Winter Warriors

by Stuart Slade

  The rain squall eased off a little and the visibility improved again. Lindemann looked out the starboard bridge wings, towards the destroyer screen. He could see Hipper running ahead of the formation. Z-23 was steaming just behind and to starboard of her while Z-24 was clearly in sight, sailing almost parallel with Derfflinger. Behind her, Z-25 was having a much easier time of handling the heavy waves. She should, the designers had finally admitted the heavy twin turret forward on Z-23 and Z-24 was a bad idea and replaced it with a single shielded mount. Four 15cm guns, not five and all the better for that. Lindemann swung his binoculars back towards Z-24. Another one of those great swells was approaching and he watched the destroyer dig her bows in before she was hidden by the mountain of green water. He watched, waiting for her to reappear, waiting to see her fight her way clear of the wave. To his mounting horror she never did. Z-24 had vanished.

  Lindemann was frozen, watching the scene through the ghostly shroud of mist, spray and rain. A three and a half thousand ton destroyer couldn‘t just vanish. In the background he heard the message from the radio room arrive. ‘Destroyer Z-24 has foundered. No survivors.’ Eventually he forced his voice to work. “How?”

  “If I may Sir.” One of the young lieutenants was speaking very tentatively. “I was training to be a naval architect before I was for .... signed into the Navy. There were many doubts about the Z-23 class even then. That big turret forward is a lot of weight; too much for the structure of the bows. Worse, there is a large compartment underneath the turret. That makes the whole bow structure extremely stressed. Finally, the trunk for the turret is too close to the hull sides. Gunnery was told, Sir, but they insisted on that twin turret forward. I think when Z-24 dug her bows in, the weight of the wave pressing down combined with the bow rising up was too much for the structure. I think her bows just tore off forward of her bridge. A battleship or cruiser, they might survive that Sir, but a destroyer won’t. Her own engines will drive her under and there is nothing to stop the flooding. Nothing at all; she probably sank in less than 20 seconds.”

  Lindemann stared at the young officer who flushed and turned bright red. “I’m sorry, Sir.”

  The Admiral slowly shook his head. “There is no need for apology. You had information I needed and gave it to me as was your duty. Communications, send a message to all the destroyers. They are to abandon efforts to hold station and maneuver as necessary to avoid damage.” Lindemann raised his binoculars to his eyes again and looked at the patch of sea that had claimed Z-24 with so little warning. For the first time, he had a very bad feeling about this operation.

  Goofers Gallery, CV-33 USS Kearsarge, Task Group 58.2, At Sea, South of Nova Scotia, North Atlantic

  “The German fleet is out.” The young torpedo-bomber pilot made the remark with complete confidence.

  “How do you know, George? The German High Command in your pocket? Giving you tips?” The other pilots on the gallery were jeering. The Adie pilot had an air of smug, condescending confidence that set people’s teeth on edge. Coming from a family with money could do that.

  “That’s the fifth pallet of torpedoes that’s come aboard in the last half hour. There’s five-inch rockets and 12-inch Tiny Tims coming aboard from the aft station. We’re offloading 500 and thousand pounder HEs and taking on sixteen hundred and two thousand-pound armor piercing. We had a lot to start; now we’ve got more. We’re going to be taking on other ships for once, heavily armored ones. So, that’s the German fleet. They’ve got be coming out.”

  Although the other pilots hated to admit it, he had to be right. They watched as Kearsarge swung another pallet of the massive Tiny Tim rockets on board. At the same time, a pack of 22.4 inch torpedoes was being hoisted over to Intrepid. Between the two carriers, the ammunition ship Firedrake was working to keep the stream of anti-ship munitions flowing. A day earlier, it would have been impossible; the storm had still been at full force. Now, it had passed in the night and the weather was fine, as good as it was ever likely to be in the North Atlantic in November.

  Not far away, the aircraft carriers Reprisal and Oriskany were bombing up from the ammunition ship Great Sitkin. The carriers were helpless, their decks were cleared, their aircraft struck below or parked forward, out of the way. Riding guard was the fifth carrier in the group, the light carrier Cowpens. She was the guard carrier, responsible for providing air patrols over the group with her three squadrons of F4U-7s. Five carriers with over 400 aircraft in this task group alone, and there were four more groups just like it. Well, not quite like it, Task Group 58.1 had the new CVB Gettysburg in place of a light carrier. That gave the group more than 500 aircraft. No wonder “Wild Bill” Halsey had made that group his flag.

  Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush looked away from the flat-tops, towards the other shapes in the weak, gray sunshine. The biggest of them were the battleships New Jersey and Wisconsin, then the heavy cruisers Albany and Rochester. There had been three but Oregon City had suffered bad storm damage and been forced to head back. There were bad whispers about the ‘Orrible Titty.’ Some said she’d been built wrong, her spine twisted. Four light cruisers, Fargo, Huntingdon, Santa Fe and Miami. Eighteen destroyers filled out the group. They were DDKs, Gearing class ships whose job was to hunt and kill submarines. Protecting the carriers was the job of all those other ships. They shielded the carriers while the carriers smashed everything they took a dislike to.

  And there were four more carrier task groups just like this one. Then there was the battle line, the support groups, the munitions groups. The ASW hunter-killer groups. All intended to keep the carriers safe and fighting.

  Below them, another pallet of torpedoes swung onto the flight deck. The munitions men down there swarmed over it, striking the extra torpedoes down to the magazines. Up on the Goofers Gallery, the other pilots had to admit Bush was right; this many torpedoes, this many rockets, this many armor-piercing bombs meant they were going after the big ships of the German Fleet.

  “I’ll tell you this guys. When we find the Huns, I’m going to get me a battleship.”

  It was too much. With one accord the pilots started beating the young Lieutenant over the head with their caps. Eventually they paused for breath and the ring-leader of the attack pushed his battered cap back on. “Yeah right, George. And one day you’ll get to be President, won’t you?”

  USS Stalingrad, Hunter-Killer Group “Sitka” in the North Atlantic, north of the UK.

  “Ready for launch.” Lieutenant Pace braced himself for the slam in the back of a catapult launch. The Stalingrad had two F8F-1 Bearcats ready to go. Not far away, her sistership, the USS Moskva had two more. They’d fly as two pairs towards the contact one of their picket destroyers had spotted. If the analysis of the target’s flight pattern was right, Hunter-Killer Group Sitka had hit golden paydirt. For today, anyway.

  “Target is cruising at Angels 26, speed 200. Bearing 135 degrees. Range 165 miles” The situation report was as complete as possible to cut down radio transmissions after the fighters were launched. If this was one of Germany’s few remaining Me-264s, they wanted to give it as little warning as possible.

  Ahead of him, one of the deck crew made a winding-up motion with his hands. Pace pushed the throttle forward; the R-2800 engine picked up power, making the Bearcat shake. There came the expected thump and he was hurtling down the deck as the catapult fired. He cleared the Stalingrad’s bows and pushed the nose down. One always traded altitude for speed; no matter how little of the former one had, the latter was worth more. Underneath him, the undercarriage doors thumped closed. He sank below deck level, then he soared upwards. The Bearcat was in its element again.

  The cruise out took a little under an hour; time for the target to move roughly 200 miles in any direction. Fortunately, the German pilot was doing the north-to-south leg of a sweep. Probably checking to see what was following the storm front. It was an open question if he’d seen Hunter-Killer Group Sitka. Probably not; German radar wasn’t that good and
surface search conditions were still pretty bad. He hadn’t deviated from his course yet. He, almost certainly, didn’t know the Bearcats were coming.

  “You’re on top of him.” The fighter controller’s voice from Stalingrad was cold, unemotional. The pair of Bearcats from Moskva had already peeled away, they’d gone to full power and moved to get between the Me-264 and its base. “There are RB-29s operating. Make sure of target identification before opening fire.” With its smooth glazed nose and four radial engines, the Me-264 looked a lot like a RB-29. It was whispered that there had already been some unfortunate accidents.

  Pace spotted their target below them. The large twin tailplanes were clearly visible even though the aircraft’s dappled light and dark gray paint job blended with the sea far below. Time to open the dance. “Confirm, Me-264. Take him.”

  The two Bearcats accelerated into a long dive. Unlike the midnight blue aircraft on the fleet carriers, escort carrier group planes were painted light gray with a gloss-white belly. It cut the shadows down making it much less likely that an alert gunner would spot them. Pace was coming in from high seven o’clock; his wingman from high-five. The Me-264 had a single 20mm gun in a turret above its rear fuselage. It could fire at one attacking aircraft, not two widely-separated ones. Suddenly, the German aircraft accelerated and black smoke trailed from its engines. They’d been spotted; and the pilot had cut in his GM-1 boost. For five minutes, the bomber would be almost as fast as the fighters chasing it.

  Between dodging the stream of tracer 20mm shells from the rear turret and the GM-1 boosted engines powering the bomber, the two diving Bearcats were hardly closing the gap. It didn’t matter. Moskva’s Bearcats soared up and fired. They hit the Me-264 with long bursts of .50 caliber gunfire, from below and to the right and left. The thin black stream of smoke from the inboard port engine was suddenly transformed into a billowing cloud of black flame and dense smoke. The Me-264 abruptly slowed. The two Bearcats behind were able to close the range at last. Pace took careful aim. His .50s lashed the aft fuselage of the bomber. The 20mm tracers stopped abruptly. Gunner killed.

  The Me-264 still had a 13.2 mm machine gun in the forward upper turret, a 20mm gun firing under the belly, two more 13.2mms, one in each waist hatch and a fixed 13.2 firing forward. For all that, the loss of the 20mm gunner was critical. It meant the German aircraft was virtually defenseless against attacks from above and behind. That’s where Pace and his wingman made their next runs, raking the bomber’s aft fuselage, walking their bursts along the structure into the wings. The gray beast below them was threshing, trying to defend itself but its fangs were being methodically drawn by the four fighters. Moskva’s two planes made another pass, this time for above and on the beam. Their streams of .50 fire raked the forward fuselage. That left the other upper turret silent. The aircraft was defenseless.

  Pace was reminded of a history lesson he had once listened to, of a game when times were harder. A pack of dogs would be let loose on a blinded bear and the crowd would place bets on how long the bear would survive and how many of the dogs it could kill. This was different of course. It was possible, normal, to feel sorry for the bear. Nobody would feel sorry for the bomber below.

  Pace swept in again, his aim undisturbed by defensive fire. His .50s streamed tracer, raking into the wing roots and walking sideways towards the engines. The starboard inner engine erupted into flames as his gunfire shredded its nacelle and the Me-264 angled downwards. As Pace’s aircraft pulled away, Moskva’s team made another pass. It was the killer. One of the long wings crumpled just inboard of a burning engine and the 264 went into a helpless spin. It fell from the sky and crashed into the sea. There, it exploded; its death watched dispassionately by the gun cameras on the Bearcats.

  “We need bigger guns.” Pace’s voice was unemotional.

  “They’re coming. The new ‘Cats will have 20mms, according to the scuttlebutt.”

  “Hope they work a bit better than the last ones.” The Navy’s previous attempt at a 20mm gun had been a fiasco. The weapons usually jammed after a round or two. “Let’s go home.”

  An hour later, the Bearcats were sitting on the hangar deck being rearmed and refueled. Their gun camera film had been taken and was being flown back to Washington. There, the kill would be confirmed. Inanna would take a file from her cabinet and delete another Me-264 from Germany’s shrinking maritime reconnaissance aircraft fleet.

  Every reduction in the Luftwaffe’s small maritime reconnaissance fleet meant the fast carriers operating out in the Atlantic were that much safer. Without the aircraft to steer them to their targets, U-boats, even the Type XXIs, were virtually useless against the fast carriers. They would have to rely on luck to be in the right place at the right time. In the North Atlantic, that just didn’t cut it.

  Headquarters, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Front

  “We have a problem.” Major-General Klaus Marcks was not given to stating the obvious but there were times when a situation merited it.

  “Captain Wilhelm Lang.” Colonel Heinrich Asbach also thought this was one of the times when stating the obvious was entirely justifiable. “The question is, how do we get rid of him? And should we?”

  “We can’t, Heinie.” Marcks had a small group of officers who had been with him since the heady days in France, five years ago. The number was growing smaller as the Russian Front whittled them away, but he still depended on the survivors for advice and insight. Only a fool trusted his own feelings when there were other, better sources available. “The man has served on probably everybody’s staff over the years. He has powerful friends, the sort who could be very dangerous for this whole unit. He got us six brand new, fresh from the factory, self-propelled 150mm howitzers with a single telephone call. Do you want to take the chance that another call would send us to Archangel’sk? While he was assigned to a new post in the opposite direction?”

  Asbach shook his head. It was not a chance worth taking. Even the name Archangel’sk had a horror associated with it, something quite unlike anything else on the Russian Front. There was a legend in the German Army. Archangel’sk didn’t actually exist anymore; it had become a gateway to Hell. That the units sent there just marched into the mist covering the city and vanished as if they had never been. It was pretty close to the truth. Being ordered to Archangel’sk was the nearest thing to a mass death sentence that could be given without actually ordering up the mobile gas chambers. He reached out and took another slug of brandy. His family owned one of Germany’s oldest brandy producers and he managed to keep the officer’s mess well stocked.

  “Anyway, he isn’t actually a bad officer, Klaus.” Marcks lifted an eyebrow at that. “He knows the regulations inside out. He knows his duties and performs them well. It’s just that he has absolutely no experience at all. I guess that back in’38 we were just like him. Only, we spent all our time out here learning the reality of the war we’re stuck in. He spent that time in comfortable headquarters units, writing regulations and sending memos. He doesn’t know when the rules and regulations apply and when they do not. And he doesn’t really understand how the veterans think or listen to their experience. You heard the story about his nickname?”

  “No?”

  “He started off as being the ‘Perfectly Perfumed Prince’ and it got abbreviated to ‘Prince.’ When he heard about it, he assumed it was a term of respect, ‘Prince amongst men’ or something like that. A normal officer would know when to turn a blind eye. Not our Captain Lang. It was against regulations, so he forbade its use.”

  “What do they call him now?” Marcks was genuinely fascinated.

  “Well, the men started calling him ‘The Officer Formerly Known As Prince’ but that was too clumsy for general use so now they call him ‘Still’ because he’s still a Perfectly Perfumed Prince.”

  Marcks barked out a laugh and shook his head. “Well, that’s all very fine but it doesn’t solve our problem. We’re kicking off as soon as this storm is over. It’s clearing fr
om the west which is apparently very significant for some reason or another. The engineers have been checking the ice. The lakes and rivers are frozen hard enough to take the strain of our lighter vehicles. The heavy traffic will have to thread its way through as best it can. That includes the artillery, both the towed stuff and our newly-acquired self-propelled guns. Can we be sure than Lang won’t get carried away and drive them into a lake or something?”

  Both men sighed and inspected their brandies. As they had both suspected, the levels in the glasses were inadequate to permit deep contemplation. Asbach topped them up again.

  “I don’t think we have much choice, Klaus. If we move him out, who gets the battery instead of him? His lieutenant has even less experience and nowhere near the same level of knowledge. I think we’re going to have to leave Lang in place and just watch him carefully.” Asbach thought for a second. “There is one possibility of course.”

  “Do tell.”

  “My part of the attack is pretty close to a raid. An armored infantry column going in to try and seize those big railway guns north of here. Preferably capture them. If that’s not possible, destroy them. We’ve built the raiding group out of the recon battalion; used its halftracks and reinforced its infantry component. It’s short on tank killing power though, its armored cars have only 75s or long 50mm guns, and artillery. Only, we now have some self-propelled artillery we can take along. So if we attach Lang and his self-propelled guns to that force, it does two things. Beefs up the raid to the point where we can do useful things and put Lang in a position where he’s both under a group of experienced officers and in a prime position to get some battle-lore of his own under his belt.”