Office if the Commander-in-Chief
Sir Roderic Maxwell Hill was notified at 17:00 hours, just as he was about to consider what to do about dinner. “What is it?” he said, shuffling a sheaf of reports into a folder.
“Sir, a priority message has just come in from the Siberians.”
“The Siberians? For me?”
“Yes sir, it came in on the special equipment—channel 272.”
“272…” That was the special code for high level command messages encrypted over modern radio sets that had been given to the British long ago by Admiral Volsky. They were used only for high-level communications, between Karpov, Fedorov, Volsky and British counterparts like Admiral Tovey, Wavell, or others in the know. One set was assigned to the War Offices in London, and now one was with the ADGB (Air Defense Great Britain) branch of Fighter Command.
“It’s directly from an Admiral Karpov,” said the messenger, handing off the paper.”
“Standby,” said Hill as he read the message. “Oh my… Good lord…” He was already reaching for a telephone, waiting for a brief moment, his eyes dark with misgiving. “This is an emergency air defense alert. Signal all ADZ Commands to be ready to scramble on my next order, and give priority to anything we have that can fight at high altitude. Understand? We need high altitude fighters up as soon as possible, and vectored north over the Midland to the North Sea. Notify the Yoxford Boys. Perhaps they can lend a hand as well.” He put down the receiver. “Lieutenant, come with me please. I’ll want you to use that radio set to contact the War Offices directly.”
The War Office building had stood near Whitehall and Horse Guards Avenue since 1906, a labyrinth of 1000 rooms connected by an endless warren of hallways and corridors. Strangely, in modern times it was sold to investors with plans to convert it into a luxury hotel with apartments. In 1944, it was as busy as ever, though many of its departments also had redundant offices scattered all through the United Kingdom, a precaution forced upon the British after what had happened at Bethnal Green.
Now the special red emergency light was glowing hotly, and the air raid sirens were already starting their long drone as dusk settled over London. Such raid alerts were not all that common these days, but this one was special. It began with the normal siren calls, then they abated briefly, and an on and off siren call took their place, the signal to the Civil Defense Command for a full emergency alert. It was a special protocol that had been put into place, and given the news from Leningrad the previous month, all the stations had been drilled on what to do. The radio also carried instructions, with all regular broadcasts interrupted to send out the warnings. Citizens were instructed to take shelter in the deepest underground facility they could reach on short notice.
Sir Roderic would go as high up the chain of command as he could, hoping to get Churchill himself on the line to convey the urgency of the message he had received. When he reached the radio room, he stared at the message again, typed out in stark bold letters:
ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!
LARGE FORMATION OF AIRSHIPS NOW ON COURSE FOR LONDON OVER NORTH SEA FOR POSSIBLE DELIVERY OF SPECIAL WARHEADS FROM HIGH ALTITUDE.
Special warheads from high altitude…. That line was dripping with the fat from everything the intelligence services had cooked up about the recent bomb dropped on Leningrad by airship. Sir Roderick had been in on those briefings, and he also knew of the very recent demands made by the Germans concerning the cessation of strategic bombing—demands that were summarily rejected by Great Britain.
All he could think of at that moment was that the enemy was coming at them tit for tat. My God, he thought… London….
Chapter 2
The Vault of Heaven
It was called the Welkin, from the old 12th Century English word that referred to the firmament, the vault of the sky. The older variant of the word simply meant cloud, but in 1944, it meant something else entirely to the RAF. The Westland Aircraft Company had designed and built a high flying, twin-engine heavy fighter interceptor, largely because of the threat perceived when the Germans had sent Junkers JU-86P Bombers over London on photographic reconnaissance runs.
Nothing in the RAF could touch that enemy plane, which had a marvelous service ceiling of 14,400 meters, or 47,244 feet. So the Welkin was designed to get up that high, borrowing from the high flying airships to use duralumin in the construction of its new pressurized cabin. It was a finicky plane, with a complex electrical system that required a long pre-flight check before most missions, and there were only about 75 operational in the entire RAF.
That day, the inspectors would not have the time to go through a four hour pre-flight check before sending the fighters up. The British were never quite satisfied with the plane. Its wingspan was 70 feet, compared to 54 feet on the more famous British twin engine fighter, the Mosquito. The length and thickness of the wings on the Welkin led to handling problems at high altitude, with a tendency to stall if the speed changed dramatically. But at least it was able to climb to about 44,000 feet, which was close enough to throw stones at those German bombers with its four 20mm Hispano cannons. The Mosquito would top out at 37,000 feet, leaving it unable to do much about the problem.
So it was that the British had only this plane, and a few modified Spitfires, capable of really challenging an enemy that could climb above 35,000 feet. But that was not true of the Americans, and now the meaning of Sir Roderic Maxwell Hill’s reference to the “Yoxford Boys” would be understood, for that was a reference to the airfield very near that town, between Ipswich and Great Yarmouth on the West coast of East Anglia, County of Suffolk. There, the American 357th Fighter Group held forth, largely involved with bomber escort duty, but this day they got a most unusual call to assist with fighter interception up north. They had just the planes for the job.
Composed of three squadrons, (362, 363, and 364) the 357th Group had three excellent aircraft. The first was the P-47 Thunderbolt, which had a service ceiling of 43,000 feet. Then came the P-38 Lightning, which could reach 44,000 feet, and finally the P-51 Mustang at nearly 42,000 feet. They were three first class fighters, all capable of flying at altitudes where they could engage all the smaller airships in Volkov’s fleet, and do so in style. Some might even nip at a big airship like the Baku , and only the Orenburg might be able to slip away higher, into the rarified thin air at 50,000 feet.
Volkov had counted on surprise, and the fact that his airships would not be detected until they were over the UK. His airships were carrying jamming equipment in the 20 to 30 megahertz frequency, which was where the British Chain Home coastal radars operated. They might normally detect an incoming threat 100 miles off shore, but Volkov hoped he could reduce that by at least two thirds with powerful jamming. He had not counted on the warning provided by his arch enemy, Vladimir Karpov.
Initially, Volkov’s plan seemed to be working. The radar operators had all been informed by telephone that an alert was being called for incoming aircraft over the North Sea, but they got nothing on their screens, and when they did, it was clouded over with much interference. By the time it resolved to a clear reading, the airship fleet was 30 miles off the coast, and running full out at 80KPH, about 50MPH. Once they reached the coast of East Anglia, County Norfolk, it would be a little over 100 miles more to London. But that was still two hours flying time, and in that interval, Volkov was counting on the night, and high altitude to preserve the stealth and integrity of his fleet.
He had not reckoned on Karpov’s warning, nor on the employment of all those high performance American fighters, and so now he was about to begin running that 100 mile gauntlet, with London seeming impossibly far away as the fighters vectored in.
When the report came in to Admiral Voloshyn that the vault of heaven was blighted by an ever thickening swarm of enemy planes, he took a desperate measure.
“Order all airships under our lift capacity to vent ballast and go to emergency maximum altitude.”
That would eke another elevation gain of 1500 to 3000 fee
t on those smaller classes, but it would be dangerous. Their gas bags would already be expanded to tolerance levels, and this would strain them even further. Add in fighters shooting 20mm cannon fire, and it was a recipe for disaster.
* * *
Fire in the sky.
That was what they would call it in the history of these events. The vault of heaven would be lit up with the hot, searing fire of burning airships. Those gas bags all had vulcanized linings, but 20mm shells taxed its performance, as did the chill of high elevation, and the high pressures within the gas bag itself. When the first Welkins climbed high enough to spot a flight of three airships, they got right on the tail of the Kalgar , and began letting those Hispano cannons do the work of the hour. They were shooting at the most vulnerable spot on the airship, as there was only one twin MG mounted in the tail, supported by fire from the aft engine gondola.
But darkness was as much a foe as it was a friend in that instance. The gunners in the airships were cold, wearing heavy coats, ear muffs, wool caps, and leather gloves. Some were already suffering the ill effects of the high altitude, sucking on oxygen flasks to keep themselves clear headed. They squinted into the night, looking for the planes the radar operator was shouting about on the ship’s intercom, but usually the first sign they would get was the stream of hot tracer rounds being fired by the fighters. Sitting in a pressurized cabin, with an oxygen mask, the British fighter pilots could spot the big airships much more easily, and maneuver into position. It was like a school of barracudas or sharks preying on the baby whales.
Will Simpson had his Welkin up at 43,000 feet, and he found himself above a rising airship when he tipped his nose down slightly and opened up with those four cannons. He saw the tracers stream into the tail section, and then was utterly shocked when the entire rear segment of the airship simply exploded. The aft quarter of the ship was where the cargo ramp would open to release the witches’ brew the airships were carrying. They had been loaded with the highly volatile thermobarics, air fuel bombs, incendiaries… It was like lighting a match in a case of dynamite.
The blast was terrible, a preview of what would have happened near ground level if that ordnance had been dropped on its target. The effect of the bomb was to crush with pressure, and then ravage with intense heat. The shock wave was so powerful that it blew the duralumin frame to pieces and the fires devoured the ship, sending the burning debris falling like a broken comet from the sky. It also took down two fighters that had been too close to the tail when it exploded, and they plummeted, like fallen angels in the rain of fire and melted duralumin. To do that the temperature had to reach or exceed 630 degrees Celsius, (1166 Fahrenheit).
There were only twelve of the high altitude fighters, a single squadron that had been close enough to intervene, and another two would be hit and killed with MG fire as they swooped in to engage. The others spat fire into the hide of the enemy airships, thinking to bust those gas bags, and not realizing that it was the explosives packed into the tail that had scored that first kill. Soon they would run out of ammunition and be forced to return to base. That was the only kill they obtained, losing four Welkin fighters in that dark madness in the sky. But the Yoxford Boys were climbing to the scene, spotting that falling airship and homing in on it. A voice came over the radio of their leading squadron.
“Rightfield-Judson, make Angels-40 and assume a heading of two-niner-five, over.”
The fighter control operator wasn’t calling out a pilot by name. Rightfield was the radio call sign of the 357th Fighter Group, and its three squadrons had designated call signs of Jusdon, Chambers and Gowdy. But the pilots needed no help to set their altitude or course. They could see the airships above them, lit up by that terrible explosion, and now they climbed to join the fray, just as the last of the British Welkins peeled off and turned for their home bases.
“Alright boys, have at ‘em!” The voice of Captain John England rallied his pilots as they nosed up into the attack. They had Mustangs, which were already reaching their listed service ceiling at Angels 42, but they could see two more airships that had veered off from the main formation, and they moved in to attack. Falling on the K-Class division, the Americans would follow with equally spectacular kills of both Kungur and Kurgan , consumed in the welter of fire and rending explosion.
One among them was 1st Lieutenant Chuck Yeager, and it would be his to claim the next kill, savaging the tail feathers of Kungur with his six .50 caliber Browning machineguns. It exploded so violently that Yeager felt his plane shudder as it went in to a dizzying cartwheel.
He was flying his favorite wings, “Glamorous Glen III,” and using all his skill, he managed to get the nose down into a dive and finally regained control at Angels-20. He could hear his squadron mates hooting above as they mixed it up with the enemy. It would be Captain Leonard “Kit” Carson who would get the next kill, igniting the Kurgan , to all but destroy that entire K-Class airship squadron. Evans, Maxwell and Weaver all made slashing attacks, but they had not divined the need to strike the tail and instead raked the body of the airship Kazan , the last of that squadron.
Yaeger had been hungry at that point in the war, with only credit for 1.5 kills, but the statisticians would be scratching their heads over this one, and eventually decided the airship should count as two. He would later go one to become an “ace in a day” when he shot down five enemy fighters on a single mission, and his other claim to fame would see him become the first man in human history to fly faster than the speed of sound.
The fighters had intercepted about twenty miles northwest of Theton, dueling for half an hour in that terrible engagement. The last of the four airships to be felled was a kill logged by 363 Squadron, right over Cambridge, where the residents thought they saw a fiery meteor falling from the sky. It was the A-Class airship Astana .
The big 180,000 cubic meter capacity Baku had been attacked three times, but aside from a damaged engine and small fire there, the airship was not seriously hurt. Yet several of her gas bags were hissing like squealers where the enemy rounds had penetrated. Over time, the Vulcanized inner lining resealed most of those MG hits, and the engineers managed to apply a patch to one bad area, but the big airship was now struggling to maintain altitude at 42,000 feet. Then, a final attack by a P-51 riddled the airship and ignited some reserve oxygen amidships. The resulting fire was now threatening to ignite the massive air fuel bombs aft, and Captain Koslov made the decision to drop what he had before he suffered the same terrible fate as the smaller airships.
The crews worked feverishly, and finally got the big cargo bay open, goggling at the last of the fighters lighting up the sky with their tracer rounds as they attacked Astana , about 500 meters below the Baku . They saw the fire consuming that ship, aghast at what they now saw as their own terrible fate. It made them all too eager to do their jobs and get those monstrous bombs off their ship and into the sky.
Far below, the bombardier took aim at the only target he could find, not really knowing it was Cambridge. It would be a good test of the new radio controlled descent, which allowed the bombardier to keep the bombs on target during the first few minutes of their descent, then he sent the signal to deploy parachutes as he reckoned his ordnance was nearing the ground.
Everything worked as it was supposed to, and the result was three massive fireballs, one over the Mill Road Cemetery, where it rattled and blackened the headstones of the dead. The second fell on the Cambridge Cricket Club, destroying it completely, and the last would do the most damage, blasting Prospect Row at Warkworth Terrace, immolating all the buildings for three blocks in every direction. The fires burned through the Parkside Police Station, and then eventually ended their raging inferno when they hit Parker’s Piece, an open, grassy area about 1000 feet square. A man in a house on Regent Terrace heard the din of the explosions, and rushed to his window to see the massive fireballs explode, the fires rising into the dark night, and he crossed himself, praying no bomb would fall on his modest home.
None did.
The slashing duel in the skies above ended, though Fighter Command was now feverishly trying to get more planes aloft. Five airships, all in the 120,000 cubic meter classes, had all died fiery deaths. But no more fighters were seen for the next thirty minutes, and by that time, Admiral Voloshyn’s intrepid fleet of “scareships” were now closing on London.
The bombardiers were looking for the Thames River as the trigger point to release all bombs, but they were having trouble finding it. In the confusion of the fighter duel, the entire fleet had veered slightly off course, and now, instead of coming in over Stratford north of the Thames, they were actually over Hampstead Heath. They were looking for a telltale double bend in the river as a reference point, where the Thames looped around a number of quays and docks off the river known as the “Isle of Dogs.” There they were supposed to make a 5 point turn to starboard, which would have put them right over the center of the city, the famous Tower of London and its nearby bridge being an aiming point.
There was a good deal that might have died a fiery death nearby, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, Southwark Cathedral, the Church of St. Magnus the Martyr. The fires might have fallen on Nelson Square, Waterloo Station. Bombs might have drifted across the river again to Westminster, and Buckingham Palace.
However, being northwest over Hampstead Heath, the fleet would move past the London Zoo, Hyde Park, and the Royal Albert Hall, and over White City, where they saw what they thought were those two telltale bends in the river, dead ahead. Now searchlights fingered the night, and the krump of AA guns began to plant dark roses of smoke and fire in the skies. Another squadron of fighters was reaching the scene just as the order to begin bombing was given to all remaining airships.
“Release! Release! Release!”
All the rear cargo bays opened to disgorge their lethal bombs, and now most would fall west of Kew Bridge, in Brentford, West London. The concentrated wrath of the fleet now fell from the vault of heaven, bringing its fiery doom to this ancient settlement, which pre-dated the Roman occupation. Now, instead of Buckingham Palace, it would be the Syon Estate and the residence of the Duke of Northumberland that would burn. Instead of St. Paul’s Grand Cathedral, it would be the much smaller namesake, of St. Paul’s Church, built in 1868, and fire would rage through the Royal Botanical Gardens across the river from Syon House. Those areas were sparsely populated, but some of the bombs fell further on, into the districts of Woodland and Isleworth
Breakout (Kirov Series Book 38) Page 2
