Winter Warriors

by Stuart Slade

  “Sir, Doc Tulley wants to see you, the German officer we picked up has recovered consciousness.”

  Wilkens left the bridge and found his way down to the sickbay. Doc Tulley was waiting outside. “Captain, one man has come around, the officer. He’s in a bad way. Exposure, frostbite, you name it. His temperature is 81 degrees, it’s a miracle he’s alive. We’re trying to do core warming and we’re using a new trick, inhalation warming, getting him to breathe heated air. If it’s enough, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody has ever picked up men this frozen who were still alive.”

  “Core warming?”

  “Preferentially warming his body, with hot water bottles and bricks the boiler rooms have been heating, but not his arms and legs. The army has found if you warm those, cold, acid blood from the extremities flows back to the body and stops the heart.”

  “Will he make it?”

  “He might. If gangrene doesn’t set in. If he doesn’t develop a pneumonia we can’t control. We have some penicillin on board, so he has a chance.”

  The sickbay was oven-hot; the heating turned up to maximum in an effort to get some warmth into the frozen men who had been brought on board. Wilkens sat down by the bunk. The man in it was breathing hoarsely, his face a mass of red chaps and cold-blisters.

  “I am Captain Hubert Wilkens, Commanding Officer, the United States destroyer Charles H. Roan. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  The voice was so distorted it was hardly recognizable, as if the cold had frozen and broken his vocal chords. “Captain Christian Lokken, battleship Gneisenau. My men, any saved?”

  “A few, not many.” Wilkens decided to keep the news of just how few to himself.

  “You picked us up.” The hoarse, faint, cracked voice sounded surprised.

  “Admiral Lee, commander of the Battle Line detached some of his destroyers to search for survivors.” Again Wilkens decided to be economical with the truth, the orders had been to search for shot-down pilots. Nobody had expected any German survivors.

  “The Battle Line.” Lokken seemed shocked. “Battleships also, how many?”

  “Ten.”

  The number seemed to stun Lokken although he should have know it. His voice faded even more. “It was all for nothing. If we had survived the jabos, we would still have lost. This was surely our death ride.”

  Captain’s Bridge, KMS Lutzow, South west of the Battle Line, North Atlantic

  There was no reason why they should still be afloat. Lutzow had taken three more torpedo hits and her superstructure was a mass of tangled, unrecognizable wreckage. She was still moving backwards. Her engines thudded with the grim determination to get her crew to safety. Her pumps strained beyond their maximum capacity to keep the flood waters at bay. Captain Becker had organized bucket chains to try and keep the flooding from overcoming them. They were helping a little, not much but a little. They were keeping the survivors of the crew busy and their minds away from the water that was, despite all their efforts, slowly gaining on them.

  Off to port, their last destroyer, Z-27, was painfully keeping up with them. She was crowded. She’d picked up survivors from Z-28 after that destroyer had been battered into a wreck during the last, furious, American assault. Becker had been listening as Scheer went down, too crippled to evade the horde of aircraft that had studded her with their torpedoes then drenched her with bombs and rockets. It had been a miracle that Lutzow had survived; a miracle Becker didn’t understand, he could just accept that it had been so.

  Then, they’d had another miracle. He’d got the reports from his shattered ship and realized there was no way he could make Norway. It was more than 350 miles away. At his painful 6 knots, backwards, that meant almost three days transit. His ship simply could not stay afloat that long. But, southwest, that was different. He was only just over 130 miles away from Torshaven in the Faroe Islands. Less than a day’s transit and he could make that. Just. So he’d swung his stern southwest and started the long, painful journey. Six hours later, he’d detected a large formation of ships. They were obviously enemy but had crossed his path, some 30 miles behind him, heading east. At a guess, the Amis had detached surface ships to mop up any survivors. He’d read somewhere that was their doctrine; carriers batter the enemy, then surface ships move in for the kill. Only, his change of course for the Faeroes had meant they’d missed him.

  “Damage report?”

  “We’re holding our own, Captain. The bucket brigades are helping a little and the pumps, well, they’re far above their rated capacity. The old girl is fighting hard, Sir.”

  Becker nodded. “And we can save her yet. We can’t get into Thorshavn, but we can beach her outside. Then we can get the crew ashore. If Z-27 makes it, she can probably get into the harbor.” Becker laughed grimly. “It looks like the Faeroe Islands have just acquired a

  Navy.”

  Admiral’s Bridge, USS Gettysburg CVB-43, Flagship Task Force 58

  “Sir, aircraft secured, pilots are sleeping it off. We’ve got an initial debrief, we’ll do some more details tomorrow. Our F7Fs are spotted on the deck, ready to go if there’s a need.”

  “Any word from Admiral Lee?”

  “No, Sir. They’ve done a sweep south and east of the kill zone, they found nothing. Formation Nan must have got the cripples. He’s complaining bitterly Admiral. He says you might at least have left him something for his guns. Oh, and the destroyers have picked up some survivors from the German ships. They’re in a pitiful state Admiral; the cans are doing what they can.” The Exec thought for a second. “Sorry Sir, that was a horrible pun.”

  “I’ll forgive it. Any word on our pilots?”

  “Mariners picked up a dozen; floatplanes from the cruisers about the same. A few ditched close enough to the screen to be picked up, total of about 30. As for the rest, we’ll have to assume they’re gone Admiral. On board the carriers, we’ve about seventy or eighty with wounds and burns from deck crashes. We’ve got around 400 dead in all. Group Sitka says it’s lost about 200 with the same number wounded. They’re heading west for Churchill and a repair yard.”

  “Pass word out to the groups. We’ll pull back; west then south west. All groups to make up a strike wave to hit whatever targets we have listed in the Londonderry area. Since we’re passing, we might as well make use of what munitions we have left.”

  The Exec consulted his flipboard. “We’re OK for land attack munitions. Lots of HE stuff, we didn’t use much of that. We’re out of Tiny Tims and rocket bombs, pretty much out of torpedoes and badly down on armor piercing 2,000 pounders, 1,600s and 1,000s. We’ve hardly any 500s. We’re low on chemicals for napalm as well. We can give one set of land targets a good seeing to. Wouldn’t be wise to hang around too long though.”

  “Agreed. The courier plane is ready?” Halsey had spent hours writing up a detailed account of the battle. What had gone right, what had gone wrong, the lessons to be learned. It was only a preliminary document. The day’s action would be as closely and avidly studied as any in naval history. There was a naval historian on board, a man called Morison. He would be writing the popular history of the battle, one that would be a rare example of a history written by an expert who had actually seen the events in question. That raised an interesting point. “I guess we have to give a name to this battle.”

  He walked over to the chart and looked down. It was smeared and smudged with the notations that had been put on it in the frantic planning that had taken place over the last 24 hours. Halsey wished he could put on his reading glasses but they wouldn’t fit the image, not here on his command bridge. The nearest patch of land was a small group of islands about 250 plus miles south west of them. The problem was that he couldn’t make out the name.

  “These islands here. What are they?”

  Across the chart table Ensign Zipster glanced at the map. He couldn’t make out the name either, but he was aware of the need for a young Ensign to impress his Admiral at every chance. Anyway, there was only one gro
up of Islands north of the UK wasn’t there? The British had a naval base in them or something. “They’re the Orkneys Sir.” Zipster spoke with authority, tinged with a slight level of condescension that nobody else had known.

  Halsey looked at him sharply. He hadn’t missed the inflection in the voice. Still, it was the information he needed. “Very well then, We’ll call it the Battle of the Orkneys.”

  Airbase Muyezersky-5, Karelia, Kola Peninsula

  Despite the Russian work teams who had been out all night, there was still slush on the runway. Just enough to drag on the wheels and lengthen the A-38Ds take-off run. Captain John Marosy mentally calculated how much the effect was likely to be as he ran his R-3350 engines up. His hands moved, dropping the flaps to the 20 degree setting, while his eyes watched his instruments as the engine temperature climbed. The R-3350 was a temperamental beast with a habit of eating cylinders when it overheated. A valve’s temperature would climb beyond the limits and burn. Then the head would disintegrate and chew up one of the eighteen cylinders. Next, the cylinder would go airborne and chew up the whole engine. At that point the hydraulic fluid would be lost and he wouldn’t be able to feather the prop. It would over-speed and come off, slashing at the fuselage on its way. Usually at that point, the whole engine would seize and twist right off the wing. On the whole, it was better not to let the engines overheat.

  He was pressing hard on the brakes but Hammer Blow was still shifting forward. Ready or not, it was time to go. Up ahead of him, the runway clearance crews saw the A-38 start to pick up speed and scattered to clear the way. Most of them anyway, a few took the chance of stopping to clear one last spadeful of slush before jumping clear. Then, the white and gray A-38 raced past them, its twin tail lifted as the aircraft picked up speed. A few waved as he passed but Marosy didn’t respond, not now. His hands were full dealing with the Grizzlies take-off run. Like most over-powered aircraft, its flying characteristics were unforgiving. The torque on its take-off run was as much as he could control. Ground-looping would be a sad way to start a mission. Embarrassing.

  Marosy blinked as Hammer Blow rotated and lifted over the snowfield. The storm had past and the air was crystal clear, the early morning sun reflections off the snowfields blinded him. Blinded wasn’t an understatement, snow-blindness was a real problem. That was why the Americans had brought along one of the war’s less obvious secret weapons. Sunglasses; available in huge quantities. They were bringing them in by the millions and distributing them as needed. The wire-framed dark glasses had even become something of a fashion statement back home. Those who could get them flaunted them. Beside him Lightning Bolt had moved into position on his wing. There were supposed to be four aircraft in this formation but Angelina had been one of the aircraft destroyed in the A-4 bombardment while Worst Nightmare had developed engine trouble and been pulled from the flight line. That left just two.

  “Where are we going?”

  In the back, Sergeant Bressler had his map spread out on the table. Originally, the second crewman on the A-38 had controlled the two twin .50 machine guns in remote controlled turrets. The D-model had those stripped out and replaced them with four fixed guns in the outer wing panels. The reduction in weight had reduced the strain on the engines and added a little to maximum speed. Now, the second crewman served only as a navigator and radio operator. He was vital in that role. He could speak with the forward air controllers on the ground and leave the pilot to worry about avoiding German flak.

  “Hitting an armored column moving up from the south. Its threatening one of the Navy’s railway gun batteries so we’re to slow it down a bit. Steer course 178, hold altitude, 2000 feet. We’re about 15 minutes out.”

  “Armored. Panzers?”

  “Panzer-grenadiers. According to the recon patrols, it’s a mixed column. Mostly mechanized infantry with an armored car unit and a self-propelled artillery battery.”

  Marosy sucked his teeth. Panzer-grenadiers meant flak, a lot of it. Each half track had a 20mm gun and there would certainly be at least one quad twenty or twin thirty. And that wasn’t the worst of it. If there were infantry, there would be spirals. They’d only appeared in the last few months and weren’t that effective but they were yet another thing to worry about. He scanned downwards, trying to pick out the vehicles on the ground against the glaring snowfields. There were theoretical armchair “experts” who decried camouflage, who would point at the vehicles on display or in pictures and sneer that the elaborate paint schemes didn’t fool him. Well, it was interesting that people like that were very keen to fire off their opinions but very reluctant to get involved in any other form of firing.

  Up here, trying to spot white vehicles against a white background, camouflage was very effective. It cost aircraft. It meant that the Grizzlies had to stay higher so they could search more effectively, then dive down for their attacks. That gave the Germans a few seconds of warning, time for them to start to disperse and get their guns lined up. No, Marosy thought, camouflage was effective all right.

  His eyes continued scanning downwards, looking for the telltale signs of a vehicle convoy moving. It could be anything; tracks on the snow although thickness and freshness made that unlikely. The vehicles would be moving on the roads. He wouldn’t see the roads themselves, they were white as well, but he might see the shadows. The sharp, clear sun was a friend as well as an enemy. It cast shadows of banks and vehicles where the object itself wasn’t so easily seen.

  In fact, it was the sun that helped him, although it worked in a different way that he had expected. His eyes caught a flash on the ground, a reflection off a windshield perhaps, or a pair of binoculars. Whatever it was, it caught his attention and focused him on a section of road underneath. That’s when he saw the vehicles and knew that they had seen him. Given the snarl of four R-3350s and the altitude he was flying at, they would have had to be blind, deaf and stupid to have missed the pair of Grizzlies. They were dispersing as much as the ground and the snow let them. He knew for certain that they were getting their flak ready.

  “Lightning Bolt, I’ve got them. 11 o’clock, about two miles out. There’s a ridgeline over at 3 o’clock. We’ll run from behind that.”

  “Got you, Hammer Blow.”

  Marosy put Hammer Blow into a long curving dive, heading for the terrain masking provided by the ridgeline. The two Grizzlies would make their first run from there, trying to see the anti-aircraft vehicles and pick them off with their 75mm guns. The ground swept up. The ridge masked the position of the German unit as the Grizzlies leveled out behind it. Then, the two aircraft swung around, skimmed the top of the rise and went straight at the German halftracks. They’d already spread out, trying to reduce the casualties when the inevitable napalm drops started. The first flicker of tracers were already starting to lick out. These days, every German half-track had a 20mm cannon, the days of the vehicles having rifle-caliber machine guns were long gone. That was why the A-38 had replaced most of the other twin-engined ground attack aircraft; its 75mm gun could knock out the flak guns from outside the range of the 20mm.

  Marosy saw one of the half-tracks giving a dense stream of tracers. It had to be a quad-twenty vehicle; probably the biggest threat. He lined up and squeezed the firing trigger. The aircraft lurched as the 75mm in its nose fired. Through the muzzle flash he saw his first round had landed short. His second was a little to the left but the third turn the half-track into a red and orange fireball. Then, he saw something else, streaks of gray smoke leaving the ground and heading for him. Spirals.

  Mechanized Column, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula

  “Disperse! Get those vehicles separated. Gunners open fire when you have the target.” Colonel Asbach yelled the orders out. They had little time to prepare for the attack that had suddenly developed. They’d seen the Grizzlies of course, and heard their engines. For a while it seemed that the Ami jabos had missed them and would head off south. Then, the aircraft had turned slightly towards them, before diving a
way to the west. Everybody in the column knew that they had been spotted. That meant the column would soon be fighting for its life.

  At the rear of the column the six self-propelled 150mm howitzers were frantically backing up, trying to get clear of the rest of the column. Their trucks were doing likewise and doing a better job of it. The English-built AECs were renowned for their ability to cope with bad conditions. When they worked at all. The British truck workers had a habit of building subtle defects into their vehicles; an axle over-tempered perhaps so it fractured under stress, or a towing bar whose mounting welds would fail when an extra load was put on it. More importantly, they weren’t overloaded. The self-propelled guns were. Like most German self-propelled artillery, the guns used captured enemy tank chassis. In this case, some British cruiser tank captured back in 1942. The Covenanter or something similar. It didn’t matter, what did was that the chassis was overloaded and clumsy. Still, the battery was better than towed guns.

  The two anti-aircraft half tracks attached to the artillery battery had already swerved to a halt. The crews on the quadruple 20mm guns elevated their weapons and scanned for the approaching jabos. Ahead of them, the half-track belonging to the anti tank squad of one of the mechanized infantry platoons had also stopped. Strange figures were emerging from it, looking like running tents with a stove pipe sticking out. The stove pipes were the Panzerschreck rocket launchers, the running tents were the men who were going to be firing them. To his astonishment, Sergeant Heim saw Captain Lang jump from his kubelwagen and run over to that half-track. What, he wondered, was Captain Still up to now? And would any of the unit survive it?

  “Sergeant! A cape, a Panzerschreck launcher and a Fliegerschreck rocket. Now!” Lang’s voice was urgent, there was little time. In the back of the vehicle, the anti-tank unit Sergeant looked doubtful. Captain Still’s reputation had spread beyond the artillery unit. Lang’s hand dropped to his pistol. “Now, Sergeant.”