World War Three 1946 Series Boxed Set: Stalin Strikes First

by Harry Kellogg

  The test rifles will be fired in graduations of 100 yards, up to 500 yards. Since this “assault rifle” was not meant to be used outside the 300-yard range, positive results were not expected in the 400-and 500-yard ranges. As the armorers fired the weapons, the designers could see that the rifles were stable, when fired from the shoulder and from the hip, the armorers were able to stay on target, or switch targets, with no apparent trouble. As soon as the firing ended, the firing range manager looked at the targets carefully, and soon declared that the rifles had consistently hit bulls eye, 96 out of 100 times, up to the 400-yard mark. This accuracy was even beyond the engineers wildest expectations. They now had an assault rifle suitable to present to President Truman, for his approval.

  General Campbell congratulated the four engineers, leaving them all smiles, as he was ushered to his jeep, where his driver waited to take him to the rocket-artillery range, where he could witness the results of what the artillery men were now calling “Truman's Smokestacks”. Bet that bastard, Uncle Joe, will get big surprise out of that...

  German Sturmgewehr-44

  *****

  1427

  5 August 1946

  North American Aviation XP (YF)-86 Project

  USAAF Flight Testing Facility

  Muroc Army Air Field, California

  General Carl Spaatz was walking through the hangar and stopped at the shiny, cigar-shaped, aircraft, with the swept back wings and tail assembly. The project manager was extolling the virtues of the design ideas incorporated into the prototype jet, while the General was thinking how much this Buck Rogers plane looked so much like those captured German prototype jets, that Truman gave to the Soviets, as spoils of war, at the Potsdam Conference. It's a good thing that our soldiers and scientists made it to the Focke-Wulf factory first, and got a good long gander at the Ta-183 prototype jet, and copied all the research, before turning it over to the Soviets, this time, last year. It's also a damned good thing that the CIA found, and kidnapped, former Focke-Wulf designer and manager, Kurt Tank, hiding in Argentina. There's nothing better than getting the goods straight from the source. “If only Bob were here to see this,” thought Spaatz, reminiscing about his dearest friend, Brigadier General Robert Olds, who passed away from chronic illness, three years before. Seeing General Olds' son, Robin, a test pilot on this project, is what brought about his melancholia.

  “General?” hearing First Lieutenant Olds call for him broke his reverie, “I think this fighter will be superior to the Yak-15's and MiG-9's that they've been overflying Spain with, but consider the fact that Soviet R&D is not as retarded as we once thought it was. Judging by the nasty surprises that they sprang on us in 'Operation Louisville Slugger' and in the Pyrenees, not to mention the embarrassment of losing an A-Bomb on a mission to Leningrad, I'd say that if we're working on this now, they probably have it already, and are working on the next generation of nasty surprises to catch us off-guard.” As much as Spaatz hated to admit it, he knew the kid was right, and to avoid lying to him, having been friends with his father since Robin was a little boy, he simply said, “We'll see.” Olds grunted his acknowledgment and adjusted his new, special, pressurized flight suit, putting on the brand-new aviator's helmet, and getting in the cockpit to roll the jet out.

  The whine of the jet engine was so loud, the General produced a pair of rubber ear plugs and stuck them in his ears. He watched as Robin rolled the jet off the tarmac, onto the runway, waiting for the tower to clear him for takeoff. General Spaatz could see the jet's tailpipe begin to turn red-hot as it waited, then a moment later, it takes off, sprinting down the runway, retracting its tricycle landing gear, as it thundered its way skyward. It pulled up in a power climb, performed a split-s maneuver, then buzzed the airfield in a low-level pass, then performing a barrel-roll as it climbed skyward again. The General knew that he really should chew the kid out for hot-dogging, but he let it go, since Olds was charged with putting this jet through its paces. They had to know what it could do, and what its limitations are. The only way to do that was to fly the jet to the edge of its capabilities. Even the General understood that.

  All of the sudden, the aerobatics stopped. The General saw the jet level off so high up, that it was barely a visible speck , and it looked like Olds punched it – followed by a visible, hemispherical, disturbance in the cloud formation, and seconds later, a deafening boom. One of the ground technicians, monitoring the test flight by radio instrument, had an equally ecstatic and horrified look on his face. “General! Lieutenant Olds just broke the sound barrier, with a top speed of 683mph, at an altitude of 29,827 feet above mean sea level.” The General looked shocked, and then, pleased “it looks like installing that new General Electric jet engine in the fighter was a better bet than we all expected” he said, while privately thinking “I wonder what that hot-dog, Chuck Yeager, will think of this” as he chuckled out loud, contemplating Lieutenant Olds' commanding officer's response to the record setting test flight. But for now, it was time for him to write his report to the Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson...

  XP-86 over the Mojave Desert

  *****

  1030

  9 August 1946

  Armored Vehicle Airdrop Experiment

  Military Air Transport Service Command

  Scott Army Airfield, Illinois

  Someone had the bright idea of parachute-dropping a perfectly good armored vehicle out of a perfectly good airplane. I think they got the idea from watching the Limeys dropping SAS jeeps, slung from the underside of Handley-Paige Halifax bombers. Or, they might have heard of Soviet experiments from the 1930's, where they dropped small tankettes from low altitude, without parachutes. But it took an American to perfect the system, to allow for heavier loads, dropped from the internal load bay of a specially-designed cargo aircraft. This might work...

  Everyone was buzzing over the scuttlebutt about what happened at Muroc: A man traveled faster than the speed of sound. And furthermore, the rumor was that he was the son of one of their own, their former commanding general, Brigadier General Robert Olds, who died of chronic illness back in 1943. But there was another project happening here. One that involved the transport and air drop of combat vehicles, a feat never before tried in this manner, under actual combat conditions. Off in the distance, a flight of four new C-97B Stratofreighter transport aircraft are being loaded with three M38A3 Wolfhound armored cars, fitted with turrets from the M24 Chaffee, and a command jeep, into each aircraft.

  The only difficulty they've had, thus far, was loading the armored cars, which had been fitted with turrets that mounted a long, high-velocity, 17-pounder main gun, the same gun installed on the Sherman Firefly tank. This necessitated that the turrets be turned off-center, to accommodate the loading of each armored car, up the long wheel ramps, and into the cargo bays of the aircraft, onto their pallets. Each pallet was equipped with five cargo parachutes, each parachute measuring 100 feet in diameter, enough to slow a cargo pallet weighing a little over 10 tons, down to 15 feet per second. Finally, the loading of all four aircraft was complete and they began to taxi down the runway. They looked a little heavy rolling down the tarmac...

  Using most of the runway, each bird made it airborne, and began to wheel around toward the drop zone, some fifty miles away, in rich Illinois farmland. Each aircraft flew to an altitude of about thirty thousand feet before opening their cargo bay doors, then, one by one, loadmasters, dressed in heavy winter clothing and equipped with portable oxygen masks, clipped the pallet's master static line clip to the ramp, and pushed each pallet out the door. As soon as each pallet cleared the ramp, the static lines pulled the rip-cords for the cargo pallets and deployed the parachutes. As the armored cars and jeeps fell to earth, another aircraft, carrying the airborne-qualified armored car crewmen, began dropping them on the drop zone. The airborne armored car crews immediately found their vehicles and fired them up, and got them going, in less than twenty minutes. The jumpmasters observing the experiment from the grou
nd were suitably impressed that the crews of an armored car platoon of twelve, along with their three command jeeps were able to get to their equipment and get them going, all within 30 minutes of aircraft liftoff... But this was an experiment, obviously improving on what the Brits and the Soviets had done before. We'll see how well it'll work in actual combat conditions...

  C-97 Stratofreighter Cargo Aircraft

  M38A3 Wolfhound, fitted with a M24 Chafee Turret

  *****

  0530

  12 August 1946

  Project Phoenix Test Hangar

  Flight Test Base,

  Muroc Army Airfield,

  Rogers Dry Lake, California, U.S.A.

  The air was calm this morning, though it was a bit chilly out in the early dawn hours. Jack Northrop sat at the table in the hangar, reading yesterday's copy of TakeOff, trying to clear his mind for the upcoming test. It made absolutely no sense to be anxious about the the test flight of the YB-49B, when he controlled absolutely everything that he could possibly control about the test already. He would just have to leave everything else in the very capable hands of his new partners, Walter and Reimar Horten, and Army Air Force test pilot, Lieutenant Glen Edwards.

  As the Horten brothers and Lieutenant Edwards, along with their specially selected and stringently screened ground crew, readied the radically redesigned YB-49B 'flying wing' bomber, which they named “The Phoenix”, Northrop would answer questions here and there, making quick calculations in his head. Though the aerodynamics of the aircraft might have changed, as has the propulsion method, it was still his baby, from top to bottom. Nobody knew this aircraft better than he, and now, the Horten brothers.

  When Walter and Reimar Horten were first introduced to him by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, former head of the Manhattan Project, now the head of Special Projects for the War Department, 'The Phoenix' was then known as the XB-35. It was an extraordinary air frame design, using fairly ordinary pusher piston-engine propulsion, delivering inconsistent and unstable results. As a matter of fact, his 'flying wing' design was based, in part, on the Horten brothers' wing-glider experiments of the late 1930's, and he was honored to be working with them, in spite of their ideological differences. No matter what anyone thought, this was a battle for survival. This wasn't just a battle for ideological supremacy.

  When the Army brought Northrop the Hortens' late war experimental air frame, it was a goldmine of information, especially as the brothers explained fully in detail every single aspect of the aircraft. More than that, Northrop was impressed by their ability to recreate the blueprints completely from memory. All of their flying wing air frames were meant to mount jet engines internally, but using the admittedly inferior wartime Junkers Jumo 004b turbojet severely limited the design's capabilities. So, when they witnessed the record-setting test flight of the XP-86, they began lobbying General Groves to procure a dozen of the fantastic experimental turbojet engines. After a radical redesign of the XB-35 air frame to incorporate Horten design features, and to accommodate four jet engines, the first prototype was ready for its maiden flight, only six weeks after work began.

  All the pre-flight checks were proceeding smoothly and the aircraft tug had just arrived to bring the big bomber out to the flight line. As the tug was hooked up to the nose wheel strut, and began pulling it out of the hangar, everyone present got a sense of how big it really was. Being moved along the flat out-spread tarmac, it formed a tall squat sprawling figure, thicker near the cockpit and narrowing to a razor's edge in the rear, with the vertical control surfaces of the original designs having been removed in redesign. Out of an abundance of caution, Lieutenant Edwards was ordered to wear one of those new-fangled pressurized flight suits and a flight helmet, which made things a bit more cumbersome for him as he entered the aircraft, climbing up through a forward hatch in the belly, using an integral ladder built into the hatch cover, and quickly settled into the cockpit, and began conducting the final pre-flight checks, before slowly powering up the engines and taxiing down the runway.

  Jet engines whining loudly, the Phoenix began to slowly roll down the runway, picking up speed as it chewed up tarmac, and lifted off about two-thirds of the way down the 5,000-foot path. The aircraft appeared to effortlessly climb high into the sky, making seamless tight banking turns, to fly its test course. Northrop's research staff began receiving radio telemetry on speed, altitude and direction, taking copious notes, and monitoring any radio traffic from Lieutenant Edwards. Everything looked good.

  Unlike the XP-86, there was no expectation that the YB-49B would be going supersonic: despite having four times the thrust capacity of the fighter, the bomber would be seven times the jet fighter's weight, fully loaded, regardless of how maneuverable it was. The phone rang in the hangar. It was the control tower. They were having trouble tracking the bomber on radar. If not for its radio beacon, they would not have known what to look for at all. Jack Northrop gave a puzzled look at his research team, and asked them what would cause radar difficulty in tracking the aircraft. They looked at each other and one of them offered their opinion: sections of the aircraft were built from layers of plywood, impregnated with a carbon solution, per the instructions of Reimar Horten, both to strengthen the plywood, and to lighten the aircraft weight. Reimar did happen to mention that this particular type of construction did cause radar anomalies during test flights, but they thought nothing of it, since German radar sets were notorious for their excessive back-scatter, due to inferior RF filtering technology. It appeared that this was not an anomaly at all, but a secondary effect of aerodynamics and construction that he could possibly capitalize on. Northrop immediately requested a copy of the film that was recording the radar screen tracking the Phoenix, along with copies of all of the magnetic voice recordings of the events occurring in the control tower during the test flight. He knew that General Groves would relent, once Northrop explained to him the importance of the discovery he may have made, and consideration of its use on future aircraft and the possibility of negating the early warning advantage imparted by radar. The fact that the YB-49B prototype aircraft had made a successful maiden flight was now secondary.

  Northrop called Reimar Horten over, and let him know what was going on and what his current thinking was. Horten did not seem very surprised, but was very enthusiastic, interested in helping Northrop find and exploit this radar anomaly. As far as they were concerned, the Phoenix was not only the culmination of a radical new bomber design, but a testbed for a potentially revolutionary new technology. As the Phoenix landed, Northrop's research team swarmed over the flying wing, measuring EVERYTHING about the aircraft, prompting Lieutenant Edwards to ask what the big deal was. He didn't get an answer from Northrop, or the Hortens. But he was smart enough to know that whatever it was, it had to be big, especially to rate this much attention.

  Horten Ho.IX (Gotha Go.229), shortly after its capture in 1945

  Original Northrop YB-49 'Flying Wing' Bomber Prototype, 1944

  *****

  1030

  14 August 1946

  Dugway Proving Ground, Utah

  Simulated Battlefield Test of

  Multiple Launch Rocket Artillery,

  Fuel-Air Explosives and

  Explosive Cluster Sub-munitions

  As the static rocket launchers were towed into position, the final preparation of the target area was being completed, and the area evacuated. They are going to attempt a Soviet-style area saturation bombardment, launching rockets for a solid two hours, before ending. About a third of the artillery rockets to be tested today will be the cluster sub-munitions type, to be tested against personnel targets and light vehicle targets.

  Out of necessity, the cluster bomb warheads could only fitted to the former German 21cm Nebelwerfer-42 rockets and the 28/32cm Nebelwerfer-41 rockets, being used for the test-firing. The 82mm, 10cm and 15cm rockets would have either high-explosive warheads, or a fuel-air explosive, air-burst, warhead. Major John Stansfield knew that the German e
ggheads, a few hundred miles south of here, in New Mexico, were working on a super-secret project, and everyone was gossiping about it. The scuttlebutt was everything from the mundane: an improved version of the captured V-2 rocket, to the outlandish: super death ray weapon, even more destructive than the A-Bomb! But that's what happens when you combine the word super or top, with the word secret. All sorts of insanity ensues! This test was the Major's time to shine. Accompanying him was Captain Stanislaw Pilsudski, United States Army Chemical Corps. Pilsudski was the son of Polish politician-in-exile, Jan Pilsudski, and nephew of the late Marshal of Poland, Jozef Pilsudski. With the Soviets occupying his ancestral home, he had more than enough reason to want see them burn. That is why he was put in charge of the fuel-air explosive warheads.

  From the safety of their observation dugout, Stansfield and Pilsudski listened to the countdown, Stansfield was itchy to push the launch button... “3...2...1...LAUNCH!” and he presses the button. Muffled in the confines of the dugout are the loud, howling, shrieks of rockets launching from their tubes or rails. He could see why the Soviets were so devastatingly effective with this weapon: just hearing the shriek of the incoming rockets was enough to make the Krauts piss their pants, and then the area would be saturated in explosions. There wouldn't be enough left of someone to put in a cigarette pack, let alone identify them. As all the batteries launched their rockets, each battery was allowed 10 minutes to cool, before being reloaded, and starting the countdown all over again. This was repeated for the next two hours.

  At the end of the test-firing, Major Stansfield and Captain Pilsudski drove out to the target area, both men couldn't help but feel like this must be what the moon looked like: pockmarked and desolate. They surveyed the area thoroughly, with the help of the technicians that arrived with them. By the appearance of the utter devastation they viewed around them, the test was a resounding success. Now, all they had to do was to gather evidence, take the photos and write the report...