Steel Reign (Kirov Series Book 23)

by John Schettler

  There may have been more enemy troops here than we believed, and now the navy is withdrawing. Those planes and pilots that landed here will most likely not remain long as well, for the Admirals will want their pilots of the Misty Lagoon back directly. Thus far, 4th Air Fleet has sent nothing but Bombers to Noumea, but no land based fighters. The range was so far from there that any practical use of those planes was prohibited until the runways could be expanded on Fiji to accommodate them. It appears that we are in for a bit of a siege here. Under the circumstances, I must suspend further offensive action until Tanaka arrives… if he arrives at all.

  Thus far we have swept all before us, except for that brief delay on Singapore, most likely due to Nishimura’s foolishness. My division bested the Americans in the Philippines easily enough, and the Dutch were no match for us. Yet I really have no more than half my division here, and Sakaguchi’s troops were not as good as my men. So we wait for Tanaka, and hopefully it will not be necessary to request further reinforcements.

  If wishes were horses… It was going to be necessary sooner than the general believed, for a new war had begun there on that island. In Fedorov’s history it began somewhere else, in the fetid, humid jungles of Guadalcanal. This time it was Viti Levu, though as the naval battle was being fought, engineers and elements of the 3rd SNLF had also landed at Lunga on the island of Guadalcanal. They were surveying the ground along the north coast for good airfield sites, and the place looked very promising. Whether the long, grueling struggle there would ever repeat itself remained to be seen. For the moment the center of the gyre was Fiji, where both sides were now arm wrestling to gain the advantage.

  On the American side of the equation, both Patch and Vandegrift thought they could win this one. Their enemy would be stalwart and it would be a difficult battle, but they believed they had the sheer mass to do the job. If the two divisions they already had on Viti Levu were not enough, there were two more in Australia and New Zealand, much closer to Fiji than any reinforcements the enemy could call upon.

  While Halsey had held off the powerful Japanese Navy, he was now under strict orders not to engage with the last two carriers the US possessed. He wouldn’t have to. Yamamoto was gone, and he had free reign in the Fijis now, and a good base at Pago Pago that had been receiving plenty of fuel via tankers. There was no way the enemy could pull a Pearl Harbor, for Allied units in the Fijis would surely spot any attempt to attack Samoa.

  For now, the fighting Admiral would find he had 123 operational planes between Enterprise, Wasp and Shiloh. The Antietam would be repaired this week, and add another 20 more, so the raw naval aviation available to either side in the theater was a dead wash. The US was getting in more ground aviation support, a couple Seabee Battalions to work on putting more airfields into use, particularly on the adjacent island of Vanua Levu.

  Unless strongly supported by carriers, Halsey believed that he could prevent any strong reinforcement of the Fiji position by the Japanese. But developments further up the chain of islands leading all the way back to Rabaul were somewhat foreboding. The Japanese now had a magnificent anchorage at Tulagi, and had landed on Guadalcanal. They had Espiritu Santo in the Santa Cruz Islands linking the Solomons to the New Hebrides, and were masters of the Solomon Sea. They had airfields building up at Lae, Port Moresby, Buka and a seaplane base in the Shortlands.

  While none of these bases were really well established yet, they would be developed over time. Halsey proposed that he return to the fast raiding style that had seen him open this campaign in the Gilberts. He sent a message to Nimitz asking for permission to raid the New Hebrides, and all these other bases once he could rest assured there was no additional ground force being aimed at Fiji. Nimitz gave him that leeway, but stressed that he was not to engage in any situation where he might now find himself facing significant enemy naval air power.

  Weakened by the heavy losses to their carriers in the Coral and Koro Seas, where Halsey had fought that last desperate battle, the US could not really consider any further offensive moves against other Japanese held territory until they received more carriers. Unfortunately, only one might be expected soon, the first in a series of twelve Essex class carriers that were now building. Halsey knew that his enemy had further resources in their Home Islands, and still had a much stronger carrier fleet. It had taken the loss of three fleet carriers to blunt the Japanese attack into Fiji, and unhinge Operation FS. Their lance pierced the US shield before it broke, and the enemy was well established in the Fiji Group. The only question now was whether they would return soon with reinforcements, or whether the small advantages the US now possessed based on position, logistics, and their “ground game” would win through for them.

  Nimitz was very worried now, and afraid that one more big loss in the South Pacific could set back the US war effort there for a full year. “It would take us that long to build up our strength again,: he said to Admiral King. “Particularly in the carrier arm of the fleet. Oh, Halsey fought well down there, but we just can’t let him put either Enterprise or Wasp at risk now. I’m calling him home to Pearl.”

  “What for? Just because he’s a fighter? We need men like that down there.”

  “True, but Halsey is exhausted. He’s carried our entire war on his back, fought the Japs hard, but the man needs rest. That skin condition that’s been bothering him is now much worse. I’m ordering him hospitalized.”

  “Who’s taking over? You aren’t going to hand those last to flattops back to Fletcher, are you?”

  “Ray Spruance.”

  “Well hell, he’s another Black Shoe Admiral. Wasn’t he on the Mississippi?”

  “And he did a fine job there. He’s on the Northampton, and I’m flagging him for the duty today. Halsey is flying out to Canton Island and taking a destroyer to Pearl. Spruance can hold things together until he gets back.”

  “Fletcher won’t like it.”

  “He had his chance in the Coral Sea and we lost two good ships there. So Fletcher stays with that battleship squadron.”

  And that was that. Nimitz knew Halsey was as good as they came, but not in this situation, not with him weary, hurting, stung by the loss of so many good ships and men, and down with medical problems. Like the ships he fought, he needed refit and replenishment too. The Fighting Admiral would return soon enough, when the Essex was ready, but for now Ray Spruance was in charge of the South Pacific Fleet.

  “Now then,” said Nimitz. “What do you make of this Siberian adventure up north?”

  “Damn interesting,” said King. “Their head honcho over there has been making overtures about opening up airfields for us on Kamchatka. I’m not sure it would do us any good to put B-17s up there—the weather is horrible. But we’ve opened talks with the Siberians along those lines. I think we should take advantage of this.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I think we should see about sending them a couple Seabee battalions to help improve those airfields. We could put DC-3s in there at Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, and then hop them over to Northern Sakhalin, and on to Irkutsk—set up a nice little air bridge to the Siberians and offer them supplies and aviation support. That’s what they’ve been asking for. We also ought to get some kind of outpost in the Aleutians, a good link to Kamchatka. But what’s all this talk I’ve been hearing about this Siberian battleship?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. But something bushwhacked the Japs on their way home from Pearl.”

  “HYPO has been picking up some real strange signals traffic whenever the Siberians operate. But this is one code they just can’t crack. That said, whenever they do get these signals, we later learn there’s been some trouble with the Japanese fleet. In fact, we now think the Siberians might have had something to do with the sinking of that carrier limping home from Pearl.”

  Nimitz frowned. “I thought it was a submarine.”

  “It would be nice if it was, but it wasn’t one of ours. HYPO says they got a lot of this odd signals
traffic just before that ship went down.”

  “Well radio waves don’t sink ships,” said Nimitz.

  “Something did, and now we think the Siberians have a big battleship up north supporting these operations. HYPO’s picked up a new code word the Japs are using about it—Mizuchi. There was some kind of scrap during those landings on Kamchatka, and we think they Japs got the worst of it.”

  “Must be one hell of a battleship, but where in hell did the Siberians get the damn thing? You know they can’t build anything like that.”

  “No, it had to come from the Soviets. I think Sergie Kirov is trading off with the Siberians in exchange for troop support. God knows, he needs all the help he can get, and the Siberians need naval support. But we should look real hard at this situation. What we’ve got here is the fledgling makings of a second front against Japan in the North. If the Siberians mean business, and that can be developed, we ought to support them any way we can. I’m going to recommend that we sneak quietly into the Aleutians and at least set up good observation posts there. An airfield would be even better. Then those DC-3s could hop from Seattle to Dutch Harbor, or even Adak, and on to Petropavlovsk. This is an opportunity we shouldn’t over look.”

  “It’s a thousand miles from Petropavlovsk to the nearest big Japanese city. That would be Sapporo on Hokkaido, and our B-17s couldn’t even get there and back with a typical load of 1000 pound bombs.”

  “Which is why this situation shaping up on Sakhalin Island is interesting,” said King. “It’s only 700 miles to Sapporo if we get a base up there near where the Siberians have landed. Now imagine if they have what it takes to push on further south.” King pulled out a map, Pointing to the center of Sakhalin. “If we could get airfields here, then all of Hokkaido is easily within range of our B-17s, and when we get the new B-29, we could strike any city in Japan from there. How long would it take us to fight our way close enough to Japan from the South Pacific? Suppose we take Guam back, or Tinian. That’s still over 1400 miles from Tokyo. Only the B-29s could make that, but from central or southern Sakhalin, we could hit Tokyo with B-17s.”

  “Air Force talk,” said Nimitz. “Leave that to them.”

  “Yes, but the Navy has to get them the bases they’ll need for the job. That’s on our watch. Now, we can slug it out with the Japs from one island to the next down there, and it could take us a couple years to get close enough for that fight to matter. Yet at this very moment, we’ve got the Siberians over there putting troops on Sakhalin and showing every intention of pushing south to reclaim that entire island.”

  “The Japanese will fight like hellcats to prevent that. If we can see this, they can see it too.” Nimitz leaned back, thinking. “Yet I agree that we ought to support them any way we can. When do you go to the president with this?”

  “Next week. In the meantime, you keep an ear to the ground on what’s going on over there for me. Tell your boys in HYPO to listen real good for this signals traffic they say they’ve picked up. If we can get some subs up there to have a good look around, all the better. This could be bigger than we think. We need to sit up and pay attention.”

  “Alright, Rey” said Nimitz. “I’ll see what I can do. If the Siberians can help take the pressure off us down south, all the better.”

  Chapter 29

  “Well now,” said Tovey. “The planning is sound, at least for the approach to the target. It’s high time we get on with it. The tides will be right on the 9th and 10th.”

  So many events in this history had come early, even if by just a few months, but this one was running late. It was supposed to have happened on the 28th of March. Instead, many of the men earmarked for the operation had been deployed to the Canary Islands. Now that a kind of stalemate had been reached in that battle, it was time to look at the plans again, and the Royal Navy was eager to begin.

  The raid itself would have happened at one time or another, for the facilities targeted were simply too valuable to the enemy to let them stand. After the delay imposed by the defense of the Canary Islands, it might have been a long year before this plan was teed up again, but the disruptive fate line of a man who was supposed to be dead had nudged the event back into place.

  That man was Lieutenant Patrick Lainson Field, the commander of the British submarine Seawolf, a boat that had been oddly diverted from other duty to patrol off the Canary Islands. Lieutenant Field, wasn’t supposed to be there that day. He was to have died in a plane crash on the 16th of December, 1941, shot down over the Bay of Biscay while en-route to Gibraltar. Yet there were no British planes being routed to Gibraltar now, and the route that plane took this time to the Azores was well away from the peril that would have taken his life. So Lieutenant Field survived, one of many thousands of souls who should have died, but lived on in these Altered States.

  There, on a misplaced submarine in the dark of the night, one lonesome and dangerous wolf was prowling the dark seas, commanded by the flesh and blood figure of a man who should be dead—a Zombie, as Professor Dorland might define him. In Dorland’s theory, such men are always wildcards in the deck of fate, for once spared the doom that should have ended their lives, they move and act with unbridled license on the Meridians of time. Their intervention can bring sudden and unexpected derailment to the careful train of events running on the long lines of causality, and that was one such night for Lieutenant Patrick Field.

  It was his good fortune to stumble across the German task force intending to land the 98th Mountain Regiment for Operation Condor. There, he clearly saw the towering silhouette of a great warship, not even knowing that he was looking at the mighty Hindenburg. It had been framed with the light of Bismarck’s salvo in support of the German attack, and Field’s heart thumped faster as he beat his crew to quarters, loading all six of his forward tubes. He would get one hit, but it would be a good one, right beneath Anton turret near the magazines and lifting gear for those massive 16-inch shells. The resulting flooding put that turret out of action, much to the chagrin of its resident master and chief, one Axel Faust.

  The presence of both Bismarck and Hindenburg in French waters was most alarming to the British. The mayhem they could cause had recently been seen in the battle off Fuerteventura, where the cream of the Royal Navy was thrown into the fight, and with heavy losses. While the Bismarck would be laid up for many more months at Toulon, the Hindenburg was very near operational readiness. The German ship had been wounded by Lieutenant Fields, but not sunk, and then it had taken three rocket hits from the Argos Fire, and a 14-inch round from King George V. now it seemed that Admiral Raeder was keen to accelerate repairs and get the dreadful battleship fully operational again.

  Initially it had gone to Toulon, where superficial damage had been cleared up, and new secondary gun barrels shipped in by rail. After the damage to the superstructure was repaired, there was still work needed on the hull to fully repair that torpedo hit, and Toulon did not have a dry dock large enough to accommodate the German ship. But there was one at Saint Nazaire, the famous Normandie dry dock, built to accommodate the massive 80,000 ton liner Normandie before the newest French battleship stole away her name. It was 50 meters wide, and 350 meters long, with massive caisson steel gates at either end that weighed 1500 tons.

  In a stealthy night move, Hindenburg moved from Toulon to Gibraltar, and Ian Fleming’s spy network in Spain learned that it would move to Saint Nazaire under heavy German air cover in five days. In one sense, the British sighed with relief. The ship was not yet ready, instead it was merely transferring to a larger facility for continued repairs. The question now was what to do about that. The Royal Navy could either risk another confrontation at sea with the German battleship, one that might send more of their own ships to the dry docks, or they could try to get at the enemy ship with the RAF. Neither plan seemed palatable.

  “We simply cannot risk forcing yet another engagement at sea,” said Admiral Pound. “Churchill would want that, but I have Duke of York, and King George V down wel
l south of the Azores. That’s the only thing keeping the Germans at bay in the Canaries. Invincible is up near the Denmark Strait with Hood working out after her refit, and keeping an eye on Tirpitz and the Norwegian Sea.”

  “You’re right,” said Tovey. “Churchill would want all four of those ships to pile on—anything to get the Hindenburg. But this plan being floated by the Commandos has my interest. They’re calling it Operation Chariot.”

  “What’s it all about?” Pound looked very weary, as he always did. A bad hip kept him awake at night, robbing him of much needed sleep, which he often recouped at staff meetings, nodding off in the middle of the proceedings.

  “A raid… On the very same dry docks the Germans need for the repair of the Hindenburg. If they can’t use Saint Nazaire, then they’ll have to use divers and that will take a good long while to repair the torpedo hit Seawolf put into that monster.”

  “Why not simply bomb them?”

  “Too inaccurate,” said Tovey. “Besides, we’ve asked the RAF for a hundred bombers, we got thirty-four, and eight of those have already been lost trying to raid that port. It’s crawling with German Flak now, and there’s always a standing patrol of Messerschmitts up over the harbor. That will go double next week when Hindenburg pulls in.”

  “Triple,” said Pound.

  “A pity we can’t sneak in a submarine.”

  “Not possible,” said Tovey. “The port is six miles deep in the estuary of the Loire River. The sand bars restrict the approach to only one good channel, and its heavily covered by shore batteries and screened by anti-sub nets.”

  “Well what do these bloody Commandos think they’re about? Do they plan to paddle in on rubber rafts?”

  “Not quite,” said Tovey. “They want a destroyer. In fact, we gave them one, an old American ship from the lend lease lot, Campbeltown.”