Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28)

by John Schettler

  Strangely, Sladen had been aboard the submarine Trident in Nordic waters, and once had the distinct honor to meet and transport a very prominent Russian Admiral back to the UK—Volsky himself. That man no longer existed, but a shadow of his being had been resurrected aboard yet another submarine, one that the men of the T-Class boats could scarcely comprehend. Now Sladen set his mind on perfecting his Chariot design, hoping it could bring fire and destruction to the enemy’s most protected harbors.

  It was not a suicide ride like the Japanese Kaiten manned torpedo, for the Chariot itself was never rigged to explode. It was merely meant to transport those two divers, and the nose of the torpedo had a detachable 600 pound warhead that would be removed and mounted on the hull of a target ship like a Limpet mine. The Chariots could ride on the surface, and also submerge to move underwater by battery power, not at the swift speed of a torpedo, but at a sedate four knots over a four hour period, giving them a range of 16 nautical miles. Slowing down to three knots could extend this another two miles. With the first Chariots delivered in June of 1942, the British had attempted an attack on the Tirpitz in the heavily defended base at Nordstern, but rough seas swamped the tiny craft, and they had to abort.

  Now eight more Chariots had arrived at Algiers harbor, along with the submarines Trooper and Thunderbolt. In the real history, they had mustered at Malta for ‘Operation Principal’ against Palermo on Sicily. Here they would stage at Algiers to target Tunis and Bizerte. The big Allied ground push was aiming to seize both those ports, and they wanted to prevent the Germans from sinking ships to block those harbor entrances. That operation would be dubbed “Welcome,” but it would be the last attempted, at a time when Allied ground forces were poised to take those ports. Before then, any shipping in either harbor would be fair game for the daring British frogmen.

  Trooper was only four months old, commissioned in August of 1942, a little over 1500 tons and capable of 9 knots when submerged. The boat was led by a man with a most interesting name. Lt. John Somerton Wraith moved to Trooper from the submarine Upright in June of 1942, and was assigned to support operations in the Med. Tall, aristocratic in aspect and demeanor, Wraith was eager to put the new devices to good use. His crew and boat had spent the entire month of December training to deploy the Chariots, and they were finally given their first target, not Palermo, but Bizerte.

  Life aboard his sub was no easy matter. Conditions were smelly and cramped, the food terrible, fresh water scarce, the air stale, and danger ever present. Now ‘The Wraith,’ as he was called, would have a pair of strange contraptions on his deck, and four extra men to fit into the crowded interior space of that sub. The daily ration of rum was a small consolation under such conditions, but the men bore up and endured. Many would not choose to be anywhere else, for there was something about the undersea service that was strangely alluring. Sixty men would go out on Trooper; another sixty on Thunderbolt. They would put their grubby service to the task at hand, eager to do something strangely different this time out. The two boats had worked out together in the Clyde for two months before sailing to the Med. Now they were ready for some action.

  The cylindrical containers on the outer decks were 24 feet long, and about five and a half feet in circumference. Lieutenant Wraith could immediately feel the difference in the way his boat handled when the chariots were slipped inside and he put to sea, burdened like a mule. He had to keep his speed down, and be cautious with course changes, so as not to rattle his deck cargo and give his position away. The two subs crept along the coast, stopping briefly by night to approach the small port of Bone for a little periscope reconnaissance. As dawn approached they stayed submerged, wary of being spotted by German air patrols. There was very little sea traffic between Bizerte and Bone, for the Germans were content to land their supplies at the two major ports and move them overland by truck. Yet the sea was far from empty.

  Somewhere out there, the Italian sub Dandolo was hunting off Algiers, for 39 merchantmen were due into the harbor, escorted by TF-33 with five US Destroyers. U-73 under Oberleutnant Deckert was also on the prowl. He had Helmut Rosenbaum’s old boat, a man that had been fated to get the carrier Eagle on his last sortie with U-73. That had been during the ill-fated Operation Pedestal, an operation that was shadowed by a strange intruder that had appeared in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Yet that was history that had already been re-written on this meridian. The Germans took Malta, so there was never a reason to mount such a relief operation as Operation Pedestal, and the mighty Kirov had sailed north around the top of the world to the Pacific in this Second Coming. In spite of that, Rosenbaum had enough success in the Med to warrant the transfer to the Black Sea, where he was now organizing a small flotilla of U-boats to neutralize the Soviet Black Sea Fleet at Novorossiysk.

  Horst Deckert was on the conning tower of U-73 that morning, his Iron Cross, 1st Class, hanging prominently beneath his left shirt pocket, a cigarette dangling between the thumb and fingers of his right hand. His officer’s cap was ruffled from too much use, and he looked tired, yet his eyes were searching the still grey waters, looking for any sign of trouble. He was feeling flush, for on New Year’s Day, he had caught the last US Convoy, UGS-3, and put two torpedoes into the Liberty Ship Arthur Middleton. He had hit her right on the bow, the explosion so spectacular that he knew he must have ignited a part of her cargo. He could clearly see portions of the hull plate careening up into the sky, followed quickly by a sheet of roaring flame. The damage was so severe that it nearly blew the bow right off the ship, which immediately began to sink, taking 81 crewmen with her, and only three of those men survived.

  Harry Cooke was among the dead, a man who had applied for a position as an officer in the US Navy in 1942. While he waited for news on that, his mother harangued him for idling about Boston while so many others were serving dutifully. So he signed on to the Arthur Middleton to bide the time and get a little experience at sea. He was just a Junior 3rd Mate, and right before setting sail from New York he wrote home to his mother to say he had been given the high honor of taking charge of the ship’s cat. His mother would get two more letters, one announcing the sinking and his tragic death, the second arriving weeks later, congratulating him on his acceptance as an officer in the USN.

  There were a hundred stories like that written every day in this war, lives, hopes, dreams, memories, aspirations all packed onto ships to venture out on the high seas, and the dark U-boats lurking in the shadowy depths were out there waiting for them. Harry Cooke was just one of those little stories, and there were 77 more on the Arthur Middleton that night, all letters that would soon reach the states with their dark news of Deckert’s accomplishment.

  It was a strange thing that put metals on a man’s chest for such an endeavor. Deckert already had three, and he had just added 7,176 tons to his account. They counted the weight of the ships they killed, not the lives of the men who sailed in them. Perhaps that was a way of maintaining some thin moral distance from the act of ordering those torpedoes into the water. At least Deckert always thought that way. He was killing ships, not men.

  A year later, he would take that same boat out from Toulon to prowl off Oran for a repeat performance. Another convoy was lining up to enter the harbor, and Deckert would line up on the Liberty ship John S. Copley. He would again put a torpedo into that ship’s starboard side, just forward of the mainmast. Flooding and an eight degree list ensued, and the crew was put off, but the damage was later found to be light enough to save the ship. Deckert would be hounded by the convoy escorts for his trouble, and destroyers Woolsey and Trippe would rush to the scene, force him to submerge with gunfire, and then put depth charges on his boat. There were 34 survivors, Deckert among them, but he would receive no more medals for torpedoing Liberty Ships, and spend the rest of the war as a P.O.W.

  This day, however, he would be caught up in a comedy of errors as he hovered off Algiers, making ready to return home soon. It was then that his sharp eye spotted a periscope, and he quickly
flicked his cigarette overboard and hastened below. His 1st Warrant Officer, Heinz Bentzein was there to greet him.

  “No fresh air for you, Heintz,” said Deckert quickly. “Take us down. There’s another boat out there, and it’s very close. Come right ten degrees and dive!” Deckert had spotted the Trooper, leaving port submerged with her secret little cargo on deck and easing out to sea. The next minutes were very tense, and Deckert slowed to a near crawl after he was submerged, wanting to be as quiet as possible.

  “Close call,” said Bentzein, “but I don’t think they’re on to us. Let’s get out of here.”

  “What’s the hurry?” said Deckert. “That has to be a British sub, and you know damn well where they’re going—Bizerte, or perhaps even Tunis to lay off the harbor and wait for our next convoy.”

  “Why do you say that?” said Bentzein, stroking his full beard beneath hair that was slicked back tight on his head with gel, gleaming in the wan light. He would not get his own boat until November that year, U-425 up north in the Arctic. And he would be one of the hungriest U-boat commanders ever to put to sea, mounting nine war patrols over 211 days and failing to sink a single ship before being sunk off Murmansk by the British sloop Lark and corvette Alnwick Castle. The events of the next 48 hours would be the most excitement he would experience in the entire war.

  “They could be going to Palermo, you know,” he suggested.

  Deckert was not deterred. “Bizerte,” he said. “That’s where the action is now, and we might as well get in on what they’re up to before we head home.”

  “What? We’re due back at La Spezia in just a few days. We don’t even have any torpedoes left.”

  “We’ll get there,” said Deckert. “What do you say Fritz? Shall we see what they’re up to?” He looked at his young 2nd Warrant Officer, Detlev Fritz, just 22 years old, a fresh faced lad who had been bothered by bad dreams of late. Fritz had served with Rosenbaum in this same position, and each night while he slept, his mind filled up with visions of a ship, long and powerfully built, its battlements towering up and crowned by strange antennae and rotating radar sets. He was seeing things that once were, but events that had not survived the rudder turn Kirov made after its second coming to this war. A few of the other crewmen were also bothered by those dreams, but few talked about it, except Fritz, and so the memories remained hidden, silent vestiges of another life.

  “Maybe you’ll get a chance to spot that battleship you keep talking about,” Deckert said with a wink. So it was decided to wait until things settled down, and then head east towards the friendly port of Bizerte. By day they would travel submerged, but as soon as darkness fell, they would surface to get that fresh air, and could cruise all night on the dark waters, relatively safe from air attack.

  For his part, Lieutenant Wraith had seen the German U-boat, but he was under orders not to engage unless his boat was directly threatened. He lowered his periscope, laid low after a course change, and then resumed course for Bizerte, not knowing that the enterprising Deckert was snooping about in his wake. The following day, Deckert was close enough to spot the Trooper as it surfaced, seeing the odd silhouette of the enemy boat in the distance briefly before it submerged again.

  “Strange,” he said. “They have something on deck, very bulky—some kind of container.”

  “Probably full of mines,” said Bentzein, arms folded, and still clearly unhappy to be off on this wild goose chase. That was perhaps a reason why Deckert would get nearly 40,000 tons before he was hit himself, and Bentzein would wander the northern seas day after day with nary a kill to his name. “What are we doing here?” he complained. “Just wasting time and fuel oil. You can’t do anything about them.”

  “Oh yes we can,” said Deckert. “If we can stay on their trail, then we can call in the Luftwaffe.”

  “Who’s to say they won’t attack us?” said Bentzein, ever cautious.

  The other boat angled off into the shadows, and hovered, listening with his sonar operator for some time, but they could not get enough information to locate the enemy’s position. So he just followed his hunch, continuing on for Bizerte, low and slow.

  The following evening, just after dusk, the two British subs reached the vicinity of Cap Blanc north of Bizerte undetected, or so they believed, and unaware that a silent shadow had been stalking them all the way from Algiers. They spotted a periscope under the moonlight, thinking it was the third member of their little mission Unruffled, which had been assigned as a rescue submarine. That boat was running very late, and was still 50 miles from the scene, but they had no message stating that.

  It never occurred to Lieutenant Wraith that he had just spotted a German U-boat instead of the one he expected to meet there, Unruffled. So he gave the order to proceed with the operation. Half an hour later they surfaced briefly, and the divers began to mount up their Chariots. Lt. Rodney Dove and Leading Seaman James Freel had the first launch on Chariot #16, and Lt. Richard Greenland and Leading Signalman Alex Ferrier would saddle up and take in Chariot #22. A mile off their starboard side, the Thunderbolt was launching two more Chariots, but it would be Trooper’s little contingent that would have all the luck that night.

  They had launched a few miles east of Cape Blanc, just where the headland dipped down towards Bizerte. All the Chariots had to do was follow the long dark coastline south to find the harbor, a journey of no more than four miles. Cruising at their top speed, they would make that in an hour. They would find the small breakwater that capped off Avant Port, the outer harbor, and then figure some way to penetrate the anti-sub netting. That could be tricky, and the crews off the Thunderbolt immediately ran into trouble. The battery failed on one Chariot, with a minor explosion under water that forced the two divers to try and surface to try and sort things out.

  It was a chaotic moment when it happened, the dull pop underwater shaking the Chariot, and Petty Officer John Miln was thinking they had been hit by gunfire. He could see Boatswain’s Mate Simpson roll off the saddle behind him, clutching his leg, a stream of dark blood in the water. He reached for the man, but saw him disappear into the depths. Unsure of what had happened, and alone in that wild moment, Miln realized that his Chariot had lost all power, and that he would now have no recourse but to abandon it and hope he could make it to the shore. It was simply too far to try and swim north to look for their subs again. He looked in vain for Simpson, but never found him, eventually pulling himself ashore near Andalucia Beach north of the harbor, wet, tired and disheartened. He would soon become a prisoner of war, but there were still three other Chariots out there, hoping to succeed where the first one had failed.

  Chapter 11

  Unfortunately, the other Chariot off Thunderbolt would also have problems, not with their torpedo, but with one of the men riding it. Lt. Cook had guided his Chariot quietly towards the south entrance, beyond the long breakwater. The men submerged to try and find a way through the anti-submarine netting, but the ride thus far had left Cook in some distress, his inner ear conspiring to give him a bad case of seasickness. With his stomach queasy, he now had to breathe underwater through his mask, and was struggling to keep his meager breakfast down, when a sudden ill-timed move near the netting saw it snag his suit and cause a bad gash. Seaman Harold Worthy was behind him, and he turned to show him his badly compromised suit, then rubbed his stomach and pointed to the surface. He got there just in time to rip off his face mask and heave out his guts. A few seconds later, Worthy bobbed to the surface beside him on the Chariot.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sick to my bloody guts. You’ll have to go on without me.”

  “And then where does that leave you?” said Worthy.

  “Go on, I can tread water out here until you get back.”

  “Not on your life,” Worthy couldn’t just leave him out there like that. “Get back in the saddle, and I’ll at least get you to shore. Then I’ll have a go.”

  They did that, making it south to Rimel Beach at a little spit
of land that jutted out to allow Worthy to keep the Chariot from going aground. He figured he still had two hours of battery power left, which would be enough to make a run for the harbor, and then get back here to recover his mate. Keeping as quiet as he could, he struggled to get the Chariot turned around again and pointed out to sea.

  It was after midnight now, and a heavier swell started to work its way through the channel. Worthy got the Chariot out to sea again, intending to move north before turning left to make his approach to the southern harbor entrance. As he went, it became more and more difficult to manage the Chariot, which had really been designed to be operated by two men to keep it stable in the water.

  Without Cook in the saddle behind him, his backside was too light, and the swell kept batting the tail about, which would force him to strain to correct it. He soon found himself veering off in one direction, then laboring to turn his craft, only to see it veer off again. He was too long at sea, and near exhausted before he realized he could simply not maneuver the damn thing against the swell. The only thing to do would be to try and get back to Cook and see if he might have recovered enough to lend a hand. So he turned about, this time the swell working in his favor to help carry him along, but when he reached the coast where they had been, he could find no sign of his mate there at all.

  Cursing his bad luck, he now knew he had to get back out to sea to ditch his Chariot in deeper water so it would not be taken by the enemy. He managed that, and then had no choice other than to swim for the shore again, hoping he might find Cook this time and that the two of them could find some place to hide and work up a plan to reach one of the submarines. It was not to be. When he finally reached the shore again, it wasn’t ten minutes before an enemy patrol found him, and he would soon discover that they already had a very miserable and unhappy Lieutenant Cook as well.