trouble, listing and slowing down. Scharnhorst was also slowing but she seemed far less hurt. Lokken guessed it was the hit forward more than anything else. Gneisenau seemed unaffected by the blow she had taken. Lokken didn’t need the damage control report to tell him what he already knew. The torpedo defense system had taken the hit, the damage was superficial at most. Just some minor leakage inboard. He took the opportunity to look around. Derfflinger hit and burning. And another blue cloud just about to descend, this time on the head of the formation.
FV-3 Shooting Star Sweet Chariot, Second Wave, Over the High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic Reprisal and Oriskany had just rejoined the fleet after a major refit. They had the latest radars, the new 3 inch L50 anti-aircraft guns in place of the quad forties, the lengthened bow and an improved island. They also had new airgroups with the least experienced pilots in the Fifth Fleet. They hadn’t even flown their first strike over France or the U.K. yet. That was why nobody had asked them to do anything clever. They had simply been steered straight at the German squadron. As a result, they were hitting it head-on.
Lieutenant Commander Bob Price knew his job. He had to assess the enemy squadron while streaking in to do the flak suppression run, then assign his aircraft to the most valuable targets. It had been a lot to do when the strike leader had ridden on an Avenger with three crew members on board. Asking a single pilot to do it while flying a Shooting Star jet fighter was placing too great a load even on an experienced man. Experienced, Bob Price was not. Well trained, talented, skilled yes, but he was asked to do a job that was way beyond him.
And yet he tried hard. It didn’t help that the Germans had built their Hipper class heavy cruisers to the same general plans as their battleships. From dead ahead, telling the difference between the ships was a matter of judging size. To those who sat in armchairs and sermonized on the minute differences between classes, distinguishing between a heavy cruiser and a battleship was easy. So much so that failing to do so was a matter of derision. For a young, inexperienced pilot moving at over 500 miles per hour through an intense anti-aircraft barrage, it wasn’t such a sinecure. Nor did it help that the American ship recognition instructors had hammered home the lesson. Twin turrets meant battleships, triple turrets meant cruisers. Price saw the shape, saw the twin turrets and his mind said battleship. He saw the single ship leading both columns of battleships and made a simple, honest, decision. That ship must be the flagship. An admiral always lead his fleet didn’t he?
“All aircraft concentrate on the lead ship.” The order sounded authoritative, crisp and sharp, exactly the way an order should sound. As a result, 32 FV-3 Shooting Stars and more than 60 F4U-4 Corsairs converged on the heavy cruiser Hipper. Behind them, the Adies swept down on the hapless cruiser.
Admiral’s Bridge, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic Once, when he’d been in Austria, Lindemann had seen an avalanche engulf part of a small village. The memory raised an urgent question in his mind, just what in hell did the Amis have against the poor old Hipper? Lindemann asked himself the question in appalled amazement as he watched the tide of Ami jabos sweep down on the heavy cruiser. Had she done something to personally offend the Ami Admiral? Was there a special order out that the Hipper was to be sunk at all costs? Did they know something about the Hipper that I don’t? Throwing more than a hundred aircraft at a single 20 centimeter cruiser seemed very excessive somehow.
Lindemann winced as the victim of the onslaught seemed to vanish under the rippling blaze of rockets from the jets that lead the assault. Attacking from the front like that had its costs though. Five of the Ami jets went down to the fleet’s concentrated anti-aircraft fire. Two of them exploded in mid air as 105mm shells scored direct hits. By coming in from the front like that they were running straight into a crossfire from the two lines of battleships.
Derfflinger’s steel armor rang with the ricochets of the .50 caliber machinegun fire that hosed down her decks. The ship’s center section was beginning to look like a slaughterhouse. Blood from the flak gunners ran down the deck and mixed with the soot from the fire caused by the crashed jet. It was odd, Lindemann had expected to see the burned out tail of the aircraft sticking out of the superstructure when the fires cleared but there was nothing. The sheer force of the impact had smashed the jet to fragments.
He swung his binoculars back to Hipper. Her flak guns were silent. She was burning from the Anton turret back to her stern where the infernal jellygas was soaking her. Lindemann had the reports from Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to confirm jellygas wasn’t a ship-killer the way torpedoes and armor piercing bombs were. In fact it did very little damage at all to the ship since the fires were superficial and didn’t bite deep. But the word from Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was that jellygas massacred the flak gunners and left the victim defenseless against the aircraft that did carry the ship-killers. Lindemann got the impression though that the pilots in this wave lacked the deadly precision of those in the first group. A lot of the rockets and jellygas tanks had missed completely, He watched two clumsily-dropped jellygas tanks bounce off the ship before exploding harmlessly in the sea alongside her.
By the time that had registered, the bent-wing jabos had passed over Hipper. They left her blazing in their wake. Their course took them through the deadly crossfire from the battleships and over Moltke. The same infernal ripple of rockets swathed her superstructure and her flak guns faltered. Still, four of the bent-wing bastards, Lindemann was surprised at how much venom was in his description, had crashed, their wreckage staining the sea.
It was the Ami torpedo bombers that suffered worst. Slow and lumbering, they were easy prey for German gunners who took the opportunity to exact revenge for the hellish jellygas. They got the bombers in their gunsights early as the torpedo planes closed on Hipper. The cheers grew as the score mounted and redoubled when it reached double figures. Twelve out of thirty plus torpedo planes had been sent into the sea by the time the survivors got to drop on Hipper.
Lindemann recognized the perfectly-executed hammerhead torpedo attack. Even with her decks saturated with fire, Hipper swung hard to port. She was trying to dodge the torpedoes closing on her but it was hopeless. Lindemann knew that and grimly counted the long columns of water shooting up from the ship’s side. Six in all, four to starboard, two to port, far more than a heavy cruiser could be expected to take. One torpedo struck right forward and ripped the bows off. Another struck under Bruno turret, a third under the bridge, two on opposite sides of the ship in the engine rooms, the last right aft in the screws. The effects were almost immediate. She started to roll over, the big cruiser slipped onto her beam ends, exposing the two great holes ripped in her port side. Even if she’d stayed afloat, she wouldn’t have been going anywhere. Her screws and rudders were tangled wreckage, her stern almost severed from the ship.
Lindemann swung his binoculars around, looking for survivors in the water. How men could have saved themselves through decks coated with jellygas he did not know. The he saw something he had missed when he’d been concentrating on the fate of the poor
Hipper, Z-31 and Z-39 were going down fast, their sides ripped open by the big rockets the Ami Douglases carried as a secondary weapon. The torpedo planes that had survived the hammerhead attack had been almost perfectly placed for a rocket attack on the destroyers and they’d done their deed well. It was then that the significance of the second attack overwhelmed him.
The American tactics were brilliant, simply brilliant. Their first wave had focused on the rear of the formation. They’d chewed up the ‘thirty eights’ and damaged the ships. They’d forced them to slow down and hindered their movements with damage. The second wave had been their youngest, least experienced men. They’d been given the easiest attack runs, straight at the head of the fleet, but also the most dangerous. Brilliant and ruthless, the Amis had thrown the pilots they’d miss least into that deathly dangerous run right into the crossfire. By blasting Hipper and her screen, they’d created a mass of sinking ships in front of the battleships. The ‘thirty eights’ were swinging to port and the ‘forties’ to starboard in order to avoid the wrecks. The Americans had sacrificed their youngest pilots but they’d pried apart the German formation. The two lines of battleships were no longer mutually supporting. Now they would have to fight on their own.
Brilliant, simply brilliant tactics. The American Carrier Admiral, was it Halsey or Spruance, was a genius. Time to be encouraging and put on a brave face. “Two waves gone, only two left. And they have only sunk the Hipper. Soon, we’ll have them under our guns.” No need
