Also by Leland Shanle
Project Seven Alpha: American Airlines in Burma 1942
Vengeance at Midway and Guadalcanal
Endgame in the Pacific
CODE NAME:
INFAMY
a novel by
Lieutenant Commander Leland C. Shanle, Jr.
USN (Ret.)
p7A Aviation
Saint Louis, Missouri
Copyright © Leland C. Shanle, Jr.
All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Published in the United States by Project 7 Alpha.
Cover design by Kristina Blank Makansi
Cover art: Shutterstock and submarine design outline adapted from various websites on World War II naval battles.
www.project7alpha.com
To Laura Lynn
There are no great men, just great challenges which ordinary men,
out of necessity, are forced by circumstances to meet.
– Fleet Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Jr.
Chapter 1
06:01 Local, 28 January, 1945 (06:01 GMT, 28JAN)
1945 Heereswaffenamt Kernphysik Command Ohrdruf, Germany
A lone figure strode through the ancient forest, his black uniform cloaking him in the shadows of the pre-dawn gloom. Occasional breaks in the foliage revealed brilliant snow-covered peaks in the distance, but the revelations were short-lived, and the landscape around him quickly fell back into darkness. Soon the wood opened onto a two-lane road where a few rag-tag refugees made their way south. The half-starved men, women, and children stumbling along the side of the road were of no more consequence than the species of the trees behind him. Spruce, fir, pine—it didn’t matter.
As he stepped across the street, gray-clad guards swung iron gates wide at his approach. Returning their salute with a dismissive wave, he marched across the parking lot and parade field toward a foreboding building. Its approach crossed over a small murky stream only inches below the concrete walkway.
Entering the wide vestibule he paused to gaze around the room. Scientists stood nervously in white coats trying not to be noticed, trying not to watch the refugees. No doubt they wanted to join them, to save themselves. Sneering at their weakness, he walked past without acknowledgment. He already knew what secrets they harbored and had no need for their favors.
The elevator doors opened on his approach, and without breaking stride he entered, did an abrupt about-face, and glared out at their fearful faces as the doors closed. Below him were nine concentric levels designed to withstand direct aerial bombardments. He punched the button for the seventh level and stood at parade rest awaiting his deliverance.
Plunging into the earth, the elevator passed the second level containing the gymnasium and administrative center full of frauleins. A distraction. They should never have been co-located. He contemplated stopping at Level Three, where the facility’s senior officers’ dining room was located, but then decided against it. That would have to wait.
Passing the fourth level, he thought of the procurement offices mixed with the scientists. Arms peddlers scurried between both divisions, plying their officers with gifts, hoping to get a lucrative contract. They were more concerned with profit than with winning the war.
Down past the fifth, more scientific research offices and the insufferable Gestapo. He didn’t know who was worse, them or Goebbels’s propagandists on Level Six, all of them useless now. All the lies and torture in the world couldn’t reverse the tide; only he could do that.
Technically, he was on temporary duty from the Waffen SS, and he still wore the black uniform of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Death’s Head Unit, with skull and crossbones on the right tunic collar. Around his neck was a white, black, and red band from which the Knights Cross hung. Above the iron cross a silver clasp with swastika affixed signified a second award. He had been tested in the combat arm of the SS and looked down upon everyone else—even the other SS units—as mere guards and hacks.
The elevator slowed as it approached the seventh level. He commanded everything below him. Level Seven contained the Plans and Tactics cell not only for his Top Secret Project Alighieri, but also for general war planning, and Levels Eight and Nine held the keys to saving the Third Reich. As things began to deteriorate on the front, it was his scientists who had been pressed into service. On eight he had constructed ten separate scientific facilities. Each worked on a portion of his project. None knew what the others were doing. Only a select few knew the entire project, and they were on Level Nine: Assembly. Above him, the Heereswaffenamt, the HWA, Army Ordnance Office Building, had hidden the true purpose of the facility. But he knew it didn’t matter now.
What mattered now was time; he needed a precious few months. He alone could change the course of the war. He alone could alter destiny. Time was what he coveted most, but had least. He stuck his hand out, stopping the doors from closing, and entered the world of Level Seven. His world.
An aide appeared out of nowhere, handed him a folder, and then disappeared again as Generalleutnant Wolfgang Walpot von Bassenheim slid into his chair, his body erect, his shoulders stiff. Like his mind, the top of his stainless steel desk was free of clutter; not even the tiniest mote of dust found refuge on its slick surface. A mere thirty-two years old, von Bassenheim’s career in the German Wehrmacht Scientific Corps had been meteoric, his unparalleled success due as much to his clarity of purpose and ruthless nature as to his scientific prowess.
His closely cropped blonde hair stayed in place even as the oscillating fan cycled across his face. He opened the folder, and his cold blue eyes narrowed in disbelief at the after-action intelligence report. Operation Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein, what the West was calling the Battle of the Bulge, had failed. American mongrels were in the Fatherland. Even worse the subhuman Bolsheviks had over run East Prussia! He cursed his countrymen for their weakness.
Closing his eyes he crumpled the report and let it fall to the floor. His mind raced back to the glorious days of the Nazi movement and his many victories in science as a member of the Hitler youth in Bavaria. It was his mother who had introduced him to the leader of the Jungstrum, what would later be called the Hitler Youth.
The Jungstrum trained young Germans to become members of the Sturmabteilung, the Storm Regiment and the Nazi Party’s adult paramilitary wing. He was accepted at the age of ten in 1923, due to his maturity and advanced acumen, and stayed loyal even when the Nazi movement was forced underground; in fact it steeled him to the cause.
As a teenager, he was personally recruited into the SS by Himmler. Because of his youth and the fact that he was a university student, he appeared harmless. He was anything but, as Ernst Röhm learned on Nacht der langen Messer, the night of long knives in 1934. In 1938 before transferring into the SS-TV, he helped plan and execute Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
He had been recognized as a prodigy, and he understood mathematics and physics as if they were beautiful expressions of a secret language known only to him. At Berlin University, he scoffed at colleagues, even his professors, for their inability to grasp the obvious. Undoubtedly, their lineage had been compromised, spoiled by th
e filth of gypsy or Jew, whereas his family, both maternal and fraternal, had kept their lineage pure. His mother’s family was Bavarian, his father’s Prussian. In Toruń, on the wall of his grandfather’s great room, the heraldry of his Prussian forefathers hung proudly above the grand fireplace. At the top was the coat of arms of the Teutonic Knights. In 1199 after receiving the monastic rules from the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim turned the Teutonic Knights into a military order and led them on a Crusade to the Holy Land where he died a glorious death in the battle at Acre.
A glorious death would not suffice for Wolfgang. He wanted more.
He visualized the look on his parents’ faces, as he was awarded his first Knights Cross at the Kehlsteinhaus, Eagles Nest, in Berchtesgaden. Hitler himself had presented the Iron Cross. His parents were gone now, smashed by Allied bombs in Berlin. Hatred flickered across his consciousness; then the useless emotion was just as quickly suppressed.
Aloof and distant, Wolfgang’s fellow officers dubbed him “der allein Wolf,” the lone wolf. Eventually, his nickname was shortened to Wolf; he knew it was not a name of endearment, and that was fine with him. For he was a wolf, a dangerous one, a solitary wolf whose only loyalty was to the cause, a fact his neighbors in Torun learned when Germany reclaimed East Prussia in 1939. SS-Totenkopfverbände, SS-TV, had a reputation of fierce, fanatical fighting even among other Waffen SS units. The Wehrmacht Army considered SS-TV officers unfit for command because their casualty rate was horrendous, and they had a penchant for executing prisoners and civilians alike. And he had stood out among the fiercest, even as his superior strategies had kept his casualties low. Not that he was emotional about losses in his unit, but to waste highly trained assets was simply an unsound tactic.
He had distinguished himself in every way, and because of his unparalleled pedigree and unquestionable loyalty he had been selected to be head of Germany’s most secret and critical scientific war project despite his young age. Even Hitler admired him. Wolf was the quintessential Nazi, evidence personified of the purity of his race, and in his hands the future of the Third Reich would be safe.
He ran his fingers over the skull-and-crossbone emblem on his cap. How could the undisciplined American mob defeat the best-equipped, trained, and disciplined army in the world? Who was to blame for the failures? Blitzkrieg had conquered Europe in a matter of days. Somehow they had lost the initiative and now were on the precipice of losing everything.
He reviewed the course of events that had led him—and his country—to this particular moment in history. There was no need for pen or paper, no need for a typewriter or so-called intelligence reports to reference. Sitting motionless, his mind wheeled through the necessary data; his photographic memory collated, organized, filed. As the plan took shape, he assigned it the code name of Infamy, his personal vendetta, and the irony brought a smile to his face that, at last, broke his concentration. Three hours passed, he finally pushed back his chair and stood. There was much to do; the Third Reich would start to dissolve very soon. He remembered the period between the wars. Chaos would return and become his staunchest ally. Pulling open the center drawer of his desk he retrieved a stack of blank orders with the letterhead and seal of the General Staff and put them in his attaché case.
Wolf glanced at the award he had received for excellence in physics many years ago. A Newton’s Cradle, it consisted of seven highly polished steel spheres suspended from a frame in bifilar suspension, so they all touched. He pulled back a steel ball on the end and dropped it. Slamming against the other six it transferred the energy causing the opposite end ball to jump. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, he mused, and America shall experience an equal application of hell.
CHAPTER 2
13:07 Local, 1 September, 1937 (19:07 GMT, 1SEP)
Bellot Strait, North West Passage
Captain, E. J. “Scotty” Gall stood on the bow as waves of fog rolled toward the HBC Aklavik. At barely sixty feet, it was more of a yacht than a cargo ship. Scotty closed his eyes and leaned his head back feeling the wind, sensing the current. A long-time employee of the Hudson Bay Company, he had lived many years with the Inuit and had adopted their ways. And after so many years at sea, he trusted his instincts.
Opening his eyes he watched the fog begin to clear. Bellot Strait appeared before him. The ice was piled on its shores, but he sensed—he knew—the narrow waterway was clear. Turning to his Helmsman, he commanded, “Full speed ahead; starboard rudder, one third.”
Nervously the Helmsman advanced the throttle to full speed, demanding all of the Fairbanks-Morse engine’s meager 35-horse power. He spun the wheel three revolutions and held fast, awaiting the next order. The Aklavik set a course for the southern shore line. Reefs appeared before them and, like the shore, they were encrusted with deadly ice.
Aklavik approached the southern shore, her starboard hull dangerously close. Her bow came about, paralleling the giant chunks of ice. All hands stopped what they were doing and watched carefully the jagged death. All except the Helmsman, whose eyes were riveted on his captain.
“Starboard rudder, two thirds.”
“Starboard, sir?”
“Aye, starboard.” Forcing himself to comply with the suicidal command the Helmsman spun in three more revolutions of the wheel to the right; he was sure impact was imminent. Instead the Aklavik held course close ashore as she slipped past a reef on her port side. Ahead another icy reef jutted out of the southern shore.
“Helmsman, ease your rudder to one third.”
Even with one third rudder pushing the vessel to the right, its bow moved left and slid past the second reef. Once into the narrow channel, the Aklavik hugged the southern shore passing cliffs and tall hills. Halfway through the strait the current began to shift and increased to eight knots in velocity. Scotty switched to the northern shoreline before emerging into the Prince Regent Inlet.
For the first time the Northwest Passage was navigated from west to east. The next day the HBC Aklavik was also the first ship to navigate the Northwest Passage east to west. Elated, Scotty radioed his homeport of Cambridge Bay to report his navigational first, only to discover that the Hudson Bay Company’s response was to direct him to keep it a secret.
Ten days later, they tied up at the Cambridge Bay pier next to a Japanese whaler being resupplied for its return voyage before the Beaufort Sea froze all the way to the Alaska shoreline. HBC had sent the Fur Trade Commissioner to meet the Aklavik, and he invited the crew to a local tavern to celebrate. Before they disembarked, Scotty reminded his small crew to keep their story to themselves.
The rowdy sailors hit the Hudson Bay Company’s public house with a vengeance, ready for a drink and Caribou steak. They guzzled beer and slapped each other on the back. Even though the pub was full of other sailors, no one else knew what the celebration was about. After two boisterous hours the Fur Trade Commissioner presented Scotty with a silver box. It had been flown in from Anchorage and was inscribed:
Presented to E. J. Gall
by the
Fur Trade Commissioner Hudson’s Bay Company
to Commemorate
His Negotiation of the Northwest Passage
September 2, 1937
Noticeably moved, he wrapped the Fur Trade Commissioner up in a boisterous bear hug and held the box up for his men to see. Across the room, the skipper of the Japanese whaler sipped his beer and watched the celebration. By midnight Scotty and his men were considerably more than three sheets to the wind, and when he set his silver box on the bar while he ordered another round, the Japanese skipper, pretending to be just as drunk as the Scotsman, stumbled to the bar to order a drink. He glanced down at the silver box and read the inscription upside down. Suppressing a smile, Lieutenant Atsugi of the Imperial Japanese Navy could hardly wait to radio the news to his superiors. His mission to gather INTEL on the Aleutian Island’s military facilities had just paid off handsomely.
CHAPTER
3
08:10 Local, 31 April, 1945 (14:10 GMT, 31APR)
Los Alamos, New Mexico
Colonel Hans Gerhardt, formerly of the Fuehrer’s Heereswaffenamt Kernphysik Command, observed as the product of his work was placed into the core of “The Gadget.” He peered through a small window of the lead containment vessel and nodded in approval.
The Gadget was the code name for the Trinity test bomb, and Project Trinity’s mission was to test the design of the atomic bomb called Fat Boy. Colonel Gerhardt oversaw the pivotal bismuth phosphate process, and he had produced the necessary batches of plutonium in the 221-T plant at the Hanford Engineer Works. His expertise was so critical, Major Daniel “Spike” Shanower of the OSS had “escorted” him from occupied France the year before and had “given” him the job.
Hans turned to the crowd of observing scientists with a broad smile, but it fell from his face as soon as he noticed Shanower at the back of the group.
“Colonel, a word,” Shanower said.
Tentatively, eyes darting in fear, he moved with the major to the corner of the room. The project had been going well, but Hans feared that as soon as he was no longer needed, he would be executed. Had that day come?
“So, my usefulness is at an end?” his voice quivered. Shanower glared at him in exasperation. “Colonel, when are you going to get it through that thick German skull that I’m not Gestapo? I’m not a gangster who is going to whack you, either. We made a deal; I’m here to live up to my end of the bargain.”
Hans stared back in disbelief. Spike went on lowering his voice. “Hitler is dead; Patton is crossing the Rhine. We must get to your colleagues before the Russians do.”
Code Name: Infamy (Aviator Book 4) Page 1
