Kirov Saga:
Lions at Dawn
By
John Schettler
A publication of: The Writing Shop Press
Lions at Dawn, Copyright©2016, John A. Schettler
KIROV SERIES:
The Kirov Saga: Season One
Kirov - Kirov Series - Volume 1
Cauldron of Fire - Kirov Series - Volume 2
Pacific Storm - Kirov Series - Volume 3
Men of War - Kirov Series - Volume 4
Nine Days Falling - Kirov Series - Volume 5
Fallen Angels - Kirov Series - Volume 6
Devil’s Garden - Kirov Series - Volume 7
Armageddon – Kirov Series – Volume 8
The Kirov Saga: Season Two ~ 1940-1941
Altered States– Kirov Series – Volume 9
Darkest Hour– Kirov Series – Volume 10
Hinge of Fate– Kirov Series – Volume 11
Three Kings – Kirov Series – Volume 12
Grand Alliance – Kirov Series – Volume 13
Hammer of God – Kirov Series – Volume 14
Crescendo of Doom – Kirov Series – Volume 15
Paradox Hour – Kirov Series – Volume 16
The Kirov Saga: Season Three ~1942
Doppelganger – Kirov Series – Volume 17
Nemesis – Kirov Series – Volume 18
Winter Storm – Kirov Series – Volume 19
Tide of Fortune – Kirov Series – Volume 20
Knight’s Move – Kirov Series – Volume 21
Turning Point – Kirov Series – Volume 22
Steel Reign – Kirov Series – Volume 23
Second Front – Kirov Series – Volume 24
The Kirov Saga: Season Four ~1943
Tigers East – Volume 25
Thor’s Anvil – Volume 26
1943 – Volume 27
Lions at Dawn – Volume 28
Kirov Saga:
Lions at Dawn
By
John Schettler
Kirov Saga:
Lions at Dawn
By
John Schettler
Part I – All Hallows Eve
Part II – Operation Phoenix
Part III – The Halfback
Part IV – Chariots of Fire
Part V – Humbugged
Part VI – Speed
Part VII – Unforgiving Minutes
Part VIII– Friends & Enemies
Part IX – Saint Michael’s Cave
Part X – Stalemate
Part XI – Lions at Dawn
Part XII – The Perfect Moment
Author’s Note:
Dear Readers,
‘Tis now the very witching time of night…’ A most appropriate quote for the way this volume will begin. We finally came to New Year’s Eve, 1942, and entered the critical middle year of the war in the last volume. 1943 was a year where both sides launched bold new offensives, punching and counterpunching in the decisive battles that would eventually decide the course of the war.
We’ll begin to see some of these new operations here, many as desperate as they are daring, as both sides attempt to ride the storm tide of war to some favorable end. And true to the general premise of this entire series, we will also see new challengers emerge to threaten the aspirations of all our principal players. Yet now I begin with another twist in the knotted rope of this story that will dramatically complicate the plans being laid by Fedorov and Karpov. It will see this book conclude with another tense six chapter naval duel in the Pacific involving the full range of all the most deadly modern weapons of war. Yet before that happens, there is much more story to relate as the war flares up in the West.
The principle action of this volume will rest in North Africa, as the combined Allied forces in Algeria attempt to push the Germans back into Tunisia, while our Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, again locks horns with General Richard O’Connor in Tripolitania. Yet Adolf Hitler also gets into the act here, his mercurial mind reaching for new opportunities in the Middle East when the Russian Front is frozen solid in the coldest winter seen in over 200 years. This will lead the Führer to revisit old plans and operations, and dramatic make changes at OKW needed to carry them out.
Just for spice, we will also see two other smaller operations here. One takes place in the Med, in the waters off Tunis and Bizerte, and another will take us to the skies above the Black Sea. There, the Führer’s new airships are launched a most surprising mission, as Germany unveils the first of its deadly “Wonder Weapons” of WWII.
- John Schettler
Part I
All Hallows Eve
“Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.”
—William Shakespeare
Chapter 1
They moved north with as much stealth as possible. Captain Harada ordered all sensors except passive sonar to go into EMCON mode, as they wanted to be certain there was no chance they might be detected by the Russian battlecruiser. The news of the attack on Truk had not been well received. It underscored just how vast the canvas of the war was, and Takami could not be everywhere. Yet even when the ship was on station, they realized they had little real clout as their missile inventory had diminished considerably. The had only 30 SAMs left, enough for one more intervention that would likely just thin out the attacking enemy squadrons. After that, they were no more than well-educated observers in the war, with very good ears and eyes.
The Captain had been flipping through a copy of a magazine that had been found on Fiji by a Japanese soldier and sent up through channels, all the way to Yamamoto, who had then casually passed it to Harada at their last meeting. “I have become somewhat of a monster these days,” the Admiral had said to Harada. “Look at the dour and devious expression they attribute to me.”
It was the cover of Time Magazine, the December 22nd issue, in 1941, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The caption beneath Yamamoto’s caricature read: ‘Japan’s Aggressive Admiral Yamamoto.’ Inside, the cover story set the same tone as the image:
‘A humble wireless set trembled last week with quasi-divine vibrations as the Son of Heaven himself sent Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Imperial Fleets, congratulations for the daring execution of a brilliant treachery.
Congratulations from Emperor Hirohito fix upon their recipient an incredible joy; but also a certain uneasiness. This is because they not only bestow praise; they also adjure the congratulatee to continue the good work—or else.’
Or else… Harada knew the feeling now. They had made their bold approach, entered into this impossible scenario thinking they could make all the difference, yet every success made him feel the weight of that statement. Keep up the good work—or else you find yourself sent home to Yokohama.
The order to steam for Yokohama took both Harada and his XO Fukada by surprise. They thought that they would be recalled to Rabaul to provide fleet defense there, particularly after the raid on Truk. Instead they were called home, and ordered by Admiral Ugaki to report directly to Fleet Chief Admiral Osami Nagano.
“I don’t like it,” said Harada. “While we were operating down south, we at least had a lid on things. Steaming into Yokohama is going to get a lot of people talking. We’ll undoubtedly have visitors, which is the last thing I want.”
“When poisoned, one might as well swallow the whole plate,” said Fukada. An Englishman might well have said, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound. “You know it was inevitable that we’d draw attention here from the moment we fired that first SM-2 in the bay off Davao.”
<
br /> “Yet so much for all our grand notions of influencing the course of this war,” said Harada. “We couldn’t persuade Yamamoto, we couldn’t handle the Russians, and now we can’t even protect the Kido Butai. We’ve been benched, Number 1, and I’m not immune to the great bane of most Japanese—shame.”
“We’d be wise to limit or prevent any more boardings by men from this era,” said Fukada.
“And what if we get a direct order from someone like Nagano? How does one say no politely to the only man in the Navy senior to Yamamoto?”
“With great caution. We’ll have to be very Japanese about it. Bow and scrape, smile a lot, say the arrangements will be made directly, delay, reschedule, ask for a postponement due to an issue with the ship. You know the drill.”
“That’ll only get us so far. We might delay a few days on a technical matter involving the ship, but not much longer. Perhaps we can say we want to make certain the ship is properly presented to his lordship. And now that we get into royalty, what if the Emperor himself is behind this request? Ugaki was very tight lipped when he gave me these orders.”
“That would certainly be something,” said Fukada, “an audience with Hirohito!”
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Harada. “How do we explain this ship to Nagano? That’s our first real problem. Are we going to tell him the truth?”
“That would be… difficult,” said Fukada.
“That’s half a word for it,” said Harada. He rubbed the back of his neck, as if he might rub away this whole nightmare, his mind haunted by second thoughts, regrets, and the realization that they were slowly becoming a little fish in a great steaming pot on the boil, and one he knew the end of only too well.”
“XO,” he said. “We’ve gone an hitched our wagon to a falling star,” he said.
“It isn’t over yet,” said Fukada, thinking to bolster the Captain’s spirits. “We still have some fight in us.”
“Not enough,” said Harada. “The Russians called our bluff and we had to back down. Kurita took our shame upon himself, and we’ve gone and made one dangerous enemy of that man. Now it seems that Yamamoto is losing faith in us as well. Mister Ikida, how soon do we make Eniwetok?”
They had initially planned to return to Japan via Manila, but Harada thought that route would expose them to far too many curious eyes, so he requested an alternate route, well out into the Pacific. They would meet with an oiler, and then proceed home.
“Six hours, sir. That was Bikini Atoll on Otani’s screen a few hours ago. We’re due west now and should be at Eniwetok by noon at this speed.”
“Then we fuel up and take a breather. Anyone want to stretch their legs? We’re meeting the Kazahaya right off Runit Island. What’s the story on that ship?” He looked at Fukada.
“First in its class, a new oiler laid down in September of 1941. It just launched this month, so this is their maiden voyage. In fact, it’s the only ship in its class, hull 304. Hull 306 was converted to a hybrid Tanker/Carrier. All the others were cancelled. This one was sunk in October of this year by a couple US subs.”
“No use mentioning that when we meet their Captain,” said Harada.
“Agreed,” said Fukada. “Though I think we should have warned Yamamoto about what might happen this April—Operation Vengeance. That was the successful American attack on Yamamoto’s plane in the Solomons.”
“You think that will happen?”
“Who can say? We convinced them to change their code, but the American Intel effort was very good. If they break this one, then they might get wind of Yamamoto’s itinerary in the Solomons.”
“Assuming he has one,” said Harada, unconvinced. “No, I think the deck is well shuffled here. We might rely on your birth and death stats as the ships are concerned, except for that lot we were screening down south. I never heard of most of those ships.”
“Me neither. They were all new,” said Fukada. “This war has more than a few surprises.”
“Right,” said Harada. “Including us.”
“Eniwetok…” Fukada was tapping a pad device now. “Yes… This was where the US tested a number of its nukes after the war in the early 1950s. In fact, they popped off nearly 80 detonations here, including Ivy Mike, the very first H-bomb test. That was the biggest detonation in this region, over 15 megatons, and it blew the islet of Elugelab right off the map. It no longer exists in our day, but we can see it here in a few hours. How’s that for a good shore leave destination? The island Ivy Mike ate for breakfast in 1952.”
The massive Eniwetok Lagoon stretched in a wide circle of coral reefs washed by white foam and pristine aquamarine and cobalt blue seas, about 20 miles wide and 25 miles long. The main island with installations and the principle airfield was in the south, on the eastern edge of the widest entrance to the lagoon. The island Fukada had fingered, Elugelab, was once in the far north, one of many that would vanish over the decades.
During the war, the Japanese navy would make the atoll a busy refueling base, and after they took it, the Americans used it as a forward base to stage hundreds of ships in the lagoon, nearly 500 ships there on any given day by mid-1944.
Takami made its rendezvous with Kazahaya, and the crews set about the process of transferring fuel oil. As usual, they could see the crewmen on the oiler gawking at their strange looking ship, but Harada had decided to limit communications to lamp or flag signals, and radio chatter. As they hovered off Runit Island, Fukada was out on the weather deck with his field glasses, searching the northern segment.
“What’s got your attention?” asked Harada.
“Just looking for the spot where they built that big concrete dome,” said Fukada. “I think it was right there,” he pointed. “In 1958 the Cactus ground burst test blasted a 350 foot crater into that spot. The ground was so radioactive that they poured 30 feet of cement over it in a massive dome. You can see it on Google Earth. It looks just like a big flying saucer sitting on the island. Locals came to call it the eye of the swordfish after they eventually returned. That spit of land was the blade of that fish, and the island its body. The dome looked like a big fisheye.”
“Very colorful,” said Harada. “Well, we’re topped off and ready to move. We’ll be escorting that oiler back to Yokohama, but let’s go see your phantom island first.”
In 2021 it was just a deep blue hole in the sea, two kilometers wide, one of many blasted into the reefs and islands that surrounded the atoll. Now, as Takami eased in close, it was a small green islet covered with a lush stand of palm trees. It was hard to believe that the entire island had been completely vaporized by the massive fireball and shock wave of Ivy Mike.
The project had been born as America’s answer to the “First Lightning” detonation by the Soviet Union, announcing to the world that the U.S. was no longer the only superpower that possessed these terrible weapons. Decades later, that arms race would make an end of both nations, but no one knew that just then, though they could feel the impending shadow of the event growing in the deepening gloom of relations between Putin’s Russia and the West.
It would be a test of two weapons, with big Mike to be the main event, followed two weeks later by a much smaller device, the “King” shot, which would only be 25 times as big as “Fat Man” at Nagasaki. King was a T “Super Oralloy Bomb,” abbreviated S.O.B. by the technicians, who came to call it the “Little Son-of-a-Bitch.” If it had been dropped on downtown San Francisco, it would have obliterated the heart of the city, killing 225,000 people instantly and injuring over 365,000 more. The thermal radiation from that blast would have covered the entire peninsula, coast to coast, singed the Golden Gate, and burnt the pastoral shores of Sausalito, encompassing all of Treasure Island in the East Bay.
The little King’s big brother was much larger. If big Mike had gone off over the financial district in San Francisco, the air blast radius alone would have extended out as far as King’s thermal radiation. Everything as far north as San Rafael would burn in the thermal
radiation, along with everything to the east, including all of Oakland, Richmond, and the Berkeley Hills. The terrible heat would just be starting to dissipate when it reached Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. The fallout from that blast would be heavy over Sacramento, according to prevailing winds, reaching all the way to Reno Nevada with radiation between 100 and 1000 Rads per hour. 782,000 would have died instantly, and another 650,000 would be severely burned and injured. A weapon like Ivy Mike used in the 21st Century would literally be hell on earth wherever it fell.
One of the first men to know the massive hydrogen bomb had detonated successfully was Edward Teller, at the Berkeley facility in California. The bomb was his brainchild, using a special deuterium fuel within a uranium tamper. It would go off with a one-two punch, a smaller fission bomb exploding in the nose to compress the deuterium and uranium fuel in the body of the bomb. In effect, Teller was using the power of a nuclear fission explosion as his hammer to pound the fuel that would yield a hydrogen explosion. It was this design, perfected by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, that would be used for most warheads wanting some real clout.
Had it gone off in San Francisco in 1952, Teller would not have survived it at his lab in Berkeley. Instead, it would detonate over that lonely isolated coral atoll in the Pacific, right where Captain Harada and Fukada were admiring the little island it vaporized. On All Hallows Eve, in 1952, it sat there in its 82 ton cylindrical cryostat thermos, called ‘the sausage’ by the technicians, a mindless supercritical mass waiting to live in the fire of that hydrogen explosion. When it went off, it was 500 times more powerful than either Fat Man or Little Boy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The era of the Thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb had been born. It was October 31st, Halloween night in Berkeley, (07:15 local time on All Souls Day, Nov 1st in the Pacific). Teller’s people picked up the vibration half way across the globe in Berkeley, and he made a cryptic call to an associate seconds after, saying only: “It’s a Boy.”
Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28) Page 1