TILTING THE BALANCE - 1945
By Stuart Slade
Northern Russia, First Week in April 1945
The beast had slept all winter but as the temperatures started to climb and the sea of mud from the Rasputitsa dried out, the war started to stir. Deep in its lair, it stretched its muscles and began to get ready for what was to come. This was the fifth year of the Great Patriotic War or Operation Barbarossa depending on which side the soldiers fought. On one side the Russian and American generals had spent the winter planning their operations for the coming campaign season. On the other, their German equivalents had been doing the same. Both were convinced that this time, this season would see them finally break through to victory. Of course, they had all felt the same in 1944 and 1943, not to mention 1942 and 1941.
In the field, the soldiers were extracting themselves from their winter quarters, leaving the shelter of wooden huts or, if they were very, very lucky, stone houses. They were taking the field again and the veterans knew what that meant. They had learned their lessons in the bitter fighting of 1943 and 1944. Their collective memory of the fighting didn’t stretch back to 1941 and 1942. There were too few survivors of those days for that. What they did know was that their chances of seeing the winter rasputitsa again were small indeed. The Generals were wrong, they would not win the great victory they had planned for. The soldiers were right, they would probably not live to see the return of winter.
Indoctrination Center, First Corps, Canadian Army, Segezha, Kola Peninsula
"And what do the eleven dents on the front of this tank tell us?" Captain Nicola Moran looked at the assembled troops. They were reinforcements, newly arrived from home and they had no idea of what the Russian Front was really like. This orientation course, a weeklong, was intended to give them at least some of the working knowledge they would need to survive. Given the frightful casualty rate on the Russian Front, almost anything was worth trying in an effort to bring it down. This orientation course proved one of the more effective ideas.
"Our guns are useless." Sergeant Robert Barrow called out the comment with an invincible certainty that would almost certainly get him court-martialed eventually, assuming he didn't get killed first. The quiet groan that went up when he spoke showed how much the others thought of his opinions.
"These hits were scored by the same guns that did that." Captain Moran pointed at the gaping hole in the side of the wrecked Panther tank. "75mms. Anybody else?"
"Obviously we have to hit Panthers from the side." Corporal Meadows thought for a second. "There's something else as well, isn’t there?"
"Well done. Yes, there is. This tank was actually disabled by the first hit, that one there." She pointed at an impact site that was just under the mantlet. "It's not just enough to hit a tank, it's where we hit it that counts. That was a neat, well-placed shot that jammed the turret in the train. That allowed another tank to get the side shot that killed the tank permanently. And why is this tank permanently dead?"
"Because it burned!" The chorus of replies delighted her. They showed the men in the orientation class had been listening to their briefings.
"Exactly. A tank that is shot up can be repaired, often in just a few hours. A tank that burns is fit for nothing but scrap. These other ten impact points were hits scored on the wreck in an effort to make it burn. The one that did the job was this one here." She walked to the rear of the tank and pointed at another hole that showed where a round had penetrated the engine compartment. "This is the important lesson here. Tank warfare is not a matter of one-on-one duels, it is a matter of teamwork and combined arms operations. This Panther was destroyed because one of our tanks disabled it and that allowed another to send a shot through its side. There's another lesson here by the way. He who scores the first hit almost always wins the battle."
She led the group to a Sherman tank that was parked alongside an undamaged Panther. "We captured this Panther in running condition near Amosovskaya last year. Now, you've probably heard that Shermans burn easily. Well, they do but so does every tank. Doesn't matter whether they are powered by gasoline or diesel, if they start to burn, the crew has around six seconds to get out. I need a volunteer crew. You five, you'll do nicely. Take your positions in the Sherman. When I blow my whistle, the tank is burning. You'd better bail out or you'll fry. Remember, six seconds."
Moran watched while the crew boarded the tank and settled down at their stations. Then she blasted her whistle and shouted, "Bugger! The tank's on fire!"
The sergeant assisting her had his stopwatch running while the crew bailed out of the 'burning tank'. At exactly the six-second mark, she blew the whistle hard. "All right, everybody still inside is dead. Sergeant, how many men died in there?"
"None ma'am. They were all out in four seconds."
"Very good, lads. Now, want to try it from the Panther?"
There was an enthusiastic 'Yay' from the same crew, more out of curiosity overseeing inside one of the dreaded Panthers than demonstrating their ability to bail out. Again, the crew clambered inside and took their positions. There was a whistle blast and again the cry of "Bugger, the tank is on fire!" The driver and bow gunner opened their hatches but found that the space between them and the turret overhang wasn't enough for them to get through fast. They were still squirming out when the whistle blew. The loader had gone out through the circular hatch in the rear of the turret while the commander had just managed to get out through his hatch in the turret roof in time to beat the whistle. There was no sign of the gunner.
"Two survivors out of five. You know, personally, I would not want to go to war in this tank. The T-34-85 isn't much better. The Sherman may not be impregnable, but it is really the most survivable tank on the battlefield today. We lose quite a few of them but the survival rate for the crews is very high. If you really have a death wish, join the infantry. Now, let's have a look at some anti-tank weapons."
A few minutes later, while the new arrivals were inspecting a collection of captured German anti-tank guns, Panzerfausts, and Panzerschrecks, Sergeant McCann spoke quietly. "With respect, ma'am, don’t you feel guilty about the line your feeding these poor saps?"
Moran shook her head. "Everything I'm telling them is true, Terry. You know that."
"Sure, ma'am, but its barely half the story and you know that."
"I know. And I know that in three months at the outside, I'll be giving this introduction to their replacements. But would it help them to know that?"
Dispersal Area, 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy), Airfield 3252, Averyanovka-West, Chuvash
“Look, Armando, we got the new quadruple turret in the forward upper position.” Captain Michael Kozlowski pointed upwards towards the nose of his new B-29A, already named Leading Lady. “That’ll help see off any passes from directly ahead. Isn’t she a beauty?”
“109s and 190s aren’t a problem. It’s those damned blowjobs that are the real danger. Two extra 50s won’t help much against them.” Lieutenant Armando Gray saw part of his role in life as co-pilot of Leading Lady being to offset the exuberance of his aircraft commander. “The fascists have had all winter to build up their jet force. We’ll need every gun we can get if we go beyond fighter escort range.”
“I’m damned certain that’s exactly what we’ll be doing in a month’s time.” Kozlowski had paid very careful attention to the training missions they’d been flying once the gas shortage had eased off. The experience of running out of the 130-octane gas needed to fly the big B-29s had been a salutary one and had undoubtedly accounted for the number of training exercises that had concentrated on getting the maximum number of miles from each gallon. Or at least some of them. The training missions also had targets for payload lifted to a given range and the figure of 1,600 miles had featured prominently. One evening, Kozlowski had casually inspected a globe and noted that 1,600 miles would take him, and 12,000 pounds of bombs, to the Romanian oil fields. The same inspection had shown him that going all the way to Berlin from Averyanovka was 1,950 miles and the pilot’s manual said that their bombload would be reduced to 8,000 pounds.
“They’re working on the engines again. Any idea where we'll be going?” Gray had seen the ground crews stripping off the cowlings prior to giving the engines their pre-mission work-over. New spark plugs, inspections made to detect unseated valves, and frequent replacement of the uppermost five cylinders were all mandatory for the R-3350s after 25 hours of flight time. At 100 hours, the engines were completely dismantled and rebuilt. The never-ending need for spare parts and replacement engines had driven the creation of a whole network of air and train routes devoted to supporting the B-29s. All of which meant one thing and the aircrews knew it. Seeing the ground crews hard at work one day meant that the aircraft would be flying missions the next.
"My guess is Baku." Kozlowski knew that it was more a pious wish than anything else. Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea was less than 150 miles from the Russian-held east bank. It was less than 30 minutes of flying time for the B-29s and they would be under heavy fighter escort the whole way. It was a milk run, barely more than a training mission with a few live shots flying around. Baku had once been the oil center of the Soviet Union; now after being a primary target for the B-29s for a year, it was mostly blackened ruins. Kozlowski knew that the raids these days were intended to make sure it stayed that way. Russia's new oil refineries, two generations more advanced than the ones that had been destroyed at Baku, were hundreds of miles to the east, safely out of the way.
"Makes sense. We haven't hit Baku for nearly two weeks." Gray looked across at the long trains of bombs being drawn from the ammunition dumps. The armament technicians would be descending on them as well, making sure that they were in good condition and then fusing them. All was done with extreme care since there was no point in the B-29s fighting their way through to their targets if their bombs were unreliable. There was also the possibility that a careless technician might set one or more of the bombs off and that would be a career-limiting move. "Mike, sixteen hundred pounders. You think we'll be hitting the railway link out of Baku?"
"The fascists certainly aren't refining anything there. Shipping crude oil out is about the only option they have left."
"They got lots of options, Mike. Crude from Romania and we haven't even touched the refineries there. And then there are the synthetic oil plants along the Ruhr. We can't get to them. Not from here."
Kozlowski reflected that wasn't strictly true. The B-29 had the range to take 4,000 pounds of bombs to the synthetic oil plants. Only, doing so would mean leaving their fighter escort behind at the Ukrainian border and flying unescorted all the way across Poland and Germany. Then, flying back again to get home. They could do it, it was just that their chance of survival was almost zero. The Romanian oil industry would be a milk-run by comparison.
"Ey, bratishka! You are going out tomorrow?"
Two Russian women, enlisted armorers, had ridden up on bicycles before stopping and giving punctilious salutes. Virtually any spare space on the transport aircraft that kept the B-29 fleet in business was either filled with bicycles for base use or comfort packages for the Russian and American personnel. The bicycles were military-issue, supposedly to reduce fuel consumption on the base, but the packages were gifts from American families back home. By quiet agreement between the American personnel, most of the packages not addressed to an individual went to the Russians. The Russian recipients were punctilious about writing back and thanking the donors. As a result, more and more packages were addressed to specific Russians.
Kozlowski looked at the two women, guessing what was coming next. "Looks like it, bratishka. We don’t know where yet."
"Please, can you take us with you?" Both women had their best puppy-dog eyes in place.
Ouch. Kozlowski had no easy answer to that question. It was common for the B-29s to take Russian personnel up on test flights and a good case could be made that having Russian ground personnel familiar with how the bombers operated was a valuable thing. Taking them on operations was different, especially where women were concerned. The official policy on the American side was that carrying overhead passengers on missions was not allowed unless there was a defensible operational reason. Normally that was carrying an interpreter to aid in coordination between the American bombers and Russian fighter escorts. Official Russian policy was that their people could ride if the Americans agreed and if it didn’t interfere with military operations or duties. On the other hand, the Americans were concerned at the risks involved for the passengers and prohibited aircrew from being caught taking them on combat missions. That policy had been laid down before the Americans realized how many Russian women were in front-line combat units.
"Perhaps, it depends on where we are going." That sounds like prevarication enough. If we are going to Baku, then we can manage it. If we go deep, then we'll probably be too heavily loaded to take passengers. Time to deflect attention from tomorrow's raid. "The donut truck has arrived. Do you have time for tea and a donut?"
The Donut Truck, 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy), Airfield 3252, Averyanovka-West, Chuvash
The Russians had realized that the American habit of giving the ground crews a few minutes off to have tea and a snack was sensible enough and that the quick rest re-energized the hard-working mechanics. It also allowed the American and Russian personnel to socialize, something that 18 months before would have been unthinkable. Watching the men and women line up by the donut truck made Chaplain Captain Dennis Stomper realize how much things had changed since the first Americans had arrived in Russia. Then, the primary concern of the national commands had been to keep the two groups apart due to concern over possible hostility. But, faced with a combination of American gregariousness and the traditional Russian desire to treat their guests properly, that hadn't happened. Instead, the two groups had coalesced.
Stomper knew very well that his own position here on this base deep inside an avowedly atheist Russia was an example of that. When American forces first arrived on the Russian Front, they had been careful to keep their symbols of faith well hidden in case they caused offense. The Russians had done the same with more overt manifestations of Marxism. Yet, as the initial tension had faded, the Americans had made the unexpected discovery that the Eastern Orthodox religion was still widely observed although those that did have kept their heads down as well. Slowly, overt albeit still discrete religious observance was becoming the normal state of affairs although Stomper still wasn't sure whether the odd Chekist who turned up for his services was there in a personal or professional capacity.
The sheer number of Russian women on the bases used by the Americans also helped the coalescence process. The Americans had always had a tiny handful of women on their bases, mostly nurses or occasionally a clerk. As the war progressed, more of the American pilots ferrying aircraft from the factories in the US to the front line in Russia were women. Here, Russian women provided the crews for the anti-aircraft guns, a good part of the security police and base defense force, the maintenance crews for the aircraft as well as the backbone of the medical staff. Fears that relationships between the American men and the Russian women would cause disciplinary problems had also faded away although Stomper knew that the reason was much grimmer. So many Russian men are dead that the Americans were the only chance a lot of the women had for a stable relationship. And, from a Russian woman's point of view, every one of her sisters who settled down with an American is one less competing for a Russian husband. There was something else as well. When Americans first saw women going into crashed aircraft to help rescue trapped crews, a healthy level of respect was added to the mix. The exploitation of women who willingly risked their lives to save others was also unthinkable and peer pressure is enough to bring the minority who might think otherwise into line.
As the months passed, Stomper had seen that groups that consisted only of Americans or Russians had faded away and now mixing the two was the norm. In fact, nearly all the problems that our lords and masters were expecting have faded away of their own volition. Sure, there are personnel issues now and then, but it turns out Americans and Russians have the same approach to solving them, a fistfight behind the bomb dump. The harder the fight, the better friends the two participants become afterward. Stomper looked over to the donut truck again and decided that he felt like coffee and a donut. Too much introspection makes a man hungry. All I can say is that God does work in mysterious ways. Which is a good thing because life would be rather boring if He didn't.
“Tea and a vatrushka please.” Another change: the donut trucks had once been for American personnel only and served only coffee and donuts. Only, Americans refused to allow a situation where they worked alongside somebody all day and then saw them have to stand to one side and watch their comrades indulge in a snack. Right from the first, the Americans had taken their Russian friends to the truck as guests and firmly insisted on them being served as well. The Red Cross had bowed to the inevitable with creditably little delay and now added tea and Russian pastries to the menu. The pastries had proved popular and not just with the Russians. The girls working in the trucks had finished their tours of duty and gone back to the States and taken the recipes with them. Word had come back that Russian pastries were becoming more popular in the United States with each month that passed.
“Here you are, Father.” The girl serving at the truck window handed down the tea and the sweetbread bun, this one filled with soft farmer’s cheese and canned cherries. That also was typical of how things worked. The Russians had limited supplies of fresh food; the Americans had almost limitless quantities of preserved rations. Once the two commissariats had pooled their resources, everybody ate reasonably well. Stomper thanked her and took a seat in the officer’s country. It wasn’t official, but both Russians and Americans felt more comfortable if officers and enlisted personnel kept an off-duty distance between them.
Stomper bit into the vatrushka and looked around. The quick ten-minute break showed something very profound. At some point in the last year or more, the alliance between the Russians and the Americans had reached a tipping point. It had grown firm, healthy roots and evolved into a genuine friendship between the two peoples. He knew there was a new challenge coming. The US Army had been segregated for many years and the Air Force had inherited the policy. There were combat units made up of black Americans, mostly artillery and engineering battalions and the Air Force had a fighter group with black American pilots as well as a medium bomber group with all-black crews. The situation was not sustainable in an environment where the brutal casualties of the Russian Front were tearing segregation apart. That casualty rate was so high that the Army and the Air Force had to make the best use of every soldier they could ferry to Russia. Stomper knew that by the end of 1945, he would be looking at a donut truck surrounded by units of a racially integrated American army. He couldn’t help wondering if the way the Americans and Russians had overcome their differences would help black and white Americans do the same.
1945 - Tilting The Balance - Not Finished
1945 - Tilting The Balance - Not Finished
Last edited by Calder on Sat Feb 18, 2023 12:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Two
Rear Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
"Faster! Faster! The fascists will not wait until you finish picking your nose before you fire shots at them!" Captain Alekse Vladimirovich Piskunov shouted encouragement at his men while they hurled rocks at the horse-drawn sled as it passed them. This was no normal sled; it had been carefully built out of logs and scrap timber to have the outline of a fascist tank. All winter, he had been encouraging his men to take every opportunity to throw rocks at the "Pine Panzer", sharpening their aim and giving them practice at leading the target so that their rock would crash squarely home against the box-like 'turret'.
When they had started the game after the snow had brought real fighting to an effective end, most of the rocks had missed but Piskunov had known they would. A survivor of the battles of 1941 when the only anti-tank weapons the Russian infantry had were wholly inadequate RPG-40 anti-tank grenades and PTRD-41 anti-tank rifles, he had learned that such ineffective weapons had to be used well if they were to have any effect at all. The RPG-40 grenades had long been withdrawn but the anti-tank rifles were still used, only their targets were now the fascists themselves, not their tanks. The anti-tank mission was now being filled by the RPG-1 rocket launcher reinforced by trophy Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks and by American bazookas. The basic lesson remained true though. For any of those weapons to stop a tank, first, they had to hit it and that was where throwing rocks came in. Now, after weeks of practice, most of the thrown rocks hit the target. Piskunov sincerely hoped that his men's rockets would do the same.
“What are you waiting for?” The men pulling the “Pine Panzer” had stopped to rest once they had passed the main positions. The men said nothing but moved to pick up the tow ropes again. As they did so, one Russian soldier popped up from an overlooked dugout and threw his rock with deadly accuracy. It made a satisfying crunk noise as it hit the wet wood. “Now, Tovarish Petr Ivanovich shows us the way! If we can’t get a good shot in before the tank passes, hold your fire until you can hit it in the flanks and rear. Remember the fascists have many, many tanks. If you are killed firing hopeless shots, who will destroy them all?”
The men in the defenses looked at each other. Suddenly the game they were playing had become real.
"Tovarish Politruk, who scored best today?" Piskunov's shout echoed across the track made by the sled.
Political instructor Mikhail Ivanovich Gushchin thought carefully before giving his verdict. It was not just based on who had thrown his rocks the furthest, the fastest, and the most accurately but on who had been the best soldier that week. Who had carried out his duties most conscientiously, with the bravest heart and with smiles for all his comrades? "It was a hard decision, bratishka, but in my judgment, it all came down to that last throw. With that, our bratishka Petya did best!"
Private Petr Ivanovich Etler stepped forward and took an American bazooka from the hands of his sergeant. It was the old 60mm version that had put the fear of God into the fascists in 1943 but was now obsolete. Replaced in the American Army by the 90mm version, the Americans used the 60mm just for training. Etler took the weapon and picked his position carefully. Half the art of being a good rocket man was knowing where to shoot from. He shouldered the weapon, took the proper position as described in the manual, and fired. The rocket flew straight and level to hit the target exactly where the 'turret' joined the 'hull'.
"A kill!" Piskunov shouted again, this time spreading the good news. "An extra 100 grams of vodka tonight for everybody!"
The wooden sled wasn't burning; it was too wet for that. In a battle, men would now throw Sharashkas, bottles loaded with a gasoline/diesel mix at the crippled tank to make sure it burned. A tank that burned was dead and if the fascists inside burned as well, so much the better.
While the rock-throwing had been taking place, the ration-bearers had brought up a cauldron with kulesh, a millet soup to which some vegetables and beef had been added. Piskunov watched his men settle down to eat their lunch, knowing that it had been well-earned. His men would earn their dinner as well by spending the afternoon digging trenches and positions for mortars and anti-tank guns. Once they had dug their pits, they would start digging decoys as well. Soon the fascists would be attacking again and stopping them was never cheap or easy. Not even with the new American wonder weapon called napalm. Those who had seen it dropped by American aircraft spoke of it with awe and no little amount of fear.
Piskunov started making his rounds of the defense area, making sure that he took a different route from the path he had followed yesterday and the day before. It only needed two or three days of walking on the same tracks and the path would be clearly visible in the photographs taken by reconnaissance aircraft. That was something to be avoided but also to be exploited when the situation was right. A well-trodden path revealed a defensive position, so the Russians avoided making them. Only, the fascists knew that so if they saw a well-trodden path, they might assume the position it exposed was a decoy. Knowing that the Russians might try and fool the Hitlerites by putting such paths close to the real defenses. A constant game of bluff and counterbluff.
“Behind a tree, bratishka? Really?” The ‘57’ was well dug-in and had been carefully camouflaged but there was a tree only a few yards in front of it.
The gun commander straightened his back and grinned at Piskunov. “Tovarish Captain, the fascist cannot hit us from in front of that tree and we could not penetrate his front if we hit him. But Mischa or Sasha on the guns next to us can take him out with a flanking shot and we can do the same for the tanks in front of them. The tree gives us extra protection.”
Piskunov laughed and clapped Sergeant Kazimir Ivanovich Usanov on the back. The veteran anti-tank gunner had remembered the lessons of last year well. The ‘57’ was a good anti-tank gun, not so much because of its power, which was average at best, but because it was small and easily concealed in ways that the 76 and 85-mm guns were not. “Well said Kazik! Will you be killing another Tiger for us?”
Usanov smiled proudly at the memory of the Tiger tank he had hit from the side and set ablaze the year before. None of the fascists inside had got out alive. “Tovarish Captain, we serve the Rodina! If another Kitty shows us his side, we will burn him as well!”
There was a quick cheer from the crew of the ‘57’ which Piskunov joined in. He kept his doubts to himself. Every year, the Hitlerites had come back with a bigger and more heavily armored tank. Tigers in 1943 had been followed by Royal Tigers in 1944. Now it was 1945. What was coming next? The truth was that even a 100mm gun could not penetrate a Royal Tiger from the front. Like all Russian infantry commanders, Piskunov hoped that the huge beasts would be somebody else’s problem.
Top Floor, Bank de Commerce et Industrie, Geneva, Switzerland.
“Is there any sign of the situation improving?” Loki looked down at the sparse tray that Branwen had brought in for his lunch. At six foot eight, he was a big man and his frame needed support. The slowly spreading famine in Switzerland was leaving him perpetually hungry, a situation made much worse by the knowledge that the employees of his bank were suffering as well. During the winter, he had finally succumbed to the inevitable and asked The Seer in Washington and Suriyothai in Bangkok for help. Both had responded generously and the supplies they had sent were making sure that Loki’s people were getting a diet that was just enough to keep them healthy. That was better than the situation facing most of the people in Occupied Europe where food was in seriously short supply. Only two nations had enough; Germany which had taken all the food it needed from the territories it occupied and Britain where large stocks had been built up before they had also been occupied and whose war industries were too useful to the Germans to allow that food to be plundered.
Branwen shook her head. “Not as long as the Germans keep taking most of the supplies for their own use. We’re just one supplicant for whatever we can get out of Spain and Italy. At least, we’re at the head of the queue since the Italians and Spaniards know whatever they sell to Switzerland won’t be taken by the Germans. Anyway, Suriyothai is slipping us a reasonable quantity of rice and canned meat and fruit. We’re getting preserved food from Washington as well.”
“We’re sharing what we can?”
“Of course.” Branwen was slightly indignant that Loki had asked but reminded herself that a pervasive drive to help as many people who were in need as possible was as much a part of his character as the ridiculous and annoying practical jokes he played. “Anyway, I have the latest shipment figures. It looks like the Germans are going to drive north again. I’d say two-thirds of their supplies and munitions are going to Army Group White Sea and at least three-quarters of their fuel. That suggests to our staff that the Germans will be on the defensive throughout 1945 except in the far North. Archangel’sk is the obvious target. Aviation fuel, now there’s an oddity there. The amount going to the front is being cut back and more retained within the Reich.”
“The raid on Berlin last year.” Loki laughed at the memory of the way the Russians had slipped a squadron of old bombers through a crack in the German defenses, flying through a seriously bad weather front on the way, and then bombed Berlin. The raid had done almost no real damage, but the morale effect had been profound. “The Germans will be upping their fighter defenses. The Nazis sold this war to the German people on the basis that they wouldn’t be affected by it. That the price would be paid by everybody else. Berlin was a wake-up call.”
“We’ll have to tell Washington that although I suspect they already know and are not happy about it. On other matters, the Germans seem to be simplifying their tank production at last. There’s nothing coming out of the Jagdtiger production site suggesting the production line is being changed to something else, all the Mark III derivatives are finally winding down and being replaced by Mark IV versions. We’re seeing a lot more tank destroyers coming out of Czechoslovakia and hundreds of those little Bren carriers being shipped out of Britain. Branwen gave a profound sigh. “We’re breaking their stuff in Russia faster than they can replace it, but the difference isn’t big enough. We’re not going to end this in 1945, Loki.”
“I know. We’ll be lucky if it ends by 1950 and 1955 is more likely.” That glum forecast was enough to destroy any semblance of cheer. In the seventh year of a world war, the coming of spring didn’t mean a renewal of life anymore, it meant the return of industrialized death on an apocalyptic scale. “No more of those Jagdtigers you said?
Branwen looked at her file. It was the cumulative result of an espionage net that extended all over Germany and man-months of analyses that teased out the secrets of what was happening. It was probably the most valuable economic and industrial analysis that had ever been written and its effects on Allied war plans were profound. Yet, for all that, very few of those who read it knew where it had come from and most of those who thought they did have succumbed to disinformation. “All the evidence is that Jagdtiger production stopped early in the winter and has not been renewed. Manannan mac Lir thinks it’s because the Jagdtigers showed up so poorly in the last battles before winter set in. Jagdpanther production is up, and Jagdpanzer IV and Sturmgeschütz IV production is likewise. Hetzer production is up a lot.”
Loki drummed his fingers on his desk. “Usually the Germans double down when one of their ideas doesn’t work. We’ll see. Now, what have we for lunch? Let me guess. Spam.”
Free Royal Navy Forward Operating Base Neskapstad, Iceland.
Neskapstad was the last stop for Free Royal Navy submarines before they set sail into the void. The base was where they topped up their fuel tanks, took on as much extra food as they could squeeze in, and then set off for the North Sea and the waters around Norway. HMS Unbroken was typical of the U-class submarines that were fighting this strangely silent war. She displaced a mere 750 tons submerged, was 190 feet long, and was armed with four 21-inch torpedo tubes with a single reload torpedo for each. Confidential Books added the information that she was capable of 14.25 knots on the surface and 10 knots submerged. These books also noted that the boats had once been fitted with a single three-inch gun and had a crew of 31 but that the gun had been removed in the interests of streamlining and the crew had thus been reduced to 27. What the Confidential Books did not add was that her commander, Lieutenant Alastair Mars was extremely proud of his ship and of the record, she and her sisters had established. The U-class submarines might be small, but they were ideally suited to fighting in the shallow waters of the North Sea where the much larger American submarines were at a serious disadvantage.
“Where are we going, Sir?” Sub-lieutenant Robert Horton, Number One on Unbroken had been waiting in the spring sunshine for his Captain to collect his final briefing from the ‘operational command authority’. This was something of a sacrifice since the sunshine was misleading. The temperature in Iceland in April rarely rose above 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the bitter chill in the air meant scarves and greatcoats were still essential all day, every day. At this time in the morning, the temperature was barely above freezing.
That Neskapstad had only been a small fishing port once did not mean that its present importance had gone unnoticed by the fascists. Neskapstad was 500 nautical miles from the Hitlerite air base at Stornoway in Scotland which put it right on the outer edge of the operational radius achievable by the three standard Luftwaffe bombers, the Ju-188, He-111, and Do-217. That had limited them to nuisance raids, pinpricks by one or two aircraft at a time. More than a few such raids had ended with the bombers ditching on the way home.
It was only when the longer-range He-177 had arrived that the Luftwaffe bombing had graduated from being a minor nuisance to a serious problem. The response had been the construction of a new fighter base on the outskirts of the town and the assignment of a wing of F-49E Ball Lightning interceptors to deter additional raids. The noise made by the F-49s taking off sorely tried the patience of the local citizens, but their presence had deterred any substantial bombing campaign. Most recently, the Germans had tried to send their He-177s in at night, only to discover the fighter wing based at Neskapstad included an F-49G night fighter detachment.
So, it was simply prudence that made Mars wait for the sound of an F-49 flight taking off to fade away before answering. Even so, he glanced around before speaking. "Kattegat again, Bob."
"Not another delivery run?" Horton meant one of two things by that. One kind of delivery run involved putting agents ashore to work with the local resistance or to carry out a commando raid. Over the last year, assassination missions had become more frequent for those agents. The other kind of delivery run involved laying mines off key points such as harbor entrances or in fjords. Both kinds of delivery runs were unusually dangerous, and the Free Royal Navy had already lost more than a dozen U-class submarines carrying them out.
"Not this time. We're on search-and-destroy. The Hitlerites are using Copenhagen as one of their base ports in support of the shipping routes to Britain. The Septics can't get at them with carrier strikes so we're going in to sink as many of the transports as we can. Going in or coming out it doesn’t matter. There will be mining going on as well, but our job is to nail the fascists who get clear of the mines."
"That means we'll be torpedoing the ships carrying food to our people back home." Horton sounded very reluctant. "The crew won’t like that, skipper."
Mars nodded. An opinion that he should have kept religiously to himself was that the Admiralty showed far too little concern for the men under its command and far too much for rebuilding the reputation of the Royal Navy. As it was, his indiscreet opinions on that issue had been noted by his superiors and had caused questions to be raised over his soundness. It hadn’t helped that he was Canadian by birth and that had caused senior officers in both the Free Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy to look on him with suspicion. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Number One. Until then, we had better get moving. We need to get out just before dusk. It's 1100 miles to our patrol area and we want to finish the run on the surface before dawn if we can."
"We're lucky the nights are still long. We still have five days to make the trip and our surface cruising speed is ten knots. The time and distance equations work, just. Isn't it about time we got a milk run?"
Mars shook his head. A 'milk run' was carrying supplies to the isolated British garrison on the Faroe Islands. Despite the Faroe Islands being only some 300 miles out from Neskapstad, the run to them was still counted as an operational mission. Informally, a milk run was a reward for a more dangerous job well done and Unbroken didn't qualify. Not yet at any rate. Mars thought. We've just never been in the right place at the right time.
"If we can score a decent amount of tonnage on this cruise, we might be in luck." Mars was well-aware he was lagging behind the other Free British submarine commanders based in Iceland where tonnage was concerned. The fact that it was because he had been assigned an unusually high number of delivery runs didn’t help soothe his feelings about the issue. “We’d better have a look at the charts. Get Rupert to join us in the wardroom, will you?”
Sub-lieutenant Rupert Clark was the navigator and the third of the three officers assigned to Unbroken. He had a roll of charts with him, but his expression was not that of a happy man. “Let me guess, Kattegat again?”
“’Fraid so, Rupert. Orders are to intercept and interdict fascist shipping from Copenhagen to the UK.”
“Don’t the damned fools in Churchill understand that they simply don’t route their ships that way? Sure, Copenhagen is a major port, but the ships go south, through the Fehmam Belt to Kiel, then transit the Kiel Canal to Brunsbuttel. After that, they hug the Dutch coast as far as they can before making a run for the East Anglia ports. To do any good we’d have to be down by Rotterdam. All that’s in the Kattegat, and the Skagerrak as well for that, are sub-chasers and torpedo boats. And aircraft of course. There’s what, a dozen airbases surrounding a stretch of water that’s 70 miles wide and a hundred and fifty long? We’re sticking our neck into a noose for nothing.”
“What I have to ask is why they route ships out of Copenhagen at all?” Horton was looking at the charts and was coming to the same depressing conclusion. “There are more and better ports all along the Dutch coast and they’re further south. Puts more distance between them and the Septic aircraft carriers.”
“Denmark produces food and dairy. Sure, most of it goes to Germany but they do ship some to Britain. They get too great a quantity of war materials there to let the place starve. If they don’t ship it, it would have to go by rail and that takes longer, costs more and gives the Resistance a chance to get at it. Give the fascists credit, they’re far too smart to go north to where the Septics are waiting. They stay in the Baltic which is their own private lake.” Mars looked at the charts as well and shook his head. “Don’t ask me why the brass in Churchill don’t see that.”
“It wasn’t their own private lake when the Russkies flew over it on their way to Berlin.” Horton’s remark caused a laugh to echo around the tiny wardroom. The Russian air raid on Berlin was still a boost to morale whenever it was mentioned.
Mars stared at the map again, looking at the likely convoy routes and the defenses piled around the straits leading to the Baltic. His orders said to patrol the Kattegat as far south as both prudent and practical and that had caused a glimmering of an idea to form in his mind.
“Bob, Rupert, we’ll be pulling out in three hours as soon as the Privateers have sterilized the waters around here. Make sure that we have everything we are likely to need for a twenty-one-day patrol. And if we can squeeze more in, do so.”
Rear Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
"Faster! Faster! The fascists will not wait until you finish picking your nose before you fire shots at them!" Captain Alekse Vladimirovich Piskunov shouted encouragement at his men while they hurled rocks at the horse-drawn sled as it passed them. This was no normal sled; it had been carefully built out of logs and scrap timber to have the outline of a fascist tank. All winter, he had been encouraging his men to take every opportunity to throw rocks at the "Pine Panzer", sharpening their aim and giving them practice at leading the target so that their rock would crash squarely home against the box-like 'turret'.
When they had started the game after the snow had brought real fighting to an effective end, most of the rocks had missed but Piskunov had known they would. A survivor of the battles of 1941 when the only anti-tank weapons the Russian infantry had were wholly inadequate RPG-40 anti-tank grenades and PTRD-41 anti-tank rifles, he had learned that such ineffective weapons had to be used well if they were to have any effect at all. The RPG-40 grenades had long been withdrawn but the anti-tank rifles were still used, only their targets were now the fascists themselves, not their tanks. The anti-tank mission was now being filled by the RPG-1 rocket launcher reinforced by trophy Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks and by American bazookas. The basic lesson remained true though. For any of those weapons to stop a tank, first, they had to hit it and that was where throwing rocks came in. Now, after weeks of practice, most of the thrown rocks hit the target. Piskunov sincerely hoped that his men's rockets would do the same.
“What are you waiting for?” The men pulling the “Pine Panzer” had stopped to rest once they had passed the main positions. The men said nothing but moved to pick up the tow ropes again. As they did so, one Russian soldier popped up from an overlooked dugout and threw his rock with deadly accuracy. It made a satisfying crunk noise as it hit the wet wood. “Now, Tovarish Petr Ivanovich shows us the way! If we can’t get a good shot in before the tank passes, hold your fire until you can hit it in the flanks and rear. Remember the fascists have many, many tanks. If you are killed firing hopeless shots, who will destroy them all?”
The men in the defenses looked at each other. Suddenly the game they were playing had become real.
"Tovarish Politruk, who scored best today?" Piskunov's shout echoed across the track made by the sled.
Political instructor Mikhail Ivanovich Gushchin thought carefully before giving his verdict. It was not just based on who had thrown his rocks the furthest, the fastest, and the most accurately but on who had been the best soldier that week. Who had carried out his duties most conscientiously, with the bravest heart and with smiles for all his comrades? "It was a hard decision, bratishka, but in my judgment, it all came down to that last throw. With that, our bratishka Petya did best!"
Private Petr Ivanovich Etler stepped forward and took an American bazooka from the hands of his sergeant. It was the old 60mm version that had put the fear of God into the fascists in 1943 but was now obsolete. Replaced in the American Army by the 90mm version, the Americans used the 60mm just for training. Etler took the weapon and picked his position carefully. Half the art of being a good rocket man was knowing where to shoot from. He shouldered the weapon, took the proper position as described in the manual, and fired. The rocket flew straight and level to hit the target exactly where the 'turret' joined the 'hull'.
"A kill!" Piskunov shouted again, this time spreading the good news. "An extra 100 grams of vodka tonight for everybody!"
The wooden sled wasn't burning; it was too wet for that. In a battle, men would now throw Sharashkas, bottles loaded with a gasoline/diesel mix at the crippled tank to make sure it burned. A tank that burned was dead and if the fascists inside burned as well, so much the better.
While the rock-throwing had been taking place, the ration-bearers had brought up a cauldron with kulesh, a millet soup to which some vegetables and beef had been added. Piskunov watched his men settle down to eat their lunch, knowing that it had been well-earned. His men would earn their dinner as well by spending the afternoon digging trenches and positions for mortars and anti-tank guns. Once they had dug their pits, they would start digging decoys as well. Soon the fascists would be attacking again and stopping them was never cheap or easy. Not even with the new American wonder weapon called napalm. Those who had seen it dropped by American aircraft spoke of it with awe and no little amount of fear.
Piskunov started making his rounds of the defense area, making sure that he took a different route from the path he had followed yesterday and the day before. It only needed two or three days of walking on the same tracks and the path would be clearly visible in the photographs taken by reconnaissance aircraft. That was something to be avoided but also to be exploited when the situation was right. A well-trodden path revealed a defensive position, so the Russians avoided making them. Only, the fascists knew that so if they saw a well-trodden path, they might assume the position it exposed was a decoy. Knowing that the Russians might try and fool the Hitlerites by putting such paths close to the real defenses. A constant game of bluff and counterbluff.
“Behind a tree, bratishka? Really?” The ‘57’ was well dug-in and had been carefully camouflaged but there was a tree only a few yards in front of it.
The gun commander straightened his back and grinned at Piskunov. “Tovarish Captain, the fascist cannot hit us from in front of that tree and we could not penetrate his front if we hit him. But Mischa or Sasha on the guns next to us can take him out with a flanking shot and we can do the same for the tanks in front of them. The tree gives us extra protection.”
Piskunov laughed and clapped Sergeant Kazimir Ivanovich Usanov on the back. The veteran anti-tank gunner had remembered the lessons of last year well. The ‘57’ was a good anti-tank gun, not so much because of its power, which was average at best, but because it was small and easily concealed in ways that the 76 and 85-mm guns were not. “Well said Kazik! Will you be killing another Tiger for us?”
Usanov smiled proudly at the memory of the Tiger tank he had hit from the side and set ablaze the year before. None of the fascists inside had got out alive. “Tovarish Captain, we serve the Rodina! If another Kitty shows us his side, we will burn him as well!”
There was a quick cheer from the crew of the ‘57’ which Piskunov joined in. He kept his doubts to himself. Every year, the Hitlerites had come back with a bigger and more heavily armored tank. Tigers in 1943 had been followed by Royal Tigers in 1944. Now it was 1945. What was coming next? The truth was that even a 100mm gun could not penetrate a Royal Tiger from the front. Like all Russian infantry commanders, Piskunov hoped that the huge beasts would be somebody else’s problem.
Top Floor, Bank de Commerce et Industrie, Geneva, Switzerland.
“Is there any sign of the situation improving?” Loki looked down at the sparse tray that Branwen had brought in for his lunch. At six foot eight, he was a big man and his frame needed support. The slowly spreading famine in Switzerland was leaving him perpetually hungry, a situation made much worse by the knowledge that the employees of his bank were suffering as well. During the winter, he had finally succumbed to the inevitable and asked The Seer in Washington and Suriyothai in Bangkok for help. Both had responded generously and the supplies they had sent were making sure that Loki’s people were getting a diet that was just enough to keep them healthy. That was better than the situation facing most of the people in Occupied Europe where food was in seriously short supply. Only two nations had enough; Germany which had taken all the food it needed from the territories it occupied and Britain where large stocks had been built up before they had also been occupied and whose war industries were too useful to the Germans to allow that food to be plundered.
Branwen shook her head. “Not as long as the Germans keep taking most of the supplies for their own use. We’re just one supplicant for whatever we can get out of Spain and Italy. At least, we’re at the head of the queue since the Italians and Spaniards know whatever they sell to Switzerland won’t be taken by the Germans. Anyway, Suriyothai is slipping us a reasonable quantity of rice and canned meat and fruit. We’re getting preserved food from Washington as well.”
“We’re sharing what we can?”
“Of course.” Branwen was slightly indignant that Loki had asked but reminded herself that a pervasive drive to help as many people who were in need as possible was as much a part of his character as the ridiculous and annoying practical jokes he played. “Anyway, I have the latest shipment figures. It looks like the Germans are going to drive north again. I’d say two-thirds of their supplies and munitions are going to Army Group White Sea and at least three-quarters of their fuel. That suggests to our staff that the Germans will be on the defensive throughout 1945 except in the far North. Archangel’sk is the obvious target. Aviation fuel, now there’s an oddity there. The amount going to the front is being cut back and more retained within the Reich.”
“The raid on Berlin last year.” Loki laughed at the memory of the way the Russians had slipped a squadron of old bombers through a crack in the German defenses, flying through a seriously bad weather front on the way, and then bombed Berlin. The raid had done almost no real damage, but the morale effect had been profound. “The Germans will be upping their fighter defenses. The Nazis sold this war to the German people on the basis that they wouldn’t be affected by it. That the price would be paid by everybody else. Berlin was a wake-up call.”
“We’ll have to tell Washington that although I suspect they already know and are not happy about it. On other matters, the Germans seem to be simplifying their tank production at last. There’s nothing coming out of the Jagdtiger production site suggesting the production line is being changed to something else, all the Mark III derivatives are finally winding down and being replaced by Mark IV versions. We’re seeing a lot more tank destroyers coming out of Czechoslovakia and hundreds of those little Bren carriers being shipped out of Britain. Branwen gave a profound sigh. “We’re breaking their stuff in Russia faster than they can replace it, but the difference isn’t big enough. We’re not going to end this in 1945, Loki.”
“I know. We’ll be lucky if it ends by 1950 and 1955 is more likely.” That glum forecast was enough to destroy any semblance of cheer. In the seventh year of a world war, the coming of spring didn’t mean a renewal of life anymore, it meant the return of industrialized death on an apocalyptic scale. “No more of those Jagdtigers you said?
Branwen looked at her file. It was the cumulative result of an espionage net that extended all over Germany and man-months of analyses that teased out the secrets of what was happening. It was probably the most valuable economic and industrial analysis that had ever been written and its effects on Allied war plans were profound. Yet, for all that, very few of those who read it knew where it had come from and most of those who thought they did have succumbed to disinformation. “All the evidence is that Jagdtiger production stopped early in the winter and has not been renewed. Manannan mac Lir thinks it’s because the Jagdtigers showed up so poorly in the last battles before winter set in. Jagdpanther production is up, and Jagdpanzer IV and Sturmgeschütz IV production is likewise. Hetzer production is up a lot.”
Loki drummed his fingers on his desk. “Usually the Germans double down when one of their ideas doesn’t work. We’ll see. Now, what have we for lunch? Let me guess. Spam.”
Free Royal Navy Forward Operating Base Neskapstad, Iceland.
Neskapstad was the last stop for Free Royal Navy submarines before they set sail into the void. The base was where they topped up their fuel tanks, took on as much extra food as they could squeeze in, and then set off for the North Sea and the waters around Norway. HMS Unbroken was typical of the U-class submarines that were fighting this strangely silent war. She displaced a mere 750 tons submerged, was 190 feet long, and was armed with four 21-inch torpedo tubes with a single reload torpedo for each. Confidential Books added the information that she was capable of 14.25 knots on the surface and 10 knots submerged. These books also noted that the boats had once been fitted with a single three-inch gun and had a crew of 31 but that the gun had been removed in the interests of streamlining and the crew had thus been reduced to 27. What the Confidential Books did not add was that her commander, Lieutenant Alastair Mars was extremely proud of his ship and of the record, she and her sisters had established. The U-class submarines might be small, but they were ideally suited to fighting in the shallow waters of the North Sea where the much larger American submarines were at a serious disadvantage.
“Where are we going, Sir?” Sub-lieutenant Robert Horton, Number One on Unbroken had been waiting in the spring sunshine for his Captain to collect his final briefing from the ‘operational command authority’. This was something of a sacrifice since the sunshine was misleading. The temperature in Iceland in April rarely rose above 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the bitter chill in the air meant scarves and greatcoats were still essential all day, every day. At this time in the morning, the temperature was barely above freezing.
That Neskapstad had only been a small fishing port once did not mean that its present importance had gone unnoticed by the fascists. Neskapstad was 500 nautical miles from the Hitlerite air base at Stornoway in Scotland which put it right on the outer edge of the operational radius achievable by the three standard Luftwaffe bombers, the Ju-188, He-111, and Do-217. That had limited them to nuisance raids, pinpricks by one or two aircraft at a time. More than a few such raids had ended with the bombers ditching on the way home.
It was only when the longer-range He-177 had arrived that the Luftwaffe bombing had graduated from being a minor nuisance to a serious problem. The response had been the construction of a new fighter base on the outskirts of the town and the assignment of a wing of F-49E Ball Lightning interceptors to deter additional raids. The noise made by the F-49s taking off sorely tried the patience of the local citizens, but their presence had deterred any substantial bombing campaign. Most recently, the Germans had tried to send their He-177s in at night, only to discover the fighter wing based at Neskapstad included an F-49G night fighter detachment.
So, it was simply prudence that made Mars wait for the sound of an F-49 flight taking off to fade away before answering. Even so, he glanced around before speaking. "Kattegat again, Bob."
"Not another delivery run?" Horton meant one of two things by that. One kind of delivery run involved putting agents ashore to work with the local resistance or to carry out a commando raid. Over the last year, assassination missions had become more frequent for those agents. The other kind of delivery run involved laying mines off key points such as harbor entrances or in fjords. Both kinds of delivery runs were unusually dangerous, and the Free Royal Navy had already lost more than a dozen U-class submarines carrying them out.
"Not this time. We're on search-and-destroy. The Hitlerites are using Copenhagen as one of their base ports in support of the shipping routes to Britain. The Septics can't get at them with carrier strikes so we're going in to sink as many of the transports as we can. Going in or coming out it doesn’t matter. There will be mining going on as well, but our job is to nail the fascists who get clear of the mines."
"That means we'll be torpedoing the ships carrying food to our people back home." Horton sounded very reluctant. "The crew won’t like that, skipper."
Mars nodded. An opinion that he should have kept religiously to himself was that the Admiralty showed far too little concern for the men under its command and far too much for rebuilding the reputation of the Royal Navy. As it was, his indiscreet opinions on that issue had been noted by his superiors and had caused questions to be raised over his soundness. It hadn’t helped that he was Canadian by birth and that had caused senior officers in both the Free Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy to look on him with suspicion. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Number One. Until then, we had better get moving. We need to get out just before dusk. It's 1100 miles to our patrol area and we want to finish the run on the surface before dawn if we can."
"We're lucky the nights are still long. We still have five days to make the trip and our surface cruising speed is ten knots. The time and distance equations work, just. Isn't it about time we got a milk run?"
Mars shook his head. A 'milk run' was carrying supplies to the isolated British garrison on the Faroe Islands. Despite the Faroe Islands being only some 300 miles out from Neskapstad, the run to them was still counted as an operational mission. Informally, a milk run was a reward for a more dangerous job well done and Unbroken didn't qualify. Not yet at any rate. Mars thought. We've just never been in the right place at the right time.
"If we can score a decent amount of tonnage on this cruise, we might be in luck." Mars was well-aware he was lagging behind the other Free British submarine commanders based in Iceland where tonnage was concerned. The fact that it was because he had been assigned an unusually high number of delivery runs didn’t help soothe his feelings about the issue. “We’d better have a look at the charts. Get Rupert to join us in the wardroom, will you?”
Sub-lieutenant Rupert Clark was the navigator and the third of the three officers assigned to Unbroken. He had a roll of charts with him, but his expression was not that of a happy man. “Let me guess, Kattegat again?”
“’Fraid so, Rupert. Orders are to intercept and interdict fascist shipping from Copenhagen to the UK.”
“Don’t the damned fools in Churchill understand that they simply don’t route their ships that way? Sure, Copenhagen is a major port, but the ships go south, through the Fehmam Belt to Kiel, then transit the Kiel Canal to Brunsbuttel. After that, they hug the Dutch coast as far as they can before making a run for the East Anglia ports. To do any good we’d have to be down by Rotterdam. All that’s in the Kattegat, and the Skagerrak as well for that, are sub-chasers and torpedo boats. And aircraft of course. There’s what, a dozen airbases surrounding a stretch of water that’s 70 miles wide and a hundred and fifty long? We’re sticking our neck into a noose for nothing.”
“What I have to ask is why they route ships out of Copenhagen at all?” Horton was looking at the charts and was coming to the same depressing conclusion. “There are more and better ports all along the Dutch coast and they’re further south. Puts more distance between them and the Septic aircraft carriers.”
“Denmark produces food and dairy. Sure, most of it goes to Germany but they do ship some to Britain. They get too great a quantity of war materials there to let the place starve. If they don’t ship it, it would have to go by rail and that takes longer, costs more and gives the Resistance a chance to get at it. Give the fascists credit, they’re far too smart to go north to where the Septics are waiting. They stay in the Baltic which is their own private lake.” Mars looked at the charts as well and shook his head. “Don’t ask me why the brass in Churchill don’t see that.”
“It wasn’t their own private lake when the Russkies flew over it on their way to Berlin.” Horton’s remark caused a laugh to echo around the tiny wardroom. The Russian air raid on Berlin was still a boost to morale whenever it was mentioned.
Mars stared at the map again, looking at the likely convoy routes and the defenses piled around the straits leading to the Baltic. His orders said to patrol the Kattegat as far south as both prudent and practical and that had caused a glimmering of an idea to form in his mind.
“Bob, Rupert, we’ll be pulling out in three hours as soon as the Privateers have sterilized the waters around here. Make sure that we have everything we are likely to need for a twenty-one-day patrol. And if we can squeeze more in, do so.”
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Three
Tank Laager, 511th Heavy Tank Battalion, III SS Panzerkorps, Vedjagino, Archangelsk
“Scheisse! What the hell are those things?” SS-Standartenführer Hermann Priess looked up at the turret of the tank in front of him, took a step back and looked again. The tank still towered over him, at least half a meter taller than the Tiger IIs he was used to. The length was even more impressive; this new tank was at least three meters longer than the older vehicle. A quick walk to the front showed it was more than a meter wider than the Tiger II. It dwarfed the tank that Priess had once believed impossibly large. I was wrong. Bigger tanks than the Tiger II are obviously possible. Practical? That is another matter.
"That, my dear Priess, is a Panzerkampfwagen VII Löwe. It is the new heavy breakthrough tank of the SS-Panzerkorps. The 511th is greatly privileged to receive the first production examples." SS-Oberführer Heinrich Kling sounded quite sincere on that point. Priess was aware that arguing the issue was probably not a good idea. Kling was also quite sincere in defining any opinion that differed from his as treasonous. What Kling was careful not to mention was that the fourteen Panzer VIIs lined up were the only ones that had been built and included the original prototype. Future production was questionable and if it was authorized would be very slow.
Preiss decided to stay on safe ground. "That is the 12.8-centimeter gun? As on the Jagdtiger?"
"It is, 12.8 cm L55 KwK80. And there is also a 7.5cm L24 KwK51 as a coaxial gun. You started your career on the old Panzer-IV, you must remember the short 7.5?"
"I do, Herr Oberführer. A good gun for its day and still an excellent support weapon."
"Indeed. It will save expenditure of 12.8 cm rounds and allow you to keep those for killing tanks. You will not need to worry too much about return fire. Your hull frontal armor is 250mm thick and the sides and rear are 200mm. Same for the turret. Nothing the Ivans or the Amis have will penetrate that."
"How much does the Löwe weigh, Herr Oberführer?"
"140 tones. I know what you are thinking, it is too heavy for the roads and bridges? Well, that is not your problem. All you have to do is to break the Ivan's front line then pull back. And you have a company of Panzer IVJs and another of Jagdpanzer 38ts to help cover you."
Preiss knew what that really meant. There were not enough Löwe tanks available to equip a full heavy tank battalion, so the numbers had been made up by adding in whatever was available. That did not augur well for the crews of those vehicles. "We must get to work training the crews of our new tanks. Are they here yet?'
"They are arriving now. Six men per Löwe. Straight from basic training and fanatical in their loyalty to the Fuhrer. You have a week to lick them into shape before the next offensive starts."
Preiss saluted and turned to inspect his new tanks more closely. That saved him from asking why, if the new recruits were so fanatical, why it had taken until 1945 for them to end up in the Army.
Me-262A-1a Schwalbe "Green 17" over Ozero, Karelia
Hauptman Guenther Högermeyer was officially an expert at shooting down Ami reconnaissance aircraft. Since arriving in Karelia twelve weeks earlier, had brought down seven of the fork-tailed Lockheed RF-38Ls, gaining him the exalted title of "experten". The fast, high-flying RF-38s had been the bane of the German armed forces ever since the Americans had first arrived in Russia in early 1943. Only now, two years later, did the Luftwaffe have their measure and it had taken the new jet fighters to do it.
Högermeyer was now hunting for his eighth victory. An Ami snooper had been reported flying across the German forces in Karelia and he'd been ordered to shoot it down. He had a well-conceived drill for this kind of mission. He would climb to the maximum practical altitude for the Me-262, just over 11,000 meters and use his jet's speed to position himself above and behind the Ami Lockheed. Then, it was just a matter of diving down on the enemy and using the heavy firepower of his 30mm guns to destroy it. Once he had achieved his above-and-behind position, there was nothing a piston-engine fighter could do to escape a jet.
The constant crackle of static in his earphones dropped sharply as the ground controller came into the air to give him the range and bearing of his target. The range was somewhat greater than he had expected but the bearing was still constant, suggesting that he was on a collision course with his target. With a level-flight speed advantage approaching 160kph at his current altitude, he didn’t expect the intercept to take very long. Once that happened, the unarmed Lockheed would be easy meat.
One advantage the jet aircraft had over piston-engine aircraft, if one excluded speed and rate of climb of the course, was that they were smooth and quiet. Piston-engine pilots found themselves ill at ease when flying jets for the first time due to the absence of engine sound and the constant vibration from the propellers. They kept thinking the engines had stopped working and sometimes they were right. Once they got used to the relative lack of background noise, they realized that communications were a lot easier and more reliable in its absence. Högermeyer heard his ground controller's intercept instructions very clearly. The Lockheed he was chasing had turned away and was now heading back toward Allied territory.
That would stretch the time he would take to catch up with it a little, but the massive speed difference between an F-38 Lightning and his Schwalbe made that a matter of little concern. He was already searching for the first sight of his target, knowing that the reflective natural metal finish of the Ami aircraft reflected the color of the sky and made the aircraft hard to spot. On the other hand, the F-38 was a large, oddly shaped aircraft and that worked seriously against it in air combat. Far ahead of him, Högermeyer saw a flash as light reflected off the cockpit canopy of his prey.
He pulled the nose of his Schwalbe up slightly, increasing his altitude by a hair. The diving attack he had planned had its downside; it reduced the time he would have to fire on his target and the speed would get dangerously close to the mysterious point where the controls would lock, and his aircraft would dive straight into the ground. The Schwalbe gave an attentive pilot enough warning to pull the nose up and slow down. It wasn't like the Ta-152s where the aircraft would be irretrievably locked into its death dive before the pilot was aware anything was wrong. Högermeyer knew that most experienced pilots refused to fly the Ta-152 and would fight to keep their older FW-190Ds
"Was zum Teufel?" He was above and behind the Lockheed, a perfect bounce position but he wasn't closing on it the way he had expected. It also occurred to him that the aircraft he was chasing was a lot smaller than the RF-38s. A strange suspicion was already beginning to form in his mind. Still, I am already above and behind him. He is done. Högermeyer pushed the nose of his Schwalbe down and started his attack run. To his shock, the aircraft in front of him, now very clearly not an RF-38, suddenly accelerated and started to move away from him.
There was only one explanation that Högermeyer could come up with. Whatever this new aircraft was, it was jet-engine. He knew that he was seeing the first of the long-awaited American jet fighters. He eased the throttles forward, uneasily aware that he was beginning to approach the dreaded death-dive point. Luftwaffe pilots had made a practice of trying to find exactly where that point was by diving slightly faster each time and hoping that they would still be below where the controls locked. They called it 'tickling the dragon's tail' and for some, the effort had been fatal. He did not know that, far away in America, scientists were tickling a different dragon's tail and for them too, some of the experiments that made had turned out to be fatal.
Högermeyer had made up the difference in speed and was closing in on the Ami aircraft. He could see it clearly now, a straight-winged, single-engine jet with a bubble cockpit towards the nose and drop tanks on its wingtips. He could see the white stars painted in its wings, but the tail markings were new to him. They were a blue diamond surrounded by white and red outlines and stylized blue eagle’s wings on either side. He vaguely remembered seeing something similar but couldn't place it. The thing that froze his attention on the aircraft was the array of camera ports in the nose. The Amis have been battered by our jets for months but when their first ones arrive, they give them to their reconnaissance units. That says something important, but I am not quite sure what.
The range had dropped to around 600 meters when Högermeyer started to squeeze the button that would fire his four 30mm cannon. As if the pilot in his target had been reading his mind, the Ami jet stood on its wingtip and swerved away in a tight turn that led into a climb. Högermeyer cursed fluently, the interplay of centrifugal forces and momentum meant there was no way his Schwalbe could follow the turn and he was already committed to a post-firing pass dive. He watched as the Ami jet soared out of reach, then did a wingover and came straight at him. Högermeyer had no choice; the Schwalbe really didn’t like tight turns and the inboard engine usually suffered a compressor stall if he tried one. The Ami pilot had trapped him though, with the jet coming straight at him, he had to take evasive action and fast to avoid a collision. He wrenched the controls over, flipping his aircraft into a hard left turn while pushing the nose still further down.
The good news was that the Ami jet cleared him by several meters and soared away. The bad news was that Schwalbe's left engine gave a very ill-mannered burp before a compressor stall sent a ball of flame out of both ends of the engine. Högermeyer felt his speed bleeding off as his aircraft tried to fly on a single engine. The Jumo jets were notoriously difficult to restart in flight; trying it was a 50:50 bet at best. Plan B was to limp home on one engine and hope that he wasn't bounced by an allied fighter. He really didn’t have much choice; he turned his aircraft and set off for his home base. The Ami jet had already flown off leaving Högermeyer with the knowledge that he had just fought the world's first jet-vs-jet fighter duel. He hadn’t precisely lost, but he certainly hadn't won.
Pleseck Luftwaffe Base, Archangelsk Oblast
The sound of four Focke-Wulf FW-190D-13s taking off was a sure warning that a jet was coming in and in trouble. Oberstleutnant Hermann Graf, commander of II/JG-52 knew very well that the Americans made a specialty of waiting until the jets were in their final landing pattern before ambushing them with their wheels down and on the brink of stalling. So, each jagdgruppe equipped with Me-262s had two staffeln with jets and two with FW-190D-13s to protect them while they were taking off and landing. That made a paper strength of 27 Me-262s and 24 Doa-13s. II/JG-52 was actually up to strength on Dora-13s but had only 17 Schwalbes.
Sixteen if Högermeyer and his escort didn’t bring Green 17 in safely. That would still make II/JG-52 better off than the other three gruppes in the Geschwader. Casualties had been bad in 1943 and they hadn't let up since. All the old-timers were gone, some under the guns of the Ami Thunderbolts, others trying to break through the defenses of the American bombers. The Schwalbe had bought a brief respite in the brutal attrition, but nobody believed it would last long.
Graf could see the problem with the inbound Me-262. One of its engines had flamed out and Högermeyer hadn't been able to restart it. The Dora-13s had grouped around him to cover him as he made his landing approach. Graf could almost hear the entire base holding its breath; this was when Amis or Ivans would appear to bring the cripple down. This time, they stayed away, and the Schwalbe touched down safely. The four Dora-13s broke away and landed on the parallel runway.
“Did you get him, Gunn?” Graf already guessed the answer from the depression that permeated the air around the opened cockpit canopy.
“No, Herr Oberstleutnant. He gave me the slip.”
“And how did he manage that?”
“It was not a fork-tail, it was an Ami jet. Single-engine, faster than a Schwalbe, and as agile as the devil. If he’d had guns, he’d have got me for sure.”
“You’d better talk to the intelligence officer.”
Högermeyer spent the next twenty minutes trying to remember every detail of the brief dogfight. Eventually, Mayor Kurt Pohl sighed and stopped taking notes. “Well, Gunn, it had to happen eventually. What you saw was a new Ami jet fighter they call the F-80 Shooting Star. We had heard that they were converting some of the older ones to reconnaissance aircraft, but a lot of people wouldn’t believe it. They will have to, now.”
“Herr Maior, there was something strange about the tail markings. There was a blue diamond on a white diamond field and a red diamond frame. On each side of the diamonds were blue eagle’s wings.”
Maior Pohl sketched for a few seconds and held up a picture that looked like the old pre-war French roundel only diamond-shaped, not round. The bars on either side were stylized Eagle’s wings. “Like this?”
“Yes, Herr Maior, exactly like that. I know of no American groups that have markings like that.”
“None do, Gunn. Those are Philippine Air Force markings. Still, that will not worry you. JG-52 is on the move.”
“May I ask where Herr Maior?”
“Down south; our intelligence is that the Americans will be starting a bombing campaign aimed at the oilfields in Romania and the Caucasus. The Schwalbes will be needed down there to face the B-29s. JG-52 is to be replaced here with JG-1.
Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
Colonel Richard Gonzalez used the most valuable instrument installed on his RF-80A to make sure he was lined up properly with the runway in front of him. That instrument was a nail driven into the nose cowling with a piece of string tied to it. If the string was aligned properly with the runway, it meant that his aircraft wasn’t crabbing as it came into land. The simple idea had come from one member of the ground crew who had thought up the idea as an easy way of telling the pilot his nose was pointing in the direction he wanted to go. If it was not, he could easily wipe the undercarriage off. The problem, like the solution, had sounded simple but it had cost enough pilots and aircraft before being solved. Jets, as everybody was beginning to learn, were different.
A flair on the nose, a touchback on the throttle, and Lailani III touched neatly down on the runway. Another touch, this time on the brakes, and the aircraft came to a halt. In front of him, a jeep had a “follow me” sign on the back and it led him to his revetment. After over 18 months back home in the Philippines, taking part in setting up the new Republic of the Philippines Air Force, he was back in Russia flying combat missions. Gonzalez tried to avoid mentally adding ‘at last’ to that thought and failed.
Already, the ground crew was taking the film magazines out of the nose cameras and would soon be rushing them off to be processed and inspected by the analysts. The carnage the fascist jet fighters had wrought on the RF-38 Lightnings had resulted in an intelligence famine. For almost five months, the Allies had been operating almost blind. Now, that had just ended.
Some Russians were waiting for him by the nosewheel of his aircraft. As he stepped down onto the ground, he was solemnly offered a piece of black bread, some salt, and a generous shot of vodka. With equal solemnity, he sprinkled his salt on the bread and ate it. Then he raised his vodka shot with a ringing ‘Pobezhdat', ‘To Victory!’ One of the women in the group lifted her own glass in return and said, very slowly and carefully ‘Sa Tagumpay’. On hearing that a new arrival was a volunteer from the Philippines, Chekist Ivan Vladimirovich Maslov had spent an anxious hour the previous evening finding out the proper Tagalog translation of the toast ‘To Victory.’
He had also spent more time reading Colonel Gonzalez’s file. It was impressive; he had already served on the Russian Front for six months in 1943 and had established the basic principles of how to fly reconnaissance missions deep into hostile territory. Maslov noted that he was a close personal friend of General Curtis LeMay and had used that friendship to obtain an ‘exchange posting’ that put him back on the Russian Front, this time flying one of the new jets. At the moment, his RF-80A was the only jet at Korovkinskaya. That would be changing soon. The first elements of the 356th Fighter Group with its F-80Bs would be arriving within the next few hours. The six-month reign of the fascist jets was finally ending.
The 356th was accompanied by its twin, the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. The two units had been together ever since the 356th arrived in Russia in the spring of 1943. The 9th Guards was equipped with the Yak-3P but was scheduled to receive lend-lease F-80Bs soon. Maslov knew that Russian jet fighters were being developed, the MiG-9, the La-15, and the Yak-17 but they were at least a year away from entering service. There was a prototype that was almost ready to start flying, the Yak-15 which was a Yak-3P that had its piston engine replaced by a jet in the nose. Even if it fulfilled its designer’s promises, and which new aircraft ever did that, it was no better than the American F-59 Airacomet. If it was put into production at all, it would be for training only. It saddened Maslov that Russia had nothing better to offer than an aircraft that was fit only for training and yet was still to make its first flight. Even the Commonwealth was doing better with Australia and India both having built their own prototypes.
Maslov had also looked at the arrivals in the Archangel’sk area for the next six months. One thing they had in common was that they were all experienced units, with well-established reputations from the Ulyanov’sk Front. That was hardly surprising; everybody knew that all hell was about to break loose on the Archangel’sk Front. It was just a question of when. It only made sense to reinforce the area.
Around him, formality had vanished from the welcome party as bottles of vodka and samogon had appeared and started to circulate. Gonzalez had a circle of Russian women around him while most of the men were solemnly inspecting the new jet. Maslov shrugged, pushed away the gloomy thoughts, and joined the party. It was spring, after all.
Tank Laager, 511th Heavy Tank Battalion, III SS Panzerkorps, Vedjagino, Archangelsk
“Scheisse! What the hell are those things?” SS-Standartenführer Hermann Priess looked up at the turret of the tank in front of him, took a step back and looked again. The tank still towered over him, at least half a meter taller than the Tiger IIs he was used to. The length was even more impressive; this new tank was at least three meters longer than the older vehicle. A quick walk to the front showed it was more than a meter wider than the Tiger II. It dwarfed the tank that Priess had once believed impossibly large. I was wrong. Bigger tanks than the Tiger II are obviously possible. Practical? That is another matter.
"That, my dear Priess, is a Panzerkampfwagen VII Löwe. It is the new heavy breakthrough tank of the SS-Panzerkorps. The 511th is greatly privileged to receive the first production examples." SS-Oberführer Heinrich Kling sounded quite sincere on that point. Priess was aware that arguing the issue was probably not a good idea. Kling was also quite sincere in defining any opinion that differed from his as treasonous. What Kling was careful not to mention was that the fourteen Panzer VIIs lined up were the only ones that had been built and included the original prototype. Future production was questionable and if it was authorized would be very slow.
Preiss decided to stay on safe ground. "That is the 12.8-centimeter gun? As on the Jagdtiger?"
"It is, 12.8 cm L55 KwK80. And there is also a 7.5cm L24 KwK51 as a coaxial gun. You started your career on the old Panzer-IV, you must remember the short 7.5?"
"I do, Herr Oberführer. A good gun for its day and still an excellent support weapon."
"Indeed. It will save expenditure of 12.8 cm rounds and allow you to keep those for killing tanks. You will not need to worry too much about return fire. Your hull frontal armor is 250mm thick and the sides and rear are 200mm. Same for the turret. Nothing the Ivans or the Amis have will penetrate that."
"How much does the Löwe weigh, Herr Oberführer?"
"140 tones. I know what you are thinking, it is too heavy for the roads and bridges? Well, that is not your problem. All you have to do is to break the Ivan's front line then pull back. And you have a company of Panzer IVJs and another of Jagdpanzer 38ts to help cover you."
Preiss knew what that really meant. There were not enough Löwe tanks available to equip a full heavy tank battalion, so the numbers had been made up by adding in whatever was available. That did not augur well for the crews of those vehicles. "We must get to work training the crews of our new tanks. Are they here yet?'
"They are arriving now. Six men per Löwe. Straight from basic training and fanatical in their loyalty to the Fuhrer. You have a week to lick them into shape before the next offensive starts."
Preiss saluted and turned to inspect his new tanks more closely. That saved him from asking why, if the new recruits were so fanatical, why it had taken until 1945 for them to end up in the Army.
Me-262A-1a Schwalbe "Green 17" over Ozero, Karelia
Hauptman Guenther Högermeyer was officially an expert at shooting down Ami reconnaissance aircraft. Since arriving in Karelia twelve weeks earlier, had brought down seven of the fork-tailed Lockheed RF-38Ls, gaining him the exalted title of "experten". The fast, high-flying RF-38s had been the bane of the German armed forces ever since the Americans had first arrived in Russia in early 1943. Only now, two years later, did the Luftwaffe have their measure and it had taken the new jet fighters to do it.
Högermeyer was now hunting for his eighth victory. An Ami snooper had been reported flying across the German forces in Karelia and he'd been ordered to shoot it down. He had a well-conceived drill for this kind of mission. He would climb to the maximum practical altitude for the Me-262, just over 11,000 meters and use his jet's speed to position himself above and behind the Ami Lockheed. Then, it was just a matter of diving down on the enemy and using the heavy firepower of his 30mm guns to destroy it. Once he had achieved his above-and-behind position, there was nothing a piston-engine fighter could do to escape a jet.
The constant crackle of static in his earphones dropped sharply as the ground controller came into the air to give him the range and bearing of his target. The range was somewhat greater than he had expected but the bearing was still constant, suggesting that he was on a collision course with his target. With a level-flight speed advantage approaching 160kph at his current altitude, he didn’t expect the intercept to take very long. Once that happened, the unarmed Lockheed would be easy meat.
One advantage the jet aircraft had over piston-engine aircraft, if one excluded speed and rate of climb of the course, was that they were smooth and quiet. Piston-engine pilots found themselves ill at ease when flying jets for the first time due to the absence of engine sound and the constant vibration from the propellers. They kept thinking the engines had stopped working and sometimes they were right. Once they got used to the relative lack of background noise, they realized that communications were a lot easier and more reliable in its absence. Högermeyer heard his ground controller's intercept instructions very clearly. The Lockheed he was chasing had turned away and was now heading back toward Allied territory.
That would stretch the time he would take to catch up with it a little, but the massive speed difference between an F-38 Lightning and his Schwalbe made that a matter of little concern. He was already searching for the first sight of his target, knowing that the reflective natural metal finish of the Ami aircraft reflected the color of the sky and made the aircraft hard to spot. On the other hand, the F-38 was a large, oddly shaped aircraft and that worked seriously against it in air combat. Far ahead of him, Högermeyer saw a flash as light reflected off the cockpit canopy of his prey.
He pulled the nose of his Schwalbe up slightly, increasing his altitude by a hair. The diving attack he had planned had its downside; it reduced the time he would have to fire on his target and the speed would get dangerously close to the mysterious point where the controls would lock, and his aircraft would dive straight into the ground. The Schwalbe gave an attentive pilot enough warning to pull the nose up and slow down. It wasn't like the Ta-152s where the aircraft would be irretrievably locked into its death dive before the pilot was aware anything was wrong. Högermeyer knew that most experienced pilots refused to fly the Ta-152 and would fight to keep their older FW-190Ds
"Was zum Teufel?" He was above and behind the Lockheed, a perfect bounce position but he wasn't closing on it the way he had expected. It also occurred to him that the aircraft he was chasing was a lot smaller than the RF-38s. A strange suspicion was already beginning to form in his mind. Still, I am already above and behind him. He is done. Högermeyer pushed the nose of his Schwalbe down and started his attack run. To his shock, the aircraft in front of him, now very clearly not an RF-38, suddenly accelerated and started to move away from him.
There was only one explanation that Högermeyer could come up with. Whatever this new aircraft was, it was jet-engine. He knew that he was seeing the first of the long-awaited American jet fighters. He eased the throttles forward, uneasily aware that he was beginning to approach the dreaded death-dive point. Luftwaffe pilots had made a practice of trying to find exactly where that point was by diving slightly faster each time and hoping that they would still be below where the controls locked. They called it 'tickling the dragon's tail' and for some, the effort had been fatal. He did not know that, far away in America, scientists were tickling a different dragon's tail and for them too, some of the experiments that made had turned out to be fatal.
Högermeyer had made up the difference in speed and was closing in on the Ami aircraft. He could see it clearly now, a straight-winged, single-engine jet with a bubble cockpit towards the nose and drop tanks on its wingtips. He could see the white stars painted in its wings, but the tail markings were new to him. They were a blue diamond surrounded by white and red outlines and stylized blue eagle’s wings on either side. He vaguely remembered seeing something similar but couldn't place it. The thing that froze his attention on the aircraft was the array of camera ports in the nose. The Amis have been battered by our jets for months but when their first ones arrive, they give them to their reconnaissance units. That says something important, but I am not quite sure what.
The range had dropped to around 600 meters when Högermeyer started to squeeze the button that would fire his four 30mm cannon. As if the pilot in his target had been reading his mind, the Ami jet stood on its wingtip and swerved away in a tight turn that led into a climb. Högermeyer cursed fluently, the interplay of centrifugal forces and momentum meant there was no way his Schwalbe could follow the turn and he was already committed to a post-firing pass dive. He watched as the Ami jet soared out of reach, then did a wingover and came straight at him. Högermeyer had no choice; the Schwalbe really didn’t like tight turns and the inboard engine usually suffered a compressor stall if he tried one. The Ami pilot had trapped him though, with the jet coming straight at him, he had to take evasive action and fast to avoid a collision. He wrenched the controls over, flipping his aircraft into a hard left turn while pushing the nose still further down.
The good news was that the Ami jet cleared him by several meters and soared away. The bad news was that Schwalbe's left engine gave a very ill-mannered burp before a compressor stall sent a ball of flame out of both ends of the engine. Högermeyer felt his speed bleeding off as his aircraft tried to fly on a single engine. The Jumo jets were notoriously difficult to restart in flight; trying it was a 50:50 bet at best. Plan B was to limp home on one engine and hope that he wasn't bounced by an allied fighter. He really didn’t have much choice; he turned his aircraft and set off for his home base. The Ami jet had already flown off leaving Högermeyer with the knowledge that he had just fought the world's first jet-vs-jet fighter duel. He hadn’t precisely lost, but he certainly hadn't won.
Pleseck Luftwaffe Base, Archangelsk Oblast
The sound of four Focke-Wulf FW-190D-13s taking off was a sure warning that a jet was coming in and in trouble. Oberstleutnant Hermann Graf, commander of II/JG-52 knew very well that the Americans made a specialty of waiting until the jets were in their final landing pattern before ambushing them with their wheels down and on the brink of stalling. So, each jagdgruppe equipped with Me-262s had two staffeln with jets and two with FW-190D-13s to protect them while they were taking off and landing. That made a paper strength of 27 Me-262s and 24 Doa-13s. II/JG-52 was actually up to strength on Dora-13s but had only 17 Schwalbes.
Sixteen if Högermeyer and his escort didn’t bring Green 17 in safely. That would still make II/JG-52 better off than the other three gruppes in the Geschwader. Casualties had been bad in 1943 and they hadn't let up since. All the old-timers were gone, some under the guns of the Ami Thunderbolts, others trying to break through the defenses of the American bombers. The Schwalbe had bought a brief respite in the brutal attrition, but nobody believed it would last long.
Graf could see the problem with the inbound Me-262. One of its engines had flamed out and Högermeyer hadn't been able to restart it. The Dora-13s had grouped around him to cover him as he made his landing approach. Graf could almost hear the entire base holding its breath; this was when Amis or Ivans would appear to bring the cripple down. This time, they stayed away, and the Schwalbe touched down safely. The four Dora-13s broke away and landed on the parallel runway.
“Did you get him, Gunn?” Graf already guessed the answer from the depression that permeated the air around the opened cockpit canopy.
“No, Herr Oberstleutnant. He gave me the slip.”
“And how did he manage that?”
“It was not a fork-tail, it was an Ami jet. Single-engine, faster than a Schwalbe, and as agile as the devil. If he’d had guns, he’d have got me for sure.”
“You’d better talk to the intelligence officer.”
Högermeyer spent the next twenty minutes trying to remember every detail of the brief dogfight. Eventually, Mayor Kurt Pohl sighed and stopped taking notes. “Well, Gunn, it had to happen eventually. What you saw was a new Ami jet fighter they call the F-80 Shooting Star. We had heard that they were converting some of the older ones to reconnaissance aircraft, but a lot of people wouldn’t believe it. They will have to, now.”
“Herr Maior, there was something strange about the tail markings. There was a blue diamond on a white diamond field and a red diamond frame. On each side of the diamonds were blue eagle’s wings.”
Maior Pohl sketched for a few seconds and held up a picture that looked like the old pre-war French roundel only diamond-shaped, not round. The bars on either side were stylized Eagle’s wings. “Like this?”
“Yes, Herr Maior, exactly like that. I know of no American groups that have markings like that.”
“None do, Gunn. Those are Philippine Air Force markings. Still, that will not worry you. JG-52 is on the move.”
“May I ask where Herr Maior?”
“Down south; our intelligence is that the Americans will be starting a bombing campaign aimed at the oilfields in Romania and the Caucasus. The Schwalbes will be needed down there to face the B-29s. JG-52 is to be replaced here with JG-1.
Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
Colonel Richard Gonzalez used the most valuable instrument installed on his RF-80A to make sure he was lined up properly with the runway in front of him. That instrument was a nail driven into the nose cowling with a piece of string tied to it. If the string was aligned properly with the runway, it meant that his aircraft wasn’t crabbing as it came into land. The simple idea had come from one member of the ground crew who had thought up the idea as an easy way of telling the pilot his nose was pointing in the direction he wanted to go. If it was not, he could easily wipe the undercarriage off. The problem, like the solution, had sounded simple but it had cost enough pilots and aircraft before being solved. Jets, as everybody was beginning to learn, were different.
A flair on the nose, a touchback on the throttle, and Lailani III touched neatly down on the runway. Another touch, this time on the brakes, and the aircraft came to a halt. In front of him, a jeep had a “follow me” sign on the back and it led him to his revetment. After over 18 months back home in the Philippines, taking part in setting up the new Republic of the Philippines Air Force, he was back in Russia flying combat missions. Gonzalez tried to avoid mentally adding ‘at last’ to that thought and failed.
Already, the ground crew was taking the film magazines out of the nose cameras and would soon be rushing them off to be processed and inspected by the analysts. The carnage the fascist jet fighters had wrought on the RF-38 Lightnings had resulted in an intelligence famine. For almost five months, the Allies had been operating almost blind. Now, that had just ended.
Some Russians were waiting for him by the nosewheel of his aircraft. As he stepped down onto the ground, he was solemnly offered a piece of black bread, some salt, and a generous shot of vodka. With equal solemnity, he sprinkled his salt on the bread and ate it. Then he raised his vodka shot with a ringing ‘Pobezhdat', ‘To Victory!’ One of the women in the group lifted her own glass in return and said, very slowly and carefully ‘Sa Tagumpay’. On hearing that a new arrival was a volunteer from the Philippines, Chekist Ivan Vladimirovich Maslov had spent an anxious hour the previous evening finding out the proper Tagalog translation of the toast ‘To Victory.’
He had also spent more time reading Colonel Gonzalez’s file. It was impressive; he had already served on the Russian Front for six months in 1943 and had established the basic principles of how to fly reconnaissance missions deep into hostile territory. Maslov noted that he was a close personal friend of General Curtis LeMay and had used that friendship to obtain an ‘exchange posting’ that put him back on the Russian Front, this time flying one of the new jets. At the moment, his RF-80A was the only jet at Korovkinskaya. That would be changing soon. The first elements of the 356th Fighter Group with its F-80Bs would be arriving within the next few hours. The six-month reign of the fascist jets was finally ending.
The 356th was accompanied by its twin, the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. The two units had been together ever since the 356th arrived in Russia in the spring of 1943. The 9th Guards was equipped with the Yak-3P but was scheduled to receive lend-lease F-80Bs soon. Maslov knew that Russian jet fighters were being developed, the MiG-9, the La-15, and the Yak-17 but they were at least a year away from entering service. There was a prototype that was almost ready to start flying, the Yak-15 which was a Yak-3P that had its piston engine replaced by a jet in the nose. Even if it fulfilled its designer’s promises, and which new aircraft ever did that, it was no better than the American F-59 Airacomet. If it was put into production at all, it would be for training only. It saddened Maslov that Russia had nothing better to offer than an aircraft that was fit only for training and yet was still to make its first flight. Even the Commonwealth was doing better with Australia and India both having built their own prototypes.
Maslov had also looked at the arrivals in the Archangel’sk area for the next six months. One thing they had in common was that they were all experienced units, with well-established reputations from the Ulyanov’sk Front. That was hardly surprising; everybody knew that all hell was about to break loose on the Archangel’sk Front. It was just a question of when. It only made sense to reinforce the area.
Around him, formality had vanished from the welcome party as bottles of vodka and samogon had appeared and started to circulate. Gonzalez had a circle of Russian women around him while most of the men were solemnly inspecting the new jet. Maslov shrugged, pushed away the gloomy thoughts, and joined the party. It was spring, after all.
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Four
United States Strategic Bombardment Commission, Blair House, Washington D.C. USA.
“I think critical probably understates the matter. Big Bird production drives everything else.” Philip Stuyvesant, more commonly known these days as “The Seer” spoke mildly as he looked around the room. It was, by far, the most secure room in Washington and probably in the United States. Bearing in mind what was discussed in it, that was most devoutly hoped by all those who knew of its existence. “The first C-model Big Birds are leaving the production lines right now. They’re going to the operational test and evaluation units. Wichita has joined the production program, although Fort Worth does not know that. The workers at Wichita don’t know about Fort Worth either so it’s all fair. Neither will know about El Segundo when they join the program. All the component suppliers believe they are building sub-assemblies for the C-99. The engine supply issue is being solved. We have a Big Bird flying continuously and whenever an engine stops working, we take it apart, find out what broke and strengthen it. The cooling problem is still an issue, but the engineers are getting on top of it and the altitudes the Big Birds fly at help cool them anyway. One thing we have found has been a pleasant surprise. Aircraft flying at these altitudes don’t burn easily. That eases the combat damage risk.
“Good news for you Pete; because we’re still building development Big Birds, R-4360 production is running way ahead of requirements and we’ve been able to shift the excess to the production of other types. Air Bridge is getting priority for C-99s, but the F-72 Thunderstorm is third and the Navy F2G fourth. The 9th Air Force should be seeing its first F-72s in a few weeks. The big headline, if we allowed it to be one, is that F-80 production is hitting three hundred a month and we should have twenty-five hundred in combat by the end of the year. North American will be ending B-25 production and shifting the capacity over to the F-74 as well. Come this fall, we’ll be shifting production from the F-80B to the F-80C.”
General Elwood Richard Quesada had only recently been read into the Dropshot secret and was still trying to absorb its implications. However, as the overall commander of the 9th Air Force, he was obviously pleased. “That is great news, Seer, we need all of them. Those blowjobs are still tearing us up. The shark-nosed Superbolts are holding the line right now and the F-80s will make a big difference but we’re still taking a hammering. I would suggest that a further concentration of our fighter-bomber strength in low-level attacks against the fascist forces in Russia may win the 1945 campaigning season. The problem is that the F-47s and A-26s will suffer grievously from the blowjobs unless we can protect them better. I believe we need a two-to-one ratio of fighters to bombers if we are to provide the ground forces with the support they need. The Shooting Stars will be tied down with air superiority though, we must get rid of those recon jets. Philip, any word on the F-84s?”
“Developmental problems and engine shortages. The F-80 has top priority, after the Big Bird of course, right now. Once we start getting production F-84s, we’ll flip R-4360 priorities so that the F2G has the third rank after the Big Bird and the C-99. The Big Bird has priority for the J-35 of course but we can divert some of those to the F-74 and XB-45 light bomber while Big Bird development continues. An interesting note, a single J-35 puts out as much power as both Jumo 004s combined on the 262. The J-33s on the F-80 is developing almost a thousand more pounds of thrust than that pair of Jumos. It’s clear we are moving decisively ahead of the fascists in jet engine technology.”
“And it won’t matter a damn if Dropshot doesn’t work.” General Curtis LeMay growled the words and chomped down on his pipe. “The fundamental vulnerability of surface targets to heavy bombers has amply vindicated our emphasis upon the heavy bomber thus far. Those operations may be costing us but there is no other way we could have made our military potential felt so rapidly, continuously, and effectively. The bombing offensive against rail transport centers in Russia proves our claims that the heavy bomber offensive is instrumental in defeating fascist forces in the field. The defeat of the fascist Ulyanov’sk offensive in 1943 was an ideal demonstration of that. Dealing with the fascist industrial production base will be a different matter. We know now that it takes a lot of bombs to shut down an industrial area and a lot more to keep it shut down. Our heavy bomber offensive provides ample evidence of the offensive power of bombers, but we must face the fact that if the Dropshot gadgets don’t deliver, bombing Germany into submission is going to take a long time.”
“The Dropshot-One Gadget will work. We can be absolutely sure of that.” Major General Leslie Groves sounded suitably dogmatic. He was not a man known for his lack of confidence in his own abilities. “It’s the Dropshot-Two Gadget that we will have to test. It is a completely different and more complex principle from Dropshot-One. The benefit is that it will be much more productive than Dropshot-One.”
“When can we test it?” President Thomas E Dewey had only been read into the full secret of Dropshot after his inauguration. Explaining the full extent of the Manhattan Engineering District that was producing the Dropshot nuclear weapons and the B-36 bombers that would deliver them had taken most of a day. President Dewey believed he hadn’t slept well since.
“The first test shot is scheduled for July 16th. We are on schedule for that date. Assuming that the test is successful, we will be able to start producing both types of gadgets within two or three months. We will need a target list shortly afterward so we can start using the Gadgets as they emerge from the production line.”
“No, you won’t, Leslie.” LeMay glared at Groves who returned the expression in kind. “We will need to know what the production rates will be, what our inventory of gadgets will be over the next year, and how we can properly plan the destruction of Nazi industry. The one thing we do not do is go off half-cocked and scatter a handful of the most powerful weapon in history at random over Germany.”
“The one thing we do not do is get the most powerful weapon in history and then sit on it. We need to end this war now and gadgets will allow us to do it. Once the Germans see the power we have at our command, they will surrender rather than face utter destruction. The Gadget allows us to cause the Germans unacceptable pain and if they fail to respond to that stimulus, we can progressively increase that pain until they do see reason.”
LeMay’s reply filled the room with an almost tangible contempt. “That is insane. All the experience we have obtained from this war is that it is the first blow that is most effective and that the impact of successive blows is reduced at an exponential rate. At the same time, the ability of our enemy to defend against those blows increases as they learn the lessons from each predecessor. We can see how our losses have risen steadily over time as the fascists improved their defenses and optimized them against us. All we will be doing, if we follow your plan, is to give the fascists a warning that we are coming and how we will conduct the attacks. In other words, teach them how to defend against us. Our first blow must quickly and decisively destroy the fascist ability to wage war.”
“Basic logic tells us that . . . .”
“Leslie, I have led bombers at the front and seen the conditions under which they operate. I have seen how quickly the enemy responds to our attacks and organizes defenses against them. You have not. You are trying to argue theoretical projections against demonstrated facts and that just won’t wash.”
“How dare you suggest that I . . .. .” Groves was almost purple with fury.
“Gentlemen, please calm down. Stuyvesant, you’re our industrial expert. What do your studies show?”
“Mr. President, I am in complete agreement with General LeMay on this. We must stockpile our gadgets until we have enough of them to destroy fascist war-making capability completely. Now, the Hitlerites have no idea that our ability to make gadgets is so advanced or that we have a means of delivering them that will neutralize their defenses. The moment we use B-36s equipped with gadgets, we have revealed both secrets and told the fascists how to do the same. That is an outcome we must avoid at any cost. Our first blow must be decisive and end the war.”
“Pete, you have seen the front line from the cockpits of our attack aircraft. What are your opinions?”
“I agree with Curt and Philip, Mr. President. If there is one thing, we have learned it is that we must strike with all the power available in concentrated blows. The Russians made the penny-packet mistake early in the war, scattering their air power in small groups of three or four aircraft against dispersed targets. They achieved almost nothing and lost almost everything. When we commit our tactical air, we do the opposite. We do not send a tiny force, we swamp the air with our planes and destroy as much as we can, as quickly as we can. As a final argument, remember the B-26 low-altitude raid back in 1943? We tried it once and it worked. When we tried it a second time, the fascists were waiting, and we lost almost every aircraft. If there is one thing, we have learned over the last two years it is that the fascists learn terrifyingly fast.”
"There is another aspect to this issue." Stuyvesant looked around at the people in the room. "At the moment we have two interlinked secrets. One is the Gadget and the other is the Big Bird. The first allows us to destroy targets in Germany with single blows, the other is a formidable means of delivering them. The moment we carry out our first strike, we will have told the fascists how to do both."
"The fascists gave up their gadget program two years ago, and in any case, they were far behind us. It's ridiculous to suggest they can get back in the game." Groves was glaring again.
Privately, Stuyvesant wondered if he realized how much damage he was doing to his own cause. He should take a lesson from Curt and Peter. When they turn up at a meeting, their staff work is such that every I is dotted and every T crossed. "Although every fascist gadget program we know about has been terminated there may still be others; despite our intelligence on German industry, we cannot be sure there are parts we haven’t found. In any case, the cessation of German gadget work will end the moment we initiate the first of our gadgets over a German target. They will move and, as Pete pointed out when they want to, they can move very fast indeed. The problem with projects like this is not doing them, it's being convinced that they can be done. The first follows naturally from the second. Once we have shown them it can be done, the rest will follow."
"That is correct, Philip. We saw that many times in the 1930s. Nobody believed we could find a ship 900 miles out in the Atlantic, but we did."
"One of my family, you met her in Iceland, was on the Rex, Curt. She was cheering you on when you buzzed her. Leslie, as to bombers, the fascists are already flying a six-engine bomber, the Ju-390 as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft, and have a six-engine Messerschmitt under development. Charles, how many doodlebugs have been fired at the US since the bombardment started?"
"Thirty-three, Philip. We’re shooting about a third of them down with fighters and the anti-aircraft batteries around New York have claimed more. Some have landed near Washington. We know that at least three more crossed the coast but where they landed, nobody knows." Charlie Wilson sounded droll; the wild inaccuracy of the doodlebugs was something the government had been stressing heavily. "How many of those shooters are there?"
"At least twelve have been built of which we have sunk three so far. They are delivering around six doodlebugs a month out of which we shoot down two or three. There’re at least a dozen submarines, an improved design based on Type XXI, the building. They will at least triple and probably quadruple the number of missiles hitting us per month. The doodlebug has enough weightlifting and volume capacity to lift a gadget. Do we really want to give the fascists the knowledge to equip them that way?"
"No, we most certainly do not." President Dewey was quite firm about that. "The division of responsibility is that Leslie, you will produce the Gadgets and that is all. Philip will decide where to put them and Curt will get them there. Pete, you will provide Curt with any and all support he needs. Are we quite clear on this?"
He looked around the conference table with all the authority he could command. "Very well. Now, the Archangel'sk offensive. When?"
That caused the meeting to quieten down. The coming Archangel’sk Offensive was hanging over everybody’s heads. The only question was, when?
Partisan Group “Sokol”, Kostopilskyi Forest, Ukraine
Political Officer Valentina Aleksandrovna Nasonkina made her way carefully through the bushes toward where the camp had been hidden. Four years of grinding partisan warfare had made her wise in the ways of war and, for a partisan, making sure that movements remained unseen was one of the most important of those ways. Her Brigade Leader, Vladimir Osipovich Osaulenko was well aware of another. Any place where they would have to stop, for a few days or longer, would be thoroughly scouted and ways of retreat plotted. So would rallying points for the brigade to reassemble if it had to disperse. Valentina had been trying to find a suitable rallying point and an escape route that led back to it. She was looking for a location that was well hidden and not far from a source of clean water. She had found several suitable places, but she was looking for one that had a dry hard surface, not sand or on a sodden meadow. After the winter had only just passed, the last requirement was hard.
She had no doubt that Iohannes Andriychuk would have found a suitable patch of ground and a suitably well-hidden way to reach it. He had lived in the forest before joining the Partisans and he knew it well. To him, the forest was a friend, a great protective presence that shielded them from the fascists. When the Sokol Brigade, all Partisan units were brigades regardless of size, had been formed it contained eight men and one woman. It had survived the winter of 1941/42 intact and made great gains in 1942. Its strength had swelled to 46 men and women, and they had instituted a reign of terror that kept the Hitlerites as confined to their barracks as they would have been had they become prisoners of war.
1943 had seen even greater success. The scattering of Partisan Brigades had united and swept across northern Ukraine and southern Byelorussia. Winning engagement after engagement with the equally scattered fascist garrisons, they had established a ‘Partisan-liberated area”. To all intents and purposes, it was a country in the rear of the fascist forces sitting across their supply lines and blocking all the flow of munitions, food, and fuel to the fascist armies in the south. On the Volga Front, the Russians and Americans had combined to strike a telling blow against the fascist front line, pushing them back a hundred miles or more. Disaster lay in that achievement. On the Volga Front, 1944 was relatively quiet.
The reason for that had been quite simple. The fascists had shifted a significant proportion of their elite SS and Heer Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions back to Ukraine in a once-and-for-all campaign to overrun the Partisan-liberated area. That had left the Volga Front seriously weakened and the fascist forces had dug in for the defensive. The Allies had expected the usual Hitlerite spring offensive and dug in as well. Both sides had used the lull to rebuild their forces and by the time the Allies had realized no fascist offensive was coming, most of the campaigning season had passed. Nobody on the Allied side had fully realized what was happening back in Ukraine.
The Partisan command had made a catastrophic mistake. Buoyed up with confidence following two years of successful operations against the rear area and partisan jaeger troops, they had ordered the partisan brigades to hold their ground and defend the liberated area against the coming assault. In doing so the partisans had given up their hit-and-run attacks and stood their ground. They had quickly learned it was one thing to fight against cooks, bakers, and the sweepings of the military prisons, and quite another to fight hardened and very experienced front-line units. The mechanized German forces had sliced through the attempted defenses and quickly overrun the liberated area. The casualties suffered by the partisans had been horrifying. Of the whole strength of the Sokol Brigade, only Osaulenko, Andriychuk, and Nasonkina were left alive.
Their base camp, such as it was, reflected the near annihilation of the brigade. There were three Zaslon lean-tos, one for Valentina, the other for the two men. They were all built the same way with a screen built at an angle toward the campfire and located some three-four paces from that fire. The arrangement allowed the heat from the fire to be captured by the lean-to and kept sleeping people warm. It also protects them from the wind. The screen was built out of poles, brushwood, and branches so that from the outside it looked like part of a bank. In the forest, the Zaslon was built between two trees. Only in the open country was the screen supported by thick poles tied together.
The three Zaslons were arranged around a night fire. This was invisible even from a short distance away and contained two logs with a lengthwise channel in each. The first log’s channel had been filled with hot coals and covered with the second log arranged channel-side down. The coals and logs would burn slowly for a long time due to oxygen deficiency yet did not produce bright flames, making them invisible from a short distance away.
Valentina shook herself; she had started thinking over the situation as if she had been lecturing a new recruit and that was a good way to get killed or, far worse, captured. She stopped, took several deep breaths, and refocused her mind on the present. That was finding the base camp and doing so without disclosing its location. Fortunately, the snow had gone at last, and the task was easier than it had been only a few weeks before.
“We have received a message.” Osaulenko had a message from the Partisan command. This was a rarity. After the catastrophe of 1944, High Command had kept very quiet.
“Is this a good thing?” Valentina had slipped into the base camp after going to great lengths to ensure she was not being followed. Andriychuk had, if anything, been more careful still. Neither was matched by the caution with which orders from the Partisan command were discussed. Contrary to popular belief, it was possible to discuss orders from higher authority on the grounds that the situation facing the field units had elements of which they were not aware. The question was, did that apply here? If the answer was negative, everybody involved could end up before a Tribunal.
“I honestly don’t know.” Osaulenko was acutely aware of the inability of the High Command to understand the problems facing the individual brigades. The elite armored troops had returned to the Volga Front, but they had been replaced by more skilled partisan jaegers than the previous troops had been. He knew that life was never going to go back to the comparatively easy days of 1942 and 1943. “The decision has been taken to consolidate the existing small brigades into a smaller number of larger units. We are to absorb three other brigades to give us the strength of more than two dozen soldiers.”
“Can we rely on them?” Andriychuk had put his finger on the key point. German anti-Partisan tactics were much more sophisticated than they had been a year before and the creation of false units intended to trap the genuine ones was quite real. This was one issue that High Command was well aware of. On the other hand, detecting such a fascist unit and keeping it isolated while under careful, unobtrusive observation could be a useful way of feeding false information to the fascists.
“We will have to see bratishka. We will have to see.”
United States Strategic Bombardment Commission, Blair House, Washington D.C. USA.
“I think critical probably understates the matter. Big Bird production drives everything else.” Philip Stuyvesant, more commonly known these days as “The Seer” spoke mildly as he looked around the room. It was, by far, the most secure room in Washington and probably in the United States. Bearing in mind what was discussed in it, that was most devoutly hoped by all those who knew of its existence. “The first C-model Big Birds are leaving the production lines right now. They’re going to the operational test and evaluation units. Wichita has joined the production program, although Fort Worth does not know that. The workers at Wichita don’t know about Fort Worth either so it’s all fair. Neither will know about El Segundo when they join the program. All the component suppliers believe they are building sub-assemblies for the C-99. The engine supply issue is being solved. We have a Big Bird flying continuously and whenever an engine stops working, we take it apart, find out what broke and strengthen it. The cooling problem is still an issue, but the engineers are getting on top of it and the altitudes the Big Birds fly at help cool them anyway. One thing we have found has been a pleasant surprise. Aircraft flying at these altitudes don’t burn easily. That eases the combat damage risk.
“Good news for you Pete; because we’re still building development Big Birds, R-4360 production is running way ahead of requirements and we’ve been able to shift the excess to the production of other types. Air Bridge is getting priority for C-99s, but the F-72 Thunderstorm is third and the Navy F2G fourth. The 9th Air Force should be seeing its first F-72s in a few weeks. The big headline, if we allowed it to be one, is that F-80 production is hitting three hundred a month and we should have twenty-five hundred in combat by the end of the year. North American will be ending B-25 production and shifting the capacity over to the F-74 as well. Come this fall, we’ll be shifting production from the F-80B to the F-80C.”
General Elwood Richard Quesada had only recently been read into the Dropshot secret and was still trying to absorb its implications. However, as the overall commander of the 9th Air Force, he was obviously pleased. “That is great news, Seer, we need all of them. Those blowjobs are still tearing us up. The shark-nosed Superbolts are holding the line right now and the F-80s will make a big difference but we’re still taking a hammering. I would suggest that a further concentration of our fighter-bomber strength in low-level attacks against the fascist forces in Russia may win the 1945 campaigning season. The problem is that the F-47s and A-26s will suffer grievously from the blowjobs unless we can protect them better. I believe we need a two-to-one ratio of fighters to bombers if we are to provide the ground forces with the support they need. The Shooting Stars will be tied down with air superiority though, we must get rid of those recon jets. Philip, any word on the F-84s?”
“Developmental problems and engine shortages. The F-80 has top priority, after the Big Bird of course, right now. Once we start getting production F-84s, we’ll flip R-4360 priorities so that the F2G has the third rank after the Big Bird and the C-99. The Big Bird has priority for the J-35 of course but we can divert some of those to the F-74 and XB-45 light bomber while Big Bird development continues. An interesting note, a single J-35 puts out as much power as both Jumo 004s combined on the 262. The J-33s on the F-80 is developing almost a thousand more pounds of thrust than that pair of Jumos. It’s clear we are moving decisively ahead of the fascists in jet engine technology.”
“And it won’t matter a damn if Dropshot doesn’t work.” General Curtis LeMay growled the words and chomped down on his pipe. “The fundamental vulnerability of surface targets to heavy bombers has amply vindicated our emphasis upon the heavy bomber thus far. Those operations may be costing us but there is no other way we could have made our military potential felt so rapidly, continuously, and effectively. The bombing offensive against rail transport centers in Russia proves our claims that the heavy bomber offensive is instrumental in defeating fascist forces in the field. The defeat of the fascist Ulyanov’sk offensive in 1943 was an ideal demonstration of that. Dealing with the fascist industrial production base will be a different matter. We know now that it takes a lot of bombs to shut down an industrial area and a lot more to keep it shut down. Our heavy bomber offensive provides ample evidence of the offensive power of bombers, but we must face the fact that if the Dropshot gadgets don’t deliver, bombing Germany into submission is going to take a long time.”
“The Dropshot-One Gadget will work. We can be absolutely sure of that.” Major General Leslie Groves sounded suitably dogmatic. He was not a man known for his lack of confidence in his own abilities. “It’s the Dropshot-Two Gadget that we will have to test. It is a completely different and more complex principle from Dropshot-One. The benefit is that it will be much more productive than Dropshot-One.”
“When can we test it?” President Thomas E Dewey had only been read into the full secret of Dropshot after his inauguration. Explaining the full extent of the Manhattan Engineering District that was producing the Dropshot nuclear weapons and the B-36 bombers that would deliver them had taken most of a day. President Dewey believed he hadn’t slept well since.
“The first test shot is scheduled for July 16th. We are on schedule for that date. Assuming that the test is successful, we will be able to start producing both types of gadgets within two or three months. We will need a target list shortly afterward so we can start using the Gadgets as they emerge from the production line.”
“No, you won’t, Leslie.” LeMay glared at Groves who returned the expression in kind. “We will need to know what the production rates will be, what our inventory of gadgets will be over the next year, and how we can properly plan the destruction of Nazi industry. The one thing we do not do is go off half-cocked and scatter a handful of the most powerful weapon in history at random over Germany.”
“The one thing we do not do is get the most powerful weapon in history and then sit on it. We need to end this war now and gadgets will allow us to do it. Once the Germans see the power we have at our command, they will surrender rather than face utter destruction. The Gadget allows us to cause the Germans unacceptable pain and if they fail to respond to that stimulus, we can progressively increase that pain until they do see reason.”
LeMay’s reply filled the room with an almost tangible contempt. “That is insane. All the experience we have obtained from this war is that it is the first blow that is most effective and that the impact of successive blows is reduced at an exponential rate. At the same time, the ability of our enemy to defend against those blows increases as they learn the lessons from each predecessor. We can see how our losses have risen steadily over time as the fascists improved their defenses and optimized them against us. All we will be doing, if we follow your plan, is to give the fascists a warning that we are coming and how we will conduct the attacks. In other words, teach them how to defend against us. Our first blow must quickly and decisively destroy the fascist ability to wage war.”
“Basic logic tells us that . . . .”
“Leslie, I have led bombers at the front and seen the conditions under which they operate. I have seen how quickly the enemy responds to our attacks and organizes defenses against them. You have not. You are trying to argue theoretical projections against demonstrated facts and that just won’t wash.”
“How dare you suggest that I . . .. .” Groves was almost purple with fury.
“Gentlemen, please calm down. Stuyvesant, you’re our industrial expert. What do your studies show?”
“Mr. President, I am in complete agreement with General LeMay on this. We must stockpile our gadgets until we have enough of them to destroy fascist war-making capability completely. Now, the Hitlerites have no idea that our ability to make gadgets is so advanced or that we have a means of delivering them that will neutralize their defenses. The moment we use B-36s equipped with gadgets, we have revealed both secrets and told the fascists how to do the same. That is an outcome we must avoid at any cost. Our first blow must be decisive and end the war.”
“Pete, you have seen the front line from the cockpits of our attack aircraft. What are your opinions?”
“I agree with Curt and Philip, Mr. President. If there is one thing, we have learned it is that we must strike with all the power available in concentrated blows. The Russians made the penny-packet mistake early in the war, scattering their air power in small groups of three or four aircraft against dispersed targets. They achieved almost nothing and lost almost everything. When we commit our tactical air, we do the opposite. We do not send a tiny force, we swamp the air with our planes and destroy as much as we can, as quickly as we can. As a final argument, remember the B-26 low-altitude raid back in 1943? We tried it once and it worked. When we tried it a second time, the fascists were waiting, and we lost almost every aircraft. If there is one thing, we have learned over the last two years it is that the fascists learn terrifyingly fast.”
"There is another aspect to this issue." Stuyvesant looked around at the people in the room. "At the moment we have two interlinked secrets. One is the Gadget and the other is the Big Bird. The first allows us to destroy targets in Germany with single blows, the other is a formidable means of delivering them. The moment we carry out our first strike, we will have told the fascists how to do both."
"The fascists gave up their gadget program two years ago, and in any case, they were far behind us. It's ridiculous to suggest they can get back in the game." Groves was glaring again.
Privately, Stuyvesant wondered if he realized how much damage he was doing to his own cause. He should take a lesson from Curt and Peter. When they turn up at a meeting, their staff work is such that every I is dotted and every T crossed. "Although every fascist gadget program we know about has been terminated there may still be others; despite our intelligence on German industry, we cannot be sure there are parts we haven’t found. In any case, the cessation of German gadget work will end the moment we initiate the first of our gadgets over a German target. They will move and, as Pete pointed out when they want to, they can move very fast indeed. The problem with projects like this is not doing them, it's being convinced that they can be done. The first follows naturally from the second. Once we have shown them it can be done, the rest will follow."
"That is correct, Philip. We saw that many times in the 1930s. Nobody believed we could find a ship 900 miles out in the Atlantic, but we did."
"One of my family, you met her in Iceland, was on the Rex, Curt. She was cheering you on when you buzzed her. Leslie, as to bombers, the fascists are already flying a six-engine bomber, the Ju-390 as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft, and have a six-engine Messerschmitt under development. Charles, how many doodlebugs have been fired at the US since the bombardment started?"
"Thirty-three, Philip. We’re shooting about a third of them down with fighters and the anti-aircraft batteries around New York have claimed more. Some have landed near Washington. We know that at least three more crossed the coast but where they landed, nobody knows." Charlie Wilson sounded droll; the wild inaccuracy of the doodlebugs was something the government had been stressing heavily. "How many of those shooters are there?"
"At least twelve have been built of which we have sunk three so far. They are delivering around six doodlebugs a month out of which we shoot down two or three. There’re at least a dozen submarines, an improved design based on Type XXI, the building. They will at least triple and probably quadruple the number of missiles hitting us per month. The doodlebug has enough weightlifting and volume capacity to lift a gadget. Do we really want to give the fascists the knowledge to equip them that way?"
"No, we most certainly do not." President Dewey was quite firm about that. "The division of responsibility is that Leslie, you will produce the Gadgets and that is all. Philip will decide where to put them and Curt will get them there. Pete, you will provide Curt with any and all support he needs. Are we quite clear on this?"
He looked around the conference table with all the authority he could command. "Very well. Now, the Archangel'sk offensive. When?"
That caused the meeting to quieten down. The coming Archangel’sk Offensive was hanging over everybody’s heads. The only question was, when?
Partisan Group “Sokol”, Kostopilskyi Forest, Ukraine
Political Officer Valentina Aleksandrovna Nasonkina made her way carefully through the bushes toward where the camp had been hidden. Four years of grinding partisan warfare had made her wise in the ways of war and, for a partisan, making sure that movements remained unseen was one of the most important of those ways. Her Brigade Leader, Vladimir Osipovich Osaulenko was well aware of another. Any place where they would have to stop, for a few days or longer, would be thoroughly scouted and ways of retreat plotted. So would rallying points for the brigade to reassemble if it had to disperse. Valentina had been trying to find a suitable rallying point and an escape route that led back to it. She was looking for a location that was well hidden and not far from a source of clean water. She had found several suitable places, but she was looking for one that had a dry hard surface, not sand or on a sodden meadow. After the winter had only just passed, the last requirement was hard.
She had no doubt that Iohannes Andriychuk would have found a suitable patch of ground and a suitably well-hidden way to reach it. He had lived in the forest before joining the Partisans and he knew it well. To him, the forest was a friend, a great protective presence that shielded them from the fascists. When the Sokol Brigade, all Partisan units were brigades regardless of size, had been formed it contained eight men and one woman. It had survived the winter of 1941/42 intact and made great gains in 1942. Its strength had swelled to 46 men and women, and they had instituted a reign of terror that kept the Hitlerites as confined to their barracks as they would have been had they become prisoners of war.
1943 had seen even greater success. The scattering of Partisan Brigades had united and swept across northern Ukraine and southern Byelorussia. Winning engagement after engagement with the equally scattered fascist garrisons, they had established a ‘Partisan-liberated area”. To all intents and purposes, it was a country in the rear of the fascist forces sitting across their supply lines and blocking all the flow of munitions, food, and fuel to the fascist armies in the south. On the Volga Front, the Russians and Americans had combined to strike a telling blow against the fascist front line, pushing them back a hundred miles or more. Disaster lay in that achievement. On the Volga Front, 1944 was relatively quiet.
The reason for that had been quite simple. The fascists had shifted a significant proportion of their elite SS and Heer Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions back to Ukraine in a once-and-for-all campaign to overrun the Partisan-liberated area. That had left the Volga Front seriously weakened and the fascist forces had dug in for the defensive. The Allies had expected the usual Hitlerite spring offensive and dug in as well. Both sides had used the lull to rebuild their forces and by the time the Allies had realized no fascist offensive was coming, most of the campaigning season had passed. Nobody on the Allied side had fully realized what was happening back in Ukraine.
The Partisan command had made a catastrophic mistake. Buoyed up with confidence following two years of successful operations against the rear area and partisan jaeger troops, they had ordered the partisan brigades to hold their ground and defend the liberated area against the coming assault. In doing so the partisans had given up their hit-and-run attacks and stood their ground. They had quickly learned it was one thing to fight against cooks, bakers, and the sweepings of the military prisons, and quite another to fight hardened and very experienced front-line units. The mechanized German forces had sliced through the attempted defenses and quickly overrun the liberated area. The casualties suffered by the partisans had been horrifying. Of the whole strength of the Sokol Brigade, only Osaulenko, Andriychuk, and Nasonkina were left alive.
Their base camp, such as it was, reflected the near annihilation of the brigade. There were three Zaslon lean-tos, one for Valentina, the other for the two men. They were all built the same way with a screen built at an angle toward the campfire and located some three-four paces from that fire. The arrangement allowed the heat from the fire to be captured by the lean-to and kept sleeping people warm. It also protects them from the wind. The screen was built out of poles, brushwood, and branches so that from the outside it looked like part of a bank. In the forest, the Zaslon was built between two trees. Only in the open country was the screen supported by thick poles tied together.
The three Zaslons were arranged around a night fire. This was invisible even from a short distance away and contained two logs with a lengthwise channel in each. The first log’s channel had been filled with hot coals and covered with the second log arranged channel-side down. The coals and logs would burn slowly for a long time due to oxygen deficiency yet did not produce bright flames, making them invisible from a short distance away.
Valentina shook herself; she had started thinking over the situation as if she had been lecturing a new recruit and that was a good way to get killed or, far worse, captured. She stopped, took several deep breaths, and refocused her mind on the present. That was finding the base camp and doing so without disclosing its location. Fortunately, the snow had gone at last, and the task was easier than it had been only a few weeks before.
“We have received a message.” Osaulenko had a message from the Partisan command. This was a rarity. After the catastrophe of 1944, High Command had kept very quiet.
“Is this a good thing?” Valentina had slipped into the base camp after going to great lengths to ensure she was not being followed. Andriychuk had, if anything, been more careful still. Neither was matched by the caution with which orders from the Partisan command were discussed. Contrary to popular belief, it was possible to discuss orders from higher authority on the grounds that the situation facing the field units had elements of which they were not aware. The question was, did that apply here? If the answer was negative, everybody involved could end up before a Tribunal.
“I honestly don’t know.” Osaulenko was acutely aware of the inability of the High Command to understand the problems facing the individual brigades. The elite armored troops had returned to the Volga Front, but they had been replaced by more skilled partisan jaegers than the previous troops had been. He knew that life was never going to go back to the comparatively easy days of 1942 and 1943. “The decision has been taken to consolidate the existing small brigades into a smaller number of larger units. We are to absorb three other brigades to give us the strength of more than two dozen soldiers.”
“Can we rely on them?” Andriychuk had put his finger on the key point. German anti-Partisan tactics were much more sophisticated than they had been a year before and the creation of false units intended to trap the genuine ones was quite real. This was one issue that High Command was well aware of. On the other hand, detecting such a fascist unit and keeping it isolated while under careful, unobtrusive observation could be a useful way of feeding false information to the fascists.
“We will have to see bratishka. We will have to see.”
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Five
Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
'Nothing is so fleeting as fame.' The truth of that ancient proverb echoed in the mind of Colonel Richard Gonzalez as he listened to the pilots of the 356th Fighter Group extolling the virtues of their new F-80Bs. The only significant difference he could see between the B-ship and the A-models was that the Bs had the 0.50-inch M-2 machine guns of the P-80A replaced with improved M-3 machine guns of identical caliber but a third greater rate-of-fire. The B-models had also been "Russianized" with canopy defrosting and natural rubber seals optimized for the extreme cold of the Russian winter. Gonzalez thought the new guns were nice but since his RF-80A was unarmed, it didn't affect him much. Yet, the base staff was crowding around to look at the new fighters the way that had surrounded his RF-80 a few days earlier.
"Hi, Rick. Welcome back to Russia." The voice from behind him was familiar and for a moment Gonzalez thought he was back on the Kazan front.
He turned around and found himself facing an American colonel, his rank badges still new and shiny. "Monty, good to see you. These beauties are yours?"
"All of them, yes." Colonel Montgomery Edwards had a happy smile on his face. "The entire group has Shooting Stars. Have you met my wife? This is Guards-Colonel Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak."
"It is an honor to meet you Tovarish Lydia Vladimirovna. Your achievements are an inspiration to us all." Gonzalez gave his most courtly and respectful salute, something that made her chuckle.
"And it is an honor to meet the famous reconnaissance pilot Colonel Richard." Lydia hesitated slightly, not knowing the correct patronymic to use.
"My father was Osbaldo. So, I suppose my patronymic would be Osbaldovich. Are you flying jets yet?"
"We have switched to the Yak-3P until we get jets as well." Lydia smiled brightly at a sudden memory. "Although I have flown Misha's F-80B. We will cover the Thunderbolts doing ground attack while the jets cover us."
"Rick, do any of your recon birds fly in pairs?" Lydia's comment about covering the ground-attack aircraft had given Edwards an idea.
"Sometimes, sure. Depends on the target to be covered of course and sometimes we need different camera configurations. We fly them really tight though, that way they only show up as a single target on fascist radar."
"And the blowjobs assigned to intercept you fly singly?"
"Sure do. I guess because they are stretched for numbers. And fuel of course."
"Well, how about this? We take two Shooting Stars and fly them at the speed and altitude used by your photo birds. Then, when a fascist blowjob comes up to play, we singe his tail feathers. After they've lost a few, they'll either stop harassing you guys or fly in pairs or more. Either way, we win, and it takes the pressure off you."
"That'll help. A lot. Now we have four RF-80s here, all RPAF. We're handling the whole Onega Front area. We can use all the help we can get." Gonzalez looked over to where the ground crews were, once more taking the film magazines out of the RF-80s nose cameras. Soon the precious films would be taken to the on-base processing laboratory, developed, and inspected by the analysts within an hour or so of the aircraft landing. Gonzalez couldn’t help but think things had changed a lot since the early days. "You know, we could get the best of both worlds by pairing a photo bird with an armed fighter."
Edwards glanced at Lydia and they both shook their heads. "We'd better pass on that Rick. We learned a long time ago never to fly fighters singly. Rick, if there is somewhere the fascists really don’t want you to photograph, where would it be?"
Gonzalez thought for a moment. "The triangle between Pershlakhta, Kuzminka, and Koryakino. The top brass thinks it is the base area for the offensive that’s about to hit us but every time we try to have a look in there, it's like we threw a brick into a hornet's nest. Which sort of confirms their opinion of course. We tried high and fast with RF-38s, a squadron with RF-63 Kingcobras tried to get a run in low and fast, then the Canadians did the same with a Williwaw, but we got no useful information, and we lost a lot of aircraft. That's one reason we were sent here."
"Misha, why do we not use four formations of your jets, each two aircraft, then we can lure the fascists up and clear the way for Tovarish Richard Osbaldovich and his reconnaissance aircraft?"
Edwards thought about that for a moment. "No reason at all. Sounds like a plan. Rick, why don’t you come over for dinner with us and we'll get some maps out."
Gonzalez laughed. "Now that really does sound like a plan."
Forward Defense Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
"Quiet, tovarish sergeant." Piskunov and his sergeant were in a forward observation trench, trying to determine what was happening a few hundred meters away. They were helped by the wind being from the west so that sound was carried across no man’s land. The gentle, low-frequency rumble was particularly suited to carrying well at night and there was a lot of it to be heard. To men whose lives depended on hearing that rumble and understanding what it meant, that effect was vital.
"Medium tanks. Type 4. Tovarish Captain." The sergeant carried on regardless. He knew his ears were sharper than his commander's.
"And at least one Sumka. Hear the squeal?" The German Hanomag half-tracks had a unique squealing noise from their tracks when the front wheels were adjusted for a turn. It was a good night recognition signal. It was also a perfect description of the kind of soldier who fell over himself to report to the officers and praporschiks every little thing that happened in their unit. It was an expressive piece of slang in another way as well. Many times, such soldiers were rewarded for their actions by having a greatcoat thrown over their heads and a good kicking administered. Likewise, the old, poorly protected Hanomags got a good kicking every time they appeared on a battlefield.
Sergeant Dmitry Isakovich Akulov listened carefully and, sure enough, he could hear the faint squeal from the suspension of the half-tracks as they cornered sharply enough to induce track braking so they could turn like a tank. Ruefully, he had to concede that his officer was sharper hearing than he had thought. Then he thought a little more about it and wondered if perhaps it was a question of his officer knowing what to listen for rather than just having the sharper hearing. Oblivious to this revelation, the private soldiers with them listened and learned. They were both new recruits with only 30 days of basic training before being sent to the 316th Rifle Division.
"Will the fascists attack tomorrow, tovarish captain?" Akulov whispered the question since the wind might be unfavorable but who knew where and when German scouts were listening?
Piskunov shook his head. "Not tomorrow. We may have a probing attack, but it will be to test us out and perhaps spot our defenses. The main attack will come the day after tomorrow or perhaps the day after that. We must listen for the heavy rumble of the fascist breakthrough tanks and feel the ground shaking as they move. The day after we hear and feel that in the night will be the day of the big offensive."
Akulov sighed slightly in relief at the knowledge they may have another day or more before the great blow fell. Almost instinctively, he looked at the carefully concealed trenches. They had been dug into folds of the ground, so they were invisible from the fascist positions yet gave their occupants cover. They were also zig-zagged with 90-degree turns every few yards. The official reason was to prevent fascists who got into the trench from raking it with fire along the whole of its length and also to prevent blasts from shells and grenades from rolling down a straight line. There was another reason though; the fascists would try and drive along a trench in their tanks, crushing the defenders with the tracks. The bends were carefully positioned to be within the turning circle of the tank to make that harder.
“Bratishka, where is your heavy machine gun?” Piskunov had sensed his sergeant beginning to focus on the battle to come and distracted him before the obsession could become too great.
“Look at this, Tovarish Captain. We built Maxie a little house where he can stay warm and dry. Akulov reached down and proudly showed his Captain that the Maxim Model 1910/30 was indeed in a carefully built wooden shelter underneath the firing step. A quick flip opened the two rear doors so the heavy, water-cooled machine gun could be dragged out quickly.
“Very good, but how do you lift it to the firing step? Tovarish Maxie is not light.”
“See these supports here Tovarish Captain?” Akulov pointed to two timbers at the sides of the shelter. “Pull those out and the roof hinges down to form a ramp. We don’t have to lift Tovarish Maxie, we just roll him up the ramp and start firing.”
“Ochen' khorosho! OK!” Both men chuckled at the praise. The Russians had already noted that the common abbreviation for ‘very good’ meant the same in American as it did in Russian. All the two men really hoped for was that it would be OK enough.
SU-100 Yebat’moya Mama, 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment, Leaving Winter Quarters, Amosovskaya
Starshina-Driver Faina Afanasyevna Kabakova took a last look around the Amosovskaya base area that had been the 1435th’s winter quarters. It was the way of war that the whole area had seen bitter fighting just before winter had closed in but was now of only secondary importance. Its value back then had been the shelter it had offered against the winter storms, and it had served nobly in that cause but with the storms gone for the next eight months, the sanctuary from driving snow and bitter cold was no longer needed.
During the winter, her SU-100, Yebat’moya Mama had been repainted. The winter whitewash had been removed of course. Then, the flat muddy green was replaced by a mottled camouflage that had a lighter green blended with two shades of brown. The bright red star had been replaced by one that was a reddish-brown matching their camouflage and the vehicle’s name had been removed from the side and was now painted on the lower nose armor. Only from above did the vehicle have distinctive markings so that it could be recognized by the hordes of allied aircraft that prowled over the battlefields. There was one other addition, also barely visible. In one corner of the vertical armor that formed the rear of the gun casement was a small, dark gray American flag. It indicated that the vehicle and crew had been adopted by a family in America who sent them parcels of much-needed supplies. Fainachka mentally checked to make sure she had written and posted a letter of thanks to her benefactors. She reassured herself that she had indeed done so and that her duty to the friends she had never met had been done.
“All vehicles prepare to advance to contact.” With an American unit, the order would have been sent by radio from the regimental command vehicle, but the Russian Army was not so careless with its communications. Fainachka quickly checked around her driver’s position. Her greatcoat, trophy blanket and kitbag were stowed in the small area of vacant space beside her seat, a design oversight that every SU-100 driver blessed daily. She also made sure that her blessed parcel of 'personal necessities' was tucked away with them. Tucked within that parcel was another, smaller, package that was even more deeply personal. Tucked within her aid parcel had been a private 'woman-to-woman' envelope from the mother of the family that had adopted her SU-100. Prefaced by the note that "these would keep water out of machine gun barrels" it had contained a supply of contraceptives. It had been timely since during the winter Fainachka had had her first love affair. During the long, cold nights, a dashing cavalryman had stolen her heart. Now, the war had parted them, and she knew it was unlikely they would ever meet again.
The first stage of the advance was an eight-kilometer drive along the road to Porog. The Regiment was moving on its tracks and Fainachka knew that meant vehicles would be breaking down and would need help from the engineer detachment. During the winter, that engineer unit had been reinforced by the addition of two American Studebaker trucks converted to mobile workshops and four armored recovery vehicles adapted from SU-85s. The latter had a superstructure replacing the casemate, a crane, a large-diameter telescoping snorkel for deep fording operations as well as a large-spade type earth anchor in the rear. She guessed the newly reinforced engineering platoon would get its first customers on the second phase of the road march, the 25-kilometer drive to Glazanikha. The third and final stage would take them another 30 kilometers to their combat positions around Syrya.
It didn't take any great insight to see what the commanders had in mind. The fascist offensive was coming, and the obvious target was Archangel'sk. Crossing the Onega when it was in spring flood would be impossible for the fascists close to Amosovskaya; the previous year the Russian Army had only managed it using American amphibians. The assault would start further south where the river was crossable and swing north. That would put the 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment in a position to hit the advance in its flank. Fainachka knew also that other vehicles would be joining them, and she wondered if her cavalryman would be with them. It was unlikely, the horse-cavalry units were intended for exploitation sweeps deep into enemy-held territory using terrain that was too rough for armored vehicles and where the infantry could not move fast enough.
"Move out!" The order came and Fainachka responded by edging her vehicle forward. As the company's starting-driver, her SU-100 would be the lead vehicle in the platoon. Before winter, there had been four assault guns per platoon, now there were five. The two vehicles in the HQ section, gave the Regiment 22 SU-100s of which ten were SU-100Ms with cross-hull rangefinders.
Before she drove other thoughts out of her mind and concentrated on driving, she allowed one last memory of her Kostya. Soon after they had got together, he had introduced her to his horse and that, everybody assured her, had proved his heart was true and sincere. She promised herself that the first kill Yebat’moya Mama scored would be dedicated to him. And so it was that Fainachka's winter ended.
HMS Unbroken, South-West of the Shetland Islands
The bottleneck between the German bases around Scapa Flow and the corresponding bases around Bergen was only the first hurdle that a submarine penetration into the Skagerrak had to face. That did not mean it was an insignificant one. Mars knew that at least two submarines had been sunk trying to get through this point and more had been badly damaged enough to abandon their missions. Each submarine attempting this transit had to decide, whether to go north or south of the Shetlands. It was a finely balanced decision but most British submarine commanders elected to take the longer but marginally safer northern route. Mars had taken the opposite decision. There was a nagging belief in the back of his mind that fuel was going to be a critical issue on this cruise and the more he saved early on the better. So, he had taken the southern route and was now just 300 miles from the entry to the Skagerrak.
"Misty out here." Horton scanned the damp gray blanket that seemed to envelop them. It hid them well but also hid aircraft reaching for them. It was fortunate that fascist radar was years behind the American and Canadian systems otherwise they could have been spotted by now. The thought of radar put an idea into mind. "Should we give the radar a squirt Alasdair? See if anybody's around?"
"I don't approve of submarines emitting anything unless it harms the enemy, you know that, Rob. We're better off doing a creeping advance under this mist and using the radar receiver to warn us of any radar-equipped search aircraft looking for us. In this mist, if the fascists don’t use radar, they won’t see us and if they do use radar, they'll warn us they are there."
"Well, the mist does look like it has set in for the day." Horton scanned the horizon with his binoculars. "There's nothing out there yet."
"We'd better set a good watch though." Mars looked around as well. "Doing a creepy-crawly is changing our arm a bit."
Horton nodded in agreement. He'd already picked the two most experienced lookouts from Unbroken's crew to stand this watch. Suddenly, he heard a dull rumble in the distance. It was a much rougher noise than the American engines on a Privateer. "Alastair, you hear that?"
"I do. A Hitlerite patrol plane. Those are Bramo 323s. That means a Kondor. We'd better dive after all."
"Too right." The U-class submarines were renowned for the speed at which they could dive, and it took only a few seconds for the submarine to start sliding under the waves. By the time the FW-200 had arrived at her location, she was well underwater and functionally invisible.
"The fascist bastard is approaching, Captain." The hydrophone operator was Jewish and had a very special hatred for the Germans. "Approaching. . . . . Overhead now. Starting to recede, he's going away. I think he missed us, Sir."
"Probably a routine patrol." Mars almost audibly sighed with relief. "I didn't know the fascists were still using Kondors."
"You certainly called that one right, skipper." Horton deliberately put respect into his voice. He was well aware that there were doubts about Mars's capabilities and that they needed to be dispelled. "If we'd flipped our radar on, he'd have been all over us. I reckon the fascists still have a few Kondors they use if the newer birds are down for any reason."
"Sounds right. Thanks, Rob. We'll stay down for an hour or so and if he really has gone, we'll come up to periscope depth for a look-see. Then on to the Skagerrak."
Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
'Nothing is so fleeting as fame.' The truth of that ancient proverb echoed in the mind of Colonel Richard Gonzalez as he listened to the pilots of the 356th Fighter Group extolling the virtues of their new F-80Bs. The only significant difference he could see between the B-ship and the A-models was that the Bs had the 0.50-inch M-2 machine guns of the P-80A replaced with improved M-3 machine guns of identical caliber but a third greater rate-of-fire. The B-models had also been "Russianized" with canopy defrosting and natural rubber seals optimized for the extreme cold of the Russian winter. Gonzalez thought the new guns were nice but since his RF-80A was unarmed, it didn't affect him much. Yet, the base staff was crowding around to look at the new fighters the way that had surrounded his RF-80 a few days earlier.
"Hi, Rick. Welcome back to Russia." The voice from behind him was familiar and for a moment Gonzalez thought he was back on the Kazan front.
He turned around and found himself facing an American colonel, his rank badges still new and shiny. "Monty, good to see you. These beauties are yours?"
"All of them, yes." Colonel Montgomery Edwards had a happy smile on his face. "The entire group has Shooting Stars. Have you met my wife? This is Guards-Colonel Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak."
"It is an honor to meet you Tovarish Lydia Vladimirovna. Your achievements are an inspiration to us all." Gonzalez gave his most courtly and respectful salute, something that made her chuckle.
"And it is an honor to meet the famous reconnaissance pilot Colonel Richard." Lydia hesitated slightly, not knowing the correct patronymic to use.
"My father was Osbaldo. So, I suppose my patronymic would be Osbaldovich. Are you flying jets yet?"
"We have switched to the Yak-3P until we get jets as well." Lydia smiled brightly at a sudden memory. "Although I have flown Misha's F-80B. We will cover the Thunderbolts doing ground attack while the jets cover us."
"Rick, do any of your recon birds fly in pairs?" Lydia's comment about covering the ground-attack aircraft had given Edwards an idea.
"Sometimes, sure. Depends on the target to be covered of course and sometimes we need different camera configurations. We fly them really tight though, that way they only show up as a single target on fascist radar."
"And the blowjobs assigned to intercept you fly singly?"
"Sure do. I guess because they are stretched for numbers. And fuel of course."
"Well, how about this? We take two Shooting Stars and fly them at the speed and altitude used by your photo birds. Then, when a fascist blowjob comes up to play, we singe his tail feathers. After they've lost a few, they'll either stop harassing you guys or fly in pairs or more. Either way, we win, and it takes the pressure off you."
"That'll help. A lot. Now we have four RF-80s here, all RPAF. We're handling the whole Onega Front area. We can use all the help we can get." Gonzalez looked over to where the ground crews were, once more taking the film magazines out of the RF-80s nose cameras. Soon the precious films would be taken to the on-base processing laboratory, developed, and inspected by the analysts within an hour or so of the aircraft landing. Gonzalez couldn’t help but think things had changed a lot since the early days. "You know, we could get the best of both worlds by pairing a photo bird with an armed fighter."
Edwards glanced at Lydia and they both shook their heads. "We'd better pass on that Rick. We learned a long time ago never to fly fighters singly. Rick, if there is somewhere the fascists really don’t want you to photograph, where would it be?"
Gonzalez thought for a moment. "The triangle between Pershlakhta, Kuzminka, and Koryakino. The top brass thinks it is the base area for the offensive that’s about to hit us but every time we try to have a look in there, it's like we threw a brick into a hornet's nest. Which sort of confirms their opinion of course. We tried high and fast with RF-38s, a squadron with RF-63 Kingcobras tried to get a run in low and fast, then the Canadians did the same with a Williwaw, but we got no useful information, and we lost a lot of aircraft. That's one reason we were sent here."
"Misha, why do we not use four formations of your jets, each two aircraft, then we can lure the fascists up and clear the way for Tovarish Richard Osbaldovich and his reconnaissance aircraft?"
Edwards thought about that for a moment. "No reason at all. Sounds like a plan. Rick, why don’t you come over for dinner with us and we'll get some maps out."
Gonzalez laughed. "Now that really does sound like a plan."
Forward Defense Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
"Quiet, tovarish sergeant." Piskunov and his sergeant were in a forward observation trench, trying to determine what was happening a few hundred meters away. They were helped by the wind being from the west so that sound was carried across no man’s land. The gentle, low-frequency rumble was particularly suited to carrying well at night and there was a lot of it to be heard. To men whose lives depended on hearing that rumble and understanding what it meant, that effect was vital.
"Medium tanks. Type 4. Tovarish Captain." The sergeant carried on regardless. He knew his ears were sharper than his commander's.
"And at least one Sumka. Hear the squeal?" The German Hanomag half-tracks had a unique squealing noise from their tracks when the front wheels were adjusted for a turn. It was a good night recognition signal. It was also a perfect description of the kind of soldier who fell over himself to report to the officers and praporschiks every little thing that happened in their unit. It was an expressive piece of slang in another way as well. Many times, such soldiers were rewarded for their actions by having a greatcoat thrown over their heads and a good kicking administered. Likewise, the old, poorly protected Hanomags got a good kicking every time they appeared on a battlefield.
Sergeant Dmitry Isakovich Akulov listened carefully and, sure enough, he could hear the faint squeal from the suspension of the half-tracks as they cornered sharply enough to induce track braking so they could turn like a tank. Ruefully, he had to concede that his officer was sharper hearing than he had thought. Then he thought a little more about it and wondered if perhaps it was a question of his officer knowing what to listen for rather than just having the sharper hearing. Oblivious to this revelation, the private soldiers with them listened and learned. They were both new recruits with only 30 days of basic training before being sent to the 316th Rifle Division.
"Will the fascists attack tomorrow, tovarish captain?" Akulov whispered the question since the wind might be unfavorable but who knew where and when German scouts were listening?
Piskunov shook his head. "Not tomorrow. We may have a probing attack, but it will be to test us out and perhaps spot our defenses. The main attack will come the day after tomorrow or perhaps the day after that. We must listen for the heavy rumble of the fascist breakthrough tanks and feel the ground shaking as they move. The day after we hear and feel that in the night will be the day of the big offensive."
Akulov sighed slightly in relief at the knowledge they may have another day or more before the great blow fell. Almost instinctively, he looked at the carefully concealed trenches. They had been dug into folds of the ground, so they were invisible from the fascist positions yet gave their occupants cover. They were also zig-zagged with 90-degree turns every few yards. The official reason was to prevent fascists who got into the trench from raking it with fire along the whole of its length and also to prevent blasts from shells and grenades from rolling down a straight line. There was another reason though; the fascists would try and drive along a trench in their tanks, crushing the defenders with the tracks. The bends were carefully positioned to be within the turning circle of the tank to make that harder.
“Bratishka, where is your heavy machine gun?” Piskunov had sensed his sergeant beginning to focus on the battle to come and distracted him before the obsession could become too great.
“Look at this, Tovarish Captain. We built Maxie a little house where he can stay warm and dry. Akulov reached down and proudly showed his Captain that the Maxim Model 1910/30 was indeed in a carefully built wooden shelter underneath the firing step. A quick flip opened the two rear doors so the heavy, water-cooled machine gun could be dragged out quickly.
“Very good, but how do you lift it to the firing step? Tovarish Maxie is not light.”
“See these supports here Tovarish Captain?” Akulov pointed to two timbers at the sides of the shelter. “Pull those out and the roof hinges down to form a ramp. We don’t have to lift Tovarish Maxie, we just roll him up the ramp and start firing.”
“Ochen' khorosho! OK!” Both men chuckled at the praise. The Russians had already noted that the common abbreviation for ‘very good’ meant the same in American as it did in Russian. All the two men really hoped for was that it would be OK enough.
SU-100 Yebat’moya Mama, 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment, Leaving Winter Quarters, Amosovskaya
Starshina-Driver Faina Afanasyevna Kabakova took a last look around the Amosovskaya base area that had been the 1435th’s winter quarters. It was the way of war that the whole area had seen bitter fighting just before winter had closed in but was now of only secondary importance. Its value back then had been the shelter it had offered against the winter storms, and it had served nobly in that cause but with the storms gone for the next eight months, the sanctuary from driving snow and bitter cold was no longer needed.
During the winter, her SU-100, Yebat’moya Mama had been repainted. The winter whitewash had been removed of course. Then, the flat muddy green was replaced by a mottled camouflage that had a lighter green blended with two shades of brown. The bright red star had been replaced by one that was a reddish-brown matching their camouflage and the vehicle’s name had been removed from the side and was now painted on the lower nose armor. Only from above did the vehicle have distinctive markings so that it could be recognized by the hordes of allied aircraft that prowled over the battlefields. There was one other addition, also barely visible. In one corner of the vertical armor that formed the rear of the gun casement was a small, dark gray American flag. It indicated that the vehicle and crew had been adopted by a family in America who sent them parcels of much-needed supplies. Fainachka mentally checked to make sure she had written and posted a letter of thanks to her benefactors. She reassured herself that she had indeed done so and that her duty to the friends she had never met had been done.
“All vehicles prepare to advance to contact.” With an American unit, the order would have been sent by radio from the regimental command vehicle, but the Russian Army was not so careless with its communications. Fainachka quickly checked around her driver’s position. Her greatcoat, trophy blanket and kitbag were stowed in the small area of vacant space beside her seat, a design oversight that every SU-100 driver blessed daily. She also made sure that her blessed parcel of 'personal necessities' was tucked away with them. Tucked within that parcel was another, smaller, package that was even more deeply personal. Tucked within her aid parcel had been a private 'woman-to-woman' envelope from the mother of the family that had adopted her SU-100. Prefaced by the note that "these would keep water out of machine gun barrels" it had contained a supply of contraceptives. It had been timely since during the winter Fainachka had had her first love affair. During the long, cold nights, a dashing cavalryman had stolen her heart. Now, the war had parted them, and she knew it was unlikely they would ever meet again.
The first stage of the advance was an eight-kilometer drive along the road to Porog. The Regiment was moving on its tracks and Fainachka knew that meant vehicles would be breaking down and would need help from the engineer detachment. During the winter, that engineer unit had been reinforced by the addition of two American Studebaker trucks converted to mobile workshops and four armored recovery vehicles adapted from SU-85s. The latter had a superstructure replacing the casemate, a crane, a large-diameter telescoping snorkel for deep fording operations as well as a large-spade type earth anchor in the rear. She guessed the newly reinforced engineering platoon would get its first customers on the second phase of the road march, the 25-kilometer drive to Glazanikha. The third and final stage would take them another 30 kilometers to their combat positions around Syrya.
It didn't take any great insight to see what the commanders had in mind. The fascist offensive was coming, and the obvious target was Archangel'sk. Crossing the Onega when it was in spring flood would be impossible for the fascists close to Amosovskaya; the previous year the Russian Army had only managed it using American amphibians. The assault would start further south where the river was crossable and swing north. That would put the 1435th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment in a position to hit the advance in its flank. Fainachka knew also that other vehicles would be joining them, and she wondered if her cavalryman would be with them. It was unlikely, the horse-cavalry units were intended for exploitation sweeps deep into enemy-held territory using terrain that was too rough for armored vehicles and where the infantry could not move fast enough.
"Move out!" The order came and Fainachka responded by edging her vehicle forward. As the company's starting-driver, her SU-100 would be the lead vehicle in the platoon. Before winter, there had been four assault guns per platoon, now there were five. The two vehicles in the HQ section, gave the Regiment 22 SU-100s of which ten were SU-100Ms with cross-hull rangefinders.
Before she drove other thoughts out of her mind and concentrated on driving, she allowed one last memory of her Kostya. Soon after they had got together, he had introduced her to his horse and that, everybody assured her, had proved his heart was true and sincere. She promised herself that the first kill Yebat’moya Mama scored would be dedicated to him. And so it was that Fainachka's winter ended.
HMS Unbroken, South-West of the Shetland Islands
The bottleneck between the German bases around Scapa Flow and the corresponding bases around Bergen was only the first hurdle that a submarine penetration into the Skagerrak had to face. That did not mean it was an insignificant one. Mars knew that at least two submarines had been sunk trying to get through this point and more had been badly damaged enough to abandon their missions. Each submarine attempting this transit had to decide, whether to go north or south of the Shetlands. It was a finely balanced decision but most British submarine commanders elected to take the longer but marginally safer northern route. Mars had taken the opposite decision. There was a nagging belief in the back of his mind that fuel was going to be a critical issue on this cruise and the more he saved early on the better. So, he had taken the southern route and was now just 300 miles from the entry to the Skagerrak.
"Misty out here." Horton scanned the damp gray blanket that seemed to envelop them. It hid them well but also hid aircraft reaching for them. It was fortunate that fascist radar was years behind the American and Canadian systems otherwise they could have been spotted by now. The thought of radar put an idea into mind. "Should we give the radar a squirt Alasdair? See if anybody's around?"
"I don't approve of submarines emitting anything unless it harms the enemy, you know that, Rob. We're better off doing a creeping advance under this mist and using the radar receiver to warn us of any radar-equipped search aircraft looking for us. In this mist, if the fascists don’t use radar, they won’t see us and if they do use radar, they'll warn us they are there."
"Well, the mist does look like it has set in for the day." Horton scanned the horizon with his binoculars. "There's nothing out there yet."
"We'd better set a good watch though." Mars looked around as well. "Doing a creepy-crawly is changing our arm a bit."
Horton nodded in agreement. He'd already picked the two most experienced lookouts from Unbroken's crew to stand this watch. Suddenly, he heard a dull rumble in the distance. It was a much rougher noise than the American engines on a Privateer. "Alastair, you hear that?"
"I do. A Hitlerite patrol plane. Those are Bramo 323s. That means a Kondor. We'd better dive after all."
"Too right." The U-class submarines were renowned for the speed at which they could dive, and it took only a few seconds for the submarine to start sliding under the waves. By the time the FW-200 had arrived at her location, she was well underwater and functionally invisible.
"The fascist bastard is approaching, Captain." The hydrophone operator was Jewish and had a very special hatred for the Germans. "Approaching. . . . . Overhead now. Starting to recede, he's going away. I think he missed us, Sir."
"Probably a routine patrol." Mars almost audibly sighed with relief. "I didn't know the fascists were still using Kondors."
"You certainly called that one right, skipper." Horton deliberately put respect into his voice. He was well aware that there were doubts about Mars's capabilities and that they needed to be dispelled. "If we'd flipped our radar on, he'd have been all over us. I reckon the fascists still have a few Kondors they use if the newer birds are down for any reason."
"Sounds right. Thanks, Rob. We'll stay down for an hour or so and if he really has gone, we'll come up to periscope depth for a look-see. Then on to the Skagerrak."
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Six
Briefing Room, 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy), Airfield 3252, Averyanovka-West, Chuvash
"Target for today is the Qoshagishiag oil refinery and storage area at Baku. You will fly down over friendly territory to Mangystau, then turn southwest as if you are heading for Tbilsi. However, at your initial point, Sheki, you will turn east and hit Qoshagishiag from the west. We believe this will wrong-foot the enemy and spread out his fighter defenses. You will have three groups of F-47Ms escorting the bomber formation while a group of F-47Ns runs ahead of you flying interference." Colonel David D. Helms looked up from his notes. "The fighters will be joining you at Mangystau. Now, in detail."
Helms started to go through the mission plan in detail, stressing the timing of the missions and the diversions that were taking place around it. To the veterans of the 1943 B-17 raids, the extent of the planning that had gone into a simple milk run made the raids two years earlier seem painfully amateurish. On the other hand, the Hitlerites had learned a lot as well. The days when their fighters would fly singly into the attack, facing the massed defensive guns of the bombers had gone. Now, the fascist fighter attacks were as carefully planned and coordinated as the bomber’s own defense plans.
“Any questions?” Helms looked around the briefing room.
The first question was inordinately brief in coming. “Any signs of blowjobs, Sir?”
“At the moment, no. Although we do have reason to believe that the Baku area will be the next to have blowjobs deployed there. Our reconnaissance aircraft have reported that key airfields in the area are having their runways lengthened and concrete surfaced. We think that, by the time the fascist jets arrive though, we will have our own jets deployed down here. The 356th is operational up north, the 357th will be arriving soon with the 4th and 56th Fighter Groups soon after. Looks like the competition to be the first jet ace will be heating up.” That caused a roar of laughter from the bomber crews. The battle between the leading American fighter aces to be the first jet-killer ace was intense already. Chuck Yeager in the 357th was leading with four Me-262s shot down with Bud Anderson, Gabby Gabreski, and Bob Johnson, all from the 56th, following on three Me-262s each. Everybody in the room guessed that there were almost certainly fascist Me-262 pilots whom more than five kills had each but they didn’t count since they’d scored their kills flying jets against prop aircraft. The more astute the bomber crew members realized that it was only piston-engine pilots shooting down jets that counted now and then only for a short while. Soon it would be jet versus jet pilots who would be the true aces. In effect, the ace tables would be starting again from scratch.
“All right, people, settle down. We have some non-mission information. First, an important issue. It has come to the 8th Air Force’s attention that bomber crews are carrying Russian personnel as passengers on a variety of flights. We have discussed this issue with our Russkiye brat'ya at military and political command levels and it has been decided that giving such rides will be permissible provided they do not interfere with military or operational duties and provided the aircraft are on training or test flights only. However, as of now, taking Russian passengers on operational flights is strictly prohibited. This will be interpreted as any flight which will cross into hostile-occupied airspace. If Russian personnel ask you for a ride on an operational mission, just say that you have received written orders prohibiting such passengers. That will be instantly understood as an absolute prohibition.
“There is an exception to this. We are training Russian personnel to fly B-29s and operate the systems on them. You may be assigned such trainees, but they will also have Russian written orders to join your crew. Make a point of confirming such orders with their Zampolit or Politruk.”
Helms looked around the briefing room again. He guessed that there were going to be some disappointed Russians around for whom the chance to ride an operational mission that dumped hundreds of tons of bombs on a fascist target had been a seriously valuable prospect. Unfortunately, the spaces they occupied would be needed by the trainees for the Russian fleet of B-29s. There would be few enough of them, probably only a single regiment, but propaganda and judiciously placed misinformation would make the fleet seem much larger than it was. The same applied to the 8th Air Force fleet of course; it also was significantly smaller than outsiders were allowed to think. The cover-within-the-cover was that the missing aircraft was part of a large B-29 fleet in the Pacific where they deterred the Japanese from abandoning their present course of friendly neutrality towards the United States. Helms briefly wondered if that too was a cover-within-a-cover then almost physically crushed the idea down. He knew very well there were questions that should not be asked.
“One last thing. Very soon, the 8th Air Force will be joining the Twentieth and Twenty-First Air Forces from the Pacific in a new organization, to be called Strategic Air Command. This will group all B-29 aircraft into a single operational force that will report directly to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. We will become part of the Third Air Division. Strategic Air Command aircraft will be distinguished by an obliquely angled blue band around the forward fuselage, placed between the forward gun turret and the cockpit. This band will bear the crest of Strategic Air Command. For your information.”
Helms flipped a new slide into the overhead projector. The track charts and mission schedules were replaced by the image of a shield bearing the blue-and-white of a clouded sky. Upon that field was a silver-mailed fist clasping a group of five bright red thunderbolts. Somehow, everybody present knew that a new era was being born.
F-80B Sandman 30,000 feet over Koryakino, Achangel’sk Front.
Edwards glanced over towards Victory Girl tucked in behind his left wing. The theory was that fascist radars would see the two aircraft as a single echo and therefore would assume it was a single RF-80 on a reconnaissance run. For the last three days, the four Philippine Air Force RF-80s had been flying two or three missions a day trying to catch up on the backlog or reconnaissance missions that had built up during the six months the Hitlerite blowjobs had effectively shut down RF-38 operations. To the intelligence people, it was as if dawn had finally arrived after a long night of information darkness. To the pilots of the 356th, the recon missions had shown the RF-80 was faster, could turn tighter, climb more quickly, and had a much superior rate of roll than the Me-262. Now, the chance to see if the heavier fighters had the same margin of superiority was coming.
“Luzon, this is Cadillac, we have hostile contact closing on you from two-seven-zero range thirty miles. The enemy is at 28,000 feet and climbing; the closing speed is 400 knots. Assume these are blowjobs.”
“Got it, Cadillac. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“You’re welcome Luzon. Be advised, we think closing bandits are a formation of four aircraft. Are picking up speed, confirm they are blowjobs.”
Cadillac was an old B-17 that had been converted into an airborne command post. Equipped with a radar in its belly, it could patrol well inside allied airspace while extending radar coverage deep into the fascist-occupied territory. Already it was proving its worth and other conversions were in hand. It was a measure of how important this mission was that the one available Cadillac had been assigned to support Luzon Flight. The flight name had, of course, been chosen to increase the probability the F-80s would be identified as reconnaissance aircraft.
“Got them.” Like all top fighter pilots, Edwards had an acute long-distance vision and he had spotted first the cloud of white trails as the fascist blowjobs climbed towards his formation, then picked up the black dots at the peak of that cloud. “Confirm four bandits. The recon birds must have really pissed them off.”
He waited patiently, carefully judging speed and distance. During the winter, he had spent months on the jet pilot conversion course, flying the F-80As daily as he learned the different characteristics of jets. Now, he had nearly 300 hours on the F-80 in its varying versions and knew its foibles intimately. Quite apart from the lack of noise and vibration, the aircraft were more streamlined that the P-47s he had flown before, and they didn’t decelerate easily. That was why they had a speed brake and the pilots had already found tactical uses for it.
"Victory Girl, break left and engage." Almost simultaneously, Edwards rolled Sandman hard right and put his aircraft into a long dive that slowly started to curve away from the approaching 262s. The formation of fascist jets split into two pairs, and they responded to the developing attack. One of the things that the American pilots had learned was that the fascists had adopted the same tactics they used when flying piston-engine fighters. Jets were different; their much higher speed presented entirely different challenges - and opportunities. Most of the time the 356th had been out of the line, converting from the F-47 to the F-80 had been spent exploring the new environment. What was about to happen was to demonstrate that preparation.
Edwards maintained his curve while one pair of 262s tried to swing behind him. At this altitude, the F-80B was almost 20mph faster than the 262 and had more than 25 percent more power from its single engine than the 262 from both of its Jumo jets together. Combined with Lockheed's lighter weight, the greater power and speed allowed Edwards to pull away from the fascist jets behind him. Once he was clear, he pulled the control stick over and skidded Sandman into a tight turn that put him directly in from of the enemy aircraft and heading straight at them. The closing speed between the aircraft was over 1,100 miles per hour and that gave the fascist jets less than a second to fire on the attacking F-80. Edwards dodged the few shells that came towards him by dropping the nose slightly and flying under the apparently slow-moving tracer blobs. He had no interest in those two jets, they were the prey of Victory Girl.
The maneuver had put Edwards behind the other two Messerschmitts and allowed him to close rapidly on them. The lessons of conversion training had been quite explicit, the only real chance one jet had of hitting another with gunfire was by firing from a narrow cone aft of the target. His two targets had seen him coming up from the rear and tried to turn away, but the F-80 was much more agile than they were. Edwards already had the trailing member of the pair framed in his lead-computing gyroscopic gun sight. His six M3s had roughly the same weight of fire as the eight M2s on a Thunderbolt but his guns were closely grouped in the nose and the F-80 was a lot smoother to fly than the Jug. The result of that combination was spectacular; Edward's burst struck the tail of the 262 and walked along its fuselage with the destructive effects of an industrial buzz-saw that only ended when the bullets tore the jet's cockpit apart. Edwards had to swerve to avoid the black fireball of his exploding target.
"Got Him!!" His cry of triumph was historic, and he knew it. It was the first time in history that one jet had shot down another in air combat. Or at least I think it is. Depends on if somebody else got in first. Still, the times sure are changing.
Even while the triumphant thoughts had run through his mind, he was closing in fast on the other 262. The fascist pilot had made a bad mistake; rattled by the spectacular destruction of his wingman, he had turned far too tightly in an effort to exploit Edward's forced to turn and the engine on the inside of that turn had flamed out. Even though he was diving in a futile attempt to escape, the loss of power doomed him. Once again, the streams of tracer from Edward's guns ripped into the enemy jet and sent fragments flying through the air. One wing, the one with the flamed-out jet still hanging uselessly from it, folded abruptly in half. The 262's undercarriage dropped down as the hydraulics failed, then the 262 rolled over onto its back. The pilot dropped out just before his aircraft broke up in mid-air. Edwards watched while his parachute blossomed.
"Got one, Sandman. The other one dived away. Not on bingo fuel yet, but I'm running low."
"Me too, Victory Girl. Time to go home. We've earned our pay for the day."
The pair of F-80s formed up and headed back toward their base. High over their heads, a single contrail marked the passage of an RF-80 as it went to take the long-delayed pictures of the Koryakino Triangle.
Approaching Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
Edwards checked the string attached to a nail in front of his cockpit and noted that it pointed straight back at him. Reassured that he was coming straight in and not crabbing, he lifted the nose a little further and eased down towards the runway. The lack of a propeller meant his F-80 sat closer to the ground than a piston-engine aircraft and meant that a landing always came slightly later than expected. Then there was a thump as the main wheels hit the concrete runway surface followed by a lighter jolt as the nosewheel did the same. Edwards held the aircraft straight until its speed had bled off, then he taxied off onto the parking ramp.
There was a breathless silence as he heaved himself out of the cockpit. Then, he lifted both arms above his head and waved twice. The accepted sign for two kills claimed. Alongside him, Victory Girl and its pilot gave a single wave. That was enough; the Russian and American ground crews surged forward and tossed him into the air in the traditional celebration. Behind them, more F-80s were coming in.
Twenty minutes later, Edwards got his shot of whisky after being debriefed. He had claimed his two kills, subject to them being confirmed by his gun camera footage. All four RF-80s had got back safely and their photographs were already being processed. That was when a piece of paper was pushed into his hand. He read it and his face broke out into a broad grin.
"People, listen up. We got nine kills, all jets. No losses. The 356th is back in the game." Edwards paused while the cheering died down. "Caution though, markings on the aircraft tell us that all the aircraft we saw were from JG-1. Intelligence says they have replaced JG-52 on this section of the front. The outfit has only just converted from Me-109Ks, and their pilots are pretty inexperienced. It won’t always be this easy.
Approaching Qoshagishiag oil refinery and storage area, Baku
"Approaching initial point now." The sight of the silver B-29s approaching their target in a stately procession of combat boxes was always an impressive one. Two of the four combat boxes had come from the 100th while two more had been supplied by the 11th. A further pair of combat boxes had been supplied by the 5th Bombardment Group, but they had split away from the main formation and unloaded their bombs on the two primary Luftwaffe bases in the area. That had left 108 bombers to dump nearly 1,100 tons of bombs on the Qoshagishiag oil refinery. It was also the third time the B-29s had come to visit Qoshagishiag which made Kozlewski wonder how long it would be before the fascists gave up on the complex. It is just too easy for us to come over the front line, hit the place, and be back over our own forces before an organized defense can be mounted.
"Bombardier here, I have the aircraft." Lieutenant Paul Clark in the nose had the target framed in his bombsight and was already making the minute adjustments needed to ensure his ten tons of bombs would be landing in the center of the refinery complex. In the cockpit, Kozlowski and Gray took their hands and feet off the controls and exchanged wry glances as they felt the tiny movements in their B-29 as Clark made his course adjustments. Clark's role was critical now; he was a lead bombardier for the combat box and all the other 17 B-29s would be dropping on his cue.
"Commander here; confirm you have the aircraft." Kozlowski looked down at the target laid out ahead. There was something different happening, something none of his crew had seen before. More than a dozen white pillars of smoke were starting to rise from around the target and bending towards the B-29 formations as they climbed upwards. The rate at which the columns were lengthening was something none of the crew on Leading Lady had seen before. Within two minutes the columns had come close enough for them to see that there was a small aircraft at the head of each. One that was moving at unheard-of speeds.
"They look like rockets?" Gray seemed almost mesmerized by the fast-climbing enemy.
"They're heading right for us." Kozlowski was concerned by the apparent intercept course being steered by the new enemy. With his B-29 locked into its bomb run, evasive action was impossible. "We know the fascists do have rockets. These could be more of them."
A few seconds later it became apparent that the attackers were going to pass ahead of the bomber formation. As they climbed past the B-29 combat boxes, the crews got their first clear look at the attackers. They were obviously manned aircraft, the sun glinting off the cockpit transparencies was a clear enough indication of that. They had swept wings but no horizontal tail surfaces. They were like nothing any of the crews had seen before. More worryingly, they looked like nothing that intelligence had warned them about.
The rocket aircraft kept climbing until they were about five thousand feet above the bomber formation. At that point, they rolled over and started a diving head-on pass at the B-29s. The bomber gunners opened fire almost instantly, the thick streams of tracer appearing to follow behind the attackers. Kozlowski instantly saw the situation was a lot worse than anybody had thought. The tracers from the gun turrets on the B-29s weren't just behind their targets, they were quickly falling still further behind them. The F-47M Thunderbolts escorting the bombers were equally ineffective. The threat was so sudden and unexpected that by the time they started to react, the window of opportunity had already passed. The M-model aircraft had been built on the basis of the 1943 Superbolts and could outperform the fascist piston-engine fighters without much difficulty. They had even given the jet’s problems, but they were hopelessly outclassed by this new enemy. By the time they had moved to block the attack, it was already over.
It was the inexperience of the fascist pilots that saved the B-29 formation from greater damage. The head-on pass they used had been an effective tactic when flying piston-engine fighters against the old B-17s and was still marginally viable against the B-29s, but the very high closing speed of the rocket fighters meant they could only fire a few shots with striking lack of accuracy against their targets. Both Kozlowski and Gray instinctively ducked as the orange balls of tracer floated past them, but Leading Lady escaped damage. Over to her left, Toolin Turtle was less fortunate. One shot hit her port inner engine, leaving it trailing smoke and the B-29 struggling to hold her position in the combat box.
The attack was over as quickly as it had developed. The rocket fighters had run out of fuel and were gliding away from the formation they had attacked with the Thunderbolts in hot but fruitless pursuit. The B-29s were rocking and bouncing from the anti-aircraft fire but they were cruising at an altitude that left all but the heaviest guns largely ineffective. More aircraft reported damage, but none were lost and the whole target area vanished under a sea of bomb explosions. Nevertheless, it was a collection of thoughtful bomber crews who headed for home. When they made their reports, the intelligence analysts were even more thoughtful.
Briefing Room, 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy), Airfield 3252, Averyanovka-West, Chuvash
"Target for today is the Qoshagishiag oil refinery and storage area at Baku. You will fly down over friendly territory to Mangystau, then turn southwest as if you are heading for Tbilsi. However, at your initial point, Sheki, you will turn east and hit Qoshagishiag from the west. We believe this will wrong-foot the enemy and spread out his fighter defenses. You will have three groups of F-47Ms escorting the bomber formation while a group of F-47Ns runs ahead of you flying interference." Colonel David D. Helms looked up from his notes. "The fighters will be joining you at Mangystau. Now, in detail."
Helms started to go through the mission plan in detail, stressing the timing of the missions and the diversions that were taking place around it. To the veterans of the 1943 B-17 raids, the extent of the planning that had gone into a simple milk run made the raids two years earlier seem painfully amateurish. On the other hand, the Hitlerites had learned a lot as well. The days when their fighters would fly singly into the attack, facing the massed defensive guns of the bombers had gone. Now, the fascist fighter attacks were as carefully planned and coordinated as the bomber’s own defense plans.
“Any questions?” Helms looked around the briefing room.
The first question was inordinately brief in coming. “Any signs of blowjobs, Sir?”
“At the moment, no. Although we do have reason to believe that the Baku area will be the next to have blowjobs deployed there. Our reconnaissance aircraft have reported that key airfields in the area are having their runways lengthened and concrete surfaced. We think that, by the time the fascist jets arrive though, we will have our own jets deployed down here. The 356th is operational up north, the 357th will be arriving soon with the 4th and 56th Fighter Groups soon after. Looks like the competition to be the first jet ace will be heating up.” That caused a roar of laughter from the bomber crews. The battle between the leading American fighter aces to be the first jet-killer ace was intense already. Chuck Yeager in the 357th was leading with four Me-262s shot down with Bud Anderson, Gabby Gabreski, and Bob Johnson, all from the 56th, following on three Me-262s each. Everybody in the room guessed that there were almost certainly fascist Me-262 pilots whom more than five kills had each but they didn’t count since they’d scored their kills flying jets against prop aircraft. The more astute the bomber crew members realized that it was only piston-engine pilots shooting down jets that counted now and then only for a short while. Soon it would be jet versus jet pilots who would be the true aces. In effect, the ace tables would be starting again from scratch.
“All right, people, settle down. We have some non-mission information. First, an important issue. It has come to the 8th Air Force’s attention that bomber crews are carrying Russian personnel as passengers on a variety of flights. We have discussed this issue with our Russkiye brat'ya at military and political command levels and it has been decided that giving such rides will be permissible provided they do not interfere with military or operational duties and provided the aircraft are on training or test flights only. However, as of now, taking Russian passengers on operational flights is strictly prohibited. This will be interpreted as any flight which will cross into hostile-occupied airspace. If Russian personnel ask you for a ride on an operational mission, just say that you have received written orders prohibiting such passengers. That will be instantly understood as an absolute prohibition.
“There is an exception to this. We are training Russian personnel to fly B-29s and operate the systems on them. You may be assigned such trainees, but they will also have Russian written orders to join your crew. Make a point of confirming such orders with their Zampolit or Politruk.”
Helms looked around the briefing room again. He guessed that there were going to be some disappointed Russians around for whom the chance to ride an operational mission that dumped hundreds of tons of bombs on a fascist target had been a seriously valuable prospect. Unfortunately, the spaces they occupied would be needed by the trainees for the Russian fleet of B-29s. There would be few enough of them, probably only a single regiment, but propaganda and judiciously placed misinformation would make the fleet seem much larger than it was. The same applied to the 8th Air Force fleet of course; it also was significantly smaller than outsiders were allowed to think. The cover-within-the-cover was that the missing aircraft was part of a large B-29 fleet in the Pacific where they deterred the Japanese from abandoning their present course of friendly neutrality towards the United States. Helms briefly wondered if that too was a cover-within-a-cover then almost physically crushed the idea down. He knew very well there were questions that should not be asked.
“One last thing. Very soon, the 8th Air Force will be joining the Twentieth and Twenty-First Air Forces from the Pacific in a new organization, to be called Strategic Air Command. This will group all B-29 aircraft into a single operational force that will report directly to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. We will become part of the Third Air Division. Strategic Air Command aircraft will be distinguished by an obliquely angled blue band around the forward fuselage, placed between the forward gun turret and the cockpit. This band will bear the crest of Strategic Air Command. For your information.”
Helms flipped a new slide into the overhead projector. The track charts and mission schedules were replaced by the image of a shield bearing the blue-and-white of a clouded sky. Upon that field was a silver-mailed fist clasping a group of five bright red thunderbolts. Somehow, everybody present knew that a new era was being born.
F-80B Sandman 30,000 feet over Koryakino, Achangel’sk Front.
Edwards glanced over towards Victory Girl tucked in behind his left wing. The theory was that fascist radars would see the two aircraft as a single echo and therefore would assume it was a single RF-80 on a reconnaissance run. For the last three days, the four Philippine Air Force RF-80s had been flying two or three missions a day trying to catch up on the backlog or reconnaissance missions that had built up during the six months the Hitlerite blowjobs had effectively shut down RF-38 operations. To the intelligence people, it was as if dawn had finally arrived after a long night of information darkness. To the pilots of the 356th, the recon missions had shown the RF-80 was faster, could turn tighter, climb more quickly, and had a much superior rate of roll than the Me-262. Now, the chance to see if the heavier fighters had the same margin of superiority was coming.
“Luzon, this is Cadillac, we have hostile contact closing on you from two-seven-zero range thirty miles. The enemy is at 28,000 feet and climbing; the closing speed is 400 knots. Assume these are blowjobs.”
“Got it, Cadillac. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“You’re welcome Luzon. Be advised, we think closing bandits are a formation of four aircraft. Are picking up speed, confirm they are blowjobs.”
Cadillac was an old B-17 that had been converted into an airborne command post. Equipped with a radar in its belly, it could patrol well inside allied airspace while extending radar coverage deep into the fascist-occupied territory. Already it was proving its worth and other conversions were in hand. It was a measure of how important this mission was that the one available Cadillac had been assigned to support Luzon Flight. The flight name had, of course, been chosen to increase the probability the F-80s would be identified as reconnaissance aircraft.
“Got them.” Like all top fighter pilots, Edwards had an acute long-distance vision and he had spotted first the cloud of white trails as the fascist blowjobs climbed towards his formation, then picked up the black dots at the peak of that cloud. “Confirm four bandits. The recon birds must have really pissed them off.”
He waited patiently, carefully judging speed and distance. During the winter, he had spent months on the jet pilot conversion course, flying the F-80As daily as he learned the different characteristics of jets. Now, he had nearly 300 hours on the F-80 in its varying versions and knew its foibles intimately. Quite apart from the lack of noise and vibration, the aircraft were more streamlined that the P-47s he had flown before, and they didn’t decelerate easily. That was why they had a speed brake and the pilots had already found tactical uses for it.
"Victory Girl, break left and engage." Almost simultaneously, Edwards rolled Sandman hard right and put his aircraft into a long dive that slowly started to curve away from the approaching 262s. The formation of fascist jets split into two pairs, and they responded to the developing attack. One of the things that the American pilots had learned was that the fascists had adopted the same tactics they used when flying piston-engine fighters. Jets were different; their much higher speed presented entirely different challenges - and opportunities. Most of the time the 356th had been out of the line, converting from the F-47 to the F-80 had been spent exploring the new environment. What was about to happen was to demonstrate that preparation.
Edwards maintained his curve while one pair of 262s tried to swing behind him. At this altitude, the F-80B was almost 20mph faster than the 262 and had more than 25 percent more power from its single engine than the 262 from both of its Jumo jets together. Combined with Lockheed's lighter weight, the greater power and speed allowed Edwards to pull away from the fascist jets behind him. Once he was clear, he pulled the control stick over and skidded Sandman into a tight turn that put him directly in from of the enemy aircraft and heading straight at them. The closing speed between the aircraft was over 1,100 miles per hour and that gave the fascist jets less than a second to fire on the attacking F-80. Edwards dodged the few shells that came towards him by dropping the nose slightly and flying under the apparently slow-moving tracer blobs. He had no interest in those two jets, they were the prey of Victory Girl.
The maneuver had put Edwards behind the other two Messerschmitts and allowed him to close rapidly on them. The lessons of conversion training had been quite explicit, the only real chance one jet had of hitting another with gunfire was by firing from a narrow cone aft of the target. His two targets had seen him coming up from the rear and tried to turn away, but the F-80 was much more agile than they were. Edwards already had the trailing member of the pair framed in his lead-computing gyroscopic gun sight. His six M3s had roughly the same weight of fire as the eight M2s on a Thunderbolt but his guns were closely grouped in the nose and the F-80 was a lot smoother to fly than the Jug. The result of that combination was spectacular; Edward's burst struck the tail of the 262 and walked along its fuselage with the destructive effects of an industrial buzz-saw that only ended when the bullets tore the jet's cockpit apart. Edwards had to swerve to avoid the black fireball of his exploding target.
"Got Him!!" His cry of triumph was historic, and he knew it. It was the first time in history that one jet had shot down another in air combat. Or at least I think it is. Depends on if somebody else got in first. Still, the times sure are changing.
Even while the triumphant thoughts had run through his mind, he was closing in fast on the other 262. The fascist pilot had made a bad mistake; rattled by the spectacular destruction of his wingman, he had turned far too tightly in an effort to exploit Edward's forced to turn and the engine on the inside of that turn had flamed out. Even though he was diving in a futile attempt to escape, the loss of power doomed him. Once again, the streams of tracer from Edward's guns ripped into the enemy jet and sent fragments flying through the air. One wing, the one with the flamed-out jet still hanging uselessly from it, folded abruptly in half. The 262's undercarriage dropped down as the hydraulics failed, then the 262 rolled over onto its back. The pilot dropped out just before his aircraft broke up in mid-air. Edwards watched while his parachute blossomed.
"Got one, Sandman. The other one dived away. Not on bingo fuel yet, but I'm running low."
"Me too, Victory Girl. Time to go home. We've earned our pay for the day."
The pair of F-80s formed up and headed back toward their base. High over their heads, a single contrail marked the passage of an RF-80 as it went to take the long-delayed pictures of the Koryakino Triangle.
Approaching Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
Edwards checked the string attached to a nail in front of his cockpit and noted that it pointed straight back at him. Reassured that he was coming straight in and not crabbing, he lifted the nose a little further and eased down towards the runway. The lack of a propeller meant his F-80 sat closer to the ground than a piston-engine aircraft and meant that a landing always came slightly later than expected. Then there was a thump as the main wheels hit the concrete runway surface followed by a lighter jolt as the nosewheel did the same. Edwards held the aircraft straight until its speed had bled off, then he taxied off onto the parking ramp.
There was a breathless silence as he heaved himself out of the cockpit. Then, he lifted both arms above his head and waved twice. The accepted sign for two kills claimed. Alongside him, Victory Girl and its pilot gave a single wave. That was enough; the Russian and American ground crews surged forward and tossed him into the air in the traditional celebration. Behind them, more F-80s were coming in.
Twenty minutes later, Edwards got his shot of whisky after being debriefed. He had claimed his two kills, subject to them being confirmed by his gun camera footage. All four RF-80s had got back safely and their photographs were already being processed. That was when a piece of paper was pushed into his hand. He read it and his face broke out into a broad grin.
"People, listen up. We got nine kills, all jets. No losses. The 356th is back in the game." Edwards paused while the cheering died down. "Caution though, markings on the aircraft tell us that all the aircraft we saw were from JG-1. Intelligence says they have replaced JG-52 on this section of the front. The outfit has only just converted from Me-109Ks, and their pilots are pretty inexperienced. It won’t always be this easy.
Approaching Qoshagishiag oil refinery and storage area, Baku
"Approaching initial point now." The sight of the silver B-29s approaching their target in a stately procession of combat boxes was always an impressive one. Two of the four combat boxes had come from the 100th while two more had been supplied by the 11th. A further pair of combat boxes had been supplied by the 5th Bombardment Group, but they had split away from the main formation and unloaded their bombs on the two primary Luftwaffe bases in the area. That had left 108 bombers to dump nearly 1,100 tons of bombs on the Qoshagishiag oil refinery. It was also the third time the B-29s had come to visit Qoshagishiag which made Kozlewski wonder how long it would be before the fascists gave up on the complex. It is just too easy for us to come over the front line, hit the place, and be back over our own forces before an organized defense can be mounted.
"Bombardier here, I have the aircraft." Lieutenant Paul Clark in the nose had the target framed in his bombsight and was already making the minute adjustments needed to ensure his ten tons of bombs would be landing in the center of the refinery complex. In the cockpit, Kozlowski and Gray took their hands and feet off the controls and exchanged wry glances as they felt the tiny movements in their B-29 as Clark made his course adjustments. Clark's role was critical now; he was a lead bombardier for the combat box and all the other 17 B-29s would be dropping on his cue.
"Commander here; confirm you have the aircraft." Kozlowski looked down at the target laid out ahead. There was something different happening, something none of his crew had seen before. More than a dozen white pillars of smoke were starting to rise from around the target and bending towards the B-29 formations as they climbed upwards. The rate at which the columns were lengthening was something none of the crew on Leading Lady had seen before. Within two minutes the columns had come close enough for them to see that there was a small aircraft at the head of each. One that was moving at unheard-of speeds.
"They look like rockets?" Gray seemed almost mesmerized by the fast-climbing enemy.
"They're heading right for us." Kozlowski was concerned by the apparent intercept course being steered by the new enemy. With his B-29 locked into its bomb run, evasive action was impossible. "We know the fascists do have rockets. These could be more of them."
A few seconds later it became apparent that the attackers were going to pass ahead of the bomber formation. As they climbed past the B-29 combat boxes, the crews got their first clear look at the attackers. They were obviously manned aircraft, the sun glinting off the cockpit transparencies was a clear enough indication of that. They had swept wings but no horizontal tail surfaces. They were like nothing any of the crews had seen before. More worryingly, they looked like nothing that intelligence had warned them about.
The rocket aircraft kept climbing until they were about five thousand feet above the bomber formation. At that point, they rolled over and started a diving head-on pass at the B-29s. The bomber gunners opened fire almost instantly, the thick streams of tracer appearing to follow behind the attackers. Kozlowski instantly saw the situation was a lot worse than anybody had thought. The tracers from the gun turrets on the B-29s weren't just behind their targets, they were quickly falling still further behind them. The F-47M Thunderbolts escorting the bombers were equally ineffective. The threat was so sudden and unexpected that by the time they started to react, the window of opportunity had already passed. The M-model aircraft had been built on the basis of the 1943 Superbolts and could outperform the fascist piston-engine fighters without much difficulty. They had even given the jet’s problems, but they were hopelessly outclassed by this new enemy. By the time they had moved to block the attack, it was already over.
It was the inexperience of the fascist pilots that saved the B-29 formation from greater damage. The head-on pass they used had been an effective tactic when flying piston-engine fighters against the old B-17s and was still marginally viable against the B-29s, but the very high closing speed of the rocket fighters meant they could only fire a few shots with striking lack of accuracy against their targets. Both Kozlowski and Gray instinctively ducked as the orange balls of tracer floated past them, but Leading Lady escaped damage. Over to her left, Toolin Turtle was less fortunate. One shot hit her port inner engine, leaving it trailing smoke and the B-29 struggling to hold her position in the combat box.
The attack was over as quickly as it had developed. The rocket fighters had run out of fuel and were gliding away from the formation they had attacked with the Thunderbolts in hot but fruitless pursuit. The B-29s were rocking and bouncing from the anti-aircraft fire but they were cruising at an altitude that left all but the heaviest guns largely ineffective. More aircraft reported damage, but none were lost and the whole target area vanished under a sea of bomb explosions. Nevertheless, it was a collection of thoughtful bomber crews who headed for home. When they made their reports, the intelligence analysts were even more thoughtful.
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Seven
Married Quarters, Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
“Come on in Rick, you timed things just right. Dinner has arrived from the kitchens.” The base might have made concessions to American sensibilities by providing some living accommodation for married couples, but all the cooking was done centrally and delivered to the married quarters by the cook's assistants. Lilya had called down earlier to let the kitchens know that they had a guest for dinner and given them his ration card number. She knew that even if her husband hadn’t made history a few hours earlier by flying the first allied jet to shoot down a fascist jet in combat, the cooks would have put whatever delicacies they could find in so that their guests would be properly entertained. She had laid the table with their best china, a wedding present from Edward’s family, and obtained some flowers to decorate the table. To her delight, she saw that Gonzalez had arrived with an armload of additional flowers and a pair of vodka bottles. Proper vodka she noted not home-brewed or the cheap kind. This was the sort of vodka Stavka might drink.
“Welcome tovarish colonel. What beautiful flowers! My favorite is lilies. Bolshoye spasibo!”
“Please tovarish colonel, call me Richard or Rick.”
“Only if you call me Lilya”
"I think we have a deal. Is that Schav I can see?"
"With tinned meat, yes. A special treat tonight in honor of the fascist jets the 356th shot down today."
"Am achievement that deserves a Lechon." Lilya looked a bit confused, so Gonzalez explained. "Back home, before the war, every village was overrun with pigs. So, when it was a cause for celebration like a marriage or relatives visiting, we spit-roast a whole pig and the whole village would join in the feast. Nine fascist jets down in a single day? Definitely a cause for a Lechon."
"How did the pictures come out Rick?" Edwards had a professional interest in where the likely targets were. The Shooting Stars had a much shorter operational radius than the Thunderbolts and that meant mission planning was much more complex.
"Very much what we were expecting. The reason why the area was so heavily defended is that the fascists have packed their stuff in there. Its tanks and artillery are parked nose to tail. I would say they are going to start moving in a day or two at most."
"Assuming our Big Friends don't hit them first. By the way, did you hear about the rocket fighters? They tried to engage in a B-29 raid down south. No casualties, but it’s a bit worrying we didn't know about them."
Listening to the shop talk, Lilya was trying not to shudder. Russian officers had long ago given up on trying to impress their ideas of operational security on the Americans and concluded that Americans talked so much that anything important was lost in the blizzard.
"Some salad Richard?" Lilya opened the next container. "We call this a Mimosa salad. Tinned fish, usually sardines, with grated egg, onions, potatoes, and carrots topped with sour cream."
"It sounds great. There's way more food here than there was back in '43."
"Things are much better now. We have fresh food of our own again, preserved food from lend-lease and many of our people get aid parcels from America. The bread is still black though."
"And all the better for it Lilya. When I was back home in the Philippines, I used to dream of good black Russian bread."
"In which case . . ." Lilya reached into the food container and took out a paper package. "Black bread, made with good Army flour! And we have some piroshky, bread stuffed with roasted onions, caraway seeds, and tinned Australian cheese. That is extra, the cooks must have put it in because we told them we had a guest. Finally, we have some preserved fruit."
An hour later, despite the rationing that still controlled diet and the dependence on imported preserved food, everybody was well fed. Gonzalez had seen how his hosts left tiny amounts of food on their plates when they'd had enough and did the same. That was the signal for a relaxed glass of tea while they listened to some American Glen Miller records.
"Our first date was a Glenn Miller concert." Edwards explained quietly, "And we had Glenn Miller with a detachment from his band playing at our wedding reception in Hellertown. Having Hollywood contacts is useful sometimes. That caused a sensation."
"That was a wonderful day. Misha's sister loaned me her wedding dress." Lilya's eyes misted slightly with the memories. They were suddenly interrupted by the wail of air-raid sirens. Gonzalez was about to head for the bomb shelters when Lilya put her hand on his arm. "Not yet. That is a warning that some Malenki Dermo are coming in. We will get another warning if they are heading this way."
"Little Shits." Edwards explained. "Doodlebugs. The A-4 rockets are Bolshoye Dermo, and Big Shits. We get most of the doodlebugs if they try to attack in daylight so the Hitlerites fire them at night or in very bad weather. Our F-61 night fighters are too slow to catch them but we've got some radar-equipped F-49s that can do it. The rockets, well, there's nothing we can do about those except stay back out of range. F-80s don’t have the legs to do that."
"Or the Night Witches can get them when they set up to launch." Lilya looked relieved when the all-clear sounded. "Now, let us celebrate with some real drinks."
Forward Defense Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
“Tovarish Captain!” Sergeant Dmitry Isakovich Akulov hissed the warning to Captain Piskunov. It wasn’t just the heavy rumble from behind the fascist lines but the ripples crossing a canteen of water that had been placed on the ground in front of their trench. It was directly in contact with the soil so that the shaking caused by heavily armored vehicles moving was instantly – and silently – revealed. “They are coming!”.
“Indeed they are, bratish’ka. There will be much work to do this day. Order all the men to their combat positions.”
The ‘combat positions” were subtly different from the obvious front line. The dummy foxholes and trenches were well-positioned, in many cases better placed than the real trenches. The fascists were many things, starting with unspeakably evil, but nobody accused them of being stupid. In many ways, it was a chess match with each move and countermove being calculated. For example, if the fascists had worked out where the real positions were, they might stage a fake attack to bring out the defenders, straight into concentrated artillery fire.
Overhead, an odd sort of growling grumbles started to add its contribution to shaking the ground. Piskunov recognized it instantly. “Malenki Dermo!” The real attack is coming!”
It was the standard, choreographed attack. The Malenki Dermo was, depending on how one looked at things, either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. The fascists would fire them from positions to the rear at targets deep in the allied logistics area. Also on their way were the Bolshiye Dermo, the big shits or A-4 rockets as they were more properly known. They would be targeted on headquarters and airfields. Piskunov knew that the fascist air force was stretched desperately thin, and the flying bombs and rockets were a substitute for the formations of aircraft that simply didn’t exist anymore.
“There’s one!” One of the ‘drugs’, a new recruit who had yet to kill his first fascist, called out as the red exhaust of a Malenki Dermo crossed the sky, heading east.
“Just keep going you little shit,” Akulov whispered. Everybody knew that the engine on a Malenki Dermo would cut out a second or two before the flying bomb started its crash to earth. He breathed a sigh of relief as it continued going east, its rough-sounding engine beginning to fade in the distance. It was still audible right up to the moment that it was drowned out by the sound of artillery and mortar fire. The fascists had opened fire dead on their usual schedule and now they would be peppering the Russian defenses with fire. Or so they thought.
The days when the fascists had lit the sky from horizon to horizon with their artillery fire were long gone. A fact for which Captain Piskunov was devoutly grateful. This barrage was a faint shadow of what the Hitlerite artillery had once been, now it was a mere splattering of shells from field guns and mortars. For all that, it was still deadly against an unprepared enemy. Men would die from the fascist guns, either torn apart by the fragments or crushed and choked in their dugouts. Piskunov knew that the men behind the Russian line would be plotting the progress of the fascist barrage, using the number of shells landing and bearings on the sound of the fire to locate where the enemy artillery was coming from and where the axis of attack was aimed. The information they gained was coarse and very crude right now, but every minute the battle went on, it would become more precise. One of Piskunov’s tasks, and that of his men, of course, was to buy that time.
He could tell his superiors right now that the dummy defenses were effective. They were drawing off a significant proportion of the inbound fire, causing some of the shell bursts to explode harmlessly. Others threw up nothing but splintered wood and shreds of cloth as the dummy gun positions were hit by the inbound fire. Deprived of the massed batteries they had once had, every round they put into the Russian defenses was valuable. By extension of that logic, every round that could be lured into a dummy target was a small victory. Enough small victories could lead to a larger one.
Piskunov felt the movement beside him as Akulov wormed along the trench to report. “They are missing, Tovarish Captain, mostly at any rate. We lost contact with a handful of men when one of the forward positions took a heavy shell. The Hitlerites are mixing a few heavy guns in with the normal selection.”
“That sounds very un-fascist. Are we sure we are in the right place?”
It was as if the fascist gunners had heard Piskunov. There was a very brief silence and then the barrage was renewed with a concentration of fire from the heavy artillery.
“That sound fascist enough for you tovarish Captain?” Akulov crouched lower in the dugout, avoiding the spray of dirt and stones thrown by the heavier shells. He thought he recognized the distinctive dull thud of 150mm infantry howitzers, then there was another pause before the incoming artillery fire returned to its previous mixture of 75mm and 105mm infantry guns and 120mm mortars. “They’re trying to shake up as much of our positions as possible.”
Piskunov nodded in agreement. The Russian infantry had re-learned all the lessons of the First World War when it came to digging their trenches. Each was as narrow as possible, with acute angles between legs to prevent blasts and fragments from rolling down the length. The forward edge of the trench was overhung and dug deep, creating a sheltered area where a rifleman might huddle, the dirt from the shaking of near misses falling on him while he prayed for deliverance, prayed that a fascist shell might not hit the narrow mouth of his trench and blow him into unfindable fragments. Yet that was not the end of the trench defenses. Every few yards, the area protected by the overhang was extended downwards into a much deeper shelter, one heavily reinforced with timber and thoughtfully provided with a grenade trap, a deep, narrow pit where a fascist grenade could be kicked so that it would expand its blast upwards rather than into the men around it. Yet, even in the deep shelters, men tried to make their shaking less obvious while they smoked. A few had even hoarded their vodka from the previous night’s ration and now swallowed it to steady their nerves. Even so, the growing tension was apparent as the men sat in the darkness and felt dislodged soil trickling down upon them.
There had been much more to building the dummy positions than just digging a few holes. Some soldiers had been ordered to stay there, to be seen going to and from the pits, to convince the fascist scouts that there really were people in those defenses. Pavel Fedorovich Koltsov, the self-appointed battalion comedian, had claimed that the structures weren’t decoys at all but a top-secret plan to win the war overnight. They were tunnels that would connect with the Moskva Metro and allow the entire Russian Army to suddenly appear in the fascist rear. So, the decoy positions were now known as “The Moskva Metro.” They weren’t quite that useful, but they were proving their worth as measured by the men who would have died but hadn’t.
There was another feature that grew out of being stationed near the dummy positions. The last stage that preceded any fascist attack was a visit from a reconnaissance aircraft that would try and assess the effects of the artillery barrage. A detachment of four riflemen, men who had survived a heavy shell hit on their dummy bunker earlier, were waiting for it to arrive. When it finally did make its appearance, they took position on their parapets and started to fire on it with their rifles. These men were volunteers, attracted by a double extra ration of vodka the previous evening and the promise of the same again the next evening. If they lived to claim it of course. While their sobriety might be questioned, their courage could not. Whatever their motivation, their rifle fire caused the reconnaissance aircraft to visibly flinch and the riflemen could imagine the crew hastily radioing back that the defenses were still active. After all, the rifle fire was usually ineffective but not always. With the final touch of the illusion being made, those four men made their way back to their main positions by a way of a carefully camouflaged path.
That was the last detail. The real trenches were covered with camouflage netting that made them hard to spot from the air. So, the last fascist test failed to see the real position and, by default, the assault they supported was aimed at the decoy position.
“We have tricked them!” Piskunov saw the fascist guns fire an intense concentration on the decoy positions. It was his duty to observe the situation and that couldn’t be done from inside a bunker or the bottom of the trenches. In any case, he detested being trapped underground in a bunker while the artillery fire was descending so he’d spent the entire time the barrage had been falling hidden between two piles of muddy earth. Being able to watch the success of the decoys and the misdirection of fascist guns was deeply and personally pleasing to him. As the fire slackened off, he worked his way as high as he dared so that he could see what was happening. There was something new to be seen, a haze of blue smoke was drifting up from behind a low ridge a thousand meters or more in front of his real position. It was a drawback of his real positions; from this point of view, the decoys were less commanded by the enemy jump-off point.
Suddenly, there was an eerie quiet that fell across the battlefield. The fascist artillery had ceased firing and that meant the assault was coming, not soon but right then. The blue haze of smoke over the ridgeline thickened amidst the roar of tank engines. Piskunov blew his whistle and saw the men pouring out of their bunkers and from under the overhang. Each man knew his place, whether it was a firing port or a platform for a crew-served weapon. Only the Maxim guns and the 57mms remained hidden. Their time would come later. “They are coming bratishka. Now is the time to remind them of how we can fight!”
There were eight tanks, all Panzer IVJs, with the anti-bazooka side plates in position, coming over the ridgeline in an irregular line. Each tank had a group of ten or twelve infantrymen grouped around it, with more men scattered in front and behind them. They were protecting the tanks from rockets but also forcing the tanks to move at the speed of their infantry screen. To Piskunov, this was a familiar sight, a badly under-strength infantry company supported by an equally under-strength company of tanks. What was pleasing was that the attack was actually moving across his front at an oblique angle heading for the decoy positions still. All the effort that had gone into building the dummy trenches was still paying off.
Piskunov had one last trick to play before the real action started. Behind him, several kilometers behind was a battery of 122mm guns. In front of him was a pre-registered artillery aiming point, one he had carefully picked earlier and coached the artillerists until they could drop their rounds onto it with acceptable accuracy. It wasn’t an ideal or flexible solution, and it didn’t use available artillery efficiently, but the Russian Army had a lot of available artillery. This pre-registration was simple, and it worked. He picked up the receiver on his field radio.
“Artillery call. Aiming point Zhenya-316. Immediate.” He got the acknowledgment of the firing order and waited while the enemy attack formation reached Aiming Point Zhenya. He knew that back at the artillery command station, the fire orders would be coming in from all the sub-units and prioritized. He had tried to get his request through quickly by assigning it an immediate priority, but he knew that every other commander would be doing the same. It was going to be a matter of pure chance whether the attacking fascists would pass through the pre-registration point before, during, or after the supporting artillery fire arrived.
The howl of the outbound artillery fire came quickly, unexpectedly so. Five minutes was a good response time, ten was quite possible. Piskunov had gambled on the response to his call is closer to the latter so his first group of four rounds fell well behind the tanks but into the group of infantry following them. “Down three, fire for effect.”
There was only a slight pause as the guns adjusted and the next group of four bursts amongst the tanks. They cut down the infantry supporting the tanks disrupting the formation and sieving the tanks away from their support. Even better, the artillery fire gave the fascists no clue that they were being engaged from an unexpected direction, even when the following shells reinforced the effect. They forced the tanks to start maneuvering so that they evaded the artillery fire. To Piskunov’s delight, one of the Panzer IVs was hit squarely on the engine gratings and immediately burst into flames. Unlike later fascist tanks, the Panzer IV was well-provided with easy-to-access escape hatches and the crew had a reasonable chance of escaping, from the vehicle at least. One man didn’t make it. His overalls were already burning as he bailed out through the hatch in the turret side, and he didn’t make it through. His screams as he burned alive only a few centimeters from safety echoed across the battlefield before they were drowned out by the explosion of noise as the battle got underway. Piskunov guessed his belt, or something had got hooked on something as he’d tried to bail out and that had delayed him long enough for the fire to get him.
The last round from the defensive barrage broke the tracks on another tank. The damaged vehicle spun around, and the crew made a hurried escape. Piskunov watched them roll clear of the vehicle and started to clear the immediate area. Then they realized their tank wasn’t burning and it might easily be repaired. They were obviously dithering, trying to decide what was the most sensible thing to do. Should they return to their vehicle? Or retreat to cover? The sight made him take the next step, the one that would end his sanctuary of silence. Piskunov blasted his whistle and his two light machine guns opened fire on the dismounted tank crew. That made up their mind; they took cover well away from their tank.
The effect was immediate; the fire coming in from the flank told the fascists that they had been tricked. The six surviving tanks started to turn in the direction of the real position with their infantry moving to cover them. Piskunov admitted to himself that the fascists still had a way to maneuver on a battlefield down to fine art. Changing the axis of advance like that while under fire could easily turn into a chaotic mess. Instead, he had to watch as the maneuver was smooth and skillful.
It was not cost-free though. Sergeant Kazimir Ivanovich Usanov had watched the maneuver start and realized that the tank furthest from the Russian line would have exposed his side to his ‘57’. “Load armor-piercing.”
Normally, he would have fired at the tank’s side, but two factors argued against doing that. One was that the tank was fitted with side plates and the other was that the armor-piercing shot from a 57mm had a tendency to shatter when it struck an armor plate. Having two thicknesses of armor to penetrate doubled the chance of shatter. So, he used his sight to level his gun at the driver’s slit in the vertical front. That way, it might have to penetrate thicker armor but the chance of the shot shattering would be reduced, and spalling from the inside might just kill the driver. Meanwhile, one of his crew was getting one of their precious ‘smooth’ BR 271N composite rounds. They were on limited issue, having only appeared a few weeks before. but they could go through 150mm of armor. Even the older composite round could penetrate 130mm but the truth was, Usanov wanted to play with his new round.
That was for the future. His first shot overshot his target. Not by much but enough. “Reload, armor piercing, fast.”
His target was alert and swinging so that the face plate was at an angle to the direction the shot had come in from. In doing so, its advance had slowed down a little. Usanov saw the shot strike at the point of aim, as near as he could see directly on the driver’s vision slit. It shattered, spraying metal fragments in an arc, and caused the tank to jerk and stall its engine. If the driver was alive, he would be frantically trying to restart for any tank that stopped moving for more than a few seconds was doomed. If he was dead, of course, he couldn’t do that.
“Load new composite.” Usanov took an extra second to aim the precious composite shot. He fired, watching keenly while the bright red streak hit the frontal armor of the Panzer 4. There was a tiny pause and then the target went up in a ball of flame that started in the engine compartment and rolled forward. Nobody is getting out of there alive.
He knew he had given his position away though and at least one tank returned fire on him. Many Russian anti-tank artillerists thought the Panzer 4 was a more dangerous opponent than the much-vaunted Panther since the earlier tank had a more effective gun for firing high explosives. One of the surviving Panzer 4s was even more dangerous than usual. The commander was really smart. He had moved behind the tank with the broken track and was using it for cover. He moved up right behind the damaged tank, so that his bow was almost touching the vehicle’s side and had his gun laid over the engine compartment. The damaged tank was hit at least twice by 57mm shots from the other two anti-tank guns, but the added metal protected the operational tank behind it. Usanov could see from the constant tiny movements of the turret that the gunner was aiming carefully before firing.
It was the tree that saved Usanov and his gun crew. The first high-explosive shot hit the trunk and exploded, destroying the tree, and spraying the area with steel and wood splinters. They rang off the gun shield, causing the crew to duck behind whatever cover they could find. “Back to the reserve positions! Back now! Quickly!”
Usanov’s crew scrambled back to an emergency trench that had been dug for exactly this eventuality. They’d just made it when a second 75mm shell scored a direct hit on the gun pit. When the smoke cleared, the 57mm gun was blackened and askew.
Back at the command position, Piskunov saw the destruction of one of his 57mm guns and the tanks firing on the rest. He also saw something else; the fascists were beginning to pull back. The infantry was being punished by the rifle and machine gun fire from the Russian trenches. The Hitlerites were returning fire with their banana-guns and the volume of fire they were laying down was intense. Nevertheless, they were in the open and the Russian infantrymen were under cover in carefully constructed positions. So, they were dominating the exchange and the fascists were dropping back. The tanks saw them doing so and started to do the same, not wanting to be exposed to the Russian rocket launchers. Last to start pulling back was the tank that had taken cover behind his crippled comrade. Piskunov desperately wanted to knock that tank out, but he didn’t have the chance.
“Look, we have driven them back!” One of the younger soldiers yelled the words in triumph. It had been his first action and he was justifiably proud of his unit’s achievement.
“You don’t understand, bratishka.” Piskunov saw the youngster swell with pride at being a brother at last. “The fascists just pissed on us. When they come back, they’ll bring a firehose.”
Married Quarters, Airfield 896, Korovkinskaya, Archangel’sk Front
“Come on in Rick, you timed things just right. Dinner has arrived from the kitchens.” The base might have made concessions to American sensibilities by providing some living accommodation for married couples, but all the cooking was done centrally and delivered to the married quarters by the cook's assistants. Lilya had called down earlier to let the kitchens know that they had a guest for dinner and given them his ration card number. She knew that even if her husband hadn’t made history a few hours earlier by flying the first allied jet to shoot down a fascist jet in combat, the cooks would have put whatever delicacies they could find in so that their guests would be properly entertained. She had laid the table with their best china, a wedding present from Edward’s family, and obtained some flowers to decorate the table. To her delight, she saw that Gonzalez had arrived with an armload of additional flowers and a pair of vodka bottles. Proper vodka she noted not home-brewed or the cheap kind. This was the sort of vodka Stavka might drink.
“Welcome tovarish colonel. What beautiful flowers! My favorite is lilies. Bolshoye spasibo!”
“Please tovarish colonel, call me Richard or Rick.”
“Only if you call me Lilya”
"I think we have a deal. Is that Schav I can see?"
"With tinned meat, yes. A special treat tonight in honor of the fascist jets the 356th shot down today."
"Am achievement that deserves a Lechon." Lilya looked a bit confused, so Gonzalez explained. "Back home, before the war, every village was overrun with pigs. So, when it was a cause for celebration like a marriage or relatives visiting, we spit-roast a whole pig and the whole village would join in the feast. Nine fascist jets down in a single day? Definitely a cause for a Lechon."
"How did the pictures come out Rick?" Edwards had a professional interest in where the likely targets were. The Shooting Stars had a much shorter operational radius than the Thunderbolts and that meant mission planning was much more complex.
"Very much what we were expecting. The reason why the area was so heavily defended is that the fascists have packed their stuff in there. Its tanks and artillery are parked nose to tail. I would say they are going to start moving in a day or two at most."
"Assuming our Big Friends don't hit them first. By the way, did you hear about the rocket fighters? They tried to engage in a B-29 raid down south. No casualties, but it’s a bit worrying we didn't know about them."
Listening to the shop talk, Lilya was trying not to shudder. Russian officers had long ago given up on trying to impress their ideas of operational security on the Americans and concluded that Americans talked so much that anything important was lost in the blizzard.
"Some salad Richard?" Lilya opened the next container. "We call this a Mimosa salad. Tinned fish, usually sardines, with grated egg, onions, potatoes, and carrots topped with sour cream."
"It sounds great. There's way more food here than there was back in '43."
"Things are much better now. We have fresh food of our own again, preserved food from lend-lease and many of our people get aid parcels from America. The bread is still black though."
"And all the better for it Lilya. When I was back home in the Philippines, I used to dream of good black Russian bread."
"In which case . . ." Lilya reached into the food container and took out a paper package. "Black bread, made with good Army flour! And we have some piroshky, bread stuffed with roasted onions, caraway seeds, and tinned Australian cheese. That is extra, the cooks must have put it in because we told them we had a guest. Finally, we have some preserved fruit."
An hour later, despite the rationing that still controlled diet and the dependence on imported preserved food, everybody was well fed. Gonzalez had seen how his hosts left tiny amounts of food on their plates when they'd had enough and did the same. That was the signal for a relaxed glass of tea while they listened to some American Glen Miller records.
"Our first date was a Glenn Miller concert." Edwards explained quietly, "And we had Glenn Miller with a detachment from his band playing at our wedding reception in Hellertown. Having Hollywood contacts is useful sometimes. That caused a sensation."
"That was a wonderful day. Misha's sister loaned me her wedding dress." Lilya's eyes misted slightly with the memories. They were suddenly interrupted by the wail of air-raid sirens. Gonzalez was about to head for the bomb shelters when Lilya put her hand on his arm. "Not yet. That is a warning that some Malenki Dermo are coming in. We will get another warning if they are heading this way."
"Little Shits." Edwards explained. "Doodlebugs. The A-4 rockets are Bolshoye Dermo, and Big Shits. We get most of the doodlebugs if they try to attack in daylight so the Hitlerites fire them at night or in very bad weather. Our F-61 night fighters are too slow to catch them but we've got some radar-equipped F-49s that can do it. The rockets, well, there's nothing we can do about those except stay back out of range. F-80s don’t have the legs to do that."
"Or the Night Witches can get them when they set up to launch." Lilya looked relieved when the all-clear sounded. "Now, let us celebrate with some real drinks."
Forward Defense Area, 316th Rifle Division, Archangel'sk Oblast, Russia.
“Tovarish Captain!” Sergeant Dmitry Isakovich Akulov hissed the warning to Captain Piskunov. It wasn’t just the heavy rumble from behind the fascist lines but the ripples crossing a canteen of water that had been placed on the ground in front of their trench. It was directly in contact with the soil so that the shaking caused by heavily armored vehicles moving was instantly – and silently – revealed. “They are coming!”.
“Indeed they are, bratish’ka. There will be much work to do this day. Order all the men to their combat positions.”
The ‘combat positions” were subtly different from the obvious front line. The dummy foxholes and trenches were well-positioned, in many cases better placed than the real trenches. The fascists were many things, starting with unspeakably evil, but nobody accused them of being stupid. In many ways, it was a chess match with each move and countermove being calculated. For example, if the fascists had worked out where the real positions were, they might stage a fake attack to bring out the defenders, straight into concentrated artillery fire.
Overhead, an odd sort of growling grumbles started to add its contribution to shaking the ground. Piskunov recognized it instantly. “Malenki Dermo!” The real attack is coming!”
It was the standard, choreographed attack. The Malenki Dermo was, depending on how one looked at things, either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. The fascists would fire them from positions to the rear at targets deep in the allied logistics area. Also on their way were the Bolshiye Dermo, the big shits or A-4 rockets as they were more properly known. They would be targeted on headquarters and airfields. Piskunov knew that the fascist air force was stretched desperately thin, and the flying bombs and rockets were a substitute for the formations of aircraft that simply didn’t exist anymore.
“There’s one!” One of the ‘drugs’, a new recruit who had yet to kill his first fascist, called out as the red exhaust of a Malenki Dermo crossed the sky, heading east.
“Just keep going you little shit,” Akulov whispered. Everybody knew that the engine on a Malenki Dermo would cut out a second or two before the flying bomb started its crash to earth. He breathed a sigh of relief as it continued going east, its rough-sounding engine beginning to fade in the distance. It was still audible right up to the moment that it was drowned out by the sound of artillery and mortar fire. The fascists had opened fire dead on their usual schedule and now they would be peppering the Russian defenses with fire. Or so they thought.
The days when the fascists had lit the sky from horizon to horizon with their artillery fire were long gone. A fact for which Captain Piskunov was devoutly grateful. This barrage was a faint shadow of what the Hitlerite artillery had once been, now it was a mere splattering of shells from field guns and mortars. For all that, it was still deadly against an unprepared enemy. Men would die from the fascist guns, either torn apart by the fragments or crushed and choked in their dugouts. Piskunov knew that the men behind the Russian line would be plotting the progress of the fascist barrage, using the number of shells landing and bearings on the sound of the fire to locate where the enemy artillery was coming from and where the axis of attack was aimed. The information they gained was coarse and very crude right now, but every minute the battle went on, it would become more precise. One of Piskunov’s tasks, and that of his men, of course, was to buy that time.
He could tell his superiors right now that the dummy defenses were effective. They were drawing off a significant proportion of the inbound fire, causing some of the shell bursts to explode harmlessly. Others threw up nothing but splintered wood and shreds of cloth as the dummy gun positions were hit by the inbound fire. Deprived of the massed batteries they had once had, every round they put into the Russian defenses was valuable. By extension of that logic, every round that could be lured into a dummy target was a small victory. Enough small victories could lead to a larger one.
Piskunov felt the movement beside him as Akulov wormed along the trench to report. “They are missing, Tovarish Captain, mostly at any rate. We lost contact with a handful of men when one of the forward positions took a heavy shell. The Hitlerites are mixing a few heavy guns in with the normal selection.”
“That sounds very un-fascist. Are we sure we are in the right place?”
It was as if the fascist gunners had heard Piskunov. There was a very brief silence and then the barrage was renewed with a concentration of fire from the heavy artillery.
“That sound fascist enough for you tovarish Captain?” Akulov crouched lower in the dugout, avoiding the spray of dirt and stones thrown by the heavier shells. He thought he recognized the distinctive dull thud of 150mm infantry howitzers, then there was another pause before the incoming artillery fire returned to its previous mixture of 75mm and 105mm infantry guns and 120mm mortars. “They’re trying to shake up as much of our positions as possible.”
Piskunov nodded in agreement. The Russian infantry had re-learned all the lessons of the First World War when it came to digging their trenches. Each was as narrow as possible, with acute angles between legs to prevent blasts and fragments from rolling down the length. The forward edge of the trench was overhung and dug deep, creating a sheltered area where a rifleman might huddle, the dirt from the shaking of near misses falling on him while he prayed for deliverance, prayed that a fascist shell might not hit the narrow mouth of his trench and blow him into unfindable fragments. Yet that was not the end of the trench defenses. Every few yards, the area protected by the overhang was extended downwards into a much deeper shelter, one heavily reinforced with timber and thoughtfully provided with a grenade trap, a deep, narrow pit where a fascist grenade could be kicked so that it would expand its blast upwards rather than into the men around it. Yet, even in the deep shelters, men tried to make their shaking less obvious while they smoked. A few had even hoarded their vodka from the previous night’s ration and now swallowed it to steady their nerves. Even so, the growing tension was apparent as the men sat in the darkness and felt dislodged soil trickling down upon them.
There had been much more to building the dummy positions than just digging a few holes. Some soldiers had been ordered to stay there, to be seen going to and from the pits, to convince the fascist scouts that there really were people in those defenses. Pavel Fedorovich Koltsov, the self-appointed battalion comedian, had claimed that the structures weren’t decoys at all but a top-secret plan to win the war overnight. They were tunnels that would connect with the Moskva Metro and allow the entire Russian Army to suddenly appear in the fascist rear. So, the decoy positions were now known as “The Moskva Metro.” They weren’t quite that useful, but they were proving their worth as measured by the men who would have died but hadn’t.
There was another feature that grew out of being stationed near the dummy positions. The last stage that preceded any fascist attack was a visit from a reconnaissance aircraft that would try and assess the effects of the artillery barrage. A detachment of four riflemen, men who had survived a heavy shell hit on their dummy bunker earlier, were waiting for it to arrive. When it finally did make its appearance, they took position on their parapets and started to fire on it with their rifles. These men were volunteers, attracted by a double extra ration of vodka the previous evening and the promise of the same again the next evening. If they lived to claim it of course. While their sobriety might be questioned, their courage could not. Whatever their motivation, their rifle fire caused the reconnaissance aircraft to visibly flinch and the riflemen could imagine the crew hastily radioing back that the defenses were still active. After all, the rifle fire was usually ineffective but not always. With the final touch of the illusion being made, those four men made their way back to their main positions by a way of a carefully camouflaged path.
That was the last detail. The real trenches were covered with camouflage netting that made them hard to spot from the air. So, the last fascist test failed to see the real position and, by default, the assault they supported was aimed at the decoy position.
“We have tricked them!” Piskunov saw the fascist guns fire an intense concentration on the decoy positions. It was his duty to observe the situation and that couldn’t be done from inside a bunker or the bottom of the trenches. In any case, he detested being trapped underground in a bunker while the artillery fire was descending so he’d spent the entire time the barrage had been falling hidden between two piles of muddy earth. Being able to watch the success of the decoys and the misdirection of fascist guns was deeply and personally pleasing to him. As the fire slackened off, he worked his way as high as he dared so that he could see what was happening. There was something new to be seen, a haze of blue smoke was drifting up from behind a low ridge a thousand meters or more in front of his real position. It was a drawback of his real positions; from this point of view, the decoys were less commanded by the enemy jump-off point.
Suddenly, there was an eerie quiet that fell across the battlefield. The fascist artillery had ceased firing and that meant the assault was coming, not soon but right then. The blue haze of smoke over the ridgeline thickened amidst the roar of tank engines. Piskunov blew his whistle and saw the men pouring out of their bunkers and from under the overhang. Each man knew his place, whether it was a firing port or a platform for a crew-served weapon. Only the Maxim guns and the 57mms remained hidden. Their time would come later. “They are coming bratishka. Now is the time to remind them of how we can fight!”
There were eight tanks, all Panzer IVJs, with the anti-bazooka side plates in position, coming over the ridgeline in an irregular line. Each tank had a group of ten or twelve infantrymen grouped around it, with more men scattered in front and behind them. They were protecting the tanks from rockets but also forcing the tanks to move at the speed of their infantry screen. To Piskunov, this was a familiar sight, a badly under-strength infantry company supported by an equally under-strength company of tanks. What was pleasing was that the attack was actually moving across his front at an oblique angle heading for the decoy positions still. All the effort that had gone into building the dummy trenches was still paying off.
Piskunov had one last trick to play before the real action started. Behind him, several kilometers behind was a battery of 122mm guns. In front of him was a pre-registered artillery aiming point, one he had carefully picked earlier and coached the artillerists until they could drop their rounds onto it with acceptable accuracy. It wasn’t an ideal or flexible solution, and it didn’t use available artillery efficiently, but the Russian Army had a lot of available artillery. This pre-registration was simple, and it worked. He picked up the receiver on his field radio.
“Artillery call. Aiming point Zhenya-316. Immediate.” He got the acknowledgment of the firing order and waited while the enemy attack formation reached Aiming Point Zhenya. He knew that back at the artillery command station, the fire orders would be coming in from all the sub-units and prioritized. He had tried to get his request through quickly by assigning it an immediate priority, but he knew that every other commander would be doing the same. It was going to be a matter of pure chance whether the attacking fascists would pass through the pre-registration point before, during, or after the supporting artillery fire arrived.
The howl of the outbound artillery fire came quickly, unexpectedly so. Five minutes was a good response time, ten was quite possible. Piskunov had gambled on the response to his call is closer to the latter so his first group of four rounds fell well behind the tanks but into the group of infantry following them. “Down three, fire for effect.”
There was only a slight pause as the guns adjusted and the next group of four bursts amongst the tanks. They cut down the infantry supporting the tanks disrupting the formation and sieving the tanks away from their support. Even better, the artillery fire gave the fascists no clue that they were being engaged from an unexpected direction, even when the following shells reinforced the effect. They forced the tanks to start maneuvering so that they evaded the artillery fire. To Piskunov’s delight, one of the Panzer IVs was hit squarely on the engine gratings and immediately burst into flames. Unlike later fascist tanks, the Panzer IV was well-provided with easy-to-access escape hatches and the crew had a reasonable chance of escaping, from the vehicle at least. One man didn’t make it. His overalls were already burning as he bailed out through the hatch in the turret side, and he didn’t make it through. His screams as he burned alive only a few centimeters from safety echoed across the battlefield before they were drowned out by the explosion of noise as the battle got underway. Piskunov guessed his belt, or something had got hooked on something as he’d tried to bail out and that had delayed him long enough for the fire to get him.
The last round from the defensive barrage broke the tracks on another tank. The damaged vehicle spun around, and the crew made a hurried escape. Piskunov watched them roll clear of the vehicle and started to clear the immediate area. Then they realized their tank wasn’t burning and it might easily be repaired. They were obviously dithering, trying to decide what was the most sensible thing to do. Should they return to their vehicle? Or retreat to cover? The sight made him take the next step, the one that would end his sanctuary of silence. Piskunov blasted his whistle and his two light machine guns opened fire on the dismounted tank crew. That made up their mind; they took cover well away from their tank.
The effect was immediate; the fire coming in from the flank told the fascists that they had been tricked. The six surviving tanks started to turn in the direction of the real position with their infantry moving to cover them. Piskunov admitted to himself that the fascists still had a way to maneuver on a battlefield down to fine art. Changing the axis of advance like that while under fire could easily turn into a chaotic mess. Instead, he had to watch as the maneuver was smooth and skillful.
It was not cost-free though. Sergeant Kazimir Ivanovich Usanov had watched the maneuver start and realized that the tank furthest from the Russian line would have exposed his side to his ‘57’. “Load armor-piercing.”
Normally, he would have fired at the tank’s side, but two factors argued against doing that. One was that the tank was fitted with side plates and the other was that the armor-piercing shot from a 57mm had a tendency to shatter when it struck an armor plate. Having two thicknesses of armor to penetrate doubled the chance of shatter. So, he used his sight to level his gun at the driver’s slit in the vertical front. That way, it might have to penetrate thicker armor but the chance of the shot shattering would be reduced, and spalling from the inside might just kill the driver. Meanwhile, one of his crew was getting one of their precious ‘smooth’ BR 271N composite rounds. They were on limited issue, having only appeared a few weeks before. but they could go through 150mm of armor. Even the older composite round could penetrate 130mm but the truth was, Usanov wanted to play with his new round.
That was for the future. His first shot overshot his target. Not by much but enough. “Reload, armor piercing, fast.”
His target was alert and swinging so that the face plate was at an angle to the direction the shot had come in from. In doing so, its advance had slowed down a little. Usanov saw the shot strike at the point of aim, as near as he could see directly on the driver’s vision slit. It shattered, spraying metal fragments in an arc, and caused the tank to jerk and stall its engine. If the driver was alive, he would be frantically trying to restart for any tank that stopped moving for more than a few seconds was doomed. If he was dead, of course, he couldn’t do that.
“Load new composite.” Usanov took an extra second to aim the precious composite shot. He fired, watching keenly while the bright red streak hit the frontal armor of the Panzer 4. There was a tiny pause and then the target went up in a ball of flame that started in the engine compartment and rolled forward. Nobody is getting out of there alive.
He knew he had given his position away though and at least one tank returned fire on him. Many Russian anti-tank artillerists thought the Panzer 4 was a more dangerous opponent than the much-vaunted Panther since the earlier tank had a more effective gun for firing high explosives. One of the surviving Panzer 4s was even more dangerous than usual. The commander was really smart. He had moved behind the tank with the broken track and was using it for cover. He moved up right behind the damaged tank, so that his bow was almost touching the vehicle’s side and had his gun laid over the engine compartment. The damaged tank was hit at least twice by 57mm shots from the other two anti-tank guns, but the added metal protected the operational tank behind it. Usanov could see from the constant tiny movements of the turret that the gunner was aiming carefully before firing.
It was the tree that saved Usanov and his gun crew. The first high-explosive shot hit the trunk and exploded, destroying the tree, and spraying the area with steel and wood splinters. They rang off the gun shield, causing the crew to duck behind whatever cover they could find. “Back to the reserve positions! Back now! Quickly!”
Usanov’s crew scrambled back to an emergency trench that had been dug for exactly this eventuality. They’d just made it when a second 75mm shell scored a direct hit on the gun pit. When the smoke cleared, the 57mm gun was blackened and askew.
Back at the command position, Piskunov saw the destruction of one of his 57mm guns and the tanks firing on the rest. He also saw something else; the fascists were beginning to pull back. The infantry was being punished by the rifle and machine gun fire from the Russian trenches. The Hitlerites were returning fire with their banana-guns and the volume of fire they were laying down was intense. Nevertheless, they were in the open and the Russian infantrymen were under cover in carefully constructed positions. So, they were dominating the exchange and the fascists were dropping back. The tanks saw them doing so and started to do the same, not wanting to be exposed to the Russian rocket launchers. Last to start pulling back was the tank that had taken cover behind his crippled comrade. Piskunov desperately wanted to knock that tank out, but he didn’t have the chance.
“Look, we have driven them back!” One of the younger soldiers yelled the words in triumph. It had been his first action and he was justifiably proud of his unit’s achievement.
“You don’t understand, bratishka.” Piskunov saw the youngster swell with pride at being a brother at last. “The fascists just pissed on us. When they come back, they’ll bring a firehose.”
Re: 1945 - TILTING THE BALANCE
Chapter Eight
HMS Unbroken, South-West of the Shetland Islands
“Another do like that and we’ll have to change our name to HMS Badly Bent”. Horton appreciated the ripple of laughter that went around the submarine. Given the stress of the last few hours, it was good that his quip had received any kind of laugh.
The problem had started twelve hours earlier when a Luftwaffe scout plane had sneaked in and made a run at them from out of the morning sun. Unbroken spotted the intruder too late to avoid attack completely but she had started a crash-dive that made her hard to hit. The four 10-kilogram bombs had straddled her, but none had inflicted any serious damage. The cause of all the problems was the pair of patrol crafts she the Arado called in. The two ships were Vorpostenboote, auxiliary patrol craft converted from pre-war fishing trawlers. What they lacked in firepower, protection, sensors, and speed, they made up for with the skill and dedication of their crews. They had been coached in by the seaplane and immediately started a patrol net over the position where Unbroken had been seen to dive.
Mars knew all too well that the Vorpostenboote had only passive sonars worthy of the name and that self-noise from the trawlers severely degraded its performance. Their active sonar was almost completely ineffective. That meant that Mars quickly adopted the standard defense tactics for this position. He grounded Unbroken on the bottom and sat there, her crew on ‘silent drill’ and every piece of unnecessary equipment turned off. She had stayed that way for nearly eight hours while the pair of Vorpostenboote had crisscrossed the area above them. The air had got thicker and more rank throughout that time. Mars knew that being up against American, Canadian, or British patrol ships would have been much worse. They would have been lashed by powerful active sonars which could pick them out on the bottom. They would have been harassed by depth charges supplemented by Squid salvoes from Canadian and British destroyers. It was even whispered that the American destroyers had a towed sonar that could hear a submarine more than 10 miles away.
Still, the Vorpostenboote were a nuisance, and their presence a constant menace. There was also a near-certainty that the presence of a possible contact meant they could summon better-equipped warships to take over the search. Mars was reasonably convinced that the original floatplane supporting the Vorpostenboote had been relieved on station more than once and, as the hours ticked slowly by, he became more puzzled by the fact that the patrol ships hadn’t been replaced by something more dangerous.
“They’re pulling away, skipper. Heading west as far as I can make out.” Able Seaman Daniel Crawford whispered the words into Mars’s ear.
“Chartroom. Now.” Mars made the reply equally quietly. He and Crawford made their way to the grandly named chartroom which was actually a table in the corner of the control room. Sub-lieutenant Rupert Clark was standing at that table, staring at the sea lanes marked on the maps.
“What do you think, Rupert?”
“Heading west?” They must think we’re trying to break out that way.”
Mars shook his head. “I think the spotter aircraft that originally saw us had to go home for fuel. He’s been replaced more than once, and knowledge of the original contact is fading. That means they have less and less faith in it. There are no real escorts coming out to take over from those trawlers which suggests the shore people haven’t got much faith in it either. There’s a bit of real search going on but a lot more is just going through the motions. I would say that all they have left is a vague report of a submarine diving but it’s deep inside their waters and we didn’t fire a shot.”
“We don’t have any guns that’s why.” Taking off the three-incher and the oerlikons had been a controversial move and Clark was one who disagreed with it.
“They don’t know that. They may have seen we didn’t have a deck gun but out here that makes us look more like a Klasse XXI than anything else. They have AA guns faired into the sail. Now, if we were a Klasse XXI heading out of the Baltic to the North Atlantic and we got attacked by a German aircraft, what would we do?”
Clark thought about it. When he replied his voice was triumphant. “Dive without opening fire and then keep heading west! That way, a check at the shore control will show who and what they are.”
“That’s right. You know what the fascists are like. Maintain the mission and all that. They’ll assume that we were a Klasse XXI going out and not bother with it. Why should they? A tenuous contact on a probably friendly submarine? So, we go east. There’s a seabed ridge a few miles to the east. If we can get the other side of that, we stand a good chance of getting clear.”
“They’ll hear us moving. Won’t they?” Clark was a lot more tactful than his commander.
“Doubt it. Those are converted trawlers with slow-running diesels. They’ll have a wide blind arc aft. We have a window of opportunity to move now, and we’d be fools to miss using it. Bring her up to 200 feet and head oh-nine-oh at eight knots. As soon as we’re behind the ridge, we’ll dive to 300.”
“Seabed is 325, Skipper.”
“That’s right, Number One. We don’t want to bottom too fast, now do we?” There was a unanimous agreement with that sentiment from everybody within earshot.
The maneuver had worked perfectly; mostly. Each time the vorpostenboote turned west, Unbroken did a quick sprint east, using the terrain to hide herself. It had turned out that the charts weren’t quite as accurate as they might be and several of the bottoming were harder than anybody thought prudent. On the other hand, allied submarines had been patrolling this area for two years and their navigational notes more than made up for the chart problems. They had advice on the condition of the bottom, the prevalence of uncharted rocks, and other valuable data observed by the surviving captains and carefully recorded in notebooks distributed for the purpose. They had been an invaluable tool in completing the quick sprints to the east that had moved them further away from the area the fascists were still patrolling so diligently. Mars noted that the two trawlers were taking longer and longer to complete their loops west and he guessed that they were extending the search area to cover the presumed Klasse XXI. After a while, Unbroken was heading southeast and then due south. She was well inside Swedish territorial waters by then, somewhere the scouting seaplanes dare not go.
By dusk, they were out of danger although the air was thick to the point of being unbreathable. Mars held a quick officer’s conference before surfacing. It wasn’t much of a conference, just himself, Horton, and Clark around the chart table. On the way in, Horton had heard a voice from the bunkroom forward. “See how the skipper got us out of there? Bounced along the seabed as if we were bunny-hopping. Made right fools of them Hitlerites we did.”
The voice from the enlisted quarters leaked in and made Horton smile to himself. His skipper might not know how to keep his mouth shut but he did know how to handle a submarine. Now, most of the crew realized the latter part. “Well, Rupert, where the hell are we?”
Clark gave a self-conscious smile and tapped the chart with a pencil. “Here, off a Swedish town called Havstenssund. We’re well within Swedish territorial waters.”
Mars thought about that and the glimmering of an idea that had been in his mind ever since leaving port picked up steam. “That suits us well, I think. Our orders are to enter the Kattegat and head as far south as possible before sinking anything fascist we can find. Now, most boats with orders like this keep out in the middle of the Kattegat, as far as possible from the airfields in Denmark and away from the really shallow water around Byrum. Why don’t we take that a bit further and come as close to the Swedish coast as we can? If possible, thread our way through this maze of small islands that runs south of us.”
“That’s very shallow water, skipper. Even the deeper passages are 25 to 30 feet. Some of the small ones have less than 10 feet of water. We draw 15 feet. We can’t submerge.”
“So we run on the surface. Go five or ten miles out to sea and we have enough water to bottom on during the day. Then we go in and run south on the surface at night.”
“The problem is fishing boats. With the shortage of food in Europe, the Swedes will have every fishing boat they can find out there. They’ll see us for sure.” Horton was beginning to realize that this idea had potential.
“So, we pretend to be a fishing boat. Run trimmed down with navigation lights on. We have no deck guns remember, so on a dark night, we’ll look like a fishing boat. It’s a new moon, that’s why the power that is ordered us out now. And I’d rather take my chances with the Swedes than the fascists.”
“Good point, skipper. That may get us down to the southern end of the Kattegat but what do we do from there? We still have few enough targets to find. We could end up torpedoing a few of those Vorpostenboote. Not that I’d object to doing that.” Horton paused. “We would be a long way south, wouldn’t we?”
“We would indeed. And we’d be right at the mouth of this.” Mars put his finger on a narrow seaway that ran between Helsingborg and Helsingor. It was barely three miles wide. “The Oresund. We slide through there, run past Helsingborg as close as we can and hope we don’t get spotted. I don’t think we will, Sweden is neutral, and Helsingborg will have every light they can muster on. From the Danish side they’ll be blinded by glare and from the Swedish side, their night vision will be shot. We have a damned good chance of getting into the Baltic. And once there, we can run riot.”
There was a sustained sucking of teeth as the officers of Unbroken considered the possibility of tonnage. Also, a daring penetration deep into enemy waters was something that made an officer’s name. Eventually, Horton expressed the consensus opinion. “Well, our orders were to go as far south as we could, and they don’t tell us not to enter the Baltic. I’d say you got a good idea there, skipper. A workable one at least.”
“Then let us get started. Bring her up, Bob, open the hatches and we’ll make 14 knots due south. And remember, everybody, we’re a fishing boat.” Mars started to leave, but then stopped. “By the way, does anybody on board speak any Swedish? If not, one of us had better start learning.”
Tank 101, 511th Heavy Tank Battalion, III SS Panzerkorps, Luzhma, Archangelsk
“All right lads. Time to move. SS-Standartenführer Hermann Priess had heard the artillery howling overhead and saw it impacting all along the Ivan positions. The real ones this time, not the dummies and decoys that had been so successful in misleading other attacks. The rumor mill was already delivering doleful messages of carefully mapped defenses being shown up as decoys by the first probing attacks. Those probes had been pushed just hard enough to reveal the real Ivan positions. Their work done, the recon units had pulled back and left the field open for the real assault forces that were now hitting all along the target line.
The sound of the engine picked up to the maximum as the huge Panzer VIIs lurched forward. Priess had served on Tiger IIs already; in fact, he had been the commander of one of the first Tiger IIs to see combat a year before. Even so, the height of his command position made the view impressive. The vehicle’s performance was less so; at twice the weight of a Tiger II but almost no additional engine power, the Löwe’s performance was best described as sluggish. He was uncomfortably aware that the size of his vehicle made it a painfully obvious target.
At the moment that wasn’t a problem. The attack on Tarasova was already going much more slowly than the original plans had demanded. Priess watched as lines of grenadiers fell under the fire from massed Ivan artillery and the Katyusha rockets. Black mushroom clouds of smoke and flashes of flame erupted all along the entire front of Panzergrenadiers, enveloping the infantry and surrounding their panzer support. Priess had grown up on a farm and he remembered how the crops had fallen under his father’s scythe. Now, the Ivans were doing the same to the infantry regiments in his division. Priess knew it was just the start; the attack hadn’t even reached Ivan’s minefields yet. Over the radio, casualty reports began to arrive even this early in the assault many had been killed with even more wounded.
It had become clear to Priess: the artillery preparation had done relatively little damage to the enemy’s minefields, fortifications, and artillery. The scheduled air attacks simply hadn’t happened. Word was already spreading that the Night Witches had hit the airfields packed with Ju-87s and the other ground-attack aircraft, inflicting gruesome casualties. The survivors had taken off at dawn only to find Ami and Ivan’s fighters swamping the battlefield as usual. Even the Luftwaffe jets hadn’t done any good. For the first time in over six months, they had met their match.
The expectation that the Ivans would be stunned by the air and artillery attacks and left unable to resist was obviously not being realized. Reports from all along the front line were reporting strong resistance. Priess guessed that any hope of a clean, swift penetration of Ivan’s positions had evaporated. Instead, they would have to gnaw their way through them meter by meter. Well, that’s what these monsters were designed to do.
Priess couldn’t help but think that this was a weird situation. The SS artillery regiments were trying to relieve the pressure on the infantry by conducting intensive counterbattery fire on the Ivan artillery. Batteries of Nebelwerfer six-barreled rocket launchers had been assigned targets amongst the Ivan infantry sheltering in the trenches and in foxholes. The problem was it was more and more apparent that those positions were either a decoy or a thin screen intended to conceal the main line positions further east. In days gone by, this situation would have been the responsibility of the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. Those days were long gone.
“Target! Blue 150!” The warning came too late for the crew of a Panzer IVJ. It didn’t just explode; it was shredded by a blast that sent its turret spinning into the air and its roadwheels spraying sideways. The burning hulk bounced along the ground on its floor pan before settling into an inferno.
“What the hell was . . . .”
“An SU-100.” Priesse sounded grim. “We’re running into trouble.”
While he was speaking, the Löwe tank had swung as the driver tried to present angled armor to the hiding tank destroyer. “That was APHE. That gunner knows his business.”
Priess never stopped scanning the ground around them while his tank rolled slowly forward. The crew was already beginning to joke that their Löwe had three gears. Slow, slower, and slowest. On the other hand, for the job it had to do, speed wasn’t a design requirement. “The SU-100 crews are the best they have. Scheisse!”
His eye had been caught by a flash off to one side of him. It’s too small for an 85 or 100mm. Must be a 57mm. “Co-axial gunner engage left, 20 degrees. Target anti-tank gun.”
The turret seemed to crawl around as the Löwe engaged the anti-tank gun position yet the short-barreled 75mm engaged only a split second after the 57mm fired its second shot. Priess heard the scream as the armor-piercing round bounced off the side of his tank. The crash of the coaxial 75mm just in front of him drowned out the rest of the sounds. He saw bits of the anti-tank gun and its crew spiraling through the air. It was the first kill for a Löwe but it seemed highly ironic that after all the efforts to put a 128mm gun in the turret, that kill had been scored by a 75mm that had entered service almost a decade before.
Any pursuit of that train of thought was ended by an ear-splitting bang and scream on the side of his tank. “That damned SU-100 again. Still, we showed him, didn’t we lads? It’ll take more than his gun to stop a Löwe.”
He was traversing his cupola, trying to see where the shots were coming from. There had been a time when the Ivan assault guns had simply charged a German position, but those days were long gone. Now they acted as true tank destroyers, lurking in concealed positions and emerging only to fire carefully aimed shots. Then, they would retreat to cover and move to another position before firing again. The SU-100 crew was doing that right now.
Priess knew what was happening. They were in Ivan’s anti-tank zone, an area of ground between the observation line but before the main line of resistance that was covered by an interlocking maze of minefields, anti-tank guns, and artillery observers. It was not designed to stop the attack but to bleed it and break up its cohesion. The tanks would be separated from the infantry and the artillery left unable to support either. It was this zone that the Löwe was designed to penetrate with impunity.
The Löwe might, but the smaller tanks could be horribly vulnerable to the powerful guns on the SU-100. Even smaller guns were a real threat to the Löwe’s escorts. A Jagdpanzer 38t had taken a 57mm shot straight through the front and was stopped, its crew bailing out and trying to get to safety. Priess saw a faint trail of fire arc through the air and explode in a ball of flame on the tank destroyer’s roof. He knew what that was as well. The anti-tank guns were supported by destroyer squads; small detachments from a penal battalion whose job was to get close to damaged vehicles and set them on fire with Molotov cocktails. Success meant at least an instant pardon for the survivors of the squad and their return to a regular unit. Squads that burned a Tiger got to leave as well. Priess had even heard that some of the survivors had volunteered to go back to the tank destroyer squads. Excitement, as Priess well knew, could be its own reward.
Exciting wasn’t quite the word. The thuds and clangs of shot bouncing off his Löwe had changed from single hits to tattoos of shots. Mostly, they were 57 or 76mms but there were occasional earthquakes from 100mm or 122s. Priess knew that eventually one of the hits had to find a chink in the armor. He found himself looking around his tank, measuring the quickest way out when the fire started. He concluded that it was through the hatch over his head. It was in a raised-protected position, but he wouldn’t be able to continue that much longer. He remembered the day that had seen one Tiger II knocked out by a 37mm shell that had bounced off the cupola, hit the raised-protected hatch, and bounced off that to go inside the turret and explode in the ready ammunition. Nobody had got out alive. The odds against that happening must have been a million to one but then, this whole war is null-acht-fünfzehn.
Another bang on the armor, this time the sloping frontal plate. 250mm of armor sloped at 55 degrees could stop anything the Ivans, or the Amis for that could throw at it. This time, though there was no scream of steel projectile sliding off the armor. Priess guessed the shot had shattered rather than bounced off. Are the Ivans having problems with their ammunition as well? Several of my comrades back in the old battalion are saying, very quietly, of course, that hits that should have penetrated were shattering on the armor of Ivan’s heavy tanks. Does that mean their steel is getting better or ours is getting worse? Or both?
“Target ahead.” Priess had seen an evil shape lurking in concealment. A low-slung tank, with every surface acutely sloped and a massive gun in a hemispherical turret. He recognized it as an IS-3 heavy tank, a truly deadly opponent. “Ready, APCR, main gun. Engage.”
He watched the bright red streak of the 128mm round closing in on the turret of the IS-3. He realized that he had shot low when he saw the brilliant flash of his shot ricocheting off the sloped frontal armor of Ivan’s latest heavy tank. He braced himself for what must surely come. The whole Löwe shook as a 122mm round smacked into the turret and howled off into space. Even in a brand-new tank, the impact had been enough to shake the dust out of every nook and cranny, filling the tank with a blackish grit and the foul smell of stale earth.
“Again!” Once more the Löwe’s 128mm fired and Priess saw a rolling ball of fire down the side of the turret. For a moment, he thought he’d knocked Ivan out but when the smoke and dust cleared, he saw the IS-3 with a massive scar down one side of its turret and backing up to get under cover. There was something about the way he was doing it that told him the turret was either knocked out or jammed in the train.
“All right, keep moving forwards. He’s pulling out. We’d better keep going. If we stop, we are dead.”
HMS Unbroken, South-West of the Shetland Islands
“Another do like that and we’ll have to change our name to HMS Badly Bent”. Horton appreciated the ripple of laughter that went around the submarine. Given the stress of the last few hours, it was good that his quip had received any kind of laugh.
The problem had started twelve hours earlier when a Luftwaffe scout plane had sneaked in and made a run at them from out of the morning sun. Unbroken spotted the intruder too late to avoid attack completely but she had started a crash-dive that made her hard to hit. The four 10-kilogram bombs had straddled her, but none had inflicted any serious damage. The cause of all the problems was the pair of patrol crafts she the Arado called in. The two ships were Vorpostenboote, auxiliary patrol craft converted from pre-war fishing trawlers. What they lacked in firepower, protection, sensors, and speed, they made up for with the skill and dedication of their crews. They had been coached in by the seaplane and immediately started a patrol net over the position where Unbroken had been seen to dive.
Mars knew all too well that the Vorpostenboote had only passive sonars worthy of the name and that self-noise from the trawlers severely degraded its performance. Their active sonar was almost completely ineffective. That meant that Mars quickly adopted the standard defense tactics for this position. He grounded Unbroken on the bottom and sat there, her crew on ‘silent drill’ and every piece of unnecessary equipment turned off. She had stayed that way for nearly eight hours while the pair of Vorpostenboote had crisscrossed the area above them. The air had got thicker and more rank throughout that time. Mars knew that being up against American, Canadian, or British patrol ships would have been much worse. They would have been lashed by powerful active sonars which could pick them out on the bottom. They would have been harassed by depth charges supplemented by Squid salvoes from Canadian and British destroyers. It was even whispered that the American destroyers had a towed sonar that could hear a submarine more than 10 miles away.
Still, the Vorpostenboote were a nuisance, and their presence a constant menace. There was also a near-certainty that the presence of a possible contact meant they could summon better-equipped warships to take over the search. Mars was reasonably convinced that the original floatplane supporting the Vorpostenboote had been relieved on station more than once and, as the hours ticked slowly by, he became more puzzled by the fact that the patrol ships hadn’t been replaced by something more dangerous.
“They’re pulling away, skipper. Heading west as far as I can make out.” Able Seaman Daniel Crawford whispered the words into Mars’s ear.
“Chartroom. Now.” Mars made the reply equally quietly. He and Crawford made their way to the grandly named chartroom which was actually a table in the corner of the control room. Sub-lieutenant Rupert Clark was standing at that table, staring at the sea lanes marked on the maps.
“What do you think, Rupert?”
“Heading west?” They must think we’re trying to break out that way.”
Mars shook his head. “I think the spotter aircraft that originally saw us had to go home for fuel. He’s been replaced more than once, and knowledge of the original contact is fading. That means they have less and less faith in it. There are no real escorts coming out to take over from those trawlers which suggests the shore people haven’t got much faith in it either. There’s a bit of real search going on but a lot more is just going through the motions. I would say that all they have left is a vague report of a submarine diving but it’s deep inside their waters and we didn’t fire a shot.”
“We don’t have any guns that’s why.” Taking off the three-incher and the oerlikons had been a controversial move and Clark was one who disagreed with it.
“They don’t know that. They may have seen we didn’t have a deck gun but out here that makes us look more like a Klasse XXI than anything else. They have AA guns faired into the sail. Now, if we were a Klasse XXI heading out of the Baltic to the North Atlantic and we got attacked by a German aircraft, what would we do?”
Clark thought about it. When he replied his voice was triumphant. “Dive without opening fire and then keep heading west! That way, a check at the shore control will show who and what they are.”
“That’s right. You know what the fascists are like. Maintain the mission and all that. They’ll assume that we were a Klasse XXI going out and not bother with it. Why should they? A tenuous contact on a probably friendly submarine? So, we go east. There’s a seabed ridge a few miles to the east. If we can get the other side of that, we stand a good chance of getting clear.”
“They’ll hear us moving. Won’t they?” Clark was a lot more tactful than his commander.
“Doubt it. Those are converted trawlers with slow-running diesels. They’ll have a wide blind arc aft. We have a window of opportunity to move now, and we’d be fools to miss using it. Bring her up to 200 feet and head oh-nine-oh at eight knots. As soon as we’re behind the ridge, we’ll dive to 300.”
“Seabed is 325, Skipper.”
“That’s right, Number One. We don’t want to bottom too fast, now do we?” There was a unanimous agreement with that sentiment from everybody within earshot.
The maneuver had worked perfectly; mostly. Each time the vorpostenboote turned west, Unbroken did a quick sprint east, using the terrain to hide herself. It had turned out that the charts weren’t quite as accurate as they might be and several of the bottoming were harder than anybody thought prudent. On the other hand, allied submarines had been patrolling this area for two years and their navigational notes more than made up for the chart problems. They had advice on the condition of the bottom, the prevalence of uncharted rocks, and other valuable data observed by the surviving captains and carefully recorded in notebooks distributed for the purpose. They had been an invaluable tool in completing the quick sprints to the east that had moved them further away from the area the fascists were still patrolling so diligently. Mars noted that the two trawlers were taking longer and longer to complete their loops west and he guessed that they were extending the search area to cover the presumed Klasse XXI. After a while, Unbroken was heading southeast and then due south. She was well inside Swedish territorial waters by then, somewhere the scouting seaplanes dare not go.
By dusk, they were out of danger although the air was thick to the point of being unbreathable. Mars held a quick officer’s conference before surfacing. It wasn’t much of a conference, just himself, Horton, and Clark around the chart table. On the way in, Horton had heard a voice from the bunkroom forward. “See how the skipper got us out of there? Bounced along the seabed as if we were bunny-hopping. Made right fools of them Hitlerites we did.”
The voice from the enlisted quarters leaked in and made Horton smile to himself. His skipper might not know how to keep his mouth shut but he did know how to handle a submarine. Now, most of the crew realized the latter part. “Well, Rupert, where the hell are we?”
Clark gave a self-conscious smile and tapped the chart with a pencil. “Here, off a Swedish town called Havstenssund. We’re well within Swedish territorial waters.”
Mars thought about that and the glimmering of an idea that had been in his mind ever since leaving port picked up steam. “That suits us well, I think. Our orders are to enter the Kattegat and head as far south as possible before sinking anything fascist we can find. Now, most boats with orders like this keep out in the middle of the Kattegat, as far as possible from the airfields in Denmark and away from the really shallow water around Byrum. Why don’t we take that a bit further and come as close to the Swedish coast as we can? If possible, thread our way through this maze of small islands that runs south of us.”
“That’s very shallow water, skipper. Even the deeper passages are 25 to 30 feet. Some of the small ones have less than 10 feet of water. We draw 15 feet. We can’t submerge.”
“So we run on the surface. Go five or ten miles out to sea and we have enough water to bottom on during the day. Then we go in and run south on the surface at night.”
“The problem is fishing boats. With the shortage of food in Europe, the Swedes will have every fishing boat they can find out there. They’ll see us for sure.” Horton was beginning to realize that this idea had potential.
“So, we pretend to be a fishing boat. Run trimmed down with navigation lights on. We have no deck guns remember, so on a dark night, we’ll look like a fishing boat. It’s a new moon, that’s why the power that is ordered us out now. And I’d rather take my chances with the Swedes than the fascists.”
“Good point, skipper. That may get us down to the southern end of the Kattegat but what do we do from there? We still have few enough targets to find. We could end up torpedoing a few of those Vorpostenboote. Not that I’d object to doing that.” Horton paused. “We would be a long way south, wouldn’t we?”
“We would indeed. And we’d be right at the mouth of this.” Mars put his finger on a narrow seaway that ran between Helsingborg and Helsingor. It was barely three miles wide. “The Oresund. We slide through there, run past Helsingborg as close as we can and hope we don’t get spotted. I don’t think we will, Sweden is neutral, and Helsingborg will have every light they can muster on. From the Danish side they’ll be blinded by glare and from the Swedish side, their night vision will be shot. We have a damned good chance of getting into the Baltic. And once there, we can run riot.”
There was a sustained sucking of teeth as the officers of Unbroken considered the possibility of tonnage. Also, a daring penetration deep into enemy waters was something that made an officer’s name. Eventually, Horton expressed the consensus opinion. “Well, our orders were to go as far south as we could, and they don’t tell us not to enter the Baltic. I’d say you got a good idea there, skipper. A workable one at least.”
“Then let us get started. Bring her up, Bob, open the hatches and we’ll make 14 knots due south. And remember, everybody, we’re a fishing boat.” Mars started to leave, but then stopped. “By the way, does anybody on board speak any Swedish? If not, one of us had better start learning.”
Tank 101, 511th Heavy Tank Battalion, III SS Panzerkorps, Luzhma, Archangelsk
“All right lads. Time to move. SS-Standartenführer Hermann Priess had heard the artillery howling overhead and saw it impacting all along the Ivan positions. The real ones this time, not the dummies and decoys that had been so successful in misleading other attacks. The rumor mill was already delivering doleful messages of carefully mapped defenses being shown up as decoys by the first probing attacks. Those probes had been pushed just hard enough to reveal the real Ivan positions. Their work done, the recon units had pulled back and left the field open for the real assault forces that were now hitting all along the target line.
The sound of the engine picked up to the maximum as the huge Panzer VIIs lurched forward. Priess had served on Tiger IIs already; in fact, he had been the commander of one of the first Tiger IIs to see combat a year before. Even so, the height of his command position made the view impressive. The vehicle’s performance was less so; at twice the weight of a Tiger II but almost no additional engine power, the Löwe’s performance was best described as sluggish. He was uncomfortably aware that the size of his vehicle made it a painfully obvious target.
At the moment that wasn’t a problem. The attack on Tarasova was already going much more slowly than the original plans had demanded. Priess watched as lines of grenadiers fell under the fire from massed Ivan artillery and the Katyusha rockets. Black mushroom clouds of smoke and flashes of flame erupted all along the entire front of Panzergrenadiers, enveloping the infantry and surrounding their panzer support. Priess had grown up on a farm and he remembered how the crops had fallen under his father’s scythe. Now, the Ivans were doing the same to the infantry regiments in his division. Priess knew it was just the start; the attack hadn’t even reached Ivan’s minefields yet. Over the radio, casualty reports began to arrive even this early in the assault many had been killed with even more wounded.
It had become clear to Priess: the artillery preparation had done relatively little damage to the enemy’s minefields, fortifications, and artillery. The scheduled air attacks simply hadn’t happened. Word was already spreading that the Night Witches had hit the airfields packed with Ju-87s and the other ground-attack aircraft, inflicting gruesome casualties. The survivors had taken off at dawn only to find Ami and Ivan’s fighters swamping the battlefield as usual. Even the Luftwaffe jets hadn’t done any good. For the first time in over six months, they had met their match.
The expectation that the Ivans would be stunned by the air and artillery attacks and left unable to resist was obviously not being realized. Reports from all along the front line were reporting strong resistance. Priess guessed that any hope of a clean, swift penetration of Ivan’s positions had evaporated. Instead, they would have to gnaw their way through them meter by meter. Well, that’s what these monsters were designed to do.
Priess couldn’t help but think that this was a weird situation. The SS artillery regiments were trying to relieve the pressure on the infantry by conducting intensive counterbattery fire on the Ivan artillery. Batteries of Nebelwerfer six-barreled rocket launchers had been assigned targets amongst the Ivan infantry sheltering in the trenches and in foxholes. The problem was it was more and more apparent that those positions were either a decoy or a thin screen intended to conceal the main line positions further east. In days gone by, this situation would have been the responsibility of the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. Those days were long gone.
“Target! Blue 150!” The warning came too late for the crew of a Panzer IVJ. It didn’t just explode; it was shredded by a blast that sent its turret spinning into the air and its roadwheels spraying sideways. The burning hulk bounced along the ground on its floor pan before settling into an inferno.
“What the hell was . . . .”
“An SU-100.” Priesse sounded grim. “We’re running into trouble.”
While he was speaking, the Löwe tank had swung as the driver tried to present angled armor to the hiding tank destroyer. “That was APHE. That gunner knows his business.”
Priess never stopped scanning the ground around them while his tank rolled slowly forward. The crew was already beginning to joke that their Löwe had three gears. Slow, slower, and slowest. On the other hand, for the job it had to do, speed wasn’t a design requirement. “The SU-100 crews are the best they have. Scheisse!”
His eye had been caught by a flash off to one side of him. It’s too small for an 85 or 100mm. Must be a 57mm. “Co-axial gunner engage left, 20 degrees. Target anti-tank gun.”
The turret seemed to crawl around as the Löwe engaged the anti-tank gun position yet the short-barreled 75mm engaged only a split second after the 57mm fired its second shot. Priess heard the scream as the armor-piercing round bounced off the side of his tank. The crash of the coaxial 75mm just in front of him drowned out the rest of the sounds. He saw bits of the anti-tank gun and its crew spiraling through the air. It was the first kill for a Löwe but it seemed highly ironic that after all the efforts to put a 128mm gun in the turret, that kill had been scored by a 75mm that had entered service almost a decade before.
Any pursuit of that train of thought was ended by an ear-splitting bang and scream on the side of his tank. “That damned SU-100 again. Still, we showed him, didn’t we lads? It’ll take more than his gun to stop a Löwe.”
He was traversing his cupola, trying to see where the shots were coming from. There had been a time when the Ivan assault guns had simply charged a German position, but those days were long gone. Now they acted as true tank destroyers, lurking in concealed positions and emerging only to fire carefully aimed shots. Then, they would retreat to cover and move to another position before firing again. The SU-100 crew was doing that right now.
Priess knew what was happening. They were in Ivan’s anti-tank zone, an area of ground between the observation line but before the main line of resistance that was covered by an interlocking maze of minefields, anti-tank guns, and artillery observers. It was not designed to stop the attack but to bleed it and break up its cohesion. The tanks would be separated from the infantry and the artillery left unable to support either. It was this zone that the Löwe was designed to penetrate with impunity.
The Löwe might, but the smaller tanks could be horribly vulnerable to the powerful guns on the SU-100. Even smaller guns were a real threat to the Löwe’s escorts. A Jagdpanzer 38t had taken a 57mm shot straight through the front and was stopped, its crew bailing out and trying to get to safety. Priess saw a faint trail of fire arc through the air and explode in a ball of flame on the tank destroyer’s roof. He knew what that was as well. The anti-tank guns were supported by destroyer squads; small detachments from a penal battalion whose job was to get close to damaged vehicles and set them on fire with Molotov cocktails. Success meant at least an instant pardon for the survivors of the squad and their return to a regular unit. Squads that burned a Tiger got to leave as well. Priess had even heard that some of the survivors had volunteered to go back to the tank destroyer squads. Excitement, as Priess well knew, could be its own reward.
Exciting wasn’t quite the word. The thuds and clangs of shot bouncing off his Löwe had changed from single hits to tattoos of shots. Mostly, they were 57 or 76mms but there were occasional earthquakes from 100mm or 122s. Priess knew that eventually one of the hits had to find a chink in the armor. He found himself looking around his tank, measuring the quickest way out when the fire started. He concluded that it was through the hatch over his head. It was in a raised-protected position, but he wouldn’t be able to continue that much longer. He remembered the day that had seen one Tiger II knocked out by a 37mm shell that had bounced off the cupola, hit the raised-protected hatch, and bounced off that to go inside the turret and explode in the ready ammunition. Nobody had got out alive. The odds against that happening must have been a million to one but then, this whole war is null-acht-fünfzehn.
Another bang on the armor, this time the sloping frontal plate. 250mm of armor sloped at 55 degrees could stop anything the Ivans, or the Amis for that could throw at it. This time, though there was no scream of steel projectile sliding off the armor. Priess guessed the shot had shattered rather than bounced off. Are the Ivans having problems with their ammunition as well? Several of my comrades back in the old battalion are saying, very quietly, of course, that hits that should have penetrated were shattering on the armor of Ivan’s heavy tanks. Does that mean their steel is getting better or ours is getting worse? Or both?
“Target ahead.” Priess had seen an evil shape lurking in concealment. A low-slung tank, with every surface acutely sloped and a massive gun in a hemispherical turret. He recognized it as an IS-3 heavy tank, a truly deadly opponent. “Ready, APCR, main gun. Engage.”
He watched the bright red streak of the 128mm round closing in on the turret of the IS-3. He realized that he had shot low when he saw the brilliant flash of his shot ricocheting off the sloped frontal armor of Ivan’s latest heavy tank. He braced himself for what must surely come. The whole Löwe shook as a 122mm round smacked into the turret and howled off into space. Even in a brand-new tank, the impact had been enough to shake the dust out of every nook and cranny, filling the tank with a blackish grit and the foul smell of stale earth.
“Again!” Once more the Löwe’s 128mm fired and Priess saw a rolling ball of fire down the side of the turret. For a moment, he thought he’d knocked Ivan out but when the smoke and dust cleared, he saw the IS-3 with a massive scar down one side of its turret and backing up to get under cover. There was something about the way he was doing it that told him the turret was either knocked out or jammed in the train.
“All right, keep moving forwards. He’s pulling out. We’d better keep going. If we stop, we are dead.”