“We might have easy pickings,” he said to the Kapitan. “I believe those are all light cruisers.”
“Perhaps, but we will turn as ordered. Raeder wants to close up for the action, and that rocket that struck us may have come off one of their big brothers further south.”
So Heinrich took the ship around in a wide turn, slowing to 30 knots as he did so to allow Prinz Eugen to keep up in his wake. The thrum of the turbines lowered, driven by four high pressure boilers producing the steam for the ship. They were so efficient that Chief Engineer, Otto Kremel, would often have to use the relief valve to let off some pressure, which hissed and whined when he did so, like a chesty diva singing one of Wagner’s operas. The crew called the boilers ‘Wagner’s Girls,’ and delighted to Kremel’s fanciful playing of an opera on the gramophone when he ran at high speed.
Heinrich smiled when he heard the men singing below decks, “Hi Ho! Hi Ho!” It was the rousing call from Ride of the Valkyries. When we finish this roundabout, he thought, then let’s see what we find. But what is wrong with the radar set? It has been fogged over with heavy interference for the last hour, and the engineers could not sort it out. And where was the Luftwaffe?
He looked at his watch. The bombers were supposed to be up and over the channel by sunrise, which was very late at this latitude in January, rising at 09:46 in another hour. But the reports that the British were off the coast again tonight should have scattered a few birds. Raeder is playing it very cautious with our aircraft carriers after what happened to the Graf Zeppelin. That thought, and these two unusual events involving that rocket attack and the obvious jamming of his radar, was cause for some concern. Yet his ship had weathered the blow, and Schirmer was ready for a fight. He had hit that British destroyer the last time the ship was in action, and at damn near 30,000 meters. Impulsive was the unlucky ship that day, broken in two by that 15-inch shell.
The last time he had received such an order to break off, he had been in hot pursuit of the British carrier Glorious, smashing that destroyer, and then sinking the cruiser Gloucester for good measure. Those ships had bravely engaged his vessel in an uneven duel, only to buy time for that carrier to launch her aircraft. And damn if they didn’t get their hit! It was just one of those old Swordfish torpedo bombers, and the thought that a single plane put his ship out of the action and sent it back to France for repairs was still enough to make him shake his head.
Air power, he thought. Those planes are dangerous, and all it takes is one hit in a vital spot to end a ship’s career. Yet these naval rockets are even worse. We have nothing to counter them, and cannot answer in kind. But they must be rare, for why else would the enemy be so stingy with them? What might have happened if three or four were fired at Kaiser Wilhelm this morning? From every account, not a single one has ever failed to hit its target. Graf Zeppelin would have died much sooner had it not been for the sacrifice of our destroyer. Yet Raeder still fights now as if this were Jutland. He has all the big ships in a line of battle. He folded his arms, looking for the dawn. Soon it will be our planes up there, he thought, feeling just a little more comfortable.
At the northern segment of his wide circling turn, he could see the lamps of Bismarck winking in salutation. Having a good idea where the enemy was, he replied, “Follow me,” and brought his ship around another 15 points. Raeder was timing things very well to coordinate with the Luftwaffe, but as they moved south, and the minutes ticked off without a sighting, the Kapitan was suddenly suspicious.
What would I do here, he thought? Would I be due south, on a line that would eventually intersect the coast of Western Sahara? Not on your life. The sun will be rising off our port side soon. So the British will be maneuvering to get out to sea, not inshore where we could pin them against the coast. Yes, and once they get in position out there, all our ships will be nicely silhouetted against that rising sun. Doesn’t Raeder see it?
Minutes later he got his answer, a radio signal to make a thirty point turn to starboard. Of course, thought Kapitan Heinrich with relief. A man does not become the first Grand Admiral of the Fleet since Von Tirpitz without good reason. Raeder had served as Franz von Hipper’s Chief of Staff, and on the staff of my own namesake, Prince Heinrich of Prussia. Glad they had the good sense to name our latest carrier appropriately, but it would be better if they get some planes up soon. And speaking of that, this very ship is named after Kaiser Wilhelm, and Raeder served aboard that man’s private yacht. He fought at Dogger Bank, and at Jutland. In fact, it was his raid aboard the Lutzow that aimed to lure the British into a trap at Jutland. What was the Grossadmiral planning this time?
At least he’s a fighting Admiral, and he will expect the best we can give him now. When we lost the Graf Spee, he issued orders that no German ship would ever be scuttled again. We either fight to win, or we die. One has to admire that kind of spirit in battle. And getting Tirpitz home safely with Scharnhorst was quite a feat. Who would have thought that Raeder would send them right through the English Channel! Yes, the man has fire in his belly, but a great deal is riding on the outcome of this battle. We’ve lost two good ships in Gneisenau and Graf Zeppelin, and that almost sunk the Admiral, and the Kriegsmarine with it. Now we have two ships wounded even before we start this battle.
Thirty points to starboard, and out to sea. If the British run on a parallel course, we’ll eventually run out of sea room. One side or another will have to turn…. That is if there are still any ships afloat after this fight.
* * *
Tovey had reconfigured his fleet by grouping all the carriers under the command of Vice Admiral Harwood in Force H, and moving any capital ships there to Force C. The four cruisers Heinrich had sighted now returned to that force, even as a light misty rain began to fall at sunrise. The weather had closed in quite suddenly from the northwest, and it was going to make visual sighting more difficult for both sides. While Tovey had the benefit of knowing where the enemy was, his gunners still had to sight and hit them with a system that was mostly mechanical.
While the Hindenburg group effected a rendezvous with Kaiser Wilhelm, Admiral Laborde’s Force De Raid moved ahead, about five kilometers east of the German task force. With Force C out in front, it would encounter this force to open the action at 18,000 yards. The four cruisers formed a separate battle line, and off their starboard side, and a little behind, was Repulse, Renown and Valiant. Captain George Tenant on Repulse wanted to run on ahead, but Valiant could only make 24 knots, and so he stayed in formation. Behind these ships came the destroyers Lookout, Lightning, Kingston, and Hotspur.
Out on the weather deck, his great coat collar pulled high, Tennant spied the tall battlements of a heavy ship, and immediately ordered both Renown and Repulse to engage. The sharp report of their initial salvos began the battle at 09:45, just as the first rays of sunlight illuminated the entire scene beneath a thickening deck of grey clouds. In twenty minutes, the sun would rise up through that overcast, and the visibility would fall off dramatically, but for these opening minutes of the duel, sighting was good as the sunlight now gleamed on the water, illuminating the spray at the bow of the oncoming ships and lighting up the shell splash of those initial rounds.
“Bearing true, but short one thousand,” called the gunnery director.
“Forward turrets, up 800,” came the reply, “Fire by twos.” The range was being increased 800 yards, and the resulting shellfall would now be observed yet again before the director sent new information down for “table turning.”
Far below, men huddled around the Mark VII Admiralty Fire Control Table, developed in the late 1930s. It might have resembled a large cooking stove, painted a deep avocado green, its metal edges smoothly beveled, and its surface segmented with areas of inlaid glass that covered a morass of dials, tachymeters and other indicators that grinned like clock faces. The corners and vertical sides bristled with hand knobs for the so called “table turning.” These were cranks and dials that would allow the operators to input all the
data they were receiving, a stack of variables to be computed by this makeshift analog computer, much like a slide rule might deliver mathematical results from analog settings.
The many variables were wind direction and speed, line of flight arrow, gun inclination, target speed across plot, gun deflection, three range settings, actual maximum gun range at present settings, target height scales, the spotting plot, barometer and temperature, ship and target speed, and of course bearing. The handles would be turned to produce a plot suggestion, then shell fall would be observed and the operators would crank handles for the reported error in range to get a new suggestion, and so on. It might have been wonderful if the Argos Fire could simply bring over a fire control radar set and digital computer, but the simple fact of the matter was that there would have been no way to connect it to these old mechanical systems, any more than a digital calculator could be connected to a slide rule. The radar could tell these men the exact range, but then they would still have to crank their dials and handles for all these variables to tell the gunnery crews how to elevate, train, and charge their guns.
Renown and Repulse had their forward turrets in action while this initial probing was carried out, until on the fifth salvo the watchman called straddle. This prompted the officer to order the aft Y turret in on the next salvo, and the guns rippled out, with each of the three turrets laddering down the range by 200 yard increments from the farthest setting. Five minutes of hot action, with corrections and a speed change, and Repulse finally drew first blood with a hit reported on the port side of the target.
Yet the enemy was not idle. The ship that had drawn the angry interest of Renown and Repulse was the battleship Richelieu, one of France’s newest designs. As many as 26 personnel teamed to manage her fire control systems, and each turret also had a separate four man team inside on another analog “computer.” Their system had a unique feature that displayed a projected future target bearing next to the current plot, and it also incorporated more electrical functions and methods. As all the revisions to existing fire solutions had to be input in the dead zone between salvo fires, the French were literally “thinking ahead” with these future position indicators, and for a good reason. The days of dreadnoughts simply lining up and blasting away at one another were over. The French Navy planned to fight their battles in a roiling, shifting display of maneuver.
Richelieu was a product of this evolution in French Naval thinking, which emphasized speed and maneuver during battle as a primary means of obtaining protection from enemy fire. Everything about the battleship kept that in mind, an evolutionary leap beyond the older battleships from WWI, many of which were still afloat in the Royal Navy. An up-scaled version of the Dunkerque class battlecruiser, Richelieu could run at 30 knots, and had all her firepower in two quadruple turrets mounted forward, one above the other. This gave the ship excellent firing arcs needed for a battle plan emphasizing maneuver as an integral part of defending the ship. With a more electromechanical fire control system, the French could feed some data directly to their guns, and the results were going to show the merits of these ideas.
Richelieu concentrated all her fire on the Repulse, and though the British had an initial advantage of twelve guns to eight, the French would manage to get five hits against the battlecruiser with her 381mm, 15-inch guns, and six more smaller caliber hits from secondary batteries. In return, Renown and Repulse were able to put two 15-inch rounds on the enemy, that first shot on the port side armor, and one more serious blow aft, penetrating the thinner armor there and interfering with one of the main propulsion shafts. It would trim six knots off the French battleship’s speed, cause moderate flooding, and a fire there would be difficult to control when it began to involve shaft lubricants.
True to tactical doctrine, Capitan Marzin now turned away to starboard, content to see that he had beaten Repulse to a fiery pulp with those five 15-inch shell hits. Two hits amidships struck away part of her aft stack and destroyed a cluster of five boats on the boat deck there. Another carried away most of the upper works on the aft gun director and smashed one of her triple 4-inch secondary gun turrets directly behind her aft turret. Another penetrated right through her relatively thin side armor, only 152mm at its thickest point compared to the 343mm armor on Richelieu. It caused a large internal explosion that compromised 8 boilers, and cut the ship’s speed to 19 knots. She was out of the action, turning away before Captain Marzin fired one last salvo at her before yielding the stage to the fleet flagship, which now loomed like a massive shadow coming out of the mist.
In all this action, Renown escaped much harm, taking only two secondary hits and one 8-inch round from the French cruiser Algiere. It was as if the name of Repulse was already inscribed in Fate’s register, for she was a ship that was living on borrowed time. The Japanese Navy should have sunk her, along with Prince of Wales the previous month in the Pacific. Now she lived on, but was nonetheless paying wergild to Time for that impertinence. If she made it safely to a friendly port, the ship would be looking at long months of repairs.
Tennant fell off in speed and turned to port, away from the action, but he was pleased to see Richelieu do the same. It was the loss of speed at a critical time that had given Captain Marzin pause, and one other thing, the presence of Normandie in his wake. This was a foe that overmatched these thin skinned battlecruisers completely, the pride of the French Fleet. That single ship carried as much raw firepower as both battlecruisers combined, and though Richelieu had fallen off in speed, her guns could still range on the enemy.
As if in answer, up came Valiant, making 23 knots to finally catch up to Tenant’s beleaguered battlecruisers, and her eight 15-inch guns would now throw in to try and even the scales. It was just the opening round of a battle that could wreck the heart of three navies that day, and when Admiral Laborde was informed that the German Luftwaffe was coming from the north, he smiled, thinking the day would be his from this point on.
If he was counting on air support to settle the issue, his appraisal of the situation was premature. His gunners, however, would do more than their fair share in the battle ahead, and a distant roll of thunder heralded the onset of the next round.
Part XII
Invincible
“Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow…
Between the conception
And the creation,
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.”
—T.S. Eliot: The Hollow-men
Chapter 34
Mac Morgan was with Captain Gordon MacRae on the bridge as the action opened. The radar operators had watched the German planes evacuating those two southern airfields, but thus far, nothing had tried to challenge the Royal Navy’s daring night raid. Later the Germans would use their Stukas in new Nachtschlachtgruppen, the ‘Night Attack Groups.’ To fly successfully at night, they would have to mount special exhaust eliminators, use ultraviolet instrument panel lighting and special sights. New tactics would also be devised, with flares used by designated planes to illuminate targets for the strike assets. None of the required modifications had been made on these planes, and the pilots had little night action training. Yet the coming of dawn, in spite of low clouds from the northwest, would bring the first real threat from the sky.
SAMPSON saw them coming well before they reached the battle zone, and Gordon MacRae decided it was time for Argos Fire to stand up the fleet air defense.
“Let’s get them well out from the fleet,” he said. “Aster 30s, gentlemen, and we won’t be stingy. That fleet replenishment ship was a nice catch, so we’ve topped off our silos.”
They had received 20 more Aster-30, and 40 additional Aster-15 missiles, along with 10 of the latest version Harpoons, the RGM-84. Now MacRae would let Argos Fire do the work it had originally been designed for, fleet air defense. It was a ship designed to neutralize
the threat of modern day enemy air power, and against these slower, ‘dumb’ targets, it would prove most lethal.
The Germans had been alerted by those night bombardment raids, and the crews at Tan-Tan, and other northern airfields were ready on the planes for a pre-dawn takeoff. I/KG-2 under Major Lerche was flying 38 Do-17s, along with III/LG-1 with 36 Ju-88s under Hauptmann Nietsch. They would be escorted by II/ZG-26 with 24 Bf-109s under Hauptmann von Rettburg. The strike assets were level bombers, with limited facility for naval attack scenarios, but behind them, a second wave of 40 Stukas had been reorganized at Tan-Tan in Oberst Bruker’s III/StG-2, with another 12 fighters escorting this group. That was going to put 98 aircraft in the first wave, and 52 in the dive bomber strike wave following, all of 150 planes.
Against this onslaught, Argos Fire had a total of 46 Aster-30 missiles that could reach out 120 kilometers, and 98 more Aster-15s with range out to 30 kilometers. So that would pit 150 planes against 144 missiles, but MacRae knew he could not expend his entire SAM inventory here.
“I think it’s time we got that launch order off to the RAF,” he said to Mac Morgan. “We can thin out the herd, but then we’ll need to hold a good missile reserve to cover these carriers.”
“Aye sir,” said Morgan. “I’ll get that order off to signals.”
“Mister Dean,” said MacRae to his XO. “Use the lamp to say goodbye to our friends for a while, and the ship will come 30 points to starboard and ahead full. Let’s get some sea room. We’ll open the engagement at 120.”
Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20) Page 29
