Winter Warriors

by Stuart Slade

  In the background, Batov tapped two men on the shoulder and they went outside to relieve the sentries. A few seconds later, the two men who had been relieved joined the zemlyanka. There was a quiet muttering as they were brought up the date on the discussion. Knyaz passed his flashlight and the pamphlet over so the men could read it. A good meeting he thought, one that had fortified the men’s spirits and intensified their resolution. And all thanks to Tovarish Ehrenburg.

  RB-29C Bad Brew II 3rd Photographic Group, 22,500 feet over The North Sea

  Photographic was a bad joke. Bad Brew II did everything except take photographs. Communications intercepts, radar intelligence data, collecting radar images of the coastline in general and of coastal towns in particular. The latter could, just, be defined as photographic. Sort of. Bad Brew II didn’t even have a bomb bay any more. It was sealed shut and converted into an electronic intelligence gathering center. That didn’t matter too much; nobody in their right mind would send a bomber over Germany again. Bad Brew II’s crew were only too well aware of that.

  The Third Photographic Group had once been the Third Bomb Group and they had taken part in the Ploesti Massacre. To be more honest, they’d been one of the four groups that had provided victims for the Ploesti Massacre. The Third had sent 27 B-29As on that raid. Bad Brew I had been the only survivor. Two engines shot out, their wings and tail riddled with bullets and shell holes, a quarter of the crew dead and half the survivors wounded; they’d survived because they’d turned back early. The lonely flight back had been an epic struggle to survive. Their B-29 had got them home, how nobody could work out. Rationally, there was no reason why the aircraft should have kept flying, but it had. They’d made it back to base. The undercarriage had collapsed on landing and the aircraft had been written off, a constructive total loss.

  The Third had been pulled out of Russia, reorganized as a Photographic Reconnaissance group with RB-29s and then sent to Iceland. Their new assignment, photographic reconnaissance sounded safe enough, but it wasn’t. The RB-29Cs operated alone, under cover of darkness; gathering their data as they penetrated closer and closer to hostile territory. Their casualty rate was around ten percent. That was low by the standard of the Russian-based bombing campaign but it was still cripplingly high by rational analysis. Statistically, a ten percent loss rate meant a given crew had a seven percent chance of surviving a tour of duty.

  The rewards were worth it. A completed tour of duty meant the crew went back to the continental United States and were then reassigned to the Pacific. Deterring the Japanese by spending hot days on Pacific Island beaches, relaxing and drinking beer, spending warm nights relaxing with affectionate maidens from the Pacific Islands.

  Some of the crews had made it, left the Third and went home. Then they vanished. Too busy relaxing with island maidens to write letters was the standard guess. Recently one whole Photo Group, the 305th, had been withdrawn from Keflavik and vanished as well. Another reinforcement for the Pacific; another reason for the Japanese to keep quiet and not annoy the American Eagle. The Germans might be able to stop the B-29. It was a very good bet that the Japanese would have a much harder time trying.

  “How’s it going?” Captain Jan Niemczyk wanted out of the North Sea at the earliest possible time. As soon as they’d got their radar pictures of the coast and, especially, Hamburg. That meant a long penetration into hostile airspace. An airspace that held night-fighters.

  “We’ve got the pictures command wanted. You reckon the Navy pukes from the carriers are coming down this way?”

  “Gotta be. I’ve heard they’re planning to bring their carriers further in. No other reason for us to be this far inside enemy-controlled airspace. Any emissions?”

  “Coastal radars only. They’re probably tracking us; signal strength is well over threshold. Command says the Germans are too short on gas to send fighters out for a single aircraft.”

  “Yeah, right.” Niemczyk’s voice was loaded with cynicism. “Anybody asked them about the birds that don’t come back? All eaten by wolves, perhaps?”

  There was a bark of laughter around the flight deck. The command line was simple. The aircraft that came back made no reports about being intercepted by night-fighters. Ergo, the Germans didn’t send night-fighters out after single aircraft. Much like the nature-lovers claimed there were no reports of people being eaten by wolves. The fault in the logic was the same in both cases. People who were eaten by wolves didn’t live to make reports. Nor did RB-29s intercepted by night-fighters.

  “Hamburg coming up on the radar screen now, boss.” The mapping radar under the belly gave good pictures, particularly where there was water and ground to give vivid contrast. Built-up areas showed up well also; bright white on the dark background. “We’re taping the images now.”

  “Good. Let’s get the hell out of here.” “Right. Boss, uh-oh.”

  In the cockpit, Niemczyk decided that the words he hated most in the English language were ‘uh-oh.’

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Airborne emissions boss. Fug-220 Liechtenstein. A night-fighter. Signal is above threshold; he’s after us.”

  “Time to go home.” Liechtenstein probably meant a He-219. A thoroughly nasty beast; fast and heavily-armed. Radar wasn’t that good, not up to the standard of the American fighters, but the German night-fighter crews knew their business. Bad Brew II was in trouble. “Engines full emergency power. Where is he coming from?”

  The RB-29C had four radar receivers; one in the nose, another in the tail, one in each wingtip. A skilled operator could use those to get a rough directional cut on the radar source. Bad Brew II had a very good operator indeed. “He’s behind us, Sir, off to port.”

  “How far out?”

  “From echo strength, I’d say 15 to 20 miles. Perhaps 25. Want me to jam him boss?”

  “No. Keep the tricks for later. Tell me when he’s dead astern. We’ll make him work for his dinner.”

  At this altitude, the RB-29C could manage 390 miles per hour, subject to the engines overheating. If the books were right, the He-219 could manage 416. That gave it a 26 miles per hour speed advantage. The night-fighter wouldn’t catch the fleeing reconnaissance aircraft for 35 minutes at worst, 45 minutes at best. The battle would take place anywhere between 250 and 300 miles north of here. The same books said He-219 had a range of 960 miles. The question was, where had he come from? Just how much fuel did he have left?

  “Cloud level is at 20,000, Jan.” “OK, we’ll head for it. How thick?”

  “Weather braniacs said a 5,000 foot layer. There’s a hell of a storm system running through. It’s not too bad here, but Kola is getting really pounded.”

  “That gives us some room to breathe.” Niemczyk put Bad Brew II’s nose down and watched the speed build up. 395mph. That put the Heinkel behind them between 40 and 55 minutes away from closing to gun range. Anywhere between 260 and 360 miles north of their present position. There was another catch. Bad Brew II carried a lot more fuel than the fighter behind her, but supplies weren’t limitless. If she ran at full power too long, she would run out of fuel also.

  It was a strange sensation. The individual minutes seemed to drag by, yet every time Niemczyk looked at the instrument panel clock, the hands seemed to have jumped forward. “Where is he?”

  “Dead behind us. Estimated two, perhaps three miles; no more than that. May be less.” They were already in the cloud layer, the gray-white shroud clung to them. The enemy radar could still see them, but the crew on the fighter would be searching for the dark shadow of the bomber. The RB-29C had an edge there. Its bright silver finish didn’t have much of a shadow. In the air, it tended to be shadows people saw, as dark patches on a light background. Contrary to myth, matte black was a very bad color for a night-fighter.

  “Everybody to an observation panel. Watch for the slightest shadow.” Originally the B-29 had had multiple remote controlled turrets with their gunners in blisters. The RB-29C had discarded them and the
blisters had been replaced by flat, transparent observation panels. “Mickey, you’re the most likely to see him first. Yell out at the slightest hint. Just don’t fire.” The twin .50 caliber tail guns were Bad Brew II’s only armament. There was a big argument about ammunition for them. Some crews carried heavy tracer loads in the hope that streams of fire would scare off a night-fighter. Niemczyk thought that was insane; tracer pointed both ways and revealed the bomber’s position as clearly as a neon signpost. Bad Brew II carried not a single round of tracer.

  “Shadow, behind us.” It was Donovan in the tail turret.

  “Drop chaff. Jam that radar now.” Niemczyk waited until the chaff cloud deployed and the jammer in what had once been the bomb bay was pumping out energy. Then he hauled Bad Brew II around, breaking left as hard as the airframe would allow. Behind them, the faint shadow in the mist passed their tail. Niemczyk was already reversing the turn, putting Bad Brew II on a parallel course to the fighter, falling behind it. Then, he saw something weird and unexpected. Streams of light headed up from the ghostly shadow in the cloud. Tracers? Upwards?

  “You see that Jan? He’s got cannon firing upwards. What the devil is he playing at?”

  “That’s new. Logical though. Cannon like that will gut a bomber. The braniacs need to know about them. They were probably firing on an estimated position when they lost us.” In front of them, the shadow faded into the mist. Niemczyk thought carefully. He must know we aren‘t in front of him, that means we must have turned. So he’s going to turn as well, right or left? Did he think we turned right or left? We went left, will he guess that? Mentally, Niemczyk flipped a coin, then broke right. The longer he could keep the fighter from picking him up again, the better. On instinct, he pulled the stick back and started a slow climb. The speed dropped. The laboring engines drifted even closer to the red danger zones on the temperature gauges. The R-3350 was not the most reliable engine ever built. Just how long could they take this abuse?

  “No sign of emissions. He hasn’t picked us up yet. Wait, I’m getting sidelobes. No main pulse, just sidelobes.”

  “Feed jamming energy into them. Try and make him think we’re heading northeast and diving.” In fact, they were heading northwest and climbing. Once again the minutes were ticking past. Bad Brew II broke out of the cloud layer, allowing her silver skin to shine in the feeble light of the new moon. Niemczyk cut the engine power back to cruise allowing the needles on the temperature gauges to drop a little away from the danger zone. Their speed dropped to 250 miles per hour as a result. In his mind, Niemczyk saw the night-fighter maneuvering, circling to try and pick up its target again, diving in the belief that the target had dived away from him, trying to gain separation. Then, he’d have come out the cloud layer below and realized he’d been fooled. That would put him at 15,000 feet and Bad Brew II was at 22,500. The He-219 was underpowered. It had a climb rate of around 1,800 feet per minute. The fighter would take four and a half minutes to regain altitude. By the time it got out of the clouds, it would be another 20 miles behind them. If they were lucky.

  “There it is!” The waist observer had seen the dark shadow of the night-fighter, silhouetted against the white of the cloud layer. “Behind us, 235 degrees. At least eight, nine miles away. Not as good as Niemczyk had hoped, the night-fighter pilot must have realized early what had happened and made a good guess on his target’s course. Still, Bad Brew II’s engines had cooled down a little and that allowed him to go back to full power. Behind them, the He-219 started to follow, then broke off and curved away, heading south east for home. Niemczyk breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief and turned northeast, for Iceland and his home base. He had a long, long story to tell to the debriefers who hadn’t believed that the Germans sent night-fighters out after single bombers.

  CHAPTER THREE: COLD WIND RISING

  United States Strategic Bombardment Commission, Blair House, Washington B.C. USA.

  “You’ve gone brown.”

  Inanna looked up, rather apprehensively. “How does it look Nammie?”

  Naamah inspected Inanna’s dyed hair with an authoritative eye. There had been a time when she’d made hair colorings from plant extracts but those days were long gone. “Your eyes don’t match, but there’s nothing you can do about that. I should know.” Naamah’s eyes were a dead, slime-green, frightening to the point of being repulsive. “For the rest, only your hairdresser will know.”

  Inanna giggled at the reference to the advertising slogan used by Clairol for their range of home-coloring products. The company held a national competition to select an advertising slogan for their new product. ‘Only your hairdresser will know’ had been the alleged winner. On paper, it was a reference to the quality of the product that could match salon hair products. In reality, a veiled reference to the fact that it offered blonde women a way to look less German. Looking German was neither sensible nor safe. The newspaper on Inanna’s desk proved that. “You heard Tommy Lynch sent in an entry to that competition?”

  “Oh no, what did he say this time?”

  “It read ‘mix up a double batch and give yourself a matching snatch’. It won too, only the company management vetoed it despite the fact it would have doubled their sales. Does it really look good? Coloring jobs in salons are getting too expensive these days; this way is a little less costly. I thought I’d try it out first and if it works fine, we’ll make sure all the blondes in our family get supplies. We’ll dip into the reserves for it.”

  “That bad, Inanna? I knew there was trouble up in Boston and New York but I thought it was confined to there?”

  “What do you think?” Inanna flipped a copy of the Boston Globe over to Naamah. The front page picture was a sagging figure, tied to a streetlight post, the head and upper body covered with tar and feathers. “They ripped her coat and blouse off, hacked up her hair and then did that. Nobody bothered to call the police, she was there for twenty minutes in this weather before the cops found her. She’s in hospital; emergency ward. Pneumonia and burns to her face and head. What sort of animals are these people?”

  “Frightened, angry, frustrated ones.” Naamah very carefully kept the anger out of her voice. “I’ll bet you any money you like; in normal times, the people who did that would have risked their lives to help a woman in distress. But now, they’re trapped in a situation they can’t understand or control. They want to slaughter the people who are killing our boys over in Russia but they can’t. So they displace that anger onto a scapegoat.” Naamah’s mouth twisted in disgust. “The normal scapegoats are blacks, Jews, any minority. Even having that thought makes people see themselves as being what they hate, being too close to the Nazis. So they pick on somebody else. In this case women with blonde hair. I’ll bet if the FBI picks up the group who did this, they’ll find in the background somebody who had a grudge against this particular victim and got everybody else worked up. Not all brutal sadists are German. They’re everywhere, here as well; you know that. Over the years, we’ve seen them often enough in more than enough places.”

  “That’s the line the Globe are following. That the woman was the innocent victim of a personal vendetta and the people who were did it were no better than Nazis themselves. Problem is, look at the other story on the front page. More massacres in Ireland, entire villages in County Limerick just gone. Everybody. Men, women, children, animals, crops, everything. Boston is an Irish-American city. A lot of people had folk back ‘in the auld country’ and they want to hit back any way they can. This country is getting ugly. Nammie, it’s in the big cities now, but it’s spreading. We need to protect our family.”

  Naamah nodded. “OK, I’ll talk to Lillith and Nefertiti, they’ll work out how much we need.” She grinned; the picture on the newspaper made it forced and unnatural. “It’s lucky we invested in the aircraft and electronics industries a few years back, isn’t it.” She looked at the picture again and even the forced grin faded. If she ever found the people responsible for that atrocity, she’d take them out f
or a drink. A very final drink.

  Bridge, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, At Sea, North Atlantic

  Even the big Forties were rolling in the seas. Huge waves; long, swelling ones that rocked the battleship. Every so often there would be intense vibration as the waves exposed the screws aft and caused them to race before plunging into the deep again. Lindemann looked behind him. The second in line, immediately behind Derfflinger, was Moltke. Lindemann watched her drive her bows in, taking green water up to Turret Anton. All eight battleships had the “Atlantic bow,” raked and flared to improve bad weather performance. It was a great improvement on the flat, vertical Taylor bow the German designers had preferred earlier. It wasn’t helping Scharnhorst and Gneisenau though. They were badly overweight, sat much lower in the water than planned and they wallowed badly. Moltke was taking water over her bows, but the two light battleships at the end of the port column never seemed to get their bows out of the green swells. Turret Anton was awash more often than not. As if to hide the two ships’ distress, the rain closed in again, shrouding them from view.

  Lindemann sighed and went back to the chart table. According to the weather people, once this storm front was past, the weather should be a lot better. By North Atlantic standards anyway. They’d be close enough by then to close on the big convoy and overwhelm it and its escorts. Then, they’d turn on the carrier group and overwhelm that.

  After all, nobody had ever sunk a battleship on the high seas with aircraft. As long as the battleships could maneuver, they could avoid the airstrikes. Once the carriers had shot their bolt, it would be all over. Some were even cautiously talking about the rest of the American fleet, probably pounding England or France, coming to the rescue and being added to the pot. Too much to hope for of course. But they would get the big supply convoy and there was word of another smaller convoy, a fast troop convoy. That would be worth the risk of adding to the bag.