Keynes' Cruisers Volume 2

[fester]

West of Warsaw, Poland December 17, 1944

The division was coming out of reserve. It had been mauled twice in the past year and now it was barely an organized rabble compared to what it had been the previous Christmas when it had counter-attacked into the flank of the Soviet assault. The quartermasters and military policemen were conferring with the divisional staff. Warsaw was closed. Partisans had either occupied or blown every bridge across the river. Perhaps the 116th Panzer Division could fight their way through the city, but by the time they had taken the east bank of the Vistula, there would be no regiment capable of completing a company's mission.

Instead, the division would head south for several hours and then east on another set of tracks before offloading on the southern shoulder of the Soviet offensive where the ninety four tanks of the division would attempt to pierce and run wild through the Soviet rear before the Soviets could reach the German strategic rear.

 

[fester]

South of Budapest, Hungary, December 18, 1944

The rifleman slowly extended his cold fingers forward. His mate tipped over the metal tea kettle. Soon the warmth flowed into the digger from the Outback. He sighed as the taste of India washed down the rest of his meal. Another day or two and the company would be pulled off the frozen front line and be able to get hot food in the battalion rear. Another day or two and he could relax slightly. Another day or two and the war would be closer to an end. Another day or two was too far too think.

A few hundred yards to the east, the Hungarian defenders shelled some fighting positions belonging to the Indian brigade that held the western most portion of the corps that was masking the 10th Army from the forces in the Hungarian capital as tens of thousands of men first rested and recovered from the fighting and then maneuvered to concentrate elsewhere to continue their advance.

 

[fester]

Northeast coast of Honshu, December 19, 1944

USS Tilefish ascended. Her conning tower broke through the waves and her crew quickly began to vent and charge her battery. The look-outs saw nothing. The radar and sonar operators had nothing on their screens either. Besides a small coastal convoy that had been heavily escorted by trainer aircraft and a trio of modern escorts that had been spotted on the second day in the patrol box, the submarine had seen little beyond sail powered fishing boats that were definitely not worth a torpedo and often not worth a surface gun action as someone, somewhere, was likely to have a radio and call in the chaos.

 

[fester]

Warsaw, December 20, 1944

A string of tracers slammed into the building behind the partisan. A few feet away from the freshly kicked up stone dust, his brother fired a few rounds. Another string of bullets arced skyward as the landser's aim was spoiled by a slug through his stomach. The dust covered partisan took a deep breath and then fired a few shots in the general direction of the German attackers.

An hour later, the dozen Poles had looted four dead German bodies. Their ammunition was now restocked and half a dozen grenades would be useful to delay the next attack. More importantly for the moment was the iron rations on the infantrymen along with their great coats. He would soon have a full stomach and not feel the chill in his bones for the first time in years before the next German attempt to take Fort V. And before that assault would begin, the earth would shake as another bombardment started in the east.

 

[fester]

Okinawa, December 21, 1944

A quartet of Marine Corsairs pulled up after they strafed and rocketed a cluster of Japanese infantrymen who were re-organizing themselves for another attack on the AmeriTim's lines. The attack had started two hours before dawn. Half a dozen light tankettes and over a thousand men tried to infiltrate along a small draw that was the boundary between the Massachusetts and Illinois National Guard regiments. Someone had tripped on a wire that was linked to a flare that bathed the creeping attack in bright red light. Machine guns had started to open up seconds after the flare exploded. Within a minute, the Japanese tanks were firing back and another minute later, American artillery and mortars were firing defensive, linear sheafs.

The first attack had broken less than thirty feet from the main defensive positions held by two infantry companies. Their outpost lines had been overrun. A few men sold their lives dearly as the fighting there had devolved quickly into knife, clubs, and teeth after grenades . Most of the men in the listening and observation posts were ground under tank treads or destroyed by a dozen grenades exploding in a few breaths. But the attackers failed as bodies began to stack in front of the kill zones. Riflemen fired at strange shadows and dark masses and odd noises. Machine gunners sent three, four and occasionally five round bursts down pre-set lanes. 75mm artillery was being called onto the wire while the heavier guns churned up the ground and kept Japanese reserves from flowing to the spots that were bending and almost breaking in the American lines.

Patrick's platoon had been pulled into battalion reserve just thirty hours ago. They were not far from the front line, but the luxury of hot food, hot water and the ability to stand up straight without worrying about snipers had been incredible. The previous afternoon half a dozen men had been released from the field aid stations to replace some of the casualties. A favorite squad leader had returned. Three men from another company had been added to the platoon. Their names were worth remembering for they had survived this long. They would not be replacements who were more dangerous to themselves and their squad; instead they were veterans who could keep themselves and their comrades alive. And then the platoon went to sleep with only half a dozen men acting as pickets as they were in reserve. When the artillery started up, Patrick woke up and had the platoon getting ready for movement fifteen minutes before the orders to counter-attack had come down from on high.

By the time that they had restored the line, dawn was breaking. Two men were wounded. One was likely to survive as he was loaded onto a jeep to take him to an aid station. The rest of the men were digging in or placing new land mines ahead of the position. Four minutes after dawn, the first Marine Corsair started their napalm run. A quartet would arrive every five to ten minutes. Bombs, napalm, rockets and slugs bought Patrick and his platoon time to dig in deeper. They would need it as the Japanese launched a viciously futile attack an hour later.

 

[fester]

North Station, Boston Massachusetts, December 22, 1944

Thick fur lined gloves pressed her heavy wool coat against her skirt. Her friend slightly re-adjusted herself as the two of them were heading back to Lowell for the holiday. Elaine began to dig through her travelling bag for the ticket that she had bought earlier in the week as the local trains around Boston were always crowded around the holidays and the sales office had restricted hours on the weekend. It was worth the crush of the T to get to the Garden and then the station to guarantee a pair of comfortable seats for her and Mary Beth. Mary had become her confidant and roommate as well as a co-worker and classmate over the past year. They were nearly inseparable as they waited for their husbands to return from the war. Patrick was somewhere in the Pacific with the Army while Joachim had been drafted into the Navy and was, per the last letter, doing something in the South Atlantic. Mary had been planning to spend the holidays alone, perhaps baking cookies or merely putting her feet up before drinking several bottles of beer each night. But that was intolerable, there would always be a space at Elaine's mother's table for one more. So the two young women were heading to Lowell, looking to celebrate the holiday and hoping that the war would be over by next Christmas.

 

[fester]

Singapore, December 23, 1944

Four battlewagons that would never again see a year of peace time service slowly steamed past the increasingly empty docks. Landing ships, assault ships, supply ships, cargo ships, brewing ships and hundreds of lesser craft had slowly been leaving the port over the past three days. The great mass of shipping was proceeding in small clusters at their most economical speeds even as the Royal Navy, Dutch and Australian destroyers, frigates and sloops rode herd like overanxious sheep dogs.

Outside of the harbor defenses, the steel castles formed two columns. In one column, the oldest ship took lead while the battered survivor of Jutland led the other column. A trio of old cruisers and a quartet of destroyers that had been laid out in ordinary during the Ethiopian Crisis joined them before the force began their slow journey north.

 

[fester]

Thrace, December 24, 1944

The gate guarding the border rose. A dozen trucks filled with armed soldiers and another two dozen trucks filled with the equipment of combat engineers and demolition specialists slowly crossed from Turkey into Greece. The small convoy would soon be met by a dozen Australian driven jeeps that would be carrying men from five countries who spoke four languages. The hundred men would make a slow journey to the port of Varna where the Turks would help their new allies continue to repair and renovate the port.

Even as the trucks finally cleared the border post, a dozen transport aircraft passed over them as they headed to deliver supplies to the Allied armies in Romania.

 

[fester]

Pirmasens, Germany, December 25, 1944

The LT walked up and down the line. He was wearing a red bandana atop his steel helmet, laughing as he passed out mail and an extra ration of chocolate to his men. The quartermasters had arranged for the infantry that were not on the outpost lines to have a hot meal of ham or turkey with all of the fixings. They had eaten well in the late morning, and only a few shells that had landed a mile away reminded all of the men that the war was still going on.

Ten thousand yards away, a pair of 150 mm gun crews hurriedly loaded shells into the breach. The spotters had relayed a target, a few dozen American infantrymen out in the open on the reverse slope of a small hill that the half battery could hold in a near defilade. The terrain offered some protection but a good shot could plausibly land a shell. The master gunner who had first fought in the Spring Offensive and had been remobilized a year ago slightly adjusted the aim. He called out. Everyone blocked their ears. Two heart beats later, the lanyard was pulled and a fragment of a figment of imagination led to the detonation of the propellent. Two shells soon arced through the air even as the gun crews hurried to load another shell with its propellent. Before the first shells landed two hundred yards long, exploding in a wood lot, the guns were ready to fire again. The master gunner made a small adjustment, and another round and then the final round of the shoot was fired. Three shells per gun and the team was working fast to displace before the American artillery, or more awfully, the American jabos would find them.

As the LT was handing out a Hershey bar to one of his squad leaders, they heard the incoming shells. Both veterans were on the ground, hands on helmets, weight on their elbows and knees. The two shells exploded well outside of the fragmentation range. They stayed low and crawled forward to the scraps of available cover. The rest of the platoon was also on the ground, even the replacements who had only just arrived in the past two weeks. The next two shells were split. One landed well wide as it had been fired from a gun with a very worn barrel, while the other was only twenty five yards long. The last salvo had a shell landed eighty yards to the left, while the master gunner had placed a nearly perfect shot. The shell buried itself into the ground two yards from the LT.

The fuse, built by forced laborers and slaves, failed.

 

[fester]

Warsaw, December 26, 1944

The partisans no longer had to fight alone.

The Red Army's spearheads of tanks and submachine gunners riding atop their T-34s and Shermans had arrived that morning. A dozen tanks and perhaps three hundred infantrymen were on the west side of the Vistula. Hundreds of artillery pieces were now available and on call as the Germans were being forced back from the few intact bridges over the entire length of the Vistula.

 

[fester]

Newport News Shipbuilding, December 27, 1944

The yard manager sighed. The news was not unexpected but it was unwanted. The Navy had just officially cancelled the contract for the last Essex class carrier the yard had contracted for. Steel had already been assembled and the work crews were soon to be available after rotating off of several other ships. He yelled for his secretary to schedule a meeting with a dozen of his top managers. Lay-offs were likely to come in the next few weeks as the pace of work was slowing down.

 

[fester]

William Beardmore & Company, Dalmuir, December 28, 1944

The yard manager smiled. The news was not unexpected but it was wanted. The Navy had officially awarded the contract for the construction of the lead ship of the new cruiser class, HMS Dragon. Her keel would not be laid until 1946, but the manager had authorization to begin purchasing steel and long lead items. Her sister, HMS Diamond would be built at His Majesty's shipyard in Portsmouth. He whistled for his secretary to order lunch for a dozen of his top managers. They had cause to celebrate as lay-offs could be avoided in a few weeks.

 

[fester]

Conical Hill, Okinawa Japan December 29, 1944

Thousands of American infantrymen shuddered as shells from battalion support guns, organic divisional artillery, corps artillery, and even the army siege and super heavy artillery command landed on the keystone of the Japanese defensive line. As dawn broke, the redlegs paused to allow for their barrels to cool, ammunition to be restocked and shell cases to be removed from the gun pits. The Japanese defenders' respite was only for two minutes as five battlewagons that had been bombed at Pearl Harbor, half a dozen cruisers and an equal number of destroyers resumed the maelstrom for another hour before the air groups of five carriers swept in to lay down a field of napalm, and delayed fuse high explosive bombs before the red legs resumed the bombardment, this time, mixing high explosives with a predominant line of smoke as the infantry began to advance again.

 

[fester]

The Western Pacific, December 30, 1944

He dreamed. He dreamed of meeting his wife and her meeting him in need and urgency. He dreamed of another time and another place. He dreamed to avoid thinking of the furious combat that was happening almost every day over the fleet and over the island where the Marines and the Army looked like tiny ants below as the Corsairs of his squadron swooped in to bomb, rocket and strafe anything that looked like cover for the Japanese defenders. Of the twenty eight pilots in the squadron who had started this campaign, nineteen could be counted on to fly tomorrow. He had already written three letters, and knew that the hope of a pilot being merely missing delayed the reality of needing to write another pair of letters once the submarines checked in and reported that they had not picked up any Marine flyboys. Three men would never fly again, another might after a year of rehabilitation while a twenty year old was on light duty for another week. Almost everyone had been stood down for at least a day during the campaign. Their edges had become dull through the routine of combat and stress. So he dreamed of happier times.

As he rolled over on his mattress, the steady thrum of the engines changed pitch. They deepened. The gong started to sound. His head cleared. As he tightened the strap on his helmet, the ship began to heel hard starboard. He leaned into the bulkhead as he pulled his pants on. The ship violently shook and threw him hard against the curtesy hatch that had separated his cabin from the passage that housed the rest of the officers of the Marine fighter squadron.

USS Bon Homme Richard slowed and began to flood as the two torpedoes created a sixty foot hole near the bow. Josh ignored the pain in his likely to be broken wrist as he made way to his battle station where his, and the rest of the pilots' jobs were to stay out of the way and to maintain water and air tight integrity as needed. Within an hour, all the pilots had been accounted for, half a dozen broken bones and everyone else bruised. Three enlisted mechanics were missing in the chaos, but the squadron was still mission capable once the ship's 9 degree list could be corrected and her propellers could move her forward at a pace greater than that of a mediocre collegiate sprinter.

 

[fester]

Baltic Sea, near Danzig, December 31, 1944

Eight Lancasters turned to the northeast. The operational conversion unit had completed their primary mission of decoying a bomber stream an hour earlier. Now they had completed their secondary mission of reseeding a garden that had already claimed a pair of coasters since the last time it had been seeded. Twenty minutes later, the bombers were slowly climbing for altitude to head home where there might be a promise of a good beer and a warm bed to celebrate the new year where there was a hope of victory.

 

[fester]

Port Stanley, Falkland Islands January 1, 1945

The garrison of the colony had shrunk again. Two light coastal defense guns with a few dozen gunners and a platoon of infantry from Wales was all that was left. The construction company, the other two infantry platoons and the gunners that had previously manned four other guns were now on an Empire ship that had loaded beef and leather from Buenes Aires before swinging by the outpost in the middle almost nowhere. Reinforcements, and more importantly, trained replacements were needed for the 21st Army Group. The edges of the Empire were being stripped of trained manpower as saboteurs, weather stations and scouts were deemed to be, at most, an inconsequential threat.

Garrisons from Gibraltar, Aden, Jamaica and Bermuda would soon be reduced again to support the final thrusts into Germany.

 

[fester]

Cam Ranh Bay, French Indochina, January 2, 1945

The half dozen Corsairs circled at 20,000 feet. The radar operators had kept them under tight control. Below them, the pride of the Marine Nationale began a turn to the northeast at a steady 12 knots. The three ships stabilized their courses, and a moment later, the six quad turrets erupted. Targets inside the bay were soon straddled, and then shells began to strike home.

Once the bombardment was over, half a dozen squadrons flying from Siam continued to work over the naval facilities inside the bay.

 

[fester]

Near Shanwei, Republic of China January 3, 1945

HMS Queen Elizabeth's four turrets slowly turned. The plotting room had a new target for them. The gun crews were going through their drill as they had done so more than a thousand times. Focus was intense but at the same time automatic as hands moved by rote and feet moved without needing commands from the brain. All guns were ready well before the solution had stabilized. She fired half salvos every thirty seconds for the next ten minutes until the spotting aircraft had called in a confirmation that the Japanese hard point was now rubble.

Her three sisters replicated her actions as the hundreds of assault transports, landing ships and small craft that had supported landings from Burma to Morocco, as well as Greece to Normandy moved ever closer to shore to launch three divisions that would eventually liberate Hong Kong. It would be an eventually as the city was too well fortified to take by a direct assault. The few beaches were covered by enough artillery and strewn with enough mines and wire to make veterans of Ypres think this could be too much.

 

[fester]

Behind the Water Line, Netherlands January 4, 1945

"Three potato's, two leeks and six hundred grams of bread..." The young woman sighed. She had collected today's ration for herself and her younger sister. It was not enough. It had to be enough. She could only hope that the snare traps would snap themselves shut on a squirrel or a rat to add a little bit of protein and more calories to their diet.

 

[fester]

Colmar, France January 5, 1945

Dawn broke. There was silence except for a few birds that were looking for shelter from the harsh morning wind. They chirped and tweeted even as the wind pushed them around.

To the west, the low thrum of engines became louder. As the clock neared eight in the morning, the first of hundreds of twin engine medium bombers and quad engine heavy bombers flew over the town. Just outside of the city was a trio of fields marked with very large crosses painted on the ground and search lights blasting photons into the sky. The lead bombardiers made necessary adjustments as squadrons entered their bomb runs for crossroads, artillery concentrations and command posts across the Rhine. Above and ahead of the bombers were hundreds of fighters looking for any German pilot brave or dumb enough to challenge them. The few experten were dangerous but they would often be swarmed. The bulk of the remaining Luftwaffe fighter force were pilots lucky to have a hundred hours in any type and unlikely to get to two hundred hours marked in their log book.

Soon the earth started to shake as the bombers emptied their bellies.

Another stream of twin engine aircraft made a dogleg fifteen miles north of the city. A brigade of paratroopers would soon drop to secure the southern flank.

Even as the paratroopers were leaving their aircraft, every gun in the 1st French Army started to fire. The lighter guns were flinging smoke to cover dozens of Dukws making an amphibious crossing of the river. The heavier guns were firing high explosives first at pre-planned targets and then once the Germans started to react, against whatever the spotters in the dozens of Piper Cubs could see.

By nightfall, thirty six thousand men and two hundred tanks were across the river.