Knight's Move (Kirov Series Book 21)

by John Schettler

  Korvettenkapitan Stiller was heading up the Naval Supply Ship Unit, Western Section, operating a group of ships out of bases on the west coast of France. Ermland had been sent down from Marine Tanker Gruppen Kommando Nord to join Group West. It had received a number of different hover points within the area in which it was to operate, each rendezvous being denoted by a code name. Kapitan Heinrich consulted his code book, and sent the appropriate message by W/T. For a tanker operation, the hours of 08:00 and 16:00 were the designated rendezvous times, and Heinrich had his young Executive Officer work out the details of this replenishment.

  These supply operations were to be carried out with all possible secrecy. Ships crossing near any known enemy convoy route had to do so at night. Any enemy vessel sighted required an immediate change of course to mask the direction of the supply ships intended rendezvous. The ships often carried colors from other nations to disguise their identity, and even used different panels with hull names to complete the masquerade. And if ever actually found and attacked by an enemy warship, the German supply ship was ordered never to fight, but to immediately destroy all code equipment, and scuttle the ship.

  Knowing that to be caught by the enemy at sea was an automatic death sentence, the men on the German oilers and ammunition ships were a clever and cautious group. They would listen for coded signals, but never send their own, maintaining strict W/T silence during all operations. Ship to ship communications would be made at range by the use of colored star rockets fired from a double barreled pistol. Closer in, they mounted recognition lights on the masts, which could be flashed on and off in a specified sequence to identify themselves. Finally, the ships would stand men on the forecastle, a certain number at a given hour, and that head count was also a code in the event other signals had been compromised. A correct flare signal, followed by the correct recognition lights had to meet that last test. For Ermland, there would be four men on the forecastle at the appointed rendezvous hour.

  Kaiser Wilhelm and Goeben would slip away and make their rendezvous well west of the Canary Islands, out of range of British planes. The replenishment operation had been drilled many times in the Baltic during sea trials. The tanker assumed a speed of 8 knots, upwind of its charge, and sent out a grass line with an air filled float. The oil hose could therefore be floated back to the other ship, snared by a grapnel, and then secured to the refueling aperture on the bow of Kaiser Wilhelm.

  In all these operations, security was provided by Marco Ritter and two other Me-109 pilots up on overwatch and patrol duty. Both ships would top off their fuel and wink goodbye. Late on the 29th of January, Kapitan Heinrich made his final rendezvous with an ammunition ship to replenish rounds fired at Fuerteventura. The Rösselsprung task force was now ready to begin a long odyssey that would take both ships to some very unexpected places. They turned south, heading for the wide empty spaces of the South Atlantic, where they would soon find the seas were far more crowded than they ever expected.

  * * *

  That night the Germans consolidated their position at Gando Bay, secured the airfield, and began flying in the 65th Regiment of the 22nd Luftland Division. Kübler’s 98th Mountain Regiment moved inland, through the small towns of Valle Nueve and Lomo Magullo, which they found empty of both enemy soldiers and civilians. The residents had long since taken all that they could carry on carts and wagons, and labored up the twisting road into the high country. The road would take them to a foothills village of San Mateo, and from there on up to the higher elevations, dominated by the volcanic massifs that formed this island.

  In the pre-dawn hours of January 26th, the RAF delivered on its promise and planes were on the airfields at Madeira. Colonel John Frost led his men aboard for the pre-dawn drop, which would be a much needed reinforcement in the northern sector. They would land near Santa Brigida, and anchor that line of the defense. This would then free up Number 2 Commando to watch the mountain roads from San Mateo that wound north along the flanks of the hills to the town of Teror. If the Germans got that they would effectively flank the Santa Brigida line, forcing the British to fall back on La Palma and the Grand Harbor for a last ditch defense.

  There, Lieutenant-General the Hon. Harold Alexander, poured over the map to try and size up his situation. He had already lost most of the two regular army brigades that had been part of his Canary Islands garrison. The 29th had 3 battalions left, and the 36th was mostly gone, but now in their place he had received the 7th Brigade, holding the south above Maspalomas, and the Para Regiment to bolster his defense in the north. The General was no stranger to desperate situations. He had received command of the British 1st Corps from Lord Gort at Dunkirk, and supervised their successful evacuation, leaving on the last destroyer. Now here he was facing the Germans yet again on another embattled shore.

  Like all men in his position, he had come up through the ranks in the First World War, mostly with the Irish Guards. He was a hard task master, yet popular with the men. Rudyard Kipling had noted that: “It is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they most readily responded... His subordinates loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own.” In India he was right in the vanguard when he operated his Brigade, often climbing heights ahead of the oncoming troops to scout the way ahead personally.

  Montgomery had been one of his instructors in the Imperial Defense College, but he said he found the man “unimpressive.” Yet when Alexander made Major General, he was the youngest officer of that rank in the British Army. He would one day reach the lofty heights as Supreme Allied Commander of all Mediterranean Forces, but that day might never come if he could not hold his keep in this hour. Now he was relieved to learn the Para Regiment would be out there on his flank.

  “They’ll need artillery,” he said to a staffer. “Send them the 465th. It’s all we can spare, and it will have to do.”

  Colonel Frost was on the ground and sorting out his battalions just before sunrise when he came across a battery of six 3.7-inch light howitzers sent to him by General Alexander. He gave it a wry grin, then raised his small hand trumpet, which he used to rally his paratroopers. It would resound from the hills, and be heard by Kübler’s mountain troops moving into position on that sector of the line.

  “So the British have Falschirmjaegers too,” said Kübler. “They can ride the planes and jump at night well enough. Now let us see how they fight.” He would rest his men that morning, while the 65th Luftland Regiment came up on the main road to his right. That morning the Germans achieved near complete control of the skies over the island. The British had 8 Spitfires and 16 Hurricanes operating on Tenerife. 11 Seafires were left on the carriers, but Glorious and Furious would return, along with Duke of York and several destroyers. Their planes would bring the total British fighter strength to 32 Seafires, 17 Martlets, 17 Fulmar, those 8 Spits and 16 Hurricanes, some 80 planes. The Germans easily had twice as many Messerschmitts, and all with veteran pilots. To these they could add several squadrons of He-111s and then fill the skies with Ju-88s, Do-17s, and screaming Stukas.

  That afternoon the British 7th Brigade put in a strong, well coordinated attack from the south. They were able to shake up the German defense there, still forming as the troops of the 16th Luftland Regiment now came south after being relieved by the 65th Regiment. Kübler sent his recon Battalion down to counterattack, while the 65th Regiment moved into position on his right for a big attack near dusk.

  Jean Bart had returned, and was put to good use pounding the heights of Bandama where 4 Commando was dug in overlooking the main road. The position was astride two successive volcanic calderas, each with steeply rising flanks above knotted ridge lines and rocky cliffs. That night they would face a prepared attack by three battalions on those heights, while two battalions of the 2nd Flieger Regiment and the engineers tried to push on up the main road into the outskirts of La Palma. This route was no better, with wrinkled ridge lines f
ingering down from the higher ground west to reach for the sea. The Germans were paying lip service in the south, holding their and pushing their freshest troops in the north.

  By dusk the British 7th Brigade had reached and taken the town of Cruces de Arinaga, but the Germans still held the ground between that place and the coast where they had a Siebel ferry setting up a small supply depot. The British had fought hard, but they were played out and low on ammunition by sunset, stopping to rest and consolidate their modest gains that night. They had pushed a mile and a half, fighting all the way, but were still five miles from the real German supply hub at Gando Bay and the airfield.

  Having rested most of the day in the north, the big attack started at dusk, with furious action to take the stony heights of Bandama Hill. Number 4 Commando fought tenaciously, its men mounting several charges with sub-machineguns blazing away to drive back the Germans. At times it was hand to hand, and the Commandos acquitted themselves well in that, their knives flashing in the wan moonlight all along the trench line. Casualties were heavy, nearly a third, but they held that hill, and Tafira heights behind it, giving the enemy worse than they got. III/65th Luftland Battalion was down to just 7 squads when it was over, and out of 81 squads that went up that hill after dark, no more than 35 were left at dawn the next morning. Medals for valor would go out on either side to men who had fought that desperate action. Then the letters would go out to the families of the dead back home.

  The German Colonel Meindel would later say it was some of the hardest fighting his men had ever seen, and on the worst ground imaginable. The men were tough professionals on either side, the British outnumbered but dug in deep and with good fields of fire. Their unyielding defense would later be spoken of with hushed reverence in the service, and any man who could say “I was at Bandama Hill,” would be looked at with renewed respect.

  To their left, the three battalions of Germans that tried to surge up the main road were also stopped by the men of Number 6 Commando. There, losses were much lighter on both sides, and the Germans called off the attack when the heights to their left could not be taken and they began getting fire from the resolute defenders on that hill.

  In the south, the Germans counterattacked Cruces de Arinaga that night, taking the small hamlet back to restore their line, but could do no more. All things considered, if the force ratio held as it was that night, the British had good prospects on Gran Canaria. But that would not be the case. The Germans would fly in the fresh 47th Luftland Regiment, and then begin landing the first regiment of that last division Halder had found, the 327th Infantry.

  Meanwhile, half a world away, General Alexander’s ex-school master was teaching class on another embattled island. General Montgomery was well occupied setting up his defense on Singapore, and the final act that would determine the fate of that bastion was about to play out.

  Part IV

  Rock of the East

  “Invincibility lies in the defense;

  the possibility of victory in the attack.”

  ― Sun Tsu: The Art of War

  Chapter 10

  The wild, exotic, prosperous city of Singapore was a much different place now under the impending shadow of war. While the fighting was still up country, far off and beyond the range of the gunfire, people could still go about their lives with some sense of normalcy. The street vendors were still out, the shops still open, the smell of scrumptious foods, cigarettes and fresh roasted coffee wafting on the city airs, with people eating late in the restaurants, coming and going in the night, until the bombers came that first dark hour.

  The city was never the same after that. The whining fall of the bombs, the shock of the explosions, the muffled mutter of the 40mm Bofors lighting up the night sky in a vain effort to fend off the attack—these were things that are seared on the memories of anyone who ever endures them. War had come to city after city like this, to France, the Low Countries, Denmark, England, and all across Russia. It wasn’t half as bad as the things that had already happened in places like Moscow, but to those experiencing that slow, steady transition from a normal life for the first time, seeing and feeling it sliding into the inexorable decline of order that builds with a restrained sense of terror towards chaos, it was always a heartrending and tragic affair.

  Moscow was burned and ravaged, like the dead nurses in Hong Kong, but just knowing about the fate that befell that city on Christmas Day when the Japanese finally burst in, was enough to build that palpable sense of fear and dread in the swelling population of the city. People saw the streets slowly filling up with strange, haggard faces, the riff raff and vagrant wave of refugees from up country, sweeping into the streets like muddy rain water, running down the alleyways where they huddled in the night beneath old boxes and tattered blankets. The refugees brought the infection of terror with them, and the fear redoubled. Then the troops began to arrive in the harbor, the 45th Indian Brigade the first reinforcements since the beginning of the war, and the bombs came after them.

  The Buffaloes lumbered up to try and find the bombers, and found the dreadful artistry of the A6-M2 Reisen Zero instead. It was only their heavy, unwieldy design that kept many of them flying, with wings and tails scraped and riddled with patched over bullet holes. They couldn’t stop the bombers, and day by day, the rubble mounted up, and the civilian death toll with it. Roads were blocked by abandoned vehicles, many set on fire when the bombs fell, and lighting up the long, empty streets at night with their eerie glow of terror until the weary fire brigades could get to them.

  Fresh water was at a premium now, and so they were hauling seawater in barrels and rigging up makeshift water pumps to fight the fires that never seemed to be under control. The posh restaurants soon closed, the city dark each night, and a heavy, thick shadow of smoke and burning oil obscured every dawn. Looters and some deserters picked about the edges of the main town, breaking into houses and stores that seemed unguarded; taking what they couldn’t buy or find by any other means. After dark , the mournful wail of air raid sirens would come, the distant rumble of the planes, and then the whistle of the bombs. The airfields were hit every day, the city every night, a campaign that became more and more indiscriminate, as war had a way of removing every vestige of civility and restraint, and killing compassion first and foremost with its cruel bayonet.

  It would not be the worst fate a great city would suffer in the war. London had it worse, Hamburg, Dresden, and so many others. It was just the early autumn of war here, as its dreadful seasons turn. It wasn’t the stark opposition of fire and frost that had blighted Moscow, but it was still death coming, and everyone in the city could feel it, sense it, fear it.

  Soon the crews could not get to all the fallen after the night raids, and the morning would see the streets stained with the fresh blood of those who were killed, their corpses lying on the pavement, some headless from the awful concussion of the high explosive bombs. The heavy tropic airs carried the scent of their death, and dismembered arms and feet that washed into the sewers would fester and rot quickly in the muggy humidity.

  Streetlamps tilted at odd angles, store windows were shattered, with the shards of glass gleaming with any sunlight that could penetrate the gloom. Dogs wandered through the streets at night, feeding on the dead. By day, the only energy in the city was clustered in a mad impulsive rush about the harbor and docks. There the quays were overrun with panicked citizens, those well off enough to think they could gain easy passage on a steamer out to points unknown, the white and wealthy first, the rabble after, or so they saw things. Many that took to those boats would die on the sea, the ships strafed by Japanese aircraft, which growled and wheeled with impudence over the city, for they had been masters of the sky for the last three weeks.

  And then the Hurricanes came.

  The last had fled the civilian field at Kellang three days ago, which did little to still the slowly rising panic in the city, but then they returned. The Japanese had been so emboldened that they came with fewer figh
ters that day, and well after dawn. On the 26th of January, the drone and thrum of engines craned necks upwards again, sending people running for any shelter they could find, until they saw what was happening through the wind rifted clouds of smoke. Dark blue fighters came wheeling in, their wings bright with fire, and people suddenly realized they were not the enemy.

  “By God, those are our boys up there!” a man shouted. He pointed, seeing the bright fire at the tail of an enemy bomber, watching it fall.

  Miles away, on the other side of the vast steamy bulwark island of Sumatra, the carriers Illustrious and Indomitable had flown off their Hurricanes to airfields designated by Montgomery. They landed just after dark, refueled, and were up at the break of dawn to make a sweeping show of strength over the embattled city. They brought the wrath of vengeance in the machineguns as they wheeled and dueled with the Zeroes, some losing that fight, others getting hits and even downing two enemy fighters. Yet more than that, they brought hope, a commodity that had been in very short supply, rationed in the hearts of only the most stalwart souls. And they were there for yet another reason that morning. Empress of Asia and a convoy of relief ships were bringing in the New Zealanders. It was a ship that had been fated to die there, bombed by the Japanese, run aground, and ravaged by merciless fire, but that would not happen today with all that air cover swarming over the city and harbor. The ship would get through to safely deliver her charge, and the considerable stores of weapons and ammunition within her holds.

  Soon the crowds parted on the quays as the tall, suntanned men marched briskly off the boats, easily carrying their heavy kit and packs, rifles slung over broad shoulders, “good-day” on the morning air instead of the whine of enemy bombs. Monty knew they would be in that morning, for he had arranged the whole affair, and when they came he was there to greet them, standing proudly with their newly promoted Brigadier, William Gentry, grinning broadly as the troops marched by.