“He put up a good fight.” Dewey chuckled. The long duel between General Groves and General LeMay had been a spectacle to behold. “When can we go?”
Stuyvesant thought carefully. “Assuming that projected B-36 and nuclear weapon production stay on schedule, sometime during the first six months of 1947. We’re shifting device production to the Mark 3 now; they’ll be entering the depots early next year and we’ve got six Bomb Groups equipped with B-36Ds either operational or working up.”
Dewey was horrified and his voice showed it. “Seer, mid-1947? In eighteen months time? My God man, do you understand we are losing 800 men a day on the Russian Front? And you want us to wait another 18 months? Do you realize that means almost half a million men are going to die out there while we wait for the bombers to be completed?”
The Seer suddenly looked very old and very, very tired. “438,000 to be precise, Mister President and yes, we all do understand that. The Big One is the only chance of ending this war quickly. Say again, the only chance. If it goes off half-cocked, if we try half measures, it will fail and this war could go on for years, decades even. Our death toll then will make a half million seem very small.
“Mister President, when we throw The Big One, it’ll do two things, quite independent of the attack itself. One is that it will tell the world that nuclear weapons are possible and give pretty much everybody a few good clues on how to build them. The other is that it will tell everybody that high-flying bombers are very hard to intercept and give them clues on how to build them as well. How long after a failed Big One, Mister President, will it take Germany to build its own long-range, high-altitude bombers and the nuclear weapons to arm them? Months? A year? Won’t be much more than that. Or how long will it be before the doodlebugs coming over have nuclear tips? And what about Japan? We have to wait Mister President, we must. It’s the hardest thing of all, to have a deadly, war-winning weapon and to wait until the time to use it is right, but it is also the only thing we can do. Any other way lies disaster.”
Dewey nodded. In his head, he could see the inevitable, undeniable logic; his mind’s eye also saw the lines of graves, lines that lengthened inexorably with every day that passed. “Can we hang on? Can the Russians hang on?”
“The people are getting tired, Mister President. Tired of the casualties, tired of the wartime shortages and rationing, tired of the blackout, tired of the deadlock. We need a victory, a big one. The German breakthrough last year was a bad shock for morale but this endless stalemate is worse. The Russians will fight on. Without us, their ability to do so effectively is questionable. The Russian military industry has lost most of its coal supplies and more than half its energy resources. Virtually every industrial complex they have, including the ones we’ve built, is short of fuel, power and metals. Now, there is some good news. Our oil industry people have been to their Siberian oil fields. The Russians had very poor extraction technology and those fields can produce, and are producing now, much more than they got out of them in the 1930s. Even better, our oil people say we haven’t even found the king and queen fields yet, let alone the emperor field.”
“King, queen, emperor? Doesn’t sound very egalitarian to me?” Dewey’s voice had its usual dry humor back.
“Sir, oil fields come in a hierarchy. From the smallest up, Squire, Duke, Queen, King, Emperor. The structure of an oil-producing area is an Emperor field, surrounded by two or more King and Queen fields and they’re surrounded by Duke and Squire fields. All existing Siberian production is coming from Duke and Squire fields. The undiscovered oil wealth that’s potentially there is enormous. Until recently, we were shipping Siberian crude to US refineries and then shipping products back but we’ve started building refineries in Russia itself. We have tuned up their metals mining facilities, coal recovery. Thank God the Russians have no objections to strip-mining, but they’re still short of everything, from people to fertilizer. Without us, their ability to hold is arguable at best. And we need a victory, a big, decisive one.”
“Is there hope of one? Or do we have to wait until 1947?”
“Sir, this morning I would have said no and yes respectively. That’s changed. We’ve just got the latest intelligence digests through. Triple source confirmed.” Dewey shook his head slightly; he didn’t want to know the sources. The Seer wished he didn’t know either sometimes. The data came from three separate routes. The Geneva spy ring called the Red Orchestra, run by Loki, a second spy net nobody could quite identify called Lucy and an ultra-secret code-cracking operation called Ultra. Between them, they gave a brilliant insight into German strategic plans.
“Mister President, shortly we will be running out big pre-winter convoys through to Murmansk and Archangel. A huge supply convoy, more than 250 ships, that will carry enough munitions, fuel etc. to keep the Kola Peninsula going until spring.”
“A convoy that big? There’s a saying about eggs and baskets.”
“I know, but in this case it doesn’t apply. A given submarine attack can only sink a given number of ships regardless of the number in the convoy. So, a big convoy has proportionally fewer losses than a small one. Also, a big convoy isn’t significantly easier to find than a small one so one big convoy is less likely to be found than the equivalent number of ships in a series of small groups. Mathematically, we’re much better off with big convoys. We’ve got to get this convoy through before winter really sets in. That’s when the ice boundary moves south and pushes us too close to occupied Norway for comfort.
“Anyway, with the main convoy will be a smaller but an equally important one, a troop convoy carrying the Canadian Sixth Infantry Division to Murmansk. We know that the German fleet plans to overwhelm the escorts for those two convoys and destroy them. Simultaneously, they plan to launch a land offensive that will take advantage of the supply crisis caused by the destruction of the convoys to take the Kola Peninsula. With Murmansk gone, Archangel and Petrograd will fall, and the Canadian Army in Kola will be destroyed. That will free up a mass of German resources for the main front.
“Sir, we had planned to cover those convoys with a single carrier group, while the rest pounded northern Scotland. In view of this information, I suggest we use all of the groups to set up an ambush and sucker-punch the German fleet as it heads north. The Germans don’t really understand naval warfare.” Nor do I, thought Stuyvesant, but I know a lot of people who do. “The initiative is with us, we decide when to send the convoys out, we decide when and where the battle will be fought. We wait for good weather, give our carriers every edge we can, and then we turn them loose on the German battleships. We can wipe their fleet out. That’s a pretty valuable goal in its own right, but it’s also the victory I think people need.”
“And how long do we have to wait for the weather we need? Months?”
“The Gods are smiling on us, Sir. We had a rough fall up there, but the weather magicians tell us we’re in for a spell of fine weather. By North Atlantic standards anyway. We can go as soon as possible. Now if we wish.”
“And the land battle?”
“On Kola? If the supplies get through, we can win that as well. Or at least make sure the German offensive goes nowhere.”