Winter Warriors

burns from the superheated steam had finally penetrated deep enough to sear the nerve endings in Rheinbeck’s skin. He was dying but he didn’t know that. All that he did know was the pain had stopped and he could see the struggling men frantically trying to escape upwards, out of the boiler room that was killing them. He crawled across the deck, leaving glove-like imprints of skin stuck to the steel. He never made it back to the way out. One of four torpedoes that slammed into Gneisenau’s side burst open the torpedo defense system and let a flood of blessedly ice-cold water into the boiler room.

Captain’s Bridge, KMS Gneisenau, High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

Captain Lokken knew that Gneisenau was done for. He’d pulled every trick he knew but it hadn’t been enough. There had been too many Ami jabos. They’d picked him out and concentrated on him. Two torpedoes dead amidships finished the work that the bombs had started, destroying his machinery plant and leaving him dead in the water. The stern was a mess. Another torpedo back there had mangled his screws and rudder. A fourth torpedo plowed into Gneisenau between Anton and Bruno turrets, penetrating the torpedo protection system and forcing him to flood both magazines. That meant everything had gone, machinery, heavy guns, flak batteries; everything that made Gneisenau a warship. It was over.

That applied to more than just Gneisenau alone. This wave of Ami jabos concentrated on the destroyers that had been with the tail of the ‘thirty eights’. The Voughts had come in just above sea level and fired their rockets into the destroyer hulls, slowing them down for the Douglases to finish off with their heavy rockets. Four of the screening destroyers had caught the attack. Two had already gone down, the other pair wouldn’t last long. That, Lokken thought, applied to Gneisenau and Scheer as well. They were being left behind, Scharnhorst was struggling to keep up with Bismarck and Tirpitz despite her torpedo damage. Gneisenau and Scheer were virtually dead in the water.

The two ships weren’t even close enough to support each other. They’d be picked off individually as soon as the Amis decided they were worth making the effort. What really hurt was that the last wave of Ami jabos had got away clean. Oh, a few of them had departed trailing smoke but none had been short down. The earlier wave that had taken out his flak gunners had done all too well.

Lokken looked around. The professional part of his mind told him the truth. The High Seas Fleet was finished. It was all over for them as well. Their formation had been cracked wide open; the two lines of battleships forced apart, then each split further. Derfflinger and Moltke had been hit badly and dropped behind the formation, leaving Seydlitz and von der Tann to try and make their run. Strange how history repeated itself, almost 30 years earlier, those ships had taken part in another death ride against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy fleet.

Lokken stopped himself in sheer shock at his own thoughts. The U.S. Navy hadn’t committed a single battleship to this action. It had never occurred to Lokken before, but he’d never even seen an American warship. They were staying safe, over the horizon, slaughtering their enemy with airstrikes. That made him think of them as being overwhelmingly powerful. The truth dawned on him. His battleship, the battleships, were obsolete, floating targets. The Americans had known it; that’s why they had built their carriers.

Lokken allowed the terrible thought to roll around his mind. What was it the American showman had said? ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ It was a chilling thought. This battle was showing them applying that as a strategic principle. If it was possible to destroy an enemy without risk to themselves, that’s what they’d do. The Fuhrer had cursed the Americans as businessmen but Lokken suddenly realized that was exactly correct. They treat war as a business problem. Minimize expenditure, maximize profits. Minimize risk, maximize gains.

The insight suddenly told Lokken the truth. The Americans would be back to finish off Gneisenau. They would do it with aircraft and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Gneisenau was sinking, slowly but inevitably. There was nothing he could do to stop that either. That left only one order to give.

“We will abandon ship. Order the men to prepare rafts. They must stay out of the water or they will freeze. They will use whatever they can find but we must get off this ship.”

Lokken looked across the sea again, at the remaining 38s, disappearing off to the North. And at the dark blue cloud that was descending on them.

Admiral’s Bridge, USS Gettysburg CVB-43, Flagship Task Force 58

“Admiral, Sir. Reports are in from Formation Easy. Formation Fox is starting its attack now.”

“How long to dusk?”

The aide blinked. “Three hours, Sir. Twilight about another half on top of that. Formation Easy, Sir?”

“Yes, yes.”

“They hit the left hand column of battleships, Sir. They’re reporting the loss of five aircraft. Claim seven torpedo hits; four on one battleship, three on the one following it. The Mames scored big Admiral. They’re claiming more than six hits on one battleship, four on another and three on a third. Strike leader reports the German formation has broken up. Sir; they’re scattered, at least four big ships are dead in the water and at least two of those are foundering. Only two battleships and a cruiser are left moving. They’ve split away from the main formation and are heading for us still, with five destroyers as screen. Formation Fox is hitting them now, Admiral.”

“Formation Fox.” Wild Bill Halsey ran the figures through his mind. Four squadrons of Corsairs for flak suppression, two squadrons of Adies with two torpedoes each, two squadrons of Mames with three 2,000 pound rocket bombs per plane. This was TG58.2s heavy punch. The one that he was swinging at the last combat-effective German ships.

AD-1 Skyraider Yellow Rose Seventh Wave, Over the High Seas Fleet, North Atlantic

Yellow Rose was straining her engine to keep up with the rest of the formation. It wasn’t that her performance was sub-standard, her R-3350 engine was behaving above and beyond specifications. It was that she was carrying three torpedoes, not two like her sisters. Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush had promised that he was going to get himself a battleship and that was what he planned to do. He’d started by bribing and blackmailing his crew chief into hanging the extra torpedo under his aircraft. It hadn’t been hard. The crew chief came from Texas. That and a few appeals to state honor combined with a gentle reminder that the Bush family looked after its own had been enough. Overloaded, he’d been running his engine on the redline all the way to the German fleet.

The battleships were in front of them now. A pall of black smoke from the flak suppression runs hid their superstructures. Six Corsairs had gone down in those attacks but their napalm and rockets had butchered the German anti-aircraft gunners. The red beads of tracer were still coming up, but only a small fraction of the fire they’d been prepared for. Bush took the throttles back from their maximum position and felt Yellow Rose slow down. The other Skyraiders were going in fast, pulling ahead of him. That reduced their exposure to the flak guns but their torpedoes had a greater chance of breaking up or sinking when they hit the water. At least one of the torpedoes broached surface and sank but his eyes were fastened on the center of the lead German battleship. Right between its two funnels.

He was falling further behind by the second and Bush suddenly realized that he felt lonely, flying straight at the gray giant while the other members of his squadron had passed over it and were already heading home. He counted the columns of water erupting along the side of his target; three widely spaced and then two very close together. The first three were beautifully placed, one under each of the forward turrets and the third under the rearmost mount. All purely by chance, it was hard enough to hit a ship with a torpedo. Placing a torpedo exactly was too much to expect. The last two hits were almost beside each other, under the aft funnel. That had to hurt.

Bush was suddenly aware that there were lights flashing round his cockpit. A German quad twenty crew had either escaped the carnage or their gun had been manned by some replacements. There was no time for distraction. He slowed down a little more, nestled closer to the water and hunched down in his seat. A