Winter Warriors

Implacable. She’d already been launched when the British Fleet ran away to Canada. Too incomplete to join them, she’d been scuttled at her shipyard. Her sister ship, HMS Indefatigable, had still been on her building slip and the British had done a very thorough job of blowing her up.

Still, between the two wrecks, there had been enough salvaged to complete the Implacable a few months ago. On paper. In fact, everything imaginable was wrong with the ship and the British shipyard workers had managed to devise ‘construction errors’ that no sane person could have dreamed up. There wasn’t a watertight door on the ship that fitted properly; they were all twisted just that little bit out of true. The cable runs led through the “watertight” bulkheads and the “seals” were constantly dripping. The gearing for the main turbines created dreadful vibration at cruising speed, enough to break glass and cause the engine room gauges to become unreadable. The officer’s latrines, now they were a masterpiece. They worked fine as long as the hatch was left open but if somebody absently-mindedly closed it, the unfortunate occupant couldn’t get out until somebody rescued him. The mess decks were beyond description. It wasn’t just the smell although the stench of rotting herring permeated the entire ship. It was that even the paint scheme seemed deliberately designed to induce nausea and heartburn.

Three carriers, between them had 106 aircraft. Barely more than a single Essex class. Their aircraft, they were a hasty adaptation of whatever could be found for them Their fighters weren’t too bad, Ta-152Fs, hurried modifications of the Ta-152C. A lot better than the converted Me-109s originally planned. The Zeppelin had twelve, the Boelcke ten, the Voss had twenty four. It was the strike aircraft that were the problem. Despite frantic efforts, nobody had found anything better that could fly off a carrier than the aged Ju-87Es. They served as both dive and torpedo bombers, the Zeppelin carried twenty, the Boelcke ten and the Voss thirty. When the fleet put to sea, Lindemann intended to use them primarily as scouts. The Ta-152s would serve as fighter cover for the battleships. Still, the old High Seas Fleet hadn’t had any aircraft carriers at all, so he was ahead of them there.

There was worse trouble in the smaller units of the fleet. The High Seas Fleet had one heavy cruiser squadron, with three ships. Two, Admiral Scheer and Lutzow were awkward hybrids. Their six 28 centimeter guns made them too big for cruisers, too small for battleships. One of the class had already been lost, the British had sunk the Graf Spee down in South America. Lindemann fumed at the memory. Three of their cruisers had shot her up, then that spineless coward Langsdorff had run for port and blown his ship up rather than fight it out. Turning the German Navy into a laughing stock in the process. Both the surviving Panzerschiffe bore the humiliation of that fiasco.

The other heavy cruisers had even worse luck. On paper, they were good, 14,000 tons with eight 20.3guns, but the class had been cursed with ill luck. Blucher had been sunk by a Norwegian coastal defense battery, Prinz Eugen had gone down in the Kattegat after a submarine put four torpedoes into her. One had been sold to the Russians and was now a floating battery at Petrograd, firing on the German troops south of the city. Seydlitz had been converted into the Boelcke. That just left the Hipper, a ship that had become a by-word for mechanical unreliability.

And, if his heavy cruiser force was weak, his light cruisers were even worse. He had three: Koln, Leipzig and Nurnburg. Nine 15-centimeter guns each. Weak ships, poorly designed but there was nothing better. His destroyers? Lindemann snorted in disgust. The best were also the oldest, the ten survivors of 22 Z-1 class ships. The British had destroyed the other twelve in the Norway campaign. That had been a nightmare. At Narvik, the new German Navy had faced the British in combat for the first time. The destroyers had taken the brunt of the onslaught as the British had gone through them like a buzz-saw through butter.

Those destroyers had five 12.7 centimeter guns and eight torpedo tubes each. On balance Lindemann felt that made them as good as the American destroyers. The other twenty of his destroyers, well, some fool had armed them with 15 centimeter guns, leaving them over-armed and poor seaboats. They were all right inshore and in the Baltic. Take them out in the North Atlantic and they’d be hard put to stay upright, let alone do any fighting. Lindemann had made repeated requests to have them rearmed with 12.7 centimeter guns but he’d been turned down.

Lindemann put down his status report file. The major fleet units were all right; it was the smaller stuff that was so lacking. That was logical. It took time to build the big ships, the Forties had taken five years, and the last two had never even been started. The idea had been that the smaller ships could be built quickly when the need arose but that wasn’t the case. By the time the need arose, the demand for tanks on the Russian Front was over- riding everything else and the small ships had never been built.

Until now that was. The High Seas Fleet had orders. The Americans were expected to send a huge convoy through to Murmansk and Archangel. It would be a mixture of Canadian and American ships bring supplies for the troops on the Kola Peninsula and besieged in Archangel. It would be heavily escorted, at least two battleships, probably more, cruisers and destroyers. An American aircraft carrier group would be providing distant cover. But, the new American battleships were with the carriers and the not-so new ones were out in the Pacific. The only battleships left for the Atlantic convoys were the very old Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Oklahoma. There were reports that the even older Arkansas, Texas and New York had already been sent back to the States for scrapping.

So, at most four old battleships, all ready to be destroyed by his guns. Then the convoy was to be annihilated. It didn’t take much insight to see what the plan was. His ships would destroy the convoy, leaving the Kola and Archangel troops desperately short of supplies. Then, the army would attack and overrun both northern ports. It wouldn’t win the war but it would be a break in the grinding deadlock.

“Lutjens!” Lindemann called his chief of staff. Once Lutjens had been the senior, a full Admiral to Lindemann’s mere Captain but Lutjens had mysteriously fallen out of favor. Just as mysteriously, Lindemann had gained a place in the sun. It was, perhaps, a measure of the man’s character that he’d never displayed resentment or ill-will from that turn of events. “Lutjens, we are going to sea as soon as the tankers are filled up. We have a mission worthy of us at last.”

Headquarters, No. 9 Counter-intelligence Corps Detachment, Canadian Intelligence Corps, Kola Peninsula, Russia

“So what are we up against?”

“In global terms, sir, the German armed forces deploy a total of three hundred and thirty three divisions and forty three independent brigades, of which sixty six divisions and thirteen independent brigades are drawn from their ‘allies’. That force totals some six and a half million men. Their major effort remains facing the Russians and the Americans along the Volga. There, the Germans deploy 258 divisions and 16 independent brigades totaling just over five million men.

“Against them, the Russians have deployed three hundred and ninety one divisions with an aggregate of six point one million men and, now that SUSAGIR has entered the line, the Americans deploy 72 divisions with a total of one and a half million men.”

“SUSAGIR?”

“Second United States Army Group In Russia Sir. It and FUSAGIR are much more powerful than their numbers suggest. Every one of those divisions is fully mechanized, by the standards of the Russian Front they’re armored divisions. And they have tactical air power coming out of their ears.”

General John M Rockingham grunted. “And very nice for them it is I’m sure. What I need to know is what do we face here?”

“On the Finnish Front Sir, the Finns have deployed a total of sixteen standard infantry divisions and one mountain infantry division plus an independent armored brigade. They’re backed up by two German mountain divisions and four German infantry divisions together with two independent armored brigades. We, First Canadian Army, face that force with two corps, with a total of five divisions. Six once your Sixth Infantry Division comes into the line. Three infantry divisions, four as soon as the Sixth arrives, and two armored divisions.

“The odds aren’t as bad as they seem. The Finns have 250,000 men at most, the Germans about 100,000. We have 120,000 men. The catch is aircraft. The Finns have about 200, the Germans less than a hundred. Here in