“On the night of the 14th of May. We wanted to go earlier, but now it’s the 14th.”
“Well, don’t worry Admiral. With my ship and crew on the watch, your raid on that dry-dock will come off without a hitch.”
“Until we meet again then,” Tovey extended a hand. “I will be in London soon, and see about the Rosetta Stone. In the meantime, if you could see to the Normandie dock gates at Saint Nazaire, we would be very grateful.”
That raid, the Great Raid, as it came to be called in Fedorov’s history, did go off without a hitch. Argos Fire had to use two RGM-84s obtained from the Funnies, and plenty of support from that accurate deck gun, but they took out the key shore batteries and smashed the searchlights. The helicopters suppressed the AA defense, slipped in with the Argonauts leading a team of British Commandos, and they fought their way into the facility to take out secondary targets. The Campbeltown made her appointment with those heavy locks, her nose laden with explosives. They got in, got out, and with very few casualties, no one captured by the enemy as had been the case in the old history.
So the Hindenburg did not reach its berth there, and was forced to turn about and withdraw to Gibraltar. There the divers set to work on that damaged hull. It would take much longer, yet slowly but surely, that great dragon of the sea was getting new scales.
Frustrated and grumbling, Hitler would soon turn his attention to another dragon, one he never thought he would see in the skies over Germany again. It was Karpov’s brazen overflight of the Reich that had put the idea in his mind, and now he would see the fruits of the orders he had given after that raid over Berlin. As for the Great Raid, he was so upset when he learned about it that he declared such operations illegal acts of war, and gave explicit orders that any enemy commando captured in another such raid was to be summarily executed on the spot.
He fretted and paced, unhappy with the latest reports that also indicated the Allies were planning some kind of new front in the West against him. Canaris seemed to downplay the rumors, but Himmler was a little more insistent.
As always, when things in the war did not go just as he liked, the Führer looked for solutions in the development of new weapons. Now he would go to the marshalling yards to see one, a most unusual development, or so he came to think, but one that could prove very useful.
Chapter 8
Hitler stood in the assembly yard, staring at the vast shape before him. On his left was Hermann Goering, with a staff adjutant, and on his right a technical advisor, there to explain the features and design breakthroughs that would make this weapon so formidable.
“And so you see, my Führer, the applied force resulting from firing the weapon must be balanced by the resulting static and inertial reactions that occur, and these forces must be equal and opposite. We have achieved this with the use of muzzle brakes to deflect the explosive gas when the gun fires, a highly lubricated recoil chamber, and precision hydraulics. The result is astounding. We have reduced the recoil effect to a point where it is barely noticeable, and far beneath the threshold where it might impact stability, pitch, or yaw of the firing platform where the gun is mounted. This will have immediate applications for this new project before you here, as well as naval guns. It will also allow us to mount this technology on vehicles as well, where stability is always a factor in overall performance and accuracy. Soon your tanks will not have to stop to have a good chance of hitting their targets. They will be able to fire on the move, and with much greater accuracy when we combine this with our new gyroscopic gun mounts.”
Hitler listened, nodding his approval, hands clasped behind his back as his eyes played over the gun before him. Yet always they were drawn back to the thing in the assembly yard, massive, looming, extending up the height of many men. This was but a single gun that would soon be mounted on it, a proven design, one of Germany’s tried and true weapons of war. It had so many applications that had been well tested on the battlefield, a flak gun, a tank killer, and now it would be something more, the fearsome 88. This gun had been retooled with lightweight aluminum in every part possible. Stronger than steel, aluminum was much lighter, reducing the overall weight of the weapon from 7400 kilograms to just under 2000. This was important, for the hulking shape in the yard that commanded Hitler’s attention was an airship, where every kilogram mattered when considering the lifting gas had to carry the dead weight of the structural frame, engines, fuel, oil, all weapons and ammunition, ballast, supplies, fixtures, and the crew itself.
“How many can be mounted?” asked the Führer.
“At the moment, we are considering four guns, one forward, one aft in the tail section, one in a rotating turret beneath the main gondola, and one on the top gun platform. This will give the ship a 360 degree engagement bubble, on both the vertical and horizontal axis. Even this was difficult to achieve, so we developed a lighter weight shell, sacrificing a little range and hitting power, but still giving us a weapon that can vastly outrange any gun presently mounted on an enemy airship.”
“Excellent. How far?”
“About 12,000 meters effective firing range. That is twice the maximum firing range of the best 105mm recoilless rifle.”
“But wont this shell simply pass right through the target? There is little armor on an enemy airship.”
“That is correct, but we have special HE rounds with fragmentation airburst effects. This entire system was tailor made for this project.”
“And the other guns?
“The ship will mount sixteen Rheinmetall 7.5cm LG 40 recoilless rifles, with an effective firing range of 6,800 meters. That is the secondary battery. Then we add another eight Krupp 10.5cm LG 40s, with a range of 7,950 meters. The 88mm guns are the main battery for long range engagement of targets on the ground, sea or air.”
“They will not do much good against a battleship.”
“No. my Führer, not to the flotation of the ship, but considering that they have a fast rate of fire, 15 rounds per minute, they can cause considerable damage to the superstructure. That said, the airship was never designed to be a sea control weapon. It can serve ably as a high altitude naval reconnaissance platform, but its main virtue is in controlling the airspace over land.”
Now Goering took over, gesturing to the airship before them with his baton. “There will also be eight twin 20mm flak guns, and sixteen more MG-42 machineguns for defense against enemy aircraft—and all the guns have special lightweight alloys for the bulk of their structure and carriage. The trick is to minimize weight wherever possible. Notice the grilled racks at the lower portion of the gondolas,” he said. “Those are for mounting bombs, and the lighter we get the structure and weapons, the more this ship will carry. Look at it, my Führer. It will be the terror of the skies, a real height climber too, capable of reaching the dizzying heights of up to 50,000 feet. Our own Bf-109 cannot even reach such altitudes, and it is the finest fighter in the world.”
“Good,” said Hitler, a light kindling in his eyes. “How big is it? How fast?”
“325meters long nose to tail, and with Six Daimler-Benz DB 800 engines that will produce speeds of up to 140kph; faster with a good tailwind. It will have 300,000 cubic meter capacity, three times that of the old Graf Zeppelin, and a third bigger than the old Hindenburg. It will be the largest airship in the world, bigger than anything the Siberians have built, or anything presently operated by the Orenburg Federation—a real dragon, this one. There will be nothing that could match it. And now we must christen it with a suitable name.”