Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (21 page)

He sighed, put away his tools and
slowly closed the box before starting away, off shift at long last and heading
home. The sound of his footfalls on the coach floor would echo through time,
though he could not know that then. For Juan Alfonso was going to set events in
motion that few could see at that moment. Juan Alfonso, a leaky roof, a
screwdriver, pocket knife and a bit of chamois—no, it was not supposed to
happen that way at all.

Juan was supposed to simply leave
work and go home that night, and not sit there listening to the sound of the
rain on the roof of that train car. He was never supposed to see or feel the
tiny fall of water drops he had just attended to. The leak in the roof was
supposed to have gone unnoticed, in spite of his very careful inspection of
everything else that night.

The following day the ministers
would board the train. It would roll north for that decisive meeting with the
Germans on the border, and it would be raining all that day. The Spanish
minister would take the seat where Juan had enjoyed that brief moment of rest
with his nibble of cheese. The nasty leak there would become a nuisance that would
drive the minister to distraction, to the point where he was completely irate
and out of sorts when he finally reached the meeting site several hours later.

 His anger apparently carried
over to the negotiations, and he was so adamant and testy that his demeanor,
along with Franco’s persistent equivocation, convinced both Hitler and
Ribbentrop that the Spanish could not be dealt with. No deal was signed in the
history Fedorov knew, and Spain ended up joining the Allies instead. The leaky
roof in that train car had worked its will on fate.

But not this time.

Not after Juan Alfonso sat in
that seat and saw those rain drops falling to soil his pant leg. Everything was
going to be different now, because that bit of chamois and a couple well
tightened screws were enough to stop the leak, which was enough to remove that
annoying and persistent perturbation for Foreign Affairs Minister Ramon Serrano
Suñer. Instead he was in a fine mood when he arrived at Hendaye on the border, so
agreeable that he even served to soothe Franco’s doubts and smooth over his
objections, and the outcome of the meeting was quite different.

The meeting was held, and Hitler
and Ribbentrop worked diligently to allay all Franco’s fears. They pledged that
Germany would protect and defend Spanish interests against any reprisal,
provide grain, sign lucrative trade agreements, even secure the telecom network
owned by AT & T. So in spite of his many doubts, Franco and Spain would
cast their fate to the wind and shake hands with Adolf Hitler that day, and everything
would change. It was not supposed to happen that way, but a simple man named
Juan Alfonso made it so.

The German Plan

“Operation
Felix,” was now
to become Germany’s next primary operation of war. Hitler emphasized all his
key objectives in Fuehrer Directive #18:

“The most urgent duty of the
French is to secure their African possessions (West and Equatorial Africa),
offensively and defensively, against England and the de Gaulle movement. From
this the full participation of France in the war against England may develop.
Political measures to bring about the entry into the war of Spain in the near
future have already been initiated. The aim of German intervention in the
Iberian peninsula (cover-name 'Felix') will be to drive the English from the
Western Mediterranean. To this end: Gibraltar is to be captured and the Straits
closed. The English are to be prevented from gaining a footing at any other
point on the Iberian peninsula or in the Atlantic Islands. The preparation and
execution of this operation is planned as follows:

PHASE I

a.
   
Reconnaissance
parties (officers in plain clothes) will draw up the necessary plans for action
against Gibraltar and for the capture of airfields.

b.
   
Formations
detailed for the operation will be concentrated at a considerable distance from
the Franco-Spanish frontier and without previous briefing of troops. Three
weeks before troops are timed to cross the Spanish-French frontier, a warning
order will be issued. In view of the low capacity of Spanish railways the Army
will detail chiefly motorized formations for this operation, so that the
railways are available for supplies.

PHASE II

a.
   
Units of
the Air Force will set out from French bases and make a well-timed air attack
on English naval forces in Gibraltar harbor. After the attack they will land in
Spanish airports.

b.
   
Shortly
after this attack units detailed for operations in Spain will cross or fly over
the Franco-Spanish frontier.

PHASE III

a.
   
An attack
will be made with German troops to seize Gibraltar.

b.
   
Forces
will be made ready to invade Portugal should the English gain a footing there.
Formations detailed for this purpose will enter Spain immediately behind the
forces intended for Gibraltar.

PHASE IV

After the capture of the Rock,
the Spaniards will be assisted to close the Straits; if necessary, from Spanish
Morocco also.

General Ludwig Kübler's 49th
Corps would lead the assault. The German mobile divisions would cross the
northern passes of the Pyrenees and sweep south, straight through Madrid and on
to Gibraltar. The assault forces for Gibraltar would be spearheaded by a
company of the elite Brandenburger commandos, and a special fallshirmjager unit.
These troops would soon be supported by a crack regiment of the
Grossdeutschland Division and the 98th Regiment of the 1st Mountain Division, their
initial assault elements to be air lifted by the Luftwaffe, and landing at
Spanish airfields. 26 medium and heavy artillery battalions, and three engineer
battalions would follow overland.

Their flank on the Iberian
peninsula would be watched and guarded by the whole of the 39th Korps, the 16th
Panzer Division, and the ‘greyhounds’ of the 16th Motorized Division. Further
forces had been detailed to support the main overland operation, including a
detachment of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, and two more infantry divisions would
be detailed to cross the straits and occupy the shores of Spanish Morocco.

“I also request that the problem
of occupying Madeira and the Azores should be considered,” said Hitler,
“together with the advantages and disadvantages which this would entail for our
sea and air warfare. The results of these investigations are to be submitted to
me as soon as possible. As to the Vichy French, now let them prove their pledge
of alliance with us and use the ships they sit on in Casablanca and Dakar to
support such a move.”

This extended campaign would deny
the British these valuable outposts as staging areas for counter-operations
against Gibraltar and Spain, while at the same time affording Germany valuable
refueling stations for its navy. They would also sit astride the convoy routes
Britain used to move supplies and resources to and from Freetown and around the
Cape of Good Hope.

Gibraltar, however, was the real
prize. Once the German Army had hold of the fabled “Pillars of Hercules,” the
British would be denied this vital base, and it would soon serve German/Italian
needs while they continued the fight to destroy what remained of the British
outposts in the Mediterranean. Then the Axis Powers could finally voice the old
Roman claim when they once referred to the Mediterranean as
Mare Nostrum,
our
sea. Malta would be completely isolated and fall within a month. The British
position in Egypt would be in grave danger, as the Germans could move forces to
North Africa easily by sea, while the British would have to rely on supply
lines thousands of miles long, around the Cape of Good Hope. The British Army
in North Africa would be effectively cut off.

The
Kriegsmarine
had returned to friendly ports after the abortive sortie to
harass the British convoy shipping in June of 1940. They began the operation
with a game of shadow boxing, aiming to draw the attention of British heavy
ships, but encountered a mysterious adversary that seemed to foil their every
move, sinking the tanker
Altmark
and forcing them to backtrack north to
refuel with an alternate supply ship. A strong battlegroup of the German fleet
had then sortied,
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz
leading the way beneath
the heavy grey overcast, intending to strike south for the Atlantic. There they
met the Royal Navy on equal terms for the first time at sea since the big sea
duels of WWI. They learned, much to their great surprise, that new and powerful
weapons of war were now threatening to upset the careful balance that would
decide naval supremacy in the Atlantic, and by so doing, decide the war.

Suddenly Raeder’s plans were all
thrown to the wind. The development of rocketry had received passing attention
in Germany before the war, but now it was given the highest possible priority.
If the British could field these weapons, or the Russians as it was later
learned, then so could Germany. Seeing that the application of the weaponry was
apparently limited, and observed on no other Russian ship, the Germans
concluded it must have been a new prototype, deployed in battle for the very
first time.

There had not been a hint or
whisper of these weapons in the Mediterranean, and no British ships seemed to
have them. Yet the impact they had in German war planning was nonetheless
significant. What if Soviet Russia had these weapons ready for use as a land
based system? This, among other reasons, prompted Hitler to postpone the immediate
invasion of Soviet Russia until intelligence could be developed on the scale of
deployment for these new weapons.

In the short run Doenitz argued
that no rocket cruiser could in any way harm his U-boats, and was glad to see
that his budget for new construction was dramatically increased, while that of
Raeder diminished. The Germans would finish the fitting out of only one more
major capital ship, the
Oldenburg
. The third big battleship Hitler had
ordered long ago, the
Brandenburg
, was summarily cancelled, and the
steel allotted for the project was diverted to the production of small
screening ships like destroyers, and more U-Boats, and the completion of the
large fleet carrier the Germans had captured from the French in Saint Nazaire.
The name itself would also transfer to that ship, and carrier
Joffre
would soon be christened CV
Brandenburg.

As for the fast AA cruiser
De
Grasse,
Raeder managed to preserve enough of his resources to convert this
ship to a hybrid escort cruiser/carrier, the
Hannover
, named after the
old pre-dreadnought battleship from an earlier day. These two ships, would join
Peter Strasser
in the shipyards and were expected to reach completion by
mid-1941 to bring Germany’s carrier fleet to a respectable four ships.

Yet Raeder had much more planned,
just as he had explained it to Doenitz earlier. His navy would play an
important role in
Operation Felix
,
and
that attack would be supported by the core of his new battle fleet in a gamble
to break the back of the Royal Navy by seizing Gibraltar. Raeder would send out
his gladiators once again, hoping to draw the Royal Navy into another pursuit
and battle at sea. He would fling his newest battle squadron down through the
Faeroes Gap and into the heat of the action. And they would be led by the
greatest champion the German Navy had ever put to sea—battleship
Hindenburg
.

Raeder could see the ships moving
in his mind’s eye, even as he visualized them on his battle map in the
operations center at Wilhelmshaven. If his Admirals and Kapitans kept good
heads on their shoulders, then he could guarantee Hitler that his segment of
the plan would be accomplished—disrupt the Royal Navy so badly that any hope of
reinforcing Gibraltar or landing forces in Portugal or Morocco would be
impossible. This he could do, rockets or no rockets. Every variable and factor
in the equation of his thinking told him that his fleet was ready for the task
as Germany prepared to strike at another hinge of fate—Gibraltar.

Part VII

Dakar

“You must never underestimate your
opposition.”

—John Scarlett

Chapter 19

The
Allied situation in the Mediterranean theater was far from
secure by mid 1940. The twin blows of Italian hostility and the metamorphosis
of France from ally to enemy had left the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth
allies to stand alone. Most of their strength lay in Egypt under General Archibald
Percival Wavell, a tall, broad shouldered, thick necked man who had been in the
British Army since the Second Boer War. He had also spent a year as an observer
with the Russian Army, and learned the Russian language before serving in the
First War. Now he found himself elevated to Commander-in-Chief Middle East, which
encompassed all of East Africa, Greece, the Balkans, and Palestine

It was
an enormous task considering the fact that Wavell’s force in Egypt was vastly
outnumbered by the Italian colonial armies in Africa. By August of 1940 it
consisted of the British 7th Armored Division, 4th and 5th Indian Divisions,
the 2nd New Zealand Division and mixed forces comprising three British brigades.
Plans were underway to reinforce Wavell with a South African Division and a
pair of Australian Divisions that were still forming. The R.A.F. could at least
muster an assortment of 300 planes, and the Royal Navy at Alexandria had three
battleships, four cruisers and 12 destroyers.

Against
this force the Italians could boast they had numerous field armies, amounting
to over 75 divisions, though most were undermanned and ill equipped. They also
had twice as many battleships in theater, good fast cruisers and destroyers,
and a robust submarine fleet. Regia Aeronautica had 400 planes in Libya with
another 300 in the horn of Africa, and three times as many more in at home
aerodromes. The threat Italy represented on paper looked very serious, and this
led Wavell to adopt an early policy of cautious containment, like a man staring
down a bee hive on his back porch, and wondering whether the first tentative
jabs would result in a whirlwind of stinging reprisal.

What
the Italians did not have, however, was the will to use the forces they had,
and the skill to use them effectively. In spite of its size on paper, the
Italian Army proved to have very little sting at all, and even less inclination
to swarm on the enemy they clearly outnumbered in every category of arms. In
August they began to buzz about at the Egyptian frontier, where small
skirmishes and quick cross border raids were the order of the day.

British
garrisons on other key Mediterranean outposts such as Malta and Gibraltar, were
also ill equipped for the gathering threat of war. As France fell, Malta had
only four old
Gladiator
fighters, still in packing crates as reserve
planes for the British carrier HMS
Glorious
. Of these only three could
be kept working, given the names Faith, Hope and Charity. Four
Hurricanes
arrived in late June, and another seven in July to build the fighter defense
there to fourteen planes. They were joined by three
Swordfish
, a single
Skua
,
one Hudson bomber and two Sunderlands. As Tovey concluded his Faeroe Island
conference with the Russians, the carrier
Argus
was preparing to make a
ferry run with twelve more
Hurricanes
, and three Maryland bombers were
also flown in, largely for reconnaissance operations.

There
were five battalions assigned to Malta Command along with a mix of artillery,
anti-tank and AA guns, and a couple companies of fortress engineers, all
gathered into the Malta Infantry Brigade. Gibraltar was equally thin on air
power, as the agreement Britain had with Spain forbade offensive bombers there.
202 Squadron flew
Swordfish
and Sunderlands on anti-submarine patrols.
On the ground, the Rock was garrisoned by only three battalions of infantry,
two companies of fortress engineers and the 3rd Heavy Artillery Brigade. A
fourth battalion, the Black Watch, would arrive in short order.

At sea
it seemed that both sides had paused briefly to take stock of their respective
situations. The Italians seemed to be half-hearted participants in the war, a
member of the Axis more in name than deed. They busied themselves with laying
mine barrages off Pantelleria, sub sparing with British ships transiting the
Red Sea, and with little result. The bulk of the Italian fleet largely sat in
their home ports, while Regia Marina operated with its submarines, using them
as transports, mine layers, and mounding defensive patrols in key waterways.

For
their part, considering the dire situation at Malta, the British mounted a well
named hasty sortie that was again led by the enterprising young carrier
commander Christopher Wells. HMS
Glorious
was still standing in for the
Ark
Royal
, and “Operation Hurry” was teed up to harass and distract the
Italians. Escorted by the battleship
Valiant
, three cruisers and eight
destroyers, Wells mounted a quick strike against airfields near Cagliari on
Sardinia as cover for CVL
Argus
, which flew off those twelve much needed
Hurricane
fighters for Malta, nearly doubling their fighter contingent
in one throw.

It
seemed that neither side had taken the full measure of the other, like two
boxers tentatively jabbing and moving about one another in the first round of a
prize fight. The British counted the eggs still left in the French navy’s
basket, and knew that something had to be done about them. Operation Menace was
the result of that brooding, a plan to make a direct challenge to the French African
port of Dakar on the Atlantic. There sat the formidable battleship
Richelieu,
and the
even more dangerous new design the powerful
Normandie
, with twelve
15-inch guns. To make matters worse, this force could be easily supported by
the battleship
Jean Bart
just up the coast at Casablanca, along with a
light cruiser, seven destroyers and eighteen submarines.

The
Admiralty still regarded this as the most immediate and dire threat to future
war operations. Sitting right on the Atlantic, the thought that the French
might one day sortie with this entire force and cut the convoy routes south
around the Cape of Good Hope was a very real and present danger. Something had
to be done about it, and, much like the recent Operation Catapult aimed at Oran
and Mers-el-Kebir, Operation Menace was aimed at facing down the best of these
ships while they lay at anchor and eliminating the menace they represented to
England’s future war effort.

A small
convoy of 4200 British Troops and 2700 Free French troops departed from the
Clyde, escorted by three cruisers and four destroyers. Along the way the
cruiser
Fiji
was hit by Lieutenant Jenisch on U-32, and the cruiser
Australia
suffered a near miss, but the force squeaked through to rendezvous with a
strong detachment from Force H. The combined force headed for Freetown for
provisioning prior to their planned approach to Dakar. There they would offer
another ultimatum, and should the French decline, it was Vice Admiral
Cunningham’s job to smash the French fleet and land nearly 7000 troops to seize
this vital port. If successful it would leave only Casablanca to be accounted
for, but the French got wind of the operation, and immediately dispatched naval
reinforcements from Toulon.

Three
cruisers and three destroyers had been ordered to the colony of Gabon near the
Congo, where De Gaulle’s influence had seduced the local authorities there away
from the Vichy fold. Instead they were ordered to Dakar, and a battle that was
never written in any of the history books Fedorov had in his library was now
gathering like the restless late summer clouds that formed off the African
coast.

* * *

Situated
a little over 900 kilometers south of Dakar, Freetown was
the capital of Sierra Leone and a valuable British sanctuary on an African
coast largely occupied by Vichy France. As such it became a valuable stopping
point for outbound convoys and a place to dock and replenish warships serving
to escort them.

Captain
Christopher Wells was out on the weather deck of HMS
Glorious
, sailing
under fair skies and calm winds. The ship was riding easily, her belly topped
off with fuel and a flight of four
Swordfish
spotted on deck and ready
for immediate takeoff. Remembering a day very like this in the Norwegian Sea
some months ago, Wells had also posted lookouts on his high main mast even
though he might have dispensed with that this go around.
Glorious
had
been alone then, with only two destroyers in escort, and Wells still shuddered
to recall those difficult moments when he had struggled to save the ship from a
pair of pursuing wolves in
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
. Now he felt
a good deal more secure, surrounded by a family of strong Royal Navy ships that
included the battleships
Barham
and
Resolution,
heavy cruisers
Cornwall
and
Cumberland
arriving from Capetown, and a flotilla of six destroyers
fanned out around the bigger ships like a gaggle of geese.

Wells’
good friend Lieutenant Woodfield came out on the weather deck to take up his
watch, pleased to see the Captain there.

“Still
mixing with the lower ranks, Captain?” he said with a smile. His friend had
moved up another rung on the ladder of command while Woodfield remained a
Lieutenant.

“Fine
day, Woody, and we’re finally ready to settle accounts with the French.”

“Still
brooding on that business off Mers-el-Kebir?”

“We
never got there. Most of the French fleet slipped right out the back door to
Toulon.”

“Not
quite, Welly. You notched your belt with a pair of battleships as I recall.”

“Who
could forget that,” said Wells, still remembering how he felt when he first
received the news that his
Swordfish
from
823 and 825 squadrons
, planes sent out by his command, had found and sunk the
old WWI era battleships
Bretagne
and
Provence.
He had
raised his hand against Britain’s former allies, put over 1300 French sailors
into the sea, and so enraged the French that they now openly sided with the Axis.
It was all his fault, or so he believed for a good long while after that, in
spite of Admiral Somerville’s praise for his conduct in the operation and
assurance that he would have done the very same thing, distasteful as it was.

Now he was back in the same game,
out assigned as primary air cover asset for Operation Menace, the British plan
to seize Dakar. They were already three hours out of Freetown, heading north
for the showdown that was supposed to play out like the original plan for
Mers-el-Kebir. Yet like that plan, the French had again been forewarned of the
British moves. Ships out of Toulon had already been dispatched to reinforce
Dakar, and had managed to slip past the watch at Gibraltar on a dark night the
previous day. Wells got that news only an hour ago, and knew he would soon be
tasked to get planes out to look for the Toulon squadron.

“I don’t like it, Woody,” he
said. “I look out at those two fat battleships there and should feel at ease,
but I have misgivings about this mission. Something tells me the French are on
to us.”

“So what if they are? R.A.F. got
a look at that squadron that slipped past Gibraltar and it’s only three light
cruisers and a few destroyers. They say it put in to Casablanca. That won’t be
much help to the French given what I see around us here.”

Woodfield might have been more
cautious had he know that the French Squadron had sailed into Casablanca the
previous morning to re-provision and sortie again, with one more addition to
the fleet that could be very troublesome, the battleship
Jean Bart.
This
force had already slipped through the Canary Islands and was heading south for
the Cape Verde Islands where the French were staging their own little operation
as part of a much bigger plan that would soon unhinge far more than either man
could imagine that fair morning.

The British troop convoy had
detached the cruisers
Australia
and
Devonshire
to look for the
French ships, but they had been unable to find them off Casablanca. These two
cruisers were still patrolling far to the north, and slowly working their way
down to Dakar.

“So we go for the gold, Wells.”
Woodfield was still exuberant. “I’ve heard that bullion reserves for the Bank
of France were spirited off to Dakar. That’s reason enough for us to get hold
of the place, eh? And that harbor is far superior to our anchorages at
Freetown. With it we’ll have a good watch on the convoy routes south, and then
it’s on to Casablanca to finish things up.”

“I wish I had your enthusiasm,”
said Wells. Yes, Woodfield had the spirit in him this morning, a lieutenant’s
dash and bravado. Wait until he wears a Captain’s hat one day and feels the
weight of those new stripes on his shoulder boards.

“Just keep a positive attitude,
Wells. We’ve sixteen good 15-inch guns out there between those two
battleships.”

“Yes well the French will still
out gun us. They’ll have twenty!”

“But those ships will be sitting
in the harbor—a pair of nice fat geese.”

“That’s what we thought at Mers-el-Kebir.
If they’ve sent this squadron from Toulon, then they’ll certainly know what
we’re up too here. I wouldn’t keep my ships anchored in port, and I’m not so
sure the French will either.”