Keynes' Cruisers

[fester]

August 29, 1941 Kiev

A string of tracers lit up the narrow street. Most of of the German assault group found cover but one man, a replacement who had been added to the platoon as a replacement of another replacement who had been killed by a mine, laid bleeding in the middle of the street. He was screaming in pain. Half a dozen men aimed their rifles in the general direction of the Soviet machine gun nest and sent a clip worth of bullets in that general direction to hold the machine gunner’s head down.

Behind the assault group ground forward an infantry support tank. Its machine guns chattered and the heavy steel armor pinged as shrapnel and bullets deflected. It stopped and the turret swung slightly. The infantrymen were behind cover and even still they found the blast of the heavy gun nearly deafening. A hole in the wall had opened and in rushed a dozen men, grenades exploding in each room as the defenders were shocked by being outflanked and taken from a direction that was outside of the mutual support that they had counted on.

Some men were able to resist briefly but most were cut down in the first few seconds of exploding grenades followed by bayonet charges. A submachine gunner was protected in the initial assault as he hid behind a sandbagged position that ate the shrapnel fragments of the initial room clearing assault. He went through his entire magazine, hitting the first two men coming through the door before the next set of grenades exploded within feet of him.

The strongpoint on the block had been taken. The assault towards the river would continue.

 

[fester]

August 30, 1941 Tokyo

The strong jaw and chin line on the man had weakened after the fifth sake. The Nazi journalist made his farewells to the Japanese hosts as they enjoyed the company of the geishas. He straightened his clothes and tipped his cap before walking out the door. As he waited for a cab to take him to his mistress’ apartment, he went over what he had been hearing. There was almost no threat to Siberia unless Moscow fell. The fleet was training to go south and east. Oil exports were still needed and Japan had the cash to pay for whatever could be spared.

He forgot about these details when he saw his mistress. They were not remembered until after his hangover subsided the next morning and he started to compose his message to control.

 

[fester]

September 1, 1941 Portland Oregon

Patrick Henry slid down the ways. She was the first of however many emergency cargo ships that had been ordered in every shipyard that had at least a single spare slip. Her crew had been assembled and they needed ten days to take her to sea for shake down and then another ten days of post shakedown repairs and replenishment. After that, she would bring 5,000 tons of food and medical supplies to Mariveles Naval Base. Besides the food, she was also due to load 100,000 shells for artillery with a roughly even split between 75 millimeter and the new 105 millimeter guns that the Philippine Scout artillery battalions had recently received.

Two of her sisters were also due to launch soon and their first journey after shaking down would be Vladivostok with nearly identical loads for the Red Army.

 

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September 2, 1941 2157 near Kos, Italian Dodecanese

HMS Clyde surfaced. One of her battery compartments had been ripped out in Alexandria. She only carried torpedoes in her tubes with no reloads. Instead, twenty four very unusual men were waiting for the captain to allow them to emerge from the hatches.

Within minutes, four rubber boats were being paddled aggressively through the waves. The heavily armed raiders were due to strike the Italian airfield near Antimachia. This was the first raid on the Italian Dodecane possessions. Continual pressure was needed to give Crete time to breath and develop. Fifteen light bombers and a dozen fighters routinely raided eastern Crete. The Special Boat Service would try to destroy as many planes, wreck as much infrastructure and kill any man dumb enough to make themselves visible at the airfield. And then they would run back to the submarine within six hours.

 

[fester]

September 2, 1941 Moscow

The freshly promoted general looked up from his paperwork. His commissar had knocked at the door and gave him at least the courtesy of a pause before coming into the dimly lit room that served as the office and bedroom of the militia division’s commander.

“Comrade, we’ve received our orders. We’re to entrain at the end of the week and head to Vyazma. The fascists are recuperating from the casualties inflicted by the heroic defenders of Kiev whose lives are buying patriots time to prepare defensive positions for a decisive battle. “

The general looked at his commissar who had served his time as a conscript immediately after the Revolution had completed and then worked as a party functionary with a studied neutrality. The division was not ready for combat yet; they might be able to hold against Romanians or Hungarians but not against a determined German attack. Stating realtiy was defeatism and the general would prefer to avoid another winter near Lake Baikal.

“Very well, we will have an officer’s meeting this evening, all battalion commanders and above as well as all zampoliti shall attend at 18:00. The Revolution shall be defended.”

The heavy set man clicked his heels and left his general alone to his thoughts.

 

[fester]

September 3, 1941 Lima, Ohio

The first M-4 tank prototype came off the line. Three more engineering prototypes were almost ready. Once completed, two would be shipped to Fort Knox and the other pair would be sent to the Salisbury Plain for evaluation and feedback. These tanks were a noticeable improvement on the tall and awkwardly armed M-3 tanks that were just starting to show up in American armored formations. The silhouette was lower, the heavy, main gun had 360 degrees of traverse and was capable of firing high explosive and anti-armor rounds. The engine was a touch more powerful even as it became more reliable. If everything went well, the new tank would be in combat ready units by next summer.

 

[fester]

September 3, 1941 Portsmouth, New Hampshire

The Stars and Stripes on the fantail of USS Marlin quickly descended. In its place, the Union Jack ascended. She was now HMS Marlin. Her crew was entirely Royal Navy now that half a dozen American instructors and engineers were superfluous. She would be heading to Gibraltar and then Malta to reinforce the coastal submarine flotillas.

Her and her sister, HMS Mackerel had been designated for transfer to the Royal Navy in the first week of Lend Lease. Crews had arrived in April to train on the small, coastal submarines. The shipyards forced them to wait to board the ships as American torpedo equipment was removed and Admiralty equipment added. There had been talk about using American torpedoes as a live fire test but the combination of the expense and rarity of modern American torpedoes, the desire by the Torpedo School to keep tight control over the sophisticated fuses and detonators and the pragmatic problems of supplying American torpedoes to British submarines in combat areas put an end to that conversation.

 

[fester]

September 4, 1941 0141 near Greenland

One ship had to return to port. The other sixty seven merchant ships continued to battle their way through the cold North Atlantic. The escorts were pinging rapidly around the perimeter. Young men were splitting their attention between keeping their fingers and toes somewhat warm and examining the sea for anything that looked like a submarine. So far, there were no losses, but the easy part of the journey was almost over. Liberators could cover the convoy for the morning and then they would be in the air gap where U-boats could safely operate on the surface. Two days of hell were ahead of them until Iceland could provide air cover. The men of the overnight watch searched the sea and saw little as propellers pushed the cargoes of the New World to the Old.

Twelve miles away, a U-boat started to maneuver. He might not be able to get a shot off before dawn, but he would be able to get a good contact report before the damnable long range bombers kept him down for the day and gave the convoy time to get sixty miles ahead of him before night fall.

 

[fester]

September 4, 1941 North Atlantic 1925 local time

The USS Greer, a modernized four piper destroyer had spent the last six hours depth charging and hounding U-652. Her hydrophone operators had not heard any noise in the past hour, so she turned north and raced to catch up to the supply convoy that was due in Iceland. The escort carrier and fleet tanker, Suwanee, accompanying the convoy had kept a pair of Vindicators overhead for most of the afternoon. They had seen nothing but their presence re-assured the destroyermen.

Two hundred feet underneath her, the captain of U-652 breathed a fetid sigh of relief as the air had become rank. The boat had been underwater for the past seventeen hours and the battery was down to 14% charge. He had the screws turning on bare steerage for the past two hours, attempting to deceive the determined but inefficient American destroyer that she had achieved a kill.

The ruse worked. The small U-boat would stay under for another hour and then surface to repair damage, refresh the air and recharge the depleted batteries.

 

[fester]

September 5, 1941 Kiev

For the first time in weeks, men could hear the birds sing. They could hear the civilians gasp in horror as they looked at their city and the remains of the villages outside. The Southwestern Front was cut-off. Combat had slowed overnight as the Germans pulled back a few hundred meters to re-supply and rest.

Over night the last trains carrying an infantry division worth of lightly armed remnants and the artillery manufacturing section of the Kiev Arsenal had been ambushed east of the city. The arsenal trains had been seized by German tankers while the troop trains were smashed by artillery and machine gun fire. A battalion’s worth of men would eventually be able to formed from the survivors.

Inside the pocket, the Southwestern Front continued to dig in. Their job now was not to stop the fascists from advancing but to delay them and force the Germans to use ammunition in Kiev instead of in Moscow, to force the Germans to bleed crossing the Dneiper instead of the Don, to force the Germans to run supply trains into the Ukraine instead of towards Leningrad. The half million defenders knew that they were the sacrifice for time and space for the Rodina.

The silence was broken as one hundred dive bombers entered their dives from 10,000 feet over a battered infantry regiment. Soon after the dive bombers escaped to the north, German artillery began to fire with the intent to separate the target of today's push from any reinforcement by laying down a curtain of high explosives between the first echelon and the rear.

 

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September 5, 1941 2143 East of Greenland

Two destroyers and six corvettes prowled around the edges of the convoy. Three corvettes had joined the convoy that afternoon from their training exercises as shore based intelligence indicated that there was a large wolf pack along the path. An American aircraft carrier and two destroyers were steaming towards the convoy but they were six hundred miles away.

The full moon was shining and lighting up the sea through the low clouds. Every ship had double lookouts stationed as the next thirty three hours were the times of maximum danger. The convoy in front of them had passed without loss. That convoy had only two ships damaged, one by torpedo and one by weather, but they had managed to make it to Iceland for repairs.

MV Empire Springbuck heaved suddenly. Moments later, her central hold full of explosives erupted. U-81 had scored with a pair of torpedoes. The old freighter broke into two pieces. The forward third of the ship was steady enough for the men lucky enough to be there to enter and launch a lifeboat. Most of the crew were not as lucky as the remaining two thirds of the ship went under within ninety seconds of the torpedo. Two men managed to jump into the water. One man was rescued within minutes while the other froze to death.

The escorts responded quickly. Both destroyers began to run down at high speed towards the probable launch location of the torpedoes. Skeena’s forward guns fired at a surface U-boat. The shells splashed wide and over but the U-boat dove as the water erupted around it in a concentric circle of depth charges. She handed off the target to the four stacker destroyer HMCS St. Clair and the corvette Alberni as lookouts had spotted another pair of U-boats on the surface.

Deck guns were firing from the larger merchant ships. The naval gun crews could scare the U-boats but the unstabilized guns with lightly trained crews who seldom had the ammunition allocated for live fire exercises had little success except to highlight where the escorts needed to hunt. Four escorts converged on the shell pocked datums and began to ping and depth charge contacts.

As three quarters of the escorts were attempting to drive down or drive off the sighted U-boats, another two hunters pounced. Three more ships were torpedoed shortly before two in the morning. The largest was only 3,000 GRT and none of them were built stoutly enough to survive the damage. Sally Maersk was a crippled hulk whose broken body survived until daylight when her survivors were rescued by the escort. The other two ships went under before lifeboats could be launched.

An hour before dawn, the escort had success. Two corvettes had been hounding a contact and the depth charge runs were getting closer and closer. An oil slick had appeared on the surface after another pattern had been dropped for 125 feet. As Alberni was preparing for her next run, U-85 surfaced. Both corvettes started to sweep the U-boat’s deck with machine gun and anti-aircraft gun fire. Twenty seconds later as the first shells started to hit the submarine instead of the ocean, a white bed sheet emerged from the conning tower’s hatch. Seventeen sailors jumped into the sea before the u-boat sank. Sixteen of the sailors were rescued and taken prisoner.

Even with this success, dawn could not come fast enough. The predators lamed a small Norwegian freighter minutes after dawn. She straggled throughout the morning before being abandoned.

The convoy continued throughout the day at a steady eight knots. The bosun on Skeena controlled the frequency of turns as he had the best dice aboard the escort commander’s ship. He would roll two dice at the skipper’s request. The first, red dice, told him when the next roll had to happen. The second, black dice, told him what turn to make. Odd numbers were to port and even numbers were to starboard. An hour before daylight departed, the lookouts sighted a single dive bomber circle the forward edge of the convoy’s path. The haze gray painted bomber only loitered for twenty minutes but he was the promise that help was nearby. The convoy just had to survive the night.

 

[fester]

September 6, 1941 North of Odessa

Men and women. Boys and girls. Young and old.

They were lined up in triple columns after gun wielding men went through their villages. Not everyone was taken. The soldiers had talked with village leaders and went to the houses that they initially pointed to and took their families outside. The first detainees were startled but as more and more houses were emptied of their inhabitants, fists were raised and then the defiant were broken with rifle butts and bayonets. By mid-morning, they were marching north as the remaining villagers started to go through the now vacant homes.

No water was passed out. No food was given. The column continued to march and soon, another column from another village merged with them. It happened several more times until almost nine hundred civilians who had been trying to stay out of the way of the armies bashing into each other were taken to a clearing.

The night before tanks with blades had cleared a trench twelve feet wide and nine feet deep. The moisture of the earth had started to evaporate and the thick, rich dark dirt had begun to crumble in the sun’s glare. A few of the adults in the front of the column quickly concluded that they would not live the afternoon. Some looked to escape but the tug of their children kept them in line while others began to pray.

As the column stopped, half a dozen machine guns opened fire and bodies fell. Some fell into the trench but most of the column fell where they stood. Five minutes later, pistol shots rang out. A few of the wounded had the wisdom to not move at all even as they were thrown into the mass grave. Six people escaped that night, and two survived to tell their story after the war.

The mass grave would remain open, flies feasting on flesh, for a week as the villages around Odessa were systematically emptied of their Jewish inhabitants.

 

[fester]

September 6, 1941 Hershey, Pennsylvania

Another reefer car was filled to the brim. The submarine squadron that had just transferred from California to Manila had place a final supply order. The squadron supply officer was new to his position,having just been recalled to active duty from the reserves in the spring and assigned to the squadron in August. He was responsible to feed and fuel twelve submarines, their crews and a small support staff on-shore or about nine hundred men. He had been told to get emergency rations that were calorically dense, tasty and shelf-stable. Chocolate fit that specification. So he had placed an order for chocolate, forty five hundred units of chocolate. Five chocolate bars would be a good emergency ration for a sailor. He made a mistake. Each unit of chocolate was sufficient to feed one infantry company one three ounce bar per man.

Sixty five tons of Hershey Bars were on their way to Cavite Bay.

 

[fester]

September 7, 1941 0321 Near Greenland

One more hour and the sun would start to light the night with nautical twilight. A few more hours and then the American aircraft carrier and her escorts could reinforce the frantically racing convoy escorts. A few more hours was all that they needed to push the convoy through to safety.

Four merchants had been sunk over the past three hours. One more was lumbering forward ponderously after a single torpedo blew off the first twenty five feet of her bow. Star shells still lit up the night as the convoy made another emergency turn. Two corvettes skidded in the water as they turned towards a new contact, their guns arcing around to throw shells at a surfaced U-boat.

Behind the fifty nine merchant ships, HMCS Skeena poured as much steam into her turbines. She needed to catch up. She was almost out of depth charges having forced down a U-boat at the beginning of the night attack. She could come back as a massive pool of debris and oil floated to the surface after her last attack run. As the escorts chased down another ASDIC contact, another submarine slipped through a hole in the screen that had been left open by a corvette prosecuting one of his brothers. Four torpedoes entered the water. Three torpedoes hit the tiny Swedish merchant Garm. Two exploded and broke her back. The attacker was able to slip back beyond the escort perimeter as another counter-attack formed.

Even as the light starting to emerge over the eastern horizon, the escorts received their first reinforcement as the 2nd Escort Group arrived. Five more destroyers could relieve the exhausted Skeena. Before she left the convoy to steam independently to restock her depth charge supply, the last depth charges rolled off the back of her stern on another U-boat. Two corvettes took her place in the attack runs until debris started to come up and they claimed the shared kill.

Two hours later, Skeena flashed recognition signals at the pair of American destroyers and the escort carrier Suwanee. She had seen a pair of Vindicators reach out for the convoy minutes ago. Another pair of dive bombers and a pair of fighters circled the small American task group. Minutes later, she fired a bosun’s line to the lead American destroyer with a quick summary of the action before heading to Iceland.

By late morning, the American carrier was in the center of the convoy and four aircraft were overhead, roaming ahead of the convoy looking for trouble. They continued on at a steady eight knots, the reinforced tri-national escort protecting the fifty eight surviving merchant ships.

 

[fester]

September 9, 1941 Murmansk

The second British convoy arrived the previous night. The 151 Fighter Wing was overhead, the Hurricanes had chased off a pair of German snoopers earlier in the day. Eleven merchant ships had departed Iceland. Weather damage forced one back and another had a bearing slip two days out of Iceland. The fleet tug attached to the convoy took her back. Now the nine freighters were busy unloading. Enough new tanks to equip an armored brigade had already been shipped south. Another battalion would be re-equipped to build a training school for new tank crews to get acquainted with the promised flow of British Valentines, Matildas, Crusader and Churchill tanks.


If the situation at the front worsened, that training battalion would be thrown into the fray to repel the Germans and the Finnish “volunteers.” So far, it seemed like the 14th Army had been able to stop the northern drive west of the pre 1939 border. A division was isolated on the Rybachy Peninsula but they were in constant contact with their supply bases via the Red and Royal Navies. Further south, the Germans had advanced over the border and then were stalled by two rifle divisions. There was a tank division available at the beginning of the offensive to aid in the defense of the Murmansk railroad but half of it had been transferred to the Leningrad Fortified Region.


By evening, the first trains had been loaded with the freshly arrived goods. The engines started to pull the supplies to the units that were still forming in the near rear of the battle front. New units would be built and devastated units would be rebuilt.

 

[fester]

September 11, 1941

President Roosevelt issued a shoot on sight order for all Axis warships in the western Atlantic.

The first operational squadron of Navy Consolidated Privateers began operational patrols from the freshly acquired Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine. Another squadron was in the process of establishing themselves at Argentia.

 

[fester]

September 12, 1941, Barrow in Furness

HMS Indomitable left her berth at the shipyard of her birth for the last time. She had completed her acceptance trials in the Irish Sea the week before and the final repairs and modifications had been made. She was joined by a trio of destroyers who clung tightly to her flanks as she started flight operations to bring aboard her entire air group of thirty-two Sea Hurricanes and eighteen Albacore torpedo bombers. There had been a debate about adding a section of Fulmars for patrol and control duties but the added hanger space was not sufficient to allow for the trade-off in either defense or striking power. She would rely on her radar for control. Thankfully, half a dozen men each from Victorious and Ark Royal had been transferred to the new aircraft carrier to run her fighter direction center and plot rooms.

By mid-morning, flight operations had been completed and most aircraft had been stored in the hanger. A single Albacore circled the force on anti-submarine patrol while a pair of Sea Hurricanes were ready to launch against snoopers. Force Q increased speed to twenty-one knots and began its journey across the Atlantic to Halifax and then Jamaica for a full shake-down to bring the new aircraft carrier up to full combat efficiency.

 

[fester]

September 13, 1941 0800 Corpus Christi, Texas

1st Lt. Joshua Jaroschek leaned over. He kissed his infant daughter on her head and she smiled at him. She had started to smile at the entire world around her in the past few days and far more memorably, she giggled at everything, including the feel of her dad’s rough cut whiskers against her hands. She grasped his nose and squealed when her father booped her cheek. He kissed her again on her forehead before placing her down in her bassinet.

His wife and her mother waited patiently, smiling and trying not to cry. Her man was going to war. It had not been declared yet, but the new Marine fighter squadron was heading first to Ewa Marine Corps Air Station and then most likely to points beyond. She knew that they had been training hard. Margaret knew that her Josh was very good in his Wildcat. And she knew it might not matter.

As soon as her baby was down in her bassinet and amusing herself with a rag doll, she wrapped herself around her husband, her lover, her friend.

“No questions and no lies on both sides, just come back to me alive.”

“I promise”

They kissed through the first three hard knocks on the door by Josh’s flight mates. They kissed as the fellow pilots whooped, encouraged and critiqued their flight leader’s technique. They kissed for as long as their lips were touching the world was whole. And then he had to leave as his bag was in the back of the 1934 Ford sedan that was at his house to take him to the air field. The flying echelon would make a series of short hops to San Diego while the ground echelon was due to board the 11:00AM train to Dallas.

Six hours later, Margaret had her daughter dressed and in her pram. She walked to the community center and prepared refreshments for the squadron wife’s club. It was her duty as an officer’s wife to make sure that the families were taken care of. If that meant lemonade, sweet tea and cookies on the day of departure, she could do that. Families filtered in, pregnant women waddled in, almost all trying to hide the red in their eyes as their men were heading to war.

 

[fester]

September 14, 1941 Kiev

They could have held for at least another day or two. They still had some ammunition, they still had some cover, they still had the will to fight. They could have held for another day and bled the Germans a little more, trading four or five of their lives to kill one German and incapacitate another. They could have held. Yet the order had gone out to surrender to the Germans. The divisional zampolit had been killed the previous night by an incredibly precise artillery strike. A shell landed meters from the car he was in, killing him and three other NKVD officers but no one else in the small column was touched. No one else remembered the artillery strike even. It was an incredible salvo.

Men started to emerge from their hides and their holes. Bodies lifted themselves from shell scrapes. Hands were held high as German infantrymen advanced over ground that had machine guns traversing and artillery zeroed in on the day before. Their advance would have cost them lives, now it cost one man a sprained ankle and a nickname he would die with. Soviet prisoners, mostly riflemen from Turkmenistan, were searched and then marched to the rear. The quiet of the night had brought down the boil of German blood and allowed most of the men to survive the first day. Some were lost when a Red Army artillery strike lashed out at the prisoner column, but most would survive long enough to be shipped west on the rail lines that were slowly being regauged.

Further west, the Southwestern Front fought and died in place, but the war was over for the men in trapped in a mini-pocket that was a part of the Kiev pocket.

 

[fester]

September 16, 1941 Liverpool

Convoy SC-42 arrived. Fifty seven merchant ships were being directed to docks, quays, lighters and mooring buoys up and down the Mersey River. One last ship had been lost to a Luftwaffe mine. Eleven ships had been sunk in the crossing. It would have been worse without air cover. The American escort carrier shepherded the convoy for three days. Only two days were needed as RAF Coastal Command Liberators from Iceland had the range to fly some cover on that third day. Four u-boats were being claimed as sunk. One was being claimed by a Liberator and three to the close-in escort.

Now the stevedores were hard at work to empty the ships that brought Britain her sustenance and her strength.