by Stuart Slade
“Look at it this way Sir. The Germans are tapped out; like us, they can’t support any more than they already have. They’ve got pitifully few troops outside Russia. Most of their occupation forces are those ‘allied’ divisions. Romanians and Slovakians mostly. Those German units that are elsewhere are reconstituting after being torn up in Russia.”
For a second Colonel Charles Lampier looked very tired. “Europe’s bleeding to death Sir, the whole continent is just bleeding to death.”
There was a grim silence. Running through both men’s minds was a terrible question that neither would admit to even thinking. Had Halifax been right? Was striking a deal better than this endless slaughter? Canada is stretched as far as we can go in supporting First Canadian Army. We’re being bled white by the casualties we’re suffering.
“So why don’t they?”
“Three reasons Sir. Two are military, one is political. The first military reason is that the terrain here is some of the finest defensive ground in the world. It’s a maze of lakes, rivers, ridges, swamps. You name it, we’ve got it. The weather is frightful; you saw how bad flying down here. That isn’t the worst of it; you wait until we get white-out conditions. The sky fills with windblown snow and nobody can see where the sky ends and the ground begins. Too dangerous even to try and fly.
“This whole area is a defending force’s paradise. Even a high correlation of forces in favor of the attacker doesn’t help much. The attack is channeled into a series of narrow thrusts and the additional troops just stack up behind the lead elements. A company can hold a division for days, weeks if necessary, and when it’s finally destroyed, the next defending company has moved in behind it.
“That brings us to the second military reason: air power. The Americans in particular; they shoot up everything that moves. And I do mean everything. If your division has vehicles on the move, make sure they display the recognition panels and pray intensely. All the Yank fighter-bombers are trigger-happy but the Grizzlies are the worst. They have a 75mm right in the nose and it’s accurate so they tend to shoot from long range. Let’s just say they aren’t too careful sometimes.
“But, once all those troops stack up in front of a defensive position, the aircraft get to work and they reduce those forces to a shambles. You should have seen the roads west of here a few weeks ago. The Germans tried a local advance to straighten their line before winter. There’s a lot of that going on, everybody tries to seize the best shelter for their own people and to deny it to the enemy. Anyway, the front was about the width of a main road. A couple of SU-100 tank destroyers and an infantry platoon blocked it then the fighter-bombers got to work. Mostly Thunderstorms and Grizzlies but even some of our Williwaws got in on the act. By the time they’d finished, the road was a tangled mass of burned out wreckage.
“Anyway, put together, those two things mean that attacking here is slow and expensive. Applies to us as much as the enemy of course but we don’t plan to go anywhere though. ‘ The Germans don’t know that of course; they can see that if we broke out of here, we could cut off their whole northern flank. Isn’t going to happen, but they have forces pinned here in case. The ground their side isn’t so defensible so they need more troops to hold it.
“The third reason is political. The Finns want to survive this war as an independent state and the way they’ve screwed the political side of things to date puts a big question mark against that. The Russians and us are doing a good-cop, bad-op act on them. The Russians make noises that, when the allies have won, Finland is going to be occupied and reduced to a Russian province and any Finns that don’t like it can seek new lifestyle opportunities in Siberia. We tell the Finns, we can argue the Russians out of that but how effective our arguments are depends on how active a part they take in the war. The more operations Finland engages in against us, the less will be left unoccupied post-war.
“Of course, the Finns have the Germans telling them that they’re going to win and if Finland wants to survive post-war and get a share of the goodies, it had better be an active German ally. So they’re dancing a tightrope. Frankly I doubt if anybody here has any sympathy for them. We all had when we arrived, Winter War, gallant little Finland and all that, but it didn’t last.
“The problem is that we need to keep this front quiet, that’s our prime driver. We need to keep the activity, and thus casualties, down to a minimum. You know how stretched manpower is back home. We’re keeping units up to ToE at the moment but if the casualty rate spikes, that’ll end and we’ll drop behind the curve. Once that happens, we’ll never catch up. It’s not as if we could draw on any of the Free British units. They’re all being reserved and trained for the invasion of the UK. If that ever happens.”
“You don’t think it will?”
“I have my doubts. Oh, sure, the Yanks are going through the motions. They’ve trained and equipped a Marine Corps, six divisions of it, and are planning a landing in France. They’ve got the Royal Marines and various other units doing beach reconnaissance and all those good things and they’re training and equipping the Free British units for a landing in the UK but there’s something missing. Either they’re not serious about it or they’re heading for the worst amphibious foul-up since Gallipoli.
“Six divisions sounds really good and, as we’ve seen, there isn’t that much to oppose them, not at first. But the Germans are on interior lines; they can move troops around. We just can’t get at their core railway system, so they can shift forces west without much interference. If they moved, for example, 11th SS Panzer Army west, they’d go through the Marines on the beach like shit through a goose. And they’re talking of landing in France? Why would they do that? The UK is the fortress that guards Europe from the west; that’s been true since the time of the Barbary pirates. Retaking it has got to come first. Surely they’d do that with one landing, at full strength, not two spread out over half Europe?
“No, sorry General, but I think they’re bluffing. They’re not really planning to land in the west; they’re just trying, not too successfully, to keep German troops pinned down in France and the UK. The issue’s going to be decided here, in Russia. And we won’t see Free British troops out here.
“So, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but at least half your job is political. We’ve got to keep the Finns scared enough so they stay quiet but not so scared they decide they have nothing to lose. Anyway, another thing running for us. Our Intel is good, very good indeed. Don’t ask me how, but we get warning of every major German move, when and where. In effect, the Germans are telegraphing every punch and that gives us a huge edge. I believe a lot of stuff comes in from the Norwegian resistance and I think we get more from the Swedes.”
“I thought the Swedes were tight with the Germans?”
“They are, or so we thought, but the intelligence thing makes it look different. It’s really weird. There are Swedish volunteer units fighting with the Germans. One of the SS panzergrenadier divisions is a third Swedish, yet I’m pretty certain we’re getting all this good intel out of Stockholm. Another thing that doesn’t make sense. Looks like the Swedes are playing a really deep double game and the Germans are not pleased about it.
“In terms of equipment, one of our two armored divisions have got late-model M-4 Shermans. They have HVSS suspension, wide tracks and 90mm guns. The other has M-27 Sheridans; same gun but a bit more armor. Between them, they’ll handle most things except the German heavies. There’s a few of those, mostly Royal Tigers down around Petrograd. The Russians have JS-IIIs down there and seeing those two go at it is a real treat. This isn’t really tank country though. Armor is a help but it’s a supporting weapon, not a decisive maneuver arm.
“Our infantry is outgunned. The Germans have those banana guns, StG-44s. We still use bolt action No.4s. We’ve got Capsten submachine guns though; they fire the hot greentip Tokarev 7.62s. Machine guns, its mostly our Brens vs their Spandaus but we’ve got the Vickers and those water-cooled machine guns are worth their weig
ht in gold. They’ll fire forever in the cold and snow. One thing, make sure all your sub-commanders check their ammunition supplies. We’re shipping both our .303 and Russian 7.62 three-line ammunition through Murmansk and the two rounds are alike enough to get mixed up. Happened already, it’ll happen again. You don’t want one of our battalions to find out it’s got three-line ammunition just as it goes into action.”
CHAPTER TWO: A CHILL IN THE AIR
Curly, Battery B, US Navy 5th Artillery Battalion, Kola Peninsula.
From above, the railway tracks looked like three snakes sliding side-by-side in the snow. If the observer above looked closer he’d see that there was another kind of snake down there, three trains, side by side on the rails. A long way between them, almost half a mile, but still there. Trains that were 14 carriages long. A very astute observer might realize there was something very strange about the fourth carriage in the train.
It was the long barrel that gave the game away. The train was a railway gun and its entourage; the wagons that held the massive 2,700 pound projectiles, the bags of charges, living accommodation for the crew, cranes to lift the loads and anti-aircraft guns to protect the whole assembly. The curves on the tracks allowed the gun to be trained at any point within a wide arc. Together, the three supercharged 16-inch 50-caliber guns could put down a devastating barrage of fire on a target up to 40 miles away.
Here and now, on the Kola Peninsula as winter drew in, railway guns had suddenly regained the importance they had lost when aircraft had taken over the role of long-range artillery. Most times during a Kola peninsula winter, the weather was too bad for aircraft. Even if they could get up, it was too bad for them to strike accurately. Weather didn’t affect the big guns. If they knew the position of their target, they could strike at it. When they did, their power was devastating.
The allies had learned that in the winter of 1942-43, the first full Russian winter the American troops had experienced. They’d suffered at the hands of the German railway guns, so they’d brought their own. Four 14-inch L50 railway guns at the Washington Navy Yard had been hastily converted to Russian railway gauge and shipped to Murmansk. They’d been followed, a year later, by six 16-inch L50s; guns that had been in store ever since the battlecruisers they’d been designed for had died under the Washington Treaty axe. The 14 inchers and three of the sixteens were down at Petrograd, at the western end of the Kola Front. The other three 16s were here, at the eastern end.
Commander James Perdue’s reverie was broken by the sound of a siren going off. It was the alert that a shoot was about to take place. He’d barely had time to register the noise and start to act before the train lurched and began to move. Forward, that would mean the gun was training to the right. If the target had been to their left, they ‘d have been moving backwards. Their gun, affectionately known as Curly was too large to have a turntable mounting, instead it was moved along the curved tracks. There were marks at regular intervals along the curve, each marking the increments by which the barrel was swinging. When the fire control system gave them the deflection needed, the engine would move the forward wheel of the gun-carriage so it was level with one of those marks. All that the gun crew needed to do was elevate to the specified degree and make a fine adjustment to the bearing.
The train shuddered and stopped. Then Curly rocked gently as a fine adjustment was made. Perdue was already heading back, down the accommodation car to his gun. He knew what was happening. The crane had lifted a 2,700 pound semi-armor piercing projectile from the stack on the flatcar and loaded it onto the conveyor. Now it was being run to the gun where it would be rammed into the breech. Behind it, the magazine cars had opened and powder bags were being brought forward. The number was determined by the range to the target. Curly had originally been designed to take eight bags but had been modified to accommodate up to ten. That level of supercharge would wear out the barrel but it wasn’t a problem. When that happened, they’d get Curly rebarrelled.
“How many charges?”
“Full load Sir.” This was going to be good. Curly’s barrel was already arcing upwards as the hydraulics drove it into the fire position. A crash seemed to shake the whole frozen landscape and a brilliant ball of fire lit up the sky. Curly sent its projectile off towards whatever target it was that had caused the commotion. A split second later, far off to the right, Larry sent its shell on its way to the same target. Perdue assumed it was the same; they usually were. Over on the left, the third gun, Moe fired its shell. The last one off, Moe’s crew would get their legs pulled about that. Curly’s barrel was already dropping as the gun returned to the load position and the railway engine pushed the gun train back to the mark.
The German railway gunners could get off one round every six minutes; the American navy men fired twice that. Larry must have done slightly better because the 16-incher got its shell off a split second before Curly. Moe brought up the rear again. Four shells each later, the guns ceased fire and their locomotives pulled them back to the rest position. Perdue hoped the target, whatever it was, had been duly grateful for the effort made on its behalf.
Headquarters, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Front
“So you are the idiot who destroyed my heavy artillery battery.” Major-General Marcks spoke thoughtfully. Outside, his aide quietly crept away. When ‘Old Lenin,’ as he was known behind his back, spoke thoughtfully, being somewhere else was a very good idea.
Captain Wilhelm Lang knew how to deal with this situation. It was necessary to take action, to show initiative. This was one of those cases where bending the rules was actually a good thing. It showed a concentration on fulfilling the objective, of gaining the required results, a good thing. “Sir, yes sir. But I have been on the long-distance radio link to a friend of mine in Army Group headquarters. He’s fixed everything. We will have new heavy guns here to replace them in a week or less. Well before we are required to bounce off.”
Lang looked at his General with what came perilously near to a smirk. It faded when he saw the irascible general going white.
“You used the long-range radio? How long ago?”
“I just came off it, just before I came in here, I was using it for five minutes, perhaps ten.”
Marcks grabbed the telephone on his desk. “Emergency evacuation now! Everybody out! Clear the area, as far as possible.” Then he pushed past Lang and headed for the door. Outside sirens wailed.
The headquarters area was a madhouse. Corporal Krause was already running the engine of Marck’s kubelwagen. He started to roll as soon as the General was in the back. Lang pulled himself in as the little vehicle sped off down the road plowed through the snow. Around them vehicles were moving. Each took as many of the headquarters staff as they could scoop up. Krause threaded his kubelwagen through the throng, heading as far away from the camp area as possible.
They made it. Krause drove the kubelwagen straight at a tree sticking out of the snow, hit the brakes and spun it around. As he did, Marcks leapt out and looked down on the HQ area nestling at the foot of the ridge. Lang had waited until the vehicle had stopped and left more circumspectly. “Best driver in the division Krause is.” Marcks was still watching the base.
“I don’t understand….”
“Have you never heard of radio intercepts?”
“Of course, I’ve read the manuals. I wrote some of the more important ones myself.” Lang was almost-smirking again. “But there was high ground between the transmission site and the Ivans.”
“Not the Ivans you have to worry about…” Marcks was interrupted by an escalating roar. Beside him Lang could swear that he saw a black streak race down across the sky and hit the center of the now-deserted headquarters. There was a white puff. For a split second, he thought the shell was a dud. Then the whole center of the camp bulged, looking for all the world like a saucepan of milk boiling over. It inflated and rose upwards, impossibly large before bursting open to send a shotgun hail of frozen mud, snow and ice into the air. The two officers
dropped flat as it scattered down around them. Even before it had landed, a second shell had slammed into the area, a little to the south of the main camp area. A third landed to the west of the camp. The ground rolled and shook, punching Marcks and Lang with body blows from the repeated concussion of the Shockwaves.
It went on and on, shell after shell slamming into the camp. The semi-armor piercing shells penetrated deep into the frozen earth before exploding. The boiling milk of the ground threshed and contorted under the remorseless hammering. As the ground wave from the last shell passed away, it collapsed as if the heat had been taken from under the pan. What was left of the HQ area was utterly devastated. Not a single building left standing. The ground itself was destroyed, snow and mud stirred and shaken into a blended, featureless nothingness.
“As I was saying, it’s not the Ivans you have to worry about. It’s the Amis. You see, Lang, the Amis are rich. They fight their wars with machines. When we fly a Tante Ju transport up here, everybody fights for centimeters of space, for every kilogram of load, because we do not know when the aircraft will be available again. When a mother in Arkansas wants to send her little boy some cookies, if there is no space on the aircraft, the Amis build another one.
“Some of those transport aircraft are stuffed with radio intercept equipment. For some reason the Amis call them Rivets. They orbit safely behind their lines and listen for somebody foolish enough to use their radio links. When they find one, they triangulate for his position. Aircraft are good at that; they can establish a long baseline quickly. So, they get a quick, accurate fix and send it in. In this case to a railway gun battery north of here. Your call was a gift to them. A long call like that, they had every chance to get hold of it and fix the position exactly.
