Overhead, the seagulls circled the dying ships.
This was the time that the railway guns came into their own. For days, the snowstorm had grounded all the tactical aircraft. The big guns, the U.S. Navy’s 14 and 16-inch weapons, the Russian 12-inch and the German 11-inch took up the burden of supporting the troops. Not that there was much direct support to be done. The same foul weather that grounded the air forces also pretty much froze the ground troops in place. Froze was the operative word, literally and metaphorically. Only the ski patrols had been out, but when the storm was at its height, even those had hunkered down to wait it out. The big units, regiments, divisions, had retreated into their cantonments and stayed put. Perfectly sensible; any sort of serious military operations had been impossible.
“Supporting the ground troops” really meant firing harassment and interdiction missions. A couple of times, they’d been lucky and they’d had a fix on a major enemy position. Then, the three great guns had fired dozens of rounds at the location. Mostly, though, they’d fired single rounds at predicted enemy positions. In other words, wasted ammunition. The German Army wasn’t stupid. They knew what looked like a good cantonment position on the map, knew that the enemy could read maps as well, and avoided likely targets. The same foul weather that grounded the tactical aircraft had also grounded the Rivet Rider communications intercept planes. Mostly they were converted C-47s and their all-weather ability was very limited. That left, Larry, Curly and Moe firing almost blind. Frustrating.
Still, the worst of the storm had passed; the howling blizzard of snow had settled back to a steady fall. The teams who had been trying to keep the railway tracks clear for the guns were on top of the task at last. All was well with the world, or would be sooner or later. Commander James Perdue shuddered slightly at the thought of how long the task might take. He surveyed the mess on his plate. According to the label on the can, it was Dinty Moore’s beef and vegetable stew. Perdue had eaten so much of this particular stew that he was beginning to take a strong dislike to Mister Moore. More particularly, he was taking an even stronger dislike, bordering on hatred, to Mister Moore’s beef stew. The worst part of it was he couldn’t just throw it away. Since the German breakthrough to the White Sea last year, every scrap of food for the armies in the Kola Peninsula was being brought in by convoy from Canada. Wasting food was a court martial offense. Commander James Perdue had already decided that when he got home, he was going to devote the rest of his life to eating chicken.
He’d washed out his mess kit; with all this snow around, water wasn’t in short supply. He was making his way forward to his gun when the alarms went off. That was a measure of just how much the weather had improved. When the storm had been at its height, the radars around the artillery battalion had been useless. This time, they’d picked up the inbound artillery fire. The crews were already trying to locate the guns that were firing. They had to be Schwere Dora, the German 11 inch railway guns. To the west, they were known to the American crews as Petrograd Pete. Long ranged and deadly accurate, they made up for their smaller shells with precision. Perdue dropped all other thoughts and sprinted through the carriages towards the fire control center. He knew he wouldn’t make it, he could hear the express train roar of the inbound shells through the steel of the carriages.
“INBOUND!” The warning yells were all around him. People struggling to get the three guns of the 5th into firing position. To Perdue’s relief, the shells passed overhead. Their explosions were muffled by the ridge behind him. The train shook slightly with the distant impacts, then violently as the locomotive started to move them forward. By the time he reached the fire control center, Curly was moving into its fire position. The tracking radars had already come up with a crude position for the enemy guns. The fire control team had plotted the circle on a map and compared it with the known railway lines in the area. Not many, unless the Germans had built more sidings.
“What have we got?” Perdue snapped the question out.
“Two shells, Sir. They hit somewhere behind us. The Germans overshot us by miles. Two shells, two guns. Petrograd Pete has arrived, no doubt about it.”
Perdue looked at the map and tapped a portion of railway line with his finger. “Here? Range and angle is right?”
“That’s our guess Sir.” The telephone rang and Perdue answered it. “Battalion agrees as well. Hit it.”
Perdue felt the train creak slightly as men alongside the wheels made tiny adjustments in position. There were more creaks and groans as the traverse of the gun was finely adjusted. In the fire control center, Perdue couldn’t hear the crashing as one of the great shells was pushed forward followed by the bags of powder. This would be a supercharge shot, no doubt about it; Curly could only just match Petrograd Pete for range. The way the train lurched back on the rails confirmed that impression. A split second after the concussion of Curly’s shot; Larry and Moe added their shells to the return fire.
The sirens on the trains went off again; five minutes after the first pair of shells had arrived. The German gunners were getting better; Perdue braced himself for the impact, only to hear the train like roar, again passing safely overhead. It hadn’t faded before it was drown out by the crash and shock of Curly firing. The German Army gunners might have improved but they still had a lot to learn from the American Navy artillerymen. Then, the telephone rang and Perdue took down another string of numbers. The tracking radar had backtracked the last pair of shells and provided a new set of coordinates and error circle. He transferred the figures to the plot. The new circle mostly overlapped the old but not quite. There was an area common to both and that area was significantly smaller than the circles on their own. The suspect rail line was right in the middle of the shared area.
“Same again.” Ten minutes after the alarm signal, Curly hurled its third shell towards the German lines. The train had hardly returned to its original position when the alarms sounded for the next pair of German shells. Another set of overs. To Perdue’s practiced ear it sounded as if they were heading over on an almost identical trajectory. That worried him. The German railway gunners were good, it wasn’t like them to make mistakes like that.
“Error in positioning?” Warrant Officer Phillips was obviously thinking the same thing. A positioning error was the great fear of all railway gunners. It didn’t take much to throw the aim hopelessly off. Perdue was saved from answering by the telephone. Another string of numbers; another fix; another circle. This one made a cloverleaf with the first pair and the shared area was much smaller. There was only a single candidate railway stretch in it, not the one they had been firing on. Perdue telephoned in the change. It was confirmed and that meant Curly had to be moved slightly.
“We can fire at will.” Perdue passed the order through.
“Why, whatever did Will do to us?” An old joke; but the fire control center laughed anyway. Underneath their feet the train shifted forward to make the firing correction. The fine adjustment crews swung the barrel a little further. Then, there was another crash and lurch as Curly hurled a projectile at the new target area. Once again, the responding German shells hurtled overhead to explode somewhere in the hills behind the American guns.
Perdue reflected that the duel between railway guns was a slow-motion affair. The exchanges of blows took so long they almost seemed like separate events. The American gun crews were tiring; their rate of fire had dropped to four minutes between rounds, then to five. The German gunners seemed to be holding theirs at one pair of rounds every six minutes; their shots still screamed far overhead, into the hills. After nearly an hour, the German salvoes dropped to single rounds. Had one of their guns been hit? Or malfunctioned? Their 15th salvo was the last. After it had roared overhead, there was silence. The three American guns fired a last salvo and then they too fell quiet.