Keynes' Cruisers Volume 2

[fester]

Haarlam, Netherlands, March 14, 1943

No one should be corpulent. At least no native citizen of the Netherlands. A few fat Germans should be expected but rations had been tight since the conquest of their country three years ago, and rumors had it that rations would be even tighter going forward. Dutch exports to Germany had increased even as total production had fallen; the young men who usually worked the fields were now in German mines and fields instead of the polders.

The young woman, her bright red hair hidden under a brown wool cap, leaned against her bicycle. A rough gray skirt kept her legs warm against the ever advancing damp cold. She ducked her head as a still rotund Dutchman waddled past her. As he passed, he slapped her ass, taking his pleasure by his right. She could do nothing at the moment. She could only grunt and take a step forward. At least no one else was walking with that walrus.

A moment later, she got on her bicycle and started to peddle down the lane. The target was confirmed. Soon another member of the cell, her younger sister, would bait the target with the easiest and most reliable bait possible. They knew that he liked his women young and this play had been successful more than once. A few hours later, the body would be disposed of in a canal, heavily weighed down with rocks and all identifying items taken off of him.

No one had ever suspected a few pretty, slight, girls of being killers. That would not change today.

 

[fester]

Tunisia March 14, 1943

The sky was dark as if a locust swarm had twin engines and advanced navigators. On the ground half a dozen signal lamps were lit and reflectors were posted on the edges of a large field. A small advanced party had landed two hours ago and they had done their job well.

The platoon leader checked his straps one last time. He had checked them as he boarded the plane. His battle buddy had checked them as the loadmaster called for them to line up and hook up. He had checked his battle buddy’s straps and now he was checking them again. Rifle was secured, straps were tight, helmet was on and the sky was bright.

The green light went on. He stepped out into the air and for a half second he floated until he left the jump line. A few smidgens of a free fall to clear the aircraft and to give the rest of the stick space to emerge safely. And then the chute deployed. He was still falling but the decelerating felt like he was being yanked to the clouds. The harness bit into his body as the big chute slowed him down. He took a quick spotting check, there was a light wind coming from right to left and a little bit behind him. An empty part of the field beckoned to him and he twisted his risers slightly to line up his landing. A few seconds above the ground, he brought his knees up and began to brace for impact. He absorbed the shock and rolled on the ground. A canteen fell off his web belt and a rock bruised his shoulder.

A minute later, he was out of his chute and had his rifle in hand. Most of the sticks was already down and moving about. Houlihan was moaning, his ankle was smashed. The nearest two privates were already splinting him up. He would be able to hobble to a medic collection point. Another five minutes and both sticks that made up 1st Platoon of Easy Company had arrived at the rally point. A point team got in front of the platoon and the little group of paratroopers soon began to advance to their objective, a “bridge” two miles away.

 

[fester]

North Atlantic, March 15, 1943


Three hundred miles to the west was another slow convoy. It had over fifty merchant ships and seven close escorts. Intelligence had suggested that there were at least two U-boat packs approaching it. Reinforcements were being organized. A US Coast Guard cutter would join the escort at first light. The main reinforcement was here, slowly picking up speed. The support group consisting of the impromptu carrier HMS Biter, two modern destroyers and three frigates. The six warships had just finished refueling from a fleet auxiliary. The almost empty tanker and a corvette would continue to Halifax while the support group had a seven day cover job ahead of them.


HMS Biter, one of the converted merchant ships made into an escort carrier, had a small air wing at this point of her journey. Two Swordfish had already crashed. A radar operator had been rescued, the rest of the crews either drowned or froze to death in the wintry seas. Five Martlets and eight Swordfish were available. Another Martlet was currently serving as a hanger queen. She was being stripped faster than an efficient waterfront working girl.

As soon as the waves became only deck high instead of deck covering, she turned into the wind and accelerated. A pair of Swordfish took off from her short deck. Within minutes, radars were warmed up and eyes scanned the surface as the support group and the slow convoy closed the distance at twenty miles an hour.

 

[fester]

Orleans, France March 16, 1943


Another pistol shot rang out. Another body slumped to the ground. Another French spy was marched into the courtyard.


The German counterintelligence officer barely noticed the background noise. He licked his fingers before he pulled another file out of the cabinet. The Paris ring investigation was closed. A few loose ends had to be left hanging. There had been a leak somewhere in the transportation divisions but that had been a dead end. There were fifteen suspects who were officially authorized to have the information that had been recovered, and then once the organization had been placed under surveillance, another four or five dozen people including some French clerical staff would have had access to the information that had been discovered on the French courier. There was another leak somewhere in inland waterway transportation and electricity generation sections that he could not discover the leaker either. Re-assignments and tighter operational procedures would probably close the information holes.


He would have preferred a watch and wait operation to roll up the entire ring. But the border guards had screwed up the initiation, so some of the ring had been able to go to ground. It was a reasonably well compartmentalized group. He knew he got the middle layer of transport and organization as well as a few low level direct informants and assets. They were all valuable spies for the French Resistance and their British controllers but he had hit brick walls going up the chain as well as down some limbs.


By mid-afternoon, the Farmer Ring had been eliminated. He now had to work on another set of leaks that seemed to be coming out of Loire Valley barge crews.

 

[fester]

Southern Russia March 17, 1943

The submachine gunner switched magazines. Bullets whizzed by him. One of the grenadiers threw another grenade in the general direction of the rifle shots that sought him out. A moment later, he squeezed the trigger and another half a dozen 9 millimeter rounds slammed into sandbags. One struck the barrel of a rifle dinging and damaging it. Even as the metal ting reverberated, the grenade exploded and the assault squad moved forward. Two Soviet soldiers had been wounded, another four were standing up and firing at the rapidly sprinting Germans. Some had bayonets levelled, while he and another man both emptied their magazines again. One defender was hit, another two went to find cover, no choice was a good choice.


Another grenade exploded, and the German squad was safe so far. Five men jumped into the hasty defensive position. Rifle butts and bayonets were being swung strongly and the attackers used their numbers to find exposed flanks. A few pistol shots rang out and then the submachine gunners and follow-on wave with shotguns cleared. Two wounded German soldiers were quickly bandaged up and sent to the rear. There were no prisoners as more than a panzer regiment pressed forward along the road that was now open for another five miles.

 

[fester]

North Atlantic March 17, 1943


HMCS Trillium sped back up. The ASDIC operator lost contact with a probable submarine. Two dozen depth charges had kept the contact down for the last four hours of darkness. The convoy had not been attacked from this quarter. Three ships were torpedoed overnight. Two were already written off, and the last one was barely able to keep pace with the other slow ships. The escorts had run down the torpedo tracks of the last attack and between depth charging and a Hedgehog attack, they had claimed a kill. Two German sailors were taken prisoner.

The North Atlantic sun was rising. The corvette was rolling worse than the town drunk after payday as waves were picking up. A storm had come off the New England coast and it was beginning to stir up trouble even thousands of miles away. The small warship had twenty miles to run before she could take the backside of the convoy. The escort force would be down a ship for another three hours.

By the time the corvette resumed her station as the last escort on the port side of the convoy, a Labrador based Privateer had flown over her. The big lumbering patrol bomber waggled its wings. It was fast and it was light. All depth charges had been dropped on an unsuspecting surfaced U-boat fifty five miles in front of the convoy. The aircraft was claiming a clean kill. A replacement for the bomber was already airborne and would be overhead after lunch.

Closer to the convoy, a pair of Swordfish and a single rocket armed Martlet fluttered and flittered around the path of advance. HMS Biter was in the center column. She was protected by four rows of merchant ships on each side of her and several ships in front and astern of her. The reinforcements had arrived just before dawn. One Swordfish had already dropped on a waiting submarine. HMS Pathfinder sat atop of the contact while the frigate Berry was setting up another attack.

The convoy continued to steam east north east at a steady eight knots. Flags to zig and zag were sent out randomly. The convoy commander had decided that speed was more important than unpredictability so instead of a turn several times an hour, he kept the convoy closer to its base course with only some variation every hour or so. There were now enough escorts to battle back against any prowling seawolves.


Night was getting close before the next contact. A small 2,500 ton Panamanian tramp freighter blew up. Two destroyers and a corvette sent over one hundred depth charges into the sea before U-638 was crushed by the immense pressure of the lightless water. The battered boat exploded when she went past five hundred feet deep. No one survived. The crew died quickly.


The convoy continued east as the escorts prepared to pass through another patrol and attack line during the night.

 

[fester]

March 18, 1943 Gibraltar


The Dakota landed. It taxied out of the way as another three of its squadron mates were in queue. Fifteen minutes later, passengers had disembarked. One man carried a briefcase full of plans for an invasion that would never be. The rest were carrying plans for invasions that still could come. RAF 512 Squadron had completed its first operational mission. The four aircraft and sixteen aircrew bedded down for the night before a return trip to a staging base near Lands’ End.

 

[fester]

March 18, 1943 Singapore

USS Neville sat heavily in the water. A battalion of Diggers had loaded up over the course of the morning. Other troop ships had most of the men of the 6th Australian Division aboard. Sailors were trying to do their job around the infantrymen who had been shown berthing spaces and the chow halls. A movie projector was whirling in readiness but the mess deck was only half full as the diggers were luxuriating in the almost unlimited hot water showers.

The tug boats made themselves fast to the large transport ship. They pulled her off the pier and soon she was moving under her own power. Eighteen large, fast ships were now assembling underneath the guns of Johor. Half a dozen destroyers and a pair of light cruisers waited for them to emerge from the channel before they started their journey.

 

[fester]

Morocco, March 19, 1943

Recently promoted Lt. Commander Kennedy relaxed as soon as the last engine turned off. Propellors feathered and slowly decelerated. The flight engineer went over the gripe list as the co-pilot confirmed that the aircraft was secured. Five minutes later, he had emerged from the latrine and a cup of good, fresh coffee instead of the bitter coffee that he drank from a flask during the eleven hour patrol was in his hands. They had seen nothing beyond a handful of baleen whales twenty five miles north of the troop convoy.

An hour later, he sighed in relief. Every plane from his squadron, his new responsibility, that had gone up this morning had come back down. Bronco-7 dropped depth charges on a surfaced U-boat eighty miles in front of a convoy. No oil slicks were seen. He would credit the crew with a force down instead of their claimed kill. The other four Privateers had missions similar to his; productively boring.

Tomorrow would be a rest day for the crews that had flown today. The other six bombers of the squadron would take their place over the convoys that were coming to and from Gibraltar.

 

[fester]

Bern, Switzerland, March 19, 1943


An agreement had been reached. The Kingdom of Thailand would surrender. The king would retain his throne and the government would not collapse. This was not an unconditional surrender like that demanded of Germany, Italy and Japan by President Roosevelt. It was a pragmatic surrender.

Two divisions of Australians were already on their way in a rush to Bangkok. The Royal Navy had loaded transports with the lead brigades days ago as the final details were being hammered out. By nightfall, the troop transports were in the Gulf and by the next morning, the first of forty thousand Australians were in the Thai capital. Loyal Thai troops had seized the docks and the coastal defense guns and their new allies or at least new co-belligents were helping them burn out and dig out their former co-belligerents.

 

[fester]

Near Hong Kong, March 20, 1943

HMS Rorqual turned to the southeast. Her screws turned and pushed the suddenly lighter boat forward at four knots. The third and final minefield had been sown. Torpedoes were still in her tubes, but those would be held only for an emergency. She was needed back at Singapore.

 

[fester]

Belfast, March 21, 1943


HMS Unicorn left her birthplace to shake down in warmer waters. Two destroyers were ready to escort the maintenance ship that looked remarkably like an aircraft carrier to Jamaica. Aboard were three squadrons of Seafires and a short squadron of Swordfish. They, too, were new to the fleet. The pilots were mostly new men with a few veterans of Taranto, Crete, Rhodes, Norway, Malaya and Timor providing experience and wisdom.

Six weeks of tropical sun and then the ships would be needed at Gibraltar.

 

[fester]

Near Taranto, Italy March 21, 1943


The almost abandoned naval base was on alert. Radar and sound equipment had picked up over seventy Allied bombers were coming in from over the sea. Their course was unusual. They were too low and they seemed to be edging to the west of the port. There was little there besides fields and vineyards.

Minutes later, the first C-47 loadmaster began pushing out dummies. Each dummy was clothed in US Army green and had several strings of firecrackers on their uniform. Every third dummy had a flare gun with a vial of acid ready to start eating away at the wire holding the trigger in place. Within an hour, a division’s worth of dummies were descending on the Italian countryside. In between the decoys were a dozen men who needed to meet up with cousins and friends from the old country to see if the rumors and intelligence could be true.

 

[fester]

Philadelphia, March 22, 1943


Up and down the river, the war was providing work. The docks were full of ships getting ready to bring supplies of food, supplies of fuel and supplies of shells to the armies preparing to lunge across the sea from the conquered base in Tunisia. Across the river in New Jersey, a convoy was being organized to head from the mouth of the Delaware to Halifax where the ships would join the great conveyor belt across the contested ocean. Upstream, tanks were being assembled and tested before being loaded onto flatbeds to Georgia, Texas, Kentucky and California where the armored divisions and army tank battalions eagerly awaited for a chance to train on the equipment that they would be taking to war.

The Navy Yard was the heart of Philadelphia’s visible contribution to the war. Dozens of destroyers and lighter escorts had already been launched into the river since work picked up in 1938. Three battleships had been ordered. One, USS New Jersey was already working up. Wisconsin was at least a year from being ready to join the fleet. Her hull had not yet touched water. Illinois was mostly a plan instead of a steel reality.

The last two ships would remain plans and hopes and dreams. Work gangs had been ordered off of Illinois. The contract had been terminated. The United States Navy would not need more fast battleships as her enemies had almost no battleships any more much less fast and modern battleships. She would be broken up on the ways and her materials and her construction slip would be used instead for amphibious assault ships. Wisconsin’s work crews had a new task. Get her ready enough to launch into the river and then freeze her construction. She was taking up valuable space and more valuable manpower. By the time there was no hope of a pennant in the city, there would only be half a dozen men assigned to the battleship’s hull. The caretakers would keep the grease thick and the hatches dogged without doing any more than that.

 

[fester]

March 23, 1943 Phulia, Bengal


Everyone was at the market today. Grandmothers were haggling with opponents who had not given them a good deal in forty nine years. Mothers were shrugging their shoulders as they bought Burmese rice. Prices were a tad higher than they were last year but not too much, it was mainly taxes for the war. Their husbands were still in the paddies and fields preparing for the next round of plenty. Now their families were living off the last harvest until the next one was ready.

 

[fester]

Leningrad, March 24, 1943


Tatianna checked her rifle one last time. She glanced at her spotter. She took in the rest of the rifle battalion. They had been on the front line for two weeks. Little beyond normal patrolling and constant vigilance had happened. A fascist company had tried to take an observation post and that evolved into a six hour fire fight. The fascist platoon was able to eventually retreat once half a dozen tanks had arrive.d

She pressed her back up against the wall of the trench complex. Her helmet that she seldom wore was heavy on her head. Someone a few meters down the line started to talk about the relief that he was getting on the next rotation to the rear. She could use some relief too, it had been a while. Suddenly the sound that the entire battalion had been waiting for erupted. Four dozen guns started to fire. Half were firing smoke, the other half were firing high explosive shells at mapped German positions. She got onto her feet and began to jog to the rear. They had been relieved, and now the front was some other battalion’s problem

Two hours later, she had hot soup, dry socks and a soft bed all to herself.

 

[fester]

Palapare, Celebes Dutch East Indies March 25, 1943

The work gangs cheered. The last steel mat was in place. The bomber field had already accepted the first B-17s weeks ago. Then it was a narrow forty eight hundred foot long single strip without hardstands. Now, the main runway was one hundred and sixty feet wide by sixty two hundred feet long. The taxi-way was also capable of launching fully loaded bombers into the sky. Hard stands were available. Mechanics were operating under tents now while the promise of hangers had been made as soon as the next supply convoy arrived.

Even as the tired construction engineers came back from lunch, thirty four bombers out of the thirty six launched entered the landing pattern. The raid on Tarakan seemed to have been successful. By now, the Japanese could mainly oppose the bombers with anti-aircraft guns. Their fighters could seldom get the altitude advantage in time, and when they did, they still needed to go through several squadrons of Mustangs or Lightnings which tagged along with the bombers. Any Oscar pilot that survived the fighters then had to face a wall of steel and lead erupting from the flanks of the bombers. A skilled man could do that once, twice, and even ten times, but each time, the chances of doing it safely decreased as the supporting cast was thinner and less well trained.

 

[fester]

Sydney, Australia March 25, 1943

He watched the healthier men play. He had a dozen scars digging into his chest, his shoulder and his flank. Another few chunks of meat in his thigh were still healing. Tom Jaroshek sat on the bleachers as the Australians who were in the general rehabilitation hospital had taken a bunch of Marines out for a friendly game of rugby. It was different but not too different from football. Maybe the boys in the Mon Valley would play this game once he got home. The docs and the nurses said he had another thirty days in Sydney before they would let him go. After that, men with his wounds either headed to California or Hawaii to take the administrative load off of men who could still fight. He sighed as he wished for a Coke and a pretty girl.

 

[fester]

Palawan, March 26, 1943

Captain Ibling paused. The point man at the head of the column had frozen a moment ago and his hand went up. The eighty men quickly stopped and signalled the man behind him. They all were alert. The birds were still singing and the animals were still scurrying out of the way.

A few minutes later, the point man resumed marching. It was nothing. The Navy pilot who was five steps behind Captain Ibling continued walking to his rescue. An hour later, two rubber boats from USS Growler came ashore in the small cove. The sailors unloaded ammunition, radio batteries and a few crates of medical supplies. They took back into the surf the fighter pilot and a trio of sick guerillas.

 

[fester]

Neville Island, Pennsylvania, March 26, 1943


Another landing ship left the riverine shipyard. It was soon in line behind the Mon Valley barges bringing coal and limestone to the Aliquippa mills. Three hours later, it had descended into another pool along the Ohio River and would make a long journey down the Ohio-Mississippi River complex until it emerged into the Gulf of Mexico. The new Navy crew would eventually pick up a company of tanks for operations in the Mediterranean.


Mrs. Jaroshek did not care. She took her kerchief and wiped the sweat mixed with grime from her eyes. Coffee that had been sitting in the urns for too long had to be quickly drunk before the break whistle called the seam team of rivetters and welders back to work. A new landing ship was being laid down this afternoon and her gang was on it. This would be the fourth ship she would work on from start to finish and by now, her hands knew all the tricks to safely work quickly.