Winter Warriors

reach now. Ehrhardt grabbed the wheel and spun it, undogging the hatch. Then, he pushed up.

The hatch opened a few centimeters. Three, perhaps four, no more than that. Then it jammed. Ehrhardt banged at it desperately but it would not move. Then, he got up close and peered through the crack. There was a metal block welded just so. It prevented the dogs on the hatch from opening properly. There wasn’t much holding the hatch shut, just a centimeter or so of steel, but it might as well have welded the whole hatch closed. He’d been right. The dockyard workers had been men of the sea; they’d known just what to do. A tiny modification, so small that it could hardly be noted, but one superbly designed to punish the men who had taken this ship away from its rightful owners. Ehrhardt was trapped in the trunked access, his men strung out beneath him. They were doomed to die one at a time as the waters rose and drowned them. And he would be last, having had to listen to them die. Ehrhardt wept in frustration and despair. Just for a moment, somewhere tucked away in a buried part of his mind, he thought he could hear a peal of laughter echo through the steel structure of the ship.

Bridge, KMS Graf Zeppelin, Flagship, Scouting Group, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

The first wave had been bad enough. The second had been hideous. Just as many of the bent-winged jabo- devils as before, but three times as many of the big torpedo planes. Some of them were a new type, one nobody had seen before. They carried an even deadlier load. Two torpedoes each and of the first eight that had attacked Graf Zeppelin, one had put both of its eels into her. They’d hit so close together that the holes they had blasted in her hull had merged into one. The torpedo defense system had failed; and the aft turbine rooms had flooded, bringing the Graf Zeppelin to a shuddering halt. That had done the inevitable. It had attracted the rest of the group and they’d swarmed her the way flies swarmed honey; leaving their attack on poor, shattered Leipzig to turn on the crippled Graffie. Another sixteen torpedoes dropped. This time the Graffie had lost the speed and agility that had helped her survive the previous attacks. Seven hit her, three right aft, three amidships, one in the extreme bow. Two of those torpedoes ruptured the aviation spirit stores and the carrier was turning into an inferno.

Brinkmann looked around at the shattered bridge. Dietrich was dead; most of the bridge crew were dead. The strafing had been ruthless, relentless. Once the jabos had dropped their bombs and fired their rockets, they’d come back to lash the ships with their machine guns and cannon. Even the men trying to abandon ship hadn’t been spared. The jabos hosed them with bullets and shells just the same.

By the end, it had been pure slaughter. The ships’ gun crews were dead; the ships themselves battered and broken by the relentless attack. Voss was going down fast. Leipzig, gutted by bombs and rockets, had already slipped beneath the waves. Nurnberg would follow her soon. Sixteen of the older torpedo planes had concentrated on her and scored two hits. One had blown the bows off; the other opened her engine rooms. Four more of them had dropped bombs on her. Big ones, thousand kilos? At least that. They’d stoved her sides in. Brinkmann was reminded of a street riot back in Dortmund many years before. He and his fellows had cornered a communist. After they’d knocked him down, they’d kicked his ribs in. Now he’d watched the Amis do the same to one of his cruisers. I wonder if Nurnberg cried for its mother while it died, the way that communist had when we left him bleeding to death in the gutter?

The destroyers had suffered badly as well. Rockets had done for them, mostly the big ones from the torpedo planes. Z-10, Z-14 and Z-15 had been hit hard and early. The bent-wing jabos hammered them with 500 kilo bombs and rockets, then the torpedo planes finished them off. Z-16 had been torpedoed. Brinkmann wasn’t certain whether it had been intended for her or whether she’d just caught a stray. It didn’t really matter which, it had broken her in half and sent her down in less than four minutes. He hadn’t seen what had happened to Z-4 and Z-5; they’d been up front but now they were gone. Only Z-20 was left. By a miracle she’d survived with severe topside damage but her hull and machinery were untouched. She was coming alongside to pick up the survivors from the Zeppelin.

Brinkmann looked around again. Sinking ships. Burning ships. Shattered ships. All doomed. The Ami airstrikes were ferocious beyond belief, beyond anything we had conceived. They’d never stopped. They‘d just hammered us over and over, with every weapon they had; no mercy, no hesitation. While they’d had ammunition, they‘d used it. Then, he picked himself up from the deck where he had fallen. The mine stowage aft must have exploded. He was surprised it hadn’t gone earlier. It had been surrounded by fire from the ruptured aft aviation spirit tanks. Odd, I can’t remember the explosion or being thrown down. It had been the last straw though; the Graffie was sinking fast by the stern. Z-20 was coming alongside now, it was time to leave.

Overhead, the seagulls circled the dying ships.

Curly Battery B, US Navy 5th Artillery Battalion, Kola Peninsula.

This was the time that the railway guns came into their own. For days, the snowstorm had grounded all the tactical aircraft. The big guns, the U.S. Navy’s 14 and 16-inch weapons, the Russian 12-inch and the German 11- inch took up the burden of supporting the troops. Not that there was much direct support to be done. The same foul weather that grounded the air forces also pretty much froze the ground troops in place. Froze was the operative word, literally and metaphorically. Only the ski patrols had been out, but when the storm was at its height, even those had hunkered down to wait it out. The big units, regiments, divisions, had retreated into their cantonments and stayed put. Perfectly sensible; any sort of serious military operations had been impossible.

“Supporting the ground troops” really meant firing harassment and interdiction missions. A couple of times, they’d been lucky and they’d had a fix on a major enemy position. Then, the three great guns had fired dozens of rounds at the location. Mostly, though, they’d fired single rounds at predicted enemy positions. In other words, wasted ammunition. The German Army wasn’t stupid. They knew what looked like a good cantonment position on the map, knew that the enemy could read maps as well, and avoided likely targets. The same foul weather that grounded the tactical aircraft had also grounded the Rivet Rider communications intercept planes. Mostly they were converted C-47s and their all-weather ability was very limited. That left, Larry, Curly and Moe firing almost blind. Frustrating.

Still, the worst of the storm had passed; the howling blizzard of snow had settled back to a steady fall. The teams who had been trying to keep the railway tracks clear for the guns were on top of the task at last. All was well with the world, or would be sooner or later. Commander James Perdue shuddered slightly at the thought of how long the task might take. He surveyed the mess on his plate. According to the label on the can, it was Dinty Moore’s beef and vegetable stew. Perdue had eaten so much of this particular stew that he was beginning to take a strong dislike to Mister Moore. More particularly, he was taking an even stronger dislike, bordering on hatred, to Mister Moore’s beef stew. The worst part of it was he couldn’t just throw it away. Since the German breakthrough to the White Sea last year, every scrap of food for the armies in the Kola Peninsula was being brought in by convoy from Canada. Wasting food was a court martial offense. Commander James Perdue had already decided that when he got home, he was going to devote the rest of his life to eating chicken.

He’d washed out his mess kit; with all this snow around, water wasn’t in short supply. He was making his way forward to his gun when the alarms went off. That was a measure of just how much the weather had improved. When the storm had been at its height, the radars around the artillery battalion had been useless. This time, they’d picked up the inbound artillery fire. The crews were already trying to locate the guns that were firing. They had to be Schwere Dora, the German 11 inch railway guns. To the west, they were known to the American crews as Petrograd Pete. Long ranged and deadly accurate, they made up for their smaller shells with precision. Perdue dropped all other thoughts and sprinted through the carriages towards the fire control center. He knew he wouldn’t make it, he could hear the express train roar of the inbound shells through the steel of the carriages.

“INBOUND!” The warning yells were all around him. People struggling to get the three guns of the 5th into firing position. To Perdue’s relief, the shells passed overhead. Their explosions were muffled by the ridge behind him. The train shook slightly with the distant impacts, then violently as the locomotive started to move them forward. By the time he reached the fire control center, Curly was moving into its fire position. The tracking radars had already come up with a crude position for the enemy guns. The fire control team had plotted the circle on a map and compared it with the known railway lines in the area. Not many, unless the Germans had built more sidings.