Winter Warriors

“That bad, Inanna? I knew there was trouble up in Boston and New York but I thought it was confined to there?”

“What do you think?” Inanna flipped a copy of the Boston Globe over to Naamah. The front page picture was a sagging figure, tied to a streetlight post, the head and upper body covered with tar and feathers. “They ripped her coat and blouse off, hacked up her hair and then did that. Nobody bothered to call the police, she was there for twenty minutes in this weather before the cops found her. She’s in hospital; emergency ward. Pneumonia and burns to her face and head. What sort of animals are these people?”

“Frightened, angry, frustrated ones.” Naamah very carefully kept the anger out of her voice. “I’ll bet you any money you like; in normal times, the people who did that would have risked their lives to help a woman in distress. But now, they’re trapped in a situation they can’t understand or control. They want to slaughter the people who are killing our boys over in Russia but they can’t. So they displace that anger onto a scapegoat.” Naamah’s mouth twisted in disgust. “The normal scapegoats are blacks, Jews, any minority. Even having that thought makes people see themselves as being what they hate, being too close to the Nazis. So they pick on somebody else. In this case women with blonde hair. I’ll bet if the FBI picks up the group who did this, they’ll find in the background somebody who had a grudge against this particular victim and got everybody else worked up. Not all brutal sadists are German. They’re everywhere, here as well; you know that. Over the years, we’ve seen them often enough in more than enough places.”

“That’s the line the Globe are following. That the woman was the innocent victim of a personal vendetta and the people who were did it were no better than Nazis themselves. Problem is, look at the other story on the front page. More massacres in Ireland, entire villages in County Limerick just gone. Everybody. Men, women, children, animals, crops, everything. Boston is an Irish-American city. A lot of people had folk back ‘in the auld country’ and they want to hit back any way they can. This country is getting ugly. Nammie, it’s in the big cities now, but it’s spreading. We need to protect our family.”

Naamah nodded. “OK, I’ll talk to Lillith and Nefertiti, they’ll work out how much we need.” She grinned; the picture on the newspaper made it forced and unnatural. “It’s lucky we invested in the aircraft and electronics industries a few years back, isn’t it.” She looked at the picture again and even the forced grin faded. If she ever found the people responsible for that atrocity, she’d take them out for a drink. A very final drink.

Bridge, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, At Sea, North Atlantic

Even the big Forties were rolling in the seas. Huge waves; long, swelling ones that rocked the battleship. Every so often there would be intense vibration as the waves exposed the screws aft and caused them to race before plunging into the deep again. Lindemann looked behind him. The second in line, immediately behind Derfflinger, was Moltke. Lindemann watched her drive her bows in, taking green water up to Turret Anton. All eight battleships had the “Atlantic bow,” raked and flared to improve bad weather performance. It was a great improvement on the flat, vertical Taylor bow the German designers had preferred earlier. It wasn’t helping Scharnhorst and Gneisenau though. They were badly overweight, sat much lower in the water than planned and they wallowed badly. Moltke was taking water over her bows, but the two light battleships at the end of the port column never seemed to get their bows out of the green swells. Turret Anton was awash more often than not. As if to hide the two ships’ distress, the rain closed in again, shrouding them from view.

Lindemann sighed and went back to the chart table. According to the weather people, once this storm front was past, the weather should be a lot better. By North Atlantic standards anyway. They’d be close enough by then to close on the big convoy and overwhelm it and its escorts. Then, they’d turn on the carrier group and overwhelm that.

After all, nobody had ever sunk a battleship on the high seas with aircraft. As long as the battleships could maneuver, they could avoid the airstrikes. Once the carriers had shot their bolt, it would be all over. Some were even cautiously talking about the rest of the American fleet, probably pounding England or France, coming to the rescue and being added to the pot. Too much to hope for of course. But they would get the big supply convoy and there was word of another smaller convoy, a fast troop convoy. That would be worth the risk of adding to the bag.

The rain squall eased off a little and the visibility improved again. Lindemann looked out the starboard bridge wings, towards the destroyer screen. He could see Hipper running ahead of the formation. Z-23 was steaming just behind and to starboard of her while Z-24 was clearly in sight, sailing almost parallel with Derfflinger. Behind her, Z- 25 was having a much easier time of handling the heavy waves. She should, the designers had finally admitted the heavy twin turret forward on Z-23 and Z- 24 was a bad idea and replaced it with a single shielded mount. Four 15cm guns, not five and all the better for that. Lindemann swung his binoculars back towards Z-24. Another one of those great swells was approaching and he watched the destroyer dig her bows in before she was hidden by the mountain of green water. He watched, waiting for her to reappear, waiting to see her fight her way clear of the wave. To his mounting horror she never did. Z-24 had vanished.

Lindemann was frozen, watching the scene through the ghostly shroud of mist, spray and rain. A three and a half thousand ton destroyer couldn’t just vanish. In the background he heard the message from the radio room arrive. ‘Destroyer Z-24 has foundered. No survivors.’ Eventually he forced his voice to work. “How?”

“If I may Sir.” One of the young lieutenants was speaking very tentatively. “I was training to be a naval architect before I was for …. signed into the Navy. There were many doubts about the Z-23 class even then. That big turret forward is a lot of weight; too much for the structure of the bows. Worse, there is a large compartment underneath the turret. That makes the whole bow structure extremely stressed. Finally, the trunk for the turret is too close to the hull sides. Gunnery was told, Sir, but they insisted on that twin turret forward. I think when Z-24 dug her bows in, the weight of the wave pressing down combined with the bow rising up was too much for the structure. I think her bows just tore off forward of her bridge. A battleship or cruiser, they might survive that Sir, but a destroyer won’t. Her own engines will drive her under and there is nothing to stop the flooding. Nothing at all; she probably sank in less than 20 seconds.”

Lindemann stared at the young officer who flushed and turned bright red. “I’m sorry, Sir.”

The Admiral slowly shook his head. “There is no need for apology. You had information I needed and gave it to me as was your duty. Communications, send a message to all the destroyers. They are to abandon efforts to hold station and maneuver as necessary to avoid damage.” Lindemann raised his binoculars to his eyes again and looked at the patch of sea that had claimed Z-24 with so little warning. For the first time, he had a very bad feeling about this operation.

Goofers Gallery, CV-33 USS Kearsarge, Task Group 58.2, At Sea, South of Nova Scotia, North Atlantic

“The German fleet is out.” The young torpedo-bomber pilot made the remark with complete confidence.

“How do you know, George? The German High Command in your pocket? Giving you tips?” The other pilots on the gallery were jeering. The Adie pilot had an air of smug, condescending confidence that set people’s teeth on edge. Coming from a family with money could do that.

“That’s the fifth pallet of torpedoes that’s come aboard in the last half hour. There’s five-inch rockets and 12- inch Tiny Tims coming aboard from the aft station. We’re offloading 500 and thousand pounder HEs and taking on sixteen hundred and two thousand-pound armor piercing. We had a lot to start; now we’ve got more. We’re going to be taking on other ships for once, heavily armored ones. So, that’s the German fleet. They’ve got be coming out.”

Although the other pilots hated to admit it, he had to be right. They watched as Kearsarge swung another pallet of the massive Tiny Tim rockets on board. At the same time, a pack of 22.4 inch torpedoes was being hoisted over to Intrepid. Between the two carriers, the ammunition ship Firedrake was working to keep the stream of anti-ship munitions flowing. A day earlier, it would have been impossible; the storm had still been at full force. Now, it had passed in the night and the weather was fine, as good as it was ever likely to be in the North Atlantic in November.

Not far away, the aircraft carriers Reprisal and Oriskany