Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  * * *

  Yet something had happened in the restless waters off Africa in the middle Atlantic. It was a little drama compared to the hundreds of thousands of men struggling in the winter with their machines, and dying in that terrible cold. It was just three ships at sea engaged in a long anticipated battle after a frenetic chase. Close at hand, a fourth ship wallowed to one side, stricken and burning, the last hours of the auxiliary tanker Ermland. The submarine Trident had seen to her fate, but the Germans had come raging back in reprisal.

  Marco Ritter could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw what Hans Rudel had just done. He dropped his small 250 KG bomb right on his target, but then gave the enemy both his fuel tanks as well! Rudel’s plane came up out of that dive, his wings wagging with defiance. Below him, the lead British ship had sustained that bomb hit well enough, but Rudel had poured 300 liters of aviation fuel on the small fire, and it ignited with short lived fury, though it looked much worse than it actually was. The second fuel tank narrowly missed the enemy ship, but it was amazing that the first had even struck home.

  “My god Hans!” said Ritter over his short range radio. “That was certainly dramatic, but now how in the world will you get to Africa?”

  “I won’t get to Africa,” said Rudel in his ear. “If I can’t land back on the Goeben, I’ll bail out and they can fish me out of the water. I’ve a good two hours fuel now. This weather could break by then.”

  “Good enough Hans. I’ll get you a medal for that one.”

  “Keep it,” said Rudel. “Just get the other boys down after those ships.”

  Two other Stukas were already in a dive, both straddling that same lead ship and shaking up Sandy Sanford’s teacups on the officers dining table. They had been left there abruptly when the sighting came in, and now Sanford was on the bridge, dismayed when he suddenly found his cruisers under enemy air attack.

  “Mister Laurence! What’s happened with that hit amidships?”

  “A ruddy fire sir. Engineers say it took out both seaplane catapults, and they’re trying to keep it off the torpedo mounts.”

  “Launch all Torpedoes,” said Sanford. “Can’t take the chance they’ll go off in the tubes, for then we’d really have a problem amidships. Any threat to the engines?”

  “No sir, we’re running well at 33 knots. In fair seas we’d be at 35, but it’s this weather, sir.”

  “Good, good. Well mister Kingston, that damn aircraft carrier is launching everything it has at us here. Get after it with the guns!”

  “Range is 16,200, but we don’t seem to be closing Captain. They’re running sir.”

  “As well they should. Then get busy with them. There’s nothing wrong with our guns.”

  Sanford was not happy. Why hadn’t the enemy chosen Sir Galahad for their parlor tricks? Now his nice new cruiser was burned and charred amidships, though reports indicated the crews would get the fire under control in another twenty minutes. His bloody gunners were firing, but they hadn’t yet scored a hit, which was most aggravating. The Captain was somewhat of a busybody, and he was hovering around the fire control station like a mother hen, watching the men work. He knew it would be difficult shooting. The seas were still high, and the pitch and yaw of the ship was going to make for a most unstable and changeable gunnery platform.

  It was that, more than the brave but largely fruitless effort of the German pilots, that served to frustrate the British gunners. They managed to put rounds very near their quarry, putting some splinter damage on the Goeben’s hull, but the carrier then slipped into a bank of low clouds and the action was down to Ack Ack fire at those bothersome planes. Five of the six Stukas had dropped their bombs, but only Rudel had scored a direct hit. The last, flown by Hansen, came very close to putting a bomb right in front of that quad turret on Sir Galahad, but the seas conspired to move the ship out of harm’s way.

  Captain Sanford saw them wing away to the northeast after a final strafing run by a speedy Messerschmitt. The bullets snapped off his conning tower armor, and one round shattered a glass pane, which prompted him to shake his fist at the enemy. Then the last of the fighters banked away, and a calm fell over the scene. To Sanford it was a most unwelcome calm. He had his mind set on fighting his gun battle with that carrier, though not one single enemy round had been fired back at the two cruisers for the hundred rounds they sent Goeben’s way without scoring even a single hit.

  That was par for the course. One or two percent would be a typical hit ratio for gunnery under these conditions, but Sanford was not at all happy.

  “Radar? Do we still have them?”

  “Contact at 18,000 meters, but they’re slipping away sir.”

  “Mister Laurence, are we running full out?”

  “Aye sir, engines all ahead full.”

  “Well my lord, that’s a fast ship out there, but to my mind they were running low on fuel. Otherwise what would they be doing here with that tanker?”

  “A fair assumption, sir.”

  “Yes… Well let’s keep after them. Keep after them. Mister Kingston, keep nipping at their hind quarters. Fire by radar while we still have a link on them.”

  Kingston knew that was mere fist shaking at this range, but he nonetheless ordered B turret to put out two rounds to satisfy the Captain. A moment later they lost that radar contact, and the Goeben had broken away, off over the grey, uncertain horizon.

  “Damn,” said Sanford, stroking his chin. “Now they might turn anywhere. They could turn south and we’d run right by them, wouldn’t we. Then again, I doubt if they’ll go south if they have a fuel problem. No, they’ll want to get north and then northeast, right in the wake of those planes. Where in blazes are those planes off to?”

  “Africa, sir,” said Laurence. “It’s clear they won’t make a landing on that carrier under these circumstances.”

  “Right you are. Then this carrier will want to get to the African coast as well, so what we’ll do is stay inshore of the little demon, and keep ourselves in a good position to cut the bastard off at the knees if he tries to slip by us. But we’ll have to do better than that on the gunnery, Mister Kingston. We’ll have to do a good deal better. I want the first hit to go to Lancelot. After all, we took the first enemy bomb. That will only be fitting. Is Galahad still firing?”

  “No sir,” said Laurence. “They’ve secured main guns as well,”

  “Oh we haven’t secured ours, Mister Laurence. No sir. We simply have nothing to fire at. Crews will remain at action stations., and now we’ve a difficult decision here. If we stay together, we’ll be putting both our chips on the same number. If we split up, we might have a better chance of one or another making contact again.”

  “A sound assessment, sir.”

  “Yes, but we’ll be halving our firepower.”

  “Yes sir, that we would, but I’d say either one of us can handle that carrier out there. Particularly now that the crows have flown.”

  “Right. Well then, order Galahad to make a 30 point turn to Starboard. They’ll look for that devil up north. We’ll carry on this heading for a while, and see what we find.”

  It was as good a move as Sanford might make, trying to cover as much seascape as possible, and sending his ships into different segments of the compass rose. But high overhead, one of the crows was still lingering. Marco Ritter had loitered for a time to see that the British would do. He saw the maneuver made by Galahad, and then radioed Captain Falkenrath.

  “Sorry we couldn’t get you more hits,” he said. “You’ll have one ship on your present heading, just over your horizon. The second has come about 30 points to starboard. They’re splitting up. You’ll know what to do.”

  Kapitan Falkenrath smiled. “Come left full rudder. We’re swinging off to port. Assume a heading of 180 true south. We’ll run on that for 20 minutes ahead full, then go ahead one third. That damn cruiser will run off west thinking he’s still on our hind quarters, but we’ll be well south. Then we’ll double back and ease on up
to the northwest. Any plane that hasn’t taken off will remain aboard. We may need them later.”

  The flight and fate of the Goeben was still in the wind, but as for Kapitan Heinrich on the Kaiser Wilhelm, he would make an easy run up north that day under considerable escort from flocks of JU-88s and Heinkels. By dawn the following day his battlecruiser would slip into Casablanca, and he would make his report to Admiral Raeder. The German navy had a naval rocket! And it had a load of complicated looking radar equipment and antennae that had been stripped from the Norton Sound. It also had something that neither man would be aware of for some time, a small, fully functioning atomic warhead sleeping quietly in the tip of that missile.

  The Grand Admiral had flown to Casablanca to be there when Kaiser Wilhelm arrived, and he was elated. When he first set eyes on that rocket.

  “Shall we have it moved ashore, sir?” Heinrich suggested.

  “Certainly not. What good would it do there? No. Leave it right where it is, in the belly of a fast armored battlecruiser. I want you to refuel today, and then tonight you steam for Gibraltar. From there you will move to Toulon the following night, and I have arrange a heavy escort for you the whole way. From Toulon, we’ll put that rocket on a fast train to Germany. Well done, Kapitan Heinrich. Let us hope the Goeben gets through as well, and Kormoran with that prize ship. The more, the merrier. Now then, let us meet over dinner to discuss this mission. I want to hear your entire report.”

  Heinrich smiled. He was holding a plain leather brief, and inside it he had placed many of the papers and logs his crew had taken from that strange American ship, and the most unusual magazine he had shared with Kapitan Detmers. It was going to make for very interesting dinner conversation, to say the least.

  Part III

  Too Many Cooks

  “Too many cooks will spoil the broth.”

  ― Proverb

  Chapter 7

  Plan Orient was dead. It had been little more than a dream, to sweep into Syria, down through Palestine and possibly into Iraq, taking the oil fields at Baba Gugur in the process and then thinking to link up with Orenburg through a friendly leaning Iran. That was not going to happen now, but Admiral Raeder’s daring Operation Condor had been trying to resurrect some advantage from the capture of Gibraltar, and revitalize Rommel’s position in Libya.

  They had tried to move into the Middle East, but the British Operation Scimitar had fought the Franco-German axis to a standstill in Syria and Lebanon. Hitler had authorized just enough force to stabilize the French, but it soon became clear that to achieve any real victory there, that force would have to be dramatically augmented. Halder insisted that any real offensive aimed at rolling back the British would require another three divisions at bare minimum, and five to seven to assure success.

  “And suppose we do retake Damascus,” he argued. “Then what? Do you honestly propose we should continue on through that desert into Iraq? That is where the British will be, and they can fall back and consolidate there indefinitely, always on our flank if we go for Egypt. Do we then plan a major operation in Iraq? To do so we will have to first drive them out of the north, take Mosul, Erbil and Kirkuk, and then push on to capture Baghdad. After that we will have to pursue them all the way south to Basra.”

  “What about the oil fields at Baba Gugur?” Raeder had argued.

  “Suppose we were sitting on them today?” said Halder. “How do you propose we move any of that oil to Germany? They can move the oil by sea out of Basra—we cannot. It will have to be trucked over 600 miles to ports in northern Syria and then another 700 miles to Athens by sea, always at risk. The only other option is to move it over that antiquated rail system in Turkey. Barbarossa could link up with Orenburg in the Caucasus in three months, and then, with command of the Black Sea, we can move all the oil he controls easily to ports in Rumania and Bulgaria. That is the oil we should set our minds on obtaining, not this nonsensical adventure in the Middle East.”

  “And what if those troops were turned south into Palestine instead?” Hitler’s eyes played over the map.

  “It will need at least three divisions driving down the coast from Beirut, four or five to push through Damascus to Amman and Jerusalem. That is a bare minimum, and then we would also have to cover that wide open flank all the way to the Turkish frontier, because the British can move troops by sea to Iraq. That would require another three divisions, possibly more, and they would all have to rely on supply lines through Turkey, and anything else we manage to deliver by sea to northern Syria, which would then be trucked hundreds of miles inland. See the difficulties? What you must do here, my Führer, is make a major commitment to open this new front and sustain it indefinitely. And bear in mind that these troops will have to be mechanized—high caliber divisions. You must either commit the force necessary to smash the British, or face a long drawn out campaign that will become nothing more than a fruitless holding action, just like we have in North Africa. And bear in mind, all these troops will have to be taken from the southern wing in Barbarossa.”

  At that Hitler had taken a long breath, quietly shaking his head. He was simply not willing to compromise the long standing plans for Barbarossa. He had listened to Raeder, given him the benefit of every doubt, but the operations had only handed him a stalemate, in both North Africa and Syria. He decided.

  “The plans and troop allocations for Barbarossa will not be disturbed. I can see this adventure in the Middle East is entirely fruitless. Make arrangements to withdraw Steiner’s troops for Barbarossa. As for the Mountain Division, send it to Rommel. The 22nd Luftland Division and other airborne troops will be returned to the General Reserve.”

  That spelled the end of Plan Orient, which had really been little more than a dream in Hitler’s mind all along, urged on by Raeder’s whispered promises. His fixation with the necessity of destroying the Soviet State was now uppermost in his mind, and Barbarossa was launched on schedule.

  The withdrawal of German support led to a quick collapse of French resistance in Syria and Lebanon. They were forced to abandon Beirut, withdrawing north while they still had German support, and consolidating their entire force to hold Northern Syria from Homs to Aleppo. The British pushed up the Euphrates as far as Ar Raqqah, and then occupied Palmyra astride their vital pipeline route to the coast. They were able to advance as far as Tripoli on the coast, but then their eyes strayed to the Libyan Desert, largely at Churchill’s urging after Rommel nearly stormed Tobruk.

  The British Operation Crusader had been the first major attempt to push Rommel back, but it had also ended in a stalemate. The British tank losses would take some time to replenish, and the new cruiser tanks they had fielded proved completely unreliable. A lull descended on the desert campaign, with neither side able to take offensive operations with any real prospect of success. In this vacuum, Japan’s dramatic entry into the war commanded the attention of Western planners, but then, Germany’s surprising Operation Condor was launched, using some of the very same troops that had been committed to the ill fated Syrian operation.

  Raeder had managed to convince Hitler that a Reichspfening spent here could make a Reichsmark in due course with the capture of the Canary Islands. His arguments as to how this would cut the British supply lines to Egypt and enhance the U-Boat campaign finally fell on good ground, and Hitler approved the operation in January of 1942.

  The Germans had made a daring attack, leaping from bases and airfields on the African coast to attack the island of Fuerteventura. The arrival of Force H and Home fleet mustered the bulk of the Royal Navy to make a bold attempt to sever the sea communications in the channel between the islands and mainland Africa. It resulted in the largest naval engagement of the war, with the Franco-German fleet going head to head with the Royal Navy in a desperate and costly battle. Good ships and good men were lost on both sides, including the loss of Admiral Volsky, who gave his last breath at the wheel as he struggled to steer HMS Invincible to safe waters. His sacrifice had already saved Tov
ey, and ended up saving that ship, but the cost was his own life, a hard blow when the news finally came to Fedorov. In the end, it was a matter of logistics that eventually compelled the British fleet to withdraw north to Madeira and the Azores for refueling.

  The Germans managed to take Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and the main island at Gran Canaria. The British still stubbornly held on to Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, with their main strength on Tenerife around the port of Santa Cruz. Now both sides began to plan how to continue that struggle, and logistics would again figure prominently in the game.

  “Now that they’ve put troops on these islands,” said Tovey in a meeting at Admiralty headquarters, “they’ll have to keep them supplied, and that goes double for what is perhaps their most dangerous asset, the Luftwaffe. I’m told the army left the airfields in bad shape when we pulled out, and we sunk an old WWI destroyer in the entrance to the Grand Harbor, but the Germans will cure that in a matter of weeks. Then it comes down to who can keep the troops and planes fighting and flying. Our intelligence indicates that those German raiders have now returned. One got through to Casablanca. The other is still operating near the Canaries, and we hope to run it down. In the meantime, the navy must do everything possible to contest the littoral zones around the islands. I’ll be sending Duke of York back to work soon, and King George V as soon as possible. But we can’t afford to lose another battleship here. Those heavy units will be there to discourage moves by enemy capital ships, but the rest will be up to our cruisers and destroyers, backed up by aircraft carriers.”