Winter Warriors s-1

by Stuart Slade

  Perdue chuckled. The tribulations of American tank crews trying to move their Shermans and Grants during their first winter in Russia had been notorious. There had been a joke that one could follow an American unit in those first months by the line of Shermans upside down in a ditch. Still, they’d learned, just as Perdue was learning now. “Is that why the slope is so shallow? When they said it was steep, I was expecting something much worse.”

  “Three percent is bad, Sir. For a train like this, and these tracks are six and a half or even seven percent. We’d think long and hard before building track like this in the States. If there was another way around, we’d take it. Situation like this, we’d have drilled a tunnel before taking track over the top like this.” Jones was interrupted as the locomotive lurched suddenly. Perdue saw him go pale and check the load behind.

  “It’s OK, Sir. The bedding must have been loosened by the ice. It shifted a bit.” He looked behind again. “Thought so. The ASTAC guys are already there, packing it back in.”

  “This is dangerous isn’t it?”

  “That it is, Sir. Going down will be worse just the way you said. Still, it’s something to tell my grandchildren about. We won’t be stopping on the crest if that’s all right with you, Sir. Going straight down, it’ll put less strain on the drawbar.”

  Perdue nodded. The train eased up onto the ridge and he took the opportunity to look out. The view was beautiful; the reddening sun reflecting off the snow fields below. Ahead, he could see the wide sweep as the track made its 180 degree curve before heading down the other side of the ridge. All too soon he was looking down at the track dropping away in front of him.

  The train crew were working hard, stopping the great gun they were pulling from starting to build up momentum. Perdue had no idea what they were doing and he was beginning to realize just how presumptuous his ‘planning’ had been. He really had no idea what was going on. Trying to keep out of the way, he looked out of the cab again. This time he watched the Russian engineers try to get the right amount of grit under the wheels of the locomotives. Without any warning, one of them took some steps alongside the tracks and slipped. It might have been a patch of ice, it might have been a sleeper that was broken and jagged. Whatever it was, he lost his footing and fell against the locomotive. In a second, he had fallen under the wheels. Perdue heard the scream ending abruptly as the train ran him down.

  The sound was still making him shake when the two Mikados got Curly down to the sidings at the other end of the ridge. Perdue jumped off the train. He’d already decided to stay here with Curly while the engines went back and got Moe. After that, it was just a matter of resorting the trains again and getting back under way. There was a cloud of steam around him. He heard the train’s whistle sounding before the two Mikes set off on the long haul up the slope. As their sound died away, Perdue suddenly felt very lonely.

  It seemed like an age had passed before the two engines reappeared with Moe behind them and the little shunter making up the rear. It was far into dusk; in the fading light, Perdue could see the constant stream of gravel and ice being dislodged by the weight. Moe was visibly swaying as the gun’s weight compacted the railbed and crushed the gravel weakened by years of ice-bound neglect. Once, Perdue thought they’d lost her. The gun started swaying and then appeared to lurch downwards. The dusk dimness highlighted a shower of sparks that shot out from the lead Mikado’s wheels, then Jones, or the other engineer on the locomotives caught her, or perhaps the little diesel had added just a bit of stability and they brought it back under control. Or had it just been a trick of the light? Eventually, Moe joined Curly on the sidings that had once served the northern mine. Perdue looked thankfully at the two guns and reboarded the first Mikado.

  “Jones, we’ll keep the diesel here to move the carriages around. The two Mikes can get the rest of the trains. Take as many trips as you feel easy with, the hard part’s done now. There’s coal here as well. We’d better stock up before we pull out.”

  They were all suggestions, not orders. Jones nodded in agreement. “Good plan Sir. Although the coal here is pretty foul stuff.” He paused for a second. “That last trip was rough, Sir. We nearly lost Moe when the bed gave way. Still, it all worked out at the end.”

  Williwaw H-AC, over Third Infantry Division Hedgehogs, Kola Peninsula

  It was called a Cab Rank. Six Williwaws circled the area, high enough to be safe from flak and Spirals. Their engines were throttled right back and the mixture leaned out so they could stay for as long as possible. They were waiting for a call from one of the hedgehogs down below; Canadian infantry units cut off by the Finns. Only, the Canadians weren’t trying to get out. They had dug in and were staying put. They were fighting the Finns with artillery and airstrikes. That was why the Cab Rank was here. A forward observer on the ground would call them directly and put them on the target. Or he’d coach in one of the little Australian Boomerangs. They would mark the targets with white phosphorus smoke rockets for the bigger, faster, Williwaws.

  We’re a strange team, Flight Lieutenant Digby Dale reflected. The Boomerang was something the Australians had cobbled together from a trainer and a few spare parts they happened to have available. Intended as a fighter, it had been too slow for the job, but its small size and agility made it perfect for the Forward Air Controller job. Boomerangs had been supplied to the Canadians and Russians for that job. The Russians used them as night harassment raiders as well. There was a whole regiment of Russian Boomerangs flown by women. Or so Dale had heard.

  The Williwaw, or the Williwarmer as it was disrespectfully called, was pretty much cobbled together as well. The starting point had been a Canadian attempt to fit an R-1830 radial engine to a Hurricane. That had been an attempt to make use of the airframes that were piling up in Canada after the Coup in Britain had shut down supplies of Merlin engines. The obvious candidate for the Canadian-built Hurricanes had been the Allison V-1710, but American aircraft needed all available supplies of that engine. So the complex job of converting the Hurricane airframe to a radial engine had started. Halfway through the effort, Hawker engineers had arrived with blueprints for a better aircraft called the Tornado. The only problem with the Tornado was that it needed one of two British engines, the Sabre or the Vulture, neither of which was available. So Canadians and refugee Brits sat down together and redesigned the Tornado to use the American-built R-2600 engine. It went into production in 1943 as the Chinook. It still equipped quite a few Canadian squadrons. More had gone to the Russians as Lend-Lease.

  In the fullness of time, the Chinook’s performance was found wanting and more power was needed. That had led the engineers to shoe-horn an R-2800 into a developed version of the airframe to produce the Williwaw. 71 Fighter Squadron had only received its Williwaws a few weeks before and were still getting used to them. It was fast and agile, no doubt about that; but what Dale really wanted was a jet. Just like the Yanks and Krauts had.

  “King Flight, this is Duffle. Come on down, target is green smoke, say again green smoke.” There were a string of numbers that gave him his coordinates. Dale did a wingover and dived down, followed by the other two members of King Flight. Hard to see in the fading daylight was a cloud of green smoke. Spotting rounds probably fired from mortars. He lined up and squeezed the button on the control column. It unleashed the twelve rockets under his wings. There were bright red streaks coming the other way, as always they seemed to be coming straight for him only to flash past on either side. Lucky these were Finns down below. The Germans had a lot more Flak guns and a lot more skill in using them.

  The green smoke was being lacerated by rocket fire. Dale shifted his finger and released his two 500 pound bombs. The snow-laden trees were approaching fast. He had just enough time to fire a quick burst from his cannon and that was that. Dusk was coming, time to go home. Behind him, the ground erupted as six 500 pound bombs speared the center of the green smoke cloud.

  “King Flight, this is Duffle. Well done lads. Target h
ad been done to a turn. Off you go; mummy’s waiting.”

  Dale led his flight away, on the long haul back to their base. 71 Squadron had been lucky. Their base hadn’t been targeted by the Huns with their damned rockets. He’d heard that the American bases had taken a right pounding the day after the storm. That was the trouble with the Hun rockets. Their doodle-bugs were easy targets for a fighter or anti-aircraft units, but nobody had come up with a way of stopping the German rockets yet. There were even rumors that the Russians had captured some intact and were trying to copy them. Still, useful as they were, they still couldn’t replace a manned fighter-bomber.

  “Break left, break left!”

  The alert broke through Dale’s reverie. He hauled the stick over and rammed the throttles forward to full emergency setting. The Williwaw stood on its wingtip and spun left. Dale’s eyes grayed out as the G-force drove blood from his head. He still caught a glimpse of the attacking aircraft as they flashed by. Twin tail, single jet engine mounted above the fuselage. He-162s.

  Dale reversed his turn, swinging in to attack the pair of German jets. It was too late, they were already far away and streaking back towards German-occupied territory. They were a hundred miles per hour faster than the Williwaws and were using every scrap of that speed to get clear. Dale had read the intelligence reports on the He-162. They rated it well as a fighter but it had only 30 minutes of fuel on board. That meant its pilots were restricted to a single pass at a target. Unless they were over their own bases, they simply couldn’t hang around to dogfight.

  The two retreating aircraft were the only ones. Dale had been half expecting another pair of He-162s to come out of the clouds, but the attack was over, barely a second after it had begun. There was a black stain across the sky. One of the three Williwaws in the formation hadn’t got the message in time or had been a bit slow in making his turn. The aircraft was now a funeral pyre on the snow below.

  “Control, this is King-1 here. We just got bounced by two He-162s. We lost H-AB. The 162s got away clean.”

  “162s? You sure of that?”

  “No doubt. Single jet above the fuselage, twin tails. And they went through us like a bat out of hell. 162s for sure.”

  “Confirm King-1. Control out.”

  A hundred miles to the north, the fighter controller slipped her earphones back. There weren’t supposed to be He-162s on this front. That didn’t excuse King-1, though. It was the old case of endofmissionitis. They’d been on their way home so they’d dropped their guard. And paid for doing so.

  Automobile Club, Andrews Air Force Base, Washington D.C.

  “Curt?” The Seer looked around the dimly-lit room. A half-built car was in one corner, a pair of greasy, coverall-clad legs stuck out from underneath. Another half-person in even dirtier coveralls was bent over the side of the car, apparently working on where the engine should be.

  “Socket wrench, quarter inch.” The voice came from under the hood. The Seer picked up the required tool and passed it to the outstretched hand. “Thanks.” The hand vanished inside the car again.

  “Phillip?” LeMay’s voice came from under the car. There was a faint rumble and a wheeled platform with Curtis LeMay on it rolled out.

  “Curt, the cover story’s out; we released an official statement an hour or so ago. It tells the world that a C-99, on a routine training flight prior to assignment to the Air Bridge, crashed on take-off. No survivors. Nobody’s questioning it; no reason they should. That’s one good thing about the big birds going in. They’ve so much fuel on board, by the time its finished burning up the magnesium and aluminum, all that’s left are the engines. Nobody can tell what the thing was.”

  “Hell of a thing to say about 15 men isn’t it? They burn up so thoroughly nobody can tell what they died in. Phillip, have you met General Francis Griswold? Commander, Third Air Division. Frank, this is Phillip Stuyvesant. More commonly known as The Seer these days.”

  “Pleasure to meet you General. I see our current situation is much like our professional relationship.” Griswold looked puzzled. “I get the tools and you guys use them.”

  “Very good, Stuyvesant. I used to follow the races where the yachts your yard built ran through their paces. Didn’t know it then of course. I was surprised to find you were the man who owned Herreshof behind the scenes. Always thought you were an aircraft man.”

  “Got interests all over, Sir. The yachts were more a matter of love than anything else. Long time ago, I met a Navy Senior Chief who taught me how to handle a sailing boat. Sort of caught the bug. What on earth are you two up to here?”

  “Frank needs a car for his family. Can’t buy a new one of course. So we got an old chassis, an engine and the rest of the parts and started to build one. No cause for complaint so far; project’s going well. Even with gas rationed the way it is, people still want a car if they can get one.”

  “And we just burned up a couple of hundred thousand pounds of the stuff. Any idea why the big bird crashed, Curt?”

  “Wing Commander is coming down tomorrow to tell me all about it. On the carpet in front of my desk.” Griswold gave a grim chuckle. There was a piece of moth-eaten carpet in front of LeMay’s desk where those who had explaining to do stood until their explanation met LeMay’s exacting standards. “You know what he’ll tell me? ‘I can’t understand it, Sir. They were my best crew.’ They always are, have you noticed that?”

  “Can’t speak ill of the dead syndrome?”

  LeMay shook his hear irritatedly. “Hell no; I could understand that. It really is the experienced crews who go in for idiotic reasons. Pure negligence on their part. The stupid, inexperienced crews don’t crash. You know why? Because we have manuals for every single job on the big birds. Doesn’t matter what. Pilot, navigator, radio operator, each has his manual. It’s got all the procedures laid down. The inexperienced follow them exactly, by the book. It says ‘read the check list out. Don’t do it from memory.’ So they read the check list exactly the way they’re supposed to. But you get some smart-assed crew who think all that stuff is for the new recruits, not for them. They’ve got ‘experience.’ So they take short cuts, ignore procedure and one day it kills them.”

  “Any idea what cased this crash?” Griswold was interested. His formations were only just starting to run through the training process.

  “First assessment? They tried to take off with a propeller in reverse pitch. There’s no mention in the tower report of them doing a Vandenburg Shuffle before heading off. That’s one thing the Wing Commander will be clearing up for me tomorrow; just how many of his crews miss the Shuffle. Before he takes over his new command at Wendover.”

  Griswold winced, Wendover was a hellish posting, right on the Utah/Nevada border. One could lose all one’s money gambling in Nevada and then have the Mormons in Utah make one feel really bad about it. Nobody liked Wendover. Some people even preferred the Aleutians. LeMay caught the gesture and continued. “People get killed in war. Can’t be helped. But if I ever meet the men who died under my command I want to be able to tell them ‘we did everything we could to prepare you. We made the best plans possible under the circumstances. We maximized enemy casualties and minimized our own. That having been done, I consider your life to have been properly expended.’ Won’t make them feel any better of course.”

  “One thing’s been bothering me a little, Curt. You told me that there were going to be four groups to an Air Division? My people ran some numbers today and that seems too few. If we go by base location and capacity, we should be able to have eight groups in each Division. I know the normal span of command is three to five but it might be a more efficient use of resources to go for eight.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement Phillip.” LeMay was interrupted by the bang of the outer door opening. Blackout regulations meant all the buildings on Andrews had double doors. A second later, the inner doors opened. An airman entered, blinking owlishly at the lights and squinting around.

  “Hey guys, need a
hand here. My battery has gone dead.”

  “We might have a spare around here somewhere.” Griswold was very carefully keeping his voice neutral. “We’ll help you put it in.”

  “No need for that. I got a spare at home; saw it for sale a few months back and grabbed it for when the old one died. Didn’t think it would go this soon, though. If you can give me a push to get started, I’ll swap them over at home.”

  A few minutes later, LeMay, Griswold and The Seer watched the masked tail lights of the car vanish into the darkness. LeMay broke the silence that had followed the bang of the car being push-started. “That’s a smart kid. Thought ahead to the time when he would need a new battery. Anybody see what his name was?”

  “Badge said ‘Martin’.”

  “I’ll keep him in mind.” LeMay granted suddenly. “I hope that kid never finds out who we were.”

  “Why, Curt?”

  “If he ever discovers who he asked to push his car, he’ll drop dead of heart failure.

  1st Platoon, Ski Group, 78th Siberian Infantry Division, First Kola Front

  “On the whole though, it is better not to get shot down.”

  Lieutenant Stanislav Knyaginichev translated the American’s remark and listened to the guffaws of laughter from his men. They’d built the zemlyanka quickly and efficiently as usual. In the process, they’d ‘shown’ the Americans how to do it as a way to stop them from trying to help and thus disrupting the well-oiled routine. Then they’d shared their vodka and food with the two pilots. The Americans had rewarded their generosity with ground attack mission stories that usually featured vivid descriptions of German units being doused with copious quantities of napalm. Russian units never seemed to tire of those accounts. The last story had ended with their Grizzly being hit by a ‘Spiral.’ That had taken a little translation work but eventually they had made it. Then one of the Russians had asked a question about fighters.