that left the building yards had more anti-aircraft guns than its predecessor. Another odd thing about the German fleet. Perhaps they thought everything should be standard and identical. Just by ze book ja? Bolte thought to himself as he emptied his .50 calibers into the superstructure of the German ship. His eyes took in the details quickly, the 4.1s were in turrets, not the open mounts that had got their crews slaughtered. So, his .50s wouldn’t be taking them out. No matter, he’d done his best. The Corsairs and Skyraiders had better tools to handle them. He flashed in front of the German ship, almost on a level with its bridge, and ran for the clear sky beyond. As he did so, he saw an explosion lighting up the portside of the ship he’d just strafed. A secondary explosion? Just what did I hit with my machine guns?
Admiral’s Bridge, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic “Scheisse.” Admiral Lindemann breathed the word in appalled fascination as the reality of the chart sank in on him. Four waves of Ami aircraft were coming at him. More seemed to be added every few minutes. Raid count, more than 200 aircraft each. Just how many aircraft had the Amis got? More than two thousand, the words sneaked into his mind as his eyes glazed over. He’d heard from the Army and Luftwaffe what happened when the Ami carriers came calling. They swamped the battlefield with their aircraft, they shot up and destroyed anything that was in the area. If anybody tried to move reinforcements in or fly them in from other bases, they’d run into a mincing machine. A dark blue wall of death that swallowed everything thrown against it. He shook himself. That was no way to think. The Amis were people, humans, men. Another treacherous thought spilled into his mind. Men who used steel and machines to fight flesh and blood. Waves and waves of those machines were coming his way and there seemed to be no end to them.
“They’re here Admiral! They’re coming from behind.” Lindemann looked out. Once, when he had been a youngster, he’d heard some of the neighborhood children challenging another to throw stones at a beehive. Lindemann hadn’t known quite why, but he’d turned away and started to run. The challenged boy had thrown the stones causing a cloud of bees to set off in pursuit of their attacker. Lindemann had got away safely, but the boys who’d shouted the challenges had been badly stung. The boy who had so foolishly responded had been stung to death. For the second time in a day, Lindemann wanted to run. He knew that running was the only wise course of action. The American aircraft descending on the rear port quarter of his fleet looked just like that swarm of bees had done.
He’d hoped the first wave would miss him, pass aft of his formation, but they’d turned and slammed into the rear of his group. Good tactics, come in from an unexpected angle. He could see one group of aircraft pulling ahead of the rest. They had to be the jets, using their speed to dodge the worst of the antiaircraft fire. It was working too, most of the bursts were behind them. For a brief second, he thought his gunners were cutting them down. He saw black smoke and flames, but it was only their rockets. They’d seemed to have concentrated on the rearmost three ships of the line; Scheer, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The latter seemed to have been worst hit. Her superstructure almost vanished beneath the rippling mass of explosions. The rockets the Ami jabos carry can’t really hurt an armored ship. They’d have been effective enough against the destroyers but the Ami pilots had ignored them.
“We got two Sir.” The gunnery officer’s voice was subdued and grim. Two out of more than thirty! The dark blue jabos had strafed three of the ‘Thirty Eights’ and were coming for the ‘Forties’. Anti-aircraft fire still largely ineffective, Lindemann noted. The jets were just too fast. One of them was streaming black smoke; dense black smoke from its fuselage that spread even as Lindemann watched.
He won’t be getting back to his carrier, he’ll go down somewhere in the bitterly cold North Atlantic. Then, Lindemann hit the deck as a hail of machine gun fire showered the bridge. The armor plated screens took most of it as the jets swept over. Lindemann chanced another look. The burning jet he’d seen a split second before was huge. In that split second, Lindemann knew that the pilot realized he couldn’t get his jet home and that his chances of surviving the crash were tiny. So, he’d made a different decision.
The FV-3 Shooting Star slammed into the anti-aircraft batteries that lined Derfflinger‘s side at more than 500 miles per hour. The aircraft had fired its rockets and machine gun ammunition. It didn’t matter, the sheer kinetic energy and more than 50 percent fuel load in the jet made for a devastating impact. Lindemann felt his flagship reel under the impact and saw the explosion of fire amidships. That was bad, his anti-aircraft firepower had been cut badly and the column of smoke from the flames would attract more aircraft in to hammer the wounded prey. Then, he looked through his binoculars. His wasn’t the only ship that had problems with fire.
F4U-4 Corsair Spider’s Web First Wave, Over the High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic. Lieutenant David Earnest Webb had his R-2800 engine pushed well into the red zone. War emergency power it was called and he guessed this classified as an emergency. He was wrecking his engine and he knew it. What the heck, the Navy wasn’t short of R-2800s. He couldn’t catch up with the FV-3s that had gone ahead, but that didn’t matter too much. By the ripples of explosions that had covered the three ships at the rear of the formation, they’d done a good job of drawing the enemy’s fangs. Or so Webb hoped. The flak coming up still looked terrifying.
He had something terrifying under his belly for the Germans. The whole point of the early strikes was to kill the German flak crews. That would leave the ships defenseless against the heavily-laden Adies and Mames that were following the fighter-bombers. They, in turn were trying to break up the German formation with their torpedoes so that the ships would be on their own against the Navy fighter-bombers. The later waves could send them to the bottom at leisure. Break the formation, that had to be the key. To do that they had to kill the flak gunners. That was why Webb’s Corsair was loaded the way it was. He carried the usual eight five inch rockets under the outer wing panels.
Under the inner panels, where the cranked wing sloped sharply upwards into the fuselage, nestled two 150 gallon tanks of one weapon the Germans hated above all others. Napalm. It had never been used against ships before. There was always a first time for everything.
Three ships had been hit by rocket fire. Their anti-aircraft concentrations were spotty at best, reduced to just a few streams of fire from areas the rockets had missed. Webb held his own rockets; he had another target in mind for them. In any case, the orders for the napalm runs were very clear. Come in from the stern of the ship, along its length. Drop so the tanks bounce along the superstructure not over the side and into the sea. Those orders put his best line in the middle of the three ships that had been softened up. Streams of fire from the ships arced up at him from both sides. He was passing ahead of one, behind another. Time to turn. He pulled the nose around. Sure enough, he lined up just about right. The twin turret was ahead of him, the smashed wreck of a 4.1 inch twin mount above it.
Just perfect. He lifted the nose a little, then squeezed the release. The tanks under his belly wobbled clear. They arced down, tumbling end-over-end on the short trip between Spider’s Web and the German battleship. They hit, burst and engulfed the hangar on the German ship in a rolling ball of orange and black fire. The napalm didn’t spread the way it did on land. The ship was a mass of obstructions that trapped the jellied gasoline into pools. Instead they saturated their area of impact. The flames ran down the decks as the sticky gel adhered to everything and everybody in its way. Webb’s first tanks had set the area around the aft mast ablaze., The tripod stuck out of the inferno that had erupted around its roots. The other Corsairs flashed past, adding their tanks to the blaze.
By the time the first squadron had completed their runs, the whole aft of the superstructure was a mass of flame. Secondary explosions marked the site of the anti-aircraft guns as their ready-use ammunition cooked off. Later pilots found their aircraft bouncing round from the turbulence of the fires so the more thoughtful Corsair pilots held their drops and placed their tanks further forward. As a result, fires spread forward to engulf the bridge and forward guns. One Corsair had the bad luck to be making its run when the torpedo tubes on the Gneisenau exploded. The blast flipped the aircraft out of control, so that it collided with the battleship’s funnel. Its fuel and munitions exploding were barely noticeable in the holocaust swallowing the Gneisenau.
That didn’t worry Webb. In fact he would never know what had happened to the Corsair pilot. Different
