Winter Warriors

murderous hail of heavy machine gun fire from the Ami carrier planes. Four of them had picked Z-7 and were diving on her. Their machine guns lined their wings with fire. His lovely Z-7 was nothing more than a target, a loose end waiting to be tied.

Riedel’s position was suitable for an epiphany. He was sprawled on the deck of his bridge in a desperate attempt to escape the hail of bullets that were scything down his crew. Anybody not behind armor was doomed by the blast of bullets. That included his antiaircraft gun crews. For some inexplicable reason, the flak mounts didn’t have shields or splinter protection. The murderous strafing had slaughtered his crews as they fought their guns.

The hail of fire seemed to slacken slightly. Had one of the Ami fighters been shot down? He chanced a quick look over the edge of his bridge plating. Ahead of him, Z-6 was surrounded by towers of water and explosions. The cruiser Koln was in far worse state, belching black smoke and already listing hard. She was slowing down too, losing her position in the formation. Riedel winced at the sight. That will be fatal, her pitiful state will draw the Ami jabos the same way a crippled stag draws in the wolves. Then, a hand grabbed him and hauled him down again. It was just in time. Z-7 rocked and threshed viciously as a quartet of explosions added to the deafening noise of gunfire, high-powered aircraft engines, gunfire and the demented screams of the rockets.

The explosions left Z-7 feeling wrong, a soft, squirming sensation in the water. The sounds faded away as the formation of jabos swept past to give the Oswald Boelcke the benefits of their fiendish attentions. There was a smoking mass in the water off to one side of Z-7. Obviously one of the jabos had been shot down but who had done it? Riedel guessed that nobody would ever really know. Then he looked back at his ship. The midships section was a tangled mass of wreckage, strafed, rocketed and bombed. It looked wrong as well as felt wrong but Riedel couldn’t work out why. Then it sunk in on him; the stern was moving separately from the bows. Not much but it was definitely shifting from side to side.

“Sir, Sir, we must abandon ship!”

“How dare you! Order damage control crews to work immediately. Abandon ship indeed.”

“Sir, it’s no use. We took a single direct hit on the aft funnel but that isn’t what has killed us. There were three near misses, very close but alongside. One to port, two to starboard. Right beside the engine rooms. The welding is failing. The ship’s back has broken. Can’t you see how we’re losing speed? In a few minutes we will break in half and nothing can stop it. Can’t you feel it?”

The tone was insubordinate but Riedel knew the speaker was correct. He could see the ship was sagging in the middle; the bow and stern rising as the center section flooded and sank. He knew what would happen next. The motion and sagging would increase until the stress levels in the metal passed critical levels and the structure failed. Then, his Z-7 would indeed break in half and go down, probably very fast.

“Sir.” Another officer was speaking. “We can’t abandon ship. The strafing has destroyed the life rafts and ship’s boats. The water is so cold, the men will only last a few minutes if they go in it. If somebody can’t take us off, we’ll all…”

The thought was unfinished but Riedel knew how it would end. The water is too cold to allow us to survive. The ship’s life rafts have been destroyed. Even if they weren’t they are no guarantee of survival. U-boat crews report that American aircraft will strafe life rafts in the water if they can.

Once, there had been talk of how the Americans were weak and soft, how they couldn’t stand the horrors of war. Perhaps that talk had been in the mind of the fool who had machine-gunned the crew of a torpedoed Coast Guard cutter. Then, at the Battle of the Kolkhoz Pass, the Army, or the SS, nobody knew whom, had massacred a large group of American soldiers who had been taken prisoner. Rumor was that it was an SS commander, who had wanted to stop any of his men surrendering to the Americans. Whatever the reason, that act and many more like it, had finally added cold hatred to rage. The old expression ‘reaping what one had sowed’ passed through Riedel’s mind. Why had nobody understood that somebody else could watch German displays of Schrecklichkeit and turn the doctrine on its creators?

If his crew stayed on board, they would drown. If they abandoned ship they would freeze. The only option left was for another ship to come along side and take the survivors from Z-7. Riedel looked out to port. Racing in above the waves was another formation of forty or so Ami aircraft. Larger ones, coming in with the low steady pass that branded them as torpedo bombers. No, no Captain will hazard his ship by slowing down in the middle of a torpedo bomber attack. Z-7’s crew had only one chance. Their ship had to hold together long enough for the torpedo attack to pass and that another destroyer would come back for them. If that didn’t happen, Riedel thought, then the Ami jabos would have killed them all.

AD-1 Skyraider Clementine Over the Scouting Group, North Atlantic.

“Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.”

Lieutenant (JG) Marko Dash had a personal tradition of singing to his aircraft as he made his ran towards the line of enemy ships. He did now. The Corsairs had busted the enemy formation wide open. The cohesiveness of the anti-aircraft fire was gone. As the Krauts had swerved to avoid the bombs and rockets, they’d straggled all over the sea. By sheer chance, the eight Skyraiders of his flight were approaching a perfectly placed pair of ships. A destroyer with a carrier behind it. The orders were to take the destroyer with rockets and then torpedo the carrier. They had the equipment to do it, each Adie carried four Tiny Tims, two under each wing, and a 22.4 inch torpedo under the belly. That slowed them down, but the punch was awe-inspiring.

The Tiny Tims might have the hitting power of a 500 pound semi-armor piercing bomb but accuracy wasn’t their strong point. The destroyer had increased to maximum speed and was turning frantically to avoid the oncoming onslaught. The Adies responded and pushed in to point blank range. Perhaps because of the ship’s maneuvers, the flak coming up was going wild. All the Adies had made it through. Clementine lurched as the rockets dropped clear but the flare that took place when they fired up was spectacular. That’s why they had to be dropped first; fire them from the wing racks and they’d incinerate the whole wing. They streaked ahead, snaking and dipping but more or less heading for the hapless destroyer in front of them. The explosions seemed to blanket her but they all seemed to be the white columns of near misses, not the black and orange eruptions of direct hits.

Then Dash saw the four black-red explosions as the rockets plowed into their target and exploded deep inside her. Dash watched a forward gun hurled into the air by the explosion of a rocket that had struck just behind it. Another blast ripped through the three aft turrets. A third hit the waterline between the funnels. The last hit the aft funnel itself, blasting it into a wreck. What had once been a trim fighting destroyer had been transformed into a shambles. Her superstructure was twisted and blackened. Fires from blast and burning rocket propellant were already taking hold.

Dash had no time to think about his handiwork. The eight Adies were already lining up for a torpedo run on the carrier. Her automatic guns were firing. Alongside Dash, an Adie suddenly lurched and went into the sea in a long sliding splash. A quadruple twenty, there was no mistaking that storm of tracer, got another one. Suddenly Dash, who had started as number six nicely in the middle of the group, was now the extreme left. Then he saw something else. The carrier was already swinging, knowing the torpedoes were coming and trying to comb their tracks. Almost by instinct, he threw his Clementine into a tight left hand curve and parted from the group at an angle of almost 45 degrees.

“Get back in formation, you yellow rat!” Dash’s flight commander screamed in rage as he thought he saw Dash break away.

Dash ignored him and held his angled course for a few seconds. Then he threw his bird back over in an equally tight right turn. As he did, he could see his guess had been right. The carrier had turned to comb the torpedo tracks. Dash could see three. Had two more broken up on impact with the water? It didn’t matter. His turns had put him dead ahead of the carrier and it was committed to its portside turn.

Dash made sure his wings were level, his speed right, and he dropped. The carrier was looming larger by the second. He thumbed the switch, raking the bridge with the 20mm cannon in his wings. Behind him, he saw what he had been praying for; the massive column of water. A torpedo, his torpedo, had torn into the aircraft carrier. Just