steel coffin, was gone. But her tanks were half full of oil. If he blew her up, that oil would wreck the fishing ground on which these people depended. They’d risked their lives in the freezing water to save his men; he couldn’t repay them by coating their island with a scum of fuel oil. He reached carefully down, disconnected the detonator and disarmed the scuttling system.
Back on deck, he dropped down into a fishing vessel, the one who had come out to meet them. Its Captain was staring at him.
“It is all right, Captain.” Becker spoke slowly. “The ship will not explode. Her tanks are half full of fuel oil; if your people can get it out, it is yours.”
The fisherman nodded and took his boat in, Becker marvelled at the skill with which the sailing ship was handled so close in. When its bow touched sand, he jumped off, involuntarily yelping at the coldness of the water that came up to his knees. Then, another fisherman grabbed him and pulled him out of the water on to the beach.
“There is somebody you must meet.”
The fishermen lead him to another figure. He wore a khaki uniform with an odd, boat-shaped cap without a peak, made of wool with a button on top and ribbons hanging down behind. The man turned around and Becker saw the Union Jack flash on his shoulder. “Colonel Ian Stewart 2nd Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Free British Army.”
“Captain Martin Becker, German Navy Ship
“Captain Becker, I must advise you that you and your men are prisoners of war. However, due to the peculiar circumstances that prevail here, I will offer your men parole. There are no facilities to keep prisoners on this island and I would not wish to keep you all locked up in your destroyer.”
“You have our parole. I will order my men to cooperate. Colonel, my ship’s fuel tanks contain oil these Islanders will find valuable, I promised to them. You will honor my promise? They deserve much more than a few gallons of oil but we have little else to give.”
“Of course.” Stewart waved and men on the hills stood up. They had Bren guns and Becker realized just how easily this beach could have been turned into a bloodbath. “We will send you out when our supply ships arrive. There are too many of you to go out in one trip but we will get you all to Canada in time.”
“Supply ship?”
“Of course. We’ve been occupying these Islands for more than two years now. We have a supply run set up. Fast minelayer out of Churchill.
Becker nodded. He had no idea the Faeroe Islands had any garrison, let alone a British one. The he started to laugh; more a result of released stress than anything else. Stewart looked puzzled. “Colonel, when we were trying to get here, we thought that a wrecked cruiser and a shot-up destroyer would at least be a start for a Faeroe Islands Navy. Now we find they have an Army as well. And at the rate the world is killing itself, soon they will be a world power of great importance.
Stewart joined the laughter. “Aye, that they could. And they’re good people here. The world could do worse than them.” Then he looked at Becker. “It was bad out there?”
Becker shuddered at the memory. “The Amis, they never stopped coming. One wave of jabos after another. They just battered our ships to death. Even when they were dead in the water, they kept on until they sank. How we survived I shall never know.”
The guards outside the door could hear the screaming even through the thick wooden paneling. Screams of rage and fury that went on and on without break or interruption. Eventually, the doors opened. A white-faced figure in an Admiral’s uniform left, shaking with rage. His aide rushed up to him, only to be pushed away.
“Don’t touch me I have leprosy. So has the whole Navy. You would be well advised to find another uniform to wear.”
“Sir?”
Admiral Karl Doenitz looked across at the young officer. “The Navy is a waste of time and resources. We have never done what the Fuhrer wants. We have never fulfilled even his lowest expectations. Every promise we have made has been broken. Our U-boats failed in 1942 and even our Type XXIs have failed to cut the Atlantic convoys. The S-boats failed to command the Baltic. We cannot even destroy a single convoy when using the entire battlefleet. How many tanks could we have built with the steel squandered on those ships? How many aircraft could fly with their engines? Where could we have gone with the fuel they burned. So asks our Fuhrer.
“If the Navy had failed him once or twice, those might be the fortunes of war. But the Navy has failed him every time and that means it is staffed by traitors. So says our Fuhrer. It is not worth keeping, it is a failure. So concludes our Fuhrer. The remaining ships are to be scrapped, all of them. So orders our Fuhrer.”
“All of the ships Admiral, even the sub….”
“All of our ships, so commands our Fuhrer. We are to scrap them all.” Doenitz looked quickly around. “The Fuhrer certainly means to include the submarines in that list but we know that submarines are not ships. In a few days, a week of two, somebody will ask that question and the Fuhrer will have calmed down enough to give an answer that will save the submarines. A few of them anyway. The missile launchers certainly, perhaps some of the rest. But the Navy is gone. Not that there are many ships left to scrap.”
The aide ran through the list of ships left after the disastrous sortie. A single old cruiser, three or four destroyers, a dozen or more torpedo boats, a lot of smaller ships. What about the minesweepers? The way the Amis were laying mines off France and around the UK, decommissioning the minesweepers would bring coastal shipping to a complete halt.
“What about the minesweepers, Admiral? If they are laid up?”
“Then we will soon be unable to move supplies by sea. I know. But the Fuhrer has given his orders and they are not to be questioned. Young man, if you can find another place for yourself, I would do so. The Navy is not a place for a young man with ambition anymore.”
“Admiral, you must come with us.” Two men, SS officers had appeared. Doenitz squared his shoulders and turned to go with them. His death wasn’t inevitable not yet. He still had a few cards to play. The missile attack submarines, the only weapon Germany had that could strike at the mainland USA, was one. The minesweepers that the Army needed desperately was another. He could play those to save his life. Others too. But he was too much of a realist to believe that his hand was strong. As a desperation play, he had a chance. No more than that. But his precious Navy had none. What the Amis hadn’t sunk with their carriers was doomed by the orders of the man who ran the country. A man who was completely insane. If Doenitz had ever doubted that matter, the display in the conference room a few minutes ago had shattered those doubts.
“Wait outside.” The voice was not one Doenitz had expected. Hermann Goering was sitting in the office. He’d been weaned off morphine over the last year and looked a world better as a result. After crashing to the bottom and losing most of his influence in the middle of the war, he was now, slowly and painfully, rebuilding his position. The two SS men left.
“Well Karl, your Navy really screwed up, didn’t it?”
Doenitz looked at him “If we’d had more planes, proper carriers….”
“You’d still have lost. My people think the Amis had almost three thousand aircraft on those carriers. They’d have swamped anything we could have put up. Anyway, that’s what we’re going to be discussing you and I. All about carrier warfare and how our aircraft performed at sea. We’ll keep on discussing it until the Fuhrer has calmed down and your neck is not due to be stretched by a piano-wire noose any more. Then we’ll edge you back into, well, not favor but tolerance..”
Goering settled back in his seat. He had acquired another ally. That meant one additional piece in his plan to re-establish his authority was back in play.
The main wheels touched the runway with the usual heavy thud. The C-99 wasn’t like a normal aircraft. It was much more like a ship in the way it wallowed through the air. It was also unresponsive. The aircraft made little attempt to follow its pilot’s instructions and fine adjustments were hard to achieve. That was why the landing run started a long way out; the aircraft had to be lined up perfectly before it got too close to the ground. More than one C-99 had been lost because the pilot had made an abrupt change in angle too late and a wingtip had dug into the ground. Flying a C-99 was an art form, one that took practice to perfect. That was why a growing trend in the C-99
