Suddenly Fielding’s observer screamed through his headset, “Fighters, eight o’clock high!”
Fielding twisted around to his left and saw the silhouettes of two small planes, probably Fiat G-50’s from the base at Lucca, but he also saw half a dozen other shapes diving on them like birds of prey, the protective Sea Hurricanes. Fielding forced himself to tum forward and concentrate on his torpedo run. It was the fighters’ job to deal with the bandits. He only had one shot, and had to get it right.
The ships had spotted the danger now and were putting up curtains of fire, but it was too late. Fielding roared between a pair of destroyers and lined up on the ltalia, trying to adjust for her forward speed as he came in at a narrow angle. He released the torpedo, and the aircraft leapt upward. He turned and saw his wingman do the same just before a fiery tongue of flame reached out from one of the escorting destroyers and sliced off one of the plane’s wings, sending it cartwheeling into the water. They were flying far too low for parachutes to be of any use.
Fielding pushed the throttle forward and began to climb, but he could not resist banking to see the results of the attack. A geyser of water erupted from the side of the Italia, then another, and the steel monster shuddered visibly as the milky white of her wake diminished to a mere ripple and smoke began to pour from the stricken vessel. Just then a wave of American dive bombers from the Ranger came screaming down, and more jets of water shot up around the Italia as her captain tried to ease the wallowing ship into shallow water to beach her as well as to get her out of the way of the Via Veneto which was coming up fast from behind on a collision course. The Americans came in groups of four, their 1,000-pound bombs hitting with a steady rhythm: miss, miss, hit, miss … miss, hit, hit, hit. Tongues of orange flame could now be clearly seen amid the thick black smoke, and Fielding smiled grimly.
He loitered now, viewing the battle. Enemy anti-aircraft gunners had plenty to do firing on attacking planes and would have no time for him. Roma had also taken at least one hit and was down by the head, moving slowly, and a torpedo or bomb had broken the back of a destroyer that was already disappearing under the waves. The sea was covered with a greasy slick of oil that was burning in places and littered with scores of tiny black dots that would be crewmen, living and dead. Other bombers were hitting the docks and oil storage tanks on shore, and several ships were burning at the quay. He watched as the last of the attackers peeled off and headed back out to sea, and Via Veneto began to make a gentle turning arc, trying to get back to the protection of the harbor with her escorts. Italia’s decks were awash, and a fire was apparently out of control on Roma’s bow. There would be no sortie by the Regia Marina any time soon. It was half a loaf, Fielding had to admit, but it was better than none.
1100 HOURS, 19 DECEMBER 1942
MARSEILLE, FRANCE
Lieutenant Commander W.E. Ellis, USN, leader of fighter squadron VGF-26 from the escort carrier Sangamon, had never seen such activity in any port in the world, even what he had thought was a veritable beehive back at Norfolk as the fleet had prepared to depart the United States. As he steered his Grumman F4F Wildcat in a lazy racetrack pattern over the port he could see what looked like swarms of ants besieging each of the dozens of transports and merchantmen lined up along the quay as mountains of supplies grew along the dockside and long columns of olive drab Army trucks wound their way through the adjoining streets and into the city. But Ellis could not afford to pay much attention to the spectacle taking place below him.
For nearly an hour he had been listening to the frantic radio traffic of other squadrons to the north and east as they clawed at the German and Italian bomber formations that were steadily advancing toward Marseille. It had taken the Nazis some time to realize that this major port was in Allied hands, and still more to get a respectable strike organized, with their airfields throughout northern France having been pounded the night before by British Wellingtons and again at the crack of dawn by American B17s, but they were coming now, with a vengeance. Surely every pilot aloft, on both sides, knew that the Allies would never again be as vulnerable as they were right at this moment, with thousands of tons of shipping jammed into this harbor, each ship loaded to the gills with all sorts of explosive and flammable cargo, and men. If the enemy could close the port now and prevent the off-loading of the men and guns, the German panzers would be able to walk over all resistance and take the port back, crippling the American Army in the process. If not, the Allies were back in France to stay, and it would only be a matter of time until Germany would fall.
So the Germans were throwing in everything they had, but the Allies had had all night to get ready. Ellis had listened to the pilots of the Army P-40s that had flown in off the escort carrier Chenango as they spotted the enemy Heinkels and Junkers and dove in for the kill. Then there were the Messerschmitt Bf-109s and the Focke-Wulf 190s that, in turn, pounced on the P-40s. The American pilots were almost exclusively new to combat, from the wing commanders on down, and Ellis could hear the fear in their voices as one after another they went off the air. From the sound of it, they had thinned out the attackers some, but they were still coming, as were the Italians who had mixed it up with VGF-27 off the Suwannee to the east, commanded by an academy classmate, Ted Wright. They were coming in dribs and drabs, as the Germans had been able to throw them together, six here, twenty there, rather than in a coordinated attack, and that was good, but there were a lot of them.
Ellis scanned the sky around him, above, on all sides, and especially in the direction of the sun. There had been an RAF pilot on the Sangamon, a veteran of the Battle of Britain, who had given them a crash course (no pun intended, he had said) in German fighter tactics, and he had scrawled on the blackboard, “BEWARE OF THE HUN IN THE SUN!” and underlined it several times. But it seemed to Ellis, as he shielded his eyes against the glare, that, if the Germans did come at him from that direction, the first he’d know of it would be tracers stitching the sky in front of him. He was also not too confident of his pudgy, stubby-winged aircraft. The F4F was sturdy and had considerable firepower in its six .50 caliber machineguns mounted in the wings, but it was far slower than the German Bf-109s, even slower than the twin-engined Me-110s, and no match whatsoever for the Focke-Wulf 190s. Ellis sighed. Designing and manufacturing a new aircraft was probably out of the question now, since he could just make out the dark specks above the horizon that would be the first enemy planes.
Ellis’s squadron followed his lead as he gained altitude and then headed straight at the approaching bombers, acting on the theory that the bombers had the least firepower facing forward, even though the combined convergence speed was over five hundred miles per hour, and he would only have seconds to get off his first burst. They were Ju-88s, big twin-engined jobs painted forest green, and they tried to maneuver to avoid him as Ellis pressed his trigger, watching the yellow tracers criss-cross around his target. He could clearly see pieces of the wing surfaces tear off from solid hits as he roared by, and he quickly pulled the plane into a tight loop to get on the bombers’ tail.
There were no enemy fighters in view, as any escorting fighters must have been diverted by the earlier encounters with the Army P-40s farther north, so it was nothing but a turkey shoot. Of course, these particular turkeys could shoot back. They did have two machine guns in the domed crew compartment, one forward and one rear-facing, and another in the belly facing the tail, but they were nothing like the American B17s with a total of five single and four twin .50 caliber machine gun mountings covering every angle of the aircraft. Ellis and his wingman hovered just behind one lumbering Ju-88, chewing away at its tail with their guns while weaving back and forth until they were rewarded with a thick trail of white smoke coming from one engine as the bomber began a slow, painful tum toward the earth. Ellis had planned to follow it all the way down, to confirm his first kill, but a frantic call came over the radio.
“Bogies, coming in high from the north!”
Ellis turned to gain alti
tude again, and he saw a large twin-engined plane pouring fire into an F4F that tried to tum out of its way. This was one of the “destroyers,” the Me-110s normally assigned to take out British and American bombers, and armed with two 20mm cannon and four machine guns. They were too sluggish to stand up to the nimble British Spitfires or the new American P-51s, but it occurred to Ellis that they might be one of the few German fighters with the range to reach here from bases in northern France. The F4F was burning, and Ellis could clearly see the pilot struggling with his canopy, but it would not open. Ellis bore in on the Me-110, firing as he went, in the hope of at least distracting the attacker, but then he was past them and had to dive out of the way of yet another enemy fighter.
There were just too many of them, and Ellis’s wingman was gone. In fact, he could only see two or three other American planes at all, while the sky was full of German fighters now, and he could see at least a dozen Ju-88s heading toward the port. Just then, a babble of voices came over the radio, speaking something that wasn’t English, and he saw at least twenty sleek fighters, all painted a dark blue and unfamiliar to him, diving on the bombers, blasting at least half of them out of the sky on their first pass. Finally, one turned broadside to him, and he could see the three vertical stripes near the tail: red, white and blue. They were the French!
The German fighters turned away from the Americans to face this new threat, and Ellis and the surviving F4Fs pursued them with a vengeance. The odds were more than even now, and he downed one more bomber and damaged another now that he didn’t have to worry about the enemy fighters so much. The battle went on for what seemed like hours, although Ellis knew that it could only have been minutes. And then, all at once, the sky was empty of the enemy. He looked around and could see a couple of fighters from his squadron heading out to sea to return to the carrier, and he joined them. As he did so, a French fighter pulled up alongside him, and the pilot waved and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up sign before banking away himself. Down below, the port of Marseille sprawled across the coastline, and several thick columns of smoke rose from the docks and from one stricken tanker which was burning fiercely out in the roadstead, and little clouds of smoke from anti-aircraft fire still dotted the sky like wildflowers in a springtime field. But the unloading was still going on. They had won, at least this first round.
2200 HOURS, 22 DECEMBER 1942
THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA
Admiral Canaris had seen Hitler in a rage before, but never like this. The “little corporal,” as Canaris could not help thinking of him, was screaming hysterically, banging the large map table in the center of his command bunker with both fists, spittle flying from his lips, and the veins at his temple throbbing. If there was one thing worse for a senior German military officer than being wrong, it was being right when Hitler was in the wrong. It had become apparent by midday on the 19th to both Canaris and von Rundstedt that the naval shelling and small-scale troop landings along the Channel coast could only be a diversion, despite the “evidence” Canaris’ spies had provided. Tens of thousands of Allied troops were ashore in southern France, and the ports of the entire Riviera were jammed with shipping. Still, Hitler had clung to his conception that the main Allied blow must fall in the north, and precious hours, then days, had been wasted as the limited armored reserves available had either been held in place or even been moved up toward Normandy, away from the real scene of battle.
New reconnaissance reports had finally dispelled all doubts, but Hitler could not stand to have his legendary infallibility questioned. He had been right in France in 1940 when his generals had wanted to hold back and not drive for the Channel to cut off the British and French forces in Belgium. He had been right in Russia during that first terrible winter when the generals had wanted to pull back all the way to Poland in the face of the Soviet offensive, and he had proven it possible for the troops to hold their line. Now he had been wrong in believing that Petain would never go over to the Allies and that they would never consider invading the continent at any point but that at which he had decreed they should come. Coming in the wake of the complete surrounding of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, this all put the Führer in a very bad mood indeed.
Canaris never failed to be impressed at how some of the most powerful men in the world, men who had all faced death on the battlefield many times, could be cowed into silence, if not quivering terror, by the rantings of this little man. All of the key commanders were present today. There was the dark and brooding General Wilhelm Keitel, ostensible commander of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) and the mousy, balding Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of staff, two of Hitler’s “desk generals,” but there was also the venerable Field Marshal von Rundstedt, commander of the forces in the West and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South. The immense Reichsmarschall Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, moped in a chair set away from the table, out of favor since his lofty promises to supply the Stalingrad garrison by air had turned to dust, and Admiral Dönitz frowned heavily as he stared at the situation map. Even the popular, almost legendary General Erwin Rommel was present, on medical leave from North Africa, along with a bevy of colonels and junior officers, besides the ever-present SS bodyguards in their black uniforms, towering over the lesser beings in the Spartan conference room.
Hitler had repeatedly reminded all present that Canaris and each of the intelligence services had assured all and sundry that the Allies would land on the Channel coast and that the activity in the Mediterranean was a diversion. This was true enough, and Canaris could only chide himself for having been taken in by the enemy’s disinformation campaign that had certainly hindered the Axis response. But Canaris could hardly point out that it had been Hitler who had continued to reject increasingly solid evidence that had come in proving where the main Allied blow indeed had fallen. Now all the generals just wanted to get the recriminations over with so that they could get on with the business of fixing the problem. Much to everyone’s surprise, it was Rommel, the junior man at the table, who spoke up first as soon as Hitler had lapsed into silence.
“It would seem that our only course of action is to withdraw the Afrika Korps from Tripolitania, along with as many Italian troops as possible, and re-equip them to form the core of a major thrust at the Allied beachhead.” It seemed to Canaris that Rommel was overplaying his hand as Hitler’s favorite. It also seemed to him that Rommel was more hype than substance, since his own conversations with a number of field officers who had served in North Africa painted a picture of a vain, impetuous man, many of whose victories were actually the work of his subordinates who ran the army while Rommel was out cruising about the desert, while most of his defeats could be attributed directly to Rommel’s own lack of conception regarding logistics.
Jodl immediately spoke up. Years on the staff had taught him to anticipate the Führer’s wishes and to voice his opinions for him. “While we are all duly impressed with the withdrawal General Rommel conducted across the desert, holding the British at bay and salvaging most of his force, we should remember that wars are never won by retreats.” Hitler just nodded vacantly, staring at the map before him.
“I should point out that our attempts to seize Tunisia ran into strong French resistance, and we discovered a full British division already on the ground in Bizerte,” Kesselring joined in. “While it is a shame to abandon North Africa after all the sacrifices our men have made there, with Tunisia in enemy hands, there is no hope of supplying our forces in Tripolitania. And the troops we had collected in Italy for a coup de main in Tunisia would be much better employed in an offensive against Vichy territory on the continent.”
“And we would only have to transport the men from Africa,” Rommel added. “We had only thirty tanks in running order in the whole Panzer Armee Afrika when I left, and those were mostly older models. The men, however, are among the best tankers in the Wehrmacht and have long experience fighting the British. With a minimum of shipping and air transport, they can all be br
ought home and fitted out with the new Panther and Tiger tanks coming out of the factories and thrown right into the battle.”
“I don’t believe that Mussolini will be able to survive the loss of North Africa as well as that of Corsica, to say nothing of the destruction of the Italian 8th Army and the Alpine Corps north of Stalingrad,” Hitler growled. “You generals simply don’t understand the political side of things. The Duce is surrounded by a pack of jackals who are only waiting for his winning streak to break to start nipping at his heels.” He paused and looked suspiciously around the room, and all of the generals quickly looked away. “We must do something to help defend Corsica.”
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 11