The Invasion of 1950 (13 page)

The Germans had known about the British armoured flight decks. It was something that had given the carriers their chance of survival in the last war. So they had prepared their weapons to compensate. The glide bombs punched through the armour before detonating right next to the aviation fuel and the torpedoes the carrier crew would load onto the aircraft, blowing the ship apart. “Admiral, the destroyers are clearing the anchorage now.”

But they’re not here for the destroyers
, Fraser thought, grimly. The Germans intended to wreck the fleet; it was the only thing that they could want, even though British destroyers were nothing to laugh at. If the Germans took out enough of them, there wouldn’t even be a chance for raiding the German supply lines at night.

“We need to get the battleships and cruisers out of the anchorage,” he told himself, wondering if the German admiral on the
Bismarck
had felt so helpless. The battle was being fought and the outcome was being determined…and he was powerless to affect either. He had to preserve Home Fleet as a viable weapon of war, but his capability to do that was limited, almost non-existent. Once the Germans stopped bombing, all he could do was pick up the remainder of his fleet and start repairing the damage.

The ship shook again, and he cursed under his breath.

***

“
Keep firing,” Brian Timpson ordered, as the massive anti-aircraft gun fired a shell into the air, aiming at a German bomber that was trying to fly down towards the anchorage, bombs falling and gliding down towards the ships with an eerie precision that sent chills falling down his spine.

His crew worked like an assembly line, loading, firing, reloading and then firing again, trying to shoot a German aircraft out of the sky. The sky itself was lit up by the strange white light of the German flares and the flames licking up from the dockyards. One massive column of fire thrust into the air from one of the fuel dumps. Timpson silently prayed for the safety of the firemen who would be trying desperately to put the fire out before it spread into one of the ammunition dumps. If it reached the explosives, the area would look like hell on earth.

His gaze tracked a German aircraft as it flew high overhead launching a bomb, and his crew fired a shell at it. The radar screen was completely fuzzed out, but they knew they had to keep filling the skies with explosions and flying shrapnel. One of the proximity fuses detonated and sent a German aircraft spiralling down in flames. It crashed into the ground and exploded with a noise that he could hear through his earmuffs, over the deafening noise of the battle. His gun’s bark sounded again and again, the noise of the other anti-aircraft guns, the heavy guns on the battleships, the roaring of German aircraft high overhead…all of them were merging into one single terrible noise, as if it were the end of the world.

“Got him,” he shouted, suspecting that none of his unit would hear him. They might not have been the people who’d hit the aircraft either. There was no way to know with all the shells detonating up there, most of them hitting nothing, or maybe even fired at the wrong side. The RAF was supposed to be up there as well – he saw a second German aircraft falling out of the sky before exploding in mid-dive – but there was no way to tell the difference between brave British pilots and underhand German pilots; they’d just have to shoot at what looked like bombers and hope.

Another flare burst in the sky and he covered his eyes, gazing out over the anchorage, and feeling awe…and terror. He’d admired the big ships when he’d been a child. His lame leg had prevented him from becoming a crewman, and it had only been through sheer luck that he’d been given command of a battery. Now, however, half of the big warships were burning, and several of them had been sunk. He watched as flames spread over a small cruiser. Moments later, the magazine exploded and the cruiser shattered.

The sight held him. He nearly forgot about the need to keep firing at the Germans. A German aircraft went down into the water, narrowly missing crashing into a destroyer as it was steaming out of the harbour. The plane sent a massive fountain of water into the air upon impact. The noise kept growing louder as the German planes came lower, but fewer were plummeting from the air. He could see crewmen abandoning burning ships, trusting to the waters below to break their fall, but the waters themselves were ablaze as fuel oil drifted across the waves. The entire harbour looked as if it were on fire. He saw the dockyards and a battle-cruiser that had been in the docks for servicing, burning with the dull flames of ignited fuel. Just for a moment, as an earth shattering roar echoed out over the harbour. One of the battleships lifted out of the water, before flying apart and crashing down in ruins. The remains wouldn’t stay afloat for long.

He screamed curses into the air, shouting at the Germans who had ruined the fleet, but all he could effectively do was keep firing into the sky as German aircraft continued their destruction of the harbour…and of his beloved navy.

***

The sight held
Gruppenkommandeur
Albrecht Schmidt’s eyes as he took in the scale of the devastation. He’d been warned by some of the older hands in the
Luftwaffe
that the scale of the damage was sometimes inversely proportional to how impressive it looked, but he was sure that the damage was vast and beyond easy repair. The British fighters had faded from the skies. He allowed himself a moment to relax, and consider the use of the rocket pods mounted under his wings. He hadn’t done much damage on the ground yet, and he wanted to wreak havoc before the order came to withdraw in a body. Some of the bombers had already started to retreat, having run out of bombs to drop on the British. It wouldn’t be long before he got the order to leave.

He glanced down at his chronometer and blinked; had it really only been fifteen minutes since they’d started the attack? He found it impossible to believe; it felt as if he’d been drifting above the burning wonderland for hours, watching like a god from on high as the British base burned and their proud fleet was reduced to ruin. Some of the ships were clearly still moving, heading out towards the North Sea and the U-boats that awaited them out there. Some of the subs crept closer to the harbour, well aware that any ship they encountered would be British. The British fleet wouldn’t know what had hit them…

His lips twitched. Actually, they’d know for certain what had hit them; they just wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

A flak burst only a few meters from his aircraft, reminded him that he was still in danger and he took the jet into a crash-dive, only levelling out bare metres above the water and flying low towards the burning ships. The water was full of British sailors, some of them panicking, others trying to salvage as much as they could, and he was tempted to machine gun them before remembering himself and the rules of war. The British weren’t monsters and would treat captured Germans decently, as long as the Germans treated British prisoners decently…and machine gunning helpless men wouldn’t improve the
Reich’s
reputation. Instead, he lifted the aircraft up, flew over a burning cruiser, and zoomed towards a small airfield on one of the islands.

He grew tense as he selected his targets. The British had had a perfect harbour and anchorage for their fleet in the Orkneys, and they’d been working on it for years, developing it into their main fleet base. It hadn’t been defended very well, but if the British had had a proper warning, or a radar plane in the air, the battle might have gone the other way. He saw the hangers and fired his rockets. They had been designed for antitank operations, but instead, they would suffice for use on a hanger that might hold important aircraft. A series of explosions rewarded his efforts, and he yanked back on the stick, screaming back into the air as the hanger disintegrated below him. They must have stuck several armed bombers or submarine-hunting aircraft in the hangers. The British had an entire line of such aircraft, all of which would be useless in a dogfight. However, the U-boat crews would be glad to know that many of them had been destroyed.

“Attention, we have enemy fighters coming in from the south,” the operator called. “All fighters, move to engage.”

Schmidt checked his ammunition – he’d fired off nearly two-thirds of his cannon shells – and turned the aircraft around, taking a quick glance at his on-board radar as he raced towards the British aircraft. They were probably more Meteors, coming towards them with fresh pilots and full ammunition, and that meant that they would have an advantage. He did a quick roll call and discovered that his flight had lost seven aircraft, either to the British aircraft or their guns on the ground; it would have been worse if they hadn’t been trying to stop the bombers.

“It’s time to take our leave,” the raid commander ordered, from the command aircraft. Schmidt had never liked that precaution, even though it ensured that the raid commander knew exactly what was going on. If the British had shot him down, there would have been a certain amount of confusion in the ranks. “
Richthofen
, engage the enemy fighters until the bombers have reached a safe distance.”

“
Jawohl
,” Schmidt said, and threw his fighter forward. He felt tired, as if every part of him had been in a massive struggle, but at the same time, he felt elated at his success. The lead British plane snapped a burst of tracer off at him and he dodged it with ease before firing back himself and swinging into a full-on dogfight with the Meteor. Losses would be roughly even now, but the British had even less experience than his own people. Both sides would be learning on the job.

The British pilot was good, he noted ruefully, flipping over himself and turning to engage him through a crazy series of loop-the-loops. He also had more ammunition. Every time he looked as if he might be able to hit Schmidt, he fired off a burst long enough to make Schmidt curse and dodge his fire, while Schmidt couldn’t fire back with such abandon because he had only limited ammunition of his own. Several of his pilots were retreating now, their ammunition drums empty; they’d be nothing less than sitting ducks for the British pilots. Finally, his opponent made one tiny mistake, and Schmidt stitched his cockpit with explosive bullets. The British aircraft exploded in mid-air

“All fighters, break off and return to the rendezvous point,” the raid commander ordered. Schmidt glanced down at his displays automatically, taking in the limited fuel and knowing that if they didn’t reach the tankers, they’d be going down in the cold North Sea. “Leave the remaining British and retreat.”

Schmidt didn’t bother to answer. He fired one last burst at a British aircraft, turned, and shot away. His aircraft was supposed to have a better acceleration rate than the British Meteor, and now he put it to the test as the remaining
Richthofen
fliers broke off and ran. The British gave chase over the burning dockyards, but eventually they broke off as they passed over the harbour limits and headed back towards their base. Schmidt allowed himself a sigh of relief; if the British had pushed after them and forced them into a dogfight, they would have burnt off too much of their fuel.

He glanced back in the mirror as they settled into their course. Scapa Flow was burning behind them, explosions still showing up as flames reached ammunition dumps and unexpended ammunition down on the ground, wrecking the harbour still further. The British would be able to put out the fires quickly – they had the entire North Sea for water – but repairing all the damage would take years.

It had been a good night’s work.

***

An hour later, Admiral Fraser stood up in a small motorboat, watching grimly
as the crewman conning the boat took him on a long path around damaged ships and still-burning facilities on the shore, allowing him to make an inspection. Searchlights glared out, illuminating the scene, but he would have been happier not seeing anything at all. Here and there, the wreckage of a once-proud ship broke the waves, or the underside of a ship was clear to the eye, signalling a ship that had capsized and somehow failed to sink. Years ago, when Fraser had been a younger man, the Germans had scuttled their fleet in Scapa Flow; now, they’d wrecked a large chunk of the British Navy.

He felt a tear in his eye as he stared at the wreckage of an aircraft carrier. It had been one of the older ones, serving valiantly during the last war, and perhaps the Germans had targeted it out of spite. A single bomb had blown it open and the wreckage was now scattered over the water. Another battleship had been run aground by her captain to prevent her from sinking, a precaution that Fraser couldn’t disagree with, even with the need to get as many of the ships out as possible.

It was unbelievable; forty ships destroyed or seriously damaged, nine of them capital ships. Home Fleet no longer existed as an organised fighting force, and it would take weeks to organise the fleet into something that might be able to sail in the same direction without causing vast confusion. He had only one carrier and two battleships left, and that wasn’t enough to defeat the German fleet, particularly as most of the carrier’s aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. They could summon up reinforcements from the Fleet Air Arm base at Southampton, assuming that that base hadn’t been hit as well.