Winter Warriors s-1

by Stuart Slade

  Newman nodded. The Martin AM-1 Mauler could lift heavier loads than the AD-1 Skyraider and was a touch faster, but the Adie had an awesome reputation for toughness and reliability despite some worrying instability problems. But then, both aircraft had been rushed into service. The deal to swap squadrons made sense to him; the skipper of CV-11 Intrepid must have thought the same.

  “Loadout?”

  Pearson flipped another page on his clipboard. “The usual. Rockets, five inch high-velocity aircraft rockets and 12 inch Tiny Tims. Thousand and two thousand pounders, rocket-boosted sixteen hundred pounders. Some five hundreds. Napalm of course. Mines and torpedoes, more than usual. Rumor is we’re running cover on a convoy, a big one. To Murmansk. Guess the powers that be want to get as much supply through as they can before winter really sets in. Expect we’ve got the torpedoes in case the Kraut fleet comes out.”

  “If only.” Newman’s voice was loaded with longing. “Nobody’s ever put a battleship at sea down with airstrikes before. Good time to be the first.” The German fleet was still orientated around its battleships. They only had three carriers, and one of those had been captured from the British. Third Fleet had twenty Essex class carriers with more than 1,950 aircraft, including those on the Gettysburg. Five more of the big CVBs were on the way, three would join the fleet before spring next year. “Anything else I should know about?”

  “Notice anything about our airgroup Captain?” Newman looked down the list. “All single-seaters.”

  “That’s right. It’s the same right across the fleet. All the multi-crew birds have gone. The Beasts went a long time ago and nobody misses them, but the Avengers have gone as well. Even on the last cruise, when a couple of the carriers still had them, they were short of crews. Now, they’re all gone. No flight engineers, no navigators, no gunners, nobody. All single seaters, just pilots. Odd that. I’d have expected it to be the other way around: plenty of aircrew, shortage of pilots. I hear the ASW hunting groups still get their crews but the rest of us are running mighty short.”

  “I guess the Air Bridge must be draining off the aircrew. Running that must take a lot of manpower. Still, it is odd that it’s hitting us this hard. It’s not just you CAG. We’re having difficulty getting aircraft mechanics and hangar deck crewmen. Bear that in mind. We’re short-handed on the decks; it’s going to take us longer to turn birds around and a lot longer to repair cripples. Anything else?”

  “No, Skipper, not unless you count some more Foo Fighter sightings.”

  The two burst out laughing at the thought. Every so often a ship reported some highly anomalous radar contacts. Very high altitude, relatively slow moving, usually inland over Canada but sometimes over the sea. Always on the edge of radar coverage and peculiarly hard to get a hold on. As if the radar pulses kept slipping off them. The Foo Fighters led to all sorts of weird explanations, the usual clutch of secret weapons and (from the pulp magazine devotees) space aliens. The scientists had explained it. There was a thing called the Jet Stream, a very high-speed current of air that circled the globe. The B-29s had found it when they’d started their ill-fated career and a lot of problems it had caused them. Apparently, every so often, a pocket of moist air got caught up in the Jetstream and floated around in it until it dispersed. Those pockets were remarkably stable and could last for hours. While they did so they gave a solid radar return. That made sense. Radar shadowing from moist air pockets down at sea level were a constant problem, so why shouldn’t the ones high up be the same? No, the Foo Fighters were nothing to be concerned about. Just a natural phenomenon of no great consequence.

  No importance at all.

  Battery Anton, 71st Infantry Division, Army Group Vistula, Kola Peninsula

  “That damned fool will kill us all.” Sergeant Heim swore, fluently but quietly. After all, nobody knew who was listening these days. It was true though, that damned Captain from the staff, that perfect perfumed prince from Berlin, seemed perfectly determined to kill them all.

  The convoy wasn’t a big one. A half-track with a quadruple 20mm gun at the front, another with a squad of infantry, then two big Henschels towing the first pair of 15 cm sFH 18s. Then, another halftrack with infantry, one mounting a 37mm anti-aircraft gun and two more Henschel 10 tonners with the other pair of sFH 18s. A second half-track with a 37mm gun then four British-built AECs carrying ammunition. Another quad twenty on a half-track and one more halftrack with the rest of the infantry bringing up the rear. Almost more escorts than escorted in this convoy. That made it like every supply convoy on the Kola Peninsula. Russian Partisans and Ami Jabos saw to that. And, right in the middle of the convoy rode the thing Heim considered more dangerous than either, a staff officer desperate to break the pristine, decoration-less monotony of his uniform with a medal or two.

  “We must get the guns into place by evening.” he had said. “The Jabos will not fly in winter,” he’d claimed. So now this artillery battery, his artillery battery more the pity, was moving in broad daylight. Something no sane person did when Ami Jabos were on the prowl. Even moving at night was getting dangerous, the Ami Night Witches saw to that. A country so rich it could put radar sets on ground attack aircraft, Heim shuddered at the thought. The Night Witch struck from the darkness and never gave any warning of its approach. Perhaps moving in daylight was better.

  Heim’s eye was caught by a flash in the sky up ahead. The sun reflecting off a cockpit perhaps? There was a chance, a slim one, it was a Luftwaffe fighter but the odds weren’t in their favor. He scanned the area with his binoculars; they were good ones, taken from a dead officer. There were lots of those over the years. At first he saw nothing. When the truck lurched a little he caught a glimpse. Two engines, a nose that stuck far, far out in front. Damn it, he thought, Grizzlies, just what we needed. Probably four of them, carrying rockets, a couple thousand kilos of bombs or, horror of horrors, jellygas. Six .50 machine guns and a 75mm gun that stuck out of the nose like the unicorn’s horn gave the aircraft its distinctive appearance in the recognition books. The Beechcraft A-38D Grizzly to give it its full and proper name. Where would they be coming from?

  Heim scanned around fast, over to the left, a low ridge. The Grizzlies will dive down, use the hill as cover, then slash across us. Different tactics from different air forces, the Russian Sturmoviks would circle their prey, each diving on it in turn. The Americans made straight strafing runs across the target area. Difficult to say which was worse. He looked around his truck.

  “Jabos coming. Get your snowshoes on. When I give the word, bail out and run like the wind, to the left.”

  That was a painful lesson, learned at grim cost. Run away from the Ami jabos and they’d give chase, treat killing the men on the ground as a game. Run towards them and one might, might, get under the attack, escape that way. Whatever one did, get away from the vehicles. For vehicles drew jellygas.

  Heim was right. Four Grizzlies erupted over the ridgeline, heading straight for the convoy. The vehicles lurched and swayed as they came to a halt, the anti-aircraft gunners swung their weapons to bear. Those who couldn’t fight the jabos were already running for the snowbanks on either side of the road. The perfect perfumed prince stood in the back of his kubelwagen, shouting something. Probably exhorting his men to stand and fight. He would learn. Learn and burn.

  Tracer screamed across the sky towards the racing jabos, the noses of the aircraft vanished behind the orange fireballs as they fired back at the flak guns. Nobody had ever accused the Amis of being inventive; they found the best way of slaughtering their enemies and stuck with it. This was the first act. They would concentrate fire on the flak guns and take them out. The guns will probably die, but if they can maul the Grizzlies, they might not go through with killing the rest of us. Heim couldn’t see the flak gunners serving their guns behind him, he was too busy running across the hardened crust on top of the snow, for the soft, deep banks where he could hide, but he knew they’d be steadily, efficiently, serving their guns.

&n
bsp; He couldn’t see but he sensed the fountains of snow erupting around the half-tracks. The guns on the Grizzlies outranged the flak pieces, so they’d be hoping to get at least some of them before the range closed. He heard the clang as an armor piercing round hit the side of one of the vehicles, heard the explosion as the ammunition in the half-track exploded, felt the heat from the ball of flame as the 37mm gun and its crew died. The viciously cold air was burning his lungs as he ran. He saw some snow banks and hurled himself into them as the Grizzlies swept overhead. The rockets screamed from under their wings and he heard the explosions. The mass of secondary explosions meant he didn’t need to look to know that the tracks brought all the way from England had just blown up.

  He did sneak a look anyway. Pyres of black smoke were rising from where both the 37mm guns and one of the quadruple 20mms had gone. The AECs weren’t just burning, they were an inferno of exploding ammunition and fuel. The infantry, the convoy’s guard against partisan attack had spread out into defensive positions, away from the guns but near enough to protect them from any partisans closing in on the scene. Joint attacks between Ami jabos and partisans weren’t unknown but they weren’t common either. More often the partisans stayed in the background and called in the air attacks.

  Up above, the four Grizzlies were turning away. One was streaming thick black smoke from its starboard wing. Heim watched it turn away still further and head north slowly losing height. One of the other jabos was leaving with it. Another difference between the Amis and Ivans. A crippled Russian aircraft was on its own, left to get back to base as best it could. The Americans detached aircraft to escort the cripple. If it crash-landed, they’d land to pick up the crew. They’d risk men to save men. In their eyes, expending treasure, machines, resources to rescue their men just didn’t enter into the equation. If their men were down, they’d do what it took to get them back. May the good Lord help anybody who got in the way.

  The Grizzlies vanished behind the trees again. Heim guessed what was coming next. It wasn’t an accident that the 20mm quad at the front of the convoy had been knocked out in the first pass. He and his men took the opportunity to get still further from the tracks on the road. They had little time and it ran out as the two remaining Grizzlies broke over the treeline. Their 75mm guns belched out the familiar orange ball of flame. They were joined by the flat hammering of the .50 machine guns. Heim saw the lead ten tonner explode. A 75mm round had plowed through the front and it shattered the vehicle into blazing fragments. There were only a handful of shots, the range was short and the Grizzlies had better things on their mind. Better for them that was.

  Heim watched the two stubby tanks detach from the bomb racks on the jabos. They wobbled down, turning end over end as they fell. An inaccurate weapon but it didn’t matter. It was the dreaded jelly gas, the foul thing the Amis had created by mixing gasoline with stuff that made it burn hot and slow. Stuff that made it stick to whatever it touched. Stuff that nothing could put it out.

  The first pair hit the ground just short of the wrecked 20mm half-track. They bounded high and erupted into a roaring mass of orange and black flame. It boiled skywards as the bouncing tanks spewed the hellish jellygas back along the lines of stalled vehicles. The second pair hit just behind the middle point of the convoy and repeated the inferno that was consumed what was left of the convoy. Roaring and screaming, the black smoke and orange flames blotted out the sky above the convoy. The black cloud of smoke turning the sun blood red. Heim’s face blistered as the heat from the nightmarish holocaust rolled across the snow. He felt the hard-packed whiteness soften and saw it turned black with soot from the fires.

  The two Grizzlies swept over the inferno below them. The orange glare of the fires reflected off their glossy white-and gray camouflage paint. Then they were gone, heading north. Probably for more ammunition, more fuel, more jellygas. Heim got up and waited for the roaring conflagration to die down. Then, he went back to the cooling remnants of the convoy. Around him, the survivors did the same, slowly, shocked by the ferocity of the assault. The vehicles were gone. Some had been hit by gunfire and rockets, others incinerated by the jellygas. Most cases it was hard to tell which was which. Burned, blasted, who knew?

  Only one vehicle had survived, the little kubelwagen right in the middle. It must have been just far enough back to miss the first pair of jellygas tanks and too far forward to catch the second. Around it, the wreckage on the convoy burned. Scattered around it were the blackened, carbonized husks that had once been soldiers.

  The perfect perfumed prince stood immaculate, in the middle of the destruction, neither burned nor asphyxiated. Mentally, Heim raised his eyes in despair. He had long since ceased to believe in God; this was just another example of the injustice that made up his world. The survival of the perfect perfumed prince responsible for this nightmare confirmed his disbelief in any form of divine providence. “Sir, I shall assemble the survivors. We should head back to the depot.”

  The depot was a safe cantonment heavily guarded against attack. They had to get back there by dusk; the Partisans were closing in. They’d have seen the smoke and heard the explosions. They knew what was happening. Most of the Partisan bands had radios now. It was a fair bet that they’d been told of the strike, to find any survivors the Grizzlies had left and kill them.

  “Our orders are to reach the 71st Division base area as soon as possible. We will go on.”

  “With respect, sir, reaching the base area is no longer possible. We are barely a third of the way there. Even if we are left undisturbed, we will not make it by nightfall. We will be hard put to get back to the depot by then. It is cold now; when dusk comes it will be much, much worse. We can’t make it. Even if we could, the wounded couldn’t. We must go back.”

  The perfect perfumed prince stared at the shabby, grizzled sergeant. Slowly Captain Wilhelm Lang realized the truth that lay behind the words he had heard. The stink of the burning vehicles and incinerated men drifted across him and with great annoyance he realized his spotless white scarf was in danger of being stained black by the soot from the fires.

  “Very well Sergeant, we will head back for the depot area. With the guns gone, there is no point in carrying on anyway. For the sake of the wounded, we must return to the depot.”

  Top Floor, Bank de Commerce et Industrie, Geneva, Switzerland.

  “I’ve got the latest production figures from Germany, Loki. Third quarter, 1945. And the transportation requirements for military and civil resource allocations.”

  Loki was leaning back in his high leather chair, looking out over Geneva, the wet roofs glistening in the morning sun. “Thank you, Branwen. Anything interesting?”

  “I’ve only had a brief look but it looks like much the same as before. Steel, coal, nitrates; all have increased a bit but not much. Armored vehicle and aircraft production are holding steady. It looks like Speer’s reforms have finally finished working through the system. Production totals have been steady for two quarters now. I expect they’ll drop a bit in the fourth quarter as coal production gets diverted from industrial production to heating. If one goes up, the other goes down, there’s no slack left in the German economy any more. Everything they do these days is a zero-sum game, as one thing goes up, another goes down.”

  Loki took the two-inch thick file and started to skip through the pages. “You know, this would all make a lot more sense if we had the American and Russian figures by way of comparison. We’ve no idea how much of the American economy is mobilized.”

  Branwen snorted. “I had Manannan take a look of the American economy; more or less from what we can see they’ve produced and guesswork at the rest. He reckons the Americans have mobilized about half their productive capacity. To put that into perspective, they’re producing around two thirds of the world’s aircraft engines.”

  “About half? I wonder why they haven’t mobilized the rest. German’s running, what eighty, ninety plus percent mobilized? And the Russians?”

  �
�Germans at least that. Russia? No means of knowing. Most of their industrial infrastructure was in the area now occupied by the Germans. The Russians evacuated a lot and destroyed the rest but how much and what did they have to begin with? We don’t know. How much of what they evacuated has been returned to use? We don’t know. We do know the Americans have been building factories and resource recovery facilities in Siberia but their output? We just don’t know. Loki. It’s maddening. We know far, far more about the Germans than about the people we’re supposed to be working with.”

  “With Stuyvesant over there at the heart of things, does this surprise you? I’m astonished he’s even told us there’s a war on. Ask Manannan mac Lir to drop up and see me this afternoon will you? I need to talk with him about the Americans and Russians.”

  Branwen made a note on her pad. Manannan had some odd theories about the American war effort. He believed that something about it didn’t quite make sense. As if anything in the madness that was tearing the world apart made any kind of sense.

  Loki started thumbing through the thick file again wondering if those who got the data understood where it came from. Masses of numbers from all over Germany. Mostly from little people who didn’t like what Nazi Germany stood for but were too afraid, either for themselves or their families, to do much about it. That, Loki could understand, he had seen the brutality of the Nazi regime for himself. But, a few economic figures, how many rifle bolts they had produced, how many trains went through a station, what the consist on those trains was, surely that didn’t matter? Loki snorted to himself. Individually, none of it did but put together by talented economists it meant a lot. Not just raw economic data either.