Stuart Slade: Winter Warriors

“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.”

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 Implacable. She’d already been launched when the British Fleet ran away to Canada. Too incomplete to join them, she’d been scuttled at her shipyard. Her sister ship, HMS Indefatigable, had still been on her building slip and the British had done a very thorough job of blowing her up.

Still, between the two wrecks, there had been enough salvaged to complete the Implacable a few months ago. On paper. In fact, everything imaginable was wrong with the ship and the British shipyard workers had managed to devise ‘construction errors’ that no sane person could have dreamed up. There wasn’t a watertight door on the ship that fitted properly; they were all twisted just that little bit out of true. The cable runs led through the “watertight” bulkheads and the “seals” were constantly dripping. The gearing for the main turbines created dreadful vibration at cruising speed, enough to break glass and cause the engine room gauges to become unreadable. The officer’s latrines, now they were a masterpiece. They worked fine as long as the hatch was left open but if somebody absently-mindedly closed it, the unfortunate occupant couldn’t get out until somebody rescued him. The mess decks were beyond description. It wasn’t just the smell although the stench of rotting herring permeated the entire ship. It was that even the paint scheme seemed deliberately designed to induce nausea and heartburn.

Three carriers, between them had 106 aircraft. Barely more than a single Essex class. Their aircraft, they were a hasty adaptation of whatever could be found for them Their fighters weren’t too bad, Ta-152Fs, hurried modifications of the Ta-152C. A lot better than the converted Me-109s originally planned. The Zeppelin had twelve, the Boelcke ten, the Voss had twenty four. It was the strike aircraft that were the problem. Despite frantic efforts, nobody had found anything better that could fly off a carrier than the aged Ju-87Es. They served as both dive and torpedo bombers, the Zeppelin carried twenty, the Boelcke ten and the Voss thirty. When the fleet put to sea, Lindemann intended to use them primarily as scouts. The Ta-152s would serve as fighter cover for the battleships. Still, the old High Seas Fleet hadn’t had any aircraft carriers at all, so he was ahead of them there.

There was worse trouble in the smaller units of the fleet. The High Seas Fleet had one heavy cruiser squadron, with three ships. Two, Admiral Scheer and Lutzow were awkward hybrids. Their six 28 centimeter guns made them too big for cruisers, too small for battleships. One of the class had already been lost, the British had sunk the Graf Spee down in South America. Lindemann fumed at the memory. Three of their cruisers had shot her up, then that spineless coward Langsdorff had run for port and blown his ship up rather than fight it out. Turning the German Navy into a laughing stock in the process. Both the surviving Panzerschiffe bore the humiliation of that fiasco.