Keynes' Cruisers

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    • fester

    March 5, 1941 Saint-Nazaire, France

    He approached the port like a petty thief in the night. Stealthily his engines hummed, boilers heated by the reserves held for the journey to safety. Lookouts were alert. Their eyes scanned the waters in front of them and the skies above them. Three minesweepers and a patrol boat led the seventeen thousand ton raider along the swept channel. A single RAF mine had been cleared already. Rifle file had produced a deafening orange ball of light and a spray of water that drenched the exposed men on the light escort’s bridge.

    Admiral Hipper was home. Or at least he was back to safety. There was no word on how he could make it to Kiel. There was no word on whether or not he would move to Brest or any other Biscayan port. He needed rest. He needed repairs, He needed time to celebrate his victories. The raid was a success. HMS Argus was the most notable kill but thirteen other ships went under the waves while he was at sea. Every convoy was now heavily escorted, tying up critical warships that could have been demolishing the trickle of supply convoys running from Naples to Tripoli. Royal Navy battleships were quartering the ocean and seeing nothing as Hipper and his bigger brothers prowled the waves.

    An hour later, the cruiser was tied up and the first sailors were ashore for the first time in months. Mail bags were dropped off, and arrangements to secure prisoners were being made. Letters with crew rosters were sent to the International Red Cross as men who had been missing and presumed lost were now found and bound for camps in Germany. Officers made arrangements to repair and refuel the ship. He took almost no combat damage, a few light shells had scarred his skin but the wear and weariness of steaming had taken its toll. French dockyard workers under the eyes and direction of supervising German engineers would be needed to restore Hipper to his fullest strength.
     
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    • fester


    March 6, 1941 1002 South of Crete

    Three liners were being covered by most of the Mediterranean Fleet as they all pushed north at eighteen knots. Cruisers and destroyers could be seen by the men of the 19th Australian Brigade who were smoking on deck or walking around. They had fought hard throughout the desert campaign and now their reward for being veterans was a month’s rest to recover, repair and integrate replacements into the ranks and then a ride to another foreign country to fight the Germans. Sharp eyed soldiers could look up and see, if they squinted hard enough, four Fleet Air Arm fighters lazily circling between the clouds north and west of the convoy.

    This was the second convoy to leave Alexandria full of troops. Equipment had already started to be shipped north. Enough American made tanks had already been landed in Athens to equip an independent tank brigade along the Salonika line where their fathers and uncles had died a generation before. Now men were moving north to meet with their equipment to fight the Germans and the Italians again. The veterans were confident to face the Italians, they folded under determined attacks and plentiful artillery. They had not yet seen the Germans and their reputation was stronger and fiercer.
     
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    • Unknown

    As I've said before, even if Greece falls (and it will be bloodier for the Germans than OTL), I don't see Crete falling to the Germans as OTL...

    Interesting...
     
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    • fester

    March 7, 1941 1743 southwest of Brest, France

    Seventy thousand tons of warships passed the Ile de Sein. They had been at sea for three months with little to show. A single small Canada bound convoy had been jumped. Eleven ships were sunk in an afternoon before a Coastal Command Liberator spotted them. The week after their position was reported was a week of searching for storms and steaming at high speed. Radio intercepts showed that Home Fleet was trying to corral the two powerful raiders into an ever more narrow box of the sea. They escaped without further detection. Post war records would show that Prince of Wales and Furious were, at one point, ninety four miles away but those hunters were steaming through twenty eight foot seas.

    Escorts were draped around the two light battleships like a string of pearls on a mistress's neck, languid, long and looping. It did not matter. HMS L26 had hovered on the bottom for most of the day. The thirty seven men aboard were still and silent. Stillness to save their breath and preserve the lingering freshness of the air. Silent to stay alive. The young skipper listened to his hydrophone team’s report once more and glanced at the map. This was only the seventh time he had looked at the chart in the past twenty minutes. The tanks expelled some water and the boat came to periscope depth. One more glance at the chart and the skipper ordered the periscope to rise and poke through the surface.

    Scharnhorst was less than a mile away. His brother, Gneisenau, was half a mile further away. They were lazily zig-zagging as they counted on the defensive minefields and local escorts to keep any submarines away. That assumption was wrong.

    Four torpedoes left their tubes within a minute. The twenty one inch missiles screamed through the gray water. A sharp lookout who had been dreaming of his wife’s welcome noticed the tracks seven hundred yards away from the ship. The captain ordered increased speed and a turn towards the open ocean. The sharp reaction was almost enough. Three torpedoes passed astern. One exploded in the wake. A single torpedo detonated along the torpedo defense system. The first set of voids filled rapidly, and some water went through a trio of slashes in the armored bulkhead.

    Within fifteen minutes, three escorts were shepherding the damaged and slightly listing battle cruiser to Brest while the rest of the escort was hunting for the interloper without success.

    By midnight, the submarine had slunked away, thinking it had crippled the mighty battle cruiser. The dry docks at the arsenal were ready to receive the wounded but still capable warrior for months of repair.
     
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    • fester

    Unknown said:
    As I've said before, even if Greece falls (and it will be bloodier for the Germans than OTL), I don't see Crete falling to the Germans as OTL...

    Interesting...
    Click to expand...
    Right now the reinforcements to Greece are within 99% of OTL. Maybe the unit order is slightly different (I am not doing that level of research for this campaign) but the fundamental problem for mainland Greece will be constant.

    Now Crete.......
     
    Story 0507
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    • fester

    March 8, 1941 0500 HMS Pembroke

    The barrack's bell rang and a hundred young men were scrambling out of their racks and assembling before their instructors could send them for careless additional physical training. Today was the last day of the training. Tomorrow, Robert Smith would be an ordinary seaman and ready to be slightly higher on the scale of life than bottom clinging whale dung. He adjusted his uniform shirt so he was neat and proper and prepared for inspection. The seventeen year old boy had tried to join the Royal Air Force but they saw that he was under-aged. The Army would have taken him. They had taken enough of his classmates, but Robert had sworn to himself that he would not dig any more in his life after spending almost the entirety of the previous summer digging along the general stop line near Dover. The invasion never came. The line was still being manned by the old men of the Home Guard but the positions were a waste of time. Instead he had signed up for the Navy a few weeks before the Christmas break. They did not care about his age, there were enough young men signing up in droves that he was just one of a crowd. Conscription would have taken him soon enough so having some choice to join the navy instead of the army was all he cared about.

    By midnight, he was exhausted. Today they marched, today, they prepared for their next destination. He would be heading to damage control training with a half dozen members of his class. Most of the soon to be sailors were ordered to join ships that were readying to rejoin the fleet after spending time in the yards or to new construction that still had not worked out. A few men had been selected out for ASDIC training. They were the ones who could sing. He did not care. He was too tired to care. One more day, and basic training would be done. That was all he thought about as his eyes closed for the night.
     
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    • David Flin

    David Flin

    Gone Fishin'
    Paulo the Limey said:
    So this piqued my interest, although I'm at a loss to say whether this is supposed to be taken literally or not.
    Click to expand...

    The logic might be, he said, taking a wild guess, is that singers tend to be more likely to have perfect pitch (and be generally better at it), thus enabling them to better detect differences in the Pings.
     

    Paulo the Limey

    David Flin said:
    The logic might be, he said, taking a wild guess, is that singers tend to be more likely to have perfect pitch (and be generally better at it), thus enabling them to better detect differences in the Pings.
    Click to expand...
    I was thinking along those lines, but thought back in WW2 a lot of ASDIC work was done on paper traces.
     

    fester

    Paulo the Limey said:
    So this piqued my interest, although I'm at a loss to say whether this is supposed to be taken literally or not.
    Click to expand...
    Coincidental. The men who tended to screen well for hydrophone duties also tended to have a well developed musical ear. Not all singers have that ear and not all good hydrophone operators can sing well but the odds of being both reasonably musically competent and a decent trainee for ASW sensor is higher than random correlation
     
    Story 0508
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    • fester


    March 8, 1941 0700 South of Qaminis, Libya

    Every man clinched the ground inches in front of their face. The Italian artillery had commenced a rolling bombardment minutes ago. Scouts had been clashing with German and Italian light armored patrols for weeks now. The Lancers and Hussars had conceded ground as they were not strong enough to hold against aggressive probes, they were strong enough to identify when a probe was an actual thrust versus purely information. The 2nd Armoured Division had created a solid line of outposts manned by the Support Group and the recently moved up Guards Brigade. The two armoured brigades were still being held in camps near Benghazi. An Indian infantry division as well as a Free French battalion were further east along the coastal road.

    The rifle men and Bren gun teams waited. They knew an attack was coming. The Italian artillery preparation would not be a feint and it was too heavy for harassment fire. As the shells burst to the rear of the forward position, enterprising subalterns and sergeants raised their heads and looked. Some looked to their front first, some looked to their left and their right. Some saw wraiths advancing in the swirling dust. Others saw their men trying to find their courage to expose their eyes and their lives to artillery again. A few were smart and active enough to call for their own artillery to shift from firing at map coordinates of likely assembly points towards actual threats.

    A dozen tanks also advanced through the dust. They were trying to curl around the inland flank of the position. Anti-tank guns were being moved quickly to counter this threat.

    A Bren gun opened up at a cluster of Italian infantrymen who had broken cover early. Two men crumpled over but soon a mortar section began to search for the Bren team. By mid-afternoon, the entire position was engulfed in sharp, short conflicts as the Italian infantry had locked the British infantry into combat.

    By the early evening, the 2nd Armoured Division’s tanks had started to move forward as RAF fighter and light bombers were screaming that a German Panzer force was trying to swing wide of the entire battle. The Valentines and Matilda's stopped and then headed inland towards the German column.

    By midnight, both armoured columns had been mauled to mutual ineffectiveness. German tanks were more vulnerable to the heavily armored infantry tanks and their two pounder guns while anti-tank guns claimed more than their fair share of cruiser tanks that rushed forward to chase feinted retreats. No one controlled the land between the armies. The division had not been pushed back substantially. Stretcher teams and patrols bumped into each other as they searched for their friends, their comrades and their enemies. Scottish, English, Indian, Australian teams brought Germans and Italians to the rear while Bavarians and Lombards brought badly burnt yeoman to field stations. Artillery sparked short duels whenever obvious concentrations were seen but the pace of the battle had slowed, the veterans and the soon to be veterans on both sides of the field could feel the blow had been delivered and absorbed.
     
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    March 9, 1941 0418 RAF Nutts Corner
    The first bomber of the morning took off. Two more bombers were in queue. Those two were twin engine light bombers whose ability to survive in combat had led them to be shunted off to Coastal Command where they just had to worry about the weather and the light cannons that could be found on the occasional U-boat.

    The four engine, American built, bomber lumbered down the runway. She could have carried a crew of ten for a mission over the Continent but only five men were in the airplane. The Scottish depot made the aircraft look odd. A bomb bay was sealed. A blister for a quad 20 millimeter cannon cluster was added. The ASV radar had been installed along the top of the fuselage behind the wings.

    She carried four depth charges and an additional bladder of fuel in the single functional bomb bay. Her mission was to circle a convoy of forty eight inbound ships from Halifax. The slow convoy had already fought through a small U-boat wolf pack and lost three ships to the sea wolves while the escorts claimed a single kill. As the merchant ships approached British home waters, the danger would increase for another day before dropping. Until last week, no maritime patrol aircraft could reach the convoys. A Liberator had escorted a fast convoy out to about the same point on the previous Tuesday without too much difficulty.

    The large bomber’s wheels cleared the runway with plenty of room to spare. Two more of her compatriots were on the flight line and scheduled for the day. Within minutes, the pilot began to concentrate on keeping his large, ungainly aircraft on the leanest and most efficient fuel mixture possible as they had 900 miles to go before they could look for the convoy. The Welsh pilot looked to his right for a moment and saw the American co-pilot alertly watching the engine RPM gauges. The American was both an observer and a trainer for the new bomber. He had three more flights before the American was off of his crew.

    330px-American_Aircraft_in_Royal_Air_Force_Service_1939-1945-_Consolidated_Model_32_Liberator._ATP9767C.jpg


    image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Liberator_I
     
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    • Oldbill

    fester said:
    The Scottish depot made the aircraft look odd as a bomb bay was sealed, a blister for 20 millimeter cannon cluster was added, and the ASV radar had been installed along the top of the fuselage behind the wings
    Click to expand...

    Oddly phrased. You may wish to rewrite the sentence to something like "The work done by the Scottish depot had made the aircraft look odd. They had sealed a bomb bay added a blister for a cluster of 20mm cannon and installed an ASV radar along the top of the fuselage along the wings."
     
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