Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire

gun fire.

The game had begun, he mused. No, not a game, but a grueling run of the gauntlet. Would they win through this time? He remembered his final urgent instructions to the convoy masters on his last run in to Malta at night… “Don’t make smoke or show any lights. Keep good station. Don’t straggle. If your ship is damaged keep her going at the best possible speed…” How many of the fourteen precious merchantmen would get through this time?

At 16:34 hrs a message came through from Flag Officer North Atlantic that was not unexpected. It warned of an imminent attack by enemy torpedo bombers, and the British fighters were soon scrambling from the decks of their remaining carrier escorts, Indomitible and Victorious, and climbing up into the salmon sky. When they came, the German Ju88s swooped low on the deck but were well harried by the fighters, who broke up their sub-flights and sent at least three into the water. Syfret gave the order to commence firing and the line of cruisers and battleships began filling the gloaming skies with puffs of broiling fire and grey smoke, laced with white tracers from the Bofors AA guns. He reckoned this to be nothing more than a probing attack, some thirty to 36 planes from the look of it. They would get much worse in the days ahead.

Now… what was this last bit in that signal warning: “Malta reports large enemy ship sighted very near Sicilian Narrows. Sortie by this and enemy cruiser squadrons deemed very possible.”

Large enemy ship? A battleship? Couldn’t they be more specific?

~ ~ ~

Kapitan Helmut Rosenbaum of U-73 received the message from Untermittlemeer Squadron headquarters at La Spezia with real satisfaction. “Congratulations in order for our newest recipient of the Knight’s cross.” All he had to do now was stay alive to collect his medal, and he was glad that he could soon make use of his new radar sets once he got clear of the main enemy convoy and found some open water.

U-73 was a very special boat, one of a very few to have the FuMO61 “Hohentwiel” radar installed. Named for a fortress constructed at the top of an extinct volcano in the year 914 by Burchard III, then Duke of Swabia, it became one of the most powerful fortresses in the duchy, and a watchful outpost on the mountain passes in the Baden-Wurttemburg region of Germany. The radar was perched atop the starboard side of the U-boat’s conning tower, scanning the area around the boat while she was surfaced to keep watch for enemy aircraft and surface units.

Her Kapitan and commander, Helmut Rosenbaum, had put her to good use on seven sorties, sinking six merchant ships and causing the loss of two the smaller vessels that were being transported on one of these targets. The crew wanted to credit him with eight ships sunk for the feat, but he was reluctant to count those last two as kills.

“No boys,” he told them. “I’m counting it at six, so now we go hunting for our lucky number seven.” Most of his kills were obtained while operating out of St. Nazaire and Lorient on the Brittany coast, but on one occasion the boat was deep in the Atlantic operating with the Gronland Wolfpack when she sighted a very odd looking warship that seemed to be the focus of a major operation. Rosenbaum had no intelligence indicating that the enemy was running any convoy at that time, so what was underway here in the icy North Atlantic, he wondered? He knew there were no German surface raiders out to sea at that time, but here was a warship of considerable size, with a lot of Royal Navy units thrashing about in pursuit.

He peered through his periscope, noting how ominous and threatening her profile was, but perplexed by the lack of any big guns on the ship. Concluding that this must be an old British battleship that had been stripped of her guns and put to sea for maneuvers and drills, he decided to spoil the party and put the ship on the bottom of the sea. The ship accommodated him by sailing right into firing position as he hovered in the silent cold waters, and was preparing to set loose one of his last torpedoes when he suddenly saw the ship put on an amazing burst of speed and veer hard into a high speed evasive turn! He realized at once what had happened. One of the other boats in the wolfpack had seen the ship as well, and fired, probably U-563 operating on his right under Klaus Bargsten.

“What are you doing, Klaus?” he breathed. The shot was far too long to have any chance of success. It was not like Bargsten to make a mistake like that, but the reaction of the target ship made Rosenbaum realize that this was no old battleship. The speed and precision of the evasive maneuver took his breath away. Then he saw something flash from the side of the dark ship and streak off at an impossible speed. Moments later there was an explosion, and he pivoted his scope to see a geyser of water in the distance, right on U-563’s line of fire. Something had lanced out and destroyed Bargsten’s torpedo! He wanted nothing more to do with this ship, and immediately ordered an immediate dive to reach a cold thermal layer and slip away. His comrade was not so lucky. The ship found U-563 sometime later and Rosenbaum’s boat and crew could feel the throbbing vibration in the sea when they killed the U-Boat.

The Kapitan remembered how he had turned to his First Officer of the Watch, Horst Deckert, amazed. “That was a battleship if I have ever seen one,” he breathed. Or at least it was something easily that big. Yet the way it moved and turned, it was like a destroyer, and the damn thing…” He checked himself, unwilling to say more. “Get us out of here, Deckert. Get us out of here.”

A year later, and now on her 8th sailing, U-73 would slip through the guarded gates of Gibraltar, her engines off, just drifting silently through the channel pushed by the swift ocean currents. She would join Unterseeboote Mittelmeer (Undersea Boat Group Med), with the 29th Flotilla, and make her way to a new operating base at La Spezia in Northern Italy. She had been out on patrol since August 4, this time in the Med, looking for another kill when Rosenbaum got word that a big British operation was underway and was vectored in as part of the initial U- Boat trip-wire defense north of Algeria. There he spotted the British convoy assembled for Operation Pedestal and slipped around to the rear to where the carriers were operating to provide air cover.

Rosenbaum skillfully escaped detection, in spite of a close escort of four British destroyers in his immediate vicinity, and worked his way stealthily into a perfect firing position on the old British carrier HMS Eagle, ripping her open with four hits and sending her to the bottom in a matter of minutes. In the ensuing chaos he eluded detection and withdrew from the slowly advancing Allied convoy. In time he would work his way north to hover off the Balearic Islands. For the sinking of HMS Eagle he soon learned that he was to be awarded the Knight’s Cross and given a new assignment—command of the Black Sea U-Boat flotilla, Hitler’s “lost fleet” in the inland waters of southern Europe.

In an ingenious and daring operation, the Germans had partially disassembled a flotilla of six Type IIB Coastal U-Boats at Kiel, removing their conning towers by oxyacetylene torches before they moved them overland on the most powerful land haulers and tractors in Germany. They eventually reached the Danube where they were packed in pontoon crates and then made their way slowly by barge to the Black Sea! Originally scheduled to arrive there in October of 1942, they were two months early, and the newly decorated Helmut Rosenbaum would now take command as soon as he returned from his current mission.

He rubbed his hands together, grateful for the new assignment where he could now command a flotilla of six U-boats. Yet in a strange twist of fate, he would have one more chance encounter at sea before he made it home to collect his laurels, and one more chance to best his lucky number seven kill. U-73 seemed to have some strange magnetic attraction to the center stage of danger where Kirov was concerned, for she was to soon come once more within firing range of the very same ship Rosenbaum had seen a long year ago in the North Atlantic…

Part IV GERONIMO

“We took an oath not to do any wrong, nor to scheme against one another…I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust.”