Winter Warriors

by Stuart Slade

  Then, a man ran out from the gallery. He passed the tail that stuck out of the fire, and jumped onto the burning wing. Oblivious to the flames, he reached through the shattered bubble canopy and slashed at the harness. Whatever he did, it must have worked because he dragged the pilot out, through the flames licking around the wings and onto the deck. Other crewmen were waiting with extinguishers and fire-fighting kit. The two men staggered clear of the fire, their flight suits and coveralls already burning. The deck crew sprayed them both with foam. Then, the medics carried them down to the sickbay. If they were lucky, their suits would have protected them; they’d get away with minor burns. If they weren’t. . ...

  “CAG, get me that crewman’s name.” Alameda’s voice had a catch in it. “If he doesn’t get a Bronze Star for that, I’ll order a strike on the Navy Department.” Below them, a jeep rammed the burning Bearcat and tipped it over the side.

  “A Bronze Star, Captain?” In CAG’s mind, a higher decoration was merited. The thought was interrupted by an orphaned cripple from Moskva landing. He recognized it; the Indian Chief nose art was very distinctive. “That’s Darkshade’s aircraft. One of the planes shot up by the F4Us. You know, I wouldn’t care to be a Corsair pilot on an Apache reservation any time in the next twenty years.”

  Hangar Deck, USS Moskva, Hunter-Killer Group “Sitka “ in the North Atlantic, north of the UK.

  There was a gaping hole overhead, ripped clean through the flight deck. That wasn’t altogether a bad thing. The bad part was that it allowed a constant supply of air to the fires from the crashed Ju-87. The good part was that it also allowed the heat and smoke to escape. That made the jobs of the firefighting crews much easier. Another good thing was that the damage was contained within and above the hangar deck. The tough tanker design of the Commencement Bay class had stood Moskva in good stead. The bad news was that the hit was much further aft than on Stalingrad among the parked Avengers. Most were destroyed or so badly damaged that they were fit only to be pushed over the side. Men had been working on those aircraft, getting them defueled and sealed down. They’d almost succeeded and their efforts made the fire much less catastrophic than it could have been. More than fifty of those men had paid the price. They’d been caught in the explosion and fires as the wreckage of the Ju-87 had crashed down on top of them.

  Chaplain Frank Westover was working his way through the chaos. He was helping where he could, keeping out of the way where he couldn’t. Mostly he was keeping out of the way because the area of the fire was reserved for those with the right gear. Westover concentrated his work far forward, away from the heat of the fires, where the casualty evacuation station had been set up. Most of the men caught in the explosion and fire were dead. They’d died quickly but agonizingly as they had been soaked in blazing gasoline. Any Chaplain who’d served on a carrier knew the terrible burns caused by raw gasoline. These were as bad as any he’s seen.

  Two medics were working on a hideously burned man. They’d pumped him full of morphine and were trying and keep him alive even though it was obviously hopeless. Westover saw them losing the battle and he slipped in to administer the last rites. He had no idea who the man was, which religion he belonged to or anything else about him. The burns were far too bad for that. He knew that the words would be a comfort to the dying man no matter who he was and the just and merciful God that Westover believed in wouldn’t refuse a man absolution because the words weren’t quite the right ones. As Westover finished, the man gave his last sigh, a little puff of smoke coming from his mouth.

  “Any more mortally wounded?” Westover asked quietly.

  “No, we’ve got the ones who have a chance down in sickbay and the rest didn’t make it. I’m not sure how to say this Father, but you might have a word with Smitty. He’s over there, by the bow 40mm quad. His friend bought it and he’s taking it real bad. You know why.”

  Westover nodded. He made his way forward, where the hangar deck led out to the quadruple 40mm mount on the bow. The dead had been moved there, out of the way of the battle against the fires further aft. In one corner a sailor was knelt over a burned corpse, the charred head cradled in his lap while the man prayed over him.

  “Mind if I pray with you, sailor?” Westover spoke quietly.

  The man, Smith, started at the voice. Westover looked down at the burned body and marveled at the love that could lead one friend to tolerate the hideous sight of what had once been another. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you, but I’d like to pray with you, if you don’t mind.”

  “He was my friend Father. Now he’s gone.” It could have come out wrong, a rejection of either Westover or the truth but it didn’t. It came out as what it was, an anguished plea for help and understanding.

  “And your love honors him. And us.” Westover knelt quietly beside the body, made the sign of the cross and started to pray quietly.

  “You don’t understand, Father. Nobody does. He was my special friend.” There was almost defiance in the word special.

  “I know. Smitty, everybody knows. Just because nobody said anything doesn’t mean they didn’t know. And your shipmates care enough about you to make sure I came over to help you in your time of grief.”

  Westover left it there; more words would have been meaningless. There were many things he could have said, many that he would not; it was neither the time nor the place. Instead he quietly started to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, hearing Smitty pick up the words and join him. The prayer might be a comfort; it might not. At least Smitty knew now that he hadn’t been left alone, that he was part of a crew who looked out for him.

  Engine Room, KMS Werner Voss Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

  Only the pumps were keeping the Voss afloat. The damage control crews did everything they could but the situation had been dire even before the last strike had put three more torpedoes into the Werner Voss. Rockets and bombs had added damage but it was the torpedoes that were doing for her. To be more precise, the ship’s appalling construction hindered all attempts to control the flooding that had finished her.

  Lieutenant Commander Siegfried Ehrhardt felt for the damage control crews. He’d seen their frustration as they closed and dogged the “watertight” hatches, only to see water leaking around the supposed seals or spraying through cracks where the hatch didn’t fit its frame properly. As a result, flooding spread constantly. Nowhere in any great amounts; just enough to slowly and surely eat away at the ship’s stability. Even worse, all the torpedo hits had been on the same side. She’d taken at least five torpedoes; only one had been amidships where it directly threatened the engine rooms. That torpedo had struck the cemented armor of the lower strake of the ship’s side protection. The armor had been brittle; it had had fractured under the stress of the heavy explosion. Pieces of plating were blasted right through the torpedo protection system and into the portside boiler room. Needless to say, the room was flooding. The spread into the machinery spaces was proving impossible to stop.

  Two more hits had been up by the bows; the remaining pair dead aft. The ship’s stern and screws were gone; now a tangled mass of wreckage, her shafts bent and twisted beyond repair. The Good Lord alone knew how much damage they’d done before their rotation could be stopped. From the way the ship was settling by the stern, a lot. A bent shaft could rip a ship’s guts out. Ehrhardt had an uneasy feeling they had.

  “List has reached 30 degrees, Sir.” The talker in the engine rooms gave the message but his voice was shaking. A 30 degree list meant a sinking ship. Ships might make transient rolls to greater degrees than that, but a set list that great meant that the game was up. As if in answer to his thoughts, the internal phone rang again. Ehrhardt answered it then put the phone carefully back in its slot.

  “The order to abandon ship is to be given. Internal communications have broken down. One of the officers called us in case we did not get the word when the order is made. We are to secure down here, set the scuttling charges, and then make our way o
ut.”

  “The pumps, Sir?” With the screws gone, the pumps and generators were the only things left of value.

  “Forget them, the Vossie is done for.”

  “How are we going to get out?” The stoker’s voice had an air of panic in it; discipline in the engineering spaces was breaking down fast. There was a reason for the question. Water was already seeping through the overhead hatches and down the bulkheads. That meant there was flooding above them. Ehrhardt could guess what was happening. The uptakes from the port and center boiler rooms ran across the ship to the funnel on the starboard side. As the Werner Voss settled and rolled, water flooded those uptakes and then poured down into the machinery spaces. At a guess, rockets and bombs from the Ami jabos had lacerated the sections above them and that flooding was spreading uncontrollably. Still, there was an answer.

  “We will use the trunked access. Open the hatch.” The British had built the Werner Voss with trunked access to all her machinery and magazine spaces. An armored tube ran upwards, unpierced and uninterrupted, to an upper deck so the men down below had a chance to escape a sinking ship. The trunking was even lagged with asbestos so it could be used when the decks above were burning.

  The access hatch to the escape trunk took only a second to release. Ehrhardt was mildly surprised by that. The Voss had so many sly defects in her construction, he’d half expected the hatch to be jammed. But, the dockyard workers who had built the carrier were men of the sea as well. They wouldn’t deprive a fellow seaman of his last chance to escape from drowning. They wouldn’t leave him trapped deep inside a sinking ship.

  “Charges set? Delay five minutes. Everybody follow me.” The charges would blow the valves off the seacocks and open the engine rooms to the sea. The Voss would go down fast after that. There were rungs set in the steel oval that formed the trunked access tube. It would be a long, exhausting climb, but better that the alternative. Ehrhardt took a deep breath and started to climb the trunk that bypassed all the decks in between and eventually would end on the main deck. The escape route.

  Halfway up, Ehrhardt heard the dull thud of the charges going off. It was strange how the trunked access tunneled all the noise upwards. That included the roar of water entering the machinery spaces and starting to flood the trunking. He’d ordered the bottom hatch closed by the last man in, but there wasn’t a watertight hatch on the Voss and he didn’t see why that one should be any different. The upper hatch was in reach now. Ehrhardt grabbed the wheel and spun it, undogging the hatch. Then, he pushed up.

  The hatch opened a few centimeters. Three, perhaps four, no more than that. Then it jammed. Ehrhardt banged at it desperately but it would not move. Then, he got up close and peered through the crack. There was a metal block welded just so. It prevented the dogs on the hatch from opening properly. There wasn’t much holding the hatch shut, just a centimeter or so of steel, but it might as well have welded the whole hatch closed. He’d been right. The dockyard workers had been men of the sea; they’d known just what to do. A tiny modification, so small that it could hardly be noted, but one superbly designed to punish the men who had taken this ship away from its rightful owners. Ehrhardt was trapped in the trunked access, his men strung out beneath him. They were doomed to die one at a time as the waters rose and drowned them. And he would be last, having had to listen to them die. Ehrhardt wept in frustration and despair. Just for a moment, somewhere tucked away in a buried part of his mind, he thought he could hear a peal of laughter echo through the steel structure of the ship.

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

  The first wave had been bad enough. The second had been hideous. Just as many of the bent-winged jabo-devils as before, but three times as many of the big torpedo planes. Some of them were a new type, one nobody had seen before. They carried an even deadlier load. Two torpedoes each and of the first eight that had attacked Graf Zeppelin, one had put both of its eels into her. They’d hit so close together that the holes they had blasted in her hull had merged into one. The torpedo defense system had failed; and the aft turbine rooms had flooded, bringing the Graf Zeppelin to a shuddering halt. That had done the inevitable. It had attracted the rest of the group and they’d swarmed her the way flies swarmed honey; leaving their attack on poor, shattered Leipzig to turn on the crippled Graffie. Another sixteen torpedoes dropped. This time the Graffie had lost the speed and agility that had helped her survive the previous attacks. Seven hit her, three right aft, three amidships, one in the extreme bow. Two of those torpedoes ruptured the aviation spirit stores and the carrier was turning into an inferno.

  Brinkmann looked around at the shattered bridge. Dietrich was dead; most of the bridge crew were dead. The strafing had been ruthless, relentless. Once the jabos had dropped their bombs and fired their rockets, they’d come back to lash the ships with their machine guns and cannon. Even the men trying to abandon ship hadn’t been spared. The jabos hosed them with bullets and shells just the same.

  By the end, it had been pure slaughter. The ships’ gun crews were dead; the ships themselves battered and broken by the relentless attack. Voss was going down fast. Leipzig, gutted by bombs and rockets, had already slipped beneath the waves. Nurnberg would follow her soon. Sixteen of the older torpedo planes had concentrated on her and scored two hits. One had blown the bows off; the other opened her engine rooms. Four more of them had dropped bombs on her. Big ones, thousand kilos? At least that. They’d stoved her sides in. Brinkmann was reminded of a street riot back in Dortmund many years before. He and his fellows had cornered a communist. After they’d knocked him down, they’d kicked his ribs in. Now he’d watched the Amis do the same to one of his cruisers. I wonder if Nurnberg cried for its mother while it died, the way that communist had when we left him bleeding to death in the gutter?

  The destroyers had suffered badly as well. Rockets had done for them, mostly the big ones from the torpedo planes. Z-10, Z-14 and Z-15 had been hit hard and early. The bent-wing jabos hammered them with 500 kilo bombs and rockets, then the torpedo planes finished them off. Z-16 had been torpedoed. Brinkmann wasn’t certain whether it had been intended for her or whether she’d just caught a stray.lt didn’t really matter which, it had broken her in half and sent her down in less than four minutes. He hadn’t seen what had happened to Z-4 and Z-5; they’d been up front but now they were gone. Only Z-20 was left. By a miracle she’d survived with severe topside damage but her hull and machinery were untouched. She was coming alongside to pick up the survivors from the Zeppelin.

  Brinkmann looked around again. Sinking ships. Burning ships. Shattered ships. All doomed. The Ami airstrikes were ferocious beyond belief, beyond anything we had conceived. They’d never stopped. They‘d just hammered us over and over, with every weapon they had; no mercy, no hesitation. While they’d had ammunition, they‘d used it. Then, he picked himself up from the deck where he had fallen. The mine stowage aft must have exploded. He was surprised it hadn’t gone earlier. It had been surrounded by fire from the ruptured aft aviation spirit tanks. Odd, I can’t remember the explosion or being thrown down. It had been the last straw though; the Graffie was sinking fast by the stern. Z-20 was coming alongside now, it was time to leave.

  Overhead, the seagulls circled the dying ships.

  Curly Battery B, US Navy 5th Artillery Battalion, Kola Peninsula.

  This was the time that the railway guns came into their own. For days, the snowstorm had grounded all the tactical aircraft. The big guns, the U.S. Navy’s 14 and 16-inch weapons, the Russian 12-inch and the German 11-inch took up the burden of supporting the troops. Not that there was much direct support to be done. The same foul weather that grounded the air forces also pretty much froze the ground troops in place. Froze was the operative word, literally and metaphorically. Only the ski patrols had been out, but when the storm was at its height, even those had hunkered down to wait it out. The big units, regiments, divisions, had retreated into their cantonments an
d stayed put. Perfectly sensible; any sort of serious military operations had been impossible.

  “Supporting the ground troops” really meant firing harassment and interdiction missions. A couple of times, they’d been lucky and they’d had a fix on a major enemy position. Then, the three great guns had fired dozens of rounds at the location. Mostly, though, they’d fired single rounds at predicted enemy positions. In other words, wasted ammunition. The German Army wasn’t stupid. They knew what looked like a good cantonment position on the map, knew that the enemy could read maps as well, and avoided likely targets. The same foul weather that grounded the tactical aircraft had also grounded the Rivet Rider communications intercept planes. Mostly they were converted C-47s and their all-weather ability was very limited. That left, Larry, Curly and Moe firing almost blind. Frustrating.

  Still, the worst of the storm had passed; the howling blizzard of snow had settled back to a steady fall. The teams who had been trying to keep the railway tracks clear for the guns were on top of the task at last. All was well with the world, or would be sooner or later. Commander James Perdue shuddered slightly at the thought of how long the task might take. He surveyed the mess on his plate. According to the label on the can, it was Dinty Moore’s beef and vegetable stew. Perdue had eaten so much of this particular stew that he was beginning to take a strong dislike to Mister Moore. More particularly, he was taking an even stronger dislike, bordering on hatred, to Mister Moore’s beef stew. The worst part of it was he couldn’t just throw it away. Since the German breakthrough to the White Sea last year, every scrap of food for the armies in the Kola Peninsula was being brought in by convoy from Canada. Wasting food was a court martial offense. Commander James Perdue had already decided that when he got home, he was going to devote the rest of his life to eating chicken.