Winter Warriors

Loki started thumbing through the thick file again wondering if those who got the data understood where it came from. Masses of numbers from all over Germany. Mostly from little people who didn’t like what Nazi Germany stood for but were too afraid, either for themselves or their families, to do much about it. That, Loki could understand, he had seen the brutality of the Nazi regime for himself. But, a few economic figures, how many rifle bolts they had produced, how many trains went through a station, what the consist on those trains was, surely that didn’t matter? Loki snorted to himself. Individually, none of it did but put together by talented economists it meant a lot. Not just raw economic data either.

Loki’s spy ring, his Red Orchestra, had assembled a complete performance and design specification dossier on the Type XXI U-boat and got it through to the Americans. It had arrived in time for them to have a test boat, modified from a British S-class submarine, at sea before the first German Type XXI was in service. The Battle of the Atlantic might have looked quite different if it hadn’t been for that coup. “Natural oil production seems steady as well. The Russians did a good job in blowing up their oil fields. Mostly this comes from Romania. Synthetic fuel production is up but not enough, Germany is still running at a net deficit in fuel.” Loki found that satisfying.

“Consumption’s slackened off a bit. The end of the B-29 raids has reduced the amount of fuel the home defenses burned, and that’s been reallocated to the Russian Front. Also the submarine operations have been cut right back in the second and third quarters. You can see how much less fuel is going to the U-boat bases.”

Loki nodded. Fuel was the one German weakness, their one over-riding constraint. They were short of all types of fuel, bunker oil for ships, gasoline for aircraft engines, diesel fuel for armored vehicles, kerosene for jets. They just didn’t have enough. They spent their time shifting what supplies they had around, trying to make do with what they had. That’s what made the distribution of fuel supplies such a marvelous indicator of future operations.

Loki turned to the pages of railway transport data. So simple to obtain, just needed one man to count the wagons in a consist and drop the list in a dead letter box somewhere. Meaningless numbers. One of those who collected the train data had been caught by the Gestapo, but had talked his way out of the arrest. He had claimed that the numbers were his orders for black market goods, so many grams of sugar, so many of sausage. They’d believed him. Who would confess to being a black marketeer when interrogated by the Gestapo unless he was one? They’d beaten him senseless and dumped him in the street as a warning to other black marketeers — and the lists had kept coming.

Loki looked sharply at the train consists again and then at the summary. “Branwen, did you see this?”

“Hmm?”

“The consists of the trains heading east. The fuel shipments going through Kaunas are up 20 percent in the third quarter; those through Minsk and points south are down by the same amount. Kaunas is the rail nexus that supplies the northern end of the front. Especially the area from Petrograd to Archangel. Last time we saw that was second quarter, 1944.”

Branwen flipped through her own file, turning to the trend lines. “First quarter. There was a jump in second quarter as well, but first quarter was the big one. Right before the great Northern offensive, the one that broke through to the White Sea.”

Loki sucked through his teeth. Those had been grim days, the most recent great breakthrough on the Russian Front, the Russian Army sent reeling backwards. Petrograd and the whole Kola Peninsula cut off, Archangel besieged. Archangel still was under siege, still fighting grimly. Were the Germans planning to finish off Archangel? Something wasn’t right, to strip the areas further south of fuel to bring that siege to an end, it seemed disproportionate somehow. Were there other areas being reinforced?

“Branwen, you’ve got the area summaries. Where else is the oil going?”

“Gasoline, kerosene and diesel, are running through Kaunas as you say….” Branwen hesitated for a moment. “Now, that’s odd. Bunker oil for ships, production was up in the second quarter. We noted that but we thought it was just an adjustment to earlier production deficiencies. It’s up this quarter as well. And a lot of it, a whole lot of it, is going to Kiel.”

“German naval base Kiel?” It was, just barely, a question.

“Where else, Loki? Where else would that much bunker oil be going?”

“Power stations?” Loki was playing devil’s advocate and they both knew it. Asking questions they both knew the answers to, just in case.

“Not a chance. Germany generates electricity from coal-fired stations, mostly brown coal from open-cast mines, and hydro from those dams along the Ruhr. Not from oil. The few power stations that used oil converted to coal a long time ago.

“It has to be the ships then. Has to be. With that much bunker oil moving, the Germans have to be planning a major naval movement. Surface navy with these quantities, not submarines.”

“Linked to the northern front?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m a futures trader remember? I’m not the great all-seeing strategist.” Loki was bitter and spiteful, his longstanding hatred of Phillip Stuyvesant dominating his voice. “We’ve got a major shift in fuel supplies to the extreme northern end of the Russian Front and indications of an equally major naval operation impending. Let’s get it all off to Washington. Stuyvesant can make sense of it. We’ve done our job; let him do his for a change.”

Admiral’s Cabin, KMS Derfflinger, Flagship, High Seas Fleet, Kiel, Germany

His ships had more fuel in their tanks now than at any time since 1939. Further shipments arrived every day. After years of existing on fuel delivered by an eyedropper, they now had as much as they needed and more. That made Admiral Ernst Lindemann a very happy man. For the first time since it had adopted that honored name in 1944, the High Seas Fleet was actually capable of putting to sea.

In numbers, this High Seas Fleet didn’t compare, with the battle fleet of World War One. In fighting power, that was hard to say. Certainly the old fleet had nothing to compare with the four 55,000 ton battleships of the First Division. The 40.6 centimeter gunned Derfflinger, von der Tann, Seydlitz and Moltke were the most powerful battleships in the world. Not even the American Iowas could compare with them. Their main guns had given the First Division its nickname, “the Forties”, just as the Second Division had been given its nickname, ‘the Thirty-Eights” from its 38-centimeter main guns. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck and Tirpitz were very much the second division. Their status was not helped by the fact that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had only six guns each. The eight battleships still represented an awesome force, even if they had yet to fire their gun against an enemy ship. Well, technically, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had, but that was before they had been rearmed with their new 38 centimeter guns.

Lindemann knew that the Americans believed the day of the battleship was done; that the lumbering gun- ships couldn’t stand up to the concentrated aircraft striking power of fleet carriers. That was why they had ended their production of battleships with the Iowas. Now, they were building carriers as fast as their yards could turn them out, and that was terrifyingly fast. The Americans had already built twenty four Essex class carriers, each with a hundred aircraft. There were rumors of an even bigger class joining the fleet.

Lindemann believed they had made a catastrophic blunder in listening to their air power advocates. Aircraft were all very well, but they couldn’t replace the sheer battering power of a ship’s heavy guns. Aircraft couldn’t fly in very bad weather and bad weather in the North Atlantic was the rule rather than the exception. Lindemann looked forward to the day when he could get the American carriers under the guns of his battleships, just like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had once got the British carrier Glorious under their guns.

He desperately hoped the Americans had got it wrong. If they hadn’t, Germany had and the new High Seas Fleet was an obsolete anachronism. It had only three carriers; none were close to the size and capability of the American ships. Graf Zeppelin and Oswald Boelcke were German-built, weird, ungainly designs with a heavy, useless, low-angle gun armament. Graf Zeppelin had 32 aircraft, Oswald Boelcke a mere 20. The third was the Werner Voss. On paper she was a better carrier, certainly she looked better. Appearances were deceiving, for the Werner Voss had started life as HMS