“Any sign of any of our pilots?”
“No sir.”
That figured. Most of the lost Corsairs and Skyraiders had either blown up in mid-air or plowed into the sea so fast their pilots had little chance of escape. The chances of survival when pressing home attacks from wavetop height were very poor. In this battle, ships, planes and men had survived together or died together. There had been very few who had found a middle way.
“Sir, Doc Tulley wants to see you, the German officer we picked up has recovered consciousness.”
Wilkens left the bridge and found his way down to the sickbay. Doc Tulley was waiting outside. “Captain, one man has come around, the officer. He’s in a bad way. Exposure, frostbite, you name it. His temperature is 81 degrees, it’s a miracle he’s alive. We’re trying to do core warming and we’re using a new trick, inhalation warming, getting him to breathe heated air. If it’s enough, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody has ever picked up men this frozen who were still alive.”
“Core warming?”
“Preferentially warming his body, with hot water bottles and bricks the boiler rooms have been heating, but not his arms and legs. The army has found if you warm those, cold, acid blood from the extremities flows back to the body and stops the heart.”
“Will he make it?”
“He might. If gangrene doesn’t set in. If he doesn’t develop a pneumonia we can’t control. We have some penicillin on board, so he has a chance.”
The sickbay was oven-hot; the heating turned up to maximum in an effort to get some warmth into the frozen men who had been brought on board. Wilkens sat down by the bunk. The man in it was breathing hoarsely, his face a mass of red chaps and cold-blisters.
“I am Captain Hubert Wilkens, Commanding Officer, the United States destroyer Charles H. Roan. Is there anything I can get for you?”
The voice was so distorted it was hardly recognizable, as if the cold had frozen and broken his vocal chords. “Captain Christian Lokken, battleship Gneisenau. My men, any saved?”
“A few, not many.” Wilkens decided to keep the news of just how few to himself.
“You picked us up.” The hoarse, faint, cracked voice sounded surprised.
“Admiral Lee, commander of the Battle Line detached some of his destroyers to search for survivors.” Again Wilkens decided to be economical with the truth, the orders had been to search for shot-down pilots. Nobody had expected any German survivors.
“The Battle Line.” Lokken seemed shocked. “Battleships also, how many?”
“Ten.”
The number seemed to stun Lokken although he should have know it. His voice faded even more. “It was all for nothing. If we had survived the jabos, we would still have lost. This was surely our death ride.”
There was no reason why they should still be afloat. Lutzow had taken three more torpedo hits and her superstructure was a mass of tangled, unrecognizable wreckage. She was still moving backwards. Her engines thudded with the grim determination to get her crew to safety. Her pumps strained beyond their maximum capacity to keep the flood waters at bay. Captain Becker had organized bucket chains to try and keep the flooding from overcoming them. They were helping a little, not much but a little. They were keeping the survivors of the crew busy and their minds away from the water that was, despite all their efforts, slowly gaining on them.
Off to port, their last destroyer, Z-27, was painfully keeping up with them. She was crowded. She’d picked up survivors from Z-28 after that destroyer had been battered into a wreck during the last, furious, American assault. Becker had been listening as Scheer went down, too crippled to evade the horde of aircraft that had studded her with their torpedoes then drenched her with bombs and rockets. It had been a miracle that Lutzow had survived; a miracle Becker didn’t understand, he could just accept that it had been so.
Then, they’d had another miracle. He’d got the reports from his shattered ship and realized there was no way he could make Norway. It was more than 350 miles away. At his painful 6 knots, backwards, that meant almost three days transit. His ship simply could not stay afloat that long. But, southwest, that was different. He was only just over 130 miles away from Torshaven in the Faroe Islands. Less than a day’s transit and he could make that. Just. So he’d swung his stern southwest and started the long, painful journey. Six hours later, he’d detected a large formation of ships. They were obviously enemy but had crossed his path, some 30 miles behind him, heading east. At a guess, the Amis had detached surface ships to mop up any survivors. He’d read somewhere that was their doctrine; carriers batter the enemy, then surface ships move in for the kill. Only, his change of course for the Faeroes had meant they’d missed him.
“Damage report?”
“We’re holding our own, Captain. The bucket brigades are helping a little and the pumps, well, they’re far above their rated capacity. The old girl is fighting hard, Sir.”
Becker nodded. “And we can save her yet. We can’t get into Thorshavn, but we can beach her outside. Then we can get the crew ashore. If Z-27 makes it, she can probably get into the harbor.” Becker laughed grimly. “It looks like the Faeroe Islands have just acquired a
Navy.”
“Sir, aircraft secured, pilots are sleeping it off. We’ve got an initial debrief, we’ll do some more details tomorrow. Our F7Fs are spotted on the deck, ready to go if there’s a need.”
“Any word from Admiral Lee?”
“No, Sir. They’ve done a sweep south and east of the kill zone, they found nothing. Formation Nan must have got the cripples. He’s complaining bitterly Admiral. He says you might at least have left him something for his guns. Oh, and the destroyers have picked up some survivors from the German ships. They’re in a pitiful state Admiral; the cans are doing what they can.” The Exec thought for a second. “Sorry Sir, that was a horrible pun.”
“I’ll forgive it. Any word on our pilots?”
“Mariners picked up a dozen; floatplanes from the cruisers about the same. A few ditched close enough to the screen to be picked up, total of about 30. As for the rest, we’ll have to assume they’re gone Admiral. On board the carriers, we’ve about seventy or eighty with wounds and burns from deck crashes. We’ve got around 400 dead in all. Group Sitka says it’s lost about 200 with the same number wounded. They’re heading west for Churchill and a repair yard.”
“Pass word out to the groups. We’ll pull back; west then south west. All groups to make up a strike wave to hit whatever targets we have listed in the Londonderry area. Since we’re passing, we might as well make use of what munitions we have left.”
The Exec consulted his flipboard. “We’re OK for land attack munitions. Lots of HE stuff, we didn’t use much of that. We’re out of Tiny Tims and rocket bombs, pretty much out of torpedoes and badly down on armor piercing 2,000 pounders, 1,600s and 1,000s. We’ve hardly any 500s. We’re low on chemicals for napalm as well. We can give one set of land targets a good seeing to. Wouldn’t be wise to hang around too long though.”
“Agreed. The courier plane is ready?” Halsey had spent hours writing up a detailed account of the battle. What had gone right, what had gone wrong, the lessons to be learned. It was only a preliminary document. The day’s action would be as closely and avidly studied as any in naval history. There was a naval historian on board, a man called Morison. He would be writing the popular history of the battle, one that would be a rare example of a history written by an expert who had actually seen the events in question. That raised an interesting point. “I guess we have to give a name to this battle.”