Keynes Cruisers

[fester]

February 1, 1940 near Summa Finland

Two, three, four shells landed within yards of the barely occupied forward trenches every second. The light field guns were firing impact fused shells while the 122mm and 152mm heavy guns as well as the specialized siege mortars had delayed fuses on their shells so that they could dig out the deeply burrowing infantrymen. Every gun in a Soviet Corps was firing in concentration against a kilometer of the Finish defenses that held back the Red tide from Viiprui.

There was no counter battery fire. Finnish 152mm and 155mm long guns were available but firing just invited a cavalcade of counter-counter battery fire. The Red Air Force had hundreds of aircraft over the battlefield including dozens of spotters and observation planes who would radio in targets of opportunity to the reserve artillery battalions. This was the seventh day of the preparation. Fire strikes would last for an hour and then silence except for the screaming of the wounded and the rumbling of Soviet assault tanks moving one tree line away from the front lines, immune to anything besides bad ground and bad luck.

Tactical genius and ferocious individual ability and willingness to fight mattered little on the fortified line. Steel and explosives against flesh and concrete reduced war to a simple numbers game that gave little solace to the steady stream of wounded and dead men who were brought to the rear. This was the war the Russians would win as they had more of everything.

 

[fester]

February 1, 1940 Western Approaches

C is for Charlie, a Sunderland flying boat continued its patrol fifteen miles in front of a convoy carrying grain, minerals and ore from South America to Bristol. Four sets of eyes scanned the sea looking for the telltale feathers of a periscope poking out from the protection of the twelve foot waves. They saw nothing. U-41 glided silently and invisibly eighty feet beneath the surface. Her sonar operators had heard the convoy but the heavy air activity meant a high speed surface run to intercept was tantamount to suicide. The twenty nine year old skipper decided to head north a bit to see if he could dodge the air patrols there.

 

[fester]

February 1, 1940 Durban South Africa

The ant like yard dogs scrambled around the damaged heavy cruiser. HMS Shropshire was up on blocks in the Admiralty’s drydock and had been like that for two months already. The initial plans had her being released for duty in April but the arrival of a recently reactivated from reserve cruiser from Liverpool changed the plans. A pair of new radars were to be added. A general purpose air search radar and a shorter range surface search radar had been sent south. As long as she was already in the yard, it seemed like a good time to build a new mast and rip out some space in the superstructure for a radar room. A dozen fresh from school sailors and a recently re-activated reserve lieutenant would be responsible for the contraptions. Shropshire would return to the sea by early May.

 

[fester]

February 2, 1940 Oslo, Norway

The naval attaché pulled his coat up. He had received a note from an old friend in the Norwegian Ministry of Defense earlier that morning. The note invited him for a drink at a dank, dark bar along the waterfront after dinner. A catchphrase indicated the meeting was urgent, so he showed up and took a table in the back corner where his eyes could scan both the front and back door. He ordered a beer from a waitress in her late fifties who had seen everything and knew when to remember nothing.

He glanced around the bar. Most of the clientele were obviously merchant sailors, mostly Norwegians manning Norwegian flagged ships but one table had some Americans, another had four Swedes relaxing. A few regulars who seldom saw daylight were propped at the bar, drinking themselves into oblivion. In the back corner and then across the room at the table closest to the door were two pairs of men. Each pair was attempting to be casually engaged in an in-depth conversation about the critical optimization problem of where the women with the lowest virtue lived but they failed in casual. The corner of an eye always focused on a door while glances were not quite surreptitiously made at his table every minute or so.

Twenty minutes and one beer later, his friend arrived. He greeted the first pair of watchers with unnatural bonhomie and they exchanged words quickly. Six feet and four inches of solid confidence strode over to the attaché's table and as he arrived, he grabbed the diplomat's hand and pulled him into a bear hug.

“Good to see you, our wives need to talk soon”

They both sat and commenced with their small talk about inconsequential things for a while. Small talk with an old friend over good beer was always a good use of an evening. But there had to be a reason why the meeting was set up so suddenly and at an out of the way location.

“Ja, Ja, how are your cousins from America doing? It has been a long time since I’ve seen them…”

The attaché took a long draught from his mug as his brain processed. He had no American cousins but the meaning of the message clicked.

“They’re well, a few of them just arrived to visit our grandmother as her health is not well. Will was always her favorite son, so his children are here to see her one last time. I’m not sure what their plans are after next week. I’ll write to them to find out.”

“You should. My cousin Jorgen just opened a hotel in Narvik, he could set them up with a good deal if they would promote his place in America. Tourists are always appreciated in Norway. Knut could accommodate them in Trondheim if they want to make a coastal tour.”

“I think they would be interested, I’ll get back to you as soon as I hear from them. They are hardy, adventurous souls so the Norwegian winter should not scare them.

Fifteen minutes later, the attaché paid for their beers and walked back to the embassy.
Twenty minutes after he arrived, two street thugs who had been retained by German intelligence to follow the British officer made it to the hospital. A fight had broken out an hour earlier between the brothers and five sailors who thought they were about to be robbed. One’s leg was broken and the other’s skull had been fractured. Oslo was going downhill, even the low lives could not walk the streets safely at night anymore.

 

[fester]

February 3, 1940 near Inverness, Scotland

Another boring morning, clearing mines in the Moray Firth. A division of minesweepers were deployed in a line, one hundred yards apart, re-clearing a previously swept channel. HMS Boreas had already found one mine, most likely dropped by a routine raid of He-111 bombers. As the sun rose, an air raid warning was called out. Fleet Air Arm Gladiators were scrambling to protect the Scottish coast, but they could not gain altitude soon enough. Half a dozen low level, twin engine German bombers swept down the Firth, hunting for prey that could not scurry out of the way. The lead pilot saw the minesweepers and wiggled his wings. His squadron mates tightened the formation and bombardiers adjusted their sights.

Black flowers burst in the sky as the minesweepers put out a barrage of anti-aircraft fire. The first salvo was off by hundreds of yards and the following salvoes were not much better as the bombers increased speed and tightened their formation even more. Bomb bay doors opened as machine gun fire stitched the air angrily.

Large splashes drenched every exposed man. Each man on the five little ships looked around. Four ships were wet, but unharmed. HMS Sphinx was not so lucky. A single 500 pound bomb penetrated the deck and exploded in the engine room. The captain and half a dozen men died instantly. By the end of the day, the minesweeper was abandoned, half her crew dead and the other half rescued. HMS Boreas finished her with gunfire.

 

[fester]

February 4, 1940 Strasburg

She was going to hell. She knew that and she accepted that. The doctor had charged her two months of her pay as a dairy maid for the ten minutes that he spent scraping her uterus. There was a little blood, just a bit worse than a heavy period and not a whole lot of pain.

Anne Marie’s mamere had pulled her aside a week ago. She had not been fooled but she was fairly certain that her husband was not paying enough attention to his daughter’s regular morning illness. She knew a doctor who would take care of problems that good girls occasionally had. He was a damn Communist, but he asked no questions and as far as the matron knew, he treated his patients well and few complications emerged. Last night, Mamere and Anna Marie decided that they needed to go to Strausburg to get some fabric for new dresses and visit her favorite aunt. The train ride was short but slow as the coal allocation had been held back for the steel mills so it could never reach full speed.

An hour later, Anne Marie left the doctor’s office with her hand held by her mother. As they walked down the street towards the shopping district, the little girl who was trying so hard to be grown out fought to come out and cry. Her mother saw this, squeezed her hand and whispered to her daughter “Moncherie,my love, you were born only six months after your father and I married. As long as your father does not know, all will be well.”

The two women walked down the street, the mother holding her child's hand like she had for thousands of days. They needed to get some pretty fabric for a pretty girl to make a pretty dress.

 

[fester]

February 4, 1940 The Clyde

The last major troop convoy from Canada arrived. Five fast liners carrying 10,000 volunteers and some of their equipment had landed. The men were partially trained. After a day of sorting out, they would entrain for the Salisbury Plain for large unit training and mating up with equipment that was still on order. Hopefully the Canadians would be ready to deploy to France in August.

 

[fester]

February 4, 1940 Selfridge Army Air Field, Michigan

The new Curtiss fighters for three squadrons were assembled on the ramp. New construction contracts had the base expanding. A new set of barracks and two large hangars were under construction. Another tower was being built for an auxiliary strip. The base movie theatre had been taken over as a briefing room and movies moved to the basketball court.

Eighty P-40s were on the flight line. Pilots were flying almost every day when weather allowed it as a squadron was getting ready to move to the Philippines with twenty four P-40B pursuit planes. The last of the P-36s had been shipped to other units that were starting to stand up. More importantly a pair of French officers had visited the base for a week to discuss their early experiences with the Hawks in combat. Those discussions were held in between recruiting pitches for a private military venture for China.

 

[fester]

February 5, 1940 Western Approaches

HMS Antelope’s crew prepared another pattern of depth charges. The first pattern on this attack run were set to go off in seconds. The ASDIC operators thought they had a solid fix on the enemy submarine who had already sunk two of the merchant ships that Antelope was tasked to protect.

Whump, whump.

The depth charges exploded as they passed through 100 feet. One of the charges went off six feet from the hull of U-41. A hole three feet wide opened as the hull plating buckled by the explosive shock. He flooded within a minute. His crew struggled to escape with no success, the black water freezing and then drowning everyone as the dead ship leaked oil and debris and plunged thousands of feet to the floor.

 

[fester]

February 6, 1940 Narvik Norway

The merchant ship SS Heddernheim left Narvik with five thousand tons of high quality Swedish iron ore. Her captain would seldom take her out of sight of land, counting on bad weather, low clouds, and Norwegian neutrality to protect her during her voyage down the Norwegian Leads from aggressive Royal Navy and Coastal Command patrols.

 

[fester]

February 7, 1940 Chateau de Montry, France

The staff left the room. Within minutes only the army commanders and Lord Gort of the British Expeditionary Force were still in the room. Marshal Gamelin had announced that he intended to fight a forward defense in Belgium rather than receive a German blow on French soil.

Divisions would need to be moved. The 7th Army would need to move from the general reserve to the far left wing of the Allied Front. Hundreds of details would need to be arranged. The army commanders talked to the commanders of their flanks as they processed the plan. The BEF would need time to get to the Dyle while the 1st Army counted on the Belgians to fortify the Gembloux Gap.

The armies of the Franco-German border had the more direct task. They were to hold firm and shield the heart of France from an instant killing blow. The interval divisions would fight the fight that they had been designed, trained and equipped to fight. The Maginot fortresses would channel invaders into kill zones where slow, deliberate defenses would leave the invaders vulnerable to methodical counterattacks. It was in the north where a great meeting engagement could occur if the Germans advanced through Belgium’s fortified border faster than anticipated.

Here was the concern.

 

[fester]

February 8, 1940 British Embassy Oslo

“I’m sending you back with the best performance report I could write, Buddy. You’ve been an excellent assistant taking care of everything that I needed you to handle even if I did not know that I needed you to do it. So please don’t take this the wrong way. I’ve arranged for you to get a posting on Exeter as the gunnery officer. The only thing you are not is an infantryman. As soon as your feet and mind get more than three hundred yards from a dock, you’re an adept amateur. I’ve requested and will be receiving a major from the Marines as my new aide”

Captain Boyes handed his assistant attaché, a young Royal Navy lieutenant a sifter of good Scotch, an Islay concoction. The decision to transfer him home and bring back a Royal Marine had not been an easy one. Johnson had shown great promise over the past year and he truly was performing excellent work. But unless the mountains were flooded high enough so that the Ark could float again, he was useless for what would be needed over the next few months. The ideal solution would have to bring over an additional Marine or an Army officer as an attaché but the Norwegians had politely informed all belligerent parties that any new diplomatic personnel would only be replacements for departing individuals. So to get a Marine meant losing a sailor.

The Navy would take care of Lt. Johnson. The fitness report was beyond glowing and Captain Boyes had sent out many a feelers among his colleagues to see who could use such an excellent young man. Captain Bell of Exeter had just lost his gunnery officer due to appendicitis. The Lords of the Admiralty worked in their mysterious ways to actually match a need to a want.

 

[fester]

February 9, 1940 Dawn Karelian Peninsula

Every man checked his rifle one last time. The machine gun crews made sure the ammunition belts were cleanly loading. The mortar men re-verified that their tubes were pointed at the preselected impact points and enough shells were ready. The assault that they had been waiting on was coming. Patrols had noted the forward stockpiling of enemy supplies. Signal intelligence had detected a surge of radio traffic and then ominous silence last night. A pair of Blenheim bombers had been able to take pictures of the lines. Two Soviet tank brigades were laagered in reserve, ready to exploit any breakthroughs.

Tea was made and short, hot breakfasts were served to the scarred and scared infantrymen who dared not raise their head above the lip of their trenches. The assault was coming. They knew it would not be a complicated defense. Soviet tanks would lead. Finnish anti-tank guns and mines would claim a fair number of them but not enough. The tanks would have riflemen clinging to their sides to protect them against Molotov cocktails and sticky grenades while artillery would take their toll. Thundering barrages would crash on the Finnish trenches, killing and wounding indiscriminately, the only protection to burrow deep underground, going blind until Red infantry could throw grenades into the dug-outs and then machine gun survivors as they attempted to come out. The seventy three steel reinforced concrete positions were the key strong points on the line.

The Soviets would focus on two or three bunkers, a narrow stretch of a kilometer and throw dozens of tanks to the pyre along with hundreds of men until they could overwhelm the local defense. Chinks in the line would then be the focal point of the divisions of reserves ready to pour forward.

The Finns in the trenches knew this. They clutched their rifles firmly and held onto their helmets as the Soviets began a preparatory barrage with over three thousand guns.

 

[fester]

February 10, 1940 near the Shetlands

The Norwegian tanker Albert L. Ellsworth forced her way through the waves of the stormy North Sea. She had left the sun of the Caribbean with a full hold of heavy oil and would soon land it at the refinery near Tonsberg. The crossing had been routine. Double watches had been maintained once the ship had come within 1,000 miles of Ireland but no submarines had been spotted. The large Norwegian flag flapping along her mast might provide some protection. The only exciting day was yesterday as she pulled thirty sailors aboard from another tanker that had been torpedoed.

Suddenly the ship shook. A loud bang was heard. Men cried out as water began seeping into the ship forward of the foremast. Ten seconds later, the ship buried itself into a deep wave. An orange/yellow explosion lit up the horizon. A torpedo exploded twenty feet in front of the plunging bow, it had left the water and re-entered, triggering the contact fuse.

The captain called for all non-critical engineering men to assemble with life jackets on deck. A radio message was sent out in the clear that a neutral ship was under attack and she was carrying cargo from one neutral nation to another. As the crew shivered on the wet deck, she poured on as much speed as she could and evaded a follow-up attack from U-50.

 

[fester]

February 10, 1940 Vigo Spain

Seven German ships were raising steam or allowing their diesel engines to warm up. The low moon would allow them to slip out into the broad Atlantic and run for home. Orizaba ‘s most valuable cargo was three hundred tons of wolfrum ore and three hundred tons of rubber. Fourteen hundred tons of aluminum and three thousand tons of nitrates filled the rest of her holds. Her purser had sold the consigned cargo for a decent loss in order to raise the cash for the purchases that he was sure would fetch a good price in Germany as the Vaterland was slowly being strangled by blockade again. Critical materials would be worth their weight in gold.

By midnight she was sixty miles from the port and on her way home.

 

[fester]

February 12, 1940 Bay of Biscay

The Armee d’Aire light bomber ducked and dodged the cloud banks. A steady stream of merchant ships were spotted but they usually were quick enough to flash the identification signals that they should have. A few were slower than they should have been, but they were obviously heading to French Atlantic ports. No submarines had been spotted, nor had any ships been torpedoed in the Bay in the past week. The pilot looked ahead and and saw a nasty wall of gray clouds, a shelf cloud forming and a squall tossing the water below like a child in the bathtub discovering displacement for the first time. He had almost reached the edge of his patrol zone, so he decided that safety was the better part of valor and turned his yoke to port and cut short his outbound leg.

 

[fester]

February 13, 1940 Chicago, Illinois

Oppressively wet, heavy snow blanketed campus again. Josh did not care. He was warm in bed with Marge. Their clothes were spread haphazardly on the floor as she crudely sipped from a bottle of cheap wine. Comfortable silence cocooned them, the silence of lovers who had nothing to say besides the immediate joy of touch, the fascination of discovery and the comfort of confidence. It was also the silence of the unknown as the past year had flown by suddenly and their circumstances were changing yet again.

Three more months of school and he would be done before he had to head off to even more school for the Navy. If he went Marines, he could go to flight school for fighters. The Navy still had not committed to flight school. They wanted to see one last set of grades before sending him to either submarine school or Pensacola. He was due to graduate a year early as he had overloaded with two extra classes every semester he had attended.

The Marines were desperate for pilots. Marines it would be. He made up his mind, as he decided that Marge would be his wife in three years after the Marines allowed for married pilots.

He smiled, turned his head and kissed the brilliant young woman whose only questionable decision was jumping into bed with him.

 

[fester]

February 15, 1940 off the coast of Southern Norway

SS Heddernheim had been delayed by bad weather on her journey from Narvik to Germany. She was skirting the edge of Norwegian territorial waters for the past three days, ducking between islands, shoals and rocks to give some protection against British blockaders while also chasing clouds and squalls to hide from the active Coastal Command patrols. The journey had been fairly monotonous.

It would have continued to be boring but a British mine that had been laid five miles outside of Norwegian waters broke free of its anchor chain. The current took her and three other freed mines towards the Leads. The three compatriots washed up on shore but this last mine laid by a destroyer in late January drifted along. Twenty five miles from its placement point, the mine bumped against Heddernheim's hull. Three horns were pressed and four hundred pounds of high explosives detonated, blowing a thirty five foot hole in her hull.

Ten sailors were killed almost instantly. The rest scrambled to contain the damage. The captain slowed the ship and made for the nearest piece of land, beaching his ship and allowing the rest of his crew to escape safely. Within an hour, a radio message had been transcribed at the Kreigsmarine headquarters. It appeared the British were getting aggressive in their actions against the critical Narvik trade.

 

[fester]

February 16, 1940 Camp Coëtquidan, Brittany France

Almost twenty thousand well armed and uniformed men stood ready for inspection. The emigres and new recruits had completed their basic physical training the day before and they were being honored for being ready to join their new units. Each men was uniformed, each rifleman had a MAS-36 rifle, and the artillery group had finally received their guns from America. They were lighter guns than a comparable French division would have as there was no howitzer regiment; instead an additional 75-mm gun regiment was added to the artillery group.

The commanding general and his staff were pleased with how the division was forming up. They were not ready for combat yet, but equipment was coming in almost on schedule, and the cadre that had escaped Poland after fighting the Germans were bringing the new recruits up to speed. Several senior officers were completing a staff monograph on the lessons of the Defensive War and how to fight the Germans that they would soon share with the rest of the Allies. The greatest lesson was flexibility was needed and not to be surprised when a German unit flanked a main position. Simple and obvious lessons, but important ones.

 

[fester]

February 17, 1940 Fortress Oscarburg

Obsert Erickson pulled his collar tight against his neck. The new orders he had received actually made sense. His command was primarily a training command for Norwegian coastal defense gunners but it was also the final defense for the capital. A cohort of almost four hundred gunners would be done with their classes over the next couple of months. Originally, they would all have been dispersed to the forward coastal defense batteries of other cities but the orders had changed. He was to keep seventy five men. Fifty men would directly reinforce the garrison. Twenty five men would be assistants to the instructors for the next cohort of recruits who were due to report to the fortress for initial training in the first week of April.