“Hey, lookout you navy rats!” he shouted into his radio set. “We’re friendly!” The navy was taking no chances, he knew. They had been hit, saw incoming aircraft, and they were sending up a wall of flack in reprisal. The destroyers were up at high revolutions, dropping depth charges in their churning wakes, but Boone knew this was no U-boat attack. The cruiser was lighting up the sky with all of her eight .50 caliber machine guns, two 37mm AA guns, and even her 5 inch secondary batteries, which doubled as AA guns, were getting into the fray. Friendly or not, he wasn’t sticking around.
Boone banked sharply away, a few of the other planes tailing after him, and he headed away from the navy ships until cooler heads could prevail. He’d get on the radio and find out what to do later. He reasoned he could head west and reach the coast of Greenland soon enough, or just ditch his plane later near a friendly ship if it came to it. One look at Wasp told him he wasn’t going to get a chance to complete his carrier qualification ticket and make a landing there. He looked over his shoulder and saw the ship heeling over to one side in a bad list, and thought he saw men jumping from her flaming decks into the sea.
God almighty. It wasn’t the Japs, and it certainly wasn’t the Brits that had attacked them. It had to be the Germans, but with what? When he had gained a little altitude he saw them again, angry red sharks streaking in and diving for the navy ships. One came in on the deck, accelerating to an impossible speed, another just dove in from above, both knifing into the cruiser Vincennes with pinpoint precision, igniting a shuddering explosion.
He watched the orange fire ignite amidships on the cruiser, a black fist of smoke punching up into the sky above her. What was the enemy firing? It looked like torpedoes were streaking through the sky, but this was no U-Boat, he knew. He had never seen anything like it in his life.
“God Almighty!” There was nothing else he could say.
His presence over the ships was a cause for much alarm and confusion. The sailors thought they were being attacked by enemy planes until one finally spotted a white star on the wings of the last plane high tailing it off after Boone.
“Hey, that’s one of our P-40s,” he said. “Hold your fire!”
~ ~ ~
Fifteen miles to the southwest, Task Force 16 plodded along at a sedate 15 knots, a fan of five destroyers out in a wide forward arc followed by the cruisers Quincy and Wichita. Behind them came the lumbering hulk of the old battleship Mississippi leading four other steamers in columns of twos, the transports bearing equipment and supplies for the newly established garrison on Iceland. Mississippi led her four steamers on like a fat mother goose, not realizing that what they would come to call a deadly “Nazi raider” was moving south like a bad weather front, bringing the rumble of thunder, lightning and war with her. The men on the bridge had heard the frantic radio calls of the P-40 pilots. Now they looked anxiously forward, scanning the horizon until they saw a pillar of dark smoke, far too large to be coming from a ship’s stacks.
“Sound General Quarters,” said the Captain. “That’s a ship on fire ahead. Better get the destroyers revved up. There could be U-Boats about.”
Captain Jerald Wright had tipped his hat to the new light carrier Wasp when she pulled away some time ago, and now he looked through his field glasses to see the carrier burning on the near horizon, a long column of charcoal smoke staining the sky ahead. Whether they knew it yet or not, the Yanks were at war.
Part IX
Dilemmas
“It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most… Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chapter 25
When Samsonov reported that the American planes had been decimated, and their carrier struck by three Moskit-II Sunburn missiles, the crew in the CIC cheered loudly. Karpov stood proudly on the bridge, his arms clasped behind his back, a satisfied grin on his face as the Weapon’s Chief finished his report. In all their maneuvers and war games the Kirov had been pitted against their one great nemesis, an American carrier task force. They had finally sunk one, or so they now believed.
Admittedly, this was a far more scaled down version of that threat, an old light escort carrier compared to the massive nuclear strike carriers Kirov had been built to oppose. It was little wonder, then, that the Russian ship dispatched her easily enough. The Americans had been steaming blithely along, without the slightest inkling that any threat was near. They had received no official word of the British dilemma concerning this new German raider until it was too late. Their P-40s had carried nothing more than a standard load of machine gun ammunition, and the main attack squadrons assigned to Wasp had been left behind in Norfolk. The carrier had only 3.5 inch side armor, and so Samsonov was able to use sea skimmers in the final approach to easily penetrate this and wreak havoc deep inside the ship. The explosions erupted up through the unarmored flight deck, igniting fires the length of the whole ship. Four of her six boilers were destroyed and the remaining two were off line within minutes due to the heat of the fires, which were so hot that bulkheads protecting undamaged areas around them were glowing red.
Of the 1600 men aboard Wasp that day, 572 died within the first five minutes of the explosions. The remaining crew scrambled for life preservers and desperately tried to fight the fires. Fifteen minutes later, secondary explosions blew a hole in her thin hull and she began shipping water at an uncontrollable rate, listing fifteen degrees in a matter of minutes. Her captain, John Reeves, gave the order to abandon ship and struggled with his bridge crew to find a way out of the growing inferno, forced to exit via a side hatch and literally leap from the ship to save his life. Hundreds of other men were already in the cold Atlantic waters, and the death toll would rise to 1127 before the day would end.
The destroyers O’Brien and Walke had been churning about dropping depth charges at an enemy that was not even there. The cruiser Vincennes was firing at the last wayward survivors of Army Pursuit Squadron 33, until she was also struck by two more of the deadly Sunburns. One bored in at sea level, it’s own pinpoint accuracy again working in favor of the target when the missile struck the thickest part of her belt armor. Yet even that was only 5 inches of steel, less than the British battlecruiser Repulse that had been damaged by a similar attack. This time the missile warhead was able to penetrate a little deeper, and the resulting explosion was far more serious on a smaller ship, only a third the displacement of Repulse.
The second missile, however, was one of Samsonov’s reprogrammed Sunburns where he had eliminated the sea skimming leg of its flight path. Instead the missile flew in at just under Mach 3, then simply dove directly down into the ship. It struck the forecastle, blasted clean through, and gutted the ship, igniting two secondary magazines and then blowing a hole in the bottom of the hull for good measure. Another 568 men of her compliment of 708 would die. While the Wasp was deepening her list and sagging lower in the sea, Vincennes was a scorching wreck.
The remaining two destroyers stopped their anti-submarine runs and desperately tried to rescue as many men as they could pull out of the water, their crews fearfully eyeing the horizon. Walke had nets and ropes down, and launched every boat and life raft she had aboard, but those unlucky enough to have found a rope were out of the frying pan, into the drink and then back in the fire within minutes. One final Sunburn missile, a sea skimmer, came lancing in at the destroyer where it lingered near the stricken cruiser, and the impact easily penetrated the small unarmored ship, igniting one of her quadruple torpedo mounts, which joined the explosion and literally broke her in two. She sunk within minutes, taking 163 of her 192 man crew with her, along with every man she had managed to pull out of the sea.
Seeing this, the skipper of the last destroyer O’Brien quickly maneuvered his ship behind Wasp and used the burning carrier as a screen while his men tried to pull in
as many souls as they could. He was lucky that day. Captain Karpov, satisfied with his kill, had decided to fire only one section of his lethal Sunburn missiles, six in all, and in doing so Task Force 1 was all but destroyed. The death toll mounted up to 1882 killed, another 460 wounded; almost as many as the Japanese attack might have killed at Pearl Harbor four months later. The date was August 5, 1941, and it was the greatest peacetime disaster in US naval history, and a new “day of infamy” when the American president finally learned the gruesome details of the surprise attack three hours later.
~ ~ ~
It was just after a late lunch aboard the heavy cruiser Augusta, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was resting on the bed in his sea cabin. He was enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, examining a few new stamps with a magnifying glass and thinking where he would add them to his collection once he returned home. On December 8, 1934, the dirigible Graf Zeppelin, named in honor of Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German inventor of hydrogen airships, departed from its home base at Friedrichshafen, Germany, bound for Recife, Brazil. It was Christmas and the airship carried 19 passengers, a load of freshly cut Christmas trees, and bundles of postcards and other holiday mail. Roosevelt was looking at one such card, Luftpost, Par Avion, and noting the distinctive circular green stamp showing the dirigible overlaid with a Christmas tree, when there was a knock at his door.
The president’s Scottish terrier, Fala, barked at once, and bodyguard, Mike Riley, got up and went to the door. His son, Franklin Junior, looked over his shoulder, seeing the shadows of three men outside and hearing the distinctive voice of George C. Marshall speaking softly to the guard. The door swung open and in came Marshall with Admirals Stark and King, their faces grave and set. Marshall was the first to speak, getting right to the point.
“Mister President,” he said, “we’ve been hit.”
Roosevelt looked up at him, a perplexed look on his face. “The Japanese?” He had been expecting trouble in the Pacific for some time now, but so soon? What had happened?
“No, sir,” said Marshall. “The Germans. Task Force 1 with the carrier Wasp was ferrying a squadron of P-40s to Iceland this morning. Apparently the British have been chasing down another German raider that broke out through the Denmark Strait.”
“We just got word of this, sir,” said Admiral King.
“It looks like Wasp ran afoul of this ship,” Marshall went on. “She’s been hit and is badly damaged. It’s likely that we’ll lose her within the hour.”
“I see…” Roosevelt put down his magnifying glass.
“There’s more, sir,” said Admiral Starke. “Cruiser Vincennes and destroyer Walke were also hit. Both sunk, sir.”
“My Lord,” said Roosevelt. “What was this ship, a U-boat?”
“No sir. It’s a surface raider of some kind. The British seem to think it may be the Graf Zeppelin.”
Roosevelt’s face registered real surprise. He looked down at his postcard, eyeing the stamp of the airship he had been examining just moments ago. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Our ships were attacked by an old blimp? How is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Admiral King. “The Graf Zeppelin is also the name of the new German aircraft carrier—a converted cruiser—and the British say this ship has a new weapon… some kind of rocket system, very accurate and capable of hitting ships and planes at extreme ranges. We just received word, sir. We don’t know how they’re launching them, or even seeing the targets, but the devil is in the details.”
Roosevelt’s eyes darkened. “What did we do to the enemy?” he wanted to know, but the three men were silent for a moment.
Admiral Stark cleared his voice. “Well, sir. It appears our boys never even saw this German ship. It was over the horizon. They had no visual or radar contact of any kind. In fact, the Germans hit our P-40 Squadrons shortly after they launched from Wasp for the run out to Reykjavík. They never knew what hit them, sir. It was a complete surprise—a deliberate attack against a neutral country.”
“I see…” Roosevelt’s face suddenly looked a hundred years old. His cheeks were sallow and drawn, eyes deep set and shadowed, with a distant, icy look in them. It was a look one might only describe as an ominous calm, as if he was suddenly seeing events that would now be set in motion the world over, cascading down through the days, months, and years from this moment, years of fire, and struggle, and the smoke and destruction of battle and war. And something in those eyes spoke to his own renewed awareness of his own mortality, as if some final, inner clock had tolled, and his own days were now to be counted off, like leaves falling from a tree, the long, lazy autumn of his life gone, and the winter of cold death waiting for him just ahead.
“Mister President,” said Marshall. “The casualties were… rather high. We don’t have the final numbers yet but there were well over two thousand men on those ships and planes. In light of the situation, I advise that we turn about and return to Washington.”
Roosevelt thought. “Where is Churchill?”
“His still at sea, sir. Apparently the British got a bit of a bloody nose when they went after this raider as well. Just like the Bismarck incident. Their ships are consolidating around Prince of Wales now, sir. That’s the ship presently transporting the Prime Minister.”
“Well is he coming or not?” asked Roosevelt.
“As far as we can determine, Mister Churchill seems intent on getting here to meet you, but we can advise him of this decision and postpone the conference until—”
“No, no, no, General. That won’t be necessary. If Mister Churchill is steaming on in the face of this threat, we’ll do the same. That’s a battleship out there with us, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Right, sir,” said Admiral King. “But the British inform us that two of their battleships were also damaged when they tangled with this new German ship. In the interest of safety, sir, I second the General’s suggestion.”
“And I veto it,” said Roosevelt bluntly. “That settles the matter. Put on speed, gentlemen. I don’t care how you do it, but get me up to Newfoundland as soon as you possibly can. And tell Churchill I’ll be waiting for him.”
Marshall had seen Roosevelt this way before, and he knew that once the President had made up his mind like this, there was no persuading him otherwise.
“Very well, sir,” he said. “If we increase to full speed I believe we can get you to the conference site a day early.”
“Good…” Roosevelt allowed himself a wan smile. Then his face was set and grim again. “Get word over to Mister Welles and the others. Also send a coded telegram to Secretary of State Hull back in the states. Tell him I’ll want a joint session of Congress convened immediately upon my return—sooner if he can learn to herd cats before that. This isn’t some U-Boat playing with a destroyer on convoy watch, gentlemen. This is something entirely different.”
There came another knock at the door, Roosevelt’s other son Elliot came in, his hat under his arm and eyes alight. “We just got word,” he said, a bewildered look on his face. “The Wasp has been sunk!”
Roosevelt leaned over, reaching for his pipe and tobacco. “Pull up a few chairs, gentlemen. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
~ ~ ~
Aboard Prince of Wales, the doughty prime minister received the word of the American president’s resolve with great satisfaction. He clapped his hands, his eyes alight with an inner fire and renewed hope. It was as if a new sun was finally rising on the gray horizon, dispelling the heavy fog of war and promising a blazoning new hour that would save his embattled nation and assure the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany once and for all.
He was with General Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. News of the engagement by his forces reached him the previous day, just as he was about to depart on the destroyer Oribi and slip out to Prince of Wales where she waited at anchor, her decks swept clean, guns and forecastle shining
with a fresh coat of paint. The Admiralty had not been pleased to hear the results of Wake-Walker’s air strikes against this troublesome German raider, and when Tovey reported his big ships were under attack as well, from an enemy no one had even set eyes on, there was talk of keeping the Prime Minister at home.
Churchill would hear none of it, and insisted on boarding and departing for his long awaited conference with the American president at Argentia Bay. Admiral Pound reluctantly agreed, and the battleship cruised from Scapa Flow a few hours early, wanting to get out to sea as soon as possible. It was not long before they ran into foul weather and the three destroyers escorting Prince of Wales lost contact with the bigger ship, but Churchill demanded that they steam on, determined. “Full steam ahead,” said the ‘Former Naval Person,’ as he oft referred to himself. Churchill had once held the Admiral’s post as First Sea Lord himself.
By midnight, Prince of Wales was well out to sea and some miles east of Ireland. They soon received word of the attack on Repulse and King George V, and Tovey’s intention to gather all his ships and form a strong covering force to insure the Prime Minister’s safety.
“Why doesn’t he just get after this German ship and make an end of it?” Churchill grumbled.
“Under normal circumstances I would agree with you, sir,” said Admiral Pound. “But considering the situation, I rather tend to second Tovey’s decision. You insisted on putting yourself in harm’s way, sir. It’s our duty to see that you reach your destination safely. Tovey’s got a sound head on his shoulders. I expect he’ll want to join up with us in due course. And then, when we have you safely off to Newfoundland, we’ll get out there and settle the matter, just as we did with Bismarck, sir.”
Kirov Page 30
