Keynes' Cruisers Volume 2

[fester]

Lemnos, Greece April 19, 1944

Fire engines were ready. A Liberator was coming in fast and on fire with the two port-engines out and the inner one still burning. A minute later, the wheel strut blew out and the wing collapsed. As foam started to be sprayed on the burning bomber, two crew members scrambled out somewhat athletically, and then another two dragged a fifth man out a minute later. Screams from inside soon faded even before the fire was under control.

The airfield continued to receive damaged bombers from the successful raid on the Romanian oil distribution system.

 

[fester]

Moscow April 19, 1944

The sergeants and junior officers yelled at the conscripts to stop staring at the city and get back onto the trains. The division had been reconstituted from their losses over the fall and winter. New conscripts, including some from the recently liberated portions of the Rodina had arrived in January and since then the division had been re-equipped with new weapons from the factories of the capital and the relocated plants in the Urals. Now the division would be shipped to the Ukrainian fronts for finishing training before the general staff wanted them on the front lines for blooding and experience before the summer offensives.

 

[fester]

Guam, April 20, 1944

USS North Carolina swung at anchor. Across the bay, half a dozen ships were being tended to by the repair ships and heavy construction vessels of the fleet train. Aboard the battleship, the deck divisions were busy as hoses full of Navy Bunker C snaked across the decks and were filling the massive oil tanks below decks. Seaman Jaroschek and others who were loading fresh produce and food for the galleys had to navigate around the crowded deck as they worked. Later in the afternoon, the anti-aircraft magazines would be replenished and then the aviation department would take on more 100 Octane gasoline and depth charges for the float planes. By nightfall, the only work left would be to establish a movie screen on the deck by the rear turret and then the battleship and most of the fleet would be ready to head back to sea the next morning.

 

[fester]

Portsmouth, England April 21, 1944

Sailors cleared their stations from the hot shell casings of the quad pom-pom that was on the stern of the old French battleship Courbet. They had fired several hundred rounds against a trio of German fighter bombers that had never ascended above ninety feet as they penetrated into the harbor. A few shells were close. None hit the intruders. A machine gun from one of the dozens of landing ships in the harbor managed to score on the left wing of the leader after the fighters had dropped their bombs in a skip-bombing attack. One bomb went in between a pair of LSTs, while the other two bombs crashed into the side of an empty landing ship. It was on fire and by the time that the damage control crews could start spraying the fires, the captain had made the decision to abandon ship.

 

[fester]

Southern California, April 22, 1944

A dozen Corsairs tipped over. As they dove, speed built up. After dropping eleven thousand feet, the squadron leader whipped his controls to shed speed and change direction. The worst pilot was a hundred yards out of position by the time the entire formation was on the new heading. He scrambled to play catch up as the double ace up ahead noticed that the formation was a bit off. The half squadron then commenced to gain altitude once again as the bombers that they had attempted to bounce turned to fly back to the coast where the factories were located.

Three hours later, Josh Jaroshek ran his hand through his hair and enjoyed the last few sips of the cold Coke. The squadron was coming together really nicely. The least experienced man had just ticked over 500 hours in the air including his 100th hour in type. Josh had logged his 1300th hour earlier in the week. The exercises had gone well this afternoon and tomorrow's would be similar although he and the other veterans would be held on the ground with "appendicitis" and "flu-like symptoms" to see how the newer pilots could apply their lessons without the constant guidance of men who had fought and survived throughout 1942 and early 1943. He finished his cola and grabbed a dozen more cold ones before heading to the flight line to listen to the ground crews and give the men who kept Smoking Maggie working a break and a token of sugary thanks.

 

[fester]

April 23, 1944 Charleston, South Carolina

LST 34, 242 and 243 followed a wooden hull minesweeper through the sanitized channel. Just east of Fort Sumter, another half dozen LSTs took station. An hour outside the harbor, a pair of gunboats as well as a trio of subchasers joined the small sub-convoy. By nightfall the fifteen ships had returned to the harbor after embarkation and assault training had revealed flaws in the combat loading of the equipment.

The quartermasters and bosuns aboard the assault and cargo ships engaged in complex negotiations and re-arrangements with the sergeants and majors of the infantry division that was a follow-on division and part of the army's floating reserve. They needed some items to be the first things off any ship. Those alterations were simple and straightforward. The challenge was prioritizing cargo, supplies and vehicles that needed to be on the beach by the fifth day. These crates and boxes could sometimes just be switched with other boxes. Other challenges emerged as the balance of the expedient landing craft could soon be off and the bow would dig too deeply into the water if the waves were greater than those of a bathtub. More than a few chiefs shouted down majors, more than a few sergeants threatened violence against ensigns. By mid-morning most of the disputes had been resolved and the arduous labor of moving cargo around could begin.

 

[fester]

Inter-Irish Border near Dundalk 0000, April 24, 1944

As the day turned over, the border guards on the Northern side pushed rock and water filled barrels across the road. The border between the two Irelands was closed until further notice.

 

[fester]

Near Guam, April 25, 1944

USS Altamaha, and two of her sister ships turned back out of the wind. Their decks were now empty. Replacement aircraft flown by fresh from the fleet reserve air groups would soon be landing on Guam where the aircraft would be refueled and checked once more while the pilots found the head and a sandwich before heading to the fleet carriers that had suffered only light losses in their coverage of landings on pre-war Imperial Japanese home territory. The fleet would be receiving the aircraft by late afternoon and disappear again into the vastness of the Western Pacific while the three escort carriers and a pair of Hickory class gunboats headed back to Pearl Harbor to pick up another load of replacement aircraft and ensigns.

 

[fester]

Scapa Flow, April 26, 1944

Home Fleet left their protected anchorage. A squadron of war emergency destroyers had already exited while the heavy ships sorted themselves out. HMS Rodney led the way. Her older sister followed. This would be the first operation the two cherry trees had been on together in years as refits, convoy operations, weather damage repairs and everything else that placed demands on the Royal Navy's modern (enough) battleship availability pool. Fifteen minutes behind Nelson, the two newest armored carriers to join the fleet after a brief work-up period followed the battleship. They were the key to the entire operation. Ten minutes behind the pair of carriers, two Norwegian manned destroyers took up the rear of the force. All radio communication would be run through them to give the German listening posts a false hand to follow.

 

[fester]

Near Hokkaido, April 26, 1944

USS Albacore turned away from the coast. Half a dozen men had scurried back aboard the submarine a few minutes ago from a small, inflatable rubber raft. It was now sinking after the assault team had run their bayonets through the side. Twelve blocks of plastic explosives had been placed on the small coastal railroad bridge. The acid that was supposed to eat through the metal still needed another three hours to trip the trigger. The raiders would be at least forty miles off-shore when the bridge came down. The day would be spent under water, and the night would be spent searching for targets better than fishing boats crewed by extended families.

 

[fester]

Near Oran, Algeria, April 27, 1944

Artillery batteries were firing rapidly. Shells, a mixture of high explosive and smoke, shrouded a thin ridge line that once was covered in trees. Beneath them on a narrow plain infantry men, many natives of the southern part of the Metropole, a few escapees from the homeland, and even more expatriates and voyagers who had come to the colors of France since her fall advanced in between clumps of tanks. The Shermans would move forward from cover and into cover while the rest of the section covered them with machine gun bursts and the occasional 75 millimeter high explosive shell. Engineers were clearing lanes through anti-tank minefields and funny looking combat vehicles were driving forward with massive bundles of wood on top of them to fill in an anti-tank ditch. Bridgelayers were not far behind.

As the infantry were within a quarter mile of the ridge line, most of the artillery shifted. The gunners paused for a few minutes to clear their work spaces and then they took new orders from observers who were either in modified Shermans or in the air above the division's advance in Piper Cubs. Artillery soon began to seek out road junctions and a narrow part of a wadi where enemy reinforcements would have to come. Even as the heavy guns of the division shifted fire to the rear, a battalion of field guns continued to fire smoke at the ridge line. Half a squadron of French flown Thunderbolts bombed and strafed the ridge as they flew parallels to it. The infantry attacked up the hill.

An hour later, the exercise was over. The division had completed its last full scale maneuver before it would be locked into its camp with almost no one going out and very few people coming in. They were ready. Their compatriots in the 1st Army of Liberation were coming to be honed to a sharp edge. Rest and recovery was needed more than another day on the exercise fields. Mechanics would go over their tanks with a fine tooth comb. Every rifleman would clean his rifle to a standard that would not disappoint a sergeant who had been in service since the Marne. Every radio operator would make sure that the sets were functional and a spare set of batteries procured. Everyone would be ready.

Soon, soon enough, this would no longer be an exercise.

 

[fester]

Kuroshima, Japan April 28, 1944

The first airfield was open for emergency landings. The strip currently was only 5300 feet long and 100 feet wide. Packed earth was in between the steel mats that constituted the actual runway. 4,000 construction troops were still hard at work on the main strip and a strip three hundred yards to the north. Both would eventually be 10,000 foot strips that were two hundred feet wide with enough fuel and hard stands to support a super heavy bombardment wing. That progress would not be complete for another two months at least, and then tankers and supply ships would need to lighter the consumables ashore before the bombers would show up.

Off to the north, half a dozen Marine fighter squadrons were operating off of the captured Japanese airfield while an entire Army fighter group of Mustangs had settled in at another brand new fighter field near the landing beaches. A few hold-outs were still in the hills that ran along the western edge of that island, but they had no artillery, no mortars and the sight lines to the airfields were obstructed by Marine occupied hills. They were a nuisance who could starve, die or surrender at their convenience as they were incapable of stopping the transformation of the island that they had been tasked to defend from being converted from farms into a massive airfield complex.

 

[fester]

San Fernando, Luzon April 28, 1944

Three big flying boats, painted midnight blue taxied to be close to their tender. They had landed just minutes ago after a long sortie up the Straits of Formosa. A small minefield was refreshed near Matsu and a tiny coastal convoy of four traders and a single sub-chaser had been spotted. The sighting had been sent out to other prowling cats and a pack of submarines that were near the northern tip of Formosa.

 

[fester]

East bank of the Pivdennyi Buh River , April 29, 1944

Three thousand guns broke the darkness of the night. Each gun had at least one hundred shells stockpiled nearby for the morning. Behind the gunners, several hundred rocket launching trucks were ready. The first salvo from those rockets would be high explosives aimed at the forward German and Romanian defenses. The second salvo would be almost entirely smoke to cover hundreds of rubber rafts being paddled across the broad river.

By nightfall, four rifle divisions had beachheads at least eight hundred yards deep on the far bank. Two of the beachheads were wide enough to accept the lead elements of tank brigades while the pioneers were already busy building ferries and bridges. The riflemen continued to push forward to secure defensive positions for the anti-tank guns to be sited and the anti-tank minefields to be laid. There would need to be a German counter-attack against these thin but expanding positions for if crossings could be secured, the entire southern German army group would be in a moment of crisis. And once that counter-attack came, the real battle would begin.

 

[fester]

RAF Korat, April 30, 1944

The airbase that had previously been rice paddies before the surrender of Thailand and the kingdom's switching sides. This morning two squadrons of Lancasters completed their first mission. The recently arrived and newly raised bomber squadrons had taken the long way from Bomber Command's birthing centers of OCU and HCUs. First they had flown to Casablanca, and then to Alexandria and hopped to Muscat. Five days of rest and repairs were needed as the bombers flew to Bombay before departing for the combat base. This base was only a few miles from a rail head and next to a decent roadlink to the conquered kingdom's capital. Liberty ships and Empire ships were steadily bringing supplies to Bangkok even as a railroad was being cut across the Burma-Thailand border to connect Bangkok with Rangoon so that the merchant ships could be better used elsewhere.

A few miles down the road, three Free French Maurader squadrons were getting ready to hit targets near Da Nang once the fighter sweep could be confirmed.

 

[fester]

Naples, Italy May 1, 1944

Smoke pots were lit as an air raid had been spotted out to sea by an trio of motor gunboats relocating to Corsica. Fighters had been scrambled and the radar teams were directing an interception against fast and low intruders. Odds were that the Germans would be bounced on their exit instead of during their attack. Anti-aircraft gunners from half a dozen nations were manning their positions. The unloading of the 92nd Infantry Division as well as first five hundred men of the of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force as paused. The sky soon erupted in dirty black shell bursts. Twin engine bombers seldom rose more than one hundred meters above the sea. Some bombers seldom were more than ten meters above the sea once they had made the turn into the bay. Two cartwheeled into the bay. The rest bored in. Some of the bombs that were skipped exploded against the mole, more sank without result. Half a dozen skipped like the stones thrown by bored boys on a lazy summer day before exploding against the hulls of three merchant ships.

 

[fester]

Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, May 2, 1944

LST 34, 242 and 243 were the first three transport ships in their column. The convoy was assault loaded for a full division ready to go ashore. Overhead a quartet of Avengers circled the convoy from the escort carrier that provided the close watch. An old Omaha class cruiser provided protection against any, rare surface raiders while a dozen war time expedient ships and two Farragut class destroyers probed the warming waters for German submarines.

A flag went up. A moment later, the 11 knot convoy resumed navigating on their base course after six hours of practicing zig-zagging based on the habits of the escort commander in the light cruiser at the head of the landing ships and assault transports. Speed was deemed to be safer than increasing the difficulty of a firing solution. As the convoy got closer to the German bases on the Bay of Biscay, that calculation would likely change, but that was another problem for another day as a division was heading to war.

 

[fester]

Corsica, May 3, 1944

The skies had darkened again. Another two medium bomb groups were forming up. The target this afternoon was a set of bridges south of Lyon. A railyard near Marseilles was being bombed right now by a similar sized strike. There was no fighter escort directly attached to the bombers. Instead a dozen squadrons were free roaming looking for targets and seeking opportunities that were becoming scarce. German fighters often would appear on dawn raids and then they would be hidden on side strips and tucked into caves or bunkers to avoid the strafers and fighter bombers that had caused enough wrecks and kills on the ground.

Several hundred miles to the north, the 8th Air Force was assembling a trio of strike packages for targets near Rouen, Amiens and St. Quentin.

 

[fester]

Lemnos, Greece May 3, 1944

The last escort fighter took off. It was the tail end Charlie of seven scores of Mustangs and five dozen Spitfires. Half an hour behind the butterball on his first mission, two hundred Liberators were climbing for altitude. Three hours later, the bombers were flying through flak as the fighters pounced on the few defenders that were flying off of locally refined aviation fuel. The experten typically survived being mobbed by avoiding the mobbing, but the rookies who had perhaps 200 hours did not know that they were about to be bounced half a dozen to two until their wingman was screaming for assistance and then floating to the ground on a parachute if he was lucky.

 

[fester]

Narvik, Norway May 3, 1944

HMS Indefagitable turned back into the wind. The morning strike was soon being recovered. The strike commander in a Firefly's rear seat had leapt from his seat as soon as the pilot had brought the plane to a stop. He carried his camera in his hand and handed it off to the technician who took the film deep into the ship. The strike commander went the other direction and headed to the Admiral's briefing room. There, half a dozen men waited for new information. Two tankers, half a dozen lesser ships, and a trio of barges were on fire or sinking. The fighter defenses were slow to respond but fairly thick. Once the raid had been detected, flak was increasingly heavy and reasonably accurate against the torpedo bombers.

Twenty minutes later, signals were raised. One last strike would be launched in the early afternoon where two dozen Albacores and Tarpons would mine the fjord before Home Fleet withdrew to the safety of the vast Northern Seas.