Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20)

by John Schettler

  “That will do for short term supply,” said Halder, “but it will not be sufficient in the long run.”

  “Correct.” Raeder did not disagree. “For that we will need regular cargo transport, but there are only two suitable harbors south of Gibraltar and Tangiers. One is the main naval base at Casablanca, but it is well over 500 sea miles from the islands. The second is at Lasfar, also 450 nautical miles. So we are looking at development of a new facility at Agadir. There is a good road to that place from Marrakesh, which will become our forward supply center in southern Morocco. Agadir is only 220 nautical miles to the nearest island, and from there we can hop supplies with the Siebel ferries to all the rest.”

  “And the ships?”

  “Here is the list.” Raeder handed Halder a short report. “These are all French ships, the General Bonaparte, a small 2800 ton passenger ship can serve as an ammunition ferry, about 1000 tons carrying capacity.”

  “Good to see the old General is still useful,” said Halder with a wry smile.

  “Then we have the steamboat Sainte Julienne, about 3500 tons, but it can carry a good number of troops or 1500 tons of cargo.”

  “A drop in the bucket.” Halder shook his head.

  “Next is Sainte Jacqueline, a slow transport at 8.5 knots with about 3000 ton cargo capacity, and Sainte Edmond can carry another 1500 tons.”

  Halder was still not impressed. “So between the General and his three saints, you have only about 7000 tons of cargo lift. If you want those three divisions, then those ships can keep them supplied for only a week to ten days.”

  “SS Patria will do a little better,” said Raeder pointing to his list. “It escaped from Haifa just before the war and made it back to Nice. That ship is nearly 12,000 tons GRT, with underdeck capacity for up to 9000 tons of cargo at 15 knots. It will be our main supply transport.”

  “Assuming you can load it at this new facility you speak of.”

  “It can run out of Casablanca or Lasfar. The smaller ships will use the new port at Agadir. With this little merchant fleet I can run a convoy every two weeks and keep all our troops well supplied. And rest assured, I can protect those merchant ships at sea, and we’ll also have good air cover over the islands.”

  Raeder inclined his head, finally convinced. “Alright, Admiral, I can approve this plan. At the moment, I would give my right arm for one or two more infantry divisions in Russia, but I will find something for your garrison force as soon as I possibly can. You realize that the British won’t like your little foray.”

  “Not at all,” said Raeder. “That is the general idea.”

  “Yes? Well Kubler’s boys may kick them out, just as he did the job at Gibraltar, but rest assured, the British will be back for a rematch. And when they do come, they will have the Americans with them, another big navy for you to worry about. So the Führer can have his bird in hand when we take those islands, assuming this plan succeeds, but I have a bad feeling that we will just get settled in before we lose them again.”

  Goring gave him a sidelong glance. “Might we say the same about Moscow?”

  The silence in the room was fairly thick after that.

  Raeder took up his maps and papers, putting them slowly into his attaché. “Herr General,” he said quietly. “I will promise not to tell the Führer you said that about this operation, if you will do the same concerning my earlier remarks about the futility of our fiasco in Russia.”

  “Agreed.” Halder nodded, ending their meeting. But neither man would forget his last remark, because the British and their American friends would not disappoint them, or fail to make Halder’s grim prediction the dangerous threat it would soon become.

  * * *

  The U-Boats were already on the prowl, the first element of the German plan to be set in motion. A Wolfpack of six boats was out from Casablanca, and silently making its way south in the oily dark night of January 17th, 1942. Designated Seeräbaur, or Sea Robber, they were out shadowing Convoy HG 76, homeward bound after delivering supplies to British bases in the Azores. It had been sighted by a Fw 200 Condor patrolling from Bordeaux. One of the Sea Robbers, U-108, was the first to spot it, 32 ships escorted by seven corvettes and a pair of old sloops.

  That night, every U-Boat in the Wolfpack closed in, including U-131, until four had made contact. They lurked in the still waters, waiting for the other boats to report in. Korvettenkapitän Arend Baumann was out in front. The boat was cruising on the surface just after dawn, when the watchman suddenly called out a warning—aircraft at three o’clock!

  The signal to dive was given soon after, but U-131 would not be quick enough that day. An eagle eyed pilot off Britain’s first light escort carrier would spot the boat, and come in to make a strafing run just as Baumann submerged. The alarm was up, and a most unusual man, on a most unusual ship would help end the first and only wartime patrol of U-131, and mark a sea change in the battle for the Atlantic, which until that moment, had been a decided failure for the Allies.

  The ship in question was one HMS Audacity, a ship that the Germans could rightfully say they had tried to sink twice. In fact, it was once a ship that served in their very own merchant marine, the SS Hanover, a 5500 ton cargo liner on the ‘banana run’ between Bremen and the West Indies. When caught off Puerto Rico by the light cruiser Dunedin and a Canadian destroyer, her Kapitan gave the first order to sink the ship, but an enterprising Lieutenant Hughes off the Dunedin, secured the ship quickly with a boarding party, closing the sea cocks just in time to prevent the scuttling attempt. The fires deliberately set by the Germans were another matter, but the British were able to tow the ship to Jamaica, where they soon renamed their prize Sinbad.

  The genie rising from that bottle would have a curious history, for Sinbad, being over 440 feet long, was selected as a candidate for conversion to a light escort carrier. Even though British occupation of the Azores and Madeira had helped to close segments of the Mid-Atlantic gap, there were still places where aircraft off those islands could not reach. The U-boats could gather there in places the merchant marine would call ‘black pits,’ plying their deadly craft of undersea warfare. It was decided that light carriers would be a good stopgap measure, and Sinbad was moved to the dry docks in Blythe for conversion. When they first began to disassemble her small superstructure, people unaware of the plan would shake their heads and call it a waste of a perfectly sound ship.

  A little over a year after her capture, the ship was renamed yet again, and HMS Audacity was commissioned into His Majesty’s Service, Britain’s first escort carrier. The ship had a perfectly flat flight deck, with no island and nothing more than a single mast which mounted her Type 79B radar set. She was rigged out with four 102mm guns, a six pounder, four 2 pounder AA guns and another four 20mm cannons, but her real mission was to carry number 802 Squadron, with eight Martlet fighters out into that Atlantic Gap. There the fighters would be tasked with hunting down the long range German Condor reconnaissance bombers, and conducting routine anti U-Boat patrols. The ship would also escort convoys when necessary, and she claimed her first kill when a Martlet found and shot down a Condor attempting to bomb the rescue ship Walmer Castle.

  The man aboard who got that plane had quite a name for himself, one Eric Melrose “Winkle” Brown, a young 22 year old test pilot who had set a record for flying 487 different types of aircraft, and would go on to make an astounding 2407 safe carrier landings, more than any other man in history. One of those landings would be accomplished in a Sea Vampire, making the first jet aircraft landing and takeoff from a British carrier. A natural in the skies, Winkle Brown had gone up for the first time on his father’s knee in a Gloster Gauntlet, when he was only eight years old.

  Strangely, Brown would meet a famous German WWI flying Ace in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, and the two men struck up a friendship. Urnst Udet was the second highest scoring German Ace of that war, and his studied eye saw a fighter pilot in the man named Winkle. He took Brown up in his plane, showed him th
e ropes, and when they had made a flip flopping landing that Brown thought would be his last, the German pilot just laughed, as he had deliberately maneuvered the plane to show Brown what could be done. Brown asked if he could fly with him again.

  “Do two things for me first,” he said to Brown in halting English. “First learn to speak German, and then become a fighter pilot.” Brown did both, and so it was that this German speaking protégé of a German Ace, on an ex-German ship that her Kapitan had failed to scuttle, now found himself in the middle of the Atlantic, with orders to bite the hand that fed him. While his old mentor went on to work for Hermann Goring, and was instrumental in building the new German Luftwaffe, it was now Lieutenant Brown’s job to shoot those planes down.

  Udet had always been a bawdy, cigar smoking, hard drinking, finagling man, in love with life and everything in it. But those years under Goering saw a shadow fall upon him, and he would later feel betrayed by the Reichsminister, blamed for any shortcoming in Luftwaffe production, and driven to kill himself in a moment of despair on the 17th of November, 1941. His suicide note claimed his death could be attributed to “Iron One,” the name he gave to Goring, but that story was covered up, and Udet was given a hero’s funeral. Strangely, a new German Ace, Werner Mölders, was killed in a plane crash while en-route to attend that funeral.

  Mölders was the first pilot in history to claim 100 kills, also credited with developing many new fighter tactics like the Finger-Four formation and Crossover Turn. History had a strange way of connecting dots, and ‘Pappy’ Mölders was laid to rest that day, right beside Ernst Udet, literally following the WWI hero to the grave. They had good company, for the famous Manfred von Richtofen was right there beside them, and the honor guard for Mölders’ burial consisted of seven more top German Aces.

  When Winkle Brown heard the news, he was sad for the loss of his old mentor, but no less determined to be a part of the undoing of his Luftwaffe now that war had come again. The Germans had not learned their lesson the first time around, and he was ready to teach it all to them again.

  Chapter 27

  Brown would get more than one chance to shine in the days ahead. Audacity was soon assigned to maritime patrol out of Horta Harbor, in the Azores on the Island of Faial. The channel between that small port, and Madalena on Pico Island to the west, was just 7 kilometers wide, and the British had made the entire channel into an anchorage for Force H. The accommodations were not as fitting as their former residence at Gibraltar, but the Azores, offering good airfields and decent anchorages, was now a vital watering hole on the long Atlantic convoy route to Cape Town and beyond. Audacity was tasked with ASW patrol and convoy escort duties, but on this occasion, the converted German freighter would soon be put to the test against her big brothers in the Kriegsmarine.

  Something was in the wind that night, a cold winter wind, and young Eric Melrose “Winkle” Brown had a nose for it. He had been watching the service crews huddling in the darkness after sunset, moving like wraiths among a herd of pterodactyls. The planes looked like that, clustered together on the aft quarter of the short flight deck, wings folded, their silence and stillness belying the violence inherent in their design. Sometimes they might work all night, tuning up engines, checking fluid and fuel levels, mounting ammo, and even test firing a troublesome machinegun. He and his mates relied on them every day for their lives, taking it on faith that the plane they climbed into the next morning was mechanically and structurally sound.

  That had not been the case for Brown when he was selected to demonstrate the new Martlets along with a few other pilots. His plane suffered an engine stopping failure right in the middle of a rolling maneuver, and he went bang away down into the water. Thankfully, the plane had built in flotation bags, which deployed to save Brown and his air steed that day. He was very gratified to know his plane could float if he ever had to ditch, something he filed away in the inner drawer marked ‘Self Confidence.’

  The feeling in the air tonight was one of renewed urgency. Weeks ago, they had been briefed on the outcome of the Japanese attack in the Pacific, crowding round the radio set to hear the broadcast speech by Roosevelt when he labeled that dark moment a “day that will live in infamy.”

  “The Yanks are in it now for sure,” said Winkle to his mate, Lieutenant Peter “Sheepy” Lamb, a bright new officer of just 18 years of age.

  “Glad for that,” said Lamb. “We’ve held the bloody watch out here for two long years. It’s about time somebody else reached for a bottle in this bar fight.” He had been itching to fly ever since he found himself in the rubble of London during the Blitz, staring up at the vapor trailed of the Luftwaffe bombers as they came in.

  “Somebody ought to get up there after that lot!” he had said to a constable, and days later he had realized that somebody was him. He would one day complete over 650 carrier deck landings, and set the record for both speed and elevation in a test jet aircraft called the SR53. Today, however, his lot was the Martlet, an American made fighter from Grumman.

  By his own admission, Brown had been one of the “suicidal types” that went for fighters after being recruited into the Royal Navy. The steady hands looked for the bombers, but he was all dash and jab. Once in his first Gloster Gauntlet, an old bi-plane, he still lorded it over the chaps in the Tiger Moths. He had flown the Skua, then the ‘old Gloster Gladiators and bumbling Rocs,’ as he call them. Finally they got a slightly better plane, the Fairey Fulmar. In his mind, this new American plane was better than all the rest.

  “This here is the sinews of war,” he said to his mate. “If they’ve got more of these, I’ll be happy to see them. That’s a tough, fiery little airplane. A real angry bee, that one.”

  The new American plane was a variant of the F4F Wildcat, renamed the Martlet by the British. He had given it a thorough test, and would write of that experience: “The Wildcat was a great asset to the Fleet Air Arm, bringing it to nearly the level of the fighter opposition. It was also an aircraft specifically designed for modern carrier operations, thereby setting new standards for British designers in the field. The Wildcat was a potent fighter, with splendid maneuverability, good performance, heavy firepower, and excellent range and endurance. On top of this, it was a superb deck-landing aircraft.”

  In Brown’s estimation, and this was from the man who would become the world’s foremost aerial test pilot, the F4F had a superior rate of roll, steeper angle of climb, and it was more stable and faster in a dive than the newest British carrier based fighter coming off the production lines, the Seafire IIC. The British Hurricane, however, could outturn the Wildcat, and it could use its superior acceleration in a dive to evade an attack from behind. Yet the Wildcat was far faster in level flight. Every plane had its strengths and weaknesses.

  The Wildcat, and the Martlet, was also found to have excessive carbon monoxide buildup in the canopy, insufficient pilot armor, and it lacked self sealing fuel tanks. It may have been faster than a Seafire, but it was still slower than the Me-109, by a full 60MPH. And when up against the German FW-190A, the advantages of the enemy plane dominated the interaction completely. The Japanese certainly had little trouble dealing with the Wildcat in the Pacific, and that news was just filtering in. It was dampening down the night like a heavy fog, for it appeared that no matter how many new planes he tested, the enemy always seemed to have something better.

  “Blokes say the Japanese have a fighter that can run rings around this American plane,” said Sheepy Lamb, a heavy set, round faced Scot.

  “Blokes can say what they want,” said Brown. “It’s the pilot that runs the rings. Know how to get the best out of your aircraft, and you will too.” The Lieutenant had learned his own craft well, deemed an “exceptional” pilot by his first flight instructors, and prone to a lot of acrobatics when he flew.

  “You reckon we can beat the 109 in this?” asked Lamb.

  “Certainly!” Brown was all guts. “Just get on their tail and give ‘em those Brownings. We got ourse
lves a Condor last September, and another one last month. One day we may get our chance against the 109s.” Brown had been credited with one of those kills, the first one going to their flight leader, then Lieutenant Commander John Wintour, though he lost his life with the effort.

  Lamb nodded, thinking that might be easier said than done. He sighed, his Scottish temperament just a little off today. Normally he was a red cheeked and lively lad, and one of the few pilots with some carrier experience on both Ark Royal and Glorious, but Brown figured it was the recent loss of their Flight CO John Wintour that was still bothering him, and knew as much when Lamb went on.

  “We paid a high price for one of those planes.” They had lost Wintour when he got abreast of the Condor and was killed by a side gunner’s 20mm cannon right into his cockpit.

  “Nothing comes easy,” said Brown. “Take a lesson from Johnny’s death. Condor is an easy plane to shoot down, but you stay on its tail feathers. Either that, or come right at the nose. That’s how I got that plane last month—hit the damn thing right on the nose, and got the pilots, the same way they got Johnny. Don’t get cheeky like the Lieutenant Commander and come in where those side guns can hit you, or you’ll get a nasty sting.”

  “You figure the Germans will be out here soon?” asked Lamb. “You figure we’ll be up against the Hindenburg again?”

  “Possibly,” said Brown. “But we stuck it to Graf Zeppelin, didn’t we?”

  “And lost the Rodney.”

  “Like I said, nothing comes easy.”

  “Did you hear the news?” Lamb reached for a cigarette. “They say the Japanese had six carriers there at Pearl Harbor. Six! Can you imagine that? They must have put up over 350 planes in that air raid.”

  “Damn impressive,” said Brown. “Carriers will be top dog out here soon enough.”