Breakout (Kirov Series Book 38)

by Schettler, John

  Thinking he was bombing Westminster, the Admiral’s four heavy bombs, and a rain of incendiaries, instead fell near Gumley House Convent School in Isleworth, Twickenham Road. Generations of young girls had been schooled there under the motto “Vive ut vivas!” (Live to live!), but no one there at that time would survive.

  The fires would burn all the neighborhoods, east and west, until they reached the Isleworth Eyot on the Thames, setting all the trees there ablaze, and eventually leaping the river into the open ground of King’s Observatory, which is today surrounded by a golf range. Casualties were numbered in the many thousands, but not nearly what they might have been if those bombs had hit Westminster as planned. It was that odd mimic of the double bend in the river that had saved central London that night, but this was but the opening thunder and fire of the coming storm. Over 100 miles away, the long launch rails of the Storm Eagles were about to let their deadly birds of prey fly.

  Chapter 3

  After the big airship raid, Admiral Voloshyn’s fleet turned to run for the safety of Nordstern again. The release of all those bombs had lightened the airships a great deal, and now they rose in elevation again, most well beyond their technical service ceilings, until the spring-loaded automatic valves began opening to relieve pressure on the bulging gas bags. Most of the fleet was now up over 45,000 feet, the crews cold, tired, afraid, and giddy for lack of oxygen.

  British fighters made several more attempts to engage, but not many of the Welkin fighters were combat ready, as the planes had languished for many months, mostly used only for occasional recon patrols. Once out over the North Sea, the fleet gave up 5000 feet of altitude so the crews could prevent any major damage to the helium gas bags. An hour later, they would begin to see the dark outline of the Norwegian coast, and radio calls indicated friendly planes were aloft to assist as escorts when the airships began their descent.

  That order was music to the ears of the crews, and the Air Men were soon at work. They would begin venting Helium into special holding tanks, while revving up the pumps to get the ballonets filled with normal air, which was much heavier. That air would slowly compress the gas bags, causing the ship to descend, which in turn would cause the helium to contract even further. It was a very careful balancing act, and all eyes were on those pressure gauges, watching to see that the needle remained steady, moving slowly. Any sudden loss of pressure could mean only one thing—a gas bag had split along a seam, or slipped a patch to lose a great amount of helium.

  The men were eager to get lower. High altitude was very stressful, and they were glad to finally be able to breathe again without a mask. Some still nursed by sucking in oxygen, flapping their arms to get the blood flowing and chase away the cold. The bombing crews tramped about on the metal grating of the central corridors in heavy coats, with fur lined hats and thick gloves, never warm enough. Those that had to climb the interior skeleton, the Riggers and Linesmen watching the cables that helped secure the interior structure and outer skin, had a most difficult time getting about in that garb, and soon it would be warm enough again to shed those coats.

  Their ordeal was over, and many now turned their thoughts to what they had just done. They had seen the horrible deaths suffered by their comrades when those five airships went down. The Orenburg , and all the German airships, were up too high to be engaged, and the Captains of the smaller airships had a bad taste in their mouths. A lot of good men died that night, but then they thought of the people they had just incinerated in London, or so they believed. The Germans had less remorse after what they had seen of Hamburg, but for Volkov’s men, the hard cutting edge of war also scored their souls.

  Then, the buoyancy of the realization that they had survived took over, and soon they were laughing again, with great relief, and slapping one another on the back. They had survived.

  Even as the fleet descended, with flights of FW-190s, now flying escort over Norway, Goring unleased his Eagle Storm. In the Pas-de-Calais, the troops heard the roar of the pulsejet engines, saw the fiery tails of what appeared to be stubby winged aircraft. Then they realized they were moving far too fast to be fighter planes, and all rising towards the coast, the English Channel, and London beyond. The infantry gaped at them, and those that had been fighting near the V-1 sites at Mimoyecoues, Watten, Lottinghem and other places now knew the urgency of their mission.

  There were 55 “ski sites” in the Pas-de Calais, and 64 other “modified sites.” Another 70 sites had been identified along the Somme and Seine Rivers, and in the Cherbourg area, there were 30 more. All the missiles stockpiled there were ordered to be expended this day, and the Germans did not plan to defend that peninsula any longer. They had nearly 10,000 V-1 cruise missiles, and this would be one of the largest barrages of the war, with 1000 allocated to this single attack. Not all would reach the target. Many would suffer engine failure before they even reached the Channel, but that day, nearly 700 would fall on London….

  It was 04:00 in the morning before the first of the Storm Eagles fell upon the city. The brief interlude of calm lost in the wailing of the air raid sirens again. The V-1’s had already been seen to be much faster than anyone expected. The first came streaking in over London, faster than any plane, and it would fall, strangely, right on the edge of Victoria Park, and right atop a quaint Chinese Pagoda near the bank of the West Boating Lake. It had been built during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1842, as an entrance feature to the Chinese Exhibit in the Central London Park. Now it was completely destroyed, and not to be rebuilt again until the year 2010.

  More V-1’s began to fall in Whitechapel, the roar of the explosions waking everyone who had tried to catch a little rest. It was the morning of May 13th exactly one month earlier than the actual opening of the V-1 campaign against London. Soon the entire city would become a madness of wailing sirens, the chalky searchlights probing the skies, the guns and AA rockets firing with futile anger. At first, when the engines cut out and the bombs began their final descent, the gunners were jubilant in thinking they were taking down enemy planes in scores. They did not know how wrong they were.

  The buzz of the flying bombs overhead would get louder and louder, and then they fell like dark shadows onto the heart of the city, their aim much truer than the work done by those airships. Some carried high explosives, 1000kg Amatol-39 warheads, others had incendiary warheads packed into a cage that could hold up to 23 one kilogram bomblets. Fires began to spring up in neighborhoods all across the city.

  Oddly, some of the V-1’s even carried paper warheads, filled with propaganda leaflets meant as a psyop. Some seemed to justify the punishment they were now administering, bearing photographs of the dead bodies in the streets of Hamburg. On the back they read: “Do you like that? You do? You may not in a few months’ time!” The leaflets noted dates of prominent Allied air attacks on German cities, Hamburg, Berlin, and others. Soon more leaflets would come in a deliberate campaign entitled “Shadow over England.” Another would proclaim with Biblical warning, quite literally: “He that soweth the wind, reapeth the whirlwind, reapeth the storm.”

  The Eagle Storm….

  They fell on Westminster, one within ten feet of the abbey nave. Others hit Parliament Square Garden, the Dean’s Yard, Jewel Tower, and the Old Palace Yard. Three plunged into the Thames just twenty feet short of the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben was narrowly missed, and soon under threat from fires. Two sailed over the War Rooms, across Horse Guards Road and into St. James Park. The Whitehall Gardens were on fire. Admiralty Arch was spared, but Trafalgar Square took a direct hit, and another fell near the entrance to Charing Cross Underground Station on the Strand.

  This was just the result of ten or fifteen missiles falling in that area, there were hundreds more on the way. To many Londoners who had survived the worst of the Blitz, this seemed even more hellish. The German bombers might be intercepted and shot down, but the British fighters could simply not catch up to the new V-1’s. If they were not already up in a good position, a
nd able to make a speedy dive on the Buzz Bombs, they simply had no chance of shooting them down.

  Explosions rocked the city for hours on end, and in their wake, the fires began to devour one house or building after another. The close proximity of water from the Thames was one saving grace, with every fire tug available sending high arcs of water up at burning buildings near the shore.

  At the height of the bombardment, Himmler and Goebbels went on the radio and proclaimed that the attack on London now under way was vengeance and reprisal for the hideous bombing of Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, and other German cities. “And this is only the beginning!” Himmler emphasized. “We can visit you day and night, a shadow over London so dark that it will drive you to madness. If, even after this, you do not relent, and cease your bombing of German cities, then you will leave us no further choice, and you can look to Leningrad to know what you will get next.”

  It was a chilling threat, even if it was bluster and bluff at that moment, but the Allies had no way of knowing that. The next high flying airship might be delivering the bomb. For Churchill, who had read all the reports he could get his hands on from Leningrad, the thought of the Thames boiling in the night, and the city overshadowed by a hideous mushroom cloud, was darkly on his mind. All he had at that moment was the assurance Fedorov had given him that Great Britain would survive.

  Resolute, his eyes as fiery as those of Sergei Kirov after what he had seen east of the Neva, Churchill reached for a special telephone and waited for the operator. “Bomber Command,” he said grimly. “Get me Air Chief Marshal Harris—at once!”

  * * *

  The news reporters called him “Bomber” Harris, but the pilots and staff within the RAF used “Butcher” Harris instead. More formally, he was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet, GCB, OBE, AFC. When Churchill gave the go ahead to begin strategic bombing of German cities, it had been Harris who developed the plans and tactics. Cities like Hamburg and Bremen would feel his sting, and give every justification to the nickname laid upon him by the pilots.

  In fact, the propaganda leaflets dropped that very day over London by a few V-1’s were, in part, a swipe at Harris, mocking his own public statement years earlier. “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

  Now that Biblical quote was thrown back in his face as the Storm Eagles landed all over London. It seemed that the winds of that whirlwind blew in both directions, but all the attack had done, insofar as Churchill and Harris were concerned, was to stiffen their resolve to deliver even more harm to the enemy homeland. Harris vowed he would utterly devastate Germany, and now he would get orders to do exactly that.

  Harris had collected all his bombers again after that dubious attack in South France preceding Patton’s Operation Thunder , and he had a mind to tee up an immediate counter for the attack then underway on London. Tit for tat… That was the deadly calculus of escalation, and to make this next raid sting as the others, it simply had to be thrown at Berlin.

  Harris had begun a campaign against that city in late 1943, but found it to be a very tough nut to crack. AA defenses and enemy fighter strength were very robust, and it led to some of the highest casualty rates sustained by the RAF during the war. Over 500 bombers were lost over Berlin in 16 raids extending into March of 1944. The so called “Battle of Berlin” had ended at that time, but now it was about to be renewed.

  * * *

  The bomber campaign that had been punishing Germany was a very complex operation, involving much more than one might think. It was a duel of electronics, offensive and defensive tactics, and finally one of fighters versus bombers along the routes to and from the target. Effective bombing needed mass, precise coordination, and time on target to achieve results, and the Germans would do everything possible to disrupt that. In earlier raids, the bombers flew to their targets in a broad wave, where pilots could individually determine their route of approach and altitude, but those times were long gone.

  Now the bombing attack was as carefully managed as a busy rail yard, and the bomber approach was designated to one controlled approach path, where individual bombers all had an assigned altitude or “height band,” and a time slot in the long line of the formation, now known as the “bomber stream.”

  This was largely done to counter the German defensive strategy, and then to achieve as much mass as possible over the designated target. The German defense against the British night bombing was known as the Kammhuber Line, established by Colonel Josef Kammhuber in 1940. It was basically a belt drawn across the map, and divided into boxes, (Raum ) wherein AA batteries, searchlights, radar stations and nightfighter beacons were positioned. By 1944, there was a continuous belt of illumination provided by these searchlights, in boxes covering the entire front, from north Denmark to Belgium.

  All the fighter beacons had specific names, and that enabled Night Hunter Commands (Kombinierte Nachtjagd abbreviated KONAJA) to quickly order nightfighters to a specific location, or box. They would use the radio beacon there to home in, and then orbit until sufficient numbers were obtained to make their attack. Hopefully, the network of searchlights would already be illuminating the targets for them. The man commanding this effort in each box was the Nacht Jagd Raum Führer (literally the night hunter box commander, or NJRF).

  This defensive strategy was known as Zhame Sau , or “Tame Boar,” a tightly controlled defense against the bombers. Before this time, it had been called Wilde Sau , or “Wild Boar,” because the fighters were free ranging in small flights, and hunting along a broad front.

  It was soon obvious to the British that such broad front approaches would dilute the bombers, weaken their defense in numbers, and expose them to enemy defenses arrayed in six or seven of these boxes in the Kammhuber Line. Therefore, the British tactic of the well-managed “bomber stream” would be aimed at one specific approach track, generally passing through only one defensive enemy box. This meant that the German Wild Boar tactic became ineffective, as it diluted their fighter strength. Tame Boar was the answer, a means of concentrating available nightfighter strength in one key location where the bomber stream was attempting to penetrate the Kammhuber Line.

  While the Germans would have loved to stop those bombers completely, the British would say “the bombers will always get through.” Therefore every key target city was also code named by the Germans, (ie) Kiebitz, Hummel, Roland, Drossel, Bär, etc.), and those zones were subdivided into at least three smaller defensive sectors. They were twenty or thirty miles deep, with a radar contact outer layer, an inner “killer zone” where the fighters and searchlights operated, and then a final defensive belt where the flak guns would take over—the “gun line.”

  Once the Germans believed they had clearly identified the target, fighters could then be vectored into the most appropriate zone. It was therefore common for the British to make diversionary attacks, most often done by Mosquitoes, with the aim of luring German fighters to that location, and away from the real target of the bomber stream.

  The Americans advocated day bombing, but the RAF ruled the night, where visual sighting of a bomber reduced from five miles to just 2,000 feet or less. The system of radars attempting to first detect and then track the bombers was another whole layer of the cake that we will not get into here, but things would always eventually come down to the eyes of that fighter pilot and those of the gunners on the bombers.

  Given his attack orders, Harris studied his moon charts, and saw that the next window when the moon would be slim to dark over Berlin was the period extending from Friday, the 19th of May, through the 25th. That was his window of retribution, but a lot would happen on the ground before the Lancasters would take to the air again, bound for Berlin.

  Part I
I

  Operation Thunder

  “ Thunder is good, thunder is impressive,

  but it is lightning that does the work.”

  —Mark Twain

  Chapter 4

  It had started in the early hours of May 5th. Long before the Eagles stormed over the skies of London, the artillery of General Corlett’s IX Corps began hammering at the German positions on the fringes of the great city of Tours. The 28th Infantry Division sat in their forward staging area, listening to the drumbeat at the city’s edge. The largest city on the Loire River, Tours had already felt the sting of war during the initial German invasion, where incendiary bombs had hollowed out a part of the city center. The magnificent gothic spires of the Tours Cathedral had survived intact, but now those guns promised more destruction as the American troops began to advance.

  The attack was not meant to storm the city, but to force the Germans to defend it. It was a diversion within a diversion, for the entire operation now underway was meant to confound the German defense further north, where Operation Overlord was ready to cast itself ashore in the Pas-de-Calais.