Marcks barked out a laugh and shook his head. “Well, that’s all very fine but it doesn’t solve our problem. We’re kicking off as soon as this storm is over. It’s clearing from the west which is apparently very significant for some reason or another. The engineers have been checking the ice. The lakes and rivers are frozen hard enough to take the strain of our lighter vehicles. The heavy traffic will have to thread its way through as best it can. That includes the artillery, both the towed stuff and our newly-acquired self-propelled guns. Can we be sure than Lang won’t get carried away and drive them into a lake or something?”
Both men sighed and inspected their brandies. As they had both suspected, the levels in the glasses were inadequate to permit deep contemplation. Asbach topped them up again.
“I don’t think we have much choice, Klaus. If we move him out, who gets the battery instead of him? His lieutenant has even less experience and nowhere near the same level of knowledge. I think we’re going to have to leave Lang in place and just watch him carefully.” Asbach thought for a second. “There is one possibility of course.”
“Do tell.”
“My part of the attack is pretty close to a raid. An armored infantry column going in to try and seize those big railway guns north of here. Preferably capture them. If that’s not possible, destroy them. We’ve built the raiding group out of the recon battalion; used its halftracks and reinforced its infantry component. It’s short on tank killing power though, its armored cars have only 75s or long 50mm guns, and artillery. Only, we now have some self-propelled artillery we can take along. So if we attach Lang and his self-propelled guns to that force, it does two things. Beefs up the raid to the point where we can do useful things and put Lang in a position where he’s both under a group of experienced officers and in a prime position to get some battle-lore of his own under his belt.”
“You’re happy to take such an inexperienced man along?”
“Happy is the wrong word, Klaus, but I think it’s the best solution.”
“Agreed. I’ll issue the orders. After we’ve finished supporting your family business.”
“Your ten o’clock Mister President. Senator Stuart Symington.” President Dewey’s secretary spoke quietly on the intercom.
“Thank you. Send him straight in please.” There were those whose services merited immediate access and those who deserved a long, long wait in the Presidential anteroom. Symington was one of the former.
“Senator. Pleased to see you. How goes work on the Air Material Production Subcommittee?”
“Thank you for seeing me so promptly, Mister President. It’s one aspect of our work I wish to see you about. Particularly one aircraft, the C-99. On the face of it, the aircraft appears to be a scandalous waste of resources. I wanted to discuss the matter with you before the subcommittee investigates the program. In case there is a reason behind this program that I and my committee are not aware of.”
“You have doubts about this aircraft Senator? If you could enlarge on them, perhaps I can set your mind at rest.”
“Sir, put at its most basic level, the aircraft seems to perform poorly and demand excessive amounts of support. It is slow. It flies at around 200mph. That makes it appear to be even slower than a C-47 and much slower than a C-54. It is restricted in altitude. My understanding is that it cruises at around 10,000 feet. We have reports that it can’t climb above bad weather, so it is often grounded. Worst of all, it uses six of the R-4360 engines that are in such short supply. The Navy is crying out for F2G Super-Corsairs and the Air Force desperately needs F-72 Thunderstorms to replace the old F-47s. Yet the production of both is restricted by the shortage of engines. If we cancel the C-99, we could free up engines for those aircraft.”
“Senator, put like that, you make a strong case. If I might show you some pictures, they might put a different light on the matter.” Dewey had been anticipating a problem like this and he had the files waiting in his office. Symington’s Air Material Production Subcommittee dealt mostly with the components for aircraft; engines, weapons, most recently radar and other electronic systems. His point had been a good one. It was just he didn’t, couldn’t, mustn’t know the whole picture. The President opened the file and handed some 10 x 18-inch prints over to Symington.
The Senator gasped. The pictures, obviously taken from a high-flying RB-29, were of a port. From the size and scale, he guessed they must have been taken from almost 30,000 feet. The port showed clearly. What was even clearer was the mass of shipping that surrounded it. Symington was irresistibly reminded of ants swarming around a leaf. A mass of shipping that engulfed the port, obviously swamping its facilities.
“That’s Vladivostok Senator. Of all the supplies that go to Russia, 25 percent goes via the northern convoy route to Murmansk and Archangel. Another 25 percent uses the southern route, via Iran and the Afghan Railway. The other half, all of it, goes via the western route to Vladivostok. And you can see the result. The congestion off the Russian port is terrifying. I’m told Admiral King has woken up screaming in the night when he imagines enemy submarines or surface ships getting loose into that mass of shipping.”
Symington nodded. In his mind he could see the exploding ships; enemy warships running through the tightly-packed merchantmen and the burned bodies of seamen washing up on the cold shores. Just like they had back in the bad days of 1942. It could not be allowed to happen again.
Dewey was still speaking. “Of course, we’re doing what we can to solve the problem. We’ve got engineers expanding the facilities at Vladivostok. They’ve doubled the capacity of the port since 1943. We’ve moved a whole new prefabricated port over there, called a Mulberry, and that helps. We’re even unloading cargoes directly over the beach where we can. They’re all only marginal solutions. We’ve achieved a lot more by building support factories in Russia. There’s iron ore, copper, nickel, lead there, oil as well, a lot of it. We used to ship crude oil back to California, then ship refined products back. That blocked the port twice per cargo. Now, we have refineries in Siberia and that saves us a lot of shipping. Only, it’s still a marginal solution.
“It’s not just Vladivostok. The backlog of shipping is causing congestion in all the ports down the West Coast. Rail yards are full because the trains can’t unload until they have a ship to unload them into. The ship can’t take the cargo because it’s still waiting to unload the previous lot at Vladivostok. Then, we’ve got the railway problem in Siberia itself. We’re double-tracking the railway and building relief lines as fast as we can but we still can’t get the job done fast enough. For all that, the equipment needed to enlarge the railways comes by sea, and the ships are backed up all over the place.
“One final thing. Take a look at the map. Look how close that shipping thrombosis is to Japan. Bombers in the Japanese home islands could take off, bomb the stacked up cargo ships and return home without ever leaving sight of their bases. Do you know what it’s costing us to persuade the Japanese not to interfere with that lifeline? A free hand in China’s just the start of it.”
Dewey sighed again. “Look, Senator, I’m sorry if I’m ranting at you, but this shipping problem is keeping everybody awake. The C-99 is the solution to the whole problem. It may fly low and it may fly slow but it has the range to take off from anywhere in the western United States and fly to an airbase in eastern Russia. It can carry 400 men, or 100,000 pounds of cargo per flight. The C-54 carries 50 men or 10,000 pounds of cargo. That means that a single C-99 can carry the human payload of eight C-54s and the cargo payload of ten. It can do all that while flying three times as far. And it doesn’t stop there. The C-54 and the C-69 are basically passenger transports. They have small doors and that gives them problems handling bulky cargoes. The C-99B onwards have clamshell doors in the nose that are big enough to handle whole vehicles. We could fly tanks to Russia if we had to, and deliver them directly from the factories in Detroit to the troops waiting on the Volga. And they can back-load troops from the Volga to the United States. Think on it, Senator, because of the C-99, a soldier with a five day pass can come home and see his family instead of drinking too much in a ‘rest camp.’