“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” said Vandegrift. The best you’ll get in the short run is that extra RCT from Vanua Levu from the 37th.”
“But without those troops, I can keep pressure on the southern road, but we’re up against the entire 48th Division down there now. Advancing to Nandi won’t be easy.”
“Yup,” said Vandegrift. “They’ve doubled down alright. But Halsey is back, and with a lot of new carriers. Things will be heating up as soon as he gets here.”
“I’ll bet that has MacArthur seeing red,” said Krueger. “He’s been wanting to get into this war for a long time, complaining the Navy has given him the short end of the stick for the last six months. He’s got all those Divisions in Australia, and there they sit. The man had it in his mind to make a move on New Guinea, and while there’s plenty of shipping available, there’s no carrier support for air cover.”
“Hell,” said Vandegrift. “After that riot in the Koro Sea last May there’s been no carrier air support down here for anyone. It’s our Marine Squadrons that have done the heavy lifting, and you’re lucky Nimitz left them behind.”
“Just the same, Big Mac is getting real antsy down under, and he wants to get in the ring now that they’ve turned the show over to the Army. He says he’s ‘bitterly disappointed’ at what he calls the foot dragging in Washington. Says the support he was getting was ‘entirely inadequate.’” Krueger emphasized the quotes with his fingers in the air. “I suppose I don’t blame him. I’d bellyache too if I were stuck down there in Brisbane when the real fight was right here. In fact, the troops in Australia are wound up tighter than a spring. There was a good deal of street fighting I’m told, and not just the typical barroom brawls. They damn near had a riot in Brisbane, with the Aussies and Yanks at each other’s throats. So when Halsey gets back, you can bet MacArthur will be after him for carriers. He still thinks he’s going to Papua New Guinea—said he wanted to discuss that whole operation for me after we finish up here on Fiji.”
“MacArthur did more than that,” said Vandegrift. “Nimitz told me he bent Curtin’s ear to see if he could persuade Churchill to send him a British carrier! Can you imagine that?”
“Hell, they lost two flattops the first time they mixed it up with the Japs, and then they lost Ceylon to boot. No, his majesty won’t get any help from the Brits, nor will we. This is our war out here.”
“Well get this… MacArthur’s little end around through Curtin and Churchill ticked off General Marshall to no end. He had Roosevelt explain the whole situation to MacArthur, but the man would not let it go. After being told he would have to get by with those divisions in Australia, and by the President himself, MacArthur sent a cable the next day demanding two aircraft carriers, another 500 planes and one more first-class infantry division. That man has bigger balls than Genghis Khan. If no more US divisions were to be allocated to his command, he then suggested that the President ask Churchill to lend him the British 18th Division at Perth!”
“Doesn’t he realize that if we don’t stop the Japs here in the Fiji Group, he may not get anything more for Australia at all? If they beat us here, then Samoa is next. They take that, and this thing is over.” Krueger was a hard fighter, but he could read a map. “Like I told you, he still has Papua New Guinea on his mind. Since the Aussies still have Milne Bay, MacArthur wants to transfer all the Ack Ack and air groups from Melbourne and Brisbane to Townsville and Cairns in the North. Then he wants to build a new air strip between Milne Bay and Port Moresby on the coast there. I got briefed on that when I was over in Melbourne last month. MacArthur is calling this new imaginary airfield by the code name BOSTON, but I guess he never stopped to think the place would be under Jap air attack from Moresby the whole time it’s being built.” Krueger shook his head dismissively.
“Right,” said Vandegrift. “Then he’ll want to march right on up through the Bismarcks to Rabaul.”
“Hell,” said Krueger, “I’d be happy to go over there and do exactly that, but not with this much Japanese force here in Fiji.”
“It’s the Philippines he really wants,” said Vandegrift. “New Guinea is just a staircase he has to climb to get back to his private little kingdom there. He never did get over being run out of the place.”
“I hear Nimitz doesn’t want it. He’s of a mind to bypass the Phils and just leapfrog along Pacific Islands, all the way to Japan. That’ll keep your Marines nice and busy. If MacArthur wins that argument, I guess he’ll want the Army to do the job in Papua New Guinea.”
“I expect we’ll find out what’s up soon enough. First things first—we’ve got to push the Japs off this island, and now it looks like they’ve handed the job to MacArthur. You get along with his majesty?”
“He’s just another CO,” said Krueger. “He’ll call the shots, but I’m the man on the ground getting things done. Fine with me.”
“When do you figure you’ll be ready to go after the Japs?”
“January. That’s when we’re scheduled to receive reinforcements from Brisbane. What about you, Archie? When do those fighting leathernecks of yours get back in the game?”
“God only knows,” said Vandegrift. “I’m told my boys get two weeks off in Samoa. After that, they’ll have something in mind. I can smell another big carrier battle shaping up here soon, and I suppose that will decide the matter.”
That wasn’t a hard thing to predict, but Archie Vandegrift was correct.
Chapter 3
The Nimitz Plan
As for the Navy, the Fiji Group was not the only thing on the minds of Navy planners. Now ready to go on the offensive, the Americans had moved both Marine Divisions to Samoa and they were waiting for the first clear opportunity to push into the New Hebrides, a place singled out by both Nimitz and King as the key to flanking the Japanese on both Fiji and New Caledonia.
“The initial objective will be this island,” said Nimitz. Eh-fa-tah, but for some damn reason the spell it Efate. The code name is ROSES. They wanted to change it to TRUCULENCE, but who wants to try and spell that on a thousand reports?”
“It doesn’t matter how they spell it,” said Halsey. “A rose is a rose by any other name. Where do I hit it?”
“Right here, at Port Vila on the southwest coast. There’s a decent small harbor there, but the bay beyond it gets a lot of rough swell. The place flanks Noumea, and if we get some good fighter groups in there, we can cut off their LOC to New Caledonia. Up north here at Havana Harbor there’s room for a seaplane base as well. We’ll take it with a single regiment, the 8th Marines. That’s job one, and this base will support any move we make on New Caledonia.”
“And job two?” Halsey was ready for more.
“Espiritu Santo,” said Nimitz. “That’s what we want next. It’s the largest island in the New Hebrides, and there’s an excellent anchorage at Luganville. From there we can throw up fighter and bomber fields and then build the place up for any move we might have to make into the Solomons. It’s perfect.”
“Japanese?” asked Halsey.
“None to speak of. They put all their chips in the Fiji Group. The French have a battalion from their Tonkin Division there, but they won’t fight.”
“Alright, how you gonna hit the place?”
“I want to put the other two regiments of 2nd Marines in there, with one landing up here in the north at Saint James Bay, and the other right at Luganville.”
“Two Regiments?”
“We won’t need both to take the place, but we might need them to hold it,” said Nimitz. “That will also give me enough to jump on anything else we might need. We’ll follow up with a Marine Defense Battalion, Naval construction troops, the works.”
Nimitz had put his finger on the island that would become the largest US Naval operating base in the South Pacific. Before the war ended in Fedorov’s history, two fighter fields and three bomber fields would be built there, along with a seaplane base, coastal guns of the 155th CD Regiment, massive supply and ammunition depots
, a naval repair dock, and even aircraft engine shops and facilities to service and store torpedoes for both planes and subs. As many as 100,000 men would be based on the island, and over 2 million would pass through it enroute to other objectives. If taken here, it would likely replace Suva Bay as the US forward operating base for the Solomons Campaign, just as it did in the old history.
“So I’ll want us to form up here, about 100 miles northwest of those islands. We’ll only have to use one carrier to hit anything the French have on them, and the remainder can wait for the Japs. In fact, we have the 1st Parachute Battalion available to pioneer this landing. We can take them out to sea with us, escorted by Antietam. The main landings won’t be authorized unless we can assure sea control.”
“What if they don’t come after us?”
“All the better,” said Nimitz. “Then we bring in the Marines, and stand there with a chip on our shoulder to see if the other fellow wants to do anything about it. Don’t worry Bull, they’ll come. They wouldn’t leave a mug like yours off their dance card.”
Halsey grinned at that. “All that R & R in Pearl did wonders for me,” he said. “I feel like a new man.”
“And you’ve got a whole new fleet. Spruance has Enterprise and Hornet, and you take in the three new Essex Class carriers. Where will you plant your flag?”
“Essex,” said Halsey. “I thought I might go with the Lexington, but first in the class always gets the nod. Besides, that ship and crew have had more time to work in.”
“A good choice. How are the air wings shaping up?”
“We’ve been running drills for the last week. I’ve got 38 F4U Corsairs, and they look good. Yorktown still has the older Wildcats, but they honored Lexington with a couple dozen of those hot new F6Fs.”
“Those are the first of the new planes we’ll be getting,” said Nimitz. “They’ve been burning the midnight oil at the drafting tables for the last year. You’d be amazed at what we have coming.”
On both sides of the war, designers were busy with prototypes and handing them off to test pilots for evaluation. Ronnie Harker was one of those rare men when he got into a plane, another great British test pilot like Winkle Brown, who had a magic touch when he flew. Harker had his eye on a newcomer, and he first fell in love with it in April of 1942.
A latecomer to the dance, it was the P-51, rolled out of the design bays in a little over 100 days after the contract was signed. Oddly, the plane had been built for the British, who were looking for something new as they shopped American built planes to help flesh out new RAF squadrons. The Curtiss P-40 was getting long in the tooth, so they asked for something else. They specified the engine they wanted, the Allison V-1710, and the price they would pay. The North American 73, or NA-73, started test flights and had some very promising features.
The airfoils created very little drag, and the heated engine exhaust had the effect of giving the plane a little boost akin to that of a rocket thrust, called the “Meredith Effect,” after a British engineer who proposed that extra heat from a liquid cooled engine could be put to this use. The Supermarine Spitfires already benefited from the effect, but this plane delighted early fliers when it was found to be faster than even the latest model Spitfires at low to medium altitudes. It also handled extremely well, at least under 15,000 feet, but RAF test pilot Ronnie Harker didn’t like what he was seeing with the plane above that altitude.
“It’s a bit sluggish up there,” he said. “Put a Rolls Royce engine in it and we might have a much better plane.” Harker might be forgiven for being just a little biased in making such a suggestion, for he was actually employed by Rolls Royce at the time, their very first test pilot looking over new aircraft proposed for the RAF.
“I was impressed with it under 15,000 feet as well,” said Wing Commander Campbell-Orde. “But what could it do that the Spitfire hasn’t already done?”
“It’s faster than the Mark V,” said Harker.
“Yes, well now we’ve got the Mark IX to go after the German FW-190s.”
“Throw in a Merlin-61 and it will be faster than the Mark IX, and probably perform like a dance queen at high altitude.”
Perhaps Harker was simply selling, like any good company man might, but his prediction would turn out to be very true. In October of 42, they did put a Merlin engine in the plane and it was everything Harker said it would be, and more. One other feature of the plane was its built-in reserve fuel tanks which gave it very long range. It could fly 1650 miles, a thousand miles farther than the plane it had been designed to replace, the Curtiss P-40. That got the light winking in the eyes of the American bomber advocates, and was largely responsible for getting the US interested in this new design.
Before the war, US theory on strategic bombing was built on the assumption that heavily armed planes like the B-17 “Flying Fortress” would be able to easily defend themselves and always get through to their targets. Even as the war came, the Army Air Force thought of the B-17 as its premier offensive weapon, and the US urged round the clock bombing against Germany, with the US flying the day operations. With most of the Luftwaffe in Russia, that worked for a time, until Germany answered the treat my simply transferring more of their excellent Bf-109 squadrons to the west, and then introduced the fearsome Focke Wulf 190. It was soon found that the B-17 was vulnerable against these excellent fighters and the pilots that flew them, so much so that daylight bombing had to be cancelled.
The US 8thAir force took the buzz about the new P-51 to heart, particularly when they heard about that tremendous range. No fighter had the range to accompany the bombers effectively before the P-51, and with that new engine making the plane more than a match for anything it would face, a legend was born. It could outfight the German 109s, and match the 190s as well. The British Spitfire IX could make 368 MPH at high altitude, but with that new Merlin engine, the Mustang could go over 430 MPH. Yet for the 8th Airforce, it had the only real quality that mattered—range.
Unbeknownst to Ronnie Harker, there were other contenders to the throne in the realm of fighter performance. The American designers wanting to protect those bombers had first thought to go with a twin-engine plane like the P-38, which was almost as fast as the Mustang at 414 MPH, and had a range of 1300 miles. It could do everything, flying as an interceptor, light bomber for ground attack, and it was also a good night fighter and recon plane. Over 10,000 would be built, but there was another plane that was much better that was overlooked…. In Fedorov’s history.
That plane was the Grumman F7F Tigercat, another sleek twin engine design that was so fast that it could simply run away from the Navy’s hot new single engine fighter, the F6F Hellcat. With four 20mm cannons and four more .50 caliber MGs, it could outpunch any fighter it encountered, and had hard points that could carry both bombs and torpedoes. The Navy took a pass on the plane when it failed carrier qualifications, being too fast on landing, and too heavy. But the Marines eyed the plane with a good deal of interest. Only 12 were ever built during the war in the old history, but in these events, another man like Ronnie Harker was out to change history.
His name was Captain Fred Trapnell, a hot shot test pilot for the Navy who thought he was sitting in the best fighter he had ever flown when he took the prototype up. He had been flying a captured Zero to see just what the magic was in that plane. The Navy wanted to beat it, and they were hoping the F6F would do the job. It would, and Trapnell’s recommendation on the F7F would not supplant the Hellcats on the decks of US carriers—but it would convince the Marines to push hard for the plane. It could achieve altitudes of 40,000 feet, hit hard, serve in any role like the P-38, and the Marines wanted it. They would see that production moved from 12 to over 250, and a good deal earlier than the Tigercats ever saw the skies over the Pacific in the old history.
So it was that the ships that never were would also be joined by planes that never got their chance in the war. The F7F Tigercat would be a notable performer for the Marines in good time. Another newcomer would
be the Boeing F8F “Bearcat.” It was a single seater, yet the biggest and heaviest ever built by the US. A “Five fingered plane” it was designed to perform five crucial roles, as a fighter, interceptor, dive bomber, torpedo bomber, or level bomber. To do that job, it had even more punch than the Tigercat, with six 20mm cannons and six MGs. It was yet another nightmare on the drafting tables that the Japanese would have to face before this was over—a plane that could fly off the decks of US carriers that were cruising outside the range of the best Japanese land based fighters. Again, that range was a critical factor in the Pacific, and the Bearcats could fly an astonishing 2800 miles, twice that of the fabled Mustang.
All of this would pose a real challenge for Japan, but there was one more man fiddling with the history, and his name was Ivan Volkov. He had quietly told the Japanese about things on the US Drawing boards, and urged them to respond. When Karpov opened the northern front by taking Kamchatka and invading Sakhalin Island, Volkov approached the Japanese again with dire warnings. America was building a new bomber, he told them, with very long range and the hitting power to lay waste to Japanese cities if it was not stopped. The “bomber threat” would lead Japan to design a number of excellent interceptors, and this threat, combined with the defeat of her carriers, channeled production away from better carrier capable planes.
The Army was already working on a promising interceptor designed by Nakajima, the Ki-84 Hayate, or “Gale.” This plane, called Frank by the Allies, began to appear in Mid-1943 in the real history, and Volkov was attempting to move that development along faster. He would also offer technical support for designs like the Nakajima Ki-87, a radial engine fighter with an exhaust driven turbo-supercharger that could take two 30mm cannon and two more 20mm guns to 42,000 feet, and at 433MPH. There was a bomber interceptor that might have a dramatic impact on the war, and Volkov was doing everything possible to see that it was developed early.
1943 (Kirov Series Book 27) Page 3