Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  “Possibly,” said Laurence. “But they’re running into the thick of that foul weather out there, so he may have reduced in rougher seas. Then again, it might be a fuel issue sir. We don’t know how much they might have taken on before we interrupted the party.”

  “I’m inclined to think that,” said Sanford. “Let’s close up to about 16,000 meters and then reduce to match their speed. If we do keep on at our best, then we’ll catch him in about two hours. If he is in the thick of that storm, we would be too. It would be all gunnery by radar, and we haven’t a lick of training under our belts with that. Those salvoes we fired back there were the first gunnery trial we’ve had. Engaging a cagey enemy in a close quarters gun duel by radar doesn’t seem advisable.”

  “I would agree.”

  “So we’ll ease up to get a better fix on his position with our own radar, and then fall off to match his speed. In the meantime, we’ll have to keep an eye over our shoulder for that carrier.”

  In another twenty minutes, they fell off to 24 knots, and the range to contact held steady. There was no sign of any contact to their south or east. The Goeben had made a clean break, but they knew it was out there somewhere, and it could come only one direction soon—north. Captain Sanford’s plan of getting astride that route was a good one, and it was going to toss the hot potato to the Germans in short order, and force some difficult decisions on them.

  Chapter 2

  “Are they still closing?” Kapitan Heinrich was getting concerned now. It seemed that he was going to have to fight, one way or the other here. They had fallen off to 24 knots, and had been watching the enemy slowly close the range. Even at this speed, he was burning more fuel than he wanted to, but now his plan had changed. There was no way he could run all the way to Casablanca, but soon they would have daylight, and a good possibility of strong air cover, depending on the weather. He had already messaged the Luftwaffe to demand any support they could fly, and when Admiral Raeder seconded that request an hour later, the local commanders at those southern airfields were already planning to get crews out in the rain to prep the aircraft.

  Then he got the answer to his question. Their pursuers had also fallen off in speed. The range was now holding steady at about 16,000 meters. Just to discourage them further, he had Schirmer fire off one salvo by radar, but nothing came back at them. At their present speed, it would be another 16 hours cruising time to the German held coast of Spanish Morocco, about 740 kilometers northeast now. By sunrise they would cut 500 kilometers off that distance, and be just within Stuka strike range. Every minute after sunrise favored his game, but he wondered what the Goeben was doing.

  The carrier had gone radio silent, knowing the British had Huff Duff teams all along the African coast, and not wanting to let them triangulate to get a fix on their position. But the Goeben had to be well south, the distance being determined by how far they ran to the east before they would have to turn north. This was what Kapitan Heinrich was assuming, and it would mean that the pursuing British cruisers would probably get themselves into a position to cut the carrier off. Goeben would not be able to fly her aircraft in this weather, not off that small flight deck in these seas. If they were caught, they would be badly outgunned.

  That would put a tough choice before him. It was agreed that if either ship was again engaged in what looked to be a fixed battle, they would send a signal to that effect, as their position would already be known to the enemy. If he got such a message from Goeben, should he then come about to render assistance? Or should he cut cards with the enemy, and continue north at his best speed, hoping to save at least one half of his precious cargo? That was the dilemma. Admiral Raeder had told him to avoid combat, but the thought of abandoning Goeben in her hour of need galled him.

  Yet you accepted this risk when you agreed to Falkenrath’s request to separate, he thought. As it stands, neither one of us can make it to Casablanca at anything over 18 knots now. Every minute I run north, even at 24 knots, I come closer to the moment when I might find this ship dead in the water, with all our fuel exhausted. I will have to reduce to 18 knots in an hour, and that might get me to Agadir with a little left in the bunkers, assuming the British don’t get to us first.

  Then he got a strange coded message. It was just one line. “FM: GW, TO: KW - 005 – 022642 / 21:42 - MEET YOURSELF OFF SPANISH MOROCCO – ZZZZ.” The first two code words were simple plays on initials. GW was Group West, and KW was the designation for Kaiser Wilhelm. The number 005 indicated the number of words in the message segment, followed by the date, and time. Then came the message…

  Meet himself? Of course! The German carrier Prinz Heinrich was still up there, and Raeder had been using it to run aviation fuel out to the Canary Islands. They had installed fuel pumps and hoses on that ship. If we could make a rendezvous with the carrier, it could serve to refuel us enough to reach Casablanca. But again, what about the Goeben? Perhaps I could make that rendezvous, transfer my cargo to Prinz Heinrich and take on enough fuel to turn south and give battle. That was going to be his hope and plan, though he still wondered if the Goeben could survive an engagement with those two new enemy heavy cruisers long enough for his effort to matter.

  He did not know it then, but he was worrying for no reason. The Goeben broke off to the east, but it was not coming north now as both Heinrich and Sanford expected. Like a falcon on the wing set free by its handler, Kapitan Falkenrath had run due east until he was out of radar range of the enemy, then he made a wide turn, not to the north, but to the south. He came about, and then took a course due west again, back-tracking, about 20 kilometers south of the position where the two ships first separated. All the while the two British cruisers ran northeast at high speed after Kaiser Wilhelm, and Goeben was now free to ease on out into the Atlantic.

  There was no way the Goeben would ever reach Casablanca now, or so Falkenrath had deduced. But he had no intention of taking the course the enemy most expected. He was heading west instead, intending to find Ermland again, and then he would drink his full and slip out into the Atlantic, looking for fair skies and open seas.

  * * *

  “A sticky situation,” said Somerville to Wells aboard HMS Formidable. “The Germans are making a run to the northeast. It appears they have no intention of operating against our convoys. The last message from Captain Sanford indicated they had been attempting a refueling operation with a tanker at sea. He broke that up, and then got into a footrace northeast with the Germans.”

  “He should have taken out that tanker first,” said Wells, which prompted Somerville to smile. He liked this young man. Wells was thinking like an Admiral here, and not a hot headed cruiser Captain. Get that tanker and you have hurt the enemy’s ability to operate here by a good measure. Yet Sanford, probably eager to blood his ships in battle, had elected to get after the German warships, and had been exchanging occasional salvos with them at ranges too long to matter in the present sea conditions.

  “Yes,” said Somerville, “get the pawn the enemy offers you first before you think to exchange Knights. That is what I would have done. The question for us now is whether we can delay here any longer. Mountbatten is in the Indian Ocean southwest of Java, and there are rumblings of trouble brewing there. My orders were to assure the safety of this convoy to Freetown, then get down around the Cape to join the Eastern Fleet. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave these German ships to Captain Sanford and his two new cruisers.”

  “Then we’re heading south sir?”

  “That will have to be the order, Mister Wells. Admiral Tovey has been after me to get moving, and so it’s down to Freetown with us tonight. Godspeed Captain Sanford, and wish the man luck.”

  That decision was going to take HMS Formidable out of the equation in the little drama shaping up off the African Coast. The weather was going to render carrier operations null and void for the next day in any case, or so it seemed. Unable to wait, Somerville turned south in haste now, as he had a very long way to go. Formidable had
6400 nautical miles to travel before reaching Mountbatten. At 24 knots, and with one stop at the Cape to refuel, he was looking at 12 days to the Java coast. Now he was worried he would arrive too late to lead the Eastern Fleet in any meaningful way to stop a planned enemy invasion of Java. He might not get there until the 9th or 10th of March, and by that time, the Japanese might already be well established on that island.

  He expressed these concerns to Wells, wondering what the young Captain thought. “Well sir,” said Wells, “if Monty is hard pressed, we may end up having to cover his evacuation to Australia.”

  “Possibly,” said Somerville. “But getting him to Darwin might be difficult at that point, particularly if the Japanese have managed to get planes on Timor and Bali, or even Java itself. In that instance, and considering the enemy is fond of covering their invasions with carriers as well, we may have no other choice but to fall back on Perth to the south, or simply pull out to Colombo.”

  “I don’t think Montgomery would like that,” said Wells. “The action is likely to move to Darwin after that, which is where he’d want to be.”

  “Precisely, but we may not be able to get him there. If this does come to pass, then Churchill will probably send his Rock of the East back to North Africa. Wavell wants him back there for his next operation, or so I’ve heard—the Rock of the Middle East.”

  “He’s a good man, east, west, or anywhere else,” said Wells, and Somerville agreed.

  Yet events were soon about to change near Java, and in a most unexpected way. At the moment, the little chase then underway in the Atlantic was going to matter more than either Somerville or Wells knew. For they had no idea what Kaiser Wilhelm and Goeben had hidden below their heaving decks….

  * * *

  Pitch black. There was still heavy cloud cover, and the moon was long gone, the sun still more than an hour off. Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad continued to probe their way northeast, slowly creeping up on the German raider by occasionally increasing speed. Radar was the only thing with a hold on them now, and Captain Sanford closed to 14,000 meters, risky as that was. He reasoned that the shorter the range, the flatter the trajectory for those heavy 15-inch rounds. His 152mm belt armor might then take the hit instead of the 50mm deck armor.

  Though it had fewer guns, Kaiser Wilhelm was still a much bigger dog at 35,500 tons full load. The German ship had 200mm armor on the main belt and conning tower, with 120mm on the decks. From every account, their optics and gunnery were also very sharp, and they had already put a good number of ships under the sea, Suffolk being the last victim to feel their hard bite.

  Cruisers have no business in a fight with a battleship, thought Sanford. That’s what I might have in front of me in another 90 minutes with the sun. Yet by God, I’m one hell of a cruiser, and with Sir Galahad at my side we’ve twenty 10-inch guns to bring to that argument, while they have only six. We’re going to get hits, and our throw weight will hurt that ship, I’m sure of it. The weather is still overcast, but the rain is abating, and the dawn promises clearing skies. That may not be good.

  I’d rather fight it out in the haze grey, ship to ship. But come sunrise we’ll be just 100 kilometers south of that enemy field at El Aaiun. They’ll likely have recon planes up, no matter what the weather holds in store. That hardly matters. Kaiser Wilhelm will have radioed our position, and they bloody well know we’re coming. So the Bofors may be just as important as my 10-inch guns at dawn. With Somerville off to Freetown and points south, we’ll have no air cover ourselves, and can’t even launch our seaplanes with the sea running this high.

  So it will come down to the guns and armor, unless we get swarmed by enemy planes. The sun will be in front of them if they run east for the coast, and they’ll be silhouetted. This time we’ll have the blanket on, at least until the sun gets up a bit.

  He looked for his coffee mug, finding it cold after the long night. He managed about four hours sleep, in the small ready/rest room he kept off the bridge, just big enough for a cot. They had fired three salvoes from A turret that night, just to check gun ranging, and harry their quarry. As they could not see the shell falls to judge range, that exercise was fruitless, and did more to jangle the nerves of the crew than anything else. The enemy never altered course, and continued on, now at an even more sedate 18 knots. It was as if they were daring him to come on up and have a go.

  That was what Sandy Sanford planned to do at first light. But he kept a rabbit’s foot in his pocket just the same. He had it thirty years now, and it always brought him good luck. He was going to need it that morning if he persisted on this course, but as fate might dictate, this time expressed in the will of the Admiralty, he would soon find himself on another heading.

  The flight of the Goeben did not pass without notice. There, lurking on the convoy route south to the Cape Verde Islands, the British submarine Trident under Commander Sladen had been diverted from a planned sortie into the North Atlantic to serve as a security patrol between the Canary and Cape Verde Islands. The boat should have been hunting Prinz Eugen and Admiral Sheer as they thought to transfer to a Norwegian port, but the former was sunk, and the latter was quietly sleeping at Kiel in this history. So Trident was well south of the Canaries when it came across a solitary merchant ship, moving in great haste to the southeast.

  It wasn’t part of any convoy in the region, as warning concerning the German raiders had diverted most of that traffic. After reporting the sighting, Sladen soon received an Admiralty order to follow, with an indication that this ship might be a German auxiliary that was known to be operating in the same region. The British had made a very good guess, for Sladen was now slowly creeping in the wake of Ermland, en route to its planned rendezvous with the Goeben. A little faster in the heavy seas, Ermland slipped away, and Trident radioed its last reported position. Realizing that Captain Sanford’s cruisers were very near the location, the Admiralty sent him a perplexing order on the morning of Feb 27th. He was to turn about and pursue this contact.

  “What?” Sanford could scarcely believe it. “Break off and pursue this other contact? My god, man, we’re just about to head into battle here!”

  It was another occasion where Sanford was killing the messenger, and Ensign Bob Willard stood there with a sheepish look in his face, not knowing how he could respond. Thankfully, the Captain realized the Ensign was not the man he needed to confer with now, and stormed off to find his First Officer.

  “Mister Laurence,” he said. “What in the world do you make of this?” He handed the man the signal, and Laurence read it dispassionately.

  “Admiralty order,” he said. “They must have wind of something sir.”

  “Yes? Well, while they’re sniffing about in the wind, I’ve had my hand on the tail of this German raider all bloody night! Now what’s this all about?”

  “Might it be that third contact we had on radar sir? We know there’s a German tanker out here somewhere. They’ve been trying to refuel their ships, and it may be that the carrier broke off last night to do exactly that. Whatever the case, HMS Trident made the sighting, and tickled the Admiralty’s fancy.”

  “Right, and now they want us to leave the bird we have in hand and go running off to look for another in the bush!”

  “Two in the bush, sir. The German carrier must be out there planning to meet up with this tanker. Didn’t you say that ship would likely be our best prey? If we can catch them in the act, we might have a better time of it than we would running up north after this battlecruiser, and under German land based air cover.”

  “But that carrier broke off to the east. This order will send us southwest.”

  “Indeed,” said Laurence. “The carrier might have doubled back,” he suggested. In any case, Trident must have seen something of interest…” He let that dangle there, eyeing the Captain to gauge his reaction.

  Sanford thought about that. It was, in fact, the same assessment the Admiralty had made, and the recent loss of Suffolk had also weighed in their decisio
n. These were two shiny new heavy cruisers, and they reasoned the crews had little or no time to cut their teeth for battle. In spite of Sanford’s arithmetic on the disparity in guns for the prospective engagement in front of him, Kaiser Wilhelm had already amassed a fearsome record at sea, with a proven, battle hardened Captain and crew. The gallant charge Sanford was planning to make seemed much more appealing to him, but as his First Officer had just pointed out, it was also going to be much more dangerous. And here was an Admiralty order in hand, compelling him to turn about and make his best speed to the southeast to look for this tanker.

  “Damn,” he said unceremoniously. “Well orders are orders. We’ll come about to the heading indicated in that message. The Admiralty knows damn well what I have in hand now, and instead they give me this business to attend to. So it seems we’ll have time for breakfast after all. Be certain Sir Galahad gets the message, if they bloody well didn’t get it first, like the last time. The turning point will be in ten minutes.” He looked about for Ensign Willard, but he had also made an abrupt change of heading after handing off the signal, and was already well on his way back to the W/T room.

  “Now where has that infernal signalman gotten himself to?”

  Ten minutes later the two ships made a graceful bow and turned away, and with that one simple maneuver the war itself reached a grim turning point, and one that no man involved on either side could perceive in any way at that moment.

  Orders were orders…

  Chapter 3

  Falkenrath lowered his field glasses, satisfied to have verified the watchman’s count of four men on the upper weather deck of the ship ahead. All the other signal lights had been proper, and so he was confident that they were slowly coming up on the Ermland.