Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28)

by John Schettler

  Thankfully, Trooper’s Chariots would have better luck. Lt. Richard Greenland and Leading Signalman Alex Ferrier took in Chariot #22 to reach the netting protecting the north harbor entrance, and found a way through after the application of a good pair of bolt cutters. Once they got into the dark harbor, they could see there were very slim pickings. A single cargo vessel was tied off on the long central jetty, but there was also a good sized warship at hand, and that got their attention immediately.

  “Not much in the cupboard,” said the Lieutenant. “But it looks like we’re here first, so we’ll have a go at that cruiser over there. Let’s dive and make our approach.”

  The warhead was 600 pounds of Torpex, and they spent some minutes under water, slowly and carefully working it off the nose of the Chariot. They were down near the bottom of the ship’s hull, completely undetected, and elated to have a real warship at hand to attack. It was a very new ship, and one that seemed fated to make their acquaintance.

  Built at Palermo, the light cruiser Ulpio Traiano had been named after the Emperor Trajan, and was only commissioned in November of 1942. She was in the Capitani Romani Class, about 5,500 tons full load, a sleek, beautiful ship that was faster than a gale force wind at 41 knots. At trials, this ship had even bettered that, and made all of 43 knots, which made her a very useful ship in a tight spot, with eight 5.3-inch deck guns, another 16 small AA caliber guns, and eight 533mm torpedoes. She could race in to deliver those lances with that dashing speed, or leave a trail of up to 70 mines bobbing in the water behind her.

  That was the very same ship these two men had attacked at Palermo on the old Prime Meridian, but the cruiser had moved here to Bizerte on a supply run, planning to leave a few hours before dawn for the run back to Palermo. Fate seemed a dogged shadow that night, and Greenland and Ferrier would get that ship no matter where it was berthed. At sea, with a full head of steam up, the cruiser would have been invulnerable to such a cumbersome attack, but there, tied off quietly at the jetty, she was a proverbial sitting duck.

  Now another torpedo of sorts was hugging her hull in the depths of the shadowy harbor, while the two men struggled to get that warhead attached, and then make as stealthy a withdrawal as possible. Even as they worked, neither man knew that Chariot #16 off the Trooper had also made it through a gap in the netting, and they were going after the same ship until they spied the other team and Chariot in the murky water and turned about. Instead they would have to try their luck on the Capo Pino, an old French Merchant cargo liner that had been commandeered by the Italians.

  Lt. Rodney Dove and Leading Seaman James Freel piloted Chariot #16, fixing their charge and then finding that they could not get the motor restarted on the Chariot to maneuver out of the harbor. Knowing they could not hitch a ride with their comrades on the other side of the harbor, they resolved to try and slip ashore and lose themselves in the city. That plan did not work out, and they were captured by an alert guardsman patrolling the quays.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing here,” he managed in reasonable English. “Spies, are you?”

  “Spies?” said Lieutenant Dove. “Not at all. Just doing a bit of sightseeing, but there isn’t much here. Take that ship there,” he pointed. “You won’t even have that to look at soon.” He looked down at his watch. “Another minute, I should think.”

  That minute passed, and the British frogmen started to think their charge had failed when there was a sudden explosion across the harbor, and they saw the Italian cruiser literally lifted out of the water, the 600 pound charge breaking her back with perfect placement. A few seconds later their own charge went off, and after shirking with the explosion, Lieutenant Dove just gave the guard a sheepish look, seeing the man had leveled his rifle at them.

  “Come now,” he said. “War is war. We’ve done our job here, fair and square, and we’re your prisoner. I can assure you, if the situation were reversed, you would get fair treatment from us.”

  “Move along!” the man said gruffly.

  As for the crew of Chariot #22, they were just approaching the netting when their charge went off with that rollicking explosion. Realizing that the alarm would be up all around the harbor in seconds, they simply poured on the power and rammed the netting, the weight and force of the Chariot pushing right on through. Now all they had to do was get back north to look for one of the submarines.

  They found one, seeing a light winking at them in the dark swells of the channel. So they made for it with renewed determination, elated to have taken out that warship, and glad their comrades had also scored a hit that night. As they eased up to the sub, Lieutenant Greenland shouted up. “Never more glad to see you! A tin of Bully Beef is going to go down quite nicely after this romp.”

  Men were out on the deck of the sub, a rope thrown over for the two divers to grasp, but as they climbed, Greenland looked up to see a man holding a submachinegun on him. It was the number two Warrant Officer off U-73, and minutes later they were hauled up and led below, soon eye to eye with Oberleutnant Deckert. He was quite pleased at the little fish he had caught with his due diligence, and eager to interrogate these men.

  “You see, Bentzein,” he said to his Number One. “Now we have one of their underwater torpedoes, and we’ll just tow it into the harbor and drop these two off. Let’s hope the Luftwaffe can get out after that enemy submarine we tailed at first light.” He looked at the two bedraggled divers, and he spoke in the King’s English.

  “We knew you were up to something,” he said. “I spotted you yesterday off Algiers, and there was something very odd about the silhouette of your sub. How many are you?”

  “Come now,” said Lieutenant Dove, “you really don’t expect us to answer that.”

  “No, but it never hurts to ask.” Deckert smiled at him. “I admire your gall,” he said. “They say the British are always too busy drinking their tea to get busy with this war, but this little caper was quite imaginative.”

  “The Degos have given us fits with much of the same,” said Dove. “Turnabout is always fair play.”

  “I suppose it is. So why don’t you tell me where your submarine is so I can go up and put a torpedo into it. If you wish, I’ll strap the two of you aboard before I fire, since you enjoy riding those fish so much.”

  Both men knew that was nonsense, and Dove just gave his mate a look and shrugged. “You might want to be very careful about that,” he said by way of warning the other man. “Our boys in the undersea service may not get the press you do in your U-boats, but we know what we’re about.”

  “I have little doubt,” said Deckert. “Very well, Fritz, take them aft, and find them some tea. They deserve it.”

  The two British submarines waited off Cap Blanc for some time, lurking quietly in the depths. At a pre-designated hour, each one put up a periscope to have a look about for the others. They were to wait no more than three hours before pulling out, as they needed to be as far west towards Algiers as possible before daylight the following morning. By that time, word of the raid would have spread and the enemy would be certain to have air patrols up looking hungrily for any sign of the enemy.

  None of the three subs spotted any of the diver teams. They had all ridden their Chariots of Fire into the breach of war, and were now considered expendable, just like all the men on the ships they killed that day in the harbor. Lieutenant Wraith sighed, looking at his watch. He had let his spirits go, and none came back. Then he gave the order to come about.

  Trooper and Thunderbolt would return empty, and the rescue boat, Unruffled, would also see nothing for some time. Then, just as they were making ready to depart, the sub’s commander saw what looked like another sub on the surface ahead. Lieutenant John Stevens was sure it wasn’t either Trooper or Thunderbolt, and it looked like it was towing something.

  “Load tube one and three,” he said quietly. “I think we’ve got a line on a U-boat out there.”

  “Loading tubes one and three!”

  “Come right
five degrees and steady at four knots.”

  “Aye sir, coming right and steady on.”

  “Sir!” came the word from the sonar listening station. “High speed props! I think a destroyer has gotten wind of us.”

  Lieutenant Stevens, spun about, swiveling the periscope as he moved, and peering through the cupped lens. “Damn,” he swore. “Come right ten degrees and dive!”

  The crew could hear the dull pop of naval gunfire, and the woosh of the rounds coming, but when they heard the first explosion, Stevens thought it must be wide off the mark. It was.

  The Freccia class destroyer Saetta, was an older ship, launched in 1932 and now commanded by Lt. Cdr. Enea Picchio. When the alarm was raised, he had been at the edge of the harbor at Tunis to the south, ready to begin his morning patrols. Receiving a radio call about the attack underway at Bizerte, he fired up all three boilers and sped north.

  Saetta had a pair of twin 120mm (4.7-inch) deck guns and two 40mm pom-pom AA guns that were also firing, but not at Lieutenant Stevens’ boat. They had seen U-73 on the surface instead, and it was clearly towing what looked to be a small mini sub or diving torpedo of the same sort the Italians would use. Thinking it was a British sub, he heartily engaged, firing first, and thinking to ask questions later.

  Deckert heard the rounds coming in, shocked to see he was now under fire by his own side. He could either try to run up his colors and try to signal the destroyer, but he had no idea whether they would heed such a call, nor could he say anything in Italian. His other choice was to do what any other submarine commander might under fire, and dive.

  “Cut that damn think loose!” he yelled. “Dive!”

  Deckert was lucky that the gunners aboard Picchio’s destroyer were a little groggy eyed that morning. He got his boat down before the Italian destroyer could get rounds close enough to matter, and then went steaming off to the northwest, his feathers well ruffled, and his 1st Warrant Officer Bentzein shaking his head dismissively.

  “I told you!” said Number One. “If those crazy Italians don’t get us first, then it will be our own Stukas in another ten minutes. We should be well up into the Tyrrhenian Sea by now.”

  “And miss out on all this?” said Deckert with a wink. “Don’t worry, Bentzein. I’m a slippery fish. They won’t get me that easy.”

  That would hold true for Deckert, until the 16th of December, 1943, and he would spend the next Christmas with the British. Bentzein wasn’t aboard when that happened. He had slipped off in November of 1943 to report to Kiel for his first command, U-425, and on the 17th of February, 1945, he would meet up with Lark and Alnwick Castle, meeting his maker soon after.

  Chapter 12

  Fafnir and Fraenir were up early that day, greeting the new year’s sun as it gleamed off the massive swelling silver canvas of the airships. They had a rendezvous to make, eager to join their two new brothers.

  In the last months of 1942, production had been steady on the airship fleet. Hitler had ordered twelve ships, and two more were now ready to join the fleet, Aegir, ruler of the sea in Norse Mythology, and Asgard, named after the land of the Gods. They had all been ordered to Berlin for a grand air parade over the city for Hitler’s delight. Then they would be off on their real mission, flying southwest over Poland and along the border of the Ukraine to Odessa, climbing high to escape the eyes of curious bystanders, and enemies who might ask what they were about.

  Each ship had been specially modified to carry a very special cargo, fruit that had been ripening on the tree of German research and development for some time. Like the cleverly modified torpedoes that had become Britain’s Chariots of Fire, this one might have been mistaken for a torpedo as well—until the two stubby wings were mounted. Hitler called the new secret weapons his Schwarzkrähe, Black Crows, and they were all painted jet black to advance this image in his mind. They would be testing the latest model of Germany’s new Argus pulsejet engine, a simple gasoline powered design.

  The whole project had been masked with a phony code name, the Flakzielgerat 76, which would roughly translate as the “Flak aiming apparatus.” It was referred to as the FZG-76, and began initial air launched flight testing over the Baltic Sea near Bornholm Island, a site very close to the development nest at Peenemünde. The British knew where it was on the Baltic coast as early as 1941, when a Norwegian engineering student was able to pass a detailed description of the facility to British intelligence. In May of 1942, a Spitfire photo-recon mission was sent to investigate, and several suspicious external features were spotted, one of which was “Test Stand VII” for the secret V-2 project launches.

  But the Schwarzkrähe had nothing to do with that. They were, however, the younger cousin of the dangerous V-2, and soon the world would come to know them as the V-1 Buzz Bomb. They had been produced as a way of showering the skies over London with flying bombs, the world’s first real cruise missiles, and they were arriving much sooner than they did in Fedorov’s history. Hitler had Ivan Volkov to thank for that, part of the way he repaid the Führer for the use of all those JU-52 transports he had borrowed for the ill-fated and final raid he made on Ilanskiy. With Volkov’s guidance, Germany had been able to produce weaponized prototypes of the V-1 a full eight months sooner.

  Plans had been made to launch the craft from special catapult ramps on the French coast, but also to carry them on modified He-111 bombers for air launched attacks that might reach far deeper into British homeland territory. Then Hitler pointed to his two new airships, for he had always envisioned them as long range strategic bombers, and so modifications were made for the great airships to each carry three V-1s.

  The Führer had come to realize the futility of ever trying to throw Goring’s overstretched Luftwaffe against the British homeland again. The Blitz had been a costly failure in 1941. It had taken 90,000 sorties to deliver a little over 61,000 tons of bombs over a long year in action. That campaign had cost the Luftwaffe the loss of 3000 planes, and 7500 pilots and crewmen on the bombers. They had damaged or destroyed over 1,150,000 structures in England, and caused over 92,000 casualties on the ground.

  By contrast, when the V-1 campaign was finally launched in the original history, it flew only a whisker over 8000 sorties, delivering only 14,600 tons, but still damaged or destroyed 1,127,000 structures, almost the same damage score at the Blitz, and all in less than 90 days. The kill ratio of bomb tonnage to casualties was identical at 1.6, and not a single Luftwaffe plane or pilot had been lost.

  Strategic missile bombing was therefore a much more dangerous and effective way to strike his enemy, and now Hitler thought he had the means to deliver his wrath from the skies with utter impunity.

  The airships could fly so high, over 50,000 feet, that the British Spitfires could not reach them. The Spitfire Mark VB could only reach 36,500 feet, and later models would climb to near 45,000 feet, but those planes had to be specially modified. The American P-38 could reach that height as well, but would still be 6000 feet below the massive airships, which were bristling with AA guns from all those lower gondolas. So Hitler was on to something when he decided to mate his Black Crows with the Zeppelin fleet, and now the first real combat test would be launched from Odessa.

  The target was Novorossiysk, the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. The very existence of that fleet posed a grave threat to any German plans to cross the Kerch Strait for landings on the Taman Peninsula. The Soviet fleet consisted of a single old battleship, still named Sevastopol in this retelling of events, with twelve 12-inch guns that could wreak havoc on any troop transport flotilla. There were also five cruisers, three destroyer leaders, fifteen other destroyers and 44 submarines. Numerous mine ships and 84 motor torpedo boats made this fleet a formidable obstacle to any German aspirations in the Black Sea.

  Thus far, that fleet had been opposed by no more than six German U-boats, a small group of fast E-Boats, and a few old destroyers taken from the Romanian Navy. Hitler now saw his four Zeppelins as powerful ships at sea, immune to fire fro
m their enemies, but capable of delivering fearful weapons on the attack. He had been both alarmed and fascinated by the use of naval rocketry against ships like the valuable Graf Zeppelin, and now he wanted a weapon that could do the same thing to the Soviet fleet at anchor in Novorossiysk.

  Operation Sturmkrähe, or Stormcrow, was born.

  The four great Zeppelins had been modified at the undercarriage of the main airframe between the central and aft gondolas. A kind of trap door was installed, lightly armored, and it would open to allow the cruise missile to slip down a ramp into the air and freefall. A radio command would ignite the engine, and these models were to be radio controlled to attempt to serve as precision strike weapons.

  The development of the Fritz-X radio controlled glide bomb was also to be tested in this attack, and those would be carried on the Dornier-217 bomber. In the real history, this weapon had been used to damage the Italian battleship Italia after it was captured by the Allies in 1943. It also sank the battleship Roma, severely damaged the US cruiser Savannah and British cruiser Uganda, and put enough hurt on the British battleship Warspite to send it to the repair yards for six months.

  In development since 1939, Volkov had shepherded the project along for Hitler, and now it was ready. A flight of six Do-217s would be up with the Zeppelins to help launch Germany’s version of Pearl Harbor at Novorossiysk. It was something the Russians never expected. The port had been the target of traditional German bombers flying from Sevastopol, but when this attack came in, it looked like nothing more than a recon mission. The bombers were seen on the rudimentary Soviet radar, and the airships as well, but then the operator indicated the planes seemed to be turning and retiring.