Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (31 page)

He smiled,
lowering his periscope and thinking of home. His patrol was over. He would go back
to La Spezia and collect his medal, and then off to a new assignment in the
Black Sea—commander of a new flotilla of six Type II boats!

Life was
good.

Part VIII

The Best Laid Plans

“
The best laid schemes of mice
and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy.”

~ Robert Burns

“I say let the world
go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”

~
Fyodor
Dostoyevsky,
Notes from Underground

Chapter 22

Word came
to Syfret in a brief respite in the
middle of a very hard day on the 12th of August. It was marked highest
priority, direct from the Admiralty, and he was to respond and confirm these
new orders at once. It was more than he needed just then, as the Germans and
Italians had been throwing everything they had at him. There was a relatively
small attack that morning at 08:00 hours, easily beaten off with the
substantial flak his escorts could put up. At noon, however, a stronger attack
came, some seventy aircraft. It was just as the intelligence had indicated
after intercepting and decoding orders sent to the Italian 77th Wing at Elmas,
Sardinia. Yet there was also some odd chaff in that message about an engagement
farther north, at Bonifacio Strait. What was that about? It was the only bright
spot in his day, as it indicated that the Italian Naval units that had been
gathering like a flock of black crows in the Tyrrhenian Sea had suddenly turned
north, and were now well away from the planned convoy route.

It was clear
from the intelligence that the whole operation was being taken in deadly
earnest by the enemy. There were opinions expressed that the Germans now
believed there was a direct threat to Benghazi, Tripoli or even to Crete, with
the threat of Allied troop landings prompting them to reinforce all these areas
with any available air and ground units.

Lord, he was
having enough trouble simply trying to protect fourteen merchant vessels
carrying supplies to Malta, let alone the notion of mounting an amphibious
operation behind Rommel’s back. He knew that was coming, but for the moment
those plans were still hush, hush. Now he looked at his new orders, curious as
to what might be so urgent in them.

‘IMPERATIVE
YOU WITHDRAW FORCE Z AT EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY - RETURN TO GIBRALTAR AT BEST
SPEED – REPEAT – WITHDRAW IMMEDIATELY - ACKNOWLEDGE – END’

He frowned,
noting how “at his earliest opportunity” had been duly strengthened by the
addition “withdraw immediately.” Here the Germans and Italians were doing
everything possible to impede his progress—high level bombers, dive bombers, low
level torpedo planes, submarines, minefields, some twist on a new aerial torpedo
dropped from planes that would circle in the midst of the convoy to seek out
targets. The Italians would call them ‘motobombas.’ He had even heard they had
packed a seaplane full of high explosives and planned to fly it by radio
control and crash it into one of his carriers. Thankfully the plane could not
be controlled and flew harmlessly across the Mediterranean Sea to crash in the
desert, leaving a large crater where it exploded but doing no other harm. The
Italians, he thought, shaking his head.

 Now the
Admiralty simply wanted him to turn about with the heart of the surface escort
fleet, and run off home to Gibraltar. For what? He knew he would have to turn
back in any case, as they were very near the Skerki Bank now, and the channel
narrowed there to make a transit by his battleships an unwise operation in
these circumstances. It had always been planned that Force Z would turn back at
this point. The question was merely how long to hold with the convoy before he
turned it over to Admiral Burrough and Force X with his cruisers and
destroyers.

They would
have the worst of what was yet to come, he knew. He was taking the carriers,
and both
Rodney
and
Nelson
home with him, and Burrows was left
with whatever they could spare him.

“
Rodney
reports she’s having difficulties with her steering, sir,” said a watch
stander. The ship had been having trouble that way for the last month, Syfret
knew, and now it was all she could do to make just fifteen knots. If the
Admiralty wanted them home directly, he had little choice in the matter. He had
to turn back now.

“Very well,”
he said with a heavy heart, and gave an order to the midshipman at his side.
“Signal Admiral Burrough Godspeed, and we’ll turn about at once and head east
for Gibraltar.” He looked at his watch. It was 16:00 hours, some three hours
before he was planning to make this turn.

So it was
that the carrier
Indomitable
, which might have sailed on into the teeth
of the enemy air attacks for another three hours, did not receive three critical
bomb hits when the Axis air forces mounted a large and well coordinated attack
with JU-88s, JU-87s, and Italian Cant 1007 torpedo bombers.
Rodney
was
also spared three near misses and the crash of an Italian aircraft on her bow. The
order from the Admiralty had changed the history—
Kirov
had changed the history
by her very presence in this region, and by prompting those urgent orders.

Now Syfret
sailed east chasing the setting sun, even as
Kirov
was beginning to put
her first divers into the water north of Menorca Island. While Rosenbaum’s U-73
was taking that long torpedo shot and prompting Karpov to churn up the sea with
his ASW rockets and initiate his search with the KA-40, Syfret was receiving
bad news over his shoulder and burdened with considerable regret. Burrough was
under attack, and his cruisers
Nigeria
and
Cairo
had both taken
torpedoes, along with the one ship he had dearly hoped to protect, the American
oil tanker
Ohio
. He was inclined to split his force and send
Rodney
on home to satisfy this order from the Admiralty, while taking
Nelson
back east to cover the eventual withdrawal of Burrough’s Force X. Yet he
received further orders clarifying his options in no uncertain terms. He was to
return to Gibraltar at his best speed, and with as much force as he could
spare. At the very least he felt obliged to detach some of his escorts and send
help to Force X, come what may. So he gave orders that cruiser
Charybdis
and destroyers
Eskimo
and
Somali
should be signaled by lantern to
break off and return to the fray. It would end up doing little good.

In the next twenty-four
hours the British would see two more cruisers torpedoed,
Kenya
and
Manchester
,
and of the 14 ships they had mustered all this naval power to protect, only five
would make it through the terrible gauntlet of fire and reach Malta. The
Ohio
was saved by a handful of dispossessed crewman who manned her AA guns while
they watched the ship sink so low in the water that the waves were right at the
height of the deck. Two British destroyers lashed themselves to either side of
the beleaguered tanker and literally dragged her to port.

Five
ships…only five made it through, but it was enough to keep the garrison and
population of Malta from starvation, and the vital oil and fuel in
Ohio’s
holds was pumped out in the nick of time before she finally settled on the
bottom at her berth, a ruined wreck. She would never sail again.

As the
haggard Royal Navy ships fell back on Gibraltar, Force Z would limp home with
the two big battleships, carriers
Indomitable
and
Victorious
, two
light cruisers and twelve more destroyers. The carrier
Furious
would be
their rear guard with five more destroyers in escort. The weary crews would get
little respite.

To his great
surprise, Admiral Syfret soon learned that they were to prepare for a make or
break defense of Gibraltar itself! He was to make immediate plans to close
those straits to any and all ship traffic.

What in the
world can have the Admiralty all rousted up like this, he thought? He was not
one of the select few that had been briefed on the details of the engagements
of a year past. Yes, rumors flew throughout the whole of the fleet of this new
German raider with its wonder weapons and the terrible end it brought to the Americans
there. And yes, he had seen the damage to
Prince of Wales
and
King
George V
himself when they had returned to Scapa Flow, and knew that the venerable
battlecruiser
Repulse
had not come home with them. But that was a year
ago, and this enemy ship had been sunk, or so the official line had been put
out. He knew nothing of the Admiralty’s continued interest and preoccupation
with the incident, and nothing of the code word “Geronimo” that had set these
events in motion.

So what was
all this bother about? Had the plans for Operation Torch been moved up? It was
the only thing he could think of that made any sense, and so he made his plans for
the fleet to refuel so his destroyers would to be ready to move out again on
patrol in the straits of Gibraltar as soon as they reached that location. Perhaps
he should invite Admiral Fraser over from
Rodney
and have a little chat.
Maybe he knew something more and could explain matters to him.

Even as
Syfret
gave that
reluctant order to turn about on the afternoon of August 12, Admiral Tovey was
already aboard the cruiser
Norfolk
and well out to sea where he would
soon transfer to the flagship,
King George V.

While the
KA-40 was searching in vain for U-73 on the night of August 12-13, Home Fleet
had been pounding it sway south at twenty-four knots. While Fedorov had his
last visit with the Admiral and Doctor, Tovey’s battleships were already off
the coast of Brest. There German reconnaissance planes spotted the fleet, and
telephones were soon jangling as the Germans tried to surmise what this big
fleet movement was all about. They had already been spooked by Operation
Pedestal, with strong opinions that the British were planning an imminent
amphibious operation on the coast of North Africa. These ships must be
mustering for that operation, they now believed, and began to strengthen their
defenses all along that coast.

Kirov
lingered well north of Menorca while
U-73 slipped quietly away to the northeast, heading home. At one point they saw
the U-boat on their powerful surface radar sets, and Karpov had a second chance
to think about killing it with a missile. He decided the boat was not worth the
expense, and let Rosenbaum go. In his mind, however, there was no calculus of
what may or may not happen at some future date, nor was there any musing over
life and death. It was simply a matter of economics at that point.
Kirov
needed her anti-ship missiles for what lay ahead of them now, not what lay
behind.

At noon
Fedorov came off his rest shift and the two men were again together on the
bridge for an hour before Karpov would take his rest. Fedorov now had one more
weighty decision to make, and he decided to sound Karpov out on the matter.

“Here is the
situation,” he said quietly. “Force Z is now withdrawing towards Gibraltar. If
we put on speed we might be able to beat them there, but I think it would be
very close, and we would have to run at thirty knots from our present location
to have any chance at all. I was going to turn south and run west of Palma, but
I have now plotted another route southwest aimed at Cabo de Nao, Spain, and
from there we would race down the Spanish coast past Cartagena and then enter
the Alboran Sea south of Almeria. On the other hand, Force Z will be well west
of Oran by that time, and if we are spotted, which is likely given the air
traffic in this region, they will probably be vectored in to engage us.”

“This means
we fight these ships in the Alboran Sea, and not in the Straits of Gibraltar,”
said Karpov.

“Correct, but
we could also take a more deliberate route at normal cruising speed and in this
event they would reach Gibraltar ahead of us. We could then wait in the Alboran
Sea and see what Admiral Volsky decides about these negotiations we spoke of
earlier. It would then be his decision as to how we proceed.”

Karpov
thought for a moment. “From a military viewpoint, I would much rather fight
this Force Z with good sea room, and in a situation where we can make the best
use of our strengths—speed and ranged firepower. Yes, we may be spotted as we
move south, but we will also see them easily enough, and I can engage at good
range with our cruise missiles. Then perhaps we could have Nikolin order them
to yield and if they have taken enough of a pounding, like the Italians, we
could then transit the straits and leave them in our wake.”

“I
understand,” said Fedorov, “but taking that course is almost certain to result
in an engagement. It will not be easy to negotiate with them while we are
hurling our missiles at their ships to keep them at bay. I think they will be
slightly ahead of us, even if we run at top speed now.”