Winter Warriors s-1

by Stuart Slade

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

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

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

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

  German Destroyer Z-7, High Seas Fleet Scouting Group, North Atlantic.

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

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

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

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

  “Sir, Sir, we must abandon ship!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  AD-1 Skyraider Clementine Over the Scouting Group, North Atlantic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Aircraft Carrier Oswald Boelcke, Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Bridge, KMS Graf Zeppelin, Flagship, Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

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

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