“There is no other way to describe it,” said Hoffmann. “We sighted what appeared to be a large battlecruiser, though it wasn’t moving at anything more than ten or fifteen knots by our estimation. We engaged and it stuck a fast moving rocket right into Gneisenau’s belly. It was astounding, Kranke! You would have to see it to believe it, but I saw the whole thing with my very own eyes, and I will never forget it. This was the same weapon that sunk Sigfrid, and hit Bismarck. We had the heart of the fleet with us, yet this ship forced Lindemann to back off. Now they are sending you? Be careful!”
He did his best to forewarn Kranke, hoping he had conveyed the same sense of peril and urgency that he felt. Scharnhorst was ordered to accompany the newcomers as far north as Narvik, where Hoffmann would wait on 4 hour notice should Kranke’s detachment run into difficulty. But what good can I do, he thought? Lindemann was not willing to stand and fight the British with ships like Bismarck and Tirpitz!
“Don’t worry about us,” said Kranke confidently. “ Admiral Scheer is a good ship. I will take your advice-and one of those cigars you keep in your pocket if you can spare one.”
Hoffman gave him three. “Smoke the first if you can find this ship,” he said. “Smoke the second if you can get close enough to verify its identity and get a good photo or two.”
“And the third?”
“Smoke that one if you get back here alive.”
The last big German ship to come this far north into Arctic seas had been an airship, Zeppelin LZ-127, which carried an international research team in 1931 on an amazing 13,000 mile route from Berlin to the far cape Zhelaniya and back, with stops in Leningrad, Archangel, White Sea ports and Franz Joseph Land. They had promised the Russians they would share any photographs and research data they obtained after getting permission for the trip, but never delivered on that pledge.
The cruiser Koenigsberg had come up into the Barents Sea briefly in 1936, and Koln followed with a brief sortie in 1937 before the war. The Germans had established a small supply base and weather station west of Murmansk at Kirkenes in Norway, but they also had plans to rapidly push a column from there to Litsa on the Molotov Gulf to provide them sea access east of the imposing Volokovaya cape landmass. From there they could watch cape area traffic and relay wind and weather front data. Code named “Base Nord,” Admiral Scheer was tasked with secretly putting ashore a detachment of ski troops to make an initial survey of the location. Then they would scout the route west to Kirkenes again in preparation for the push east.
With war looming in the far east, Germany also thought about the prospect of exploring the Arctic passage to the Bering Sea. There were several German merchant ships and steamers that might find a quick and safe way home by that route. Raeder contemplated sending the armed merchant raider Komet north for this mission, but decided to send a ship that would not have to ask permission to sail where it wished. It was risky. An incident could spark hostilities, so he made sure to brief Kranke well.
“Just slip in the back door and see what’s in the kitchen, Kranke. And be careful, don’t break the china while you are there! The last thing we need is a war on two fronts.”
The operation was happening two full years earlier than it might have in the history Fedorov knew. In his books the Admiral Scheer had sailed alone, under a different commander, and caused much trouble in the north. The history now, in the shattered world these ships all sailed in, would be an eerie echo of that operation-including the trouble it stirred up. Kranke’s detachment was tasked with listening to Russian radio traffic, putting shore teams in at isolated Soviet outposts to look for anything of value, particularly maps, code cipher keys and related equipment. They would also scout sea conditions, ice floe patterns and ice density, and note prevailing weather.
The detachment sailed from Narvik on the grey morning of July 4th, 1940, and quietly made its way north around the northern cape of Norway. Kranke would sail east of Bear Island, past the ragged Spitzbergen Islands to the forsaken icy rocks of Franz Joseph Land. His first goal was to slip into the Kara Sea and collect as much information as possible. To facilitate that effort he took aboard a Kriegsmarine Funkaufklarung team. Experts in radio signals intelligence, these men also spoke fluent Russian to listen in on the radio traffic.
Their work would be aided by Oberleutnant zur See Peter Grau aboard U-46, which had left Narvik several days earlier to take up a station near Cape Zhelanlya for relaying radio intercepts. There the German U-Boat surfaced to catch a small Russian outpost by surprise. Then something happened that soon set events off on an unpredictable course. Two Russian guards fired at U-46, raking its exposed hull with machine gun fire. Grau replied by shelling the radio tower and two seaplanes, and then putting a team ashore to search the station. Declared or not, Oberleutnant Grau’s first shot at the icy northern outpost on the 5th of July, 1940, was the opening round of the war in the east between Germany and Kirov’s Soviet Russia, though no one knew that yet.
There had been no time for a distress signal before the radio tower was destroyed, and so the Soviets remained unaware of the incident, and oblivious to the steady northern incursion of Admiral Scheer and Nurnberg, which rendezvoused with the U-boat later that same day. There they received Grau’s report, and Kranke ordered the U-Boat to scout down the long ragged western edge of Novaya Zemlya Island to look for similar outposts. Then the German flotilla turned north east into the cheerless waters of the Kara Sea.
“What are we doing here, Heintz?” Kranke was on the bridge with his Executive Officer, thinking about those cigars and wishing he was in the Atlantic. “There’s nothing up here but these isolated weather stations and a few old Russian merchant ships. No glory here, just these tedious ice floes and cold hands and feet.”
What Kranke did not know at that moment was that Soviet Intelligence had become suspicious of trouble when the weather station Grau had shelled did not report that day. They had a coast guard ship, SKR-18, the former armed icebreaker Fedor Litke in the Kara Sea, and decided to send it down to have a look.
“Lean pickings, I agree Kapitan, but we are not even supposed to be at war here. Remember, this is nothing more than a reconnaissance operation.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Heintz. I was only joking earlier. We have business here, as you will soon see.”
Heintz did not quite know what that was about, but said nothing. A day later, July 6, 1940, the top mast reported a small ship sighted due east of their position. Kranke stepped out onto the cold weather deck to have a look through the better telescope there. Sure enough, he could make out the red flag, though the ship did not look all that threatening. Back on the bridge he waited until the distant ship began to hail them on radio, and when the call was not answered he saw they had begun flashing their search lights.
“They are ordering us to stop and heave to for boarding,” said Heintz.”
“Tell them to go to hell,” said Kranke. “Once they get a look at those eleven inch guns out there they will see that I have more than ample means to send them there myself!”
“They will report our position, Kapitan.”
“Let them. What can the Russians do about it?”
The Captain of SKR-18 was very insistent, and he did indeed report the contact in a message to the Archangel Party Commiserate that was soon followed by another message. SKR-18 was under attack! Kranke was in a bad mood that day, and when the coast guard ship fired a warning shot across his bow, under international protocols, the Kapitan answered with his forward gun turret. It might have been no more than a simple reflexive impulse of war, just as Grau had done, but Heintz soon learned that Kranke seemed to be deliberately courting conflict here. Five minutes later SKR-18 was a flaming wreck, sinking fast, but the last plaintive message had been sent: Sighted German warships. Under attack!