The pilot requested permission to take off. It was Admiral Turner’s voice that granted it. And then he added, “We’ll do what we can to hold ’em off, Cobb. Give Pratt my regards.”
Cobb learned much later how well they did.
The effects of the atomic blast had not been as severe as expected. Saratoga’s Hawkeyes had done their job. They intercepted the Backfires before launching. An acceptable number of Soviet aircraft had gone down.
But there were fighters joining up with the Russian bombers, and the Hawkeyes took a beating after that. The assumption the Soviet submarines might take over control of the cruise missiles on their final run was correct. When they surfaced to do so, Turner’s helos and antisubmarine ships went after them. That accounted for the accuracy of another batch of missiles. But a number continued toward their target.
The ships undertook countermeasures, using everything they could to decoy the incoming missiles. That accounted for another batch. Sea Sparrow missiles accurately brought down more. But there were more than a dozen that survived all phases of the battle group’s defense.
Saratoga was actually the first ship to be hit. A missile impacted aft of the island on the starboard side, just below the elevator. Fires ignited on the hangar deck. A second missile hit just below the angled flight deck on the port side. A large section of deck ruptured. More fires erupted. The third missile penetrated the hull plating, detonating in the after engine room. The watch there died almost instantly, either from the blast or from escaping high-pressure steam. Saratoga was now operating on three shafts.
As the carrier was fighting her own battle, other ships in the group also came under fire. The frigate Gallery disappeared in a belch of flame as a missile exploded in her torpedo storage. A surviving captain of one of the nearby ships reported that within sixty seconds almost nothing remained of the little ship.
The stern of Deyo disappeared to the waterline.
The bridge of Macdonough was cleared by a direct hit. When her executive officer took command, he was told that the blast took out the bridge, the combat information center, and three decks below, and that the fires were out of control. Three minutes later the torpedoes in the ASROC launcher blew, and he watched the forward third of the ship drift away.
According to the computers, the first Soviet launch had been more effective than projected — perhaps even by them. It had never been considered that they would take advantage of the effect of a high-altitude nuclear blast. The computers also said that an aircraft carrier should be able to survive at least four cruise missile hits. Saratoga was trying to survive three. Fires in her hangar threatened fuel and ammunition. The angled deck was useless, as was the elevator that had been hit. There was no chance of getting the after engine room back on line. She could likely float after more than three direct hits, but was it worthwhile?
On the bridge, Admiral Turner explained to Saratoga’s commanding officer that Soviet doctrine called for a second, equally devastating launch.
ABOARD U.S.S. YORKTOWN
The initial assault on Saratoga and her battle group was taking place even as the commanding officers of Pratt’s battle group were meeting aboard Yorktown about four hundred miles to the west to make final plans for their defense. The radical nature of the attack — the creation of an electromagnetic pulse — had not been expected by most of those men. Only Carleton and Nelson were unsurprised; one of Pratt’s original projections had been based on the Soviet fleet attacking before ground forces moved into Germany. It was based on the persisting Russian concept that NATO forces in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean would have to be neutralized. If they were not, then NATO ground forces in Europe could be reinforced, control of the air could not be guaranteed, and a prolonged ground war would likely mean acceleration to the nuclear level.
The Russian hierarchy would accept nuclear war only if it was to combat a last-ditch NATO nuclear effort. Once the Russians thought the flow of battle in Europe was to their advantage, they would call for peace talks as their divisions swept across Central Europe to the Atlantic coast. By the time a cease-fire would actually be effected, NATO would no longer be a threat.
“They’re ahead of schedule,” Nelson whispered to Carleton. “Probably want their General Keradin — dead or alive. But I never expected they’d go for the nuclear stuff this early.”
One of the other COs stood up to ask Pratt’s staff man a question. “Just what does this EMP thing mean now from a strategic aspect? I mean we all know what it does technically, but they weren’t expected to go for anything like that this early. Does this mean they’ll set one off over us too?”
“They don’t have to set off another right away,” came the answer. “All of us use the same satellites, whether it’s Saratoga or Kennedy or NATO headquarters.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Washington anticipated something like this could happen, and they’ve got some more recon satellites perched at Vandenburg right now. For all we know, they may already have launched. On the other hand, the Russians also launched some maneuverable killer satellites yesterday. We send one up; they go after it. If they can’t catch up to ours, they launch another ASAT; we send up our F-15s to fire antisatellite missiles at their antisatellite satellites…” He shrugged again, to Nelson’s amusement. “What we do is we go back to doing the same thing we did at Okinawa forty years ago — radar pickets. This time it’s Hawkeye aircraft and guided-missile frigates, and they’re facing the same threat — a cruise missile is just like a kamikaze.”
Another staff officer appeared in the back of the briefing room, whirling a finger in the air to indicate “speed it up.” It would be hours before their own group was attacked, but Pratt’s plan was to disperse the formation even farther in case of nuclear attack. Pratt then intended to launch his own attack.
He had asked Wendell Nelson to impress the role of submarines on both Tactical Action Officers and captains. Military use of the waters beneath the surface had changed radically since World War Two, the last time subs had proved their worth under actual wartime conditions. In those days, a submarine was actually an air-breathing creature, able to submerge only for short periods of time. Now they were truly submersibles, capable of navigating the strange subsurface world for extended periods. A true silent service, they traded in stealth and surprise. Their preferred environment was the open ocean. Effectiveness within the straits and narrows of the Mediterranean depended completely on their individual performance. Because subs from both sides were forced to pass through straits to gain access to the Med, the initial element for achieving success was to sever contact with the inevitable shadows that tracked them. The submarines would present a challenge when the confusion of combat released them.
The reaction of the COs to Wendell Nelson was markedly different than the previous day. He was no longer an upstart — he was accepted as a full four-stripe captain in the forefront of radical antisubmarine tactics, and the traditional white attitude had become colorblind in the face of the Soviet threat. When they left, each commanding officer had access to antisubmarine tactics never before used. They felt they now had an even chance against Soviet numbers.