Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (36 page)

Like
MacRae on the
Argos Fire
, Gromyko had not had the benefit of the long trial
and error that
Kirov
had, and there had been little time to brief him.
So the missiles would strike the ship at its strongest point, a case of the
irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The face hardened armor was
dual density, with the bulk being ten inches of very hard steel that was meant
to blunt the nose of an incoming projectile, de-capping the shell and therefore
reducing its penetrating power. The inner four or five inches were of softer
density, designed to prevent the armor from fragmenting and producing shrapnel
splinters that could wreak havoc inside the ship. The slope of the armor itself
further increased its resistance to penetration, an ingenious design that would
make the ship all but invulnerable to full belt armor failure from a flat
trajectory attack—or so the designers believed.

Two
blazing battering rams struck at the hardened citadel of the ship that day, the
place where
Hindenburg’s
defense was meant to protect the machinery,
boilers, generators, power switchboards and the gun plot rooms. It was struck
with a combined warhead weight of 500kgs, but had been designed to resist
single shell hits twice that heavy, in the range of 800 to 1000kgs—but not
shells moving at Mach 2 driven by a 3000 kilogram rocket! The armor would
de-cap the warheads, and they would fail to penetrate, but the tremendous force
behind the attack would buckle the steel and blast it with massive heat and
shock. The fire that erupted from all that excess kerosene was terrible. Men
anywhere near the point of impact literally had the oxygen sucked from their
lungs, and the ship was scalded with searing heat. Most of the damage control
crews that had been fighting, and slowly suppressing the fire from the GB-7
hit, were now simply immolated by the attack, and
Hindenburg
burned, a
fierce, raging fire that enveloped the entire starboard middle segment of the
ship, with flames so hot that the gunwales above the point of impact literally
melted.

Amazingly,
the armor held, just as it was designed, for in fact, it would have taken an
18-inch gun from the
Yamato
at near point blank range to fully penetrate
due to the ingenious scheme against flat trajectory rounds. It would be the damnable
fire that would eventually rule the hot hour Lütjens had come to. He could feel
the ship roll with the punch, and he also saw that
Bismarck
had taken
two hard hits as well, one slightly aft and a second amidships. One look at the
fires that enveloped the ship told him what was happening now on
Hindenburg
.
Unless these fires were quickly controlled, they might spread and do damage
that could put both vessels in the repair docks for a very long time.

“Starboard
twenty,” he shouted. “Come about!”

The
helm answered, and the ship turned, the wind fanning the flames and driving the
heavy smoke past the bridge viewports.

“We are
turning?” Captain Adler had been watching
Bismarck
with his field
glasses. “What are you doing, Admiral?”

“One
look at those fires should tell you that. Signal
Bismarck
to follow.”

“Then
you are breaking off? We must continue! There is nothing wrong with our guns.”

“There
will be if those fires reach a magazine. Look at them! Look at
Bismarck!”
Lütjens was pointing at the raging smoke and flame, and the desperate struggle
to get more damage control parties to the scene, but Adler’s eyes were trained
with the big forward turrets of
Hindenburg
. Bruno turret fired, the
power of the volley shaking the ship.

“Look
at
that
fire,” he said. “We can crush the British!”

“Those
flames are nearly as high as the bridge, Captain. If they aren’t controlled
soon we may not be able to even breathe here, let alone have these nice little
arguments in front of the men.” He paused to let that sink in, but Adler had
the heat of the battle on him now, and propriety was the farthest thing from
his mind at that moment.

“Sir,”
came a report from a young officer, “Main gun director reports the smoke is too
heavy for accurate sighting.”

“Because
you have turned to starboard,” said Adler, “right into the wind and everything
is blowing across our beam!” The Captain was clearly unhappy.

“Kindly
look to port, Mister Adler. A turn in that direction would have put us right
across the bow of the
Normandie
. No, we will come about as I have ordered.
If these fires cannot be quickly controlled, then this battle is over. I was
not given this ship to see it burned to a blackened hulk. The Führer would
never forgive me.”

Down in
Anton turret, Axel Faust had felt the blow and knew the ship had taken a hard
hit, though he had not seen the rocket attack. His turret was still trained on
the British battleships, but no data was coming from Eisenberg or Fuchs.

“Trouble
with the gun directors!” he shouted, settling in behind the optical gun sights
available in the turret itself for just this contingency. “Elevation twenty,
five degrees right. Fire!”

The
turret roared, and the men leapt to their evolution, human sinew in the
workings of this vast machine. The breech opened, the shell loading bogie slid
into position and the massive shell was rammed home. The five seconds for the
rammer to return seemed like an eternity to Faust now. The gun had to be moved
off elevation while the loading progressed, then elevated again and re-trained
with the sighting data. Faust saw the fall of his shells and knew the shot was
close enough for rapid fire, but he suddenly felt the ship turning.

“Track
right! Five degrees! More… one degree more… Hold! Elevation eighteen point
five. Steady… Fire!”

The
German ships had turned to disengage, but were still firing, with no damage to
their turrets beyond the loss of director control. It was Axel Faust that made
the difference now, his well schooled eye at the turret optics making good on
the reputation he had earned as the best gunner in the fleet. His last salvo
had been right on the mark, and
Queen Elizabeth
would not survive the
hit he scored, with the heavy round plunging in behind the funnel. The ship’s
recent refit had improved her deck armor over machinery sites to 2.5 inches,
but the 16-inch shell from
Hindenburg
would penetrate twice that at the range
fired, and it gutted the ship, exploding three decks below the point of impact,
destroying two more boiler rooms.

Down
seven degrees at the bow and still listing, it was now only a matter of time
before the ship sunk. Captain Barry knew the worst when his chief of engineers
reported that damage from that last hit could not be controlled. A fire had
reached ready ammo store for one of the secondary batteries, and a second
explosion rocked the heart of the ship. With a heavy heart he signaled all
fleet units that he was forced to abandon ship. The crews were ordered to any
boat they could deploy, but he knew that many men were going to die here today.
Axel Faust had signed their death warrants with the guns of turret Anton.

The
heavy missiles off
Kazan
had done more to turn the action than anything
else. A British
Harpoon
weighed only 691kg with booster, and the GB-7
was in that same class. The
Onyx
missile was nearly five times heavier
and three times as long. The shock and fire they delivered was many times that
of the British missile, and the results were plain to see. Both German ships
were burning badly and now turning away from the main action.

Strausbourg
had been slightly ahead of the Germans, firing with her
twin quadruple turrets that were ideal in a pursuit scenario like this. But
that ship had been struck twice as well, beneath the forward A turret and again
much closer to the bow, which was more lightly armored and was rent asunder by
the heavy blow. Her fires were not as bad due to the location of the hits away
from the main superstructure, but the damage to the bow was causing severe
flooding forward and the ship turned, falling out of the battle.

The
cruiser
Colbert
got the worst of it. At 12,700 long tons she had only
20% of
Hindenburg’s
displacement. And no more than 60mm armor on the
belt. The two supersonic missiles blasted clean through this, erupted in a
massive fireball of ignited fuel and broke the ship in two.

Admiral
Laborde watched in horror as
Colbert
died an agonizing death, well out
in front of his ship. The
Normandie
had been screened by the two German
battleships, and thus had not been targeted. His ship had taken one GB-7 hit, a
close straddle from
Malaya
, but his gunners were slowly finding the
range with the two forward turrets, and at a little under 20,000 meters he
raked
Malaya
with a spread of 15-inch shells, finally getting a hit. He
gave an order to turn ten more points to port, away from the Germans, and was
soon able to run completely parallel to the British line, and bring all twelve
of his guns to the action.

Malaya
was wreathed in heavy smoke, and the cruiser
Berwick
had interposed itself, and now had the misfortune of becoming the new target. The
twelve guns roared and scored a hit. The next salvo would log two more, and the
cruiser, already damaged by a 500 pound bomb, was suddenly penetrated to
magazine level and exploded. It would sink in the next ten minutes.

In
other action the three remaining French cruisers had pounded the
Calcutta
to a smoking wreck, but Coventry and Orion had scored enough hits to discourage
their closer approach to the scene. The French cruisers broke off, but the
heart of their battle fleet,
Normandie
and
Dunkerque
, remained
undamaged, and undaunted.

Dunkerque
had been in on the action against Calcutta, scoring at
least one good hit there before turning the battle over to the cruisers and
looking for bigger prey. Now the battlecruiser joined the action against
Malaya
,
adding another eight 12.9 inch guns to the heat of that engagement.

It was
then that Admiral Laborde saw the streaking tail of yet another missile pierce
the heavy pall of drifting battle smoke, and lance into the heart of the light
cruiser
Jeane de Vienne
. The resulting explosion told him the ship had
taken heavy damage. The missile had popped up and come down on the 38mm deck
armor, plunging deep into the ship and nearly exiting through the bottom hull.

Damn
these naval rockets! Look what they’ve done to the German battleships. He was
receiving reports from every ship in the fleet, keeping a mental tally of his
losses. Of his ten destroyers,
Mistral, Orage
and
Vauban
had been
sunk, with damage to
Tempte, Tornade, Lynx
and
Panthere
that had
forced them to retire. He had clearly lost the heavy cruiser
Colbert
,
and the same might now be said for
Jeane de Vienne.
The hits to
Strausbourg
were serious, and the ship was struggling to control bad flooding as it shrunk
from the fight. Both German battleships had turned away, though their aft
turrets were still firing.

He had
two good ships in hand, his flagship hit but undaunted, and
Dunkerque
was
practically the only ship in the engagement that had come through without so
much as a paint scratch.
Queen Elizabeth
was clearly a lost cause for
the British, and he could stay here and pound the
Malaya
senseless if he
chose to do so, but how many more of those rockets might find his ship? The
fires he could still see burning on the
Hindenburg
were enough to
convince him that this engagement had run its course.

The
Franco-German fleet had been hit with fifteen supersonic missiles and eight
more of the lighter
Sea Skuas
. They had also faced the gunnery of the
British fleet, which had scored many hits in the battle to cause further
mayhem. It had been a terrible hour, and one of the most costly naval
engagements in history when the final tally was registered on both sides.
Considering the losses that had been sustained by the Italians, the Axis fleet
had taken a severe mauling.

It was
then that the sole surviving spotter plane sent in a report that another
squadron of enemy ships was approaching, seven ships in front at high speed,
another six ships, and aircraft carriers among them that appeared to be
launching planes. That was enough to convince La Borde that he had tarried here
too long. He gave the order to break off, just after 18:00, and the heavy smoke
soon obscured all view of the enemy as the
Normandie
began its turn. Now
he looked to the skies, sending orders that the fleet should regroup on a new
heading and prepare to defend against enemy air attack. In all this time, he
thought, where was the air cover he had been promised by the Germans?

The
Luftwaffe would come, but far too late to make any difference in the action.
His column reformed, beat off one half hearted attack by British
Swordfish
torpedo bombers, and then the skies began to darken with the growl of the
German planes. It was a formation of thirty Bf-110 twin engine heavy fighters,
more than enough to discourage any further air action off those carriers. As it
was soon determined that these planes were no direct threat to the fleet, both
Kirov
and
Argos Fire
preserved their SAMs, and the action slowly dissipated.