Thor's Anvil (Kirov Series Book 26)

by John Schettler

  Kirov Saga:

  Thor’s Anvil

  By

  John Schettler

  A publication of: The Writing Shop Press

  Thor’s Anvil, Copyright©2016, John A. Schettler

  KIROV SERIES:

  The Kirov Saga: Season One

  Kirov - Kirov Series - Volume 1

  Cauldron of Fire - Kirov Series - Volume 2

  Pacific Storm - Kirov Series - Volume 3

  Men of War - Kirov Series - Volume 4

  Nine Days Falling - Kirov Series - Volume 5

  Fallen Angels - Kirov Series - Volume 6

  Devil’s Garden - Kirov Series - Volume 7

  Armageddon – Kirov Series – Volume 8

  The Kirov Saga: Season Two ~ 1940-1941

  Altered States– Kirov Series – Volume 9

  Darkest Hour– Kirov Series – Volume 10

  Hinge of Fate– Kirov Series – Volume 11

  Three Kings – Kirov Series – Volume 12

  Grand Alliance – Kirov Series – Volume 13

  Hammer of God – Kirov Series – Volume 14

  Crescendo of Doom – Kirov Series – Volume 15

  Paradox Hour – Kirov Series – Volume 16

  The Kirov Saga: Season Three ~1942

  Doppelganger – Kirov Series – Volume 17

  Nemesis – Kirov Series – Volume 18

  Winter Storm – Kirov Series – Volume 19

  Tide of Fortune – Kirov Series – Volume 20

  Knight’s Move – Kirov Series – Volume 21

  Turning Point – Kirov Series – Volume 22

  Steel Reign – Kirov Series – Volume 23

  Second Front – Kirov Series – Volume 24

  Tigers East – Volume 25

  Thor’s Anvil – Volume 26

  Kirov Saga:

  Thor’s Anvil

  By

  John Schettler

  Kirov Saga:

  Thor’s Anvil

  By

  John Schettler

  Part I – Cherry Blossoms

  Part II – Operation C

  Part III – Pearl of Great Price

  Part IV – The Mission

  Part V – Only Yesterday

  Part VI – Allies

  Part VII – Fire on the Volga

  Part VIII– Red October

  Part IX – The Bridge

  Part X – Führerbefehl

  Part XI – The Wrath of Jupiter

  Part XII – The Cauldron

  Author’s Note:

  Dear Readers,

  As you may have noticed, I’m a serious and lifelong student of WWII. I can remember reading Sink the Bismarck in Middle School, and have loved all the battles on sea and land ever since. A warmonger? No. A man in love with this history? Yes. So please pardon me if I build a level of detail into these stories to properly honor that history, and the men and women who lived it through. Sometimes the outcome of a battle or entire campaign can hinge on one division, one regiment, one battalion, even one man. I try to go to each of those levels in my recounting of the war, Strategic, Operational and Tactical. And I try to give you a chair in the briefing rooms, and sometimes even get you inside the heads of all the main historical figures.

  In the author interview for this book, I talk more about all this, and why my understanding of the history reaches deeper than the sweeping overall strategy of things. But I haven’t lost sight of where the series all began, on that ship in the Norwegian Sea. I know some of you are out there just wanting to walk that deck. Don’t worry, there will be lots more action featuring the original cast and crew to come. Yet the series isn’t just named after that ship, but also the man that gave the ship his name. One of the principal historical figures is young Mironov—Sergei Kirov, and his struggle to save his nation is at the heart of this story. The lines of fate run through him in very many ways, and his tale will continue in this volume, along with Fedorov’s mission.

  That man now guides the history that gave rise to the ship that launched this series. In that light, please understand that the retelling of that history is now my overweening vision for the series as a whole. The life and survival of Kirov, the ship, and all the crew, depend on the outcome of this war. The entire question concerning the Grand Finality raised by Elena Fairchild and Paul Dorland rests on the plates I’m stacking up in this kitchen. Will the altered history ever give rise to the building of that ship? The crew of Kirov shattered the original history, and now I am doing my best to piece it back together, and their fate rides in the balance.

  Some, like Karpov, have jumped into that history wholeheartedly, intending to win; to make it their own. Others, like Fedorov and Volsky, remained deeply conflicted about what they were doing. Over time, they come to see that they can never hope to restore things as they were. That admission means their lives are now on the altar I am building to that history, come what may. They must decide what they will do now to see it all through to a conclusion. I will do the same.

  A lot of you write to me with comments, questions, suggestions or just to say what you like most about the series, or what you want to see next. Some tell me they wait for the next historical segment, the retelling of the war that is now part of the great labor of the series. Some say they want that material less detailed, while others ask for more. Some say they love the character based segments, both with the main characters aboard Kirov, and with the historical characters. Some want the naval action, others the land battles. In this offering, I will try to please you all.

  I have a lot of ground to cover here. We last left the Pacific Theater on the 5th of May with that big carrier duel that became “the Battle of the Koro Sea.” That ran in tandem with the confrontation between Takami and Kirov in the Sea of Okhotsk. Now we return to the Pacific to catch up on what has been happening after Takami broke off and Kurita wisely retired from that engagement.

  After that, I have six or seven chapters for you on the conduct and outcome of Fedorov’s mission, and its consequences. There will be a brief recap of what has been going on with Rommel and Patton, and that takes us to the halfway mark. The last half of the book will then be devoted to the east front, the struggle at Volgograd, and the Russian Winter Counteroffensive continues with yet another bold thrust by Zhukov in “Operation Jupiter.” I hope you enjoy it as much as I did while writing it, the research, the men, the battles.

  Fear not! We return to Kirov big time in 1943. One Vladimir Karpov is about to take off the gloves….

  - John Schettler

  Part I

  Cherry Blossoms

  “That is the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.”

  — Willa Cather

  Chapter 1

  On the northern Island of Hokkaido, the Cherry Blossoms were blooming very late that year. It was already June, the war over six months old, but the beauty of the fragile white flowers had not been frightened away. Yet that year, another flower was blooming in a secret design facility near Yokosuka that had first been set up to evaluate models of foreign aircraft acquired by Japan before the war. It was now working closely with the Naval Academy and design bureau at Tsukijii near Tokyo Bay, and the flowers they were contemplating would one day come to be known as the MXY-7 Ohka, or “Cherry Blossom.”

  For a long year now, there had been rumors, followed by intelligence, concerning the existence of a phantom ship that had appeared in the Atlantic, soon found to be closely cooperating with the British Royal Navy. It was thought to be a highly advanced prototype ship, bearing weapons that soon shocked military analysts in battles with the German Kriegsmarine. They were naval rockets, fast, precise in their targeting, and very deadly.


  The rumors remained simply that for some months, talk in the bars, whispered tales, sailor’s stories as wile and contrived as those of a fisherman describing his catch. But they did not remain rumors and stories for very long. Not ten days after the dramatic opening attack on the American fleet at Pearl harbor, the rumors and gossip became a grim reality, witnessed by officers of the highest rank aboard the flagship of the Kido Butai, the carrier Akagi.

  A sighting report had come in from a search plane describing a fast moving vapor trail approaching Nagumo’s task force from the north. That alone had been puzzling, for there was no land mass of any kind in that direction where a plane might have originated.

  “What is this supposed to mean?” said Nagumo at that time, handing the report to the ship’s Captain. “A fast moving vapor trail?”

  The Captain frowned at the paper, but at that moment a bell rang and the upper watch was reporting verbally that something was in the sky to the north. Nagumo considered the possibilities quickly. The only land mass that could have launched an aircraft was Wake Island to the south. What would be coming out of the north? Could one of the American carriers have been so bold as to follow them? Surely his search planes would have spotted such a task force creeping up, but he had not paid much attention to the northern flank. He had three fighters up on cap, with three more on the decks of his carriers ready for immediate launch. He had it in mind to have his Air Commander, Masudo Shogo, vector in one of those fighters for a look, until he saw what the watchmen were reporting with his own eyes.

  The meaning of ‘fast moving vapor trail’ was now immediately apparent. Something was soaring towards his position, high in the sky, but now it began to descend, like some demigod or demon swooping down. It had to be a plane on fire, he thought, raising his field glasses, and thinking he could even see the faint gleam of fire there. Some ill-fated pilot was falling to his doom, but impossibly fast in the descent. Who could it be?

  Then, to his utter amazement, the falling aircraft leveled off just before it would have crashed into the sea. All the men on the bridge who saw it reacted, some pointing in awe. The Admiral’s eyes narrowed as he watched. It was coming, still burning from what he could see, low and fast over the water, and the fire from its tail glowed upon the sea. That such a descent could have been corrected at the last moment like that seemed an impossible feat of flying to his mind, but now he would see more than he ever thought possible. The aircraft suddenly veered left, then right again, dancing over the water like a mad kami from hell. The pilot must have finally lost control, he thought, but the longer he looked, the more those first moments of surprise extended into shock.

  The maneuvers that aircraft was making could not be accomplished by any plane he had ever known, and yet there was something about the snap of its course corrections that led his mind to conclude they were carefully controlled.

  The thing in the sky came flashing in at the ship, as if deliberately piloted and steered to collide with the carrier. Nagumo saw the deck of Akagi heave upward when it struck, exploding deep within the innards of the carrier. He staggered under the jarring impact, still stunned and not yet even knowing what could have possibly hit the ship. Yet he had seen it with his own eyes, and now the roar of chaos and fire was all about him. It was as if some demonic spirit had simply reached down and hammered his fist against the side of the carrier, breaking its hard metal hull and shattering all within.

  The shock of that hit weighed heavily on the entire bridge crew, and they would soon learn that the entire center of the upper hanger deck was involved with fire.

  “It was clearly a single plane,” said Fuchida. “I was well aft when it came, seeing to the three Zeros we have spotted on ready alert. The impact knocked me from my feet.”

  “One plane?” said Shogo. “Its speed was fantastic! Could it have been the rocket weapons we were warned about?”

  “The tales told by the Prophet?” said Hasegawa. “You might just as easily tell me it was a sky demon”

  “That is not far from the truth,” said Genda. “Plane, rocket, it does not matter. We have seen what it can do, how it can move and strike us with such precision.”

  “It must have been piloted,” said Shogo. “No rocket fired from over the horizon could hit with such accuracy. So if it was piloted, then it must have been launched from a carrier. We must find it and destroy it at once!”

  Those first words, uttered in both awe and fearful respect for the weapon that had just attacked them, would soon reach the ears of the aeronautical designers at technical facilities all over Japan, and one in particular, an Ensign Mitsuo Ohta, took them to heart…. “No rocket fired from over the horizon could hit with such accuracy. It must have been piloted….”

  The concept of rockets wat not a new thing, particularly to the people and culture of Japan. The Chinese Song Dynasty had created rudimentary rockets as early as the year 1232, and enemy warriors actually described them as “Fire Arrows,” with a devastating explosion on impact that could be heard five leagues away. In the 14th Century, the first multi-stage rocket would be born, described as a fire dragon in the artillery manual known as the Huolongjing, or Huo Lung Ching.

  Used by the Chinese Navy, it would be fired from a ship, and could then even ignite smaller rocket propelled arrows from the front of the missile, the fiery breath of the monster used to attack the enemy. Others called them flying crows with magic fire. So it came as no great surprise that the Germans of the 1940s were not the only nation working on rocketry, and the Japanese interest in the subject had been dramatically accelerated when the Akagi was struck by what might easily be described as a flying dragon on the 16th of December, 1941.

  Now Japan had finally seen the devastation that could be achieved by the use of naval rocketry. Work on their own rocket engines had been feverishly advanced since that time, and a great deal of progress had been made, particularly when a cache of secret documents were mysteriously delivered from the Japanese embassy in Orenburg, a “gift” from Ivan Volkov. In them were detailed plans of models the Germans were currently working on, and suggestions for solving problems in the design of their own rockets, improving range, airframe design, aeronautic stability.

  The one problem that would evade a solution was how such weapons could be guided to their intended targets. No mechanical solution could be found. The Germans were exploring avenues of research using radio controlled systems that might be guided to targets visually by a pilot in the plane that carried and launched their aerial flying dragons. So the Japanese also began to develop versions of a missile that would look very much like the German V-1 Buzz Bomb.

  The Ohka was their version, and they were working on a host of variants, some that might be mounted on a Model 24J Bomber, the one the Allies called “Betty.” This was the Model 11, and it was powered by three Type 4 Mark 1 Model 20 solid fuel rockets. It would have limited range, making it necessary to use the bomber to carry the weapon within 20 nautical miles of the target, and the bomber could not fly off the deck of a carrier. While these liabilities made the Model 11 unsuitable for use by the Navy, the Japanese Air Force was keenly interested in it as a possible means of precision bombing, because the guidance problem had been solved another way—the Ohka would be designed to be guided by a pilot. That solution would later lead the Americans to dub the missile the “Buka,” which was the Japanese word for “stupid,” or “fool.”

  Yet the men who would line up in Japan to volunteer to pilot those revolutionary craft were no stupid fools, but the brave souls who would come to be known in Japan as the Jinrai Butai, the Thunder Gods. A plan was already in the works to produce 750 of the Model 11 Ohka missiles, and there would be 750 men ready to pilot them, each one willing to give his life to deliver the weapon he controlled to its target. There, painted on the side of the fuselage of the Ohka, was the image of a cherry blossom, and when the Thunder Gods flew, their souls would fall like those fragile flowers when they died, but they would take many souls with
them, or so it was believed.

  For the Navy, the Model 22 Ohka seemed much more interesting. It would use a new engine, and have a much longer range. In fact, the Germans were planning to launch their own V-1s from France, flying them over the English Channel to hit targets all over England, and they could achieve a range of 250 Kilometers, delivering an 850kg warhead of Amatol. The Navy wanted a similar engine on the Okha, and Yamamoto knew exactly where he could find the blueprints—in the library of a most unusual ship that had come to him after that fateful and untimely eruption of Krakatoa off Java. While that explosive event had savaged Japanese troops ashore and at sea, it also delivered a new champion to the fleet, the strange men and their marvelous ship of war, the Takami.

  They had told the Admiral they could defend the fleet with their own amazing radars and aerial rocket weapons, and even pose a challenge to the mysterious raider that had attacked Akagi and sunk the Hiryu. A plan had been hatched to launch an ambush when the Siberians boldly moved to invade northern Sakhalin Island, then called North Karafuto by the Japanese. One of Yamamoto’s most trusted Admirals, Kurita, led two of Japan’s fast new battleships north to escort Takami, and the carriers Tosa and Kaga joined to provide the air power.

  Unfortunately, the plan failed, and now Takeo Kurita’s neck burned with shame as he came to report to Yamamoto, and explain why. He bowed low, a long and deep bow that would only be offered under such grave circumstances, and Yamamoto, knowing what was in the mind of his able officer, sat patiently until Kurita finally rose, eyes still averted, the shame a look of actual pain on his face. Then Yamamoto decided enough was enough.

  “Very well,” he said. “I have seen, and quite clearly, that the mission recently concluded has not caused any more hair to grow on the top of that bald head of yours, Kurita. Make your report, but do not think, for a single moment, that I will entertain any thought of your resignation, and far less of any notion you may have of ending your life. You were sent to conduct an offensive operation, just as Nagumo was sent to Pearl Harbor, nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that both my warriors returned with casualties. So be it. Now tell me what happened.”