Matthews blinked. Her hearing was sharper than his, but he could hear it too, now, a dull thrumming, echoing through the air. He looked around, wondering what could be causing such a noise… and then he saw them, moving through the air like a swarm of angry wasps. They took on shape and form rapidly as they flew west; aircraft, a massive flight of aircraft. Matthews tried to count them, even to estimate their numbers, but it seemed as if the sky was filled by thousands of black aircraft. He stared at them, trying to understand, and then it all made sense.
“Get the radio,” he cried, as he raced into the small cabin. He’d had a government-issue radio, like every other fisherman, just on the off-chance that they might spot something worth reporting to the military. He’d kept it charged because some of the fishermen used them to communicate between themselves, but he’d never used it himself to call the Royal Navy.
Morag didn’t understand, but he ignored her questions, struck suddenly by a sense of imminent doom. There seemed to be no end to the stream of aircraft flying overhead, but he knew where they were going; they were making a direct beeline for the Royal Navy harbour. He picked up the radio, flicked switches until the radio was warming up, and then tried to make a broadcast.”
“This is Matthews, ID ORK3473,” he called. He’d been given a crash course on how to use the radio, but he’d forgotten most of it. “There’s a massive flight of German aircraft heading west, I repeat…”
“Dad,” Morag said. Matthews looked up to see a smaller black aircraft flying lower than any other, heading right towards the fishing boat. He knew exactly what it’s pilot had in mind; he’d heard from sailors who had been strafed by German planes, down towards the south. “Dad, I think…”
“I know,” Matthews said. He reached out and took his daughter in his arms. “I love you…”
The German plane opened fire, strafing the water and shattering the boat with explosive shells. Moments later, the fishing boat blew apart and left nothing but wreckage drifting on the surface of the sea.
* * *
Admiral Fraser settled down in his bunk for the night, closing his eyes and trying to relax; it had been a long two weeks. His appointment as the commanding officer of Home Fleet — and hence the senior British Admiral actually on active duty — had been a pleasant surprise, but after nearly a year of commanding the fleet, he was starting to wish that he’d been left in command of the Gibraltar or Singapore fleet bases. He’d had up-to-date experience, or at least as much experience as anyone else in the Royal Navy, of modern battleship combat. He’d served on-board King George V as a Vice Admiral during the short but bloody combat with Italian battleships during 1943. They’d sunk two Italian ships there, losing no British battleships in exchange, although Nelson and Queen Elizabeth had been badly mauled by the Italians.
Fraser firmly believed that new technology would determine the shape of future war. In that, he was in full agreement with the Germans, who were pouring more and more resources into their Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. The Home Fleet had sunk the Bismarck nine years ago, but it had been a close-run thing. The Bismarck had been stopped by a fluke, a lucky hit, more than anything else — and once that hit had disabled the ship, the Germans had been doomed. If the ship had broken out into the Atlantic, it would have had a disastrous effect on the Royal Navy’s attempts to keep the convoy system going. The Germans had actually risked the Tirpitz in 1943, but in that case Hitler’s fears had prevented the German battleship from being more than a worrying problem for the Royal Navy. Fraser didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the ship had been given to an aggressive commander — a German Nelson — who had the guts to ignore the bleating of the Fuhrer and move in for the kill.
And now, he fretted, the Fuhrer might have bad intentions towards Britain. Fraser had read the message from the War Office with a mixture of incredulity and disbelief before turning to the one from the Admiralty, which had been a bit clearer. Fraser was experienced enough to read between the lines and guess that someone expected the Germans to make trouble. But they didn’t want to make a major fuss in case it was a false alarm. Fraser had wanted clarification. However, Churchill had been direct but unhelpful and the War Office had dithered. Scapa Flow was not a popular place among the crewmen, even though the Royal Navy had done its best to provide facilities for the crews; Fraser’s orders to keep some of the fleet in readiness might keep some crewmen busy, but it wouldn’t be popular. He’d strengthened the defences as best as he could…
It felt like only moments before there was a banging at his cabin door. “Come in,” he called, pulling himself to his feet. His orderly should have prevented any disturbance unless it was urgent; he grabbed his jacket and pulled it on before the inner door opened, revealing a nervous-looking Midshipman. “Yes?”
The Midshipman looked as if he was going to faint at the mere thought of addressing an Admiral. “Sir, there has been a disturbing radio transmission, and Captain Abernathy would like to see you in the CIC at once,” he gasped out. “Sir…”
“Very good,” Fraser said, wryly certain that the young man expected to be thrown to the dogs at any moment for daring to address an Admiral. “I’ll be there directly.”
It was only a minute later when he entered the CIC of the battleship. His quarters had been placed right next to the CIC. He’d spent weeks of training ensuring that everyone knew how to use the systems they had developed for coordinating the fleet and using it in a battleship duel; he honestly felt that if they had had the system back in 1943, the Italian fleet would have been wiped out. Captain Abernathy straightened up at once and saluted; Fraser returned it without much irritation. He’d served with Captain Abernathy long enough to know that he never panicked over nothing.
“Sir,” Captain Abernathy said. His face looked grim in the red light of the radar screens. “Ten minutes ago, we picked up a radio transmission from one of the fishing boats, a transmission warning of enemy aircraft. We lost contact almost immediately afterwards and have been unable to raise them since.”
They’ve been sunk, Fraser thought, and felt his blood run cold.
“I ordered the radar stations to be turned on and… well, there’s a lot of vague contacts in the air,” Captain Abernathy continued. Fraser glanced down at the nearest radar screen and flinched; the contacts were resolving themselves even as he watched. “I think that…”
“Enemy aircraft rising up now,” a radar operator stated, his voice cutting through the babble. Fraser remembered a classified briefing on the performance of some of the newer German aircraft and cursed under his breath. “I have at least five hundred contacts!”
“Sound the air raid alarm,” Fraser ordered. Klaxons started to wail at once; he knew that they would be louder on the outside, echoing over the still waters of the loch and waking soldiers and sailors who had been trying to rest after the exercise. They had equipped and rearmed the anti-aircraft batteries, but he wasn’t confident that any of them would be able to take down a German aircraft, even slaved to British radar stations. “Launch the ready fighters and order the crews of the carrier-borne aircraft to get in the air as quickly as possible.”
He found himself grinding his teeth in rage as he realised he’d made a dreadful mistake. The carriers held nearly sixty aircraft each, but they had been flown off to the local airbases, just to limit the potential for disaster. If there had been an accident on the landing deck of a carrier, the entire ship could have been destroyed, but now… there would be a great deal of confusion as the pilots strove to get into the air. They’d be lucky to have more than half of their fighters in the air when the Germans commenced their attack…
“Send a signal to the Ministry of Defence,” he ordered, feeling his heart clenching in his breast. “Inform them… that we are under attack. Great Britain is, once again, at war with Germany.”
* * *
There were pilots who claimed to have broken the sound barrier in one of the Messerschmitt Me 270 aircraft, although Grupp
enkommandeur Albrecht Schmidt didn’t believe them. He’d taken the aircraft through an entire series of fast dives towards the ground, an exercise that the pilots disliked as the engines sometimes staggered under the sudden changes in pressure, and hadn’t come close to actually breaking the sound barrier. It didn’t really matter; for the moment, the flight was the fastest thing in the air, and Schmidt was its point man.
He reached down and toggled his on-board radar. The Luftwaffe had developed smaller and smaller radars — ironically, they were based on an Italian design — but he’d been warned not to use it until they were making their final approach. It bothered him — if the British had been alert, they would have a chance to bounce his wing out of the sky — but he knew that radar signals travelled much further than they seemed. The British might be lurking just outside his range, but they would know he was there by detecting his own radar signals. The radar pulses raced ahead of his fighter, testing the boundaries of his reach, and bounced off a dozen British fighters, settling into a combat air patrol formation. Other fighters were rising into the air — too late. They wouldn’t have a chance to alter the outcome of the engagement.
“Richthofen, attack,” Schmidt ordered, and gunned his own engine forward. The aircraft lunged and raced towards a British fighter that turned to face Schmidt with a speed and agility that almost matched his own; the vaunted British Meteor was truly a worthy foe. He snapped off a quick burst of explosive cannon shells — if he hit the enemy fuel tanks, he would destroy the aircraft — and had the satisfaction of watching the Meteor explode in a flash of fire. A second British aircraft fired at him but narrowly missed and then evaded his return fire with a flip of his aircraft’s wings. He spun through the air, focused his nose on the enemy’s tail, and fired again. This time, the British plane spun down towards the ground.
White light flashed into existence as the first of the flares lit up. This was rapidly followed by explosions in the air as the British air defence guns opened fire, sending shells bursting in the air. The briefing had warned that the British had developed their own version of the proximity shell and Schmidt kept his aircraft evading, trying to avoid the ground fire even as he hunted down British targets. The white light of the flares cast an eerie glow over the entire horizon, illuminating the cold metallic shapes of the British fleet and the fires blazing up from where the aircraft had hit the ground. He cursed as a streak of tracer flew past, then threw the aircraft into a crash dive, levelling out barely above the ground and firing his cannon down towards a British aircraft on the ground. A line of explosions ripped through the airbase; he powered away from it before the defences could chase him away.
The entire battle was becoming a dreadful dogfight, with planes choosing their targets and trying to destroy the remaining British aircraft before it was too late. The Meteors were holding their own, but there were older aircraft now staggering up to join them. Schmidt guessed that they were carrier-borne torpedo-bombers or fighters, rather than land-based aircraft. The Reich had been experimenting with a carrier-borne jet fighter, but hadn’t managed to make one work properly. The British, as far as he knew, hadn’t had any success either. He fired down at one of them and smiled upon seeing it falling out of the sky before the radar screen flickered. The bombers had arrived. The white light grew brighter as the observers dropped more flares, allowing the bombers a chance to actually see their targets. Immediately after that, they launched their heavy weapons from their bomb bays. The bombs were the largest and most powerful ones that Germany had built. They were designed to punch through battleship armour and the armoured decks on carriers, and then explode within the vulnerable interior of the ships.
Schmidt tore his attention away from the rapidly growing inferno as more enemy fighters pounced on the bombers. He gave chase as the enemy aircraft attempted to engage the bombers, shooting down one of them before the enemy pilot knew that he was behind him. A hail of fire from the bomber reminded him of one of the very real dangers of the war, being shot down by his own side. He jerked away from the bombers, looking for more targets, knowing that it wouldn’t be too long before more enemy fighters appeared. He knew better than to hope for success even though raids had been scheduled on Scotland’s airbases just to ensure that the fighters based there had other problems than a major raid on the fleet base. The jet jerked as the heavy bombs started to explode down below. A fuel depot exploded on the island itself and lit up the area in red-yellow fires before spreading out of control.
The defenders on the ground were firing desperately towards the bombers, and one of them fell out of the air, falling towards the water, but it was too late. One of the bombs hit a carrier, another hit…
And then HMS Invincible exploded in a ball of flame.
Chapter Nine
Felixstowe, England
“I think that we’ll be in harbour within an hour,” Kapitän zur See Christian Wulff said, as the Hans Bader started to inch towards the green hills of the British homeland. Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck nodded as he studied the darkening hills with his binoculars, silently wondering if he would ever see Bavaria again; Britain had proven to be the graveyard of many reputations. “If we are lucky, they won’t want to inspect until the morning.”
Baeck said nothing. The short voyage had been hard on his men, even though they had trained endlessly for the mission; they all knew that if the British smelled a rat, a single destroyer would end their mission abruptly. A hail of shellfire would be more than enough to sink the Hans Bader, even though it had been covertly designed to be harder to sink than the average freighter.
“You seem quiet,” Wulff said, after a moment. “You’ve done everything you can, so why worry?”
Baeck glanced down at his watch. Rommel had said that there were other operations being planned against the British, but Baeck hadn’t understood the sheer scale of the overall plan until a day before when the Hans Bader had set sail from Kiel. The timing had to be precise. If they got it wrong, even slightly, the British would catch on to their plan and unceremoniously sink the Hans Bader. Baeck wasn’t given to reflection, but now, facing the British port and defences up ahead, he half-wished that he had turned down Rommel when he had offered him the mission. He had trained for the mission along with the others of his unit, but now… now they would finally put their training into practice.
“I’m a born worrier,” he said, as he lit a cigarette. “Why don’t they inspect our ships well away from anywhere that might be a target?”
Wulff shrugged. “The British Government doesn’t like having to deal with us, or at least having to deal with us openly,” he said, as they passed an MTB heading out to sea. Baeck tracked it with uneasy eyes, knowing that it too could sink their ship if it suspected what they really were. “For some reason their people don’t like us very much, and so we’re officially a German commercial ship rather than anything to do with the Reich itself.”
Baeck laughed. The Hans Bader would never have passed muster as a proper military ship, but it was well fitted to carry troops into a safe harbour, even while disguised as a commercial ship. They had replaced the cargo bays and cargo access points in the interior of the ship with a new structure that would allow his troops to leave the ship quickly and efficiently. If they took the port and its cranes intact, they could get most of the battle group out without any problems, and then secure the port and hold it against anything short of an armoured division. In the British place, he would have had an infantry division dug in at any possible landing place, but they had refused to spread out their forces that way. There was a Home Guard force near, he knew; how long would it take for the British to organise and mount a counter-attack?
“I’m going to check with the men,” he said, and headed down the ladder into the first of the infantry decks. He acknowledged the salutes of his men as he passed, waving some of them back down when they rose to stand at attention, others even tried to sleep. The soldiers enjoyed a relaxed atmosphere on ship; it was when they would
be hitting their target that they would have to obey orders and fight as one. The Sergeants had been working overtime, preventing fights from breaking out in the confined quarters of the ship, while others had been studying the maps of their targets again, individual groups planning their actions as part of the overall plan.
He passed soldiers preparing their weapons and nodded in approval as the soldiers went through all of the steps. They’d all had weapons care and safety drummed into them from the first day at the training centre; now, they should all be able to field-strip an automatic weapon blindfolded and under enemy fire. Others held rocket launchers, antitank weapons and smaller grenade launchers and mortars. They were prepared to meet an armoured counter attack if one was mounted. They had practised endlessly; now, finally, they would have a chance to see if it worked as well in practice as it had when they were training.
He whistled once and waited until all of the section leaders had come up to surround him. There was no room on the Hans Bader for a proper conference room, although he would have refused one if it had been offered; he preferred to work with his men in the field. He spread out a chart of the docks and went through all of the objectives one by one.
“When I blow the whistle, you will all send your units towards your targets,” he said, at the end. The first few moments of the assault would be organised chaos, for them as much as for their British opponents; everything would depend upon the courage and experience of the German NCOs and the handful of officers in charge of the separate units. “Remember, we want prisoners, not dead dockyard workers, understand?”
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