by Stuart Slade
“Consumption’s slackened off a bit. The end of the B-29 raids has reduced the amount of fuel the home defenses burned, and that’s been reallocated to the Russian Front. Also the submarine operations have been cut right back in the second and third quarters. You can see how much less fuel is going to the U-boat bases.”
Loki nodded. Fuel was the one German weakness, their one over-riding constraint. They were short of all types of fuel, bunker oil for ships, gasoline for aircraft engines, diesel fuel for armored vehicles, kerosene for jets. They just didn’t have enough. They spent their time shifting what supplies they had around, trying to make do with what they had. That’s what made the distribution of fuel supplies such a marvelous indicator of future operations.
Loki turned to the pages of railway transport data. So simple to obtain, just needed one man to count the wagons in a consist and drop the list in a dead letter box somewhere. Meaningless numbers. One of those who collected the train data had been caught by the Gestapo, but had talked his way out of the arrest. He had claimed that the numbers were his orders for black market goods, so many grams of sugar, so many of sausage. They’d believed him. Who would confess to being a black marketeer when interrogated by the Gestapo unless he was one? They’d beaten him senseless and dumped him in the street as a warning to other black marketeers - and the lists had kept coming.
Loki looked sharply at the train consists again and then at the summary. “Branwen, did you see this?”
“Hmm?”
“The consists of the trains heading east. The fuel shipments going through Kaunas are up 20 percent in the third quarter; those through Minsk and points south are down by the same amount. Kaunas is the rail nexus that supplies the northern end of the front. Especially the area from Petrograd to Archangel. Last time we saw that was second quarter, 1944.”
Branwen flipped through her own file, turning to the trend lines. “First quarter. There was a jump in second quarter as well, but first quarter was the big one. Right before the great Northern offensive, the one that broke through to the White Sea.”
Loki sucked through his teeth. Those had been grim days, the most recent great breakthrough on the Russian Front, the Russian Army sent reeling backwards. Petrograd and the whole Kola Peninsula cut off, Archangel besieged. Archangel still was under siege, still fighting grimly. Were the Germans planning to finish off Archangel? Something wasn’t right, to strip the areas further south of fuel to bring that siege to an end, it seemed disproportionate somehow. Were there other areas being reinforced?
“Branwen, you’ve got the area summaries. Where else is the oil going?”
“Gasoline, kerosene and diesel, are running through Kaunas as you say. ...” Branwen hesitated for a moment. “Now, that’s odd. Bunker oil for ships, production was up in the second quarter. We noted that but we thought it was just an adjustment to earlier production deficiencies. It’s up this quarter as well. And a lot of it, a whole lot of it, is going to Kiel.”
“German naval base Kiel?” It was, just barely, a question.
“Where else, Loki? Where else would that much bunker oil be going?”
“Power stations?” Loki was playing devil’s advocate and they both knew it. Asking questions they both knew the answers to, just in case.
“Not a chance. Germany generates electricity from coal-fired stations, mostly brown coal from open-cast mines, and hydro from those dams along the Ruhr. Not from oil. The few power stations that used oil converted to coal a long time ago.
“It has to be the ships then. Has to be. With that much bunker oil moving, the Germans have to be planning a major naval movement. Surface navy with these quantities, not submarines.”
“Linked to the northern front?”
“Don’t ask me, I’m a futures trader remember? I’m not the great all-seeing strategist.” Loki was bitter and spiteful, his longstanding hatred of Phillip Stuyvesant dominating his voice. “We’ve got a major shift in fuel supplies to the extreme northern end of the Russian Front and indications of an equally major naval operation impending. Let’s get it all off to Washington. Stuyvesant can make sense of it. We’ve done our job; let him do his for a change.”
Admiral’s Cabin, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, Kiel, Germany
His ships had more fuel in their tanks now than at any time since 1939. Further shipments arrived every day. After years of existing on fuel delivered by an eyedropper, they now had as much as they needed and more. That made Admiral Ernst Lindemann a very happy man. For the first time since it had adopted that honored name in 1944, the High Seas Fleet was actually capable of putting to sea.
In numbers, this High Seas Fleet didn’t compare, with the battle fleet of World War One. In fighting power, that was hard to say. Certainly the old fleet had nothing to compare with the four 55,000 ton battleships of the First Division. The 40.6 centimeter gunned Derfflinger, von der Tann, Seydlitz and Moltke were the most powerful battleships in the world. Not even the American Iowas could compare with them. Their main guns had given the First Division its nickname, “the Forties”, just as the Second Division had been given its nickname, ‘the Thirty-Eights” from its 38-centimeter main guns. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck and Tirpitz were very much the second division. Their status was not helped by the fact that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had only six guns each. The eight battleships still represented an awesome force, even if they had yet to fire their gun against an enemy ship. Well, technically, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had, but that was before they had been rearmed with their new 38 centimeter guns.
Lindemann knew that the Americans believed the day of the battleship was done; that the lumbering gun-ships couldn’t stand up to the concentrated aircraft striking power of fleet carriers. That was why they had ended their production of battleships with the Iowas. Now, they were building carriers as fast as their yards could turn them out, and that was terrifyingly fast. The Americans had already built twenty four Essex class carriers, each with a hundred aircraft. There were rumors of an even bigger class joining the fleet.
Lindemann believed they had made a catastrophic blunder in listening to their air power advocates. Aircraft were all very well, but they couldn’t replace the sheer battering power of a ship’s heavy guns. Aircraft couldn’t fly in very bad weather and bad weather in the North Atlantic was the rule rather than the exception. Lindemann looked forward to the day when he could get the American carriers under the guns of his battleships, just like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had once got the British carrier Glorious under their guns.
He desperately hoped the Americans had got it wrong. If they hadn’t, Germany had and the new High Seas Fleet was an obsolete anachronism. It had only three carriers; none were close to the size and capability of the American ships. Graf Zeppelin and Oswald Boelcke were German-built, weird, ungainly designs with a heavy, useless, low-angle gun armament. Graf Zeppelin had 32 aircraft, Oswald Boelcke a mere 20. The third was the Werner Voss. On paper she was a better carrier, certainly she looked better. Appearances were deceiving, for the Werner Voss had started life as HMS Implacable. She’d already been launched when the British Fleet ran away to Canada. Too incomplete to join them, she’d been scuttled at her shipyard. Her sister ship, HMS Indefatigable, had still been on her building slip and the British had done a very thorough job of blowing her up.
Still, between the two wrecks, there had been enough salvaged to complete the Implacable a few months ago. On paper. In fact, everything imaginable was wrong with the ship and the British shipyard workers had managed to devise ‘construction errors’ that no sane person could have dreamed up. There wasn’t a watertight door on the ship that fitted properly; they were all twisted just that little bit out of true. The cable runs led through the “watertight” bulkheads and the “seals” were constantly dripping. The gearing for the main turbines created dreadful vibration at cruising speed, enough to break glass and cause the engine room gauges to become unreadable. The officer’s latrines, now they wer
e a masterpiece. They worked fine as long as the hatch was left open but if somebody absently-mindedly closed it, the unfortunate occupant couldn’t get out until somebody rescued him. The mess decks were beyond description. It wasn’t just the smell although the stench of rotting herring permeated the entire ship. It was that even the paint scheme seemed deliberately designed to induce nausea and heartburn.
Three carriers, between them had 106 aircraft. Barely more than a single Essex class. Their aircraft, they were a hasty adaptation of whatever could be found for them Their fighters weren’t too bad, Ta-152Fs, hurried modifications of the Ta-152C. A lot better than the converted Me-109s originally planned. The Zeppelin had twelve, the Boelcke ten, the Voss had twenty four. It was the strike aircraft that were the problem. Despite frantic efforts, nobody had found anything better that could fly off a carrier than the aged Ju-87Es. They served as both dive and torpedo bombers, the Zeppelin carried twenty, the Boelcke ten and the Voss thirty. When the fleet put to sea, Lindemann intended to use them primarily as scouts. The Ta-152s would serve as fighter cover for the battleships. Still, the old High Seas Fleet hadn’t had any aircraft carriers at all, so he was ahead of them there.
There was worse trouble in the smaller units of the fleet. The High Seas Fleet had one heavy cruiser squadron, with three ships. Two, Admiral Scheer and Lutzow were awkward hybrids. Their six 28 centimeter guns made them too big for cruisers, too small for battleships. One of the class had already been lost, the British had sunk the Graf Spee down in South America. Lindemann fumed at the memory. Three of their cruisers had shot her up, then that spineless coward Langsdorff had run for port and blown his ship up rather than fight it out. Turning the German Navy into a laughing stock in the process. Both the surviving Panzerschiffe bore the humiliation of that fiasco.
The other heavy cruisers had even worse luck. On paper, they were good, 14,000 tons with eight 20.3guns, but the class had been cursed with ill luck. Blucher had been sunk by a Norwegian coastal defense battery, Prinz Eugen had gone down in the Kattegat after a submarine put four torpedoes into her. One had been sold to the Russians and was now a floating battery at Petrograd, firing on the German troops south of the city. Seydlitz had been converted into the Boelcke. That just left the Hipper, a ship that had become a by-word for mechanical unreliability.
And, if his heavy cruiser force was weak, his light cruisers were even worse. He had three: Koln, Leipzig and Nurnburg. Nine 15-centimeter guns each. Weak ships, poorly designed but there was nothing better. His destroyers? Lindemann snorted in disgust. The best were also the oldest, the ten survivors of 22 Z-1 class ships. The British had destroyed the other twelve in the Norway campaign. That had been a nightmare. At Narvik, the new German Navy had faced the British in combat for the first time. The destroyers had taken the brunt of the onslaught as the British had gone through them like a buzz-saw through butter.
Those destroyers had five 12.7 centimeter guns and eight torpedo tubes each. On balance Lindemann felt that made them as good as the American destroyers. The other twenty of his destroyers, well, some fool had armed them with 15 centimeter guns, leaving them over-armed and poor seaboats. They were all right inshore and in the Baltic. Take them out in the North Atlantic and they’d be hard put to stay upright, let alone do any fighting. Lindemann had made repeated requests to have them rearmed with 12.7 centimeter guns but he’d been turned down.
Lindemann put down his status report file. The major fleet units were all right; it was the smaller stuff that was so lacking. That was logical. It took time to build the big ships, the Forties had taken five years, and the last two had never even been started. The idea had been that the smaller ships could be built quickly when the need arose but that wasn’t the case. By the time the need arose, the demand for tanks on the Russian Front was over-riding everything else and the small ships had never been built.
Until now that was. The High Seas Fleet had orders. The Americans were expected to send a huge convoy through to Murmansk and Archangel. It would be a mixture of Canadian and American ships bring supplies for the troops on the Kola Peninsula and besieged in Archangel. It would be heavily escorted, at least two battleships, probably more, cruisers and destroyers. An American aircraft carrier group would be providing distant cover. But, the new American battleships were with the carriers and the not-so new ones were out in the Pacific. The only battleships left for the Atlantic convoys were the very old Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Oklahoma. There were reports that the even older Arkansas, Texas and New York had already been sent back to the States for scrapping.
So, at most four old battleships, all ready to be destroyed by his guns. Then the convoy was to be annihilated. It didn’t take much insight to see what the plan was. His ships would destroy the convoy, leaving the Kola and Archangel troops desperately short of supplies. Then, the army would attack and overrun both northern ports. It wouldn’t win the war but it would be a break in the grinding deadlock.
“Lutjens!” Lindemann called his chief of staff. Once Lutjens had been the senior, a full Admiral to Lindemann’s mere Captain but Lutjens had mysteriously fallen out of favor. Just as mysteriously, Lindemann had gained a place in the sun. It was, perhaps, a measure of the man’s character that he’d never displayed resentment or ill-will from that turn of events. “Lutjens, we are going to sea as soon as the tankers are filled up. We have a mission worthy of us at last.”
Headquarters, No. 9 Counter-intelligence Corps Detachment, Canadian Intelligence Corps, Kola Peninsula, Russia
“So what are we up against?”
“In global terms, sir, the German armed forces deploy a total of three hundred and thirty three divisions and forty three independent brigades, of which sixty six divisions and thirteen independent brigades are drawn from their ‘allies’. That force totals some six and a half million men. Their major effort remains facing the Russians and the Americans along the Volga. There, the Germans deploy 258 divisions and 16 independent brigades totaling just over five million men.
“Against them, the Russians have deployed three hundred and ninety one divisions with an aggregate of six point one million men and, now that SUSAGIR has entered the line, the Americans deploy 72 divisions with a total of one and a half million men.”
“SUSAGIR?”
“Second United States Army Group In Russia Sir. It and FUSAGIR are much more powerful than their numbers suggest. Every one of those divisions is fully mechanized, by the standards of the Russian Front they’re armored divisions. And they have tactical air power coming out of their ears.”
General John M Rockingham grunted. “And very nice for them it is I’m sure. What I need to know is what do we face here?”
“On the Finnish Front Sir, the Finns have deployed a total of sixteen standard infantry divisions and one mountain infantry division plus an independent armored brigade. They’re backed up by two German mountain divisions and four German infantry divisions together with two independent armored brigades. We, First Canadian Army, face that force with two corps, with a total of five divisions. Six once your Sixth Infantry Division comes into the line. Three infantry divisions, four as soon as the Sixth arrives, and two armored divisions.
“The odds aren’t as bad as they seem. The Finns have 250,000 men at most, the Germans about 100,000. We have 120,000 men. The catch is aircraft. The Finns have about 200, the Germans less than a hundred. Here in Kola, we have 300 planes, the Americans have 350 and the Russians 950. So we rule the air pretty much unchallenged. As long as we have avgas, of course. If that runs out, we’re in a world of hurt.
“To complete the picture, at a right angle to our deployment is the Petrograd Front. The Russians have fourteen infantry divisions, one mechanized corps and two tank corps down there plus about forty independent battalions, most of them in Petrograd itself. They face Army Group Vistula under the command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.”
“Vistula? How did it get that name? The river Vistula runs through the middle of Po
land.” Rockingham was amazed at the out-of-place name.
“The Germans only change the name of their Army Groups when they get seriously defeated or are split. They started the war here in Russia with three, Army Group North, Center and South. Near the end of ‘41, Army Group North split with Army Group Vistula being formed to mop up the Baltic states and Petrograd. The rest remained Army Group North and headed east. I guess the Vistula was the nearest big river back then and there’s been no reason to change it. Down south, Army Group Don is still in business as well. Anyway, Vistula has two armies, Ninth and 11th SS Panzer. Total of 17 infantry divisions, one mountain division, two SS Panzer divisions and three SS Panzergrenadier divisions. Ninth is pretty poorly equipped, but 11th SS? Well, they’re SS divisions, if its good, they’ve got it.”
“If they outnumber us that much, why don’t they attack?” The balance of forces he faced appalled Rockingham.
“It must be very tempting Sir. The Germans have seventy five divisions and twenty seven independent brigades not deployed on the Volga Front. Of those, a total of thirty five divisions and three independent brigades are deployed here on Kola. That’s not quite half their uncommitted forces but it’s pretty close to it. It must be frightfully tempting for them to attack, roll us up and seize Kola. Once that’s done, they could free up, probably, the whole of the German contingent and leave most of the occupation work to the Finns. Thirty more divisions on the Volga front, well, it won’t win the war for the Germans but it’ll swing the deadlock there in their favor.
“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.”
