Winter Warriors s-1

by Stuart Slade

  “Rifleman Kabanov asks if you have fighter escort when you fly against the Hitlerites?”

  “Our Grizzlies, usually no. We fly low down and there we are faster than the fighters, except the jets of course. But if we fly higher up, as bombers rather than ground attack aircraft, then we have an escort, yes. When I flew A-20s, we always had escorts. Usually Thunderbolts. If we were lucky we had Yaks to protect us.”

  There was a stir of pride when Knyaz translated that. “So the Russian pilots are better then.” It was more a statement of satisfaction than a question.

  “For us in the bombers yes, very much so. The Yak pilots remember their duty. They chase off the fascists but then stay with us in case more arrive. Our fighter pilots leave us to attack the enemy aircraft, but then go chasing off after them so we are unprotected when more Hitlerites appear. We were always pleased when we heard a Yak regiment was to be our escort.”

  “And now we shall escort you as well.” Knyaz shifted to Russian. “Bratischka, the fascists have advanced north of us but they have not broken through. Our men have formed a defense line further north and the Hitlerites have failed to penetrate it. The Finnish attack has also failed. They have broken up the Canadian division they attacked and isolated it in small pockets but those pockets are holding out. Not just holding on but their artillery and aircraft are bleeding the treacherous fascists white. We are winning this one, Bratischka. Now, our orders are to head north as well, to rejoin our parent unit. And, of course, to bring our American friends back with us. Let us do that task well, Bratischka. You have all heard how they have made the fascists suffer for invading our soil.”

  Torshavn, the Faroe Islands, North Atlantic

  The two ships were blacked out; just shadows that were very slightly darker than the land against which they were silhouetted. Becker ran his eyes quickly over them. Three large funnels amidships; two twin four inch guns forward, one twin mount aft. They sat high out of the water. Their freeboard was increased by the mine deck that was the whole purpose of their design. Today, that mine deck was an extemporized field hospital, crowded with German seamen; most were badly burned, all suffered from exposure. Becker had picked the worst casualties for the first run to Iceland. The Faroese Islanders took their fishing boats out in the pitch black night to help speed the loading process. Once again, Becker had been awed by their skill at handling the small craft and their dedication to helping the wounded.

  “Aye, they’re good people in these Islands. They can hold their heads high in any company I can think of.” Colonel Stewart was watching the two minelayers getting ready for sea. “The thing is, if our positions were reversed, they would still be doing the same. They don’t care who’s right or wrong in this. They’re sailormen and when they see fellow sailormen in trouble, they drop everything to help.”

  “We could learn a lesson or two from them.” Becker lapsed into silence. His mind was occupied by the images of the battle. The screams of the men burning as his ship had been hammered, the way she had shaken as the hits reduced her to scrap. And, always, the vicious snarl of the Ami jabos as they had pitilessly pounded her. They’d won in the end. His Lutzow was dead, a hopeless wreck on the rocks.

  “I got the reports from Task Force 58. The destroyers attached to the battle line have picked up some more survivors. They combed the battle area but the numbers aren’t good. A couple of hundred. Stewart kept the rest of the message to himself. By the time the Americans had finished pushing aircraft too badly damaged to be worth repairing over the side, they had lost almost 500 planes. And yet, Halsey was going to take another swing at the British Isles before he left to repair his air groups.

  “There’s one last group of survivors to be loaded before the minelayers pull out. They’re on the way out now.”

  Becker looked curiously at the Scottish Colonel. “I thought we had the worst of the wounded on board already.”

  “We have. These are something different. Some of my boyos speak German and they’ve been listening to what was being said. Quite a few of your lads are pretty devout Nazis so we’ve separated the worst ones out and are getting them out first. Better for us that way, they’d be the ringleaders in any trouble. Better for you, they’d be the ones to dispute any orders you give.” Becker nodded. It made sense. “One thing, Captain. We separated out the ones we could recognize. We can’t have got them all. The ones that are left aren’t going to appreciate the difficulty of your position and they won’t like the way the ships have had their scuttling systems disarmed. If I were you, I would watch my back very carefully.”

  27th Canadian Armoured Regiment, Kola Peninsula

  The M27 Sheridan tanks of the 27th Canadian Armoured Regiment (The Sherbrooke Fusiliers) had stopped all along the road leading to the besieged Third Canadian Infantry Division. Night had fallen. Too many German tanks had night fighting equipment to make chancing a nocturnal firefight acceptable. Better to wait until daybreak when the Allied fighter-bombers would be swarming over the battlefield again. That was the theory, anyway.

  Captain Michael Brody didn’t have much time for theory. He had even less when he could see the brigade chief of staff approaching. Although his military career hadn’t been that long, it seemed otherwise. Any length of time on the Kola Front felt like eternity and had taught him a senior officer never brought good news.

  “Michael, do your boys feel like a little night-time drive under the stars?”

  “Sir?”

  “That’s my man. The infantry have got a wee problem and they’ve asked us for some help. Take a look at this map. There’s a dominant hill up ahead, with a house on it. Old farmhouse, probably, but it’s got thick walls and the infantry couldn’t take it without tank support. Anyway, infantry battalion commander came to me and said ‘Give us a couple of tanks old man, they’re just parked alongside the road with the crews getting cold and bored.’ I gave him a good cursing of course, told him my boys needed some sleep. Anyway, all said and done, I promised him a pair of tanks to shoot up that house for him so his men could capture it. You were my first choice for the job, good of you to volunteer. Here’s the orders, off you go.”

  The Chief of Staff took off down the road again, back to the Regimental headquarters. Brody toyed briefly with the idea of shooting him with the coaxial machine gun but dismissed it. There were probably written copies of his orders back at HQ so it wouldn’t do any good.

  “Sergeant, we got a job to do. There’s this little house on the hill over there, it’s on the reverse slope, I guess we could hardly see it. The krauts have an artillery observation position there. Defenses are ringed around it; trenches and a mortar battery. The infantry want us to blow it apart. We got a good HE load?” It wasn’t really a question. The sixty-odd rounds of 90mm they had on board were split evenly between HE and HVAP.

  The house was indeed on the reverse slope. There were times when Brody would have preferred the old M4 Sherman with its low-velocity 75mm. The arching trajectory meant they could have dropped shots over the ridgeline. The 90mm gun was flat trajectory; the first two shots only succeeded in blowing the roof off. Then Brody and his companion tank went up the hill along with the infantry riding behind the turret. Something the Canadians had learned from the Russians; in operations like this, tank-riders were decisive. As the house rose into view, the two tanks methodically pumped more shells into it.

  Behind the hill the Germans had trenches and a mortar battery. The Sheridan was almost blind when closed up. Brody, like most of the other tank commanders in the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, drove his tank with the turret hatch open. This time it paid off. The Germans hadn’t been expecting tanks at night and they were caught completely flat-footed by their appearance. While the Sheridan’s main guns blasted the little house, the bow and turret top machine guns laced tracers into the defensive positions around it. The German mortars were firing over the ridge at the infantry they assumed were making their way up the slope. It was the first time Brody had ever seen mortars c
lose up. By the look of it, it was the first time the Germans seemed to encounter a Canadian tank at close quarters. Brody snapped out short bursts from his .50 machine gun. The big slugs tumbled the German infantry as they tried to organize a resistance to the tanks.

  Behind him, Brody heard the infantry commander yelling “Go forward! Get ‘em boys!” The Canadian infantrymen jumped off the back of his tank. His driver was spun his tank left and right, trying to give the infantrymen cover as they rushed forward into the German pits and trenches. His machine gun was useless. It was too high up, and couldn’t be brought to bear close in. The powers that be had thought of that and given Brody a Capsten Mark V SMG. He sprayed it at a group of Germans who were trying to run towards the smoldering ruins of the house. Another German suddenly appeared with a Panzerfaust aimed directly at him. The infantry were too fast for him. Three of them were all over him, their bayonets and rifle butts rising and falling.

  Brody had reached the mortar pits. The Germans were still trying to fight but it was hopeless. He drove over the pits to crush the mortars. His driver shifted the tank right-left-right as he crushed their crews under his tracks. Brody heard the screams from beneath him but had more important things to think about. The tank accelerated out of the pit, Brody still firing his Capsten at the Germans fleeing in front of him.

  Ahead of him he saw a red light in the treeline. “Gunner, engage left! Infrared Searchlight.” The turret spun and the 90mm crashed. Almost simultaneously there was an explosion on the frontal armor. The flash blinded him and Brody felt his face burn. Ahead of him, the red light went out as both Sheridans pumped shells into the position of the half-track. That was the weakness with the German night-fighting system. They had to have infra-red searchlights to illuminate the targets. There was another brilliant flash off to the left. He heard the shell scream just in front of him. His driver didn’t need orders, he spun the tank around to face the German tank. That was another advantage of fighting opened up; when the hatch was open, everything could be seen. His crew noticed anti-tank guns as soon as they started firing, and started maneuvering at once. If they waited just one little bit they’d get hit in the side. It was bad news to be hit in the side; a frontal hit wasn’t so dangerous.

  The 90mm guns crashed again. This time there was a fireball from the treeline. The German crew hadn’t been fast enough. They’d given away their position with the muzzle flash from their gun and they hadn’t cleared position fast enough. The American 90mm would make very short work of a Panzer IVK. And had.

  If there were more tanks, they’d pulled back. They couldn’t save the house. If they stayed, the Canadian infantry would be all over them. The two Sheridans started backing up, moving to a position just behind the crest of the ridge where they could sit in overwatch. The infantry commander was jogging up and shouting. “Hey tracks. We’ve got a medic; you look like you could use him”

  Brody felt his face. It was covered with blood and he could feel a steel fragment stuck in his cheek. He waved acknowledgement at the infantrymen. Once his tanks were in position, he decided it was time to take advantage of the offer. The first aid post pulled out the fragment and bandaged his cheek. Then they gave him a half full bottle of vodka to take away the pain.

  F-61D Evil Dreams, over the Southern Part of the Kola Peninsula

  “Anything moving down there?”

  The radar screen was masked under a curious cone-like arrangement that was supposed to shut out all non-essential light and make the dim display more readable. It worked, after a fashion, but it meant that the radar operators on the F-61D Black Widows could be picked out by the circular bruise around their faces. The constant jolting of an aircraft being flown at low altitude meant that resting one’s face on anything would result in steady, minor injury.

  “Can’t see anything, Boss.” Sergeant James Morton squinted hard. There had to be something down there. The Germans had staged a major offensive, both sides of Lake Oneda, and had run into heavy opposition. There had to be supply columns moving up behind the lead German elements, there just had to be. Nothing was moving in daylight, the Grizzlies and Thunderstorms were seeing to that. So, the supplies had to be moving up at night. Which lead back to Lieutenant Quayle’s question. Was anything moving down there, and if not, why not?

  “They could be man-packing stuff, Boss. We wouldn’t see that on the radar.”

  “No way Jimmie. The krauts have thrown the best part of their Army Group Vistula into the attack. Lot of tanks, even if they are moving slowly. There’s got to be gas trains and ammunition moving north. Don, anything you can see out the back?”

  Donald Phelan looked out through the glazed portion of the F-61s central fuselage nacelle. The whole rear section of the nacelle had been made transparent; why Phelan couldn’t quite work out. Probably it stemmed from the Black Widow’s ancestry as a night fighter somehow but it did seem excessive. Technically, Phelan was the aircraft’s gunner, controlling the quadruple .50 caliber machine guns in the turret on top of the fuselage. His real job was to look out for targets on the ground below. The F-61s had been replaced as night fighters by the faster, more agile Grumman F-65 Tigercat, but they’d found their role as night intruders. They could lift a fearsome array of bombs and rockets, while their SCR-720 radar had proved very useful at finding targets in the darkness. It was a pity that radar wasn’t showing anything now.

  “I’m going to try a bit further south. The Germans may be moving north more slowly that intelligence is suggesting. That would mean their supply convoys will be further back.”

  Evil Dreams turned south. Her R-2800s droned steadily, her radar swept the ground ahead of her. This was the hard part, actually finding something to shoot at. Once she had a target, Evil Dreams had the bombs and rockets, not to mention her four 23mm cannon, to do something fairly disastrous to it. But first she had to find it. The minutes ticked by, slowly draining the fuel from her tanks.

  “Hey Boss, got something.”

  “Worthwhile?” There had been all too many times when a F-61 had expended its bombs and rockets on a target of little value only to have a rich group turn up when she was on her way back home, her racks and magazines empty.

  “Collection of vehicles; definition isn’t good enough to count how many.” There was a rustling of maps in the bulky radar compartment. “OK, there’s a railway junction ahead. East-west line meets a north-south line. I think the contacts are clustered around the buildings at the junction.” The resolution of the SCR-720 wasn’t that good, it was barely adequate to show that the targets were there.

  “OK, we’ll take them down.” Quayle swung Evil Dreams around in a wide curve, getting her lined up on the radar contacts below. There was nothing to be seen down there. Every unit on Kola knew that keeping itself blacked out was essential if they were to survive. The Americans had their sophisticated Black Widows with their array of weapons and radar. The Russians had their partisans on the ground, all too ready to spot a target and steer in one of the little night-intruder Boomerangs. The Germans had their night fliers as well; everything from the old Hs-123 biplanes to Ju-88Gs and He-219 night-fighters. An array of nocturnal pests whose activities condemned the troops on the ground to a night of sleepless darkness.

  “Target’s in front of us now Boss.” Quayle reached down and selected the inner bomb racks. They had something new, a device that allowed three 500 pound bombs to be carried on a single pylon originally intended for a single 1,600 pound weapon. The price paid was that the triple rack was draggy and pulled their speed down. That’s why a wise pilot dumped those bombs first. Next step was to put the nose down, taking Evil Dreams into a long, quiet dive that allowed him to throttle the engines back. No point on giving the targets more warning than I have to.

  Morton quietly read the range to the cluster of targets on the ground ahead. Then, he stopped; they were too close in for the radar to be effective. It didn’t matter. Quayle had seen the shadows of the buildings in front of him and had lined
up perfectly. Then, he punched the bomb release and slammed the throttles forward. The big Black Widow leapt forward with the added power from its R-2800s. Staring out of the back transparencies, Phelan saw the ground erupt with the six explosions from the bombs. Then two more, bigger, fireballing blasts.

  “Secondary explosions, probably fuel or ammunition going up. Whatever had been down there, we’ve hit something.” He paused a second. “Problems Boss. We’ve got a bandit out here. I’m picking up Lichtenstein emissions and we just gave him the flaming datum to end all flaming datums.” Morton scanned his radar warning equipment.

  There was no indication where the enemy night-fighter was, but it was out there and it had a good idea where the intruder it was hunting could be. Phelan slid away from his observation post and climbed into his gunner’s seat. If they couldn’t find the enemy night-fighter, defending against it would be his job.

  In the cockpit, Quayle was weighing odds. The fighter couldn’t be to the south or west of us, otherwise we ‘d have picked it up. It had to be north and east, probably on its way back to base. And it had to be above us. In daylight that would be a bad disadvantage for Evil Dreams but at night, things were different. The lower aircraft would be hidden against the shadows of the ground; the higher aircraft would be silhouetted against the brighter sky. Provided the differential wasn’t too great, the plane below had the edge. Quayle remembered something else; an urgent intelligence warning that German night-fighters carried upwards-firing cannon. No. Here, now, being below was good.

  As Evil Dreams turned, her radar scanning arc cut across the sky, searching for the hostile night-fighter. The Germans had a radar warning system too; one that could detect the SCR-720. That was probably how they knew Evil Dreams had been in the area.

  “Got him, Boss. He’s turning our way but we’re behind, below and outside his curve. About 5,000 yards ahead. Closing steadily, his speed’s around 200, perhaps 250.” Quayle glanced down, Evil Dreams was doing just over 330 mph. Within two minutes, they should be able to see the target. Theoretically, it was possible to do an entire intercept using radar sightings but nobody ever did. They waited to see their target first.