Breakout (Kirov Series Book 38)

by Schettler, John

  Air power, he thought. Who would have thought what a dominating role it would play in surface naval operations way back in 1940? Even then, if Raeder and the Führer had listened to me, we would have concentrated our main production on the U-Boat fleet, and I might still have 500 boats. But where would I put them now? The British are sinking them as fast as new boats come into service, so I guess we will not have to worry about port capacity.

  Yes… In 1940, a good surface raider could do a great deal. Look what the old pocket battleships accomplished. Admiral Raeder learned too late that we also needed aircraft carriers if we were ever to think of matching the British. Then, obsessed with his battleships, the Führer gutted all further surface fleet production after Hindenburg went down. When we had the Graf Zeppelin and the Goeben , things were quite different. Raeder was very skillful in the way he utilized those ships with Operation Condor in the Canary Islands. There was the most desirable U-Boat base ever, one where we could cut the British lifeline to the Middle East and North Africa. It looked as though Raeder’s strategy was working. We had Gibraltar, Malta, the Canary Islands. Then came the Allied Operation Torch, and in one blow, it all came tumbling down like a house of cards. The truth is, we never really had the naval and air power to prevent that invasion—or any invasion since that time. And so now the British and Americans will soon be at our throats as the war pushes relentlessly across France.

  Should I unite the entire fleet and go for one more massive operation, as Raeder might have done? I still have Peter Strasser, and the Brandenburg could be made operational without much difficulty. That would give me some air power at sea, but would it ever be enough to truly matter? Frankly, the surface fleet is now just a shadow, a threat, and an expensive one to maintain. This general sortie by the North Fleet is costing me a good deal of fuel oil. Why was Himmler so insistent? Should I have told him to mind his own business, like Zeitzler? Something tells me he is sending me more munitions for his airships. So look at us now. The entire Northern Fleet sorties, and simply to cover and facilitate the safe delivery of these exotic munitions for the Zeppelin fleet.

  Yet there may be some noteworthy things I can still do. The Allies need ports, and those they have already taken will not be adequate. Brittany is too far away to sustain their armies in any real operation aimed at the heart of Germany. The channel ports can only support a fraction of their army. That is what these landings in the north were about—Antwerp. They want that port, and also to eliminate the V-1 rocket sites. Strange to think that now we are the ones flinging rockets at the British, when they were the ones throwing them at Raeder’s ships, and years ago. Why nothing ever came of that is a real mystery. He shook his head inwardly, saddened by the missteps along the way, and the sure fate that awaited his beloved Kriegsmarine .

  That thought brought back an old memory, of the day he had first made Korvettenkapitän, on the 1st of November 1928. He remembered the strange letter he received that very day, a request that he travel to Bavaria, to the town of Marktredwitz near the Czech border. It was signed by none other than the famous Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the “Man with the Iron Mask,” as he was called, because of his stern aspect. It was a very high honor to be given a meeting with that old hero of the first war, and Döenitz hastened to make that appointment, arriving on the 20th of November 1928.

  “I was to meet with Admiral John Jellico this very week,” said Scheer as he shook the hand of Döenitz. “That can wait. First I wanted to see this fine young Korvettenkapitän.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Döenitz. “I am honored, but I cannot imagine why. As you just indicated, I am only a lowly Korvettenkapitän. It will be years before I ever get command of a respectable ship.”

  “All things in good time,” said Scheer, looking at Döenitz as though he was seeing right through him, seeing things that Döenitz did not even know about himself. He was…. For years earlier, Scheer had met and sailed with some rather remarkable men, and aboard a most remarkable ship that had made an unexpected and somewhat mysterious appearance in the engagement off Dogger Bank. That ship was the Kaiser Wilhelm , and her Kapitan had told Scheer many things about the future of the Kriegsmarine , and of Germany itself.

  “You know,” said Scheer quietly. “There will be a second war with the British. Nothing was truly settled by the first one, even though we were defeated and humiliated, the High Seas fleet caught up in a mutiny, and then sailed off to Scapa Flow to meet its sad end. Yes… There will be another war, and I think it will be the young men like yourself that will make all the difference. Here….”

  He handed Döenitz a copy of his most recent book, entitled Vom Segelschiff zum U-Boot (From Sailing Ship to Submarine ). “I hope you will read it, and take note of the meaning in that title. Note how it ends with the submarines—yes, the U-Boats. Mark my words, Döenitz, the U-Boats will be the key to Germany’s future at sea, not the battleships. I have seen them all, you know, all the mighty ships with their big turrets and massive shells. They were marvelous, truly awesome, and all the young Korvettenkapitäns can think of nothing more than the moment they will first take their seat in the Kapitan’s chair aboard such a ship. The days when we line them all up to shoot at one another are already gone. But the reign of the U-Boat is only just beginning. Remember that. Never forget it.”

  The two men would sit and share brandy and fine cigars, and Scheer spoke long of things that he saw coming, as if he knew them to a certainty. In truth, they were all things shared with him by the men of the Kaiser Wilhelm , and as their conversation came to a close, the Admiral lowered his voice, in an almost conspiratorial manner.

  “There is one more thing,” he said quietly, but with a sense of urgency. “Raider Z… You have heard about it?”

  “You mean the interloper at Dogger Bank?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Nothing much is said about it after that. Nothing really gets into the history books aside from a few paragraphs about a raiding sortie to the South Atlantic. That is because it was decided that way—a secret to be kept and known only to a very few highly placed officers. Well, I was one of them. In fact, I can tell you that I was aboard Raider Z on that South Atlantic foray, and it was a grand affair. But listen here… That ship was not what it seemed. You think it has already lived and died, but I can tell you with every confidence that it has not even been born! It will come soon. You will know it by the name, christened for our great leader. It will serve well, and then one day, it will disappear. They will say it died at the hands of the Royal Navy, but that is not so. No—it was never bested by the British, not in any engagement it ever fought. But hear this…. I think it may come again one day. Never forget that, Döenitz. Never forget that….”

  It was all very mysterious, as Döenitz remembered it now. A ship named for our great leader? No ship had ever born the Führer’s name, though Hitler quibbled with Raeder about that on occasion. Then Döenitz suddenly realized that Scheer would have known nothing about Adolf Hitler, so the great leader he referred to would have to be… The Kaiser…. Kaiser Wilhelm ! Yes, that was the ship that was lost under cloudy circumstances in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Four days later, on the 26th of November 1928, Admiral Scheer would die of a heart attack. So he would never explain exactly what he had meant, though as he had exhorted the young Korvettenkapitän, Döenitz never forgot what he had told him to remember.

  The ship Scheer spoke of had to be the Kaiser Wilhelm , thought Döenitz, a ship not yet born at the time Scheer told me that mysterious bit about Raider Z . What was he talking about? What did he mean it would come again one day? Did he mean that Germany builds a new ship with that same name? It was all very confusing.

  I never did forget what he told me, thought Döenitz. Yes, and I took what he said about the U-Boats to heart. Soon we will have the new Electroboats. Will they be too little, too late to matter? He was thinking about that when the telephone rang, from fleet communications in Wilhelmshaven.

  “Yes, Döenitz here
. What is it?”

  “Message received from Vice Admiral Topp aboard Tirpitz , sir. He has something quite remarkable to report.”

  “Well,” said Döenitz? “What is it?”

  “Sir, I think you should be briefed in person. May I send an officer directly?”

  * * *

  The sea was finally calm.

  The high white capped waves and lifting swells had abated, so suddenly that every man aboard could sense that something had changed, something was amiss. On the bridge of Kaiser Wilhelm , Kapitan Dieter Jung stood listening, looking, waiting. He could also sense that something had happened, but he knew not what. A minute later, 2nd Watch Officer Beck shouted out a warning.

  “Mainmast has sighted a ship! Bearing 070 degrees, southeast.”

  All eyes looked to the dark horizon, where something large was looming in the mist. The strange light that had bedeviled them like St. Elmo’s fire had abated with the sea, but Jung could not understand why they had not seen the ship on radar. Seconds later, the operators shouted out the contact.

  “Multiple readings, sir. Many ships!”

  “Damn if the British haven’t crept up on us,” Jung said to his navigator, Hans Olmen. “Battle stations! We’ll teach them a good lesson here. Schirmer! Range to target?”

  “Calculating sir. About 27,000 meters. Good time to load and train the guns.”

  Peter Weiss came in from the weather deck, where he had rushed to man the long range binoculars. “It’s big,” he said. But it looks like nothing the British could have built. By God, if I didn’t know better I’d say it was ours—Bismarck class.”

  “What?

  “It has four turrets, plain enough, but it can’t be anything in their new Queen Elizabeth Class. The stack is all wrong. This ship has an angled funnel cap, and its painted black.”

  “Sir, we’re getting a lantern signal—what ship… what ship?”

  “Looks like someone has had a good look at us as well. If that ship was British they wouldn’t be so polite. They know where all their ducks are lined up. Show them our colors—battle ensign!”

  Young Leutnant Gruber stirred at his post. “Sir, radio communication. I think it is from that ship!”

  * * *

  He was walking briskly, a sense of unrestrained urgency driving him, out of the main hanger and onto the tarmac, where a high-flying JU-86 was waiting, its engines spinning restlessly as the winds rose from the east. Before he left, Döenitz had given one single order.

  “Get them back,” he said. “Every ship—Tirpitz, Scharnhorst , the lot of them. I want them all back in a nice safe fiord in 24 hours. Understand?” Then he stormed out into the wind, the whirlwind that had come with that inexplicable briefing. Kaiser Wilhelm had returned, just as Scheer had said it would. The ship simply came out of the mist and ran up on the Tirpitz , which had seen nothing whatsoever on its radars until a shadow darkened its near horizon. The two ships very nearly came to blows, which would have been a disaster, but Admiral Topp was cool headed enough to know what he was looking at, and he signaled by lantern, and then short range radio.

  It was back.

  That fact alone was a tremendous mystery. How could the Kaiser Wilhelm have possibly navigated through the enemy infested waters of the Med, passed the Pillars of Hercules unchallenged at Gibraltar, and made it safely into the Atlantic? And even if it did accomplish that impossible feat, where in the world has it been all this time? The ship was reported missing in September of 1943! Here it was, nearly nine months later, and where do you hide a massive battlecruiser, and one that would have surely been seen and reported by any of a hundred ships along the lanes that led to the Norwegian Sea?

  Even as the sleek plane took off, winging up into the night, all Döenitz could think of was that brief and unexpected visit with Admiral Scheer, so very long ago… and Raider Z. As he recalled it again, it seemed to him that Döenitz was equating the raider with this ship, the ship he said was as yet unborn; named after our great leader, and the ship he said would return one day—Kaiser Wilhelm .

  Everything about that ship had been tinged with mystery, thought Döenitz. What really happened in the deep South Atlantic when it broke off from the fighting in the Canaries? That ship it brought home was a most unusual prize, and its contents were shockingly advanced. What was it doing there? We could clearly read the name and hull number, and papers indicating the ship’s identity were found in the Captain’s quarters… among other things. Then, a month after Kaiser Wilhelm disappeared in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Naval Intelligence finally came up with a strange bit of information. It seemed that the Americans had just launched a ship by that exact name, the U.S.S. Norton Sound . In fact, it was still fitting out, and had not yet even been commissioned. Was this a replacement for the ship captured by Kaiser Wilhelm ? The Americans often did that, resurrecting the name of a lost ship, as with their big aircraft carriers in the Pacific.

  Admiral Raeder had been particularly obsessed with that ship, and its contents. So was Kapitan Heinrich, doting over a silly magazine he had found in one of the staterooms. That was the least of it. The weapons that had been found on that ship were astounding, sleek needle-nosed rockets, which they first believed were some of the same that had been used against German ships by the British. But they were something altogether different.

  Now, here is Kaiser Wilhelm yet again, risen from the dead, and thousands of miles from the place where it was thought to have had its final battle. What was it Admiral Scheer had told him? He said that Kaiser Wilhelm was never bested by the British, not in any engagement it ever fought. How could he have even known a single thing about that ship? What was Raider Z? Were the two ships…. No, his mind would not take that leap, to the impossible conclusion that the two ships were one and the same. He knew only one thing now, that he was going to have a very long conversation with Kapitan Heinrich about all this, and get to the bottom of this business once and for all.

  Misty eyed Admiral Scheer might have told him what had happened. In fact, when he was stricken with his heart failure four days after Döenitz had visited, he lay in his study, eyes open, and with a far away look in them that seemed to see things that were yet to come. Through his greying mind ran a series of vignettes, of himself aboard the strange interloper that had first tipped its hat at Dogger Bank… of the ship sailing in the South Atlantic, and slowly dismembering the British Squadron there. Of the long return voyage home, pursued by the British, who had come to call the ship “Raider Z.” They could never catch the speedy battlecruiser, and after a brief stop back at Kiel to replenish, the young Kapitan Jung had asked for permission to take the ship north to do some further hunting. All Scheer learned after that had come in the lines he read on coded messages sent back, all collected now, and quietly hidden away, apart from all the other records of German naval activity in this war. The messages stopped, and nothing more was ever heard of Raider Z.

  The tabular record of movement for this ship, the Kaiser Wilhelm , would never be recorded, for it had come from ether and mist, and vanished into the same, navigating the seas of time itself as it followed some unseen course charted by Fate.

  Now it was back… Kaiser Wilhelm had returned, and the Great Lion of the Sea, Karl Döenitz, simply could not wait to set foot on the decks of that ship, and get the answers to a thousand questions all blooming in his mind. No ship or submarine could get him north fast enough. He would take the high flying JU-86, which could go where British fighters could seldom fly, and he would get there just as soon as he possibly could.

  Part VI

  Relentless

  “Things that will make you unstoppable;

  Get the naysayers out of your life,

  Take charge of your destiny,

  Be uncommon,

  Be relentless, and

  Never look backwards.”

  —Germany Kent

  Chapter 16

  The story, when he finally extracted it from the ship’s new Kapitan, would raise as
many new questions as it answered. Kapitan Heinrich had vanished when the ship was still in the Tyrrhenian Sea, along with several other senior officers, Otto Kremel, the ship’s Chief Engineer, and Dr. Schöerner, the Physician. A total of twelve men were missing, and never found. The weather was not bad, the seas relatively calm, so to think that they might have all been swept overboard was impossible. And to think that men like Kapitan Heinrich and the others might abandon the ship for self-serving reasons was equally absurd. Only one clue dangled in the wake of their disappearance—they were all the old salts, all of them in their 30’s, and born on or before the year that this young Dieter Jung now claimed he had visited.

  One impossible thing explained by another, thought Döenitz. 1915? Dogger Bank? It was then that Jung produced photographs, and they froze the blood of the Admiral. There, standing on the bridge of the Kaiser Wilhelm with all the young officers around him, was a man he knew quite well—the Man with the Iron Mask, Admiral Reinhard Scheer. That image had shaken Döenitz to the core…. Raider Z….

  The story that followed recounted everything that had happened to the ship and crew after that, and it danced in strange accord with everything the Admiral had come to learn about Raider Z , the ship that had bedeviled the British South Atlantic Squadron, and defied the British fleet, eventually sailing north into the Norwegian Sea, never to be heard from again… Until now….

  “Gentlemen,” said Döenitz. “I do not have to tell you that all this is utterly astounding. You have had the benefit of firsthand experience, seeing that man with your own eyes, a man I once spoke with, face to face. You have all had time to embrace this amazing circumstance, and still you cannot explain how any of it could have possibly happened.”