There came a shuddering vibration and the ship seemed to rock violently to port, prompting him to hang on the side railings of his crow’s nest for dear life. Seconds later, as a column of thick, black smoke broiled up from below, he finally heard a long descending roar overlaid on the growl of the explosion, not knowing it was the sound of a hypersonic missile finally catching up with itself. Alarms were jangling all over the ship, and he looked down to see engineers quickly donning life preservers and running to the scene of the impact, the orange red flames licking through the heavy black smoke like the tongues of hundred dragons.
Down on the bridge, Captain Tennant never saw the missile as it skimmed in silently over the glistening sea. Traveling at just under three times the speed of sound, the P-1000 Moskit-II “Sunburn” was one of most lethal missiles in the new Russian naval inventory, replacing the P-800 Yakhont/Bramos in 2016. It was the second missile to bear the NATO codename “Sunburn,” as its design and performance were much akin to that of its predecessor, the dreadful Moskit-I.
Shaped like a long, aerodynamic torpedo with a finely pointed nose, it had four small winglets in an X-scheme at mid-fuselage, with a series of small ramjet engines mounted between them that gave it the look of a sleek and deadly shark. It's solid rocket booster would ignite upon firing, followed by two small stabilizing jets from the nose of the missile, one to incline it towards its target after its vertical launch, and the second to counter this thrust and keep the missile level. After these two short bursts, the solid fuel at the rear would rapidly accelerate the missile, expended in the first four seconds of flight as it reached its incredible speed of over 3600 kilometers per hour, quickly leaving the roar of its own engines in its wake. Liquid fuel would then power the missile along the remainder of its flight path. It would fly at altitude for all but the last ten percent of its course to the target, then would streak down to sea level accelerating right over the top of the ocean for the last deadly run.
It had been fired by Kirov just two minutes ago, gobbling up the 100 kilometers to the target with blistering speed. It could maneuver with precision and defend itself with a suite of electronic countermeasures as well, but its job today would not be difficult. It’s target was crystal clear ahead, its design giving no thought to minimizing its radar cross-sections. It was masked by no countervailing ECM, no infrared suppression system was in play, and there was no chaff in the air intend to spoof or decoy the missile away-nor was there any AA gun aboard the ship with the slightest chance of tracking and hitting it as it came on its final blistering sprint at Mach 3.0. It was like shooting a fish in a barrel.
When the missile struck Repulse, it delivered a 450 kilogram, armor piercing warhead that hammered against a belt of cemented armor measuring six inches thick just above the waterline amidships. Only her big 15 inch gun turrets had better protection, though this belt armor was relatively thin for a ship of her size. Some thirty kilometers behind her by now, the flagship King George V, had armor more than twice this thickness along her main side belts. The protection given Repulse was enough to impede, but not stop, the missile. It prevented it from completely burning its way deeper into the ship when the Sunburn exploded, but the remaining load of liquid fuel in its long fuselage ignited in a roaring fireball. The armor plating buckled and broke, seared by the explosion and considerable kinetic impact of the missile, which was enough to send a shower of metal fragments inward to pierce the inner sides of the hull in places, and claim the life of two Able Seamen who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A jet of flaming hot metal seared through the breech, and started a major fire.
On the bridge, Captain Tennant could only think that he had been hit by a torpedo, and he immediately had his Chiefs check all the watches to see if anyone had spotted a periscope. Doolan's phone rang and he blurted out his incredible tale of high flying meteors descending and skipping over the waves. Tennant thought the man was daft, but yet his ship was on fire, and he was clearly under attack. The eyes of every watch stander squinted at the horizon looking for any sign of an enemy vessel, but saw nothing. Then they heard a roar, the sound of the missile’s rocket engine finally catching up with it, well after it had already struck the ship. It seemed like the moaning of some demonic, unseen leviathan.
Captain Tennant shuddered with the sound and the sight of the awful fire now burning amidships. When he had taken stock of the situation, and heard from his engineers below, he turned to his signalman and said: “Make to Tovey on King George V. We are under attack, struck by a torpedo amidships on main belt. Ship on fire, but damage appears moderate and under control, and we are still seaworthy. No enemy surface contact, and no periscope sighted. No damaged to engines or plant, but slowing to twenty knots to assess possible breech below the waterline. Beginning zigzag pattern for the next hour.”
He turned and gave the orders to begin evasive maneuvers and scolded his watchmen to be on the lookout for periscopes, particularly on the starboard side of the ship where the blow had landed. As more reports came in it was soon made apparent to him that, while struck very near the waterline, all the damage to the ship was well above it. Unless this was a new torpedo that could leap out of the water like a swordfish, the damage had to be caused by something else.
Minutes later that ‘something else’ was again inbound on his position with evil intent. As before, it came in from above, then swooped down like an evil bird of prey to skim across the ocean at a scorching speed. This time he saw it, his jaw slack with amazement as the missile bored in on Repulse leaving a long thin white tail of smoke behind it. “Bloody hell,” he breathed. Then it exploded again, a little higher and slightly forward of the last hit.
The ship rocked with the second impact, and fire and smoke billowed up, obscuring his vision. A single fragment of near molten metal struck and pierced his forward viewport, shattering the glass there an jarring a nearby bulkhead with a metallic thud. Thankfully, no one was hit.
“What in blazes was that? ” he said to his Executive Officer. His mind reeled, still replaying the image of the silent, swift approach of the weapon as it flashed against his ship. Thank god they were hitting us amidships, he thought. Any higher and that devil would have missed our side armor and run completely through the ship.
A com-link phone jangled, and the XO took it up. “Hull breech from that one, sir, and another bad fire… But well above the water line. No flooding. Burned out one of the new AA guns above the point of impact. Several casualties.”
“Make to Tovey,” he said to the signalmen. “Second hit amidships. Not a torpedo, yet no ship sighted. Weapon appeared to be a rocket. Repeat, not a torpedo.” He knew how unusual this would sound. He had heard of experimental rocket weapons, but had never seen one-until now. It was the only thing that could possibly explain what he had witnessed and also fit with the reports he had been receiving from the engineers below. That thing was flying. It came down at him from above until it hugged the sea before it hit. It was not a torpedo.
Tennant scanned the horizon with his field glasses, then removed them, squinting up into the sallow gray sky to look for any sign of an aircraft. There was nothing. He was like a blindfolded boxer in a ring with the heavyweight champion of the world. He would never see the punches coming, nor the man who threw them, but he would surely feel them. He had taken two hard blows to the gut, and his ship was doubled over with the pain. Yet as he looked about him, rushing from one side of the bridge to another, the sea was stark, cold and empty.
Wake-Walker was brooding on the Bridge of HMS Victorious. He had been delayed while detaching his destroyer screen to Iceland for refueling and sorting out his remaining planes into one new squadron. The enemy put on more speed and slipped away, and his radar lost contact with the phantom raider. Wanting to get back in the chase, he had planes up that morning spread out in a line abreast in two sub-flights of three each. One of each group was equipped with radar. The other two were, he realized, nothing more than decoys. If the enemy fired
those damnable long range rockets at them, chances are they might target the wrong plane and he could re-acquire his fix on the enemy contact to the south. The planes were having fits with their radar, however, and his flight leader reported he could see nothing at all. Reluctantly, he gave the order to bring the ship about, turning on a heading to best recover his fighters. HMS Furious was out in front, all her planes but two gone now. He would send her off to Scapa Flow in due course, but for now she was nothing more than a forlorn scout ship.
In fact, that had been her role when first laid down in 1915. She was one of three ‘oddball’ ships, a light battlecruiser with just two massive guns, one in each of two turrets mounted fore and aft. But she was soon to lose the cumbersome weapon up front and have it replaced with a seaplane flight deck that converted her to a hybrid cruiser-carrier. A year later the aft turret was removed for another seaplane deck there, and by 1925 both of these decks had been removed and replaced with a single flight deck that ran nearly the whole length of the ship. Two other old ships had undergone similar reconstructive surgery, the Courageous and Glorious, but the former was torpedoed and sunk by U-20 on 17 Sept 1939, and the latter sunk by gunfire from Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 8 June 1940 during the evacuation of Norway. Furious was the last of the oddballs, a strange, anachronism from the First World War bridging the way to a new era. Yet she was fated that morning to be struck by a nemesis from a time no man aboard her could imagine, let alone comprehend.
Two Moskit-II Sunburns arced up into the sky and sped north, accelerating to lightning speed over the first 90 kilometers, then descending rapidly to skim just above the sea. They had each been targeted at one of the two British carriers but, for some reason, both now homed in on the lead contact, hapless and forsaken, the odd man out of the fleet, HMS Furious. Midshipman Bill Simpson saw them coming, just by chance when he was out on the flight deck that morning with Albert Gibson laying lines.
“Look there, Al,” he pointed, and the two men saw something blur silently in from the starboard quarter, impossibly fast, then turn with a suddenness that astounded them and flash in against the ship. There was a thunderous roar as the first missile struck, blasting through the thinner three inch side armor and flaming into the guts of the ship as its remaining fuel igniting in a holocaust of fire and smoke.
The delay off Iceland had seen the task force fall nearly 200 kilometers behind the enemy, and that ended up being a bit of a saving grace. The missiles had expended much of their liquid fuel before they hit home, and there was less to ignite the fires. Seconds later the other missile struck, literally reeling the ship to one side as it thundered home and sent both Simpson and Gibson sprawling onto the deck. Luckily, they were in the aft quarter of the ship, and when the second explosion blasted up through the thin flight deck, they were saved from the flying shrapnel, fire and debris. But Furious had been struck a heavy blow, immolating her vacant, empty forward hanger area, with chunks of twisted steel shot gunned clean through the other side of the ship. Fire and thick, black smoke were everywhere.
Aboard Victorious, Wake-Walker’s head was jerked around as he looked, aghast at the scene. He had been in the plot room a moment ago, and did not see the missiles approach. So he, like Captain Tennant on the Repulse, surmised that this had to be a torpedo attack or enemy air strike off the Graf Zeppelin, and he shouted the order for all hands to stand to battle stations. What was wrong with the ruddy radar sets today? There had been no sign of aircraft about at all. Then he noticed the strange contrails high in the distance, two thin tracks from the south aimed right at his ships.
Thirty kilometers behind Repulse, Admiral John Tovey knew exactly what Tennant was speaking of when he sent his frantic messages. King George V had been struck in exactly the same place, dead amidships, and just above the waterline, though thankfully on the thickest portion of her main belt armor, all of fifteen inches there, with newer cemented armor that was even more resistant to shock. While the missiles had managed to storm through the side armor of Repulse, Tovey’s newer ship was jarred, set afire by exploding fuel, but was otherwise unharmed. The shock, however, was more mental than physical. Both he and his bridge crew were astounded to think that the Germans could have a weapon of this speed and accuracy. There was no enemy ship anywhere in sight, and nothing whatsoever between his ship and Repulse, which meant that this rocket must have been fired from a range of over a hundred kilometers, many times the range of his big main 14 inch guns. In fact, it had been fired at a range of 130 kilometers, running that distance in just two and a half minutes.
Tovey’s mind reeled with the shock of the attack, unable to comprehend it. How could they even see his ship to know how to aim and fire such a weapon? He called to his air watch radar sets and yet no one had seen anything more than snowy static on their screens. No watchman had reported any sign of a spotting plane. Then, just as he was getting an assessment of the damage below, another rocket contrail could be seen overhead, swooping suddenly down to the ocean and skimming right in over the wave tops to shudder against the side of his battleship in another thunderous explosion.
The big ship rocked, then steadied herself, but there was more smoke and fire than actual serious damage. “God, almighty,” said Tovey. “Thank our lucky stars we’re taking these on the main belt armor.” His ship had been designed to take potential hits from the main guns of opposing battleships and survive intact to keep fighting. In fact, his sister ship Prince of Wales had been hit several times by large 15 inch shells fired by the Bismarck weighing all of 1760 pounds. While damaged and penetrated, the ship had remained seaworthy and was even now at sea ferrying the Prime Minister to Newfoundland.
By comparison, the missiles fired that morning from Kirov delivered a warhead weighing just under 1000 pounds. This alone was not sufficient to penetrate the battleship’s main armor when struck full on, though the kinetic power of the full missile itself when it struck, delivered an incredible shock that buckled the armor at the point of impact. Yet it held, the strongest outer wall of the citadel that was the armored shell around the ship’s most vital inner compartments.
In her first incarnation Kirov had carried an even bigger weapon, the P-700 Granit “Shipwreck” missile that delivered a warhead twice the size of the Sunburn on a missile that was nearly twice as heavy. These had been removed and replaced by lighter, faster weapons designed to defeat the real armor of a modern ship, which was its suite of electronic countermeasures and missile and gun defenses. The warheads on the new Sunburns would have been enough to make a shipwreck out of most modern destroyers or frigates with one or two hits, but they were now striking targets with heavier armor they had never been designed to defeat.
When Samsonov and Rodenko reported a perfect six out of six hits, Captain Karpov was elated. “That will let them know we are not to be fooled with,” he said proudly.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Fedorov. “If our missiles struck as they should have, and hit the targets amidships, then it is very likely they have not seriously harmed the battleships. The carriers were probably hurt, and Repulse will be damaged, though I believe she would survive and still be seaworthy. As for King George V, if we hit her belt armor it would feel like a good stiff jab, but she would shrug it off.”
“What are you saying?” said Orlov. “The Germans sunk battleships with guided flying bombs in this war, did they not? Our missiles are much more lethal.”
“Respectfully, sir,” Fedorov knew he was on thin ice, but he needed to make his point. “You are referring to the Fritz-X, and yes, they sunk and damaged battleships, from above. They did not strike flush against the main armor belt of those ships as our missiles would do coming in at just above sea level. They penetrated the deck armor, which was much thinner. If you want to truly hurt a well armored ship, then you must reprogram your angle of attack on our missiles and have them strike well above the hull line, or at a much steeper angle on impact from above. If you bring them in at sea level, as we would do to defeat modern
ship defensive weapons, they will burn and break armor in places, but will not penetrate to the interior of a battleship to do serious damage. Our Sunburns were simply not designed to penetrate this kind of armor. They were built to penetrate thin hulled modern ships of our day, and that they can do well enough. Yet we know that at least two hits are thought necessary to disable a modern American destroyer. Three for their Ticonderoga class cruisers, and as many as five hits for their carriers. Our missiles are powerful, but we need to hit the ship’s deck and superstructure, not its belt armor.”
Orlov scowled at him. “You know so much, eh?” But even his own thick skull had been penetrated by the navigator’s argument. “Samsonov,” he said quickly. “Can we reprogram the angle of attack?”
“We can, sir, but it will take some time. I cannot do this while presently engaging targets. I have two more missiles primed for firing.” He look at the Captain, waiting.
“Hold fire, Samsonov,” said Karpov. “Disengage your system and begin reprogramming for a top down approach to the target. Eliminate the final sea skimming run. Mister Fedorov is correct. Our Sunburns used as low altitude sea skimmers will not be as effective as they could be. As the enemy cannot see us, let alone catch us, we will take the time to make these adjustments. But I want all our offensive weapons optimized as quickly as possible. Report on your progress in four hours. For now, secure from battle stations. Mister Rodenko, let me know what our contact is doing now. Perhaps this attack has at least given them something more to think about.”
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