“It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most… Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!”
Chapter 25
When Samsonov reported that the American planes had been decimated, and their carrier struck by three Moskit-II Sunburn missiles, the crew in the CIC cheered loudly. Karpov stood proudly on the bridge, his arms clasped behind his back, a satisfied grin on his face as the Weapon’s Chief finished his report. In all their maneuvers and war games the Kirov had been pitted against their one great nemesis, an American carrier task force. They had finally sunk one, or so they now believed.
Admittedly, this was a far more scaled down version of that threat, an old light escort carrier compared to the massive nuclear strike carriers Kirov had been built to oppose. It was little wonder, then, that the Russian ship dispatched her easily enough. The Americans had been steaming blithely along, without the slightest inkling that any threat was near. They had received no official word of the British dilemma concerning this new German raider until it was too late. Their P-40s had carried nothing more than a standard load of machine gun ammunition, and the main attack squadrons assigned to Wasp had been left behind in Norfolk. The carrier had only 3.5 inch side armor, and so Samsonov was able to use sea skimmers in the final approach to easily penetrate this and wreak havoc deep inside the ship. The explosions erupted up through the unarmored flight deck, igniting fires the length of the whole ship. Four of her six boilers were destroyed and the remaining two were off line within minutes due to the heat of the fires, which were so hot that bulkheads protecting undamaged areas around them were glowing red.
Of the 1600 men aboard Wasp that day, 572 died within the first five minutes of the explosions. The remaining crew scrambled for life preservers and desperately tried to fight the fires. Fifteen minutes later, secondary explosions blew a hole in her thin hull and she began shipping water at an uncontrollable rate, listing fifteen degrees in a matter of minutes. Her captain, John Reeves, gave the order to abandon ship and struggled with his bridge crew to find a way out of the growing inferno, forced to exit via a side hatch and literally leap from the ship to save his life. Hundreds of other men were already in the cold Atlantic waters, and the death toll would rise to 1127 before the day would end.
The destroyers O’Brien and Walke had been churning about dropping depth charges at an enemy that was not even there. The cruiser Vincennes was firing at the last wayward survivors of Army Pursuit Squadron 33, until she was also struck by two more of the deadly Sunburns. One bored in at sea level, it’s own pinpoint accuracy again working in favor of the target when the missile struck the thickest part of her belt armor. Yet even that was only 5 inches of steel, less than the British battlecruiser Repulse that had been damaged by a similar attack. This time the missile warhead was able to penetrate a little deeper, and the resulting explosion was far more serious on a smaller ship, only a third the displacement of Repulse.
The second missile, however, was one of Samsonov’s reprogrammed Sunburns where he had eliminated the sea skimming leg of its flight path. Instead the missile flew in at just under Mach 3, then simply dove directly down into the ship. It struck the forecastle, blasted clean through, and gutted the ship, igniting two secondary magazines and then blowing a hole in the bottom of the hull for good measure. Another 568 men of her compliment of 708 would die. While the Wasp was deepening her list and sagging lower in the sea, Vincennes was a scorching wreck.
The remaining two destroyers stopped their anti-submarine runs and desperately tried to rescue as many men as they could pull out of the water, their crews fearfully eyeing the horizon. Walke had nets and ropes down, and launched every boat and life raft she had aboard, but those unlucky enough to have found a rope were out of the frying pan, into the drink and then back in the fire within minutes. One final Sunburn missile, a sea skimmer, came lancing in at the destroyer where it lingered near the stricken cruiser, and the impact easily penetrated the small unarmored ship, igniting one of her quadruple torpedo mounts, which joined the explosion and literally broke her in two. She sunk within minutes, taking 163 of her 192 man crew with her, along with every man she had managed to pull out of the sea.
Seeing this, the skipper of the last destroyer O’Brien quickly maneuvered his ship behind Wasp and used the burning carrier as a screen while his men tried to pull in as many souls as they could. He was lucky that day. Captain Karpov, satisfied with his kill, had decided to fire only one section of his lethal Sunburn missiles, six in all, and in doing so Task Force 1 was all but destroyed. The death toll mounted up to 1882 killed, another 460 wounded; almost as many as the Japanese attack might have killed at Pearl Harbor four months later. The date was August 5, 1941, and it was the greatest peacetime disaster in US naval history, and a new “day of infamy” when the American president finally learned the gruesome details of the surprise attack three hours later.
It was just after a late lunch aboard the heavy cruiser Augusta, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was resting on the bed in his sea cabin. He was enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, examining a few new stamps with a magnifying glass and thinking where he would add them to his collection once he returned home. On December 8, 1934, the dirigible Graf Zeppelin, named in honor of Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German inventor of hydrogen airships, departed from its home base at Friedrichshafen, Germany, bound for Recife, Brazil. It was Christmas and the airship carried 19 passengers, a load of freshly cut Christmas trees, and bundles of postcards and other holiday mail. Roosevelt was looking at one such card, Luftpost, Par Avion, and noting the distinctive circular green stamp showing the dirigible overlaid with a Christmas tree, when there was a knock at his door.
The president’s Scottish terrier, Fala, barked at once, and bodyguard, Mike Riley, got up and went to the door. His son, Franklin Junior, looked over his shoulder, seeing the shadows of three men outside and hearing the distinctive voice of George C. Marshall speaking softly to the guard. The door swung open and in came Marshall with Admirals Stark and King, their faces grave and set. Marshall was the first to speak, getting right to the point.
“Mister President,” he said, “we’ve been hit.”
Roosevelt looked up at him, a perplexed look on his face. “The Japanese?” He had been expecting trouble in the Pacific for some time now, but so soon? What had happened?
“No, sir,” said Marshall. “The Germans. Task Force 1 with the carrier Wasp was ferrying a squadron of P-40s to Iceland this morning. Apparently the British have been chasing down another German raider that broke out through the Denmark Strait.”
“We just got word of this, sir,” said Admiral King.
“It looks like Wasp ran afoul of this ship,” Marshall went on. “She’s been hit and is badly damaged. It’s likely that we’ll lose her within the hour.”
“I see…” Roosevelt put down his magnifying glass.
“There’s more, sir,” said Admiral Starke. “Cruiser Vincennes and destroyer Walke were also hit. Both sunk, sir.”
“My Lord,” said Roosevelt. “What was this ship, a U-boat?”
“No sir. It’s a surface raider of some kind. The British seem to think it may be the Graf Zeppelin.”
Roosevelt’s face registered real surprise. He looked down at his postcard, eyeing the stamp of the airship he had been examining just moments ago. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Our ships were attacked by an old blimp? How is that possible?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Admiral King. “The Graf Zeppelin is also the name of the new German aircraft carrier-a converted cruiser-and the British say this ship has a new weapon… some kind of rocket system, very accurate and capable of hitting ships and planes at extreme ranges. We just received word, sir. We don’t know how they’re launching them, or even seeing the targets, but the devil is in the details.”
