Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (9 page)

At two in the morning the cruiser covering force put to sea to shadow PQ-17. In command was Rear Admiral Louis ‘Turtle’ Hamilton, of whom it was said that he was a ‘bachelor wedded to the White Ensign, courteous, unflappable and popular’. He was also an aggressive commander who believed along with Churchill that the best place for the German surface fleet was on the bottom. That was about all he agreed on with Churchill, castigating him for his failure to use the RAF to help clear the sea of Kriegsmarine vessels rather than bombing Germany.
¹
He had been heartened to know that the USS
Wasp
would add its airpower to that of HMS
Victorious
in this operation.

He had been more than pleased at the enthusiasm and cooperation of his two American cruiser captains. His orders were not to engage any force heavier than his. Unfortunately that order was a conundrum of sorts. Of the seven major German ships that were expected to challenge the convoys, according to the report from Sweden, only two,
Hipper
and
Prinz Eugen,
matched his own 8-inch guns. The problem was that both ships were part of task forces that included ships with heavier guns. In effect, his orders were not to fight anything larger than a destroyer. He would see about that.

‘Anything larger’ was to be handled by the Home Fleet covering force following at a distance of 200 miles.

In issuing his operations order, Hamilton directed that, ‘The primary object is to get PQ-17 to Russia, but an object only slightly subsidiary is to provide an opportunity for the enemy’s heavy ships to be brought to action by our battlefleet and cruiser covering force.’ He also clearly stated that, ‘It is not my intention to engage any enemy unit which includes
Tirpitz,
which must be shadowed at long range and led to a position at which interception can be achieved by the Commander-in-Chief.’
²
Now, only if the Germans would cooperate, he could pull off the classic role of the cruiser and pull
Tirpitz
towards its destruction at the hands of the battleships. Any other group of German ships he would not hesitate to fight it out with.

Reporting aboard
Wichita
was Admiral Giffen’s flag lieutenant ‘for temporary additional duty’, whose job it was to write an ‘hour by hour chronicle’ of the voyage. Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., USNR, was an intelligent and perceptive man, and his chronicle would do much to untangle the events that were to come.
³

That night Fairbanks recorded the address of the executive officer in the hangar deck aft on the coming operation to the entire crew who listened with ‘solemn, tense faces’. Later that evening Captain H. W. Hill gathered his officers in the wardroom and in an impersonal command tone reminded them of the importance of the convoy to the war effort, that it was worth $700,000,000, and that there was intelligence that there was likely to be a knock-down, drag-out naval battle to protect it. Now that they had this warning, they were to do their utmost. Discipline had to be perfect. Fairbanks then recorded that Hill ‘leaned on the table and smiled: “Do you realize, I’ve been in the Navy since before many of you were born?” His eyes glistened visibly as he went on, “All my life I’ve been studying, training, and waiting for this one moment - and now it’s come!” He sighed, wagged his head, and with a wave added, “Good luck to you all!’”
⁴

Both sides were rolling for the whole pot; every available heavy ship had put to sea. The Germans were determined to destroy the convoy. The Allies were equally determined to defend the convoy and fight it out with the Germans. The British particularly were haunted by the lost opportunity in the great naval battle of the First World War at Jutland in 1916 when the German High Seas Fleet was allowed to escape and serve as a threatening fleet in being for the rest of the war. For too long the German surface fleet centred on the
Tirpitz
had filled the same role as its ancestor.

The determination to prevail is vital in any military or naval contest, but there were concrete obstacles in its way. The closer the Allied forces approached Norway, the closer they came to the reach of Luftflotte 5’s aircraft. For the two Allied carriers to support the big ships, they in turn had to come within range of the same German aircraft and that included JG 26’s Fw 190s, at that time the finest fighters in the world.

And therein lay a problem. The Vindicator dive-bombers aboard
Wasp
were already obsolete before the war. Their crews disparagingly referred to them as Vibrators or Wind-indictors. The Royal Navy had taken over a French order for Vindicators and renamed the aircraft the Chesapeake and had to up-gun and up-armour the aircraft. Aircrews referred to it as the Cheesecake. They were withdrawn from British service in late 1941. The
Wasp’s
fighter squadron was equipped with Grumman F4F Wildcats. Its torpedo-bombers were the Devastator TBD-1, nicknamed the Torpecker by its crews. It was slow and scarcely manoeuvrable, with light defensive weaponry and poor armour relative to the weapons of the time; its speed on a glide-bombing approach was a mere 200mph, making it easy prey for fighters and defensive guns alike. The aerial torpedo could not even be released at speeds above 115mph. Torpedo delivery requires a long, straight-line attack run, making the aircraft vulnerable, and the slow speed of the aircraft made them easy targets for fighters and antiaircraft guns.
⁵
Wasp’s
air wing counted 75 aircraft–27 F4F fighters, 33 Vindicators, and 15 Devastators.

The Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm was equipped with Fairey Albacore biplanes capable of level, dive- and torpedo-bombing roles but whose maximum speed was barely 140mph. They were already relics. Fighters were Sea Hurricanes of 885 Squadron, which were easily worn out in the stress of carrier operations.
Victorious’s
air component consisted of Albacore Squadrons 817 and 832 and Sea Hurricane Squadron 885, for a total of 42 aircraft.
⁶

The signalmen of the Luftwaffe’s 5th Signals Regiment thought they had been assigned to the back of beyond in the frozen Norwegian north where their primary mission was to intercept Allied and Russian aircraft radio communications. As unappreciated as they may have felt in such an isolated posting, they were worth their weight in gold. Their equally priceless counterparts in the Navy’s B-Dienst had laid bare enough Allied signals to give the Germans an enormous advantage. They were aided by a strong agent network in Iceland and enough local sympathizers to give them advance warning of every convoy sailing. The Germans knew exactly when PQ-17 and Hamilton’s cruisers had left Iceland.
⁷

Because of their warnings, the German 1st Battlegroup had departed from Trondheim early to avoid British air reconnaissance.
Tirpitz
and
Hipper
had arrived in Narvik to join the other two battlegroups under battlegroup commander Admiral Schniewind. His flag flew from mighty
Tirpitz.
The combined fleet would move farther north the next day to Altenfjord. From there they would be able to throw themselves across the path of the convoy in the quickest time as it passed between Bear Island and the southern tip of Spitzbergen. The absence from Trondheim of the German battleship was itself of great intelligence value to the Allies. The ogre was loose upon the seas, just as the intelligence from Sweden had predicted.

The Home Fleet was cruising northeast of Iceland when the report was received that the
Tirpitz
was loose. Admiral Tovey was more than concerned for, if
Tirpitz
and
Hipper
were gone, that meant they had either moved up the coast to join the other German heavy ships or that they had struck directly northwest to intercept the convoy. If the former were true, the original operational plan would hold. If it were the latter, his battleships and carriers would have to race to intercept them for the Germans had at least one day’s head start and less distance to go. At least the lack of signals from the convoy escorts and Hamilton’s cruisers indicated that the enemy had not made contact. In the absence of any further information, he turned his force to speed towards where the enemy might be. He desperately hoped he would not find them already savaging the sheep in the fold.

MAP №2 BATTLES OF BEAR ISLAND AND 20° EAST 3–4 JULY 1942

To his immense relief a scout plane found the convoy just off Jan Mayen Island. At the same time, observers on the convoy saw the masts of the battleships, and for a while the convoy feared it was
Tirpitz
until a trawler properly identified them as the Home Fleet.

At noon that same day, just as the convoy had passed Jan Mayen Island heading northeast, the convoy escorts sighted their first U-boats. They were driven off, but the escorts broke radio silence alerting the B-Dienst to their location.
⁸

Early in the afternoon, PQ-17 passed its counterpart QP-13 heading home. There were now three German reconnaissance aircraft shadowing the convoy, and they hung stubbornly on the rim of the horizon. Late that afternoon one of Hamilton’s destroyers reached the convoy and came alongside a tanker to refuel.

Suddenly eleven He 115 floatplane torpedo-bombers made a half-hearted attack under the low overcast only to be driven off by the gunfire from the escorts. The squadron commander’s Heinkel was shot down, its crew scrambling into their yellow liferaft. Another German aircraft turned back from the retreating squadron and raced towards the bobbing crew. It was obviously a rescue mission to which the Allied antiaircraft gunners gave no sympathy. They concentrated their fire on the He 115 as it skimmed over the wavetops at zero feet and:

It was a brazen deed of great courage in the face of which the Allied crews could only gape in amazement.
⁹

Their amazement was about to turn into something far less edifying. The submarines that had been shadowing them had been trying to attack but had either been driven off by the very active escorts or found themselves socked in by dense fog. When
U-255
surfaced it found the convoy had disappeared into the fog.
U-456
trailed after by following the convoy’s oil slick. The U-boats were now reinforced with another six which all took up position as a screen across the convoy’s path. That same day Dönitz issued the order for the fleet to attack the convoy the next day.

In the early morning hours, the German fleet slipped out of Altenfjord screened by a dozen destroyers and two E-boats.
Hipper
led the way with Admiral Carls flying his flag from it. The day was bright in the perpetual light of the Arctic summer. The fiord was tricky to navigate, full of hidden rocks, but Admiral Carls had ordered his commanders to defer to their Norwegian pilots as they wended their way to the open sea. As it was,
Lützow
nearly smashed into a ledge of jagged rocks barely under the surface. They sailed directly north towards Bear Island and the convoy, which was reported to be heading east to pass 30 miles north of it. Bear Island, a rocky and uninhabited 70 square mile Norwegian possession, was 240 miles from Altenfjord. It would be the fulcrum of the coming clash.

For two days now German reconnaissance aircraft had been skimming around the convoy radioing its location as it moved steadily east at 8 knots. Its escorts darted around the convoy’s edge driving off the U-boats in a game of cat and mouse in which neither side had scored a kill, though it was not for lack of trying. A number of torpedoes were only stopped by the concentrated fire of the escorts and the guncrews on the merchant ships, blowing them out of the water sometimes at the very last minute. The mood was tense among the convoy and escort crews, but their morale had been boosted by their success. It would never be higher.

Broome received a signal from the commander of the submarine HMS
P.614
¹⁰
which stated that ‘if heavy enemy surface units attacked, he intended to remain on the surface, receiving the reply from Broome, “So do 1.”’
¹¹

On the bridge of
Tirpitz
Schniewind looked up to follow the noise of engines. Overhead a formation of twenty-three He 111 torpedo-bombers from KG 26 at Bardufoss was flying towards the convoy led by the Geschwader’s acting commander Hauptmann Eicke. The admiral did not see another thirty Ju 88 dive-bombers of KG 30 that were flying ahead of the torpedo-bombers. Eleven of the Kriegsmarine’s He 115 torpedo-bombers had also set out to attack the convoy. At the bases from which all these aircraft had just departed another mixed strike force was preparing to launch on order after the first had struck and was on the way home. The mission of the strike forces was to sink as many ships as possible and so disorganize the convoy that it would fall easy prey to the surface ships and the gathering wolf pack of U-boats codenamed Ice Devil.

A Gruppe from JG 26 would join the fleet as it approached Bear Island to fly top cover, an ever mindful reminder of the Führer’s admonition to watch out for the carriers. With a round-trip range of 500 miles, the Fw 190s could just reach Bear Island and have a little precious loiter time. This would require the other two Gruppen of JG 26 to relieve each other in rotation. A patrol pattern SSW of Bear Island would also likely serve to intercept any Allied carrier aircraft.

Gruppenkommandeur Major Josef ‘Pips’ Priller’s III./JG 26 of thirty Fw 190s would have the honour of the first rotation. Priller was a killer in the sky with seventy kills to his credit, most of them against the RAF, having shot down more Spitfires than any other German ace.
¹²
He was a stocky, little man, jovial by nature, well-liked by his men, and with a penchant for talking back to his superiors. His three squadron commanders were the best in the Luftwaffe.

They need not have worried at that time about the carriers. The Home Fleet with HMS
Victorious
and USS
Wasp
had not even passed Jan Mayen Island, 600 miles (1,000km) west of Altenfjord and almost as far to Bear Island, and was unaware of the location of the German ships, only that the
Tirpitz
and
Hipper
were missing from Trondheim. Fog along the Norwegian coast had prevented RAF reconnaissance of the naval bases at Narvik and farther north. It had also blanketed the convoy route intermittently. Tovey and Hamilton both knew that the German surface fleet had orders to be at sea, and signals intelligence indicated that German communications were spiking. It was not much to go on, but Tovey made some shrewd guesses based upon what he knew of the Germans and the location of the convoy. Within half an hour the Home Fleet had changed course and was steaming for Bear Island at 28 knots. From the decks of his two carriers, reconnaissance aircraft took off to scour the sea between the Home Fleet and Bear Island.

If Tovey was far away, Hamilton and his cruisers were parallelling the convoy only 40 miles to the north. So far as he knew, the German reconnaissance planes did not know where he was.