He walked over to the chart and looked down. It was smeared and smudged with the notations that had been put on it in the frantic planning that had taken place over the last 24 hours. Halsey wished he could put on his reading glasses but they wouldn’t fit the image, not here on his command bridge. The nearest patch of land was a small group of islands about 250 plus miles south west of them. The problem was that he couldn’t make out the name.
“These islands here. What are they?”
Across the chart table Ensign Zipster glanced at the map. He couldn’t make out the name either, but he was aware of the need for a young Ensign to impress his Admiral at every chance. Anyway, there was only one group of Islands north of the UK wasn’t there? The British had a naval base in them or something. “They’re the Orkneys Sir.” Zipster spoke with authority, tinged with a slight level of condescension that nobody else had known.
Halsey looked at him sharply. He hadn’t missed the inflection in the voice. Still, it was the information he needed. “Very well then, We’ll call it the Battle of the Orkneys.”
Despite the Russian work teams who had been out all night, there was still slush on the runway. Just enough to drag on the wheels and lengthen the A-38Ds take-off run. Captain John Marosy mentally calculated how much the effect was likely to be as he ran his R-3350 engines up. His hands moved, dropping the flaps to the 20 degree setting, while his eyes watched his instruments as the engine temperature climbed. The R-3350 was a temperamental beast with a habit of eating cylinders when it overheated. A valve’s temperature would climb beyond the limits and burn. Then the head would disintegrate and chew up one of the eighteen cylinders. Next, the cylinder would go airborne and chew up the whole engine. At that point the hydraulic fluid would be lost and he wouldn’t be able to feather the prop. It would over-speed and come off, slashing at the fuselage on its way. Usually at that point, the whole engine would seize and twist right off the wing. On the whole, it was better not to let the engines overheat.
He was pressing hard on the brakes but Hammer Blow was still shifting forward. Ready or not, it was time to go. Up ahead of him, the runway clearance crews saw the A-38 start to pick up speed and scattered to clear the way. Most of them anyway, a few took the chance of stopping to clear one last spadeful of slush before jumping clear. Then, the white and gray A-38 raced past them, its twin tail lifted as the aircraft picked up speed. A few waved as he passed but Marosy didn’t respond, not now. His hands were full dealing with the Grizzlies take-off run. Like most over-powered aircraft, its flying characteristics were unforgiving. The torque on its take-off run was as much as he could control. Ground-looping would be a sad way to start a mission. Embarrassing.
Marosy blinked as Hammer Blow rotated and lifted over the snowfield. The storm had past and the air was crystal clear, the early morning sun reflections off the snowfields blinded him. Blinded wasn’t an understatement, snow-blindness was a real problem. That was why the Americans had brought along one of the war’s less obvious secret weapons. Sunglasses; available in huge quantities. They were bringing them in by the millions and distributing them as needed. The wire-framed dark glasses had even become something of a fashion statement back home. Those who could get them flaunted them. Beside him Lightning Bolt had moved into position on his wing. There were supposed to be four aircraft in this formation but Angelina had been one of the aircraft destroyed in the A-4 bombardment while Worst Nightmare had developed engine trouble and been pulled from the flight line. That left just two.
“Where are we going?”
In the back, Sergeant Bressler had his map spread out on the table. Originally, the second crewman on the A-38 had controlled the two twin .50 machine guns in remote controlled turrets. The D-model had those stripped out and replaced them with four fixed guns in the outer wing panels. The reduction in weight had reduced the strain on the engines and added a little to maximum speed. Now, the second crewman served only as a navigator and radio operator. He was vital in that role. He could speak with the forward air controllers on the ground and leave the pilot to worry about avoiding German flak.
“Hitting an armored column moving up from the south. Its threatening one of the Navy’s railway gun batteries so we’re to slow it down a bit. Steer course 178, hold altitude, 2000 feet. We’re about 15 minutes out.”
“Armored. Panzers?”
“Panzer-grenadiers. According to the recon patrols, it’s a mixed column. Mostly mechanized infantry with an armored car unit and a self-propelled artillery battery.”
Marosy sucked his teeth. Panzer-grenadiers meant flak, a lot of it. Each half track had a 20mm gun and there would certainly be at least one quad twenty or twin thirty. And that wasn’t the worst of it. If there were infantry, there would be spirals. They’d only appeared in the last few months and weren’t that effective but they were yet another thing to worry about. He scanned downwards, trying to pick out the vehicles on the ground against the glaring snowfields. There were theoretical armchair “experts” who decried camouflage, who would point at the vehicles on display or in pictures and sneer that the elaborate paint schemes didn’t fool him. Well, it was interesting that people like that were very keen to fire off their opinions but very reluctant to get involved in any other form of firing.
Up here, trying to spot white vehicles against a white background, camouflage was very effective. It cost aircraft. It meant that the Grizzlies had to stay higher so they could search more effectively, then dive down for their attacks. That gave the Germans a few seconds of warning, time for them to start to disperse and get their guns lined up. No, Marosy thought, camouflage was effective all right.
His eyes continued scanning downwards, looking for the telltale signs of a vehicle convoy moving. It could be anything; tracks on the snow although thickness and freshness made that unlikely. The vehicles would be moving on the roads. He wouldn’t see the roads themselves, they were white as well, but he might see the shadows. The sharp, clear sun was a friend as well as an enemy. It cast shadows of banks and vehicles where the object itself wasn’t so easily seen.
In fact, it was the sun that helped him, although it worked in a different way that he had expected. His eyes caught a flash on the ground, a reflection off a windshield perhaps, or a pair of binoculars. Whatever it was, it caught his attention and focused him on a section of road underneath. That’s when he saw the vehicles and knew that they had seen him. Given the snarl of four R-3350s and the altitude he was flying at, they would have had to be blind, deaf and stupid to have missed the pair of Grizzlies. They were dispersing as much as the ground and the snow let them. He knew for certain that they were getting their flak ready.
“Lightning Bolt, I’ve got them. 11 o’clock, about two miles out. There’s a ridgeline over at 3 o’clock. We’ll run from behind that.”
“Got you, Hammer Blow.”
Marosy put Hammer Blow into a long curving dive, heading for the terrain masking provided by the ridgeline. The two Grizzlies would make their first run from there, trying to see the anti-aircraft vehicles and pick them off with their 75mm guns. The ground swept up. The ridge masked the position of the German unit as the Grizzlies leveled out behind it. Then, the two aircraft swung around, skimmed the top of the rise and went straight at the German halftracks. They’d already spread out, trying to reduce the casualties when the inevitable napalm drops started. The first flicker of tracers were already starting to lick out. These days, every German half-track had a 20mm cannon, the days of the vehicles having rifle-caliber machine guns were long gone. That was why the A-38 had replaced most of the other twin-engined ground attack aircraft; its 75mm gun could knock out the flak guns from outside the range of the 20mm.