“Air Force talk,” said Nimitz. “Leave that to them.”
“Yes, but the Navy has to get them the bases they’ll need for the job. That’s on our watch. Now, we can slug it out with the Japs from one island to the next down there, and it could take us a couple years to get close enough for that fight to matter. Yet at this very moment, we’ve got the Siberians over there putting troops on Sakhalin and showing every intention of pushing south to reclaim that entire island.”
“The Japanese will fight like hellcats to prevent that. If we can see this, they can see it too.” Nimitz leaned back, thinking. “Yet I agree that we ought to support them any way we can. When do you go to the president with this?”
“Next week. In the meantime, you keep an ear to the ground on what’s going on over there for me. Tell your boys in HYPO to listen real good for this signals traffic they say they’ve picked up. If we can get some subs up there to have a good look around, all the better. This could be bigger than we think. We need to sit up and pay attention.”
“Alright, Rey” said Nimitz. “I’ll see what I can do. If the Siberians can help take the pressure off us down south, all the better.”
Chapter 29
“Well now,” said Tovey. “The planning is sound, at least for the approach to the target. It’s high time we get on with it. The tides will be right on the 9th and 10th.”
So many events in this history had come early, even if by just a few months, but this one was running late. It was supposed to have happened on the 28th of March. Instead, many of the men earmarked for the operation had been deployed to the Canary Islands. Now that a kind of stalemate had been reached in that battle, it was time to look at the plans again, and the Royal Navy was eager to begin.
The raid itself would have happened at one time or another, for the facilities targeted were simply too valuable to the enemy to let them stand. After the delay imposed by the defense of the Canary Islands, it might have been a long year before this plan was teed up again, but the disruptive fate line of a man who was supposed to be dead had nudged the event back into place.
That man was Lieutenant Patrick Lainson Field, the commander of the British submarine Seawolf, a boat that had been oddly diverted from other duty to patrol off the Canary Islands. Lieutenant Field, wasn’t supposed to be there that day. He was to have died in a plane crash on the 16th of December, 1941, shot down over the Bay of Biscay while en-route to Gibraltar. Yet there were no British planes being routed to Gibraltar now, and the route that plane took this time to the Azores was well away from the peril that would have taken his life. So Lieutenant Field survived, one of many thousands of souls who should have died, but lived on in these Altered States.
There, on a misplaced submarine in the dark of the night, one lonesome and dangerous wolf was prowling the dark seas, commanded by the flesh and blood figure of a man who should be dead—a Zombie, as Professor Dorland might define him. In Dorland’s theory, such men are always wildcards in the deck of fate, for once spared the doom that should have ended their lives, they move and act with unbridled license on the Meridians of time. Their intervention can bring sudden and unexpected derailment to the careful train of events running on the long lines of causality, and that was one such night for Lieutenant Patrick Field.
It was his good fortune to stumble across the German task force intending to land the 98th Mountain Regiment for Operation Condor. There, he clearly saw the towering silhouette of a great warship, not even knowing that he was looking at the mighty Hindenburg. It had been framed with the light of Bismarck’s salvo in support of the German attack, and Field’s heart thumped faster as he beat his crew to quarters, loading all six of his forward tubes. He would get one hit, but it would be a good one, right beneath Anton turret near the magazines and lifting gear for those massive 16-inch shells. The resulting flooding put that turret out of action, much to the chagrin of its resident master and chief, one Axel Faust.
The presence of both Bismarck and Hindenburg in French waters was most alarming to the British. The mayhem they could cause had recently been seen in the battle off Fuerteventura, where the cream of the Royal Navy was thrown into the fight, and with heavy losses. While the Bismarck would be laid up for many more months at Toulon, the Hindenburg was very near operational readiness. The German ship had been wounded by Lieutenant Fields, but not sunk, and then it had taken three rocket hits from the Argos Fire, and a 14-inch round from King George V. now it seemed that Admiral Raeder was keen to accelerate repairs and get the dreadful battleship fully operational again.
Initially it had gone to Toulon, where superficial damage had been cleared up, and new secondary gun barrels shipped in by rail. After the damage to the superstructure was repaired, there was still work needed on the hull to fully repair that torpedo hit, and Toulon did not have a dry dock large enough to accommodate the German ship. But there was one at Saint Nazaire, the famous Normandie dry dock, built to accommodate the massive 80,000 ton liner Normandie before the newest French battleship stole away her name. It was 50 meters wide, and 350 meters long, with massive caisson steel gates at either end that weighed 1500 tons.
In a stealthy night move, Hindenburg moved from Toulon to Gibraltar, and Ian Fleming’s spy network in Spain learned that it would move to Saint Nazaire under heavy German air cover in five days. In one sense, the British sighed with relief. The ship was not yet ready, instead it was merely transferring to a larger facility for continued repairs. The question now was what to do about that. The Royal Navy could either risk another confrontation at sea with the German battleship, one that might send more of their own ships to the dry docks, or they could try to get at the enemy ship with the RAF. Neither plan seemed palatable.
“We simply cannot risk forcing yet another engagement at sea,” said Admiral Pound. “Churchill would want that, but I have Duke of York, and King George V down well south of the Azores. That’s the only thing keeping the Germans at bay in the Canaries. Invincible is up near the Denmark Strait with Hood working out after her refit, and keeping an eye on Tirpitz and the Norwegian Sea.”
“You’re right,” said Tovey. “Churchill would want all four of those ships to pile on—anything to get the Hindenburg. But this plan being floated by the Commandos has my interest. They’re calling it Operation Chariot.”
“What’s it all about?” Pound looked very weary, as he always did. A bad hip kept him awake at night, robbing him of much needed sleep, which he often recouped at staff meetings, nodding off in the middle of the proceedings.
“A raid… On the very same dry docks the Germans need for the repair of the Hindenburg. If they can’t use Saint Nazaire, then they’ll have to use divers and that will take a good long while to repair the torpedo hit Seawolf put into that monster.”
“Why not simply bomb them?”
“Too inaccurate,” said Tovey. “Besides, we’ve asked the RAF for a hundred bombers, we got thirty-four, and eight of those have already been lost trying to raid that port. It’s crawling with German Flak now, and there’s always a standing patrol of Messerschmitts up over the harbor. That will go double next week when Hindenburg pulls in.”