“Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.”
Lieutenant (JG) Marko Dash had a personal tradition of singing to his aircraft as he made his ran towards the line of enemy ships. He did now. The Corsairs had busted the enemy formation wide open. The cohesiveness of the anti-aircraft fire was gone. As the Krauts had swerved to avoid the bombs and rockets, they’d straggled all over the sea. By sheer chance, the eight Skyraiders of his flight were approaching a perfectly placed pair of ships. A destroyer with a carrier behind it. The orders were to take the destroyer with rockets and then torpedo the carrier. They had the equipment to do it, each Adie carried four Tiny Tims, two under each wing, and a 22.4 inch torpedo under the belly. That slowed them down, but the punch was awe-inspiring.
The Tiny Tims might have the hitting power of a 500 pound semi-armor piercing bomb but accuracy wasn’t their strong point. The destroyer had increased to maximum speed and was turning frantically to avoid the oncoming onslaught. The Adies responded and pushed in to point blank range. Perhaps because of the ship’s maneuvers, the flak coming up was going wild. All the Adies had made it through. Clementine lurched as the rockets dropped clear but the flare that took place when they fired up was spectacular. That’s why they had to be dropped first; fire them from the wing racks and they’d incinerate the whole wing. They streaked ahead, snaking and dipping but more or less heading for the hapless destroyer in front of them. The explosions seemed to blanket her but they all seemed to be the white columns of near misses, not the black and orange eruptions of direct hits.
Then Dash saw the four black-red explosions as the rockets plowed into their target and exploded deep inside her. Dash watched a forward gun hurled into the air by the explosion of a rocket that had struck just behind it. Another blast ripped through the three aft turrets. A third hit the waterline between the funnels. The last hit the aft funnel itself, blasting it into a wreck. What had once been a trim fighting destroyer had been transformed into a shambles. Her superstructure was twisted and blackened. Fires from blast and burning rocket propellant were already taking hold.
Dash had no time to think about his handiwork. The eight Adies were already lining up for a torpedo run on the carrier. Her automatic guns were firing. Alongside Dash, an Adie suddenly lurched and went into the sea in a long sliding splash. A quadruple twenty, there was no mistaking that storm of tracer, got another one. Suddenly Dash, who had started as number six nicely in the middle of the group, was now the extreme left. Then he saw something else. The carrier was already swinging, knowing the torpedoes were coming and trying to comb their tracks. Almost by instinct, he threw his Clementine into a tight left hand curve and parted from the group at an angle of almost 45 degrees.
“Get back in formation, you yellow rat!” Dash’s flight commander screamed in rage as he thought he saw Dash break away.
Dash ignored him and held his angled course for a few seconds. Then he threw his bird back over in an equally tight right turn. As he did, he could see his guess had been right. The carrier had turned to comb the torpedo tracks. Dash could see three. Had two more broken up on impact with the water? It didn’t matter. His turns had put him dead ahead of the carrier and it was committed to its portside turn.
Dash made sure his wings were level, his speed right, and he dropped. The carrier was looming larger by the second. He thumbed the switch, raking the bridge with the 20mm cannon in his wings. Behind him, he saw what he had been praying for; the massive column of water. A torpedo, his torpedo, had torn into the aircraft carrier. Just where the flight deck structure met the hull sides, about a hundred feet back from the bows.
“Well done Dashy.” The flight commander’s voice was contrite now. He’d seen what Dash had seen and understood what Dash had done about it. An important lesson, one that needed to be got back to the fleet as quickly as possible. The doctrine of dropping torpedoes in large tight groups wasn’t as effective as it should be; better to split into two smaller groups and hit the target from two different angles. Still, they’d got a hit on the carrier and they’d know better next time.
The Adies skimmed the seas between the ships. Tracers from the anti-aircraft guns licked round them. It was a sure bet some of those shells were hitting other German ships, cutting their gun crews down. With a little luck, a 4.1 inch crew will get careless and smack one of their shells into a ship that could really get hurt by them. Stranger things had happened after all.
Another destroyer was ahead. The six surviving Adies had fired off their heavy weapons but they still had their cannon. Their tracers laced the target, sparks of hits flashing all over its dull gray paint. Then they were out and clear. Unlike the Corsairs, they wouldn’t be going back in. The bent-wing beasts would continue their strafing passes until the last of the heavy bombers was clear. They’d make their passes even if they were out of ammunition; because anti aircraft guns firing at them, weren’t shooting at the Adies. That’s why the Corsair pilots got paid the big bucks. Dash repeated the time-honored cliché to himself as he swung Clementine around for the trip home.
Oswald Boelcke had always been unlucky. In many respects she’d been cursed since the day she had been laid down as a heavy cruiser. Her construction had been slowed by the outbreak of the war. Then, when 95 percent complete, orders had been given for her to be converted into an aircraft carrier. That had been an insane decision. It would have been quicker and cheaper to build a new ship rather than rip apart a virtually complete cruiser. But, the orders had come from above and those orders were not to be ignored. So torn apart and rebuilt she had been.
It was bad luck that had placed her as the portside member of the triangle of three carriers in the Scouting Group on a day when the waves of Ami aircraft had come from the west. Oswald Boelcke had been the first carrier they had seen and eight of their torpedo bombers had concentrated on her. She’d shot down two and dodged the torpedoes of five. One had hit her and oh, how that torpedo had hurt.
Oswald Boelcke was a converted ship, her internal arrangements were far from optimal. In fact, they were very, very bad. The designers had done the best they could but it had been impossible to do better. They’d been aware of the dangers presented by the storage of aviation gasoline and had elected to use the magazines of Bruno and Caesar turrets as the gasoline storage. These were situated where the hull was wider so there was more space to absorb any explosions. Anton and Dora magazines had been adapted for munitions storage. It was judged that their contents were less subject to exploding so situating them where the hull was narrower was acceptable. Perfectly correct, perfectly logical decisions; the sort any competent design team would have made.
What beat them was Oswald Boelcke’s thoroughly rotten luck. Marko Dash’s torpedo hit directly abreast Bruno magazine. Worse, Oswald Boelcke was turning sharply to port when the torpedo struck. That turn, combined with her excessive topweight to cause her to roll severely to port. This had lifted the starboard side of her hull high. Instead of striking the ship’s side and exploding on the armor and torpedo protection system, the 22.4 inch torpedo ran under the turn of the bilge and struck the underside of the hull some 20 feet inwards from the side. The hit bypassed the torpedo defense system completely and exploded directly under Bruno magazine.