ship, almost on a level with its bridge, and ran for the clear sky beyond. As he did so, he saw an explosion lighting up the portside of the ship he’d just strafed. A secondary explosion? Just what did I hit with my machine guns?

“Scheisse.” Admiral Lindemann breathed the word in appalled fascination as the reality of the chart sank in on him. Four waves of Ami aircraft were coming at him. More seemed to be added every few minutes. Raid count, more than 200 aircraft each. Just how many aircraft had the Amis got? More than two thousand, the words sneaked into his mind as his eyes glazed over. He’d heard from the Army and Luftwaffe what happened when the Ami carriers came calling. They swamped the battlefield with their aircraft, they shot up and destroyed anything that was in the area. If anybody tried to move reinforcements in or fly them in from other bases, they’d run into a mincing machine. A dark blue wall of death that swallowed everything thrown against it. He shook himself. That was no way to think. The Amis were people, humans, men. Another treacherous thought spilled into his mind. Men who used steel and machines to fight flesh and blood. Waves and waves of those machines were coming his way and there seemed to be no end to them.

“They’re here Admiral! They’re coming from behind.” Lindemann looked out. Once, when he had been a youngster, he’d heard some of the neighborhood children challenging another to throw stones at a beehive. Lindemann hadn’t known quite why, but he’d turned away and started to run. The challenged boy had thrown the stones causing a cloud of bees to set off in pursuit of their attacker. Lindemann had got away safely, but the boys who’d shouted the challenges had been badly stung. The boy who had so foolishly responded had been stung to death. For the second time in a day, Lindemann wanted to run. He knew that running was the only wise course of action. The American aircraft descending on the rear port quarter of his fleet looked just like that swarm of bees had done.

He’d hoped the first wave would miss him, pass aft of his formation, but they’d turned and slammed into the rear of his group. Good tactics, come in from an unexpected angle. He could see one group of aircraft pulling ahead of the rest. They had to be the jets, using their speed to dodge the worst of the antiaircraft fire. It was working too, most of the bursts were behind them. For a brief second, he thought his gunners were cutting them down. He saw black smoke and flames, but it was only their rockets. They’d seemed to have concentrated on the rearmost three ships of the line; Scheer, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The latter seemed to have been worst hit. Her superstructure almost vanished beneath the rippling mass of explosions. The rockets the Ami jabos carry can’t really hurt an armored ship. They’d have been effective enough against the destroyers but the Ami pilots had ignored them.

“We got two Sir.” The gunnery officer’s voice was subdued and grim. Two out of more than thirty! The dark blue jabos had strafed three of the ‘Thirty Eights’ and were coming for the ‘Forties’. Anti-aircraft fire still largely ineffective, Lindemann noted. The jets were just too fast. One of them was streaming black smoke; dense black smoke from its fuselage that spread even as Lindemann watched.

He won’t be getting back to his carrier, he’ll go down somewhere in the bitterly cold North Atlantic. Then, Lindemann hit the deck as a hail of machine gun fire showered the bridge. The armor plated screens took most of it as the jets swept over. Lindemann chanced another look. The burning jet he’d seen a split second before was huge. In that split second, Lindemann knew that the pilot realized he couldn’t get his jet home and that his chances of surviving the crash were tiny. So, he’d made a different decision.

The FV-3 Shooting Star slammed into the anti-aircraft batteries that lined Derfflinger‘s side at more than 500 miles per hour. The aircraft had fired its rockets and machine gun ammunition. It didn’t matter, the sheer kinetic energy and more than 50 percent fuel load in the jet made for a devastating impact. Lindemann felt his flagship reel under the impact and saw the explosion of fire amidships. That was bad, his anti-aircraft firepower had been cut badly and the column of smoke from the flames would attract more aircraft in to hammer the wounded prey. Then, he looked through his binoculars. His wasn’t the only ship that had problems with fire.

Lieutenant David Earnest Webb had his R-2800 engine pushed well into the red zone. War emergency power it was called and he guessed this classified as an emergency. He was wrecking his engine and he knew it. What the heck, the Navy wasn’t short of R-2800s. He couldn’t catch up with the FV-3s that had gone ahead, but that didn’t matter too much. By the ripples of explosions that had covered the three ships at the rear of the formation, they’d done a good job of drawing the enemy’s fangs. Or so Webb hoped. The flak coming up still looked terrifying.

He had something terrifying under his belly for the Germans. The whole point of the early strikes was to kill the German flak crews. That would leave the ships defenseless against the heavily-laden Adies and Mames that were following the fighter-bombers. They, in turn were trying to break up the German formation with their torpedoes so that the ships would be on their own against the Navy fighter-bombers. The later waves could send them to the bottom at leisure. Break the formation, that had to be the key. To do that they had to kill the flak gunners. That was why Webb’s Corsair was loaded the way it was. He carried the usual eight five inch rockets under the outer wing panels.

Under the inner panels, where the cranked wing sloped sharply upwards into the fuselage, nestled two 150 gallon tanks of one weapon the Germans hated above all others. Napalm. It had never been used against ships before. There was always a first time for everything.

Three ships had been hit by rocket fire. Their anti-aircraft concentrations were spotty at best, reduced to just a few streams of fire from areas the rockets had missed. Webb held his own rockets; he had another target in mind for them. In any case, the orders for the napalm runs were very clear. Come in from the stern of the ship, along its length. Drop so the tanks bounce along the superstructure not over the side and into the sea. Those orders put his best line in the middle of the three ships that had been softened up. Streams of fire from the ships arced up at him from both sides. He was passing ahead of one, behind another. Time to turn. He pulled the nose around. Sure enough, he lined up just about right. The twin turret was ahead of him, the smashed wreck of a 4.1 inch twin mount above it.

Just perfect. He lifted the nose a little, then squeezed the release. The tanks under his belly wobbled clear. They arced down, tumbling end-over-end on the short trip between Spider’s Web and the German battleship. They hit, burst and engulfed the hangar on the German ship in a rolling ball of orange and black fire. The napalm didn’t spread the way it did on land. The ship was a mass of obstructions that trapped the jellied gasoline into pools. Instead they saturated their area of impact. The flames ran down the decks as the sticky gel adhered to everything and everybody in its way. Webb’s first tanks had set the area around the aft mast ablaze., The tripod stuck out of the inferno that had erupted around its roots. The other Corsairs flashed past, adding their tanks to the blaze.

By the time the first squadron had completed their runs, the whole aft of the superstructure was a mass of flame. Secondary explosions marked the site of the anti-aircraft guns as their ready-use ammunition cooked off. Later pilots found their aircraft bouncing round from the turbulence of the fires so the more thoughtful Corsair pilots held their drops and placed their tanks further forward. As a result, fires spread forward to engulf the bridge and forward guns. One Corsair had the bad luck to be making its run when the torpedo tubes on the Gneisenau exploded. The blast flipped the aircraft out of control, so that it collided with the battleship’s funnel. Its fuel and munitions exploding were barely noticeable in the holocaust swallowing the Gneisenau.

That didn’t worry Webb. In fact he would never know what had happened to the Corsair pilot. Different squadron, different carrier. Just another loss in the list that was growing steadily as the November day ticked past. He had another thought on his mind. Up ahead of him, another battleship had been marked by an explosion, a big one. He didn’t know what had caused it. Whatever it was, he was going to take advantage of it. He lined up on the battleship. It was a big one, with two funnels. The area around the fore funnel was burning from the explosion, no anti-aircraft fire was coming from there. The aft funnel was the center of a fiery mass of flak. He lined up and held his fire to the last second. Then Webb let the gunners have it with his machine guns and rockets.

At last, he was out of the deadly cones of fire and heading home. Webb eased back on the power and watched his instrument panel record the lowering temperatures and pressures. All characteristics that determined the life of his engine. He was heading home, back to Gettysburg. The trail of smoke behind him wasn’t enough to worry about. Spider’s Web had been hit before. She’d be hit again but it didn’t matter. Today, he was going back to his carrier.

In his imagination, he could feel the heat washing off the three burning ships. He knew the damage wasn’t mortal. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t even severe. Napalm would sear the upper decks, incinerate anybody outside the armor but it would burn off. It could not penetrate the heart of the ship. That was the job of the torpedo bombers. Bayonne Beauty had a single torpedo nested under her belly and four Tiny Tim rockets under her wings. Lieutenant Fisher McPherson knew that the objective this early in the game wasn’t to sink ships but to spread chaos and disorder. The birds later in the attack would be carrying two or three torpedoes each. They would be the ship killers.

Still, McPherson wanted to do the best he could. Even if the objective was to break the formations up, professional pride meant he wanted to score a hit. The problem was the torpedo bombers were coming in from astern of the targets, the worst possible angle for a torpedo attack. The torpedoes were consigned to a tail chase, one in which their speed margin over the targets wasn’t that great. He had already decided there were other options, other targets.

McPherson picked his first target; a destroyer running just behind the worst-hit of the three burning enemy ships. Its anti-aircraft fire was flashing round him. That didn’t matter too much, the important thing was to get as close as possible. So close his Tiny Tims would gut her. Anyway, the German destroyers didn’t have dual purpose main guns. The destroyer grew closer, much closer and his rockets slashed across the gap between the Adie and its prey. Three satisfactory explosions; one of the rockets must have misfired. Now it was time for the battleship. He swerved, skimming the sea as he brought his nose around then tried to close the range as much as possible. In a stern chase like this, he had to get as close as possible if his torpedo was to stand a chance of a hit.

His torpedo launched McPherson swung away, heading out from the German ships. The fighter-bombers could indulge in wild rides across the enemy ships, strafing everything in their path. The lumbering torpedo planes were too valuable. They had strict orders. No grandstanding. Drop your fish, come back, get some more, drop those. Come back, get some more, drop them. Keep going until there weren’t any targets left. The crews got the message.

“We’ve lost everything aft of the tower, Captain. There’s nothing left back there.” The young Lieutenant gasped, not from exhaustion but from shock and sickness. He’d never seen what the Ami’s dreaded jellygas had done before. He’d heard stories but he’d dismissed them as soldier’s tales intended to impress the pampered sailors of the High Seas Fleet. Now he knew different. He’d seen the charred husks sitting at the remains of their guns; seen others till writhing as they died. He shook the images from his mind and carried on. “The fires are terrible but they’re confined to the upper decks. The jellygas didn’t penetrate into the ship. Below decks, there’s no damage.”

Captain Christian Lokken was only half listening. His attention was fixed on the cloud of torpedo-bombers that were closing in him from behind. “I want every turn of the screws the engineers can give me. Every one. No holding back. If there are safety margins, ignore them. Today, there is no section of the gauge marked in red. Understood?”

Engines nodded and spoke into the communication system. They’d lost contact with a lot of the ship. The fires had severed the runs in the superstructure. Thankfully, the machinery spaces were still on line. Underneath their feet the vibration picked up as Gneisenau accelerated. Lokken did not take his attention away from the aircraft closing in. The formation split in three. One group headed for Scharnhorst up ahead; another picked Scheer behind. The majority of the planes were coming for him.

“They’re coming at us from behind, Klaus. Poor tactics on their part. A bad angle for torpedoes.” Lokken tensed. There were torpedoes dropping from the Ami bombers. “Port and centerline screws hard aft; starboard screw full ahead.”

Gneisenau’s bow started to swing around as the ship’s machinery screamed in protest at the abuse. She slid sideways through the water, combining her turn with forward motion and sideways shift, all in ways the designers had only dreamed of. Lokken watched the

torpedo planes pulling away. If he timed this right….”All engines, full ahead.”

The screaming shudder stopped. Gneisenau lurched forward and left the tracks from the torpedoes to pass aft, not far aft but enough. As long as they missed, it didn’t matter by how much. Ahead of the battleship, the two surviving destroyers scattered out of her way. When a 32,000 ton battleship hit a 2,000 ton destroyer, it didn’t take any great insight to know who would come off worst.

“Scheer’s been hit.” The First Officer spoke quietly as he saw the tower of water rise from the heavy cruiser. A bad hit; right aft where the hull dropped a deck. That was always a position of great stress. Given the questionable strength of the ship’s stern, she’d be lucky to keep her rear end in place. And there was always the possibility of damage to the shafts. Captain Mullenheim-Rechberg on Bismarck had claimed the odds against a ship getting a crippling hit in the screws was a thousand to one against. That was nonsense of course, simple mathematics said otherwise. 15 percent of the ship’s length was the screws, shafts and rudders. Assuming hits were distributed at random on the hull, one hit in six would cripple one or all of those units. One in six, not one in a thousand.

Lokken paid no attention. “Starboard, centerline screws hard aft, port screw all ahead.” Gneisenau screamed again as her bows were hauled through the sea. It was a desperate turn to try and avoid another group of torpedo planes that had caught up with her before dropping. The white streaks in the water were closing on her, getting dangerously close. Then an intercept course slowly turned to parallel and then to diverging. Gneisenau had turned inside the torpedoes.

“That makes at least twenty misses. The Ami’s need some practice.” Then the First Officer cursed his words. Two columns of water rose from Scharnhorst. One was way forward, between the bows and the foremost turret, the other level with the aft mast.

Lokken still ignored him. His mind was consumed with the picture of his ship surrounded by the torpedo bombers. He was fighting desperately to survive the hail of torpedoes launched in his direction. Another salvo was coming in, this time from in front. The bombers had worked around him. Now they were attacking from both sides, eight off the port bow, four off the starboard. Lokken visualized the geometry and knew it was over. That’s why this attack was called the Hammerhead. To avoid one group he had to expose himself to the rest. Well, better four than eight. He swung his bows to starboard. “All back full.”

With a little luck the sudden reduction in speed would throw the Amis off. Gneisenau threaded the spread of eight torpedoes. They raced past either side of him. It was close, the nearest wobbled as it entered his wake and was almost drawn into his screws. But, it wasn’t, it was just a fraction too far out. The other four were racing towards her. As Gneisenau slowed, Lokken saw them. The first was passing well in front of his bows, the second much closer. Lokken cringed. The third slammed into his ship in almost the same place Scharnhorst had been hit just a few seconds earlier. Slammed home, but no explosion. Whatever had happened, the torpedo hadn’t exploded. Fuze failure? Lokken didn’t know. Another hit, right between Anton and Bruno turrets. That one did explode and Lokken felt his Gneisenau shudder from the hit.

It was over. Their bolt shot, the torpedo planes were leaving. Scheer was in deep trouble, listing and slowing down. Scharnhorst was also slowing but she seemed far less hurt. Lokken guessed it was the hit forward more than anything else. Gneisenau seemed unaffected by the blow she had taken. Lokken didn’t need the damage control report to tell him what he already knew. The torpedo defense system had taken the hit, the damage was superficial at most. Just some minor leakage inboard. He took the opportunity to look around. Derfflinger hit and burning. And another blue cloud just about to descend, this time on the head of the formation.

Reprisal and Oriskany had just rejoined the fleet after a major refit. They had the latest radars, the new 3 inch L50 anti-aircraft guns in place of the quad forties, the lengthened bow and an improved island. They also had new airgroups with the least experienced pilots in the Fifth Fleet. They hadn’t even flown their first strike over France or the U.K. yet. That was why nobody had asked them to do anything clever. They had simply been steered straight at the German squadron. As a result, they were hitting it head-on.

Lieutenant Commander Bob Price knew his job. He had to assess the enemy squadron while streaking in to do the flak suppression run, then assign his aircraft to the most valuable targets. It had been a lot to do when the strike leader had ridden on an Avenger with three crew members on board. Asking a single pilot to do it while flying a Shooting Star jet fighter was placing too great a load even on an experienced man. Experienced, Bob Price was not. Well trained, talented, skilled yes, but he was asked to do a job that was way beyond him.

And yet he tried hard. It didn’t help that the Germans had built their Hipper class heavy cruisers to the same general plans as their battleships. From dead ahead, telling the difference between the ships was a matter of judging size. To those who sat in armchairs and sermonized on the minute differences between classes, distinguishing between a heavy cruiser and a battleship was easy. So much so that failing to do so was a matter of derision. For a young, inexperienced pilot moving at over 500 miles per hour through an intense anti-aircraft barrage, it wasn’t such a sinecure. Nor did it help that the American ship recognition instructors had hammered home the lesson. Twin turrets meant battleships, triple turrets meant cruisers. Price saw the shape, saw the twin turrets and his mind said battleship. He saw the single ship leading both columns of battleships and made a simple, honest, decision. That ship must be the flagship. An admiral always lead his fleet didn’t he?

“All aircraft concentrate on the lead ship.” The order sounded authoritative, crisp and sharp, exactly the way an order should sound. As a result, 32 FV-3 Shooting Stars and more than 60 F4U-4 Corsairs converged on the heavy cruiser Hipper. Behind them, the Adies swept down on the hapless cruiser.

Once, when he’d been in Austria, Lindemann had seen an avalanche engulf part of a small village. The memory raised an urgent question in his mind, just what in hell did the Amis have against the poor old Hipper? Lindemann asked himself the question in appalled amazement as he watched the tide of Ami jabos sweep down on the heavy cruiser. Had she done something to personally offend the Ami Admiral? Was there a special order out that the Hipper was to be sunk at all costs? Did they know something about the Hipper that I don’t? Throwing more than a hundred aircraft at a single 20 centimeter cruiser seemed very excessive somehow.

Lindemann winced as the victim of the onslaught seemed to vanish under the rippling blaze of rockets from the jets that lead the assault. Attacking from the front like that had its costs though. Five of the Ami jets went down to the fleet’s concentrated anti-aircraft fire. Two of them exploded in mid air as 105mm shells scored direct hits. By coming in from the front like that they were running straight into a crossfire from the two lines of battleships.

Derfflinger’s steel armor rang with the ricochets of the .50 caliber machinegun fire that hosed down her decks. The ship’s center section was beginning to look like a slaughterhouse. Blood from the flak gunners ran down the deck and mixed with the soot from the fire caused by the crashed jet. It was odd, Lindemann had expected to see the burned out tail of the aircraft sticking out of the superstructure when the fires cleared but there was nothing. The sheer force of the impact had smashed the jet to fragments.

He swung his binoculars back to Hipper. Her flak guns were silent. She was burning from the Anton turret back to her stern where the infernal jellygas was soaking her. Lindemann had the reports from Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to confirm jellygas wasn’t a ship-killer the way torpedoes and armor piercing bombs were. In fact it did very little damage at all to the ship since the fires were superficial and didn’t bite deep. But the word from Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was that jellygas massacred the flak gunners and left the victim defenseless against the aircraft that did carry the ship-killers. Lindemann got the impression though that the pilots in this wave lacked the deadly precision of those in the first group. A lot of the rockets and jellygas tanks had missed completely, He watched two clumsily-dropped jellygas tanks bounce off the ship before exploding harmlessly in the sea alongside her.

By the time that had registered, the bent-wing jabos had passed over Hipper. They left her blazing in their wake. Their course took them through the deadly crossfire from the battleships and over Moltke. The same infernal ripple of rockets swathed her superstructure and her flak guns faltered. Still, four of the bent-wing bastards, Lindemann was surprised at how much venom was in his description, had crashed, their wreckage staining the sea.

It was the Ami torpedo bombers that suffered worst. Slow and lumbering, they were easy prey for German gunners who took the opportunity to exact revenge for the hellish jellygas. They got the bombers in their gunsights early as the torpedo planes closed on Hipper. The cheers grew as the score mounted and redoubled when it reached double figures. Twelve out of thirty plus torpedo planes had been sent into the sea by the time the survivors got to drop on Hipper.

Lindemann recognized the perfectly-executed hammerhead torpedo attack. Even with her decks saturated with fire, Hipper swung hard to port. She was trying to dodge the torpedoes closing on her but it was hopeless. Lindemann knew that and grimly counted the long columns of water shooting up from the ship’s side. Six in all, four to starboard, two to port, far more than a heavy cruiser could be expected to take. One torpedo struck right forward and ripped the bows off. Another struck under Bruno turret, a third under the bridge, two on opposite sides of the ship in the engine rooms, the last right aft in the screws. The effects were almost immediate. She started to roll over, the big cruiser slipped onto her beam ends, exposing the two great holes ripped in her port side. Even if she’d stayed afloat, she wouldn’t have been going anywhere. Her screws and rudders were tangled wreckage, her stern almost severed from the ship.

Lindemann swung his binoculars around, looking for survivors in the water. How men could have saved themselves through decks coated with jellygas he did not know. The he saw something he had missed when he’d been concentrating on the fate of the poor

Hipper, Z-31 and Z-39 were going down fast, their sides ripped open by the big rockets the Ami Douglases carried as a secondary weapon. The torpedo planes that had survived the hammerhead attack had been almost perfectly placed for a rocket attack on the destroyers and they’d done their deed well. It was then that the significance of the second attack overwhelmed him.

The American tactics were brilliant, simply brilliant. Their first wave had focused on the rear of the formation. They’d chewed up the ‘thirty eights’ and damaged the ships. They’d forced them to slow down and hindered their movements with damage. The second wave had been their youngest, least experienced men. They’d been given the easiest attack runs, straight at the head of the fleet, but also the most dangerous. Brilliant and ruthless, the Amis had thrown the pilots they’d miss least into that deathly dangerous run right into the crossfire. By blasting Hipper and her screen, they’d created a mass of sinking ships in front of the battleships. The ‘thirty eights’ were swinging to port and the ‘forties’ to starboard in order to avoid the wrecks. The Americans had sacrificed their youngest pilots but they’d pried apart the German formation. The two lines of battleships were no longer mutually supporting. Now they would have to fight on their own.

Brilliant, simply brilliant tactics. The American Carrier Admiral, was it Halsey or Spruance, was a genius. Time to be encouraging and put on a brave face. “Two waves gone, only two left. And they have only sunk the Hipper. Soon, we’ll have them under our guns.” No need to mention Scheer, her screws smashed, her stern hanging off, limping along behind the formation. Waiting for the Amis to finish her off. Just don’t mention her, hope everybody will forget that she was a dead ship.

The Signals Officer spoke, his voice shaking. “Admiral, Sir, it’s not just four waves. At least three more have joined the plot. There are five waves at least more to come.”

“Sir, Formation Able has reported in. Claiming a heavy cruiser and two battleships hit and seriously damaged. They’ve lost at least 11 aircraft, have 13 more with varying degree of damage.” A signalman rushed up with another message flimsy. “Formation Baker, Sir. They claim a battleship sunk, another one seriously damaged and four destroyers sinking.” The lieutenants voice became grim. “Baker has lost more than 21 aircraft shot down, Sir. We’ll be recovering Able in 40 minutes, Baker in an hour.”

Halsey nodded, absorbing information. The days up here were short. It was already past noon and we are racing against the setting sun. “TG-58.3 launching?”

The Flag Lieutenant nodded. “Message just in, Sir. Formation How is on its way; 58.4 will be launching Formation Ink in 15 minutes. We’ll be recovering Able while 58.5 launches Formation Job.”

“Very good. Take one of our Corsair groups and the remaining Adie squadron, and the CAP Corsairs from Essex, Franklin, Hancock and Bon Homme Richard. That’ll give us a strike of six groups. Formation Key. All Corsairs, they’re to carry Tiny Tims. If anybody’s running low, 1,600 pound APs instead. The other groups are to use the groups they’re holding on deck for CAP when their turn comes up. CVLs as well. We’ll use the surviving Flivvers for CAP. That’ll buy us another two hours to rearm and refuel. Then Able goes in again. Clear?”

“Clear, Sir.”

Wild Bill Halsey looked over the sea again, south to where his prey was lurking. And to the west, the sun was beginning to sink towards the ocean. At dusk the carriers would turn north, away from the German fleet, if it still existed. And, in case it did….

“Admiral Lee is forming the Battle Line?”

“Sir, it’s assembling now. The battlewagons are detaching from the Task Groups as per your orders. Uhh,” the officer was about to risk the legendary wrath of Wild Bill. “The Large Cruisers Sir? Should they go too?”

Halsey shook his head. “They stay with us. They’ve no place in a gunnery duel.” He looked out again. Is it my imagination or has the sun sunk a little more already? Time was the enemy, he realized that, but how little of it he had scared him. The constant stream of fighter-bombers and torpedo planes from his carriers could sink the German fleet. Of that, he was confident. As long as they had enough time.

The Germans had made a catastrophic mistake. In maneuvering to avoid the torpedo planes, their formation had started to break up. Their anti-aircraft fire had lost its cohesion, it was wild, uncoordinated, ineffective. The FV-1s streaked straight through it, unloading rockets and machine gun fire into the lead pair of battleships. Those gray monsters staggered under the blow and their defensive barrage faltered under the rippling wave of rockets. The pilots off the Randolph and Bunker Hill were some of the most experienced in the fleet and their tally of missions over France and England had paid off. None of the jets had been hit. They’d curved away at the end of their runs, leaving their targets nicely softened up for the Corsairs and their napalm.

Lieutenant-Commander Raymond Searle absorbed the position as he saw the superstructures of the two leading battleships in front of him erupt into flames. The Corsairs swung around slightly and made their runs from directly ahead of the four huge battleships. It cost them. The anti-aircraft fire from the lead ship had been degraded badly by the flak suppression runs but the following ship had not. Two Corsairs were nailed as they passed over the lead ship and tried to make their runs at the one behind. Ten Corsairs had deluged the German battleship’s superstructure with 3,000 gallons of napalm, sticking to everything and everybody.

Searle watched and reflected grimly that, in this case, antiaircraft fire dying had a very literal meaning. For a brief second he had a picture of the nightmarish inferno on the decks of the stricken battleships. Then he swept it from his mind. They were Germans, who cared what happened to them? Searle’s younger brother had been one of the prisoners murdered at the Battle of the Kolkhoz Pass. That made hammering the German fleet personal.

The Maulers were making their runs a lot higher than the previous aircraft. There was a good reason for that. Searle had named his aircraft Conestoga for a reason; it could lift loads no other single-engined aircraft could equal. There was a lot of rivalry between the Adie and Mame squadrons. Mame was a bit faster than the Skyraider and it could carry more. On the other hand, Adies were easier to fly and had shown an incredible ability to survive damage. Searle had seen Adies that had no right to be in one piece, let alone still flying, bring their pilots back alive before finally giving up — after landing on the decks of the carriers. Both planes were new; both had their problems. It was the Adies that had won the pilot’s trust.

The Mames had something new for the Germans to chew on. They carried a 2,000 pound rocket-boosted armor-piercing bomb under their bellies, another one on the inner hardpoint under their wings and ten 200 pound parachute-braked fragmentation bombs under the outer hardpoints. Searle flew ahead of the battleships, then swung to run down their length. Errors were usually in range, not bearing. This plan would minimize the effect of range errors. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his squadron dropping into place. The formation had been worked out to maximize the number of bombs hitting the target. His eyes flipped down to his bombsight. Through its lens in the bottom of the fuselage he could see the sea. He changed course slightly and the bow of the lead German battleship appeared. His cross ran along it. The forward turret appeared, then, as the second turret eased into view, Searle dropped his entire load. As soon as they saw him do so, the other pilots released simultaneously.

Searle swung away and headed north. His pilots were behind him. 11 of the 12 Maulers in his squadron had survived. Beneath and behind him, he could see the Adie torpedo planes hadn’t been so lucky. The two German battleships at the rear of the formation had concentrated on them. Three planes down? That’s what it looks like.

Behind and beneath him, the 2,000 pound bombs dropped by the Maulers worked as advertized. Each was equipped with a parachute and, as they’d been dropped, a lanyard opened that chute, effectively stopping the bombs dead in mid-air. The weight of the bomb under the chute swung the assembly down to vertical. As the bomb passed 80 degrees, a simple inclinometer fired the six 5 inch rocket motors welded around the outside of the bomb. They boosted it to speeds far beyond anything a normal bomb could achieve. Pre-war analysis had been based on the assumption that, to gain any degree of penetration, a bomb had to be dropped from high enough to pick up speed on the way down. The higher the altitude, the faster the bomb descended and the greater the thickness of armor it would penetrate. That applied all the way up to terminal velocity. Beyond that, the rate of descent stabilized and wouldn’t cause any further increase in penetration. Of course, the higher the bomb was dropped from, the less the chance of it hitting the target. If the thickness of armor was such that a bomb of given weight had to be dropped from a height where the chance of it hitting the target was negligible, the needs of protection were served.

The rocket-boosted American bombs didn’t need altitude to accelerate. The rockets drove them. The bombs dropped from 2,000 feet up were moving far faster than terminal velocity by the time they hit the decks of the ship. They were still accelerating even after they had punched through the thin steel of those decks. That was something the Derfflinger’s designers had never anticipated. Nor had any other battleship designer, but it wasn’t their products that were under attack.

Nine of the bombs hit Derfflinger; ten hit Moltke. More hit the sea alongside the two ships, diving deep underwater before they exploded. In a way, those near misses did more damage than the direct hits. The shock waves pummeled the two ships, springing plates and bursting open welds. The armor piercing rocket bombs were something even the battered German ships had never experienced before.

Two of the direct hits were from Connestoga. One hit B turret. It sliced through the 130mm armored roof and scythed down the long steel barbette. The bomb’s delayed action fuse was initiated by the impact and methodically counted away the milliseconds before the time came for it to destruct. The fuse designers had forgotten to allow for the fact that the bomb was still accelerating even after it had passed through the turret armor. As a result, the bomb had passed below the shell and charge magazines before it exploded.

That oversight and the small charge carried by the heavy-cased bomb saved Derfflinger. Fragments from the explosion ripped open the fuel tanks under the barbette and opened the ship’s bottom to the sea but they didn’t detonate the magazine. Earle’s other hit, on the deck in front of and to port of A turret, also failed to cause a magazine explosion. The explosion there blew the ship’s side out where the six bow torpedo tubes were installed. Derfflinger lucked out again, the water rushed through the ripped open side and extinguished the fires before the torpedoes could explode.

Compared with the wrath of the armor-piercing bombs, the two torpedoes that hit the battleship seemed almost insignificant. A few minutes earlier, the towers of water beside C and D turret would have been cause for alarm but the ship was still reeling from the bomb hits. The torpedoes defeated the torpedo protection system and ripped open the side of the ship. That was where Derfflinger’s luck ran out.

A few seconds earlier two rocket-boosted bombs had sliced through the ship’s side beside C turret, just inboard of the torpedo bulkhead. They’d exploded in the area between the bulkhead and the ship’s C turret magazine, reducing the maze of relatively insignificant compartments to a tangled mass of wreckage. The water from the torpedo hit just a few feet away burst through the shambles and flooding started to spread throughout the whole area. A split second later, the second torpedo hit another area beside D turret, one that had also been mangled by a bomb hit. The two torrents of water mixed and merged as they raced through the wreckage, spreading uncontrollably as they did so. It took the water only a few seconds to find flooding paths through the ship and into C and D turret magazines.

Lindemann picked himself up from the deck, stunned by the blasts. The sight had been incredible. B turret had been lifted clear off its mounting amid smoke from the explosion underneath that formed almost a perfect ring. The turret was now sitting drunkenly across its barbette. The damage reports were coming in but Lindemann didn’t need them to tell how bad the situation was. He could see the bow ripped off by one of those parachute rocket bombs, He could feel the ship slow and begin to list. The word penetrated his senses somehow.

“One machinery room has gone, Sir. Direct hit. We’ve lost Bruno, Caesar and Dora turrets. I think Anton will flood soon. Stern’s been hit. We’ve lost steering and the port and centerline screws. We’re trying to restore power to the starboard screw but we’ve, the gearing has, it’s all a wreck back there. Those damned bombs went straight through our armor deck. We’d probably have been better off without it. All it did was set the damned things fuses working. There are fires down below but they’re under control. It’s the flooding. The bombs smashed us up inside, the torpedoes opened up holes to let the water in. Admiral, Sir, the flak guns, they’re gone. Those little parachute bombs exploded just above the decks, what the jellygas didn’t finish off, they did. The crews in the open mounts, they were already dead, we only had the enclosed 105s. Fragmentation bombs did for them.”

“Message from Moltke, Sir.” The Signals officer was reading from a piece of paper, his face white with shock. “Ten hits, all from bombs. Anton and Dora took direct hits, they’re gone. One bomb hit beside Dora, it’s blown the whole side out there. She took three hits dead aft, their whole stern section had detached, she’s dead in the water. Bow’s gone, she took four hits forward of Anton. She’s flooding freely up there and settling by the bows.”

Lindemann shuddered, Derfflinger and Moltke were already slowing, Seydlitz and von der Tann overhauling them. “Signal Z-28 to come alongside. I must transfer my flag. Order Von Der Tann to be ready to take command of the fleet. How long to the next wave hits us?”

“Ten minutes Sir. At most.”

Incredibly their air search radar was still working. Ten minutes gave him just enough time to shift his flag to Z-28. Then, he could transfer to Von Der Tann in the next gap between waves. That raised the obvious question. “Any more waves of Ami aircraft joined the attack.”

“Oh yes, sir. One more in the last few minutes. They’re holding steady launch rate by the look of it. One wave every fifteen to twenty minutes. No sign of it ending.”

Boiler Room, KMS Gneisenau, North Atlantic.

They were coming under attack again, Rheinbeck knew it. Orders came down on the telegraph, for every tiny fraction of steam that could be forced from the boilers. The violent changes in machinery orders; the canting of the deck. Rheinbeck had heard it all before. Only an hour ago. He still remembered the screaming protests of the boiler plant forced far beyond its capacity; the reversing and full ahead orders following in bewildering succession. The swerves as the battleship tried to dodge the weapons launched at her. Captain Lokken had worked wonders that time, dodging torpedo after torpedo. Then Rheinbeck had heard the crash and felt the ship shake as one of the Ami torpedoes had struck home. The torpedo defense system had held. Gneisenau had survived.

That had been an hour before and now it was starting all over again. Rheinbeck wondered what is happening up there, what is happening to the rest of the fleet. Are our guns bringing down the Ami bombers as the officers had so confidently predicted. An hour since the first attack and we havn’t been struck again. It has to be going well doesn’t it? So why are we being hit now?

If a needle could be bending against the stop mark on the gauges, the ones on the steam pressure indicators were. 52 kg/cm atmospheres pressure, 450 degrees centigrade in theory, the Good Lord alone knew what the temperatures and pressures in there were really like. The piping was already groaning as it was forced beyond its capacity. Then, the deck under Rheinbeck’s feet canted and he knew the attack was coming in for real. Captain Lokken was on the bridge, fighting for them all again, maneuvering his battleship as if it were a destroyer.

The vibration in the boiler room was intense, yet even through it Rheinbeck could feel the shattering effect of the hit aft. A rocket-powered 1,600 pound bomb slashed through the roof of Caesar turret. It plunged down the barbette and exploded in the ammunition hoist. It was empty. The flashtight doors to the magazine were closed and that ruled out a catastrophic explosion. The blast from the bomb’s detonation went downwards, rupturing the centerline shaft tunnel and bending the middle of Gneisenau ‘s three shafts. The bend wasn’t that great but it caused the long, racing cylinder to rip open the tunnel and its seals. Water surged in from the sea and started to spread through the stern quarter of the ship.

The hammering of the bent shaft against the seals in its tunnel told Rheinbeck Gneisenau’s luck had run out. The second bomb hit told him just how badly. It punched straight through the 80-millimeter thick armor deck and exploded in Rheinbeck’s boiler room. The armor-piercing bomb had a low explosive charge. It didn’t disintegrate into a hail of small, man-killing fragments the way a high explosive bomb would have done. Instead, it split up into a small number of large chunks that crashed into the over-strained machinery in Gneisenau’s port boiler plant. That started a chain reaction that caused the whole installation to disintegrate. The boilers themselves were finally stressed beyond their physical limits and erupted. Pressure surged through the steam pipes, causing them to rupture also.

A few men were in the direct path of the fragments. They were the luckiest ones; the flying lumps of steel crushed the life out of them. Others were standing in front of the boilers when they flashed back.

They were less lucky. They were instantly incinerated and died where they stood. For the rest of the boiler room crew, hell was just about to start.

Rheinbeck was one of the unlucky ones. He was immersed in a scalding cloud as the ruptured boiler plant filled the compartment with superheated steam. He’d never felt anything like it; never in all the years he’d worked down here in the bowels of the ship. Searing agony as raw steam saturated the air. It filled his lungs and eyes, blinded him, ripped at his throat and nose. He ran, staggering for the hatches that lead out of the scalding hell that now surrounded him. There was something, someone? Between him and the way out. A figure already with his feet on the rungs that were the way to escape. Insane with pain, Rheinbeck grabbed him and threw him out of the way. His only idea was to find a way out, up to where there was no steam, where the pain would stop. He climbed up, three, then four rungs. Then he was seized around the waist and thrown to one side. He felt himself slipping, he tried to hang on but a boot crushed his fingers. He fell, back down to where the superheated steam was condensing into near-boiling water on the deck.

He could see again, slightly, as if he was peering through a dense fog. Thankfully, the pain stopped. The burns from the superheated steam had finally penetrated deep enough to sear the nerve endings in Rheinbeck’s skin. He was dying but he didn’t know that. All that he did know was the pain had stopped and he could see the struggling men frantically trying to escape upwards, out of the boiler room that was killing them. He crawled across the deck, leaving glove-like imprints of skin stuck to the steel. He never made it back to the way out. One of four torpedoes that slammed into Gneisenau’s side burst open the torpedo defense system and let a flood of blessedly ice-cold water into the boiler room.

Captain Lokken knew that Gneisenau was done for. He’d pulled every trick he knew but it hadn’t been enough. There had been too many Ami jabos. They’d picked him out and concentrated on him. Two torpedoes dead amidships finished the work that the bombs had started, destroying his machinery plant and leaving him dead in the water. The stern was a mess. Another torpedo back there had mangled his screws and rudder. A fourth torpedo plowed into Gneisenau between Anton and Bruno turrets, penetrating the torpedo protection system and forcing him to flood both magazines. That meant everything had gone, machinery, heavy guns, flak batteries; everything that made Gneisenau a warship. It was over.

That applied to more than just Gneisenau alone. This wave of Ami jabos concentrated on the destroyers that had been with the tail of the ‘thirty eights’. The Voughts had come in just above sea level and fired their rockets into the destroyer hulls, slowing them down for the Douglases to finish off with their heavy rockets. Four of the screening destroyers had caught the attack. Two had already gone down, the other pair wouldn’t last long. That, Lokken thought, applied to Gneisenau and Scheer as well. They were being left behind, Scharnhorst was struggling to keep up with Bismarck and Tirpitz despite her torpedo damage. Gneisenau and Scheer were virtually dead in the water.

The two ships weren’t even close enough to support each other. They’d be picked off individually as soon as the Amis decided they were worth making the effort. What really hurt was that the last wave of Ami jabos had got away clean. Oh, a few of them had departed trailing smoke but none had been short down. The earlier wave that had taken out his flak gunners had done all too well.

Lokken looked around. The professional part of his mind told him the truth. The High Seas Fleet was finished. It was all over for them as well. Their formation had been cracked wide open; the two lines of battleships forced apart, then each split further. Derfflinger and Moltke had been hit badly and dropped behind the formation, leaving Seydlitz and von der Tann to try and make their run. Strange how history repeated itself, almost 30 years earlier, those ships had taken part in another death ride against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy fleet.

Lokken stopped himself in sheer shock at his own thoughts. The U.S. Navy hadn’t committed a single battleship to this action. It had never occurred to Lokken before, but he’d never even seen an American warship. They were staying safe, over the horizon, slaughtering their enemy with airstrikes. That made him think of them as being overwhelmingly powerful. The truth dawned on him. His battleship, the battleships, were obsolete, floating targets. The Americans had known it; that’s why they had built their carriers.

Lokken allowed the terrible thought to roll around his mind. What was it the American showman had said? ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ It was a chilling thought. This battle was showing them applying that as a strategic principle. If it was possible to destroy an enemy without risk to themselves, that’s what they’d do. The Fuhrer had cursed the Americans as businessmen but Lokken suddenly realized that was exactly correct. They treat war as a business problem. Minimize expenditure, maximize profits. Minimize risk, maximize gains.

The insight suddenly told Lokken the truth. The Americans would be back to finish off Gneisenau. They would do it with aircraft and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Gneisenau was sinking, slowly but inevitably. There was nothing he could do to stop that either. That left only one order to give.

“We will abandon ship. Order the men to prepare rafts. They must stay out of the water or they will freeze. They will use whatever they can find but we must get off this ship.”

Lokken looked across the sea again, at the remaining 38s, disappearing off to the North. And at the dark blue cloud that was descending on them.

“Admiral, Sir. Reports are in from Formation Easy. Formation Fox is starting its attack now.”

“How long to dusk?”

The aide blinked. “Three hours, Sir. Twilight about another half on top of that. Formation Easy, Sir?”

“Yes, yes.”

“They hit the left hand column of battleships, Sir. They’re reporting the loss of five aircraft. Claim seven torpedo hits; four on one battleship, three on the one following it. The Mames scored big Admiral. They’re claiming more than six hits on one battleship, four on another and three on a third. Strike leader reports the German formation has broken up. Sir; they’re scattered, at least four big ships are dead in the water and at least two of those are foundering. Only two battleships and a cruiser are left moving. They’ve split away from the main formation and are heading for us still, with five destroyers as screen. Formation Fox is hitting them now, Admiral.”

“Formation Fox.” Wild Bill Halsey ran the figures through his mind. Four squadrons of Corsairs for flak suppression, two squadrons of Adies with two torpedoes each, two squadrons of Mames with three 2,000 pound rocket bombs per plane. This was TG58.2s heavy punch. The one that he was swinging at the last combat-effective German ships.

Yellow Rose was straining her engine to keep up with the rest of the formation. It wasn’t that her performance was sub-standard, her R-3350 engine was behaving above and beyond specifications. It was that she was carrying three torpedoes, not two like her sisters. Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush had promised that he was going to get himself a battleship and that was what he planned to do. He’d started by bribing and blackmailing his crew chief into hanging the extra torpedo under his aircraft. It hadn’t been hard. The crew chief came from Texas. That and a few appeals to state honor combined with a gentle reminder that the Bush family looked after its own had been enough. Overloaded, he’d been running his engine on the redline all the way to the German fleet.

The battleships were in front of them now. A pall of black smoke from the flak suppression runs hid their superstructures. Six Corsairs had gone down in those attacks but their napalm and rockets had butchered the German anti-aircraft gunners. The red beads of tracer were still coming up, but only a small fraction of the fire they’d been prepared for. Bush took the throttles back from their maximum position and felt Yellow Rose slow down. The other Skyraiders were going in fast, pulling ahead of him. That reduced their exposure to the flak guns but their torpedoes had a greater chance of breaking up or sinking when they hit the water. At least one of the torpedoes broached surface and sank but his eyes were fastened on the center of the lead German battleship. Right between its two funnels.

He was falling further behind by the second and Bush suddenly realized that he felt lonely, flying straight at the gray giant while the other members of his squadron had passed over it and were already heading home. He counted the columns of water erupting along the side of his target; three widely spaced and then two very close together. The first three were beautifully placed, one under each of the forward turrets and the third under the rearmost mount. All purely by chance, it was hard enough to hit a ship with a torpedo. Placing a torpedo exactly was too much to expect. The last two hits were almost beside each other, under the aft funnel. That had to hurt.

Bush was suddenly aware that there were lights flashing round his cockpit. A German quad twenty crew had either escaped the carnage or their gun had been manned by some replacements. There was no time for distraction. He slowed down a little more, nestled closer to the water and hunched down in his seat. A little closer, just a little… Then he punched the release, dropping his centerline torpedo first followed by the two under his wings. They were heading for the target now, in a tight group with his first fish following the others. Now, if it went just right, that really would hurt.

As Yellow Rose cleared the German ship, the 20mm gun got the range. Its shells, explosive and armor-piercing incendiaries lashed at the aircraft’s wings and belly. They tore out large lumps, slashing into her systems and ripped open fuel and hydraulic lines. Yellow Rose staggered in the air, mortally injured by the long, raking burst. As the crippled Skyraider turned away, her torpedoes crashed into the battleship’s side.

The anti-aircraft gun had shot Yellow Rose to shreds but the three torpedoes did damage that far outweighed the shells. The leading pair of torpedoes hit directly under the bridge, barely 30 feet apart. They blew a hole more than 150 feet long in the ship’s side. The torpedo defense system had already been compromised by the earlier hits and failed completely under the stress of the twin explosions. A split second later, the third torpedo exploded in the middle of the failing structure. It turned the torpedo bulkhead into shards of razor-sharp steel that slashed inwards, raking the engine room behind with fire and fragments. The concussion from the three hits blasted open the internal bulkheads separating the diesel machinery rooms. That opened the way for the floodwaters that followed.

Limping away from the ruptured battleship, Bush had no way of telling just how much damage he had caused. He’d seen the explosion. From his viewpoint it looked like one massive blast. He was too busy keeping Yellow Rose airborne to worry about it anymore. His engine was banging and coughing. The front of his canopy was coated with oil and the only gauges that weren’t registering far into the red danger zones were the ones that didn’t work at all. The rear section of his canopy was clear of oil. That let him see the wings, their control surfaces ripped up and hanging loose. Objectively, Lieutenant Bush realized there was no reason why his aircraft should still be flying.

Yet, Yellow Rose was still flying. Even more impressively, she was heading home. Bush did the calculations in his head; he was losing altitude very slowly and could do nothing to stop it. He was losing fuel as well and couldn’t do much to stop that either. He didn’t think he was losing oil; by his estimates it had already gone. Why his R-3350 was still working was beyond him. But, if things didn’t get any worse, he’d just about make it back to his carrier. What he’d do when he got there was another matter. Still, it was time to concentrate on flying, what happened later could wait for later.

“Hey, Shrub. What’s with that German ship? How did it get you that mad at it? Blow up one of your pappy’s oil wells or something?”

Bush looked around. Two Skyraiders from his squadron were forming on him, escorting his crippled bird. He waved at them and one pilot waved back.

“Damage report, Shrub. You know the panel, square one on the side, just above the tailhook? It hasn’t got a bullet hole in it. All the rest have. You’re streaming black and white smoke, I think the white is fuel, and there are bits falling off now and then. Guess Pappy’s going to have to buy you a new bird after this.”

Bush waved again. His family was rich enough to buy him a new aircraft but he suddenly found he had an intense desire to keep Yellow Rose. Almost as if she was responding to the thought, the engine surged a little and he was able to regain a little altitude. Then the surge died away and the temperature gauge was climbing up again. The aircraft staggered onwards as the minutes ticked by; as if she was grimly determined to get her pilot back home.

“Yellow Rose, this is Kearsarge. You’re around ten miles out. You’re clear for landing straight in, come to course oh-one-five.”

“Negative Kearsarge. If I put this bird on the deck, she’ll pile up. Too many other birds coming in for that. Permission to ditch her?”

There was a long pause and the voice on the radio came back, loaded with quiet respect. “Granted Yellow Rose. Be advised there is a plane guard destroyer bearing oh-three-oh, four miles out. Ditch close to her. She’s getting a boat out for you.”

Bush reached up and opened his canopy. Light from the afternoon sun flooded in, telling him just how blackened his canopy had been. He tightened his straps, then tightened them again. Finally, he exhaled as far as he could, the yanked the straps another notch tighter. Ahead of him he could see a Gearing class destroyer had slowed right down to pick him up. Lose the little altitude I have left, then drop the plane onto a wave. There was a brutal slam as the crippled Skyraider plunged into the waves. Then, another series of blows as it bounded along, spinning as one wing dipped and grabbed a wave. Then, there was a dull wump noise as the flotation bags in the wings inflated. Bush knew they wouldn’t last long; they must be full of holes as well. He looked around and saw a ship’s boat closing in on him.

Yellow Rose was sinking slowly. Bush felt that somehow he’d let her down. She’d fought hard to bring him back and now she was going to die out here. Well, he could do something about that, he took his kneepad and started to write out the story of what she had done to get him home. That way, his Pappy would buy him a new bird to carry on the name. He was so involved in writing it, that he didn’t feel the bump as the rescue boat hit the sinking Skyraider.

“Jeez, look at that, guys.” One of the seamen in the crash boat was incredulous. “Sits there, as cold as ice, writing up his reports. Damn.”

It was unbelievable, incredible. All around him, ships were writhing. They burned from bomb hits and the infernal jellygas, listed from the relentless waves of torpedoes that ripped their sides. Captain Martin Becker couldn’t believe his old cruiser was still afloat. Already, according to the raid count, more than a thousand of the dark blue Jabos had raked the fleet with rockets, torpedoes and bombs. The radar showed still more enemy formations coming in, at least five. Possibly six. As soon as one wave cleared, the next had arrived; a perfect conveyor belt of death and destruction. The last wave raked the two surviving ‘forties’ with bombs, rockets and torpedoes. Both were now dead in the water, von der Tann was settling fast. She’d taken eight torpedo hits all along one side and six of those lethal rocket bombs. One had smashed the bridge, burst it open with the same casual ease as an over-ripe tomato thrown at an unsuspecting victim. Admiral Lindemann had transferred his flag to Von Der Tann only a few minutes before. He’d managed the dangerous task of transferring his flag under fire, only to put himself directly under an Ami 2,000 pound bomb. All went to prove that one couldn’t trick the Grim Reaper.

The wave overhead was different. The previous groups of Ami jabos had come in low, slashing at the formation from only a few dozen feet above sea level. This group were higher; five or six thousand feet at least, probably more. Were the Amis getting tired of the casualties from the flak? Or did they have a new trick in their book?

It was a new trick, and it was being used on a new target. Previous waves of jabos had concentrated on the big ships. Now they were helpless and could be finished off almost at leisure. High overhead, the aircraft in this latest wave were peeling off in the traditional curve of the dive bomber, heading down in chains at the destroyers underneath. It was a familiar enough sight. The German crews had seen it often enough during newsreels of the glory days of 1940 and 1941 when nothing seemed able to stop the German steamroller. Obviously, the Amis had decided it was their turn to suffer. Not that the destroyer men hadn’t paid a grim price already. Seven of the sixteen had been bombed and rocketed. Five had already sunk, the other two wouldn’t last much longer. Those attacks though had been afterthoughts, incidental to the main weight of attack that had been hurled at the battleships. Now the Amis were targeting the destroyers for destruction.

Far away, at the head of the formation, Z-30 vanished under a hail of bombs. The Ami Voughts had gone for her, firing their rockets in the dive; then releasing bombs. Not jellygas, the destroyer men had been spared that horror. It was a grim comment on this battle that the prospect of freezing to death in the icy seas was a mercy compared with burning in Ami jellygas. Would Z-30 make it out of the pattern of bombs that had been hurled at her? She did, but she was burning and losing way. How many bombs had hit her? Three? Four? According to the books the Ami Voughts could carry two 500 kilo bombs each in addition to their rockets. They would make short work of an unarmored destroyer.

A realization hit Becker. Lutzow was the only capital ship left in the formation that was even partly operational. She’d tried to make the break north with Seydlitz and Von der Tann but she’d been too old, too slow, and her diesels hadn’t been up to it. She’d been floundering along, left further behind every minute. Now, there was enough separation between her and the main group that she might, just might, be overlooked.

“Helm, come to course one-six-zero. Maximum speed, hold nothing back.”

“Sir?”

“You have a problem Commander?”

“Sir, the….” The First Officer was trying to find a tactful way of phrasing this. “The Admiral’s last orders were to head on zero-zero-zero straight for the Ami fleet.”

“Admiral Lindemann’s orders died with him. Do you think he survived that?” Becker pointed at the sight of von der Tann, a pyre of black smoke marking a hull that already had more than a thirty degree list. The ship wasn’t recognizable. Both funnels were down. The fore bridge was a mass of burning wreckage. All the turrets were at strange angles, some with their barrels up, others down. If ever a ship was a floating wreck, it was von der Tann. Only she wasn’t the worst off from what had once been the Second High Seas Fleet.

Becker winced as, on the horizon, Z-23 exploded. A rocket bomb? Probably not, more likely a normal five hundred kilo that had punched through the destroyer’s thin plating and touched off a magazine. A split second later Z-25 followed her. The eruption from her magazine formed a strange mushroom-shaped cloud. For a second, Becker shuddered with a cold horror he couldn’t explain. Something much more frightening, on a much deeper level, than the death of a ship and her crew of 340 men could explain. Looking at the cloud marking the magazine explosion that had destroyed Z-25, Becker could only think of the expression ‘somebody had walked on his grave.’ But this was Germany’s fleet that was dying under the relentless air attacks. Did that mean that Z-25 had walked on Germany’s grave?

“One-six-zero, NOW. We are Germany’s last capital ship. As long as we can stay afloat, the fleet still lives. The day is lost, hopelessly, irretrievably. We have a chance to turn around and save something from this disaster. Signal what other ships still can to head for home. Night is just two hours away. If we can survive until then, the Ami carriers will have to wait for dawn. Nobody can fly from carriers at night.” Lutzow answered her helm and her bows swung south, heading for home.

“Sir, over there.” The first officer spoke quietly, apologetically. Across the sea, Scharnhorst and Moltke, probably the last battleships left even partly mobile, were also turning for home. Far behind, Scheer was struggling with her wrecked rudder and single remaining shaft to do the same.

The American tactics changed. Instead of the waves hitting a few ships in concentrated blows, now they were spreading out, finishing off the cripples. Bismarck was down by the bows. Her foredeck was already underwater with the sea lapping around the base of Anton turret. At least what was left of Anton. It was burned out, the barrels, blackened and drooping in the water. None of the other turrets were in any better condition. Bruno was completely off its barbette, lifted into the air and dropped back. For all the world it resembled a blackened shoe thrown carelessly into a pile. The ship was listing heavily to port. The last wave of Ami bombers had put six torpedoes into her port side, adding to the four that had already hit her. Now the port edge of her catapult deck was also level with the water. What there was left of her superstructure had been raked with more bombs. Fortunately none of the rocket bombs since she’d already taken six of those. Just a mix, 500 kilos, 750 kilos, thousand kilos, some high explosive, some armor piercing. They churned her superstructure to scrap. After a while the hail of hits had just been rearranging the wreckage.

It was a mark of how much water the ship had on board that the submerged bow and heavy list hadn’t raised her stern or starboard side clear of the water. Not that the ship still had a stern to expose. An Ami Douglas had put both its torpedoes into the screws and the entire stern section had dropped clean off. A sheer, cliff-like wall now marked the point where the structure had failed. The incredible thing was, with all the holes in the hull and the thousands of tons of flood water that was surging through the battleship’s insides, she was still burning down there. A huge plume of black smoke rose above the sinking ship, half-masking the blood-red sun that was slowly setting in the west.

That sun had masked the aircraft’s approach. Four Corsairs came out of it, in tight formation. Their wings sparkled with the flashes of their .50 caliber machine guns. The hail of bullets swept through the men struggling to abandon ship on the sloping, burned out and wrecked decks, scything them down. The Corsairs dropped their bombs and passed over the fleet to where the settling hulk of Seydlitz steamed in the sea. They lashed her with their rockets and machine guns and were gone. They were probably orbiting round for another pass, that was something else that had changed, the hours when the Amis made a single pass across the fleet and left were gone. Now the ships were defenseless, their flak guns gone, their machinery useless. Their crews could only watch the Americans circled around them, placing their bombs and torpedoes just so. Coming back over and over again until their guns and bomb racks were empty.

Captain Mullenheim-Rechberg felt the battleship shudder under his feet. More internal explosions as the fires down below eat their way towards his magazines. He picked himself up; he’d ducked behind a wrecked anti-aircraft mount when the strafing pass had started. The men who’d been trying to abandon ship were sprawled around on the deck where the Ami jabos had cut them down.

“Why? Why? Couldn’t they see we are sinking, that the crew are abandoning ship?”

One of the junior officers was almost hysterical. For a moment Mullenheim-Rechberg had sympathy for him. He’s barely more than a boy and this wasn’t what anybody had expected. But panic and fear were contagious and had to be crushed quickly. “Get a grip on yourself. You are an officer, act like one.”

“Sir, Von Der Tann has gone! She just rolled over and went down.” That wasn’t surprising, she’d taken at least ten torpedo hits and twice than many of the heavy armor-piercing bombs. She was the first; but she wouldn’t be the last, Seydlitz and Derfflinger were as bad. Behind Bismarck, Tirpitz was shattered and sinking fast. That didn’t surprise him, by the time the last Ami bombers had finished with her, she’d taken a total of 13 torpedoes and a dozen heavy bombs. She would not last much longer.

Captain Mullenheim-Rechberg staggered as another internal explosion racked his ship, sending a fireball upwards out of the smashed ruin of her superstructure. She was rolling over more quickly, settling lower all the time. It was only a question of what would get her first, a massive explosion as her magazines went or flooding eating up what was left of her buoyancy. That decided him. There was one thing left he could do for the Bismarck. He cupped his hands around his mouth and put all the power in his lungs into the shout. “Scuttle the ship!”

Then, he turned to the young officer beside him, a supercilious smirk on his face. “Now the Amis can’t claim they sank her.”

The great German battleship rolling over had been a spectacular sight; her red belly contrasting with the black-gray sea, the tiny figures of men running down her hull trying to avoid the inevitable and fatal plunge into the ice-cold seas. Their efforts were futile, the ship’s stern vanished beneath the waves and she had slipped under, leaving them floundering in the water they had dreaded. Marko Dash circled the sight for a minute, then felt his aircraft rock savagely. A second German battleship had exploded. The fires must have reached her magazines although there were rumors that the Germans weren’t too bright when it came to storing fused shells in their magazines.

Clementine circled the sight below again. Two of the German battleships had gone. Another was at the last edge of extremity. He watched her slip under, faster and faster. He knew the mechanism, as the hull sank deeper, the pressure driving water through the holes in her hull increased and the flooding rate increased. Then, as the ship sank deeper, more holes in her hull became submerged and they too added their contribution to the mass of water that was sinking her. Finally, the shattered and riddled superstructure let the air out, leaving nothing to save the ship. That battleship, and the one behind her, were doomed.

Aren’t they all? The U.S. Navy had Chance-Vought, Douglas, Martin, Lockheed. They had aircraft carriers, the Germans had battleships. What had they been thinking? Over to his left, Dash saw a single battleship, slowly, painfully, turning south. She was listing, leaving a trail of oil in the water behind her, black smoke staining the sky behind her. Marko lead his formation over to the position of the ship and looked at her more closely. She was one of the smallest German battleships, two twin turrets forward, one twin aft. Scharnhorst class. What looked like her sister ship was way behind, dead in the water. The other eight aircraft from Marko’s squadron already making their attack runs on her. This one, the mobile one, was Marko’s.

“All Sugar aircraft, split into two groups of four. Hit her from either side of the bows. 45 degrees off centerline; first flight hit port, my flight hit starboard.” Marko’s voice was confident as he rapped out the orders. TG58.5 had only enough aircraft and munitions left for a single strike and this wave was a mixture of serviceable aircraft from the squadrons on board the carriers. One good strike.

He took his plane down, skimming the waves in the now-familiar pattern of the torpedo-bomber pilot. There was some flak; a tiny amount, a few tracers here and there. Nothing like the storm that had greeted them when they’d hit the enemy carriers that morning. He knew it was a perfect hammerhead attack. The torpedoes would interlock to form a web from which even a fully-mobile ship found it hard to escape. This cripple didn’t even have that chance. Marko’s rockets streaked towards the target. The battleship’s battered bridge vanished under the flashes of the impacts, then his torpedoes were gone. His wing cannon added to the chaos on the target. Then his formation flashed over the ship and their work was all done.

Behind him, seven columns of water rose from the ship. Two up by the bows severed the raking structure, causing it to collapse downwards. Two more hit portside, just under the funnel; three more starboard side, under what was left of the aft superstructure. That had to hurt. Marko watched the battleship lose the last vestige of movement. She went dead in the water, her wake faded away as she lost speed.

Marko’s formation had got in and out clean. Eight aircraft had gone in, eight come out. He led the formation higher, ready for the return flight home. Below him, he saw the battleship he’d watched foundering had already gone and the one behind her was on her beam ends. That made it time to report.

“Saber control, this is Ink Five-Two Leader. Have seen two battleships sink, one explode. Fourth is on her beam ends. Attacked one battleship heading south, estimated seven hits. All torpedoes released.” Marko paused. “Control, we’re doing murder out here.”

“Ink Five-Two leader, Washington wants a clean sweep on this one. Do a circuit of the area, see if any other hostiles are heading south.”

“Roger, sweeping south now.”

Marko’s group swung south and started its search arc. It didn’t take long. They didn’t have to go very far. There was a formation beneath them; a capital ship, five escorts. For a second, Marko debated whether to call the sighting in. Hadn’t enough ships been sunk, hadn’t enough men died? That doubt lasted only a second.

“Saber Control. Ink Five-Two leader here. Sighted enemy formation. Estimated one capital ship, five destroyers, about 20 miles south-east of main formation.”

“Acknowledged Five-Two Leader.” There was a long pause. “Be advised that one squadron of Adies from your group is being diverted to hit them. We are contacting Excaliber and Knife to have Formations Jack and King diverted to take down that group. Come on home. The sun’s going down.”

“Sir, Word from Saber.” Halsey grunted. Shangri-La and her task group had opened the battle and her crews now had more experience at attacking ships than his other pilots. “Sir, Formation Ink reports that three enemy battleships have sunk. One more is going down now, the other four are dead in the water. The survivors, one large ship reported as a battleship but we think it’s a cruiser, and five destroyers heading south. Saber requests Jack and King hit them. They’re all-Corsair waves, Admiral. So are Log and Mike. We’re ready to launch Nan now Sir, but we’re running out of time. We’ll be well into dusk by the time they recover.”

Halsey thought for a minute. “Nan is Able reloaded. Get them off. They started the battle, they can finish it. Then get the Tigercats loaded up for a night torpedo attack. They’ll go in if any of the Germans survive the daylight strikes.” He broke off, another messenger had arrived on the bridge.

“Sir, final report from Ink just in. Two more battleships gone down, total is now five. Confirmed losses are identified as two Derfflinger class, two Bismarck class, one Scharnhorst class. Smaller units wiped out. At least three cruisers and twelve destroyers sunk.

“Very well. Transmit the following message to Washington.” Halsey took a message blank and scribbled a few words on it.

The messenger read the five words and grinned broadly. “Yes SIR!”

One of Captain Becker’s secret vices was that he was a hopeless addict to American cowboy films. He particularly loved the endings where the good guys were holed up, either cavalry in a fort or a wagon train drawn up in a circle, hoping for rescue but determined to sell their lives dearly. That was his situation now, except he knew no rescue was coming. He’d seen the cloud of smoke on the horizon as Seydlitz had exploded. He’d heard the reports as von der Tann and Tirpitz had capsized. Bismarck and Gneisenau had gone as well, they’d just taken too much damage, too many hits, and had foundered. No, there was no rescue coming, that left only selling their lives dearly. At least, Lutzow still had her anti-aircraft guns working. She could still fight.

“Maximum power. It doesn’t matter what the gauges say, get this ship moving.” That was a decisive enough order. There were 16 torpedo planes coming in, already splitting into two groups of eight to catch him in a scissors attack. “Concentrate fire on the portside group. Hard to starboard.” Try and shoot down as many of the torpedo planes on one side as possible, try to take the other group head on.

His anti-aircraft guns ranged in on the formation he’d selected. He was rewarded, first one Douglas erupted into flame and plowed into the sea, then another blew up. Probably a direct hit form his 105s. His 20mm guns chewed up a third, sending it spinning into the sea. The remaining five dropped at perilously close range, then passed overhead. Becker heard the roar of their rockets but his whole attention was focused on the tracks of the torpedoes. Only eight? Two must have broken up or sunk, perhaps a Douglas hit by 20mm fire at just the wrong second? His ship was turning hard, the tracks were slowly drifting aft of him. Seven missed, somehow, the last caught his ship under his rear turret. Becker braced himself for the explosion that never came. A dud?

His relief lasted only a second. Lutzow shuddered as two explosions up forward racked his cruiser. He cursed the bad luck that had brought them. He’d dodged the deadly beam attack that should have raked his ship with hits, only to get hit twice by torpedoes from a bow-on attack, where the book said the chances of getting hit were but slight. He could feel the ship slowing, her movement in the water changing as the buoyancy of the bows were lost. The torpedoes had hit either side of the ship, precisely between the peak of the bow and Anton turret. Now, the whole bow had gone, sheared off just forward of Anton turret.

“Report.”

There was an interminable delay from up front as the damage control crews tried to get a handle on the effects of the hits. Meanwhile Becker looked around at the rest of his squadron. 2-38 and 2-29 were burning, the Douglases must have hit them with rockets as they passed. It looked like they’d hit at least one more of the Ami bombers though.

“Damage control. The forward bulkhead is holding, we’re reinforcing with timbers and sealing off now. We can’t move though. If we get any way on, the bulkhead will split wide open.”

Becket grimaced. Staying here meant death. Then inspiration struck. “You mean we can’t get any forward speed on. No reason why we can’t go backwards.” He flipped to the engine room telegraph. “Full power astern. If we have to, we’ll back all the way home!”

“Nan is making its run now, Sir. It’s the big finale. 58.2 and 58.3 got off four full squadrons of Adies and Mames each. With our group, that’s four squadrons of Corsairs and ten of bombers. More than 200 strike aircraft. The officer checked a tally list, one that was a long, long column of numbers. “Sir, good place to stop, with Nan going in, we’ve launched exactly 1,776 sorties against the enemy fleet.”

Halsey grinned. That was a number that would make headlines. “Our losses?”

“So far, 254 aircraft lost due to enemy action, 186 lost operationally, 48 are badly damaged and will need major repairs. We have just over 1,672 aircraft left operational of the 2,160 we started with. Attrition is 22.6 percent of our totalled air groups.” The aide thought for a second. “I’ve no idea whether this is good or bad. Nobody has ever done what we did today.”

Halsey grunted. “What’s left out there?”

“Main formation has gone Sir. One battleship and a cruiser are left dead in the water, 58.3s Adies are closing on them now. Another cruiser and five destroyers tried to make a break south. The destroyers have gone, the cruiser is crippled and heading south.” The aide laughed. “She’s going backwards, her bows got blown clean off. Nan and a mix of Adies and Mames from TG54.3 are hitting her now. It’s over Sir, Washington got their clean sweep.”

“Any news?” Igrat’s voice reflected the tension that had been building in Washington all day.

“Nothing official. Last I heard, the Rivets are intercepting a lot of communications from the Germans and some from our aircraft. If they’re anything to go by, the Germans have lost a lot of ships and Halsey a lot of aircraft. Phillip says that means we’re winning, we can replace our aircraft a lot faster than the Germans can replace their ships.”

“He would. We can’t replace those pilots though.”

“Have you seen the output of our flying schools Iggie?” Naamah relaxed slightly. It had been a long day and she was tired. “We’re actually training more pilots than we can use at the moment.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. The boys who get shot down, we can’t be picking many of them up.”

“Don’t know. No word on that either. I know we’ve got Mariners and floatplanes out to recover as many of the splashed pilots as we can, but its winter and it’s the North Atlantic. I guess you’re right, we can’t be getting to that many of them. Anyway, we’ll know soon. Got any plans for the weekend?”

“Going up to stay with Mike on Long Island. Going to make it a long weekend. I’ve got a few days leave before we do the next run to Geneva.”

“Be careful with Mike, he tends to be over-emotional.” From Naamah, that was a serious criticism. She regarded Mike Collins as a playboy, essentially a lightweight who drank too much and didn’t keep his temper under control. There was a good reason why Stuyvesant hadn’t tapped him for either the Strategic Bombing Commission or the Economic Intelligence and Warfare Committee. As far as she was concerned, his only redeeming virtue was that he threw good parties. Still Iggie had always liked dancing on a knife edge. At least she never whines when she gets cut.

“You’re not being fair, Nammie. He’s tired; tired deep down inside. The troubles in Ireland wore him out, disillusioned him, and what’s happening there now has finished the job. Seeing Protestants in the partisan-jaegers hunting Catholics and Catholic partisan-jaegers hunting Protestants, it really got him. He thinks nothing is worth doing, nothing is worth any effort, so he might as well have a good time. Anyway, he does throw good parties and you know what they say, a man in the bush is worth two in the hand.”

Naamah shook her head and went into The Seer’s office. “How’s it going?”

“Nothing since you asked ten minutes ago.” Stuyvesant smiled to take the edge off the remark. “And pass that to Lillith as well, It’s been fifteen minutes since she asked. Got to admire her self-restraint. We’re probably about an hour behind the loop though. Intel will go to Navy first, then the White House, then back down to us. All we can do is wait.”

At that moment, the red telephone on The Seer’s desk rang and he listened to the voice on the other end for a minute or so, no more. Then, he went out to where his assistant was sitting. “Lillith, round up the gang and spread the word. We’ve just had a message from Wild Bill. Message reads, and I quote. ‘Sighted German Navy. Sank Same.’”