The second Tomahawk hit the Frunze IV starboard midships, the explosion shattering all glass on the bridge, decapitating two officers on watch, while a great hole, over ten feet in diameter, now gaped at the waterline. The dark, inky sea turned to a frothing cauldron as it churned into the cruiser, the enormous intake of water causing the ship to roll sharply starboard and capsize — sinking in less than eleven minutes, all 794 hands lost. Most drowned in the first five minutes or so; others swam through the ice-cold sea of oil and flotsam to a few inflatable rafts where they hauled themselves aboard only to the shortly of pneumonia, coughing unceasingly, lungs coated in oil — in effect, drowning in their own fuel.
Of the ten surface-to-surface SS-19s that the cruisers had fired at the Missouri and Wisconsin, two struck Missouri and three the Wisconsin. Three of the others were shot down by American Harpoon and Vulcan AA fire; the remaining two exploded in the sea, sending enormous spumes of white into the tracer-streaked night. And now the argument that had raged for years over the advisability of keeping the old battle wagons was answered.
Both had seen active service, particularly the Missouri in the Iraqi war, but not ship-to-ship confrontations, and the moment the two battleships were struck, there was in the Pentagon an almost unseemly rush to hear what had happened. What happened was that of the two missiles that hit the Missouri, one exploded starboard side against the bridge, the other made a wide-angle hit on the stern deck that took out two of the battleship’s four SH60-Lamps helos; the other two helicopters were aloft on antisub watch.
When the first missile hit the bridge it killed two men in number two turret from sheer concussion, its fireball so intense that the explosion took out four of the five-inch guns on that side, killing twenty-six men while engulfing one of the stern-facing five-inch guns, sending a sheet of dense, curdling fire rushing along the starboard side as if some enormous flamethrower had belched, the smoke and flame spilling over the stern’s triple sixteen-inch turret.
It did not destroy it but, because of the heat, made the turret, even with its air conditioning, uninhabitable for the next half hour as fire hoses crisscrossed in dense smoke to get the deck fire under control. But the main concern was the missile that had hit the starboard side of the bridge, nearer the ship’s combat control center. It was known that no air-to-surface missile, such as the Exocet, which could smash through any of the lighter-armored modern ships, could penetrate the battleship’s armor belt, but now the surface-to-surface Siberian missile, striking the seventeen and a half inches of thick class A steel that girded the bridge, failed to penetrate.
Inside the bridge two officers would lose their hearing forever from the impact, and several others would also be repatriated, suffering permanent inner-ear damage. But no one in combat control was killed, and while the navigation electronics were knocked out, the “stand-alone” fire control for the two forward turrets, with three guns apiece, and the fire control for the three guns in the lone stern turret were unaffected, despite the fact that the latter was still not visible because of the thick, choking, white smoke that had replaced the black as the fires were being doused; the urgent thump, thump, thump, of the pumps was audible to the Wisconsin several miles off the Missouri’s starboard quarter.
The Wisconsin sustained damage to two of her four shafts from the missile that had hit the stern’s solid 12.5-inch-thick steel armor belt, causing spider fractures. But here, as aboard the Missouri, bulkheads had held. The “old” battle wagons, once so disparaged by the “bottom line” accounting experts as outmoded “floating nostalgia,” had more than once proved their resilience to enemy missiles, their armor belts far thicker than the thinly skinned, higher-tech cruisers and destroyers of more recent years.
As if this weren’t enough, they were now about to do what no other ship in the fleet could. In addition to its array of Tomahawk missiles, Vulcan twenty-millimeter Gatling guns, and five-inch, dual-purpose guns, the old lathes’ nine sixteen-inch guns administered the coup de grace to the USAF’s bombing assault out of Attu against the Kommandorsky Islands. Each of the eighteen 16-inch guns of the two battleships hurled a 2,700-pound shell, the equivalent of throwing a Volkswagen Beetle twenty-three miles. And they did it thirty-six times a minute. The crews of the twenty-four smaller five-inch guns had to wait until the battle wagons got closer to the islands. The five-inch guns were only able to throw seventy-pound shells fourteen miles, by which time Missouri’s Harpoon missiles had dealt with three of the hydrofoils sent out from the Kommandorskys; the Wisconsin took out six.
The Siberians’ mistake in having concentrated all their available air power from Kamchatka south against the American battle carrier group and losing the fight for air superiority was now compounded by the terrible punishment the two American battleships were meting out to the Kommandorsky airfields, killing any hope in Novosibirsk of using the Kommandorsky Islands as an advance carrier for the MiG-29s, the inferior V/STOL Forgers in Baku’s fleet unable to stop Burke’s task force from protecting Freeman’s landing.
Worse still for the Siberian TVD, Far Eastern Military District HQ in Khabarovsk, was the dilemma now confronting them. Should they concentrate their forces south nearer the Sea of Japan — Japan being the Americans’ carrier in the far east, particularly the island of Hokkaido; or should they move those forces already in the south north to reinforce the Kuril garrisons? But this would be in vain if Freeman decided, in light of the terrible air offensive now underway against Sakhalin, to bypass the Kurils and Sakhalin and actually invade the mainland.
Splitting their forces violated fundamental military doctrine, and particularly Soviet military doctrine, of concentrating all your forces, of amassing overwhelming strength before attacking. Even now, Novosibirsk was receiving information from the four Kuril Island Strait monitoring stations that the enemy-most likely the American navy’s Seals — was probing the straits, possibly readying to detonate the mines in one or all of the vital gateway channels between the Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.
But in Novosibirsk, Marshal Yesov knew that if the Americans’ activity around the straits was a feint and they kept moving south, the Siberian garrisons on the Kurils and Sakhalin might simply be bypassed. Yet if the garrisons weren’t maintained, the Americans might decide to land there as a springboard for an attack on the mainland.
General Dya Stavkin, C in C Fifth Army’s shock artillery division on the Pacific border, which included regiments of tactical missiles, self-propelled artillery, and massed Katyusha— mobile barrage rockets — approved of Yesov’s strategy, favoring “scorched earth” from the coast inland as far as it took to make what the Americans called their LOTS — logistics over the shore — supply problems as critical as possible. It had worked against Napoleon and the Wermacht — why not against Freeman? Better to obmanut amerikantsev— “suck the Americans in”—and give them what their whole national psyche was worst prepared for: not a quick campaign but a long, drawn-out one. Soviets could wait. The usually somber Yesov told his staff a joke to illustrate the point. “You won’t be able to get your new car for ten years,” the Moscow salesman tells a buyer.