“How about the linguists?” Winston asked.
“Nominally, the Marines are training the Navajo codetalkers, the Army has set up a school for Japanese, German and Italian. Remarkable how many second-generation people can’t really speak the languages of their parents. When the time comes, the Marines will pass codetalkers to the Army, and the Army will provide translators to the Marine Corps.” Larry said.
“How very ‘Purple,’” Winston joked.
“We set it up that way; forcing the services to share resources to encourage cooperation.”
“Are we passing up recent immigrants?”
“Not really passing them up, but I don’t think we have a program to lasso them in. Let me send it up the chain for consideration.”
“How are the British doing?”
“About the same as us. Building up. This time they did not guarantee Polish independence, so they are not yet at war, but the French are. We are now in the ‘Phoney War’ phase.” Tom replied. “But they have announced they will fight to protect France or Scandinavia.”
“What was their reasoning?”
“The couldn’t help the Poles even if they wanted to. By not going to war now, they are under no obligation to send the BEF to France. They are keeping their army at home to maintain flexibility. If the Germans hit Norway, they will hit back, there are a lot of advantages to having Norway. When the Germans hit France, if they do, the BEF will be too late to arrive and so avoid another Dunkirk. They intend to drive west from Egypt and seize the Italian colonies once Rome goes into France.”
“I wonder why the Italians gave Ethiopia a pass this time.”
Hereford answered, “We don’t really know, their army is pretty good this time, but perhaps the difficulty of transporting mechanized formations all that way made them think twice. More power, but with shorter legs, so to speak. They can make a real contribution in France when they go it.”
Winston stroked his cheek, “So we trade metropolitan France for Norway and North Africa. I suppose the Brits will preempt Petain this time?”
“They have something cooked up, I’m sure. The idea will be to keep a Vichy French state from ever being formed.”
This time Hitler and his advisor played it smart. German troops concealed in freighters and huddled on the decks of fast destroyers hit points all over Norway in a single night. Two days later, the armored formations crossed the frontier into France. The French panicked and began to collapse under the unceasing hammer blows of the German armor.
The British controlled the seas around Norway, and with their long-range fighter, the Glouster Reaper, soon dominated the skies as well. British aircraft dropped mines on Norwegian airfields soon after the Germans captured them. As a result, the Germans were unable to reinforce as quickly as their opponents.
Both sides used radio-guided bombs that sank the better part of the German surface fleet and several major British ships. Again, German attempts to bring in more force was thwarted.
In a sharp battle at Kvast, two British armored divisions smashed the Germans advancing north from Oslo and then their own began to drive south. While the victory was impressive on the maps that were hung in government ministries all over the world, the scale of the fighting was tiny compared to France.
There the French command structure suffered a nervous breakdown, unable to react more quickly than the invaders. While the German spearheads destroyed many formations, others were bypassed relatively intact. Some of these were brought off the beach by the Royal Navy augmented by hundreds of civilian yachts and fishing boats.
From Egypt, British reconnaissance formations secretly crossed the border into Libya, advancing a considerable distance before they found Italian formations. Using powerful binoculars, they counted and sketched formations before returning the next night.
“Have the Italians crossed into France yet?” Winston asked.
“Not a sign of it, in fact they are welcoming French refugees.”
“Message from the British.” Tom called to bring other conversations in the office to a halt.
“They confirm Paris has fallen of course, but also report that one of their armored car patrols got mired in quicksand in Italian Tunisia.”
“The British invaded Italian north Africa?” Winston was surprised.
Larry answered, “Just some aggressive patrolling. Nothing that would cause real trouble.”
Tom returned to the yellow dispatch in his hand. “The next morning, I guess that means two days ago now, the Italians found and captured them.”
“Then what?” Larry asked.
“The Italians called up a couple of tanks to pull them out, fed them a nice lunch and escorted them back to their own lines. The local Italian colonel explained his orders were to allow no provocation of the British in his sector.”
“Think El Duce is going to sit this one out?” Winston asked.
“It would make more sense if everyone in the whole world sat this one out.” Hereford replied gruffly.
“Will the British let them go on selling oil to the Germans?”
“Time will tell, I guess.”
Cooperation with the British increased as the national mood became more militant. The Royal Navy beat back the early U-boats with ease, but not without casualties. Each American ship lost was played up in the American papers thanks to an elaborate public relations offensive by the British and the Hearst Organization. Roosevelt called the U-boats the “rattlesnakes of the sea” in one of his fireside chats. The western half of the Atlantic was declared to be a ‘neutral zone,’ protected by American air and sea power.
The American Army staged a mock amphibious landing on Iceland and Greenland to relieve the British garrisons there. Both exercises were disasters with critical supplies misplaced and interservice cooperation weak. Still, they staffs learned from the experience. When the British offered air bases in the Caribbean in exchange for fifty old but recently renovated American destroyers, they repeated the evolution, this time invading the British West Indies with better results. This time the Sherman tanks swam ashore next to the landing craft and personnel carriers. Mock barrages fell on supposed defenders and air strikes protected the landings. Not perfect, but improved. By the end of 1940, the eastern Atlantic was an American lake.
Long-range Liberators began to patrol the air, reporting icebergs, storms and U-boats alike as hazards to navigation. When the Germans objected with gunfire, the Americans learned to reply with depth charges and hedgehogs. A secret war was beginning at sea away from prying eyes.
At the Boston Navy Yard the United States Navy collected its obsolete S Class submarines. Workers there stripped out their torpedo tubes and removed the ancient guns. Then they renewed the lead-acid batteries that provide underwater power and the diesels used to recharge them. Finally each boat had a new hydrophone array placed along their hull.
The seventeen boats left the port as each was completed to take up positions near major shipping lines. There they dropped anchor, submerged and began listening.
Admiral Hereford plotted each position on the chart on the wall near his desk. “Passive sonar pickets, Winston.”
“I thought I told you about our shore-based SONUS system. Sonar buoys linked by cable to a shore station.”
“Good idea, but our electronics are not up to it. This way all the delicate parts are in easy reach when something burns out. These guys will serve as training for our sonar crews, and a let us know if any U-boats come sniffing around.”
“So they hear a U-boat, then what?”
“They use a directional antenna and burst transmit to shore, then we send out a plane. As I understand it, there is no way the pickets can be detected.”
“Pretty darn clever.”
“We’re not cavemen you know.”
The British Oversight Committee reported an increasing number of the new electroboats, an advanced form of submarine. Gradually the new threat reached the American zone and began to teach the antisub
marine forces new tricks.
In the Pacific, defenses were improved in both Hawaii and The Philippines with the goal of full readiness by 1 December, 1941. First the Marines and then the Army began to practice amphibious assaults in California, then on remote Alaskan islands that offered more privacy. With time, even these complex operations became routine.
Douglas Macarthur was reluctant to leave his sinecure in The Philippines, but after an unfriendly phone call from an investigative journalist he was happy to return to West Point and his old position as Superintendent. To replace him, Marshall selected the Army’s best staff officer, Eisenhower who had grown to love the islands during his previous service there. He pinned on three stars as Commander-in-Chief of US Forces Far East.
In May, 1940, acting on secret orders passed to him by courier from the Secretary of the Navy, Admiral King launched a series of simultaneous unannounced mock air attacks on Pearl Harbor, Manila and the Panama Canal. The planes were able to score simulated hits on critical airfields, harbors and other facilities with ease. A scathing review of the exercise brought increased readiness to the defenses of American installations all over the world.
Chapter 13, A Lull
The Germans held Europe from the French Atlantic coast to the eastern edge of dismembered Poland.
The British were secure in Norway and had occupied Greenland and Iceland as air bases. At no point did British and German troops face each other. It seemed that the whole world was holding its breath.
“Sort of an elephant versus a whale sort of problem.” Winston observed.
“Plenty of war in the Atlantic.” Hereford replied. “The convoys form up in the East Coast ports, all they way up to Nova Scotia. We take them east halfway, then the British pick them up for the hard part.”
“How are we doing?”
“Well, overall the Germans cannot sink them as fast as we can build them, but that seems a crude way of saying it. Our main defense is the convoys themselves. If the electroboats can’t find them, we’re OK.
Sometimes a boat stumbles into a convoy, but not often. Once the ships get in range of the Luftwaffe’s long-range patrols the submarines can mass, the merchant ships get hit pretty hard sometimes.”
“How about the Royal Air Force?”
“The long-range fighters and the escort carriers try to knock down the Condors, the escorts try to kill the boats, the sweepers try to clear mines on the way into the ports. It is all in play, it can still go either way.”
Tom, the Air Corps man, wandered over to the conversation. “If the British could take out the airfields in France, that would change everything.”
“They can do it too,” Larry advised, “but only once. They can land a couple of mechanized divisions wherever they like, but as long as the German Army is at full strength the landing force would be wiped out in short order. I’ll hand it to Churchill, he has been able to restrain the Provisional French in Casablanca. If he let them, they would land in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t stand a chance in Hell.”
“So it all depends on Russia?” Winston’s question was rhetorical.
“British intelligence says that the Germans are already preparing to go into the Soviet Union.” Tom reached for a telegram. “Four thousand tanks in twenty armored divisions.”
“The tanks are mostly the Panzer IV, that is say the ones we saw in France have been moved to the infantry units.” Larry interrupted.
Tom continued, “over a hundred infantry divisions, all of them in various stages of mechanization.
Perhaps a thousand four-engine bombers, they are in France and the Low Countries now, hitting the British ports, but fields in Poland are being made ready.”
Larry picked up another pile of papers, “Our ambassador in Berlin is reporting a shortage of public transportation, even though truck factories have been going full blast for more than a year. Wool prices in Europe are skyrocketing as the Nazis buy up everything they can.”
“So this German guy, this Professor Hermann, is doing all he can to help Hitler win this time?” Winston still could not understand that. What was he thinking?
“On the other hand, the Italians seem to have found a way to cop a walk,” Hereford said, “that helps.”
“Anything about a Japanese or Russian guy?” Tom asked. For some reason they had taken up the casual word.
This was Winston’s special area of interest. “Some things, hard to be sure.” The Japanese seem to be stockpiling critical materials, we just don’t know if their effort is in advance of what they did in my timeline. In Moscow, nobody has seen Nikita Khrushchev for years. The Russians have purged their generals, but there are rumors they are not being killed. Again, we just don’t know what that means exactly.”
“We have done some clever stuff to help the Russians.” Hereford offered, “We have a fellow in the War Department who is spying for Uncle Joe, we are feeding him all sorts of technical tidbits for him to pass along.”
“Good plan,” Winston said, “if we told them, they would never believe us.”
The Red Army is a blunt instrument Zhukov thought. He was inspecting his troops facing the Japanese along the border between the Mongolias. In front of him a platoon of soldiers formed a pair of ragged lines, each man had pulled back his snow smock to show he was armed with the new SPK machine pistol. The weapon was well-suited to the army, so poorly made that the parts rattled, still the wide gaps between the parts ensured it would almost never jam.
“Where is your rocket launcher, Comrade Lieutenant?”
The young man barked out a command, two men ran to the front and snapped the two halves of the tube together. They fell into the snow and one raised a streamlined missile into the air in some sort of stylized drill from the practice range.
“That tree, the one that is leaning, shoot it!” The general shouted. Zhukov knew what he was looking for and it was not marksmanship. He stood beside the team and faced the platoon apparently in order to protect himself from the fiery launch. The subaltern knelt beside his crew and coached them through the firing procedure.
“Halt!”
The lieutenant instinctively knew he had been found somehow wanting and came to attention in front of his Commanding General.
“Comrade lieutenant, I have some questions for you. One, what is the distance to that tree?”
“Two hundred meters, Comrade General.”
“What is the range of this launcher?”
“One hundred meters, Comrade General.”
“So why did you not tell me the target is out of range? Does the cat have your tongue? I rely on you and your scouts to provide me information, comrade. Finally turn around young man and tell me what you see.”
The officer made an attempt at a parade ground maneuver in the snow and failed. “I see the Four Ninetieth Scout Platoon Comrade General.”
Zhukov walked around to face the young man again. “I see the Four Ninetieth Scout Platoon standing in the back blast area of a rocket launcher. You did not move them. Worse, they did not think to move themselves.”
“Listen to me, all of you. The Soviet State demands much of its soldiers, technical ability, courage and initiative. What sort of officer is too scared to report a target is out of range? What sort of soldier stands behind a rocket launcher? What sort of rocket team needs an officer to tell them how to use their weapon? This,” he waved toward the Japanese four kilometers away, “is no game.”
On his way to his staff car the general instructed the regimental commander that the unit was not to be punished. “It is critical that this lesson be spread as widely as possible. Let them tell the others.” As the car pulled away the general was already reading a report on the next unit he would visit.
The new American special operations boat, Halibut raised a periscope for a close look at the volcanic peak. The captain adjusted the focus carefully to determine the range before the cone disappeared in the dusk. With both the bearing and the range to a known point, the navigator could determin
e his location to a fine point of accuracy. This he plotted on his chart. The boat then raised its antenna mast. Over half an hour passed as the electronics officer listened for stray Japanese broadcasts. He also plotted known commercial transmitters over the horizon, further pinpointing their location. That done, the skipper ordered the snorkel to the surface and fresh cold air flowed into the boat. With the officer of the deck manning the periscope, the skipper returned to his map table.
“Here, sir.” The navigator was just a year out of university.
The captain grunted.
The intelligence officer pointed to a number of red marks on the Japanese shore, “These are known transmitters,” he indicated new points, marked in pencil, “here are three more new ones operating on military frequencies.”
“What do you think?”
“Probably an airfield, sir. The bearings we took yesterday crosses the ones today just here.” He placed another mark a few miles inland. “Also we saw air traffic climbing out of that area yesterday. It all fits. An airfield.”
“Okay, good. Once we finish this snort, we’ll take her down to the bottom to update our chart, but we still have to find their shipping channel. We’ll take her inshore tonight.” The skipper felt a real need to sleep, but could not bring himself to lie down while his boat was so close to the surface. Still he had to try. “Call me at 0200.” He walked to his cabin.
“Last one!” the foreman called. An open-sided truck pulled away from the boxcar and up the wide ramp of the Liberty ship and stopped in front of a gang of stevedores. With practiced strength the men forced the heavy bales, crates and barrels into place on the sloping deck. The last three tons of this load joined the rest in a pile reaching to the ceiling like the jumble under a giant Christmas tree. A longshoreman, a different union, hooked a number of chains to a wench which pulled them taught as a marginal precaution against the load shifting in heavy seas. With that the Liberty California was ready for his first trip to Liverpool. The men moved slowly to the loading door and home. None stopped to watch the huge portal raise and close into the side of the gray ship.
Paul Adkins Page 8
