Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20)

by John Schettler

  There would be no guessing or wondering in this engagement. Those missiles were each going to find a target, unfailingly, and it was only a matter of how many missiles MacRae wanted to spend here in exchange for German planes. Initially, he hoped the shock value of his first salvos might also have an effect, so he ordered a full third of his Aster-30s in the opening salvo.

  One might have wished he could have seen the look on Goring’s face when the first reports of that missile fire came in, but the Reichsminister had long since left the theater, and was already back in Berlin. To the pilots who saw them coming, however, shock was not an adequate word. They did everything instinct would command, some diving to look for protective cloud cover, others trying to wheel and evade the deadly rockets, but all to no avail. One after another those missiles found planes, and a single hit was fatal. When it was over there were 135 planes on the radar, and 15 newly listed into the register of fate as KIAs.

  Yet it wasn’t enough to stop the Germans from coming. The scattered squadrons began to reform, and about 80 kilometers out MacRae decided on a repeat performance, this time with only 10 missiles, which would still leave him 21 of the precious long range lances under his deck. Again, the results were simple math—10 missiles fired, 10 hits, 10 planes gone with all their crews. Yet now it would be up to the lighter Aster-15s.

  Of the 98 planes in that first German wave, 73 were still out there. Three then lost their nerve in the rocket trails, and turned back, but 70 more were still coming. They would think the worst was over, flying another 50 kilometers without incident. The Do-17s had lost 18 bombers, but they were the back of the cupboard as far as Goring was concerned. Production had been halted on the plane the previous year in favor of the better performing JU-88s, but 12 of these had been killed by the Aster-30s as well. This left only 54 bombers alive in those 70 planes, the rest being fighters.

  When the next barrage of missiles came, their hot tails scoring the lightning skies, they fell on the remaining formations like a school of predatory piranhas. MacRae authorized two salvoes of 18 missiles each, and the thinning of the herd continued. Yet by the time the survivors actually got over the targets, it was found that they were largely ineffective in a naval strike role. Several near misses were scored on the battlecruisers of Force C, and Mauritius took a close shave with extensive shrapnel damage. Yet for all their bluster, the level bombers caused little more than trouble for the fish their bombs disturbed.

  Then the Stukas came. MacRae did not want to use any more of his Aster-30s, so he fired another 22 Aster-15s against the incoming group, killing six Messerschmitts and 16 of the dive bombers. The RAF was only now arriving over the channel, with seven Spitfires, and four Hurricanes joined by eight Martlets off Victorious. Argos Fire Stood down, turning the air defense of the main surface fleets over to the British pilots.

  “We’ve done what we could without pulling all our teeth,” MacRae said to Mac Morgan. “I only hope it was enough.”

  In fact, the Germans might have only registered a few more hits had their whole level bomber force come in unscathed. It was the Stukas that were to be the problem, for eight of the 40 planes that had started the attack got through, and one of them was being flown by a man named Hans Rudel. When he learned that his mates were in the air from Tan-Tan, he begged Ritter to let him go up.

  “Alright,” said Ritter, “but you get me as a wing man. I’ll keep the British off your tail.”

  Arriving a little late to the party, they did not have to run the missile gauntlet, and Ritter was too good to allow any of the British fighters to bother his charge. Two Martlets tried to get on Rudel’s tail, and he broke them up by flying right at them, all guns blazing and sending one down in smoke, with the other veering away at the last moment in that deadly game of chicken.

  Free to pick his target, Rudel came down on top of the battleship Valiant, and put his bomb right on the gun director mast directly behind X turret aft. Up in that director, the men were working in the crowded, armored space. The Rangetaker was in the center, Gunlayer on his left, hunched forward and peering through the telescope. Directly behind him was the Telephone Talker, who would relay some data verbally to the Gunnery Table below decks. The Control Officer sat directly to his right, and behind him was the another Rangetaker. There were two more seats for Rate Officer and Trainer when needed.

  Rudel dropped a 1000 pound bomb. It shattered that station completely, killing everyone there and silencing the stream if information they were feeding to the Gunnery Table below. After that it started a fire on the boat deck, and while not serious enough to prevent the ship from fighting, the hit would weigh heavily in the action that followed. The men around the Mark VII Gunnery Table would have to work a good deal harder with the loss of that gun director data. Valiant could still punch, but she was sluggish at it, and often missed the target.

  She came on the scene of the battle, seeing Repulse trailing thick smoke, and wallowing to port as her speed fell off. Renown was still engaging, now shifting her six 15-inch guns to the looming threat posed by the Normandie. That threat soon became hard steel in the ensuing duel. With a light rain starting to fall, and reducing visibility, Laborde ordered his ship to close, trusting to the heavy armor that protected him, and knowing the British battlecruisers had thinner hide. With him came the cruiser Algiere, and two of the fast destroyers, Le Fantasque and Le Terrible.

  The British would find they were simply overmatched. The opening salvos from Normandie found the range quickly, and Laborde put on speed, swinging up and around Renown to make it more difficult for the other British battleship to sight him. Renown turned with him, and the range closed very quickly to 10,000 meters, where the French gunners really began to do their work. A hit was scored amidships, and then another quickly followed. Already wounded slightly in her scrap with Richelieu, the battlecruiser scrambled crews to fight the fires, which soon involved her aft turret to a point where that gun was out of the action at a critical time. The Normandie could now pound away with twelve guns to four, and only the two forward turrets of the Valiant were in action as that ship came around to get a better angle on the enemy and join the fight.

  Seeing the battleship as a more serious threat, Laborde shifted fire to Valiant, straddling the British warship on the third salvo. When Normandie next fired for effect, the result was awesome. In the probing segment of the battle, the ships would most often fire two guns at a time to easily spot shellfall and gauge proper bearing, line and range. Once Normandie had these in hand, Laborde decided to let loose with a full broadside, though he ripple fired one turret at a time. The result was still going to be twelve heavy 15-inch shells coming at Valiant, and three were going to hit, a remarkable score.

  The forward A-turret was struck a severe blow, and knocked senseless, the conning tower took the second hit, shuddering behind its 11 inches of armor, but the third hit was above the main armor belt where the thickness reduced from 13 inches to six. It penetrated the ship directly beneath the mainmast where it struck the magazine for the number three 6-inch casemate gun, to cause a severe internal explosion. The concussion blew through two bulkheads, and down another three decks, a hard body punch that had the ship stunned and reeling from the blow. Everyone on the bridge must have been knocked off their feet, for the ship seemed to waver off line, as though no one was at the helm.

  Now, with one turret aft compromised by the fire Rudel’s bomb started, and the A-turret out of action, Valiant was struggling to get back on her feet with B and Y turret, but she did not fire for some time. The French had two more quadruple turrets ready and well aimed before the British ship got off two rounds with B turret. They would be the last to come close to hitting the Normandie, because that body punch had also loosened side plating, and water was leaking into the ship at three places. Flooding and fires below decks would soon leave Captain Morgan no choice. He would be forced to flood the magazines for B-turret, which looked to put him right out of the action.

  C
aptain Charles Daniel on the Renown saw Valiant turn, her guns mostly silent, the ship enveloped in heavy smoke and her speed off to little more than 18 knots. Now he saw the big turrets on the Normandie retraining on his own ship, and he knew the thin side armor on the battlecruiser would not protect him. He gave the order ‘all ahead full and ten points to starboard,’ but Normandie was too quick, easily keeping pace as he tried to open the range. The situation was quickly becoming desperate, migrating directly to hopeless when another secondary explosion deep inside Valiant opened her sides to the sea. Then Renown herself took yet another hit amidships from a 15-inch shell, the flat trajectory piercing her armor low on the waterline.

  The next twenty minutes were hell on the sea, as Captain Daniels saw Valiant list heavily to her port side, her hot fires hissing and steaming as the ship rolled inevitably over. There was a hushed moment on the bridge, and even the French ceased fire momentarily as they realized what was happening. Nearly a thousand men would go into the sea, and the loss of the hero of Gibraltar, hung heavily on any man who saw the ship go down. Now there was only one ship left of the old Queen Elizabeth Class, the dour hearted Warspite, with Cunningham in the Med. Barham and the Queen were long gone, and Malaya was a wreck in Alexandria, never to sail again as a ship of war.

  The pride of France had delivered a knockout blow here, besting not one, but two capital ships of the Royal Navy. Captain Daniels had only one thought now, to put as much sea room between his battlecruiser and that monster out there as possible, but it was not to be. The enemy was simply too fast.

  Normandie took up her station abreast at about 6000 yards and had all twelve guns in action against only four on the Renown. The French ship would take three hits, one on a secondary battery, and two on her heavy side belt armor, which weathered the blows. In return Renown would take 29 hits from various calibers, with 11 of those coming from the bigger 15-inch guns. The battlecruiser was literally beaten to scrap, burned from bow to stern, and soon dead in the water.

  More to conserve ammunition than anything else, Laborde ordered cease fire, and sent in Le Fantasque and Le Terrible to finish her off with torpedoes. The cruiser Algiere had chased off the two British destroyers, and so all things considered, this was a decisive win for the French. But it was only part of the massive naval battle now being waged that morning. Elsewhere the cruiser squadron of Force C was having a better time against three French cruisers and a pair of destroyers. The more experience Royal Navy Captains simply fought their ships better, and they would put the Dupleix down for good before the light faded when the sun climbed through the low cloud deck.

  The main body of Tovey’s Home Fleet had not yet been engaged, but that was now coming to a head. Two more duels would be fought, and Tovey would again face his old nemesis when he saw the contacts reported off his starboard bow were the threatening high silhouettes of the German Schweregruppe.

  “Sir,” came a runner from the W/T Room. “Message from Kenya up ahead. Valiant has gone down, keeled right over sir, and we’ve lost Renown as well, dead in the water and burning down to a stub.”

  “Easy boy,” said Tovey, with just a little iron in his tone. “We may have lost those ships, but I’m quite sure that signal said nothing of the kind. In the future, a salute and a hand off on anything you bear from the W/T Room will be sufficient.”

  “Aye sir… Sorry sir.”

  “Now then. You are to go to the flag bridge and have them hoist the ship’s battle ensign. By God, that’s Nelson’s flag, and so step lively.” Tovey looked for his chief gunnery officer. “Mister Connors!”

  “Sir!”

  “Kindly pick your target. That big fellow in the number two station looks promising.”

  “That it does, sir.”

  Chapter 35

  HMS Invincible was the flagship of the fleet, but in many ways it was now showing its age. Commissioned in 1922, just two years after the Hood, the ship would soon celebrate her twentieth birthday. Estimates of the life span for Hood made in 1920 considered that the probable year for scrapping would be 1941, a rather prophetic estimation. In like manner, Invincible might have had an appointment at the scrap yards, were it not for the onset of the war, where every ship afloat would be needed.

  Tovey loved the ship for its excellent combination of speed, protection and sheer firepower. Fleet men would say it could run like Hood and yet punch like Nelson, the best of both ship classes. And it was a much tougher ship than Hood, with better deck and side armor, and a well protected conning tower with just over 200mm of steel. While Hood had an older Fire Control Table from the 1920s, Invincible had received the Mark VII when both Renown and Repulse got theirs. Only the newer King George V ships had anything better, the latest Mark IX. While very well protected, that class had a lighter throw weight in 14-inch guns, and Invincible was four knots faster.

  So all things considered, Tovey was in perhaps the best ship the Royal Navy could put to sea, aging, yet still strong and battle worthy as ever. The ship would now face the best Germany had, and for the second time. She had made a bold rush at Hindenburg and Bismarck, fighting a battle that many thought she might not survive, and fighting it alone. Now, with the company of King George V on her wake, Tovey thought the odds had shifted a notch in his direction, but this was to be a much different battle. He was not alone, not desperate, and therefore did not have to resort to the desperate and daring charge he had made the first time these ships met, and the sly use of his forward torpedoes against an opponent who had been born and bred as a torpedo man, Admiral Lütjens.

  But Lütjens was dead by then, the victim of an errant shell splinter that blew out his consciousness like a sudden breath of air could extinguish a candle flame. Kapitan Adler was in his place, and the last thing he had ever expected from HMS Invincible was a close range torpedo run. Now things were different. Raeder was aboard, a man with even more experience than Lütjens, and Adler had every confidence his fighting Admiral would prevail.

  * * *

  “Target bearing 320 degrees at 18,400 yards!”

  The Gunnery Talkers were already at work on the Invincible, sending data to the Rangekeepers in the Fire Control Table Room, which would become turns and half turns on dials, which in turn sent new data on to the gun turrets where the Gun Captain ordered his trainer and elevators to mirror that data as best they could. It was a long human chain, from the eyes, head, and hands of one man to another, a communication moving from mainmast to the guts of the ship, and then back out again to the massive gun turrets.

  Starting with the optics that allowed for that sighting, the Germans had an edge with their much wider rangefinder base length of 10.5 meters compared to only 4.6 meters on the British ships. The German optical performance was perhaps a third better, but the British would also utilize additional rangefinders mounted on their gun turrets, instead of relying entirely on the central control of their main gun director station. They would also enjoy a clear advantage with their much better radar sets.

  Radar was supposed to bring more certainty to finding that range, but the guns still had to be properly trained and elevated to match what the radar indicated. Argos Fire had been jamming all typical bands to blind the enemy, and everyone else, but when the action was to start, Tovey had requested they cease this interference so his ship could have the benefit of that Type 274 Radar. The German FuMO23 could only calculate and send data for proper gun elevation, but the British Type 274 could also calculate bearing. It was therefore about 40% better at feeding useful data to the guns, at least on King George V. With her older Fire Control Table, Invincible would have more human links in the chain between the first sighting of the enemy and the order to fire, but that order eventually came from Tovey’s lips, the single spoken word that opened the action at about 18,000 yards.

  “Fire!” came the order, but after it came the lag, the shadow of uncertainty, those shaved halves of seconds that were made up of the sheer time it took for the human brain to process that order,
move that finger, and press the trigger. Then there was the mechanical lag in the gun firing interval. With the trigger pressed, the circuit had to complete, the charge had to fire, and the shell had to travel down the long bore of the gun.

  T. S. Eliot might have been speaking of this when he wrote: “Between the idea And the reality, Between the motion And the act, Falls the Shadow…” In a modern ship like Kirov or the Argos Fire, that interval of shadow had been beaten down to the barest fraction of a millisecond. Yet in 1942, that space was a vast gulf that loomed between success and failure in the entire mission all of this machinery was intended for—the bringing of death and destruction to a specific point in space and time.

  The specialists at the Admiralty had calculated that darkened interval at somewhere between one quarter to a half second. And in that interval there came the roll of the ship, the movement of the gun firing platform, a change in the wind, a change in target speed or course, a swell in the sea. For every careful calculation intended to guarantee a hit, a hundred other factors arose to try and frustrate that attempt, and impart a further margin of error to deepen that shadow. The gunnery directors would try to compensate with a so called ‘forecast’ that would account for these discrepancies. It was an assessment made by the Gunlayer, a human assessment made by a human eye: one part judgment, one part experience, one part guessing, and three more parts being the mechanical gauges and optical sights he used to measure everything.

  As things evolved, gyroscopes helped to stabilize the Gunlayer’s sighting line, and special TIC gear was fitted to automatically calculate the forecast. Those letters stood for Time-Interval Gear, and they were trying to take away that need to make an educated guess, turn it all over to something mechanical, win through to certainty, and eliminate the possibility of error. Yet in every ship, the Gunlayer was still guessing, still hoping he was right, and often betting his life, and the lives of everyone else on his ship and the target in the same breathless moment.