John Schettler - Turning Point

Damn, thought Falkenrath. We’re an aircraft carrier. That’s how we scout, and how we fight, and the fact that I have kept these planes below deck is the reason Ermland is burning out there now. If Ritter had been up there we would have seen those damn cruisers long ago and taken evasive action. Now here he is, ready to attempt this impossible launch operation, and saved Ermland at the same time. Yet it is either that or my falcons sit below decks while I turn and try to fight off those two cruisers with the forward deck guns. One good hit to our flight deck and Ritter’s proposal would be off the table. It’s now or never. Decide!

“How long would it take you to get armed and fueled for takeoff?”

“I ordered that last night. We’re ready to go now.”

“You had planes below deck armed and fueled all night? What if that damn British submarine had put a torpedo into us?”

“What if? That horse never won a race, Kapitan, but I’m telling you I can win this one now. I can get those planes up, and we can damn well get after those British cruisers, weather or no weather.”

He gave Ritter a stern look, his eyes expressing both his admiration and the anxiety inherent in what he was now ordering. “Go,” he said. “But I do not think you can even contemplate trying to return to this ship. You’ll have to run for the coast.”

Ritter smiled, nodding as he turned and hastened away. “Your worries are over, Kapitan. My boys will do the job. You’ll see.”

It was no idle boast. These were some of the best pilots in the Luftwaffe, Ritter, Heilich, Hafner, Brendel, Ehrler, and Hans Rudel, all itching to get off that ship and up into those grey skies. That flight would be the first to go, three Messerschmitts and three Stukas . The flight deck was a wild place, but the ship came into a very stiff wind and it was going to provide the planes with a good deal of lift. Ritter insisted he be the first, grilling the flight deck crews on how to hold his plane cabled while he revved up to full power. We should have a catapult installed, he thought, but they didn’t, and so he would do this the old fashioned way, with one plane spotted and launched at a time to make maximum use of the available flight deck. They timed the takeoff attempt right when the Goeben was tipping over the crest of a high swell and heading down into the trough.

When the flagman waved him off, the roar of his plane’s engines was loud in his ears. The Messerschmitt went careening down the pitching flight deck, until it fell away beneath the fighter, and Ritter gunned his engine for all it was worth. He was airborne, climbing up and over the next high ocean swell, and even waving his wing tips with glee.

There were no bombs on his fighter, but he had plenty of MG ammunition, and his cannons, and he was damn well going to use them to give those two cruisers a piece of his mind. Even as he banked to make his first turn, he saw the sea erupt well in front of the Goeben with the telltale splash of heavy shellfall.

Minutes later he was over the enemy ships and into a screaming strafing run, which caught the AA crews by surprise. He riddled the forward deck of the lead ship, seeing his rounds snap off the armored main gun turrets, but as he did so he was surprised by the configuration, a quad forward turret with a twin gun mount above and behind, just like the King George V series. Battleships! Should he radio Falkenrath that information? While Kapitan Heinrich had already solved the riddle on Kaiser Wilhelm , word never filtered down to Ritter on the ready deck where he huddled with the flight crews. If he told Falkenrath he was up against a pair of battleships, he would certainly run, but that was what he was going to do in any case, as soon as the last plane made it off the flight deck.

He pulled up, elated with his attack, his blood up, and seeing Heilich and Hafner coming in to make the same strafing run. The skies were pocked with AA gunfire now as the enemy ships fired. Then he saw the first Stuka laboring up from the Goeben off in the distance.

“Is that you Hans?”

“One and the same,” came Rudel in his headset ear phone.

“Well take your pick, another pair of battleships for you to send to the dry docks.”

“Dry docks? I’ll put the damn things right under the sea! But those aren’t battleships, they aren’t fat enough. They have to be those new enemy cruisers. No matter, I’ll get busy here in just a moment.”

That was a boast Rudel would not be able to make good on this time, though he would try his best. He had only one 250kg bomb amidships, his wings being laden with those two 300 liter drop tanks. Up he went, climbing to at least 5000 feet to line up on the targets ahead with his flaps and elevator at cruise position. Then he tripped his rudder to cruise, put the contact altimeter in the ON position and set it to his desired release altitude of 1500 feet. He put the supercharger on automatic, closed his throttle, shut his cooler flaps and opened his dive brakes. That sent his nose down at once, and he was into that screaming 600kph dive in to the target, the Jericho trumpets wailing with his approach.

His single bomb was away, but he held on, refusing to toggle the knob on his control column that would trigger the automatic pull out from that six G dive in the event he blacked out. He grunted and swore, and then did something that shocked Ritter when he saw it. Rudel released both his 300 liter drop tanks, intending to jettison them just as if they were wing mounted bombs, adding fuel to the fire he was certain he was going to start amidships on the lead ship in that formation.

His 250 KG bomb was right on target, coming down behind the aft stack on Sir Lancelot . Then the two fuel tanks came in right after, with one striking the ship and exploding in a broiling mass of fire when it did. The second was a near miss, but one was enough. Sandy Sanford was going to have a very bad day.

Whenthe long overdue Soviet counterattack finally came it was still a great shock to the Germans. They had been huddling in the charred and broken remnants of Moscow, controlling two thirds of the massive city, which then settled into a nightmarish quagmire of fighting from cellars and sewer lines to rooftops and attics, block by block. And as Russia stretched on for thousands of kilometers, the city never seemed to end. It became work for small assault teams, engineers, snipers, with the entirety of the war being reduced to small and bitter contests over a particular house or building that promised decent shelter, a commanding view of some important intersection, or fresh furniture that could be used for firewood. Through it all, one of the coldest winters in a hundred years had descended over the land, and it would stay that way for longer than any realized.

From Moscow the lines stretched west to the Baltic and south to the line of the Don, and the German assault sat frozen in Fahrenheit temperatures that often reached 30 to 50 degrees below zero. On January 26th it reached 63 degrees below. It was so cold that the oil froze in the Panzers, and to even start the tanks, the crews had to kindle fires beneath them to warm the engines. Needless to say, that was not going to make those units capable of any rapid reaction to an enemy attack. At other times, field mice found their way into the vehicles, and chewed on electrical cables and rubber hoses, rendering them unusable.

In places, the major roads would become impassible unless plowed, which ended up creating huge snow berms on either side that would harden to near ice, restricting any lateral movement. Vehicles broke down, and the sluggish supply deliveries saw no spare parts readily available. So other vehicles were cannibalized to keep some still running, and the landscape was soon haunted by the derelict trucks, tanks and prime movers that were now good for little more than shelter from the wind for nearby troops. In some cases, the men used working prime movers to haul these abandoned vehicles into metal laagers, and set up small encampments within. Everyone wanted to be the lucky ones who could spend the long cold nights inside a truck cabin, and small fire lit beneath the trucks kept water heated in the radiators, which the men used for many purposes.