The Moscow Option (29 page)

The American fleet was observing complete radio silence, and there was one important fact of which Fletcher was unaware.
Ranger
, the sole US carrier in the Atlantic, had been relieved of escort duty and rushed south across the Caribbean to join the battle. It had arrived at the Atlantic end of the Canal in the early hours of that morning, and was due to pass through to the Pacific the following night.

There would not be time. At 07.10
Ranger’s
captain received two pieces of information. One of the Catalinas had found the Japanese fleet, and the Canal Zone radar installations, on full alert for several days, had picked up an incoming flight of enemy planes. The only naval battle in history to span two oceans was underway.

The Canal Zone’s AA defences had been greatly strengthened in the months that followed Midway, and the radar warning had given the USAAF plentiful time to scramble, so Fuchida’s planes received a lively welcome. The Vals and their Zero escort were assailed by American fighters - mostly Wildcats - high above the Canal Zone, and both sides suffered heavy losses. Far below the raging dogfights the Kates were flying through a hail of flak towards the Pedro Miguel locks. Two broke through to launch their torpedoes against the lower gates, both of which were severely damaged. But since the locks were empty and the upper gates also closed there was no uncontrollable rush of water. The one torpedo dropped inside the locks exploded harmlessly when it hit the shallow bottom. As his surviving planes turned back to sea a frustrated Fuchida radioed Nagumo that there was need of a second strike.

The Admiral, waiting for such news with Kusaka on the
Akagi
bridge, agreed to launch one. There was no likelihood of US naval forces in the area, and his fleet could protect itself against the Panama fighters. The search-planes from the cruisers
Tone
and
Chikuma
had been out on patrol to the east and south since 06.30, and had found nothing but empty ocean. The sky was still clear. At 08.15 Nagumo ordered the second strike-force into the air.

Unknown to the Japanese theirs were not the only planes hurtling down a carrier’s flight deck. At around 08.25
Ranger
was launching its fighter- and torpedo-bombers from a point five miles off Colon in the Atlantic Ocean. They flew across the isthmus, passing on their left the fire and smoke left by Fuchida’s raid, and ventured out into the Gulf of Panama.

At around the same moment Admiral Fletcher was listening to the clanking of the
Saratoga
lift as it brought the armed planes up from the hangar deck. The distance between his task force and the Japanese was rapidly closing. Fletcher offered a silent prayer of thanks for the blanket of cloud which seemed to be accompanying his eastward passage.

From the viewpoint of the
Akagi
bridge these clouds were still no more than a line across the western horizon, and Nagumo and Kusaka were pre-occupied with watching the recovery of Fuchida’s returning planes. Soon after 09.30 Kusaka went down to talk with Fuchida himself, leaving Nagumo to fret on his own. The Admiral noticed the clouds on the horizon. They were coming nearer. Could the Tone search-plane have missed something out there to the west?

‘What could it have missed?’ asked the sarcastic Kusaka on his return. ‘A fleet of American carriers? All but one were sunk at Midway! And if that one is out there, we shall have no trouble in destroying it.’

The logic seemed sound to Nagumo, but before he had time to ponder the question further some disquieting news came in. A flight of approaching bombers was reported by the northernmost Japanese destroyers. As the Zero patrols above the fleet sped north to intercept this menace, Nagumo and Kusaka asked each other where it had come from. It could only be the mainland. But what were carrier planes, Dauntlesses and Devastators, doing in Panama? Could that one carrier be in the area?

For the next ten minutes the two Admirals considered this question, as the flak and the Zeroes dealt with
Ranger
’s planes. No great damage was suffered; only
Soryu
was hit by a bomb and the resultant fire was easily extinguished.

Nagumo’s problems were not yet over, however, for now he received news from Tomonaga. The second strike on Panama had been as unfortunate as the first. The American air defences were still unbroken, the lock-gates were still unbreached, and there was need for a third strike.

Nagumo now found it difficult to take a decision. There were too many imponderables. Kusaka tried to assist him. The first strike should be ordered back on to the flight deck, he urged. If there was an American carrier in the area - which he doubted - then Fuchida’s planes could be sent to destroy it. If not then a third strike could be launched against the Canal.
Kido Butai
had not come 9000 miles to be baulked by a pair of lock-gates.

Kusaka’s confidence restored Nagumo’s. He agreed with his Chief of Staff. Unfortunately their conversation had taken ten minutes, and they would prove the most important ten minutes in
Kido Butai’s
glorious but short career.

Wasp
and
Saratoga
had launched their planes soon after 09.00. Fletcher had learnt something from the Midway battle, and he had sent the slower torpedo-bombers off ahead. They would pull the fighter defences down to the surface, and so maximise the chances of the dive-bombers.

Fletcher knew he was outnumbered two to one in carriers and planes, but he also knew that he had surprise on his side. And this time there was none, of that false confidence which had preceded Midway; the crews knew what they had to do, knew that it was going to be extremely hard, and that they were going to do it anyway.

By 10.55 the flights decks of the four Japanese carriers were almost full of planes loaded with high explosives. At that moment a fresh flight of enemy aircraft was sighted moving in from the west. This time there were more of them. Where were all these planes coming from? A chill of desperate uncertainty passed through the minds of the Japanese sailors.

The American torpedo-planes bored in towards the Japanese carriers, through the vicious flak and the marauding Zeroes. One by one they went down, eliciting murmurs from Nagumo in praise of their reckless gallantry. ‘The Americans must be feeling desperate today,’ muttered the more prosaic Kusaka. Nagumo did not answer. Perhaps a dumb foreboding was growing in his consciousness. The torpedo-bombers had at least scattered his fleet, and the Zeroes had all been pulled down close to the water. Nagumo looked up, in time to catch the first glimpse of the American dive-bombers dropping out of the sun. Nemesis had arrived. It was 11.10.

The 500 and 800-pound bombs lanced into the flight decks of all four carriers, tearing huge holes and starting blazing fires. The fuel and explosives in the densely-packed planes ignited. The Japanese firefighting teams were unable to contain the spreading flames. Burnt men lay screaming in agony amidst the charred corpses of their comrades.

Some of the bombs had passed clean through the flight decks to explode on the hangar decks below. These triggered off more multiple explosions as the fires spread to the bomb and torpedo racks. Fuel lines ignited, sending rivulets of flame washing across the decks of the listing carriers.

None of them had been hit by torpedoes, and none were damaged below the water-line, but only
Shokaku
’s engines and rudder were still working at 14.00, and only she would still be tenuously afloat at the end of the day. The still-burning hulk of this famous carrier would be sunk by its own destroyer escort on the following morning.

Nagumo and Kusaka had abandoned the stricken
Akagi
within thirty minutes of the attack. From the bridge of the battleship
Kirishima
they watched the carriers of
Kido Butai
burn. Pearl Harbor, Ceylon, Midway, California - it had been a glorious morning. But now it was past noon, and the sun was commencing its downward turn. The Rising Sun would rise no more.

It may be a fire, tomorrow it will be ashes.
Arab proverb

And we shall save Jerusalem
From Rommel’s grubby German hands.
Eighth Army ditty, September 1942

I

Through the last week of July and the first fortnight of August Field-Marshal Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been moving south across the four hundred miles of open country between the Don and the Caucasus Mountains. Eleventh Army had crossed the Kerch Strait into the Kuban and was fighting its way down the Black Sea coast. On its left flank the stronger Seventeenth Army was marching in the wake of Kleist’s panzers towards the northern end of the mountain highway that led across to Sukhumi. In the centre, astride the main road and rail communications, First and Second Panzer Armies pushed south towards the Georgian Military Highway and the Caspian littoral respectively.

The distances involved were immense, supply a continuous problem, but the German advance was living on its own momentum. Across the dry steppe, through fields of waving corn and man-high sunflowers, towards the distant cloud above snow-capped Mount Elbruz, the German tide flowed forward, leaving its customary trail of burning villages, rotting corpses, and vehicles which had finally succumbed to one bad road too many.

The German High Command had estimated that there were twenty Russian divisions in the Caucasus, but so far they had seen little to substantiate such a figure. Small groups of Red Army soldiers and tanks hindered the panzer spearheads at all the difficult river-crossings, but melted away into the south once the Germans had secured bridgeheads on the southern banks. In Lotzen it was thought that the Red Army would make its stand at the entrance to the mountain passes; until then the problems were all logistic ones - water, vehicle maintenance, the ever-recurrent shortages of fuel.

The last-named had not been alleviated by the capture of the Maikop and Grozny oilfields, on 2 and 12 August respectively. Both had been put out of action by the retreating Red Army. The oil storage tanks had been destroyed and all vital plant equipment removed. It would be several months before any of the precious black fluid could be brought to the surface, always assuming that the German supply network could stand the additional burden of moving the necessary equipment.

This was well appreciated in Kuybyshev, and preparations were already being made for the destruction of the Baku fields. If, as was now feared, the Red Army failed to hold the line of the mountains, the Germans would find no functional oil-wells on the other side.

The Caucasus was only one of three fronts on which the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. The Japanese attack in the Far East, though no surprise, had been thoroughly depressing. The relative ease with which Rokossovsky had thrown back the invaders in the Mongolian border region was encouraging, but the closing of Vladivostok, at a time when the volume of American aid coming in through the port was rising steeply, was a hard blow. And successful or not, the war in the Far East was now tying down twenty Red Army divisions.

These could well have been used on the third crucial front, forty miles south of Vologda. Since the final fall of Yaroslavl in mid-July 3rd Panzer and Sixteenth Army had been trying to reach the important railway junction. The strong Red Army positions on the Danilov ridge had been successfully stormed on 24-25 July, but little further progress had been made in the weeks following. This front was now acting as a magnet to the German and Soviet High Commands; both were throwing in reserves they could ill afford, raising the stakes without changing the ratio of forces.

It was not yet apparent, but the dangerous game in progress south of Vologda was more dangerous to the Germans. The bulk of the panzer force was now tied up either here or in the distant Caucasus, leaving the long line from Gorkiy to Stalingrad manned almost exclusively by infantry formations. This was only safe as long as the Red Army had no armoured reserve.

It was building one. Soviet industry, after all the problems involved in the vast removal programme, was at last getting back into its stride. New tanks and planes were starting to pour steadily off the Ural and Siberian assembly lines. In Kuybyshev this was felt to be a trump card. Regardless of the likely fall of the Caucasus this card would be there to play. As long as Hoth could be held south of Vologda for another two or three months, then the long winter nights would see a resumption of the Arctic convoys and the alleviation of the most worrying shortages. And then, perhaps, advantage could be taken of that long thin German line stretching from Gorkiy to the south.

In the Wolfsschanze such eventualities were not under consideration. Victory was still taken for granted. Certainly Halder was getting worried, and Hitler was getting more than annoyed, at the time it was taking to accomplish this inevitable victory. By mid-August Vologda was proving more than an irritation or a nuisance, it was a symbol of German frustration.