Winter Warriors

were bombing up from the ammunition ship Great Sitkin. The carriers were helpless, their decks were cleared, their aircraft struck below or parked forward, out of the way. Riding guard was the fifth carrier in the group, the light carrier Cowpens. She was the guard carrier, responsible for providing air patrols over the group with her three squadrons of F4U-7s. Five carriers with over 400 aircraft in this task group alone, and there were four more groups just like it. Well, not quite like it, Task Group 58.1 had the new CVB Gettysburg in place of a light carrier. That gave the group more than 500 aircraft. No wonder “Wild Bill” Halsey had made that group his flag.

Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush looked away from the flat-tops, towards the other shapes in the weak, gray sunshine. The biggest of them were the battleships New Jersey and Wisconsin, then the heavy cruisers Albany and Rochester. There had been three but Oregon City had suffered bad storm damage and been forced to head back. There were bad whispers about the ‘Orrible Titty.’ Some said she’d been built wrong, her spine twisted. Four light cruisers, Fargo, Huntingdon, Santa Fe and Miami. Eighteen destroyers filled out the group. They were DDKs, Gearing class ships whose job was to hunt and kill submarines. Protecting the carriers was the job of all those other ships. They shielded the carriers while the carriers smashed everything they took a dislike to.

And there were four more carrier task groups just like this one. Then there was the battle line, the support groups, the munitions groups. The ASW hunter-killer groups. All intended to keep the carriers safe and fighting.

Below them, another pallet of torpedoes swung onto the flight deck. The munitions men down there swarmed over it, striking the extra torpedoes down to the magazines. Up on the Goofers Gallery, the other pilots had to admit Bush was right; this many torpedoes, this many rockets, this many armor-piercing bombs meant they were going after the big ships of the German Fleet.

“I’ll tell you this guys. When we find the Huns, I’m going to get me a battleship.”

It was too much. With one accord the pilots started beating the young Lieutenant over the head with their caps. Eventually they paused for breath and the ring-leader of the attack pushed his battered cap back on. “Yeah right, George. And one day you’ll get to be President, won’t you?”

USS Stalingrad, Hunter-Killer Group “Sitka” in the North Atlantic, north of the UK.

“Ready for launch.” Lieutenant Pace braced himself for the slam in the back of a catapult launch. The Stalingrad had two F8F-1 Bearcats ready to go. Not far away, her sistership, the USS Moskva had two more. They’d fly as two pairs towards the contact one of their picket destroyers had spotted. If the analysis of the target’s flight pattern was right, Hunter-Killer Group Sitka had hit golden paydirt. For today, anyway.

“Target is cruising at Angels 26, speed 200. Bearing 135 degrees. Range 165 miles” The situation report was as complete as possible to cut down radio transmissions after the fighters were launched. If this was one of Germany’s few remaining Me-264s, they wanted to give it as little warning as possible.

Ahead of him, one of the deck crew made a winding-up motion with his hands. Pace pushed the throttle forward; the R-2800 engine picked up power, making the Bearcat shake. There came the expected thump and he was hurtling down the deck as the catapult fired. He cleared the Stalingrad’s bows and pushed the nose down. One always traded altitude for speed; no matter how little of the former one had, the latter was worth more. Underneath him, the undercarriage doors thumped closed. He sank below deck level, then he soared upwards. The Bearcat was in its element again.

The cruise out took a little under an hour; time for the target to move roughly 200 miles in any direction. Fortunately, the German pilot was doing the north-to-south leg of a sweep. Probably checking to see what was following the storm front. It was an open question if he’d seen Hunter-Killer Group Sitka. Probably not; German radar wasn’t that good and surface search conditions were still pretty bad. He hadn’t deviated from his course yet. He, almost certainly, didn’t know the Bearcats were coming.

“You’re on top of him.” The fighter controller’s voice from Stalingrad was cold, unemotional. The pair of Bearcats from Moskva had already peeled away, they’d gone to full power and moved to get between the Me-264 and its base. “There are RB-29s operating. Make sure of target identification before opening fire.” With its smooth glazed nose and four radial engines, the Me-264 looked a lot like a RB-29. It was whispered that there had already been some unfortunate accidents.

Pace spotted their target below them. The large twin tailplanes were clearly visible even though the aircraft’s dappled light and dark gray paint job blended with the sea far below. Time to open the dance. “Confirm, Me-264. Take him.”

The two Bearcats accelerated into a long dive. Unlike the midnight blue aircraft on the fleet carriers, escort carrier group planes were painted light gray with a gloss-white belly. It cut the shadows down making it much less likely that an alert gunner would spot them. Pace was coming in from high seven o’clock; his wingman from high- five. The Me-264 had a single 20mm gun in a turret above its rear fuselage. It could fire at one attacking aircraft, not two widely-separated ones. Suddenly, the German aircraft accelerated and black smoke trailed from its engines. They’d been spotted; and the pilot had cut in his GM-1 boost. For five minutes, the bomber would be almost as fast as the fighters chasing it.

Between dodging the stream of tracer 20mm shells from the rear turret and the GM-1 boosted engines powering the bomber, the two diving Bearcats were hardly closing the gap. It didn’t matter. Moskva’s Bearcats soared up and fired. They hit the Me-264 with long bursts of .50 caliber gunfire, from below and to the right and left. The thin black stream of smoke from the inboard port engine was suddenly transformed into a billowing cloud of black flame and dense smoke. The Me-264 abruptly slowed. The two Bearcats behind were able to close the range at last. Pace took careful aim. His .50s lashed the aft fuselage of the bomber. The 20mm tracers stopped abruptly. Gunner killed.

The Me-264 still had a 13.2 mm machine gun in the forward upper turret, a 20mm gun firing under the belly, two more 13.2mms, one in each waist hatch and a fixed 13.2 firing forward. For all that, the loss of the 20mm gunner was critical. It meant the German aircraft was virtually defenseless against attacks from above and behind. That’s where Pace and his wingman made their next runs, raking the bomber’s aft fuselage, walking their bursts along the structure into the wings. The gray beast below them was threshing, trying to defend itself but its fangs were being methodically drawn by the four fighters. Moskva’s two planes made another pass, this time for above and on the beam. Their streams of .50 fire raked the forward fuselage. That left the other upper turret silent. The aircraft was defenseless.

Pace was reminded of a history lesson he had once listened to, of a game when times were harder. A pack of dogs would be let loose on a blinded bear and the crowd would place bets on how long the bear would survive and how many of the dogs it could kill. This was different of course. It was possible, normal, to feel sorry for the bear. Nobody would feel sorry for the bomber below.

Pace swept in again, his aim undisturbed by defensive fire. His .50s streamed tracer, raking into the wing roots and walking sideways towards the engines. The starboard inner engine erupted into flames as his gunfire shredded its nacelle and the Me-264 angled downwards. As Pace’s aircraft pulled away, Moskva’s team made another pass. It was the killer. One of the long wings crumpled just inboard of a burning engine and the 264 went into a helpless spin. It fell from the sky and crashed into the sea. There, it exploded; its death watched dispassionately by the gun cameras on the Bearcats.

“We need bigger guns.” Pace’s voice was unemotional.

“They’re coming. The new ‘Cats will have 20mms, according to the scuttlebutt.”

“Hope they work a bit better than the last ones.” The Navy’s previous attempt at a 20mm gun had been a fiasco. The weapons usually jammed after a round or two. “Let’s go home.”

An hour later, the Bearcats were sitting on the hangar deck being rearmed and refueled. Their gun camera film had been taken and was being flown back to Washington. There, the kill would be confirmed. Inanna would take a file from her cabinet and delete another Me-264 from Germany’s shrinking maritime reconnaissance aircraft fleet.

Every reduction in the Luftwaffe’s small maritime reconnaissance fleet meant the fast carriers operating out in the Atlantic were that much safer. Without the aircraft to steer them to their targets, U-boats, even the Type XXIs, were virtually useless against the fast carriers. They would have to rely on luck to be in the right place at the