Grand Alliance (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  “Signal Volsky on the secure channel,” said Gromyko, and he soon had his answer. The British ship was to be considered friendly and the Admiral was now asking Gromyko to do whatever he could to lend support.

  “Do whatever?” Gromyko smiled, crumbling the message in his fist. He had his boat at a good depth for missile action, and had no worry that he might attract the attention of a deadly American attack sub. He also had sixteen supersonic Onyx missile’s ready, the system he had retained after lending Kirov the bulk of his P-900s. So he did the simplest thing he could think of—he picked his targets and fired.

  Better late than never, he thought, realizing he had just become an active combatant in the middle of the Second World War.

  Chapter 30

  Gromyko was going to fight this battle as he had fought the Americans in the Pacific. Kazan had been part of the three boat missile barrage that Karpov had ordered against the Washington battlegroup, and had been the only sub to escape after taking that daring risk. Russian naval tactics knew the importance of getting in the first blow, the struggle for the first salvo, and when they fired against a modern adversary, they meant business.

  Now he decided that the size of the enemy battlegroup ahead needed a good strong salvo here as well, and so he committed nearly half his remaining missiles to the attack. The eight air breathing P-800s were fast at Mach 2.0. closing the range to the target in brief minutes. Nearly nine meters long, the missiles weighed 3100 kilograms, a good portion of that from the T-6 kerosene fuel, and packed a 250kg warhead. At this range the monopulse active/passive radar locked on, hopping from one frequency to another as if it were trying to spook enemy ECM jamming that would not exist for decades.

  The Russian word for the missile meant “Ruby,” the red gem of wrath, and the formation of eight missiles were carrying a combined warhead weight of 2000kgs, over 4400 pounds on eight times that in the weight of the missiles themselves. With range out to 300 kilometers, they were only going to use a small portion of the kerosene fuel to reach their targets, and the remainder was going to ignite a holocaust on any ship it struck. It was a lightning fast salvo of heavy armor piercing fire bombs.

  The watch on Hindenburg called out the alarm, seeing the missiles arc up in the sky and then dive for the sea like a formation of dragons. Some of the men stared in awe as the formation came in, and then slowly fanned out as the missiles began to acquire specific targets. One missile in the salvo was acting as leader, ruling on target acquisition like the chairman of the board. It had been programmed to allow no more than two missiles to lock on to any single ship. Gromyko wanted to spread the joy around.

  Hindenburg and Bismarck would both take two hard hits, right amidships on the squadron flagship, with one missile very near the bruised and blackened armor from the GB-7 strike from Argos Fire. The roar of the missiles thundered in, and the hour that Lütjens had mused on now became a crucible of searing fire. The kinetic shock of the missiles were tremendous, as they were many times the weight of the GB-7. Nearly fifteen inches of cemented, face hardened Krupp steel stood in their way. The armor scheme had been conceived by designers who assumed the ship would most often fight in the misty cold waters of the North Atlantic, where visibility was low and range for gunnery duels was often very short. As such, the layout and angle of the armor was designed to repel flat trajectory attacks, like the one the missiles were delivering, as opposed to plunging fire attacks that might be delivered from shells fired at a greater range.

  Like MacRae on the Argos Fire, Gromyko had not had the benefit of the long trial and error that Kirov had, and there had been little time to brief him. So the missiles would strike the ship at its strongest point, a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The face hardened armor was dual density, with the bulk being ten inches of very hard steel that was meant to blunt the nose of an incoming projectile, de-capping the shell and therefore reducing its penetrating power. The inner four or five inches were of softer density, designed to prevent the armor from fragmenting and producing shrapnel splinters that could wreak havoc inside the ship. The slope of the armor itself further increased its resistance to penetration, an ingenious design that would make the ship all but invulnerable to full belt armor failure from a flat trajectory attack—or so the designers believed.

  Two blazing battering rams struck at the hardened citadel of the ship that day, the place where Hindenburg’s defense was meant to protect the machinery, boilers, generators, power switchboards and the gun plot rooms. It was struck with a combined warhead weight of 500kgs, but had been designed to resist single shell hits twice that heavy, in the range of 800 to 1000kgs—but not shells moving at Mach 2 driven by a 3000 kilogram rocket! The armor would de-cap the warheads, and they would fail to penetrate, but the tremendous force behind the attack would buckle the steel and blast it with massive heat and shock. The fire that erupted from all that excess kerosene was terrible. Men anywhere near the point of impact literally had the oxygen sucked from their lungs, and the ship was scalded with searing heat. Most of the damage control crews that had been fighting, and slowly suppressing the fire from the GB-7 hit, were now simply immolated by the attack, and Hindenburg burned, a fierce, raging fire that enveloped the entire starboard middle segment of the ship, with flames so hot that the gunwales above the point of impact literally melted.

  Amazingly, the armor held, just as it was designed, for in fact, it would have taken an 18-inch gun from the Yamato at near point blank range to fully penetrate due to the ingenious scheme against flat trajectory rounds. It would be the damnable fire that would eventually rule the hot hour Lütjens had come to. He could feel the ship roll with the punch, and he also saw that Bismarck had taken two hard hits as well, one slightly aft and a second amidships. One look at the fires that enveloped the ship told him what was happening now on Hindenburg. Unless these fires were quickly controlled, they might spread and do damage that could put both vessels in the repair docks for a very long time.

  “Starboard twenty,” he shouted. “Come about!”

  The helm answered, and the ship turned, the wind fanning the flames and driving the heavy smoke past the bridge viewports.

  “We are turning?” Captain Adler had been watching Bismarck with his field glasses. “What are you doing, Admiral?”

  “One look at those fires should tell you that. Signal Bismarck to follow.”

  “Then you are breaking off? We must continue! There is nothing wrong with our guns.”

  “There will be if those fires reach a magazine. Look at them! Look at Bismarck!” Lütjens was pointing at the raging smoke and flame, and the desperate struggle to get more damage control parties to the scene, but Adler’s eyes were trained with the big forward turrets of Hindenburg. Bruno turret fired, the power of the volley shaking the ship.

  “Look at that fire,” he said. “We can crush the British!”

  “Those flames are nearly as high as the bridge, Captain. If they aren’t controlled soon we may not be able to even breathe here, let alone have these nice little arguments in front of the men.” He paused to let that sink in, but Adler had the heat of the battle on him now, and propriety was the farthest thing from his mind at that moment.

  “Sir,” came a report from a young officer, “Main gun director reports the smoke is too heavy for accurate sighting.”

  “Because you have turned to starboard,” said Adler, “right into the wind and everything is blowing across our beam!” The Captain was clearly unhappy.

  “Kindly look to port, Mister Adler. A turn in that direction would have put us right across the bow of the Normandie. No, we will come about as I have ordered. If these fires cannot be quickly controlled, then this battle is over. I was not given this ship to see it burned to a blackened hulk. The Führer would never forgive me.”

  Down in Anton turret, Axel Faust had felt the blow and knew the ship had taken a hard hit, though he had not seen the rocket attack. His turret was still trained on the British
battleships, but no data was coming from Eisenberg or Fuchs.

  “Trouble with the gun directors!” he shouted, settling in behind the optical gun sights available in the turret itself for just this contingency. “Elevation twenty, five degrees right. Fire!”

  The turret roared, and the men leapt to their evolution, human sinew in the workings of this vast machine. The breech opened, the shell loading bogie slid into position and the massive shell was rammed home. The five seconds for the rammer to return seemed like an eternity to Faust now. The gun had to be moved off elevation while the loading progressed, then elevated again and re-trained with the sighting data. Faust saw the fall of his shells and knew the shot was close enough for rapid fire, but he suddenly felt the ship turning.

  “Track right! Five degrees! More… one degree more… Hold! Elevation eighteen point five. Steady… Fire!”

  The German ships had turned to disengage, but were still firing, with no damage to their turrets beyond the loss of director control. It was Axel Faust that made the difference now, his well schooled eye at the turret optics making good on the reputation he had earned as the best gunner in the fleet. His last salvo had been right on the mark, and Queen Elizabeth would not survive the hit he scored, with the heavy round plunging in behind the funnel. The ship’s recent refit had improved her deck armor over machinery sites to 2.5 inches, but the 16-inch shell from Hindenburg would penetrate twice that at the range fired, and it gutted the ship, exploding three decks below the point of impact, destroying two more boiler rooms.

  Down seven degrees at the bow and still listing, it was now only a matter of time before the ship sunk. Captain Barry knew the worst when his chief of engineers reported that damage from that last hit could not be controlled. A fire had reached ready ammo store for one of the secondary batteries, and a second explosion rocked the heart of the ship. With a heavy heart he signaled all fleet units that he was forced to abandon ship. The crews were ordered to any boat they could deploy, but he knew that many men were going to die here today. Axel Faust had signed their death warrants with the guns of turret Anton.

  The heavy missiles off Kazan had done more to turn the action than anything else. A British Harpoon weighed only 691kg with booster, and the GB-7 was in that same class. The Onyx missile was nearly five times heavier and three times as long. The shock and fire they delivered was many times that of the British missile, and the results were plain to see. Both German ships were burning badly and now turning away from the main action.

  Strausbourg had been slightly ahead of the Germans, firing with her twin quadruple turrets that were ideal in a pursuit scenario like this. But that ship had been struck twice as well, beneath the forward A turret and again much closer to the bow, which was more lightly armored and was rent asunder by the heavy blow. Her fires were not as bad due to the location of the hits away from the main superstructure, but the damage to the bow was causing severe flooding forward and the ship turned, falling out of the battle.

  The cruiser Colbert got the worst of it. At 12,700 long tons she had only 20% of Hindenburg’s displacement. And no more than 60mm armor on the belt. The two supersonic missiles blasted clean through this, erupted in a massive fireball of ignited fuel and broke the ship in two.

  Admiral Laborde watched in horror as Colbert died an agonizing death, well out in front of his ship. The Normandie had been screened by the two German battleships, and thus had not been targeted. His ship had taken one GB-7 hit, a close straddle from Malaya, but his gunners were slowly finding the range with the two forward turrets, and at a little under 20,000 meters he raked Malaya with a spread of 15-inch shells, finally getting a hit. He gave an order to turn ten more points to port, away from the Germans, and was soon able to run completely parallel to the British line, and bring all twelve of his guns to the action.

  Malaya was wreathed in heavy smoke, and the cruiser Berwick had interposed itself, and now had the misfortune of becoming the new target. The twelve guns roared and scored a hit. The next salvo would log two more, and the cruiser, already damaged by a 500 pound bomb, was suddenly penetrated to magazine level and exploded. It would sink in the next ten minutes.

  In other action the three remaining French cruisers had pounded the Calcutta to a smoking wreck, but Coventry and Orion had scored enough hits to discourage their closer approach to the scene. The French cruisers broke off, but the heart of their battle fleet, Normandie and Dunkerque, remained undamaged, and undaunted.

  Dunkerque had been in on the action against Calcutta, scoring at least one good hit there before turning the battle over to the cruisers and looking for bigger prey. Now the battlecruiser joined the action against Malaya, adding another eight 12.9 inch guns to the heat of that engagement.

  It was then that Admiral Laborde saw the streaking tail of yet another missile pierce the heavy pall of drifting battle smoke, and lance into the heart of the light cruiser Jeane de Vienne. The resulting explosion told him the ship had taken heavy damage. The missile had popped up and come down on the 38mm deck armor, plunging deep into the ship and nearly exiting through the bottom hull.

  Damn these naval rockets! Look what they’ve done to the German battleships. He was receiving reports from every ship in the fleet, keeping a mental tally of his losses. Of his ten destroyers, Mistral, Orage and Vauban had been sunk, with damage to Tempte, Tornade, Lynx and Panthere that had forced them to retire. He had clearly lost the heavy cruiser Colbert, and the same might now be said for Jeane de Vienne. The hits to Strausbourg were serious, and the ship was struggling to control bad flooding as it shrunk from the fight. Both German battleships had turned away, though their aft turrets were still firing.

  He had two good ships in hand, his flagship hit but undaunted, and Dunkerque was practically the only ship in the engagement that had come through without so much as a paint scratch. Queen Elizabeth was clearly a lost cause for the British, and he could stay here and pound the Malaya senseless if he chose to do so, but how many more of those rockets might find his ship? The fires he could still see burning on the Hindenburg were enough to convince him that this engagement had run its course.

  The Franco-German fleet had been hit with fifteen supersonic missiles and eight more of the lighter Sea Skuas. They had also faced the gunnery of the British fleet, which had scored many hits in the battle to cause further mayhem. It had been a terrible hour, and one of the most costly naval engagements in history when the final tally was registered on both sides. Considering the losses that had been sustained by the Italians, the Axis fleet had taken a severe mauling.

  It was then that the sole surviving spotter plane sent in a report that another squadron of enemy ships was approaching, seven ships in front at high speed, another six ships, and aircraft carriers among them that appeared to be launching planes. That was enough to convince La Borde that he had tarried here too long. He gave the order to break off, just after 18:00, and the heavy smoke soon obscured all view of the enemy as the Normandie began its turn. Now he looked to the skies, sending orders that the fleet should regroup on a new heading and prepare to defend against enemy air attack. In all this time, he thought, where was the air cover he had been promised by the Germans?

  The Luftwaffe would come, but far too late to make any difference in the action. His column reformed, beat off one half hearted attack by British Swordfish torpedo bombers, and then the skies began to darken with the growl of the German planes. It was a formation of thirty Bf-110 twin engine heavy fighters, more than enough to discourage any further air action off those carriers. As it was soon determined that these planes were no direct threat to the fleet, both Kirov and Argos Fire preserved their SAMs, and the action slowly dissipated.

  When he learned the enemy fleet had diverted from its easterly course and turned south, Tovey had turned about with Invincible and all his cruisers, leaving Warspite to escort the carriers with a few more destroyers. Argos Fire saw them coming on radar, the ships appearing on her screens just after that missile stri
ke by Kazan. The formation had come upon the scene too late to take any decisive action, but its sudden appearance had been the last factor compelling La Borde to break off.

  It was better late than never for Tovey. The damage had already been done. The British were going to lose two battleships that day. As that terrible hour ended, the stately Queen Elizabeth finally rolled to one side, bow down and slipping beneath the tempestuous sea. Only 728 men would be saved from her crew, and Captain Barry would not be among them. He knew the life boats would only take a portion of his men to safety, and had given the order to abandon ship, remaining on the bridge.

  The men in the boats could hear the crewmen still on the ship singing ‘Hail Britannia’ as the battleship rolled over, the chorus quashed by the heavy swells as men made that last desperate leap into the water to try and save themselves. The arrival of Tovey’s ships would save many that might have otherwise died, and four hours later the fleet turned for Alexandria, bloodied, bruised, and missing Queen Elizabeth, Berwick, Calcutta, and the destroyers Marne, Ledbury and Echo.

  Malaya was still afloat, and taken in tow, but the ship was so beaten and battered by the Normandie that it would never see action again. The enemy had lost the Colbert, with enough damage on La Galissonniere, and Jeane de Vienne to take them out of the war for the next year. Both Hindenburg and Bismarck eventually controlled their terrible fires, as the fuel sustaining them had burned itself away. Their armored sides were bent and blackened by the missile hits, but their propulsion systems and guns were all operational and they would fight again.

  One other ship remained unseen beneath the sea, slowly following in the wake of the retiring enemy fleet. Gromyko had fired his missiles, and now began to look for wounded ships that would be easy prey for his torpedoes. The German ships sped away at good speed and evaded, but he came upon the Strausbourg, wallowing behind the main French fleet as it labored for Taranto at 18 knots.