Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (10 page)

Major Erich Bloedorn, commanding KG 30’s Ju 88 dive-bombers, caught the convoy in its eight-column formation just west of Bear Island just as it was turning northeast to go around the island. Bloedorn could not help but shout to himself,
‘Ausgezeichnet!
[Excellent!]’

The Ju 88 dive-bombers climbed high in order to gain the altitude from which they could come screaming down on the enemy to drop their bombs. This would distract the enemy guncrews from the attacks made by the He 111 torpedo-bombers as they came skimming right over the waves. They would come in from the southern flank of the convoy and from the rear at an oblique angle. The He 115s were to attack the head of the convoy, also from an oblique angle, at the same time.

But plans have a way of going awry in wartime, especially in matters of coordination. Despite Hitler’s orders for the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe to cooperate in this operation, old animosities still lingered, animosities that had become habits. So the strike of the He 115s came in too early and did not wait for Bloedorn’s dive-bombers to start the show and draw British and American eyes upward.

Instead, they were drawn to the water as the lumbering He 115s came in for the attack. They were spotted quickly by one of the antisubmarine trawlers of the escort. Within minutes Broome signalled the escorts, ‘to close the convoy at best speed to give antiaircraft support’. Air attack warnings sounded and the guncrews on the merchant vessels flew to their guns. The escorts swiftly drew in from their normal 3,000 yards perimeter to 1,000 yards. So well-drilled was the escort force that the torpedo-bombers could not find a way through the streams of lead to attack any of the merchant ships. The antiaircraft ships
Palomares
and
Pozarica
were particularly effective in sending up such a hail of fire that the Heinkel crews dared not drive home their attacks. Chastened, they pulled away in defeat, jettisoned their remaining torpedoes and flew off, to the relief of the escorts.

Bloedorn’s initial elation had lasted only seconds until he realized that the convoy was already in action against a torpedo-bomber attack. ‘Who the hell can that be?’ he muttered. Whoever it was had just ruined his plan of attack. He thought quickly and decided simply to revise the attack sequence. He radioed the He 111 torpedo force to wait as he led his dive-bombers up to attack altitude.

The Ju 88 was a formidable aircraft able to deliver a pinpoint attack with a 2,000kg bomb big enough to smash any merchant or escort vessel. Bloedorn’s planes fell on the convoy seemingly out of nowhere. Each of his squadrons struck as prearranged on the flanks or centre of the formation. Bloedorn led the attack into the centre of the convoy, down, down, down, with a big ship in his crosshairs, then released the bomb and hauled the control column back hard to pull his aircraft up and out of the way. He had not seen a single puff of antiaircraft fire, but now he felt the blast wave roll past his plane from the bomb he had just dropped. He looked back to see a cloud of black smoke rising from the centre of the ship. He would learn later that it was the Soviet ship
Donbass
that he had struck, one of the larger ships in the convoy at almost 8,000 tons. Its cargo of ammunition started exploding, and then with a thunderclap that pulsed over the sea and ships around, it blew to pieces.

From the bridge of the
Keppel,
Broome could see that at least four more of his ships had been hit and were burning. The British oiler, the 8,400-ton
Aldersdale,
had not been touched. Luck had nothing to do with it. The German Navy had hopes to capture oilers and live off their heavy oil which was in such short supply. Oilers were not to be attacked.

The Ju 88s regrouped to the south. Bloedorn was amazed that there appeared to be no losses. He led his planes back to the convoy to simulate another run as the air around them filled with black puffs of smoke and tracer. Good, he thought, keep watching us. The half dozen Ju 88s that had not released their bombs now hurtled down in a screaming high dive. One exploded in an orange burst and another trailed smoke and then broke apart.

But already the He 111s had begun to make their runs. The Allied lookouts were still scanning the sky when the torpedoes began to splash into the water. Signalman Taylor aboard the
Palomares
saw a Heinkel approach, drop its fish, and climb quickly. A few of the ship’s Oerlikons and pom-poms opened fire to no avail. Captain Jauncey was in the process of throwing the helm over when the torpedo struck. The ship shuddered with the explosion in the engine room. The seawater rushing in flooded the boilers. The
Palomares
was dead in the water and listing when another torpedo surged by to hit the American Liberty ship
Christopher Newport,
destroying its engine room. The rescue ship
Zamalek
quickly steamed over to take off survivors.
Zamalek’s
flinty Welsh captain was surprised as the Liberty ship’s mostly black crew cheerfully boarded his vessel in their best shoregoing clothes.
¹³

The
Christopher Newport
drifted abandoned now as other ships swerved to avoid it. Elsewhere another torpedo ‘skimmed the stern of
Aldersdale
to hit the Russian tanker
Azerbaijan
which disappeared behind a huge sheet of flame’. Amazingly,
Azerbaijan
emerged at 9 knots still going. Its largely female crew had stood by their ship. The day had started out hard on the Russians.
¹⁴

The Americans and British were not denied their share of the
Furor Teutonicus.
Leutnant Hennemann, a squadron leader, was just about to become legend. This daring young officer had already received a letter of commendation from Goring for destroying 50,000 tons of Allied shipping. Now he came in just over the water in an interval between the ship columns, dropped a bomb on a ship ‘then banked across the bow of the
Pozarica
with all the panache of a medieval Landsknecht, apparently contemptuous of the shell bursts of the ack-ack ship’s pom-poms’. His aircraft now burning from a number of hits, Hennemann flew so low that ship’s gunners fired level, many of their rounds striking other ships. He released his torpedoes which bounced over the water then submerged to hit the British
Navarino.
Hennemann’s plane crashed into the water just ahead of Broome’s
Keppel.
The polyglot crew of the passing Panamanian
El Capitán
could see the crew writhing in the flames. The seamen cursed them and cheered in a brutal lack of chivalry. Only later would the survivors of the British and American ships who had also observed the hero’s death uniformly praise the courage of Hennemann and his crew. Hennemann was posthumously awarded the Knights Cross.
¹⁵

Behind them another torpedo struck the American
William Hooper,
blowing its boiler clear out of the ship to hit the water with an enormous splash. Astern many of the crew of the
Navarino
had fallen into the water from capsized lifeboats. As the
Bellingham
ploughed right through the struggling seamen, one of them raised a fist and shouted defiantly, ‘On to Moscow . . . See you in Russia!’
¹⁶

Broome had broken radio silence as soon as the air attack began, alerting both Tovey and Hamilton. At the same time, Bloedorn had radioed the fleet that his attack was beginning. That also triggered the dispatch of the second strike group from its airbases in Norway. Now all three surface groups were converging, unknown to each other, on the stricken convoy off Bear Island.

Broome was immensely relieved two hours later to see the arrival of Hamilton’s cruisers. Eight of his ships had either been badly damaged or sunk. The additional protection of the cruisers would be a great help should the enemy attack again. Both Broome and Hamilton launched their scout planes to patrol to the south and southeast of the convoy. Tovey’s scout planes by now had also come within range. They broke radio silence to report that the entire German surface force was heading straight for Bear Island. The report stunned the command group on the bridge of the
Duke of York.
Tovey realized that the Germans would strike the convoy a good four hours before he would get there. He radioed Hamilton this news and ordered him to screen the convoy until the Home Fleet arrived. Hamilton had just given the same order having received the same warning from his own scout plane. Hamilton would have his cruiser screening mission, just as he had anticipated. He then told Broome to keep his ships moving east to put as much distance between them and the oncoming German ships. He detached submarines
P.614
and
P.615
to his own cruiser force. If their original mission was to defend the convoy against German capital ships, they would have the best chance of that by operating with his cruisers.
¹⁷

As word spread of the approaching German fleet, near panic set in among many of the merchant crews. On the
Troubador
the crew mutinied and overwhelmed the naval armed guards. At gunpoint they forced the captain to alter course - due south towards the German ships.
¹⁸

The convoy escorts were still close in, in case of another air attack. For proper antisubmarine protection, they should have been several thousand yards farther out from the convoy. That was just the opening that the Ice Devil pack needed. A dozen U-boats moved to attack. First to be sunk were the disabled ships left in the convoy’s wake. The
William Hooper
disintegrated, sending a fiery shock wave over the sea as its 10,000 tons of ammunition exploded. The first of the steaming ships to be struck was the
ungallant El Capitán.
It fell out of line and began to sink by the stern. That exposed Pozarica, which took two torpedoes, stopped dead in the water and began to list. Broome quickly ordered his escorts farther out to drive off the U-boats. As he watched his ships swinging towards their new positions, his own ship shuddered with one torpedo hit then another. The
Keppel
sank so quickly hardly a man survived. The convoy was now without a commander.
¹⁹

Hamilton’s reconnaissance floatplane never saw the Fw 190 that shot it down. The admiral only knew that it had stopped transmitting. Tovey’s scouts suffered the same fate, all but one, and it was able to radio its sighting of the German fleet as still on course to Bear Island.

The next Hamilton knew of the Germans was when his own destroyers sighted their counterparts screening Carls’s fleet. The destroyers reported the Germans as coming in three columns, each in line ahead, with
Tirpitz
in the centre column. Hamilton’s plan was to protect the convoy by pulling the Germans to the northwest away from Bear Island.

The destroyers began the show. Hamilton’s ships shot forward to pierce the German screen and launch their torpedoes at the German capital ships. The German destroyer captains were just as aggressive, launching their own attacks on the British to throw off their torpedo strikes. Carls had the advantage now that Hamilton was blinded from the air. Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft reported that the convoy was steaming north of Bear Island while the cruiser force was southwest. He told off his port column, 2nd Battlegroup’s
Lützow
and Scheer, to engage the Allied cruisers while he went after the convoy with the 1st and 3rd Battlegroups.

From the bridge of HMS
London
it was clear to Hamilton what the enemy was doing. Carls had thrown a spanner into his plan to pull the German fleet northwest away from the convoy. Hamilton now knew that Tovey was approaching quickly with the Home Fleet, but it would be a good four hours before he could arrive. Hamilton had no choice but to attack with such force as to compel the rest of the German ships to engage. If he had followed his orders and not engaged, he would never have lived down the shame of leaving the convoy to the mercy of the German surface ships.

First though he had to get through
Lützow
and
Scheer,
and that problem was emphasized as strikes from their 11-inch guns began to splash around his cruisers. They outranged his 8-inch guns by several thousand yards. Although he had four ships to these two, his would have to cross this beaten zone in which the German guns could hammer them before they could reply.

Clouds of mosquitoes hung about the woods throughout which the buildings and huts of the Wolfsschanze were scattered. As Goring got out of the staff car that had brought him from the airstrip, a cloud of the tiny tormentors, attracted by his heavy cologne, fell upon him with more fury than his own Luftwaffe over Rotterdam or London. He fled inside Hitler’s headquarters waving his baton as if it would drive the mosquitoes away. Goring joined Hitler and soon puffed himself up as the reports came in of the Luftwaffe’s success in striking the convoy. He reminded Hitler that another strike force was now in the air and a third waiting to follow. Goring could see that Hitler was also pleased, but he was pacing back and forth nervously. ‘All well and good, Goring, but what about the enemy aircraft carriers?’

He was prescient. While Hamilton charged, dive- and torpedo-bombers from
Victorious
and
Wasp
were taking off for a strike at the Germans. They formed up and headed out in separate formations so as to come in from different directions.

Dönitz had also taken his Führer’s anxiety on board. He had directed that U-boat Flotilla 10 screen Carls’s ships far to the west. One of these boats reported large air formations heading northeast. The flotilla commander ordered his boats to head in the direction from which the planes had come.