by Stuart Slade
“Well, they’d damned well better not collapse then, hadn’t they?” Rockingham looked at the map, envisaging what his front like had to look like. “And there’s no damned reason why they should. This infiltration and hedgehog trick is all very well. The Finns made good use of it during the Winter War and the early stage of the Continuation War, but those days are gone. We’ve got more tactical air than we know what to do with and our units are a lot more self-contained. When we get through to the units that have been cut off, tell them they are to hold their ground and not try to break out. We’ll come to get them. Tell them that if they run short of supplies, we’ll drop them by air. Get that out as soon as we have transmission.”
“Sir, we heard about the RCAMC post. Is it true?’
“So I’m told, I haven’t seen it for myself.” The Signals sergeant swore under his breath, quietly vowing to get word of what had happened out to the front line units. They would take a due and dispassionate revenge for the crime.
Rockingham left the bunker as carefully as he’d entered it. Next thing was to get to the aid post that the survivors of the medical unit had set up and exchange a few rude jokes with the wounded. All part of keeping unit morale up. While he was doing it, he could find out how long General Rodgers was going to be out of action for. Then back to the radio bunker to start coordinating with the units that were cut off. Telling them to hang on, stand fast and wait to be relieved in place was one thing. He had to make sure they could see they were getting the support they needed to do it.
Hedgehog, The Regina Rifle Regiment, Kola Front
“Major Gillespie? A word please.” Lieutenant Colonel Haversham had got the orders a minute or so earlier.
“Sir?”
“Divisional headquarters are back on the net. Their general orders to all units are to hold in place; we’re not to try and break out. Instead, we will fight our ground where we are. The rest of the division will come and fight their way through to relieve us.”
“Makes sense Sir. I’ve been reading up on what happened to Russian units that got cut off like this. It wasn’t being cut off that chewed them up, it was their own efforts to break out. They weakened themselves so much that when the Finns finally moved to liquidate the pockets, there wasn’t much the Russians could do to stop them. So we’re to stay put?”
“That’s right. Rocky’s arranging for air and artillery support and says we’ll get supply drops if we need them.”
“Rockingham’s arranging it? I thought he was 6th Division when it finally arrives?”
“He is. I guess General Rodgers is out of it and Rocky has taken over in his place. There’s bad rumors coming out of Division. Apparently the headquarters units got chewed up. Including the RCAMC detachment.”
“Damn.”
“Anyway go spread the word, everybody to dig in deep. Make sure the front line is continuous. The Finns are masters at slipping through any holes that we leave and we don’t want them in our back areas. Above all, nobody and I mean nobody leaves the perimeter until we get relieved. And if we’ve got artillery and air coming in, we’ll be calling it in almost on our own heads. The deeper we dig in the better. Last thing we want is casualties from our own supporting fire.”
“Especially if the Yanks are delivering it. You know what their pilots are like. Over-enthusiastic.”
That, Haversham thought, was putting it politely. The Canadian troops had a saying about the Yank fighter-bomber pilots, they were unerringly accurate. Every bomb they dropped hit the ground. Somewhere. Then, he had a strange sensation, as if his own thoughts had been turned into reality. A whistling noise.
“INBOUND!” The shouting was all over the perimeter, Haversham glanced around to see figures diving for cover. That was probably a good idea and he copied it. The explosions followed a split second after he made it to the ground. They were mortars, 82s? Perhaps 50s? They were light cracks, not the heavy thuds of the medium mortars. The ripple of explosions lasted for barely minute and then the scene was silent again.
“Fire back, Sir?” Gillespie picked himself out of the snow. All over the hedgehog, the troops were doing the same. Miraculously despite the number of explosions, nobody seemed to have been hurt. The tiny charge on the German 50mm mortar had combined with the thick snow to produce a lot of barks and no bites. Haversham knew they wouldn’t be that lucky again.
“No. Waste of ammunition. Those were 50mm mortars, the crews will have moved long before we can put fire down on them. That’s what they’re trying to goad us into doing. Plus get a measure of what we’ve got in here. See if we can get support from the outside. We need to hoard what we have in here with us. Goes for food as well as ammunition. Gillespie, get an inventory made of what supplies we have here and what we need urgently.” Haversham sprinted over to the radio section. It was time to fight a war the Yank way. Hole up, form a defensive perimeter around their radio operator and let him fight them with the divisional artillery. It wasn’t soldiering the way his father or grandfather would have understood, making sure a kid could eat his can of beans undisturbed while he blasted the enemy with somebody else’s artillery but it was the low-cost way of fighting a war. Low cost in terms of Canadian lives anyway. That was what was important.
“Get in touch with headquarters. Tell them we’re coming under fire. If there’s support available, we could use it on the perimeter.” It was time, Haversham thought, to start educating the Finnish Army on the facts of life. One of the earliest lessons would be that there were consequences for actions. That lesson could be applied on a lot of levels.
Finnish 12th Infantry Division, Kola Front
Lieutenant Martti Ihrasaari wasn’t particularly happy at this point. Having been detached and sent on this infiltration mission had allowed him to get out from under the crushing dead weight of the divisional and regimental commands for a while. When the Canadian division had collapsed, the rest of the division had moved up as well. Now he was back under their command. He’d got a cursory ‘well done’ for his roadblock that had this battalion bottled up along the road but now he was just back to being a small cog in a big machine. One that didn’t necessarily have his interests at heart.
What had just happened was a good example. That quick flurry of mortar fire had been supposed to wake the Canadians up and make them fire off their counter-battery salvoes, wasting their ammunition and revealing their position. The crews of the little Model 36 mortars had gone as soon as they’d finished their fire mission of course. That was the one good thing about those mortars. It was a good tactic in theory, but it had no regard for the people who were left and who couldn’t move away. The really annoying point was that it hadn’t worked. The Canadian position was still silent.
Then Ihrasaari heard a threatening roar, one that came from overhead and grew closer all the time. He knew instantly what it was. Artillery and not the pipsqueak little 50mm mortars either. This was the big stuff, Canadian 5.5 inch guns or Ami 155s. He felt his stomach clench and his body try to drive itself deeper into the snow. There was one good thing about this. Artillery came down at an angle and the shells would bury themselves in the snow before exploding so much of their force was directed down into the ground. The little mortar shells came straight down and their explosions were much more effective -for their size. That didn’t change the fact that their size was tiny compared with the big inbounds.
Ihrasaari was wrong. The shells didn’t explode deep in the ground. They burst in the air above the Finnish positions around the Canadian hedgehog. Their fragments lashed down at the troops in their dug-outs and foxholes. The first two patterns of shells were bad enough, but the third was sheer hell. Those shells didn’t explode in the air; they hit the ground and went off with a curious muffled explosion. The burst pattern was strange as well. The cloud of smoke was greater than he’d expected and had curious white tendrils that leapt out of it.
Perhaps tentacles was a better word, Ihrasaari thought, they reminded him of the octopus he had se
en once at an aquarium.
Ihrasaari saw the white smoke cloud rolling towards him. A smoke-screen? Were the Canadians trying to break out of their fortifications already? He knew that’s what the divisional commanders wanted; the besieged troops to exhaust themselves in break-out attempts but this was very early for that. When the smoke engulfed him, Ihrasaari felt the heat creasing his skin. It caught him in the throat and caused him to erupt in an explosive fit of coughing. He saw his men were surrounded by a snowstorm of small, white particles that floated down upon them. Then, he realized what the rounds were and the idea filled him with instant terror. These were white phosphorus rounds, incendiaries, anti-personnel. The men who had been hit by the little snowstorm were screaming in pain and terror. Their clothes sizzled and burned as the flakes landed. They tried brushing them off but the effort only made things worse. When their hands touched the stuff the little flakes caused a horrible burn, increasing in intensity as it burrowed into their flesh.
He tried to run over to his men. Some were rolling in the snow, trying to put out the fires that were eating into them. He knew it was no good, that the white phosphorus was dissolving into the fatty tissues of their bodies where it would prevent the wounds healing. As he thought that, he heard another roar overhead. Another series of the airbursts flailed the ground with fragments. His suspicions had been right. This wasn’t going to be like fighting the Russians.
Hedgehog, The Regina Rifle Regiment, Kola Front
“That’s all we’re getting Sir. Battery shoot. Two rounds per gun of proximity-fused airbursts, one of Willie Pete and a last proximity salvo as an envoi. I hope that for what the Finns received they were truly grateful.” The forward artillery observer switched his radio link off and went back to eating his lunch. A can of beans, Haversham noted.
Bridge, KMS Lutzow, North East of the Faroe Islands, North Atlantic
More problems?”
Captain Becker rubbed his eyes. He was deathly tired and the bitter cold had long seeped into his bones. There was no shelter from it, Lutzow was too torn up for that. Just a shattered pile of steel slowly, painfully, heading her way towards an inevitable end on the rocks outside Thorshaven. “Diesels are overheating. It’s not surprising, we were never built to go backwards this long. The intakes are designed to scoop up water while we are going forward, not backwards. The flow isn’t enough and the engines aren’t being cooled properly. Can we turn around and go forward for a while?
The Damage Control Officer thought, or tried to. His mind wasn’t working properly; hunger, cold, exhaustion and fear had shrouded him in a blanket that seemed to strangle every thought before he could even get it out. He breathed deeply, trying to compose himself. “How far are we out, Sir?”
“Thirty kilometers, perhaps fifty? No more than that. If we can just keep running for four more hours, we can make it to the rocks.”
“We’ve got more timbers up on the false bow, we’ve stiffened it a bit. Provided we don’t go too fast, it should hold. For an hour or two, to cool the diesels at worst, get us in at best.”
“Captain.” The Navigator’s voice was slurred also. “Why don’t we send Z-27 ahead? If we go down, there’s nothing they can do for us. If we don’t, they can spread the word, get us some help. Get the men ashore across the rocks or get fishing boats out to take off the wounded. Anything.”
“Good idea. Do it. By signal lamp.” Becker rubbed his eyes again and saw Z-27 pulling away from the sinking cruiser. “Turn us around, we’ll go forward.”
The orders were carried aft by word of mouth since the ship’s internal communications had long since failed. Under his feet, Becker felt Lutzow shudder and start to swing. Behind him, the long line of men passing buckets of oil-stained water from below stopped work and looked around. Was the ship going down at last? Then they saw her make her slow, anguished turn and realized what was happening. Wearily, they started the bucket chain again, painfully passing the flood water from one hand to the other.
One of the men looked down suddenly at the contents of his bucket. “Hey, I recognize this lot. We threw it over the side three hours ago.”
There was a tired surge of laughter from around him; then back to throwing the buckets of water over the side. Becker found himself looking over the brutally-amputated bows of his ship. She was going forward again.
“Engineers? How are our engines?”
“Cooling slightly Sir.” He nodded. That had solved one problem but had it created another?
“Damage Control, what is the situation up forward?”
The reply came quickly. “Leakage is down a bit, Sir. Water still coming through but it hasn’t increased the way I thought it would.”
“Suction.” Another officer spoke quietly. “When we were heading backwards, the cut-off area acted like a transom stern. There was suction there, pulling the timbers outwards. Now there is pressure pushing them back together. It will mean that when the leaks start again, they will be worse, but until then, not so much.”
Becker nodded and suddenly looked through his binoculars. “There, in front of us. You see it? On the horizon? Land. Just another couple of hours, that’s all.”
Another officer looked. “Might just be cloud, Sir?”
“Perhaps, but for the men’s ears it is land ahead.”
It was. For the next hour, Becker saw the shadow on the horizon solidify and enlarge. It was land. It had to be the Faeroes. He saw something else as well; a small boat coming out to meet him. It took time to pull alongside, He saw it was a fishing boat, a sailing craft. He didn’t find that surprising since the Faeroes probably hadn’t seen diesel fuel for years.
“German battleship. Are you heading for Thorshaven?”
“We are, God willing.”
“Your destroyer told us where to find you but you cannot bring your ship into our harbor. You will block it when she sinks.”
“We do not wish to. We would beach her outside.”
“That is good. There will be other boats and men on shore to help your crew. Can you steer a course?”
“Not with accuracy. We are setting the rudder by hand. But we can try.”
“Set ten degrees to port. This will put you on to a sand beach. Your men will stand more chance there than on the rocks.”
“Very well.” Becker gave the helm order and felt Lutzow shift again. The island grew in front of him, quickly swelling in size. He had to make several more small changes of course to try and hold the line the Faeroese fishermen wanted but they managed it. Soon, he could see the beach, a small cove, sheltered, welcoming. Much better than he expected.
“Get everybody out from down below. Minimum crew for running the ship only. Everybody else on deck.”
“German battleship?” The voice came from the fishing boat again, still distorted by the loud-hailer. “We can take your most wounded if you wish. There are other trawlers coming out. If you lower your wounded down to us we will take them to Thorshaven.”
“Thank you.” Becker wanted to say more but he couldn’t think of the words. He was just too tired.
Slowly, Lutzow was surrounded by fishing craft. Her crew lowered the worst of the wounded down to the larger trawlers. More small craft were joining them by the minute, ready to take the survivors off when the sinking cruiser hit the beach. That wouldn’t be very long now. Becker could feel her getting more sluggish as the water filled her hull.
“Time to go. Engineers, full power from the diesels, the harder we hit that beach the better. Means we’ll be closer to dry land. What’s the tide?”
“High tide, Sir.”
“Good.”
There was a blast on Lutzow’s sirens and the ship started to pick up speed. The wooden false bow started to disintegrate as the water lapped at it but it really didn’t matter anymore. Becker felt the vibrations as the hull started to touch the bottom followed by the vicious slam as his ship grounded fully. The engines pushed her ashore, through the bottom sand and onto the rocks beneath. Eventua
lly, she stopped, hard aground, barely fifty meters from the high tide mark. When the tide went out, she would be almost wholly exposed. Becker felt something else. As his ship had grounded, she’d changed. Something had gone from her. In his heart Becker knew the truth, Lutzow was dead. She’d got her crew to safety and she’d died doing it.
Alongside, the small craft were pulling men aboard, catching them as they climbed down from the decks and pulling them to safety. The little boats ran them ashore before coming back for more. Then Becker saw something he couldn’t credit. Groups of Faeroese Islanders were running into the sea, long chains of them secured by lifelines. They grabbed at the German sailors and manhandled them back to the beach, just as the same sailors had manhandled the buckets all through the night. Others waited on shore with blankets. They wrapped the survivors in them as they reached safety and rushed them off to be warmed and sheltered. Quietly Becker marveled. After the ruthless bombing the day before, it was almost too great a contrast to bear.
As custom demanded, he was the last man off. He even made a tour of the ship to make sure she was deserted down below. Then he came to the demolition switches. There he hesitated. The standing orders were to blow the ship up but he held his hand. It wasn’t the ship, the cold, empty stillness told him more clearly than anything else that Lutzow was dead. Whatever it was that made her a ship rather than a steel coffin, was gone. But her tanks were half full of oil. If he blew her up, that oil would wreck the fishing ground on which these people depended. They’d risked their lives in the freezing water to save his men; he couldn’t repay them by coating their island with a scum of fuel oil. He reached carefully down, disconnected the detonator and disarmed the scuttling system.