by Peter Albano
To the north, two dozen Japanese and Libyan fighters were locked in a tumbling, blazing battle. Already two fighters had flamed and plunged into the sea. A single white parachute was drifting slowly downward. Almost directly above, Commander Yoshi Matsuhara and his two strange companions, which had been identified as British Seafires, had shot down three of the bombers and were climbing desperately in an attempt to bag more. But the trio could not stop all the bombers. That was obvious. Hell would be raining from the sky soon.
The young gunner was shocked by Williams’ command. “Five-inch, commence firing. Commence! Commence!”
Before Brent could say a word, Crog shouted, “Our fighters, Captain?”
“They’ll have to take their chances and they know it.”
Brent choked back his own objections. Williams was right again and he knew it. In fact, if he were in command, he would give the same order.
The five-inch gun was specially plated and lubricated to withstand repeated immersions. However, the incursions of salt water made the mounting of an automatic loading machine impossible. Manually loaded, it could fire only about ten rounds a minute with a maximum range of 8,000 yards. Without radar fire-control and with fuse settings called out by Chief Gunner’s Mate Robinson, who was using a pair of range-finding binoculars, it would be highly inaccurate. But it might frighten the bomber pilots. Perhaps spoil their accuracy. And perhaps destroy a bomber or a friendly fighter.
Elevated to almost fifty degrees and pointed to port, the muzzle of the cannon was almost even with Brent’s head. There was a flash, a sharp explosion that struck the young lieutenant’s eardrums like the end of a whip. Every man rolled with the blast like a fighter taking a punch. There were groans, and hands flew to ears. The staggering concussion sent the bearing ring flying off of the gyro repeater and a log book, pencil, and parallel rules were catapulted off of the small chart table mounted in a corner of the bridge. “Jesus Christ,” Brent heard Bowman moan. There was a faint smell of cordite, but most of the smoke was blown aft and over the stern.
Brent watched as a brown smear of smoke burst high above like a malignant tumor in the blue sky. “Five hundred feet low, and, Christ, a half-mile to the right. My God man, what are you shooting at, Shanghai?” Williams roared, dropping his glasses to his waist.
There was a clatter of brass on steel as two men manhandled a sixty-five-pound cartridge to the breech and rammed it home. Then the shouted commands of the gun captain. The pointer and trainer cranked their wheels furiously and then Brent heard a chorus of, “On target. On target.”
Again the cannon spat its yellow tongue and the groans came as the blast lashed the bridge crew. Another brown puff, this time above the bombers and to the left.
“Jesus, man,” Williams stormed, staring through his binoculars. “A thousand feet high and a quarter-mile to the left.” He punched the wind screen. “Rapid fire, but try not to sink us. On the other hand, those enemy pilots might laugh so much they might not be able to hit us.”
Brent wondered at Williams’ words. Doom was closing in above, yet the man could actually joke. He felt a new respect for the big black.
Matsuhara and his wingmen were ripping through the long line of bombers from ahead, curving in from below and the side, making desperate passes that brought them under fire from both the pilots’ two fixed 7.92-millimeter machine guns and at the same time drew fire from some of the twin machine guns mounted in the rear cockpits. Tracers glowed, smoked, and crossed in mad patterns as if an insane spider were hurling a web across the sky. The leading bomber burst into flame and then tumbled across the sky in wild gyrations like a demented moth that had dared a candle’s flame once too often. A Seafire blasted the landing gear from another, shattered the cockpit, and the big Junkers curved toward the sea manned by dead men. But the seven survivors plodded on with a determination that froze Brent’s blood.
Then a new fear struck him. Three ME 109s had broken through the dogfight high to the north and were streaking downward and toward Matsuhara’s fight with the bombers. Matsuhara’s section would be forced to disengage the bombers and defend themselves. And that was precisely what they were doing, abandoning the attack on the bombers, pulling up hard and climbing to meet the three plunging Messerschmitts. Brent narrowed his eyes and stared above, a jolt of hate flowing through his veins and charging his entire being. A red Messerschmitt was leading. Oberstleutnant Kenneth Rosencrance. And one of his wingmen was flying a black fighter with garish white stripes. Captain Wolfgang “Zebra” Vatz. Rosencrance and Vatz, the enemy’s two most cold-blooded killers. Brent prayed for Yoshi.
Abruptly, his attention was diverted to the preservation of his own life. The first JU 87 had peeled off into its dive. Instead of diving in the usual stream, the remaining six began to circle above, watching and waiting for their own turns. Either they were inexperienced or so supremely confident they were using Blackfin for target practice. Or maybe the wild firing of the five-inch had disconcerted them. In any event, they had made a mistake. The submarine’s AA guns could concentrate on one target at a time with time to reload and regroup between attacks.
“All ahead flank!” Williams screamed. “Right full rudder! Secondary armament commence firing when in range!”
Brent felt the boat surge as the four Fairbanks-Morse diesels were throttled to full power, delivering 24,000 horsepower to the twin bronze screws. At the same time he felt himself pushed to port as Quartermaster Sturgis cranked the wheel and Blackfin turned sharply to starboard.
“Twenty-six knots, four hundred sixty revolutions,” a tight, nervous voice shouted up the hatch from the conning tower.
“Very well,” Williams yelled down the hatch.
The five-inch barked again and again, but the rounds were hopelessly wide and poorly fused. Brent was on his own, could open fire at his own discretion. But the big plane was still too high — too high for even the Orlikons. He watched fascinated as the plunging Stuka grew in his ring sight — the big Jumo 211 engine blasting its power out of six exhaust ports on each side of the hood, the graceful gull wing and the clumsy fixed landing gear, the high canopy and the pilot’s goggled head behind his sight, the big air brakes like boards stretched beneath the outer wings, and the huge bomb slung beneath the fuselage on its trapeze-like crutch.
The bomber had steepened its dive to about eighty-five-degrees, which was the favorite bomb release angle. ‘six thousand feet, five thousand five hundred feet,” Brent heard Williams chant as he studied the Junkers. Abruptly, the captain turned to Quartermaster Sturgis. “Rudder amidships, steady on zero-nine-zero.”
“Rudder amidships. Steady on zero-nine-zero, sir,” Sturgis repeated.
Suddenly the boat was enveloped by a sound like a hundred tortured banshees. Brent had heard the frightening sound many times before. There was a chorus of, “What’s that noise?” “For Christ’s sake, what’s that?”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Brent shouted. “They have sirens on their landing gear. The Arabs call them “Trombones of Jericho.” They’re supposed to scare us.”
“Shit. I don’t need no more scarin’,” Bowman said.
At that moment the twenty-millimeter guns began to fire and at the same time Brent saw the 500-kilogram bomb suddenly swing far below the Stuka’s fuselage on its crutch and hurled clear of the propeller like a shiny black marble flung by a slingshot. Four smaller bombs were released at the same time.
Like all men under dive-bombing attack, Brent felt the bombs were headed directly for him, would actually land on his head. His stomach became a cement mixer and he could taste the ham sandwich he had had for lunch trying to spasm its way up through his throat. His flesh was icy, and tiny insects with frozen feet were racing up his spine. He had never known such fear, such horror. But the men could not know this, could not suspect. He was an officer. Must set an example. Grunting, he choked back the curdled, acid taste that fouled his mouth, squared his shoulders, clenched his teeth, and skinned his lips
back in a rictus of determination. The black, finned missiles were growing and shrieking as they plunged downward. But Brent kept his whole attention, his whole being concentrated on the target.
In a hail of twenty-millimeter tracers, the pilot pulled back hard on his stick. But his momentum was carrying the plane very low. The Stuka’s wingspan became a diameter of Brent’s ring sight, and part of the underside of the bomber’s fuselage was visible as well as the dive flattened. Leading the bomber like a hunter shooting game birds, he pressed the trigger.
His Browning and Crog’s starboard fifty stuttered to life simultaneously. The belt jerked and raced through the breech, and the ejector sent a stream of brass cartridges clattering into the canvas bag. He saw his tracers blast the big air-scoop and radiator from the bottom of the aircraft, and immediately a white stream of glycol shot into the slipstream. As the pilot pulled up and careened to port, black smoke trailed him like a dirty string in the sky. Brent heard some men cheer.
The cheering was stopped by a cataclysmic explosion to port. The 500-kilogram bomb ripped a blue-green tower from the sea not more than fifty feet from the port side, the flash of the high explosives snuffed out immediately by the water. There were hums and whines and clattering ricochets as shrapnel tore the sea and sailed over the bridge. Not all missed. There was a scream from periscope shears, and the port lookout, Seaman Max Orlin, doubled over, nearly cut in half by a piece of bomb casing the size of a stewing pot. Blood, torn intestines, and gore rained on the bridge and on every man. Then the lookout’s eviscerated body tumbled from his platform, bounced off the deck, and rolled off the pressure hull and into the sea. A bloody streak smeared the submarine’s wake.
The starboard lookout in the shears began to howl, “Max! Max! My God, Max!”
“Shut up and get back to your watch,” Williams yelled. The howling stopped.
Brent did not have time to wipe the blood from his face or even feel the anguish and horror of the moment. The second bomber had dropped off into its dive while the others continued to circle. He heard Bowman whimper, and his loader dropped a box of ammunition. “God damn it! Shut up and stand by to load,” Brent shouted.
“Sorry, sir.” The loader picked up the box and came erect.
While the Orlikons yammered and the cannon roared, the second plane’s dive steepened and the shrieking began. “Left full rudder!” Williams screamed.
Again the wings of the Stuka filled Brent’s ring sight. His thumbs stiffened on the trigger.
*
“Edo flight! Form up! Form up!” Commander Yoshi Matsuhara’s voice squawked in Captain Colin Willard-Smith’s earphones. “Follow my lead. Intercept and then individual combat!”
Both wingmen acknowledged. The command was not really necessary. One pass as a unit, and then it would be every man for himself in the wildest kind of bloody barroom brawl where the stakes were life or death. Willard-Smith and York were closing in fast on the Zero’s elevators as the flight commander pointed his cowling at the three diving Messerschmitts. Blackfin would be on its own until they disposed of the mortal threat thundering down from above.
No doubt about it, Rosencrance was leading with Captain Wolfgang Vatz’s zebra-striped fighter on his left side with the usual solid black Messerschmitt of every other member of the Fourth Fighter Squadron covering his right. And at least a dozen more ME 109s were pouring in from the west, while an equal number of Zeros streaked in from the north and east. This battle was developing into one of the greatest dogfights of the five-year war. Not since the storied Mediterranean engagement of 1984 had there been so many fighters locked in combat. Already the toll had been heavy. An ME was burning and streaking toward the sea like a meteor, a Zero had exploded, and another ME had lost most of a wing and was disintegrating as it tumbled downward. Two parachutes descended slowly toward the sea.
With the Rolls Royce Griffon screaming in war emergency power, Willard-Smith was pushed back into his seat by acceleration and gravity. Anxiously, the Englishman glanced at his instruments. The oil and coolant temperature readings were crowding their red lines at 105 and 121 Celsius. Passing 2850, the rev-counter, too, was approaching the danger area while the manifold pressure gauge showed 67 inches of boost, which was about all the engine could take. But even in this climb, the airspeed indicator showed 360 knots. Fast, but barely enough to keep his station off Matsuhara’s tail.
This would be a head-on pass, the enemy fighters diving, Edo Section climbing. Moving the stick slightly, Willard-Smith brought the reticle of his electric reflector sight to the right-hand Messerschmitt. It was completely black, but now he noticed it had a white propeller boss. The boss became his bull’s-eye. The diving trio was still far out of range, but with a combined closing speed of almost a thousand knots, they would be in range in a less than a minute. His right hand gripped the loop at the top of the control column, and his thumb moved to the firing button.
The fighter circuit was filled with the frantic voices of aerial combat, but they did not distract him. “Ronin Green. Take your section higher! Higher! Upsun. We need top cover.”
“Roger Ronin Leader. Climbing to nine thousand meters.”
“Kudo! One on your tail. Five o’clock. Break left!”
“Breaking left, Shigamitsu.”
“Shigamitsu. They got Ikeda. He’s burning.”
“Watch your own backside, Okumura. Two MEs closing fast. Are you blind?”
“See them. Give me some help, Watanabe. Tell me when to break.”
“Okumura, I have the one on the right. In the name of the gods, turn! Break left now! Now!”
“Breaking left, Watanabe.”
“No! No! Okumura. Don’t dive! You can’t dive with them!”
“Shigamitsu, this is Kudo. I sent the yatsu (bum) straight to his hell, prebaked in his own stew.”
“This is Watanabe. Okumura has joined his ancestors.”
“Ronin Flight, this is Ronin Leader. Many enemy fighters high and to the west. Ronin Green, where are you?”
“Intercepting. But there is a full squadron up here, Ronin Leader.”
“Ronin Flight. Disengage! Climb! Climb! They cannot climb with us.”
Shigamitsu was taking his sections up to meet the new threat. He was gaining altitude, a fighter pilot’s most prized possession. His fighters had shot down three or four of the Fourth Fighter Squadron but had lost three or more of their own. However, help had arrived. Perhaps fifteen more Zeros were streaking across the sky to help Shigamitsu intercept the new squadron of enemy fighters.
Willard-Smith ignored it all. His whole universe was the diving ME 109, growing in his windscreen with frightening speed. He was thankful for his ninety-millimeter armorglass windscreen, but knew it could not stop a twenty-millimeter shell. In a millisecond his mind reviewed everything he knew about the Messerschmitt: level flight speed of 360 knots; extremely good climb and dive speeds, could out-dive both the Seafire and the Zero, direct fuel injection which functioned without missing a beat in negative-g maneuvers, rugged construction but a little weak in the wing roots, two wing-mounted Mauser twenty-millimeter cannons and two cowling mounted Borsig 7.9-millimeter machine guns. He must look for its limitations: heavy ailerons at high speeds and, also, elevators hard to move at combat speeds; no rudder trimmer which made long flights extremely tiring; prone to high-speed stalls and it had a wide turn radius.
He hunched forward, caressing the red button. A head-on pass canceled out most advantages and disadvantages except armament. Here he had the advantage. Without moving his eyes from the reflector sight, he picked up Commander Matsuhara’s Zero creeping ahead. The new Sakae 42 was pulling the light fighter ahead of the Seafires. And Rosencrance’s red machine was far ahead of his diving companions.
Both Rosencrance and Matsuhara opened fire simultaneously. Bright orange and yellow fire motes flickered from hits on both aircraft. Rosencrance turned to his left slightly. Matsuhara turned with him. They were hub to hub, firing and closing at
an incredible speed. It appeared Matsuhara was determined to ram the Oberstleutnant.
Willard-Smith stiffened and his eyes widened as the wings and hood of the black ME 109 blossomed with the deep red of roses in full bloom. Tracers streaked toward him and dropped off. “Too far, amateur.” He brought his nose up slightly to bring the black machine into the lighted orange circle. At last, the wings of the black machine stretched far enough to touch the circle like a chord and the reticle was on the boss. He whispered as he squeezed the button, “Here’s your ticket to Mecca or Valhalla or wherever you’re going, you bloody bastard.” The recoil of the four Hispano-Suiza cannons shook the airframe like an old building in an earthquake, knocking open the flare-gun locker and raising dust in the cramped cockpit. Willard-Smith felt his teeth chatter, but he was not sure it was from the recoil. In the corner of his eye he saw Matsuhara and Rosencrance pass each other, Rosencrance pulling up at the last instant. They had both apparently missed delivering mortal damage to each other.
But he was too close to miss and so was the enemy. A trip hammer began to drum on the Seafire’s right wing, and holes appeared in the aluminum magically. But the Englishman was scoring, too. His heavier armament told immediately. A shell blew off the ME’s port exhaust manifold fairing strip and ripped the ejector exhaust. Then the port cowling fastener was blown loose and the cowling ripped and bent up into the gale like a piece of paper and smashed into the armored windshield frame, bounded over the cockpit taking the RDF loop and antenna mast with it. Passing the tail, it ripped the top from the rudder and vertical tailplane.
Either in a panic or experiencing a loss of control, the enemy pilot did the worst possible thing. He pulled back on the stick. Shouting in triumph, Willard-Smith saw the entire bottom of the Messerschmitt exposed like the belly of a trout ripe for gutting. At zero deflection and at close range the big shells blasted chunks of aluminum into the slipstream, exposing stringers, frames, cables. The sledgehammer blows marched to the tail, blowing off the tail wheel and then the port elevator and the rudder.