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In the early days, it had gone well. The Command Centers had been installed in heavy concrete bunkers. The radars and observers who were the eyes of the system had been linked by protected land-lines and the whole system connected by even more heavily protected trunk lines. A Local Command Center could flash a message up to the RCC or even NCC and have the necessary information passed down the system again to the neighboring LCC in minutes. Communications, that had made the system work. It had turned out that women were much better at handling the communications system than men and the Luftwaffe had gone on a recruiting spree, pulling in young women from all over the country to run the communications switchboards. Quickly Herrick had found himself with a unique command, one that was almost entirely female. It turned out that specific skill sets were required at each level and if the skills needed by the NCC seemed to require the most attractive and amiable of the recruits, well, Rank Had Its Privileges.

NAIADS had been working so well, that the obvious happened. Himmler had tried a power grab. Herrick had been his most enthusiastic supporter, pointing out to everybody how much power this would give the faithful Himmler, how everybody would benefit by having him as part of their organizations, how he was sure that this new authority wouldn't be used by Himmler for his own ends. How Himmler's advice and support would be invaluable for everybody. He'd been so eloquent in Himmler's support that even today, he was still one of the SS leader's favorites. For some strange reason, everybody else in the Party hierarchy had been persuaded that adding NAIADS to Himmler's empire was not a good idea and the campaign had been defeated. Even today, Herrick treasured Goering's quiet “Well done my boy. With friends like you, little Heinrich doesn't need enemies.”

Then it had all gone wrong. First, the Russian Campaign had bogged down with a casualty toll that showed no signs of ending. The original NAIADS proposal had called for 20,000 88 millimeter anti-aircraft guns to defend Germany. All 20,000 had ended up on the Eastern Front, as anti-tank guns. Herrick couldn't argue the logic. The battle line in Russia was four times longer now than it had been when Barbarossa had started. It was taking the whole strength of the Russian and American Armies to man that front. The Germans couldn't. They had to rely on defending key points and rushing mobile forces to stop break-throughs elsewhere.

Herrick thanked God there had been no strategic bombing of Germany in 1942 or 1943. If those 88s hadn't been in the East, the Russians would be in Berlin by now. Anyway, the destruction of the German Navy had made up for part of the loss. The surviving ships and submarines had been stripped of their guns and production diverted to AA weapons. The 13 cm guns from the ships were too big for anti-tank so there was no need for them in the East. They, at least, had found their way to NAIADS.

The real blow had been the disastrous B-29 raids. Disastrous for the Americans that is. Herrick grinned, his new system had worked perfectly. The B-29s had been shot from the skies, that he had expected. What he hadn't anticipated was that their bombing would be so wildly inaccurate. They had scattered their bombs more or less at random. Goebbels propaganda had stated that the Americans were taking raid casualties of 50 percent and over in order to blow up the odd farmer's plough and for once the odious little creep wasn't lying. The Americans had persevered for a short while, then given up. They couldn't get through at low or medium altitude and they couldn't hit anything from high. With that, the strategic bombing threat had evaporated, and NAIADS priority had dropped to near-bottom.

The American carriers were pounding France and the UK - so the autocannon went there. Germany's production capacity was much greater than anybody could have dreamed possible in the 1930s but now so were her casualties. The best and most modern fighters went to the front, NAIADS got the old, the obsolete, the worn out and the experimental. Fuel consumption in the war effort was such that Germany could barely keep pace with that - and nearly all the precious kerosene for jets went to the Russian Front. Most of his fighters were piston engined, he had just one squadron of jets. Herrick mentally shook his head, his collection of freaks contained more four-engined fighters than jets. Four engined fighters. He supposed the idea had made sense to somebody.

In mid-1944, there had been a surge of interest in building long-range aircraft twin-engined aircraft by joining two single-engined ones together with a central wing. Dornier had taken that idea a stage further by suggesting a similar pairing of their push-pull fighter, the Do-335. Now, that wasn't a bad fighter, in some ways Herrick believed it was the best heavy he had. But twinned as the Dornier 335Z long-range reconnaissance aircraft? Dornier couldn't do it, they were fully committed building the Do-335 and the 317 bomber so Junkers had taken it over as the Ju-635. The first one had flown in late 1945. Four Daimler Benz 603s. In a fighter. Madness. The original plan was a crew of three, pilot and radio operator in the port fuselage and a second pilot in the starboard fuselage. Unarmed of course, this was a long-range reconnaissance aircraft and thus all weight was reserved for fuel and speed.

The aircraft had been canceled, but the design had been offered to Herrick for NAIADS. The Ju-635 didn't use components in critical supply so it could be built when nobody had anything better to build. It had been redesigned, slightly, with a battery of four 30 millimeter cannon in the central wing. What made the Ju-635 worth having was something very special. Back in 1944, a group of engineers had produced a wire-guided air-to-air missile, the Ruhrstahl/Kramer X-4. It was the size and weight of a 100 kilo bomb and was quite unsuitable for the sort of fighting that was taking place now. However, political influence had played it’s part and it had been put into limited production. Herrick had got them. Now, each of his Ju-635s carried three of them. One pilot flew the aircraft, the other steered the missile. He had sixty of his big fighters now and more coming. 20 kilos of explosive steered to an aircraft flying up to almost four kilometers away. There was the start of something here that could change the way air fighting was carried out.

But the biggest disappointment had been Wasserfall. The original intent was to set up Wasserfall antiaircraft batteries in each LCC, which would come to approximately 200 Wasserfall batteries. The first Wasserfall site was to have been set up in November 1945, with production to reach 900 missiles per month by March 1946. Russia had done for those plans. The production capability was needed for the A-4 bombardment rockets that the Eastern Front was also eating in huge quantities. The same fate had fallen all the other antiaircraft missiles. In the East, the fighting demanded close support aircraft and fighters to protect them. Fighting rarely went above a thousand meters or so. In the West the American carrier strikes flew low as well. Missiles that could reach up to almost 20,000 meters just weren't needed. There were a few Wasserfall batteries, mostly in the Ruhr, but the system was a shadow of what had been intended.

Field Marshal Herrick looked at his NCC with pride. So he didn't have all that he wanted or the best that there was. But what he had was the best air defense system in the world, the only integrated air defense system in the world. If the Americans came in, his fighters and anti-aircraft guns could hack them down. NAIADS was waiting for them to try.

Combat Information Center, USS Shiloh, CVB-41 Position 46.8 North, 4.6 West

“We're getting there sir.”

Captain Madrick thought that was welcome news. The fires had been burning for almost an hour now but they had been contained and it looked like Shiloh was coming around. Water pressure was on its way back up, it turned out that one of the German bombs had damaged the automatic systems. A damage control team had found the fault and turned the water system back on manually. Now, the firefighting teams had water. Some, anyway. But there were more fires being found. One team had found a small but spreading blaze in an avgas trunk; they'd put it out with carbon dioxide bottles and fog nozzles. One damage team in particular was making splendid progress, somehow they'd got a gasoline handy-billy pump from the hangar to the fire perimeter and used it to push forward. They'd retaken several compartments from the fire now and were working on the next.