Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (13 page)

Just to prove that life is unfair, Carls’s chivalry was going to cost him dear. After the fight with the cruisers, the time it took to rescue survivors proved costly. It was as if, by lingering at the site of his victory, he was trailing his coat past both the Royal and US Navies. It was time that Tovey used to position the Home Fleet right across Carls’s way home. Tovey had calculated the most direct route from the last sighting of the German fleet as it sank Hamilton’s cruisers and then marked just where he wanted to be to intersect it - right on the meridian of 20° East.

Carls’s staff and the captain of the
Hipper,
Karl Topp, remonstrated with him but to no avail about the dangers of remaining in the area. Topp was outspoken, ‘With respect, the enemy carriers have not been accounted for. They are still out there and able to launch more strikes.’

The admiral was a firm man but not a martinet. He did not shut down Topp with an order but chose to reply:

He did not know that Tovey’s ships had barrelled right through the U-boat screen and left enough destroyers to keep them dodging depth charges and not able to surface and signal.

Topp would not give up. ‘I would feel a lot safer if we set a course for home directly.’

Carls thought the expression of a firm opinion from a subordinate was to be encouraged. He threw the man a bone. ‘Just in case, then, Captain, we will send a few of our floatplanes from
Tirpitz
and
Gneisenau
to search to the west. We will also request the Luftwaffe to hurry up its support for our return home.’ He saw that Topp still wanted to argue:

He turned away and stepped out onto the weather bridge, and that was that.

Carls’s message to the Luftwaffe unfortunately went through Headquarters, Naval Group North, to commander of Naval Forces Norway to the commander of Luftflotte 5. When it finally reached KG 26 and KG 40 at the airfields at Bardufoss and Banak, most of the planes had been pulled into their hangars for maintenance, and the crews were off celebrating, as only aviators can. The maintenance crews were swarming over the aircraft separating out those with battle damage and beginning first echelon maintenance on the rest. Only Priller’s group of JG 26 was in relatively good shape.

About three hours later, Carls was to be the recipient of too much intelligence too late. In quick succession he received reports from U-boat Flotilla 10, the B-Dienst, and his own floatplanes that the enemy had indeed stolen a march on him and was cruising between him and his Norwegian bases. The U-boats had finally broken free of the British destroyers and surfaced to report the passage of the Home Fleet. The B-Dienst had decrypted Tovey’s message to the late Hamilton telling him to rendezvous at 72° 30′ North, 20° East. Finally one of the floatplanes radioed the enemy presence just a few miles to the southeast.
¹⁰

Wasp’
s Wildcats had pounced on the rest of the floatplanes within range before they could radio the presence of the Home Fleet. The American pilots were out for blood after the loss of most of their first strike force, as were the few surviving British air crews. There were still 23 fighters aboard
Wasp
as well as 20 dive-bombers and 3 torpedo-bombers. The
Wasp
still had more than one sting, as Churchill had said in May.
Victorious
had another few aircraft left and was still game for the next round. Aboard
Wasp
was Lieutenant David McCampbell, who was beside himself that he had not been able to accompany the first strike on the
Tirpitz.
He was convinced that he could have accounted for a few of those Fw 190s and got back too, not an inconsiderable concern.

The planes seemed to leap off the carrier decks to circle until they were all in the air before heading off. Tovey was determined to fix or slow down the Germans with this air attack while his big ships closed the distance. No one was more surprised than Carls when the air attack alarms were sounded. He rushed out to the weather bridge to see for himself, just in time to watch the Vindicators diving on to the fleet. He ordered immediate evasive action and for the destroyers to move in close to provide more antiaircraft protection for the big ships. It became plain that
Tirpitz
was the object of the dive-bombers’ special attention. The huge ship was still nimble and threw up a leaden storm, dodging bomb after bomb and plucking a plane or two out of the air. The last pilot in the attack felt the 20mm shells stitch through his plane just as he dropped his bomb. He knew it was off target as he pulled away, the plane sluggish to the controls. He looked back and down as the 1,0001b bomb fell and fell to strike not the sea, but at the very last moment the battleship’s prow. The fuze worked perfectly, and the prow disappeared in a mushroom of black smoke. When it cleared, all that was left of its elegant shape was twisted metal.

The handful of torpedo planes, three Devastators and two Albacores, also went after
Tirpitz.
The close-in destroyers shot down the low-flying biplanes, but a Devastator got through to drop its fish. It slid under the water with a splash and disappeared, its path marked only by a trail of bubbles. It struck
Tirpitz
amidships and blew through the hull into the crew spaces. Luckily they were empty. The ship rocked with the blow but did not slow down. The damage-control parties sealed off the damaged areas quickly.

The
Hipper,
consort to
Tirpitz,
received some of the attention meant for the bigger ship and took a bomb that blew a hole in its forward deck and another that knocked out its forward turret. It was all Kapitän Topp could do to keep his ship in the battle line as fires licked out of the twisted holes.

The Home Fleet was barely 30 miles away sailing at 28 knots line ahead. Aboard USS
Washington,
Vice Admiral Giffen addressed the crew. ‘We go into battle on the 166th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. We sail with a ship bearing the name of our first president. All of America sails with us today. It is up to us to show the world that we are worthy of the men of 1776 and Washington himself.’
¹¹

As he closed in Tovey turned the line to port to run roughly parallel to the disorganized course the Germans were on as they tried to fight off the stinging cloud of dive-bombers. At 24,000 yards, the gun captains gave the order to fire. ‘The fire gong sounded its “ting ting” and the director layer, his left hand automatically spinning and elevating the hand-wheel, squeezed the trigger with his right hand, and the electric circuits from the turrets were completed.’
¹²
Twenty British 14-inch guns and nine American 16-inch guns thundered, long flames, the residue of their propellant charges, shooting fiery tongues from the barrels after their huge projectiles raced ahead at almost three times the speed of sound.

Tirpitz
was their target. Tovey and the officers on the
bridge
of
Duke of York
cheered as they saw that the German ship was wreathed in splashes but marked also by orange bursts of flame where it was hit.
Tirpitz’
s well-trained damage-control parties quickly got the fire from the hit in the superstructure under control, but the aft turret had been pierced by two of the big American shells. The explosion found the powder bags for another salvo just lifted up through the magazine well. It blew the top and back off the turret; the great guns were blown loose from their mounts and crashed onto the deck. Fire danced out of the split turret as huge chunks of armour and debris fell into the ocean on either side of the ship.

Then the
Tirpitz‘
s own guns spoke before the next enemy salvo could be fired, and it was
Duke of York
and
King George V’
s turn to take a very hard punch. It was a tribute to the German ship and its crew that after absorbing such punishing blows they could coolly hit back.
Washington
absorbed repeated hits from the 11-inch guns of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
which profited from the enemy’s concentration on
Tirpitz. Washington’s
thick, tough armour was proof enough against the German shells. Aside from superstructure damage, its armour belt and turrets only showed serious gouges and scorch marks.

Into the beaten zone between the two thundering lines of ships the destroyers charged to make torpedo attacks on the enemy’s ships. The sea was filled with white wakes as torpedoes were launched. When they had expended their fish, the destroyers would get in close to fight it out with their guns. The ever-observant Lieutenant Fairbanks would later record that ‘they resembled nothing more than mailed knights in wild charges’. In short order the German
Z-30
was on fire and sinking while HMS
Obdurate
caught a stray torpedo and quickly went down.

German destroyers
Richard Beitzen
and
Z-24
slipped through the mêlée to launch torpedoes on
Duke of York.
The battleship tried to turn hard to port to avoid them, and one passed a hundred yards to its stern, but the other struck the stern and jammed the rudder in such a position that the ship was now locked into a wide circle.
Beitzen
swung back and circled around to come up right alongside
King George V
at less than a hundred yards on a parallel course.
Beitzen
raked the British superstructure with its fire, destroying antennas, radars and antiaircraft guns, and driving fragments through the bridge’s armoured viewing slit to wound the captain and most of the officers and men with him. Following behind, the
Washington
was already hotly engaged with the two sister battlecruisers but pulled to starboard enough to depress its forward battery as low as possible. One salvo and
Beitzen
disintegrated.
Washington
just ploughed through the wreckage; it did not include a single survivor.
¹³

To the rear, the three Allied cruisers pulled out of line to strike northwest and come up on the other side of the German battleline. Instead,
Scheer
and
Prinz Eugen
took the same course to head them off leaving the six battleships to themselves to pound each other to bits. At this point neither admiral was able to influence the battle. Tovey was desperately trying to find a destroyer to take him off the circling
Duke of York
while Carls found that the damage to
Hipper
had knocked out its radios. Signalling by flags was possible but difficult in all the smoke.

Priller had been the first to get his group into the air. It took barely thirty minutes to fly the 150 miles to the battle. He had only to guide on the columns of smoke and the gun flashes. Behind him those of the Ju 88s and He 111s that were not too badly damaged from their attack on the convoy were rolled out, refuelled and rearmed. Enough crews were found who had not yet replaced their blood supply with alcohol to get about fifty planes into the air.

No aircraft were visible over the battle, but along their flight path there appeared the top heavy bulk of aircraft carriers and two destroyers. Priller said to himself, ‘The Führer will enjoy the gun camera film I am about to shoot.’ He could do little to aid battleships in battle, but he could keep the enemy from tormenting them with his carrier planes. He led his twenty Fw 190s into the attack straight out of the sun. They were in among the Sea Hurricanes and Wildcats so unexpectedly that three of them went down in the first pass. The Germans turned and hunted their targets.

Priller flamed his first Wildcat, amazed at how slow and clumsy it was, and then looked down to see the two carriers. One had at most a half dozen aircraft on its flight deck. The other must have had thirty or more. These were the Devastators and Vindicators from the first strike on the German fleet, now refuelling and rearming for a second strike. He said to his wingman over the radio, ‘Follow me down!’ They came up from the fantail right over
Wasp‘
s flight deck strafing the packed aircraft with 20mm cannon fire. Fuelled planes and bowsers burst into flames behind them. As Priller and his wingman pulled up and around, they could see the explosions of ordnance carried by the aircraft on the flight deck. He said with a laugh to his longtime wingman, Heinz Wodarczyk, ‘Shall we go again or do you think they’ve had enough of the glory of the German Luftwaffe?’

By the time he had gained altitude, most of the British and American fighters had been shot down or chased away - all except one. And this one had shot down two of Priller’s experienced pilots, amazing in light of his aircraft. McCampbell now found himself the object of a dozen Fw 190s. His safety was in the fact that so many of them were after him that they endangered each other. He slipped down to the deck and around the
Victorious
hoping to lead any of his pursuers through the ship’s antiaircraft fire. Priller now felt the challenge of the chase and followed the American down and around, ignoring the fire from the ship. His wingman was not so lucky and began to trail smoke. ‘I am hit, Pips!’ he shouted into this radio. That pulled Priller back to shepherd his wingman to safety. Heinz Wodarczyk and he had been together too long for Priller to abandon him.

By now Priller had lost three of his planes to air combat and another to antiaircraft fire while two more were damaged and had to be guided home. Another pilot pointed to the east where a flight of a dozen Junkers and Heinkels was coming in. They had homed in on the fight, and so Priller made room for them as they attacked. This was their second air battle in twenty-four hours, and many of them were tired. Audacity in battle is a factor of strength, and strength comes from rest. Most of their attacks were not pressed home with the elan of their fight with the convoy. Yet the Ju 88s did make several hits on both carriers. The armoured steel deck of
Victorious
absorbed the explosions. Nothing penetrated to the hangar deck or fuel and ammunition. The
Wasp’
s teak decks were no barrier at all to the German bombs, which crashed through to explode inside the hangar deck, filled with bombs and torpedoes ready to be sent topside. The explosions ripped through the ship igniting aviation fuel in turn. Piling on misery were the torpedoes dropped by the He 111s. Two of them hit home. Within minutes the carrier was listing to port as flaming wreckage from the splintered deck fell overboard.
¹⁴

Confident that
Wasp
would soon go under, that
Victorious
had taken repeated hits to its flight deck to make it useless, and having expended their bombs, the German fighters and bombers headed back to their Norwegian bases. Another flight of Ju 88s and He 111s passed them coming out and were told to go in the direction of the battleships.

Lieutenant McCampbell had landed on
Victorious
as soon as the German planes had flown off to be refuelled. He taxied down the deck dodging the jagged steel where the German bombs had hit, following the surviving Sea Hurricane and made it into the air. They flew after the German dive- and torpedo-bombers, heading north. The Wildcat and the Hurricane fell on the last two Heinkels in the formation. McCampbell came up close before pressing the firing button. The plane’s wing tore off, and it plummeted to the sea. He saw that the Hurricane had splashed another one.
¹⁵

By the time the two fighters reached the naval battle, McCampbell had shot down two more Heinkels and was on the tail of a Ju 88. The presence of an unknown number of Allied fighter pilots panicked the Ju 88s. They scattered, jettisoned their bombs, and headed for home. The Wildcat and the Hurricane followed. McCampbell watched one enemy catch fire and explode. He saw that the Hurricane had scored another kill. They saluted each other as they turned back to
Victorious
to rearm.
¹⁶