“Can’t we counter those S-300s?”
“We’d have to use the SM-3s. Face it, the Russian missile tech is second to none. That S-300 is damn fast. Later versions can get to 5000 meters per second velocity, and that is well beyond the capability of even a missile like the Patriot for an interception. Perhaps our only solace will be the fact that they will have that missile in limited numbers, but even their mid range SAMs can fire out at least 80 kilometers. They’ll fire in large salvos, and we won’t be able to stop them. Our best bet is to use our own SAMs to stop any SSMs they direct against our ship or the carriers we’re defending. Their P-900s will be easy to catch—they’re subsonic until terminal mode. The Moskit IIs only haul at Mach 3, and we should handle them as well.”
“So we play defense for those carriers against the SSMs,” said Harada. “But we can’t really help them get through Kirov’s SAM defense, not unless we throw every SSM we have at them at just the right time.”
“It will be difficult to predict that outcome,” said Fukada. “But if we do go offensive, I’d use our Type 12s against other shipping. That’s what they were originally conceived for. Our 5th Anti-Ship Missile Regiment at Kumato was going to use them to target Russian Amphibious vessels.”
“That means we’d have to be within 120 Klicks of the target. Getting that far north with Takami could be a problem. They won’t be landing down south.”
“No argument there,” said Fukada. “And we won’t want our carriers up that far either. My thought was that we could take this loaf in slices. Stand east of Korsakov for phase one operations. That will put us in a good position to interdict any move the Russians make towards our reinforcement operation.”
“What about the carriers?”
Fukada shook his head. “Frankly, we’d be better off on our own. If Kurita moves up there with us his carriers will just be a magnet for Russian missiles. We won’t attract too much attention alone if we stay passive on the electronics. We lie in wait….” Fukada had a strange look on his face, as if he was trying to see the battle that was coming. “They won’t expect us here, and they’ll likely be radiating like there’s no tomorrow. Otani will pick them up, and then we get a very brief window to decide what to do. What we need is for someone to wiggle a left jab in their face. Then we hit them with a good right cross—all eight Type 12 missiles—all or nothing.”
“So you’ve changed your tune about using them against the transports.”
“You were right—we’d never get that far north without being detected and challenged, and we don’t want Kurita up there.”
“Who wiggles the jab?”
“We have to have some air power in lower Sakhalin. Once we locate Kirov, we vector them in. A nice little bomber strike would be enough to fix their attention west toward the island. Then we launch all eight Type 12s in sea skimmer mode. I just wish the damn things were faster. The Type 12 runs just a whisker below the speed of sound. If we fire at anywhere near our maximum range, and we’ll want to, then we’re looking at five minutes to target on those missiles.”
“Right…. And the Russian Moskit IIs move at Mach Three. So while we’re sitting here looking at our watches and waiting out those five minutes….”
“I get the picture, but I don’t see any other option. Five minutes sounds like an eternity when the other fellow can throw back something that fast. Who knows, maybe they’ll get stupid and counter with their P-900s.”
“Don’t bet on that,” said Harada. “This Karpov knows what he’s doing. No. All we have going for us if we attack is those few minutes of shock and uncertainty. They won’t know what’s coming at them, unless they have some kind of wizard on their sensor suite. So I’m betting on that little interval of confusion while they try and convince themselves that the Japanese of 1942 suddenly have a near speed of sound missile.” The Captain shrugged, his arms folded, thinking. “All or nothing. We let that punch fly and see if we get lucky.”
Fukada nodded. The great risk they were taking here was very apparent to him now, but even as he felt this, another idea occurred to him, though he said nothing about it to Harada. All or nothing…
Chapter 32
It was an odd place for a crucial turning point in the war to be found, and few who worked there knew that the project they were now undertaking would become one of the most secret and most significant of the entire war. There, at the new Applied Physics Laboratory of Washington's Carnegie Institution, a team of scientists and civilian workers were attempting to solve a frustrating problem for the military—how to defeat enemy aircraft.
Since the end of WWI, the modern aircraft had been the bane of military defense planners and the chosen method of first strike on offense. Swarms of bombers, dive bombers, and fighters would lead any major assault on land. For the Navy, the hard lesson that control of the sea depended on control of the skies above that sea was taught over and over, from Pearl Harbor to the carrier duels that preceded the struggle for vital Pacific island outposts. It was the aircraft that was the true King of the battle space, not the lumbering battleships, and the value of a carrier rested solely in the fact that it could bring those aircraft to the fight.
For the last year there had been rumors throughout the US defense establishment of a new weapon that now threatened to upset the long steel reign of the military aircraft. Though the British had been very closed mouthed with intelligence on the matter, word had leaked through about the efficacy of rockets as an AA weapon.
Up until that time, rocketry was an arcane science, the province of physicists and engineers like Robert Goddard in the United States, who built liquid fueled rockets as early as 1926, achieving 34 successful launches before America’s war began in late 1941. Like Germany’s Wernher von Braun, Goddard was a true pioneer in the development of rocket technology. As a young boy Goddard had first dreamed of designing a device that could take humanity into space, as far away as Mars, all in the muse of his young 17 year old mind while he was staring at the skies from the top of a cherry tree in 1899. He called it the moment of his first great inspiration, and celebrated it every year as a kind of anniversary on October 19th.
So when rumors began to fly that the British had a rocket weapon that could track and hit a speedy flying aircraft, the matter eventually found its way to Goddard’s design table. In Fedorov’s history, the Army had not come calling on physicists and aeronautical engineers until 17 August, 1944, when they issued a memorandum asking for a radar guided missile that could shoot down enemy strategic bombers. Bell Labs would take up the challenge, which would soon become the Nike Ajax Rocket project, but it would be seven long years before the first successful interception of a drone occurred in 1951.
The little demonstration witnessed by Admiral Yamamoto in Davao Bay was therefore quite ground breaking, and did much to shock him into embracing these two strange officers that had come to him, seemingly out of nowhere. Now he had sent these men, and their amazing ship, off to defend his northern fleet against the demonic powers of yet another interloper with awesome new weapons of war, the ship they called Mizuchi.
Rocketry was already plying its deadly craft, right there in the 1940s, in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Despite that fact, little was really known about the ships that used these weapons, and what was known was kept in the closely guarded circles of military intelligence organizations. Even as work began on this idea of hitting an aircraft with a rocket, the technical challenges were seen to be truly daunting. First they needed a stable and effective rocket, reliable and consistent performance, an engine that could propel it to desired altitudes, and a means of tracking and guiding it to the target. While history would record that all these challenges would be overcome, it would take time to accomplish that, and enormous resources.
While all this was going on, that frustrating problem of how to defend against enemy aircraft continued to be a sore thumb on the mailed fist of all armed services. Some argued that the best and only defense was yet another aircraft, b
ut others looked for ways to improve the existing ‘low-tech’ defense approach being used—the venerable anti-aircraft gun. A man named Merle Anthony Tuve was another of those brainy PhDs tinkering at the edge of technologies that would soon combine to become lethal weapons of war.
He was exploring the use of radio waves to measure the height of the atmosphere, and it soon became apparent that radio waves could be used to measure other things as well. The fledgling technology that came to be known as ‘Radar’ would be one thing that emerged from that observation. One day, considering the problem of those bothersome aircraft, Tuve theorized that AA guns might be made much more effective if their shells could ‘see’ enemy planes. The way to give them those eyes would lie in his tinkering with radio waves, but his colleagues thought it would be too difficult to try and mount delicate radar technology on something subject to violent forces like an AA gun shell.
“No,” said Tuve. “Just use the radar as an early warning system on the ground, or something to help the gun get pointed in the right direction. What I’m talking about is just something that can tell the shell its target is near. You know, those shells have quite a blast radius for fragmentation shrapnel when they explode, but right now, they only do so on contact. Most AA shells just fly right past a target unless they score a direct hit, or explode at the fixed altitude set by their fuse. What I’m talking about is a kind of proximity fuse that can set off that shell when it gets anywhere near an enemy plane.”
Tuve became the founding director of the Applied Physics Laboratory, now at John Hopkins University, and there he set about to develop his idea, much to the delight of the Army. It took as many as 25,000 rounds fired from an AA gun for each hit obtained when Tuve started his project. During the Battle of Britain, the British estimated they fired an average of 18,500 rounds at German aircraft for each one they actually destroyed. When Tuve finished, he had cut that down to between 30 and 60 rounds, and this would improve as the war progressed. That was a staggering leap forward in the precision and effectiveness of AA guns, and it would become one of the most closely guarded technologies of the US war effort, as secret as the Manhattan Project, and in many ways more significant in its impact on the war effort in general.
Both the British and Germans had looked at the idea in 1940, but deemed it impossible to achieve. Tuve proved them wrong. What the team created was a miniature radio device that could simply bounce radio waves off any target it was approaching. Well before the development of the transistor, radios of that day all relied on very fragile vacuum tubes. How in the world would the team fit a glass tube into an artillery shell, and have it survive the violence of being fired from a gun?
The answer would come from another man, Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. He met Merle Tuve at the Carnegie Institute, and became a member of the National Defense Research Committee, the same group that would spawn the Manhattan Project. Van Allen had been working on creating more durable vacuum tubes for special rugged duty. He had learned that a small company was also involved with miniaturizing the tubes so they could fit inside a hearing aid. Those two attributes, ruggedness and miniaturization, would become key factors in the successful design of Tuve’s radio proximity fuse.
Materials were found to shield and cushion the glass, prevent the fragile tungsten elements inside the tubes from being damaged, and allow the vacuum tube to survive the shock of being fired from a gun—20,000 G-forces. Van Allen’s solutions helped the team deliver its first shock-proof tube by January of 1942 in Fedorov’s history. But the question of how to advance this technology had come earlier in these Altered States, another odd effect of Kirov’s influence on events. It was June of 1941 when the first fuses were tested here, and six months later, as many as 5000 proximity fuses had been produced and installed in AA gun rounds. That was largely due to Tuve’s tremendous organizational ability, and the team he coordinated to solve the problem. He believed in Napoleon’s first principle of war: “I can make up for lost ground, but never lost time.”
So Tuve insisted his personnel forget about saving money or resources, and focused entirely on saving time. It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to get done, and before the enemy developed the same thing. “The best job in the world is a total failure if it is too late,” he said, “We don’t need the best possible unit, but we damn well want the first one.” Tuve insisted on speed in every aspect of the development process, but still achieved a 97% quality control rate on the overall system. Everything needed, the radio transmitter, antenna, tubes, battery detonation switches and safety measures, all had to fit into a tube no more than 1.5 inches wide and 8 inches long, and with a shelf life for storage in the shells of up to three years or more.
It would later be learned that the Germans had employed at least 50 small project groups to try and solve the same problem, but believed it would not be achieved in time to matter in the war. Tuve proved them all wrong. His small initial team would soon burgeon into massive production centers producing 40,000 rounds per day. Over 22 million would be produced in the war before it ended.
Naturally, the Navy was very interested in the idea of a much more accurate AA gun to protect its ships. The gun that would fire them was the QF 5-inch dual purpose gun mounted on ships from destroyer class up to battleships and carriers. The technology increased AA accuracy by an order of magnitude, one day achieving 90% kill rates on V-1 Buzz Bombs with only ten rounds fired. It was going to be so significant, that it would spell the doom of Japanese naval and land based air power as an effective strike weapon of war. The Japanese would eventually learn the trick themselves, but too late in the war to really matter.
They did not know it at the time, but the fruits of Tuve’s project, the effort of over 80,000 men and women, had already produced proximity fuse rounds for the U.S. Navy to make surface ships much harder targets for naval strike craft. The first ships to be fully equipped with the new rounds were already at sea, and had already fired them at the planes and pilots of Hara’s Carrier Division 5.
During that battle, Halsey had ordered Fletcher’s battleship squadron to make a run at the Japanese positions around Nandi, particularly the airfield they had captured there. Two ships in that squadron had the new special proximity fused AA shells for their 5-inch guns, the USS South Dakota, and the light AA cruiser Atlanta. They would now report back that the new rounds were a tremendous success. South Dakota had taken down four enemy planes for the expense of only 42 of the new rounds. Without them they might have had to fire close to 500.
The new proximity fused shells had arrived six months earlier than they did in the unaltered history, when the cruiser Helena was the first to receive them in November of 1942. The use of the shell itself, and even its existence, was still to be considered a closely guarded secret. They could only be fired in situations where the military believed it would be impossible for the enemy to ever recover a dud or misfired shell to learn its secret. This was why all those 5-inch guns now carried two types of rounds, one for use against other naval targets or in shore bombardment, and the proximity fused rounds for use against enemy aircraft.
In case the shells were ever found, or captured by the enemy, the US was already working on a special jammer that could be installed on its own bombers. It was designed to sweep the signal band used by the radio transmitter in the shells, and inhibit their ability to bounce a clear signal off the target. It worked, and that fact also contributed to the secrecy that surrounded the new shells. They could be easily jammed, and so their best defense was to prevent the enemy from ever knowing they existed.
As we have seen in this tortured history, some enemies simply knew too much, and for them the secrets of WWII were quite literally an open book. One such man was named Ivan Volkov. One word from him could render the effort of men like Tuve, and the thousands of others supporting his project, null and void. He could tell the Germans the round existed, how and when it could be expected to be used on defense, and how it could be jammed. Be
yond that, Volkov could tell the Germans their seemingly fruitless effort to develop proximity fuses of their own could produce a rich harvest if they only followed his advice and guidance. He could do this by going to Hitler with yet another sheaf of supposedly captured enemy technical documents, things he could fetch from his dangerously efficient jacket computer. Amazingly, it still worked, a testament to the efficiency of its design.
Volkov could do all of this, and if the Germans heeded his advice, they would soon have a powerful defense against one of the most devastating weapons the enemy would throw at the Third Reich—strategic bombers. And this is exactly what Ivan Volkov did.
“Do not be put off by the failure of your Luftwaffe to humble the British in 1940,” he said to Hitler in their semi-annual meeting. “Do not think the enemy bombers will have the same difficulty when they come to attack Germany.”
“Our fighters should be defense enough,” said Hitler. “We will simply sweep them from the skies.”
“In the beginning…” said Volkov with just a hint of foreboding in his tone. “Yet their bombers will grow in numbers, and soon they will have a long range fighter capable of escorting them all the way to Berlin! Your Luftwaffe will fight bravely, but it will not be enough.”
“What? You say this as though you really are a prophet. This is merely speculation.”
“But it is based on real intelligence,” said Volkov, who anticipated this line from Hitler and had a folder of diagrams of the actual enemy fighters in hand. “Look here,” he said, passing a document to Hitler. “This one they will call the ‘P-51Mustang,’ and it will have a range of over 1,600 miles, more than 2,700 kilometers. They will send these by the hundreds, not simply escorting their bombers, but sweeping the area over the intended bombing target well before the bombers get there. They will be enough, my Führer, to break your air defense. So why not build these new proximity fuse flak shells? I can also tell you how to protect them from jamming. Then, when those enemy bombers come, the thunder of your 88s will truly shock them. I can increase your AA defense accuracy by a hundred fold. You will no longer have to fire barrages into pre-determined boxes and detonate shells by elevation.”
Steel Reign (Kirov Series Book 23) Page 27