“Hold it sir”
An Air Force Police Sergeant stopped Dedmon. The Ml Carbine was slung muzzle-down over her shoulder ready for use if needed. In SAC Air Force Police were not a joke; when they said stop, you stopped. Early in the history of SAC an AFP NCO had recognized LeMay and waved him onto the base without stopping him. That NCO had found himself a frontline infantry private in Russia within 24 hours. This wasn't security though, it was safety. The tunnel was barely ten feet down and this was where it ran underneath a runway. Nobody thought a B-36 would break through, but nobody used the tunnel when one was taking off, just in case. Dedmon could hear the rhythmic pulsing of the six piston engines and the howl of the four jets as the bomber ran up to full power. Then the tunnel shook as the bomber went overhead on its take-off run.
“Fifth test flight in the last hour Sir. Guess The Big One must be coming. You can pass now”
“Think so Sergeant. It's time.”
Time indeed, Dedmon thought. The Second World War had been deadlocked now for four years, ever since the German invasion of Russia had ground to a halt east of Moscow. Halifax's coup had taken Britain out of the war and turned the country into a Nazi satellite but all that had meant was that Britain was no longer part of the British Empire. There was good-natured rivalry now between Prime Minister Locock of Australia and Prime Minister Boyd of Canada over just whose Empire it was; the smart money was betting that Australia would end up in charge.
Especially since the Japanese threat had ended. The American production ramp-up after the Halifax Coup had made enough equipment available to seriously reinforce the Philippines. Then, in January 1941, Thailand had gotten itself into a war with the Vichy authorities in Indo-China. By that time, anybody who was suspected of collaborating with Nazi Germany were the bad guys and the US had backed Thailand to the hilt. A French naval victory at Koh Chang hadn't helped them, by the end of the month-long war, the Vichy Indochinese Army had been routed, the Thai frontier ran along the Mekong and the Thai armed forces were receiving generous amounts of American aid. That and the Philippines reinforcements had blocked the Japanese route south.
Their route north had already been blocked by Khalkin Gol in 1939. The strategic problem had stymied the Japanese until mid-1942 by which time, it was obvious that joining the war was not a clever move. The result was an uneasy peace; filled with dislike and suspicion from the Americans and spite-ridden hatred from the Japanese. But the Japanese looked at burgeoning American military power and knew their window of opportunity had passed; they had to live with it.
The Germans were also having to live with it. Not only had the Halifax coup put America onto a war footing, it had brought America into the war. The Germans claimed that the British surrender made them rulers of the Empire. Canada, Australia and the rest of the Empire disagreed. Germany announced it would assert its rights by force. America had asserted the Monroe Doctrine. Germany had demanded the return of the Royal Navy. The US Government's two word reply to the German demand, “Molon Labe”, had delayed things for a few weeks while the Germans tried to translate it. When they did so, they declared war and sent their submarines.
The first few months had been a bad time; even now Dedmon could remember looking out to sea every night and seeing five or six burning ships offshore. But the menace had been beaten back with the assistance of the Canadian-based Royal Navy, then the US Navy had gone onto the offensive.
The German Navy hadn't lasted long and its allies had preceded it into destruction. Those of their ships that weren't on the bottom had been hunted down in port and smashed by the US Navy's fast carriers. The Atlantic was an American lake now. There had been a brief scare when the Germans had brought in a new kind of U-boat but that hadn't lasted. The new U-boats had been sunk and countermeasures to their abilities instituted fleet wide.
That was the problem the Germans faced. Russia was bleeding their armies white. Their advance everywhere else was blocked. They had only themselves to blame of course, the Nazis had a positive talent for creating enemies. Take the Russian provinces in the South. Largely Moslem, they'd welcomed the Germans as liberators.
The Germans had moved in, set up their administration and started of eliminating Moslem influence. Less than six weeks later, a Moslem servant had entered a German officer's mess - and exploded. He'd been wearing a belt of dynamite and rusty nails. News was hard to get but apparently that had been the first of many such suicide bombs. Dedmon shuddered; if that sort of insanity became commonplace, there was no telling it where it would end.
Sure enough, it was time for The Big One. It was time, more than time.
Aboard CVB-41 USS Shiloh, Bay of Biscay.
Admiral Karl Newman tossed the operations orders on his desk and stared at the map. He was seeing only a small part of the operation and knew it. His task group was five aircraft carriers, his flagship and four smaller Essex class, two large Alaska class cruisers, half a dozen other cruisers and 18 destroyers. More than 500 aircraft, at least half of which were jets. The Shiloh had the new McDonnell F2H Banshee on board; it had replaced the veteran F4U7 Corsairs as the fighter-bomber for this cruise. He had his heavy Douglas AD-Is Skyraiders for strike. His Essex class carriers, Oriskany, Crown Point, Reprisal and Princeton had the Adies as well but still kept the Corsairs. Some had the Navy F4U-7s but the lucky ones had Marines with their Goodyear F2G-4s. Those hotrods could match a jet low down. They were vicious to fly though, their overpowered engines could flip them into an irrecoverable spin if the pilot let his attention wander. All five carriers had Lockheed FV-1 Shooting Stars as interceptors. Known irreverently as the Flivvers, the conversion of the Air Force's P-80 had countered the threat of the German jets in 1944. Now, two years later, they were showing their age and a new jet fighter from Grumman, the Panther, was coming down the line.
Five carriers, 500 aircraft and a mass of support and that was just a part of it. Newman knew that to the north of him was another task group and there were two more to the south. Behind them were the support groups, jeep carriers with replacement aircraft, tankers, ammunition ships. And Spruance's command group with its six fast battleships. Then there were the air-sea rescue units to pick up shot-down pilots, ASW groups protecting the flanks of the carrier forces. But the heart of the fleet were the carriers. Wherever they were now, by the time the Shiloh and her consorts were ready to launch, the four task groups would be in a line 50 miles apart. The Navy called the formation “Murderer's Row” and it worked. The carriers could either ripple off strikes for a sustained pounding of targets or they could hurl a single alpha strike, a concentrated surge of aircraft that would swamp the any defense the Germans tried to put up. The Luftwaffe called the massed wave of Navy aircraft coming at them “The Blue Wall of Death”. A tidal wave of 2,000 aircraft that overwhelmed whatever defenses were in place then spent a couple of days rampaging over the defenseless area, strafing and bombing anything that moved. By the time the Germans could move enough aircraft in to contest the airspace, the carriers would have recovered their airgroups and be gone. Out to sea, out of sight of land where they were safe.