The Germans had tried to counter the carriers and couldn't. They couldn't even find them. Their attempts to build long-range bombers had failed dismally and the converted transports they'd used for long range maritime work had been shot from the skies. They'd tried other ideas as well, some quite good. One had been to put long-range radar on an aircraft to extend its horizon. That had spotted the carriers alright but the aircraft had been shot down long before it could coach in strikes. Another was a V-l with equipment that could radio radar data back to land. That really had been imaginative. The Germans had designed the V-l for use in Russia, to hit the factories their aircraft couldn't reach. Then they'd found that the Russians already had an almost identical missile, the Chelomei Kh-10. Each of Newman's cruisers carried four of those now, reverse lend-lease. But the radar-carrying V-1s were a good idea. Newman had an idea that there was the germ of something workable there. Didn't matter though. The Germans would only find the carriers if the carriers wanted them to.
Newman knew that if he looked out of the scuttle he'd see - nothing. If he listened to the comms circuit's he'd hear -nothing. The US ships were blacked out and under total EMCON. No radio no lights nothing. The task groups were ghosts on the sea. The Germans hadn't learned that lesson either. When their fleet had come out in 1945, if anybody could call it a fleet, they'd been chattering on the short-range radios and sending bombastic messages back home. And allowed the US carriers to track them as surely as if they were in visual sight. It had been a massacre. Two obsolete design carriers, five battleships, three heavy cruisers and twelve destroyers against 16 US Navy fleet carriers and eight of the old light fleets.
Spruance had decided to make a point that day. Newman had been in command of the Kearsarge and had watched his aircraft leaving. The Flivvers had streaked in to strafe the decks of the enemy ships, the Corsairs had dive-bombed and napalmed them then the Skyraiders had gone in with torpedoes. When Newman had joined the Navy, the standard torpedo bomber had been the old Devastator with its single 18 inch torpedo. At the Battle of the Orkneys, his Skyraiders and Maulers had lumbered off the decks with a 22.4 inch torpedo under the belly and one more under each wing. Risky that had been, and the overload had left no room for error. But the Adies and Mames had come though and started a legend in the fleet for reliability that grew daily. The strikes had rippled off from Murderer's Row keeping the German squadron (Newman decided fleet was inappropriate) under constant attack. The German capital ships had gone first, then their supports had been hunted down and sunk.
Hitler had thrown a tantrum of epic proportions; what little was left of the German fleet had been laid up and naval construction virtually ended. He'd probably had no choice anyway since the casualties in the U-boat fleet had been grim leaving the surface ships the last resource of trained seamen. At the Orkneys, the German casualties had been dreadful; their survivors could only live for a few minutes in the icy water and the US Fleet had absolutely no interest in mounting a search and rescue effort for them. The PBYs had picked up the few shot-down Navy aircrew they could find and left.
Newman grinned, lost for a moment in his memories of the battle. One of the torpedo bombers had come back with its fuel tanks damaged and the young Lieutenant flying it had elected to ditch beside the carrier rather than risk blocking the deck with a crash. The new-fangled flotation bags had worked and Kearsarge's cutter had rowed over to pick him up. They'd found him sitting in the cockpit, pretending to write his mission report. He now commanded one of the strike squadrons in another group. That kid would go far Newman thought. Bush, that was the kid's name, George Bush.
Newman looked at the mission order again. Although it said nothing about other task groups, the routing instructions gave hints as to who else was involved. This time it indicated that a fifth carrier group had joined up. That meant one group would probably be going home soon. Probably the Gettysburg group. CVB-43 had been out a long time and her consorts were short-hulled Essexes. Some even had the older quadruple 40 millimeter guns in place of the new twin 3 inchers. Could be Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg, both were about ready to join the fleet. Didn't matter, both honored places where the Yankees had got a good thrashing.
Counting those two, there were ten more CVBs under construction and due to join the fleet in the next two years. That would change the fleet to eight task groups, each with two CVBs and three Essexes. Nobody spoke much about the older carriers now. Lexington, Hornet, Yorktown and Saratoga, were in the Pacific Fleet along with six of the nine CVLs. Ranger and Wasp were also in the Pacific, training new pilots for the fleet. Enterprise had been sunk by a U-boat during the East Coast massacre. Independence was doing experimental work. Some new sort of deck layout. But this series of strikes would be all five groups. Something special was in the wind.
Back to the map. Then what had been nagging at Newman jumped into focus. All the listed targets were much deeper inside France than earlier missions. Much deeper. To the point where his jets would be operating at the limits of their range. OK. So the deeper targets went to the Corsairs then - and after the enemy fighters had been wiped out. Newman looked at the orders and grimaced. It was still there. No aircraft were to fly at altitudes over ten thousand feet. That had made sense in the old days when all the birds were radial-engined. Unless they were turbo-charged, they were at a disadvantage high up. But the jets weren't yet the restriction remained in place.
The Germans had taken advantage of the restriction and clipped the wings on their fighters, increasing speed and agility at low altitude. The Ta-152Cs and the F4U-7s were evenly matched although the German aircraft couldn't carry the bombload. The F2Gs could match the He-162 Volksjagers, especially since the Heinkels were flown by kids barely into their teens. The Flivvers still had an edge over the latest model 262s but it was fading fast. Still the new Grumman jets would be coming soon, Newman had heard that the Panther was really something. But the Navy planes were still giving the height advantage to the Germans even though there were few real high-altitude fighters in the Luftwaffe. Height and speed were gold in air combat and the Navy was giving one to the Germans without a fight. And Navy pilots were paying the bill.
The mission duration was a lot longer as well. Normally the carriers lunged in and spent three days pounding the target area then out. This time they were staying close in for five. The exposure didn't worry Newman; he was confident his carriers could handle anything the Germans could throw at him. It was the why that nagged. The Navy had a system that worked, that did devastating damage at acceptable cost. Why change it? Unless there was something new in the pipeline. Newman looked at his charts again. It was almost as if his fighters were blasting a path through the German defenses then staying put to cover a withdrawal. Was this raid his part of The Big One? It was time, more than time.
Dijon, France. Primary base of JG-26 Schlageter
Falling to his knees and kissing the tarmac always seemed like a good idea to Major Lothar Schumann after a flight in the Go-229. He remembered his first mount, the Me-109G as being a Dobermann Pinscher, a lean, fast killer that could twist and turn in a dogfight. His Ta-152 had been a Rottweiler, massive and powerful that would just crash through whatever got in its way. Schumann wasn't sure what sort of dog the Go-229 represented, but whatever it was, it had rabies. The Gotha flying wing fighter was vicious, untrustworthy, unreliable, so directionally unstable it was a lousy gun platform and when it got into trouble, it broke up so fast that the pilot never stood a chance. Sometimes the Fledermaus would do that without even getting into trouble. Once the Gestapo had investigated the factory suspecting sabotage because so many 229s had fallen apart in mid-air for no apparent reason. They'd arrested some people and taken them away as an example to the rest but the truth was, the Fledermaus didn't need sabotage to make it break up, it did that just fine on its own. It was also the fastest and highest-flying fighter the Luftwaffe had.