where the flight deck structure met the hull sides, about a hundred feet back from the bows.
“Well done Dashy.” The flight commander’s voice was contrite now. He’d seen what Dash had seen and understood what Dash had done about it. An important lesson, one that needed to be got back to the fleet as quickly as possible. The doctrine of dropping torpedoes in large tight groups wasn’t as effective as it should be; better to split into two smaller groups and hit the target from two different angles. Still, they’d got a hit on the carrier and they’d know better next time.
The Adies skimmed the seas between the ships. Tracers from the anti-aircraft guns licked round them. It was a sure bet some of those shells were hitting other German ships, cutting their gun crews down. With a little luck, a 4.1 inch crew will get careless and smack one of their shells into a ship that could really get hurt by them. Stranger things had happened after all.
Another destroyer was ahead. The six surviving Adies had fired off their heavy weapons but they still had their cannon. Their tracers laced the target, sparks of hits flashing all over its dull gray paint. Then they were out and clear. Unlike the Corsairs, they wouldn’t be going back in. The bent-wing beasts would continue their strafing passes until the last of the heavy bombers was clear. They’d make their passes even if they were out of ammunition; because anti aircraft guns firing at them, weren’t shooting at the Adies. That’s why the Corsair pilots got paid the big bucks. Dash repeated the time-honored cliche to himself as he swung Clementine around for the trip home.
Aircraft Carrier Oswald Boelcke, Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic Oswald Boelcke had always been unlucky. In many respects she’d been cursed since the day she had been laid down as a heavy cruiser. Her construction had been slowed by the outbreak of the war. Then, when 95 percent complete, orders had been given for her to be converted into an aircraft carrier. That had been an insane decision. It would have been quicker and cheaper to build a new ship rather than rip apart a virtually complete cruiser. But, the orders had come from above and those orders were not to be ignored. So torn apart and rebuilt she had been.
It was bad luck that had placed her as the portside member of the triangle of three carriers in the Scouting Group on a day when the waves of Ami aircraft had come from the west. Oswald Boelcke had been the first carrier they had seen and eight of their torpedo bombers had concentrated on her. She’d shot down two and dodged the torpedoes of five. One had hit her and oh, how that torpedo had hurt.
Oswald Boelcke was a converted ship, her internal arrangements were far from optimal. In fact, they were very, very bad. The designers had done the best they could but it had been impossible to do better. They’d been aware of the dangers presented by the storage of aviation gasoline and had elected to use the magazines of Bruno and Caesar turrets as the gasoline storage. These were situated where the hull was wider so there was more space to absorb any explosions. Anton and Dora magazines had been adapted for munitions storage. It was judged that their contents were less subject to exploding so situating them where the hull was narrower was acceptable. Perfectly correct, perfectly logical decisions; the sort any competent design team would have made.
What beat them was Oswald Boelcke’s thoroughly rotten luck. Marko Dash’s torpedo hit directly abreast Bruno magazine. Worse, Oswald Boelcke was turning sharply to port when the torpedo struck. That turn, combined with her excessive topweight to cause her to roll severely to port. This had lifted the starboard side of her hull high. Instead of striking the ship’s side and exploding on the armor and torpedo protection system, the 22.4 inch torpedo ran under the turn of the bilge and struck the underside of the hull some 20 feet inwards from the side. The hit bypassed the torpedo defense system completely and exploded directly under Bruno magazine.
It was a tribute to the ship’s engineers that the blast didn’t cause an immediate fire or explosion. The problem that had faced the designers had been to fit the fuel storage and delivery system into the space normally allocated to an 8 inch magazine. Getting the components in had left the fuel delivery system severely compromised. It was contorted; full of bends and misalignments. These had already caused problems. Fuel couldn’t be pumped to the aircraft as quickly as the capacity of the pumps indicated. Given the maze of piping, that level of pressure would cause bursts. The piping wasn’t shock-insulated either. The blast waves from the torpedo hit shattered the maze, burst the pipes and ruptured the walls of the tanks. Oswald Boelcke had used only a small proportion of her aviation fuel. The rest was pouring out of the tanks in Bruno magazine and into the ship’s bilges. It was only a few minutes before the crew in the forward part of the hull started to smell the stench of gasoline.
On the bridge, Ensign Zipstein picked up the ship’s intercommunication system. The strafing from the Corsairs and Skyraiders caused havoc amongst the ship’s officers. Many were dead; more wounded. The Chief Damage Control officer was one of the dead. His deputy had taken an armor-piercing incendiary .50 caliber bullet in the stomach. He wasn’t dead; if he came around from the morphine that had been pumped into him, he’d wish he was. That left Zipstein in charge of damage control when the phone had rung and a Petty Officer had told him of the spreading smell of gasoline.
Zipstein was young and inexperienced; he really shouldn’t have been where he was. However, he was intelligent and quick enough to associate the smell with the torpedo hit forward. Also, he was quick to realize what had happened. He knew that the danger of gasoline vapor was many, many times worse than that of liquid gasoline and a smell that was spreading meant the fuel-air explosion risk was high. That vapor had to be got rid of fast. Zipstein made his decision and ordered the ship’s ventilation fans turned on full power.
Bridge, KMS Graf Zeppelin, Flagship, Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic “It could have been worse. A lot worse, Admiral.” Dietrich was trying to put a brave face on it. The Ami strike was over, leaving more than a dozen stains on the sea surface where their aircraft had been shot down. The cost had been high; not yet critical, but high. Z-7 had broken in half and sunk. Her sisters Z-6 and Z-8 were burning pyres of smoke and orange flame. It was obvious neither could survive. Z-16 and Z-20 were moving alongside to take off survivors. The light cruiser Koln had been bombed, rocketed and torpedoed. She was a burning shattered wreck, sinking fast. Nurnberg had been hit by rockets from the Corsairs. She had fires but was in good shape overall. Most of the other ships had got off relatively lightly. The strafing had caused serious casualties to their crews but they were otherwise sound enough. It was the carriers that had been hit.
Oswald Boelcke had been torpedoed forward; she’d been slowed and was down by the bows. Graf Zeppelin also taken a single torpedo hit amidships but the torpedo defense system had taken care of it. An engine room had flooded but that was all. The Graffie was a fast ship, the damage wasn’t that worrying. She had a five degree list but, then, her design meant she always had. Now she had a good excuse for it. Werner Voss was in a different category completely. She’d taken at least six heavy bomb hits, dozens of rockets, including some of the big ones fired by the torpedo bombers, and two torpedo hits. She was listing badly; the reports from the damage control crews showed hints of desperation.
Brinkmann drummed his fingers. It wasn’t too bad he told himself. The key factor was the state of the Oswald Boelcke. He picked up the short-range radio, called over and demanded to speak to the damage control officer. Zipstein answered, and called down to the damage control teams forward for the latest reports. As Brinkmann listened to the call being made he had a strange mental picture, a ship’s internal telephone system making the connection, and emitting few minor sparks as it did. In an atmosphere that contained a lethal percentage of gasoline vapor.
Brinkmann didn’t hear the explosion. He saw the shock wave of the fuel-air explosion form into a ball and race outwards. Pieces of steel were hurled hundreds of feet into the air. Others scythed out laterally, lashing at the other German ships. He heard the dreadful hammering as some of those pieces sprayed Graf Zeppelin and decimated her gun crews more thoroughly than the Ami strafing. By the time his senses had recovered from the awesome blast, the shock wave had gone. It had left the Oswald Boelcke no longer recognizable. Above the waterline, she had been reduced to a pitiful shambles of tortured steel. Her plating had been thrown around so that they resembled the scrambled remains of a destroyed city. The damage below the waterline must have been equally bad. Brinkmann guessed that the blast had ripped huge holes
