They were correct.
* * *
The last of the Helldivers were spotted and ready for takeoff on the Big T, with something under its modified fuselage that looked very strange. Aviation Ordnanceman Julian Lowry was still scratching his head over the device, a fat 1700 pound bomb with wings! It had a big round nose that was crammed with gizmos, or so he had heard, though he never got a look inside.
“This thing like those Jap missiles?”
“Hell no,” said Boatswain’s Mate Rod Madison. “They stick some dumb ass in theirs and fly them like Kamikazes. Not like ours,” he pointed. “That sucker has its own radar.”
“What do you know about it, Boats?”
“We were working the decks in the lower munitions hold when they brought the damn thing in. I heard the briefing. It’s got radar in there, I tell you. That’s why they call it a bat.”
Madison was correct. They were looking at one of the world’s first “Smart Bombs,” named the ASM-N-2 BAT, (Mark 9). It was an amazing development by RCA, Western Electric and other talented engineering firms, deployed and tested for the first time in April of 1945 off Borneo where it sunk a couple Japanese merchant ships and damaged the escort ship Aguni from a firing range of 20 nautical miles. The first true “fire and forget” anti-ship weapon, over 3500 were built and deployed on numerous aircraft from bombers to seaplanes to the versatile Helldivers. The $700 million investment in the weapon was exceeded only by the Manhattan project. Clearly the Americans had seen what these rockets and radar guided weapons could do, and they were hot to deploy their own.
It had been a long time in development, with numerous models by various names designed before this model achieved success. The problem of how to guide a special weapon to the target was a daunting one first tackled by the Germans with their Fritz X, a glide bomb that was actually radio controlled and guided by a crewman in the bomber it was dropped from. The US wanted to use a bomb with its own radar instead, though one group argued it could easily be defeated by jamming and suggested a wacky, yet novel approach. They fixed a lens in the nose of the bomb that would project an image of the target ship onto a white screen. There, tucked away inside the nose of the bomb, they placed a pigeon trained to peck at the image, which generated signals from the sensitive wired screen that would serve to reorient the bombs air foils to correct the missile’s flight path! Needless to say, the radar advocates won the day.
“They say the Russians have guided rockets,” said Lowrey. “Spooked some of the pilots pretty bad last time up.”
“Yeah? Well take a good look, Lowrey. We’ve got the damn things too.”
“Did you see that big Russian bomb this morning?”
“Yeah, I saw it. We’ve got one too.”
“How you know all this, Boats?”
“You think they got something we don’t have yet? Get a clue, Lowrey. We had to ship the Russkies trucks and planes for years. If they have it, then we’ve got it too.”
The plane was loaded and on the flight line now, and the lucky man in the cockpit that day was Rod Bains. Signalman Bill Tomko was handling the flags as the engine revved up, and he was ready to wave the plane off when someone pointed at the sky. He craned his neck to have a look, first seeing the thick flights of Hellcats overhead as they formed up for the big strike run up north. Then he saw what Lowrey and the Boatswain’s mate were jaw-boning about, thin white streaks in the sky, coming in so fast he could hardly believe what he was seeing. The rockets ripped into the dense formations overhead with booming explosions. He saw three planes go up with the first fireball, their flaming remnants falling from the sky like wounded angels.
The Russians had pigeons too.
“Holy crap! Will you look at that! Where are they coming from?”
The skies overhead were soon a wild melee of wheeling aircraft and more missiles came streaking in from the north, eight in all. The signalmen gaped at the scene, their unbelieving eyes transfixed as the rockets exploded, one by one. There was something wrong about it, something unfair, like a boxing match where the two fighters were standing face to face with the referee and one man snapped a sharp jab at the other fellow before the bell even rang. The formations overhead were broken up and wheeling in all directions now, like angry bees.
Once the shock and amazement abated there was also palpable anger on the flight deck. Lowrey shook a fist at Bains, as if to urge him to go get some well deserved revenge. Bill Tomko was fired up and he snapped his flags back up pointing the way forward to the nose of the ship.
“Come on Bat Man, go get the sons-of-bitches, will ya?” With a snap of his arm the Helldiver was on its way, the Bat Bomb cradled under its fuselage and off to war.
Then the flying fish came in, and everything was chaos again. Someone pointed off the port side of the ship. “Hey, look out! More of them rockets coming in fast!”
Gunner’s mate Benny Benson barely got a look at them, three flying fish skimming low over the sea in the distance, leaving frothy white tails behind them as they raced in. Two veered off and he got a good side view for a second as they sped towards the light carrier Monterey, the third was headed right for Big T, and it came in with a roar and wallop unlike anything he had ever heard. A brilliant orange fireball lit up the port side of the ship, and the missile blasted through the thin side armor, plunging inside to the maintenance bays. It was lucky that all the planes were mostly in the air. The Bat Man was the last off the deck, his Helldiver laboring up with its heavy load.
Bains looked over his shoulder, saw Ticonderoga burning, and set his jaw tight, then wagged his wings in farewell, a signal that set the everyone on the flight deck cheering him on. At least twenty angels had fallen from the sky when the lightning fast rockets caught them in their tightly packed formations. Now all bets were off. The rest of the strike package was dispersing like a flight of scattering birds, flying off in all directions and altitudes as they had been told in the pre-flight briefing. The rockets would not find them huddled together again, and soon they were all heading north.
* * *
Karpov was after the carriers first. He had pegged their positions with the long range AEW radars on the KA-226. Samsonov fired a salvo of eight P-400 missiles at each carrier group, hoping to catch the air formations early and hurt them. The eight missiles that had shaken up the Sprague’s group took down over twenty planes, and he had similar results against the Halsey group carriers. But the allies were getting cagy now. They immediately began dispersing their carriers at high speed, making each one an individual target instead of steaming them in a centralized task force. Each had an escort of two destroyers, particularly after three P-900s found Ticonderoga and Monterey, the latter hit badly by two missiles.
The blow changed all future history, at least in one respect, in a way that Karpov would never know. The General Quarters Officer of the Deck on Monterey was Gerald R. Ford, later to become the Vice President in Richard Nixon’s administration, and eventually the 38th President of the United States. He was once fated to be the longest lived president in US history, reaching the age of 93 years and 165 days, but all that was changed in a hot flash of fire and smoke from a Sizzler. The General Quarters OOD didn’t make it off Monterey alive.
It was shaping up to be a battle of attrition at first. The salvos against the carrier groups had expended all but one of Kirov’s P-900s. Only the number ten missile remained, and it was mounted with a ‘special warhead.’ Kirov still had seventeen Moskit-IIs nine MOS-III Starfires, and that last remaining P-900. The other ships in the flotilla could contribute another thirty missiles. The only question he had now was whether they could sufficiently disable the American combat power with limited conventional weapons, or whether they would be forced to resort to stronger measures.
As the action proceeded Karpov finally began to take the full measure of his foe. The Americans were not going to back down. They were going to persist with this attack with everything they had at their disposal, just as the
British had. Wouldn’t I do the same, he thought? Shouldn’t I do the same now? I’m letting the ghosts of Volsky and Fedorov convict me here, and Zolkin was no help either. This is war now—yes, a war of my own making, but war nonetheless.
He turned that over in his mind, and made an inner resolution. If he could not retain sufficient combat power to insure future operations, he was a good as dead, the ship sunk, and this whole thing over. Before he would let that happen he would show the Americans that his massive shot across the bow was no bluff. Yet given the deployment he was now facing he realized they might easily punch through the American battle line with conventional weapons and head out into the Pacific.
They were not going to negotiate. His fantasy of sitting at the table with MacArthur and Nimitz and Halsey was now an insubstantial folly. These were men of war, and their answer to his challenge had been to turn the full might of their navy to engage him. Volsky was correct, at least on one point. Why would they negotiate after the casualties they will sustain in this engagement?
He shook his head inwardly, realizing that, for all their power, his flotilla was still a small player on the board, a dangerous renegade knight, but one that could not force a checkmate on its own. He had two choices now. One was to return home to Vladivostok, and hope it could shelter him from the wrath of the allied navies. The Soviets had nothing to speak of for a Pacific Fleet at this time, he realized, but they had strong land forces. If the Americans wanted to get pushy they would have to try to put ground troops on Soviet soil.
Then his mind ran down a long corridor of thought, recalling the folded bureaucracy that had greeted them in Vladivostok of 2021. Volsky won’t be there. It will be Stalin’s Russia, and if I thought Inspector General Kapustin and his lap dog Volkov were a nuisance, Stalin’s NKVD will be many times worse. Sail for home at your own peril. You will end up having to flee from the Golden Horn harbor yet again, this time a pariah to your own country, and not the proud warrior who led the fleet out in 2021.
Yet what else could they do? Rodenko has advised him to get some breathing room and run out into the Pacific. Perhaps he could find a way to talk sense into the Americans later. Now he felt what Lucifer must have felt after his challenge failed at the gates of heaven. He would be an outcast if they ran east, wandering the seas, forever hunted, pursued the world over. It all seemed so simple hours and days ago, with the American fleets set to gather at Tokyo Bay. He thought he could make that one decisive intervention and change everything, but now he realized that this world would not submit to his will without a fight. It was not so simple any longer.
“Mister Rodenko, we will have to select a point in the enemy line and blow a hole. Then we’ll make our best speed and punch through.”
“KA-226 can feed us the data now, sir, and the Fregat will have line of sight contact any minute.”
“Good. Signal Admiral Golovko. Tell Captain Ryakhin he is to prepare a salvo of six missiles, two sets of three, and I want him to engage with the first set on this ship here.” He pointed to the tactical board. “Can you feed him the location data?”
“Yes, sir. Nikolin has been reading ship to ship chatter. That is a heavy cruiser.”
Karpov had fingered the St Paul.
Chapter 33
She was everything a good heavy cruiser should be, fast, reasonably well protected and with decent punch in her nine 8 inch guns. The lavish addition of twelve 5 inch guns, forty-eight 40mm Bofors and twenty-four 20mm Oerlikon cannons gave her considerable air defense capability for her role in screening the fast carrier task forces that won the war in the Pacific. Seventeen ships were built in her class, but only seven saw service in the war. St Paul was one of them, slipping into the action in those final days when Halsey’s carriers made their last raids on Honshu and Hokkaido. The ship also got in close and bombarded industrial targets on the Japanese mainland on two occasions, and had the distinction of firing the final salvo in this role from any capital ship in the war.
The enemy never laid a finger on her throughout this brief action, but St. Paul’s fate was about to change. Something was coming at her that all her lavish anti-aircraft guns could not forestall. There was nothing but scrambled eggs on the radars that day, and the lookouts barely saw the missiles coming. Admiral Golovko had fired three Oniks/Yakhont sea skimmers on Karpov’s order, and they came in at Mach 2.6, striking the ship at ten second intervals with three hard punches that set her ablaze from stern to bow. And like so many foes Karpov had engaged, the ship and crew never saw the enemy that had crippled her in one swift blow.
Halsey got the word just as he was consulting with staff on the battle bridge of the Missouri to lock in their best location for the enemy based on information relayed by the radar pickets. Iowa, some ten kilometers on his starboard side, had already turned on a new heading to intercept, and he was bringing Mighty Mo around fifteen points to starboard, churning up the seas at 30 knots.
“Where in hell did the Russians get these damn rocket weapons?” The ship’s Captain, Stuart S. Murray was still trying to get his mind around the situation. “You would think we might have known something about it.”
“Apparently we did,” said Halsey. “Or at least the British did. That mushroom cloud we saw this morning was the same thing they used to sink Mississippi in TF-16, and that was before we were even in the war. Admiral Fraser says the Brits slugged it out with these Russians more than once—a renegade ship from all we can deduce now. There was only one before. Now we have three according to the picket reports. They think there’s at least three enemy ships out there now. No one knows where they came from or what they’re about. Even the Soviet government claims they have no knowledge of these ships, but yet there they are, demons at sea, and they just hit St. Paul hard. She never got off a single round.”
Admiral Fraser’s words returned to haunt him now, biting harder with the news coming in about St. Paul… “The fact is, Admiral, this is no ordinary ship. As I said earlier, it’s fast, it has advanced weaponry—naval rocketry in fact—and it can strike from a great distance, even beyond the range of those big sixteen inch guns out there. It looks like a battleship if you ever lay eyes on the damn thing, as I did one black night. There wasn’t a gun on it bigger than a QF five incher, but it could pound a ship like Yamato to near scrap.”
“Well, Sunshine,” Halsey said to the Captain, using his nickname to put the matter on more personal terms. “We’re about to see just how good the Iowa class battlewagons really are. I think the enemy is trying to break out into the Pacific. They can see what we’re doing and they’re trying to punch a hole in our line right there—right where they hit St. Paul. So I think that’s exactly where they are heading, and we are too. The good news is that we’re now in a good position to intercept. The bad news is that those rockets may be heading our way soon when this Karpov realizes that. I want damage control and repair crews doubled on both Iowa and Missouri. Lay out extra fire hoses. Take men from any watch you need to fill out the ranks. If those charts we’ve just plotted are accurate and the enemy is where we think he is, then we could be in visual range within the hour.”
“Still good light for a couple hours,” said Murray.
“We’ll need it. Pass the word. The gunners can’t rely on radar. I’ve got lookouts up on every weather deck and mast I could find—even up on the radar mounts themselves. We’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. Somehow they’ve managed to black out and foul up every radar set on the ship.”
“This just doesn’t add up, Admiral. How could the Russians be so far ahead of us? They couldn’t even produce the trucks they needed early in the war. How could they build ships that can do this, and then have the gall to stand there and deny any knowledge of them?”
“A lot of guff,” said Halsey. “Well I plan to have a real close look at these ships, personally. See that the Missouri is trimmed for action.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Murray was only too happy to comply, then he looked over his shoulder
.” Suppose they throw another big one our way, Bull. Then what?”
Halsey’s eyes were dark fire beneath those bristling grey brows. He gave the Captain a long look. “We’ll coordinate our attack with the air wing,” he said. “Bastards tried to sucker punch us there too, but we’ve got most everyone up now and they’re heading our way. Cowpens got hit, but the fleet carriers came through alright. Plenty of deck space there for further operations, though I’m ordering the flattops to move further south.”
Murray noted that Halsey had not answered his question, but said nothing more.
* * *
A thousand miles away other men were working to answer that question. North Field on the Island of Tinian was a very busy place that day. The big silver B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force were being rolled out of their hard stands and rigged for battle. The Americans had taken the strategic island a little over a year ago, in July of 1944, and it meant the big superfortress bombers now had a place to roost in range of the Japanese homeland. North Field was originally Ushi Point, a Japanese runway for recon planes until 1500 Seabees showed up and expanded the operation in a vast quilt of new runways, tarmacs, and hard stations to house the planes.
To do the work they moved thousands of tons of coral and earth to complete what soon became the largest airfield in the world at that time, occupying the entire northern end of the island as if it had been branded into the ground there. It was now home to 265 B-29 bombers, which busied themselves in pounding Iwo Jima, Okinawa and then blackening the major cities of Japan in the last months of the war. The bombers were all set to continue with Operation Olympic, the planned invasion of Japan, but the Emperor came to his senses and capitulated just days ago.
But it wasn’t over. Word was that Halsey was still fighting out there, though few knew the details of what was happening. All they knew was what they were told. Tonight all leave was cancelled, and every man was to be in their quarters. Units in and around Runway A on the big airfield were rounded up and literally locked in Quonset huts, watched over by MPs and dour faced Master Chiefs. Something was up.
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