Lieutenant-Commander Raymond Searle absorbed the position as he saw the superstructures of the two leading battleships in front of him erupt into flames. The Corsairs swung around slightly and made their runs from directly ahead of the four huge battleships. It cost them. The anti-aircraft fire from the lead ship had been degraded badly by the flak suppression runs but the following ship had not. Two Corsairs were nailed as they passed over the lead ship and tried to make their runs at the one behind. Ten Corsairs had deluged the German battleship’s superstructure with 3,000 gallons of napalm, sticking to everything and everybody.
Searle watched and reflected grimly that, in this case, antiaircraft fire dying had a very literal meaning. For a brief second he had a picture of the nightmarish inferno on the decks of the stricken battleships. Then he swept it from his mind. They were Germans, who cared what happened to them? Searle’s younger brother had been one of the prisoners murdered at the Battle of the Kolkhoz Pass. That made hammering the German fleet personal.
The Maulers were making their runs a lot higher than the previous aircraft. There was a good reason for that. Searle had named his aircraft Conestoga for a reason; it could lift loads no other single-engined aircraft could equal. There was a lot of rivalry between the Adie and Mame squadrons. Mame was a bit faster than the Skyraider and it could carry more. On the other hand, Adies were easier to fly and had shown an incredible ability to survive damage. Searle had seen Adies that had no right to be in one piece, let alone still flying, bring their pilots back alive before finally giving up — after landing on the decks of the carriers. Both planes were new; both had their problems. It was the Adies that had won the pilot’s trust.
The Mames had something new for the Germans to chew on. They carried a 2,000 pound rocket-boosted armor-piercing bomb under their bellies, another one on the inner hardpoint under their wings and ten 200 pound parachute-braked fragmentation bombs under the outer hardpoints. Searle flew ahead of the battleships, then swung to run down their length. Errors were usually in range, not bearing. This plan would minimize the effect of range errors. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his squadron dropping into place. The formation had been worked out to maximize the number of bombs hitting the target. His eyes flipped down to his bombsight. Through its lens in the bottom of the fuselage he could see the sea. He changed course slightly and the bow of the lead German battleship appeared. His cross ran along it. The forward turret appeared, then, as the second turret eased into view, Searle dropped his entire load. As soon as they saw him do so, the other pilots released simultaneously.
Searle swung away and headed north. His pilots were behind him. 11 of the 12 Maulers in his squadron had survived. Beneath and behind him, he could see the Adie torpedo planes hadn’t been so lucky. The two German battleships at the rear of the formation had concentrated on them. Three planes down? That’s what it looks like.
Behind and beneath him, the 2,000 pound bombs dropped by the Maulers worked as advertized. Each was equipped with a parachute and, as they’d been dropped, a lanyard opened that chute, effectively stopping the bombs dead in mid-air. The weight of the bomb under the chute swung the assembly down to vertical. As the bomb passed 80 degrees, a simple inclinometer fired the six 5 inch rocket motors welded around the outside of the bomb. They boosted it to speeds far beyond anything a normal bomb could achieve. Pre-war analysis had been based on the assumption that, to gain any degree of penetration, a bomb had to be dropped from high enough to pick up speed on the way down. The higher the altitude, the faster the bomb descended and the greater the thickness of armor it would penetrate. That applied all the way up to terminal velocity. Beyond that, the rate of descent stabilized and wouldn’t cause any further increase in penetration. Of course, the higher the bomb was dropped from, the less the chance of it hitting the target. If the thickness of armor was such that a bomb of given weight had to be dropped from a height where the chance of it hitting the target was negligible, the needs of protection were served.
The rocket-boosted American bombs didn’t need altitude to accelerate. The rockets drove them. The bombs dropped from 2,000 feet up were moving far faster than terminal velocity by the time they hit the decks of the ship. They were still accelerating even after they had punched through the thin steel of those decks. That was something the Derfflinger’s designers had never anticipated. Nor had any other battleship designer, but it wasn’t their products that were under attack.
Nine of the bombs hit Derfflinger; ten hit Moltke. More hit the sea alongside the two ships, diving deep underwater before they exploded. In a way, those near misses did more damage than the direct hits. The shock waves pummeled the two ships, springing plates and bursting open welds. The armor piercing rocket bombs were something even the battered German ships had never experienced before.
Two of the direct hits were from Connestoga. One hit B turret. It sliced through the 130mm armored roof and scythed down the long steel barbette. The bomb’s delayed action fuse was initiated by the impact and methodically counted away the milliseconds before the time came for it to destruct. The fuse designers had forgotten to allow for the fact that the bomb was still accelerating even after it had passed through the turret armor. As a result, the bomb had passed below the shell and charge magazines before it exploded.
That oversight and the small charge carried by the heavy-cased bomb saved Derfflinger. Fragments from the explosion ripped open the fuel tanks under the barbette and opened the ship’s bottom to the sea but they didn’t detonate the magazine. Earle’s other hit, on the deck in front of and to port of A turret, also failed to cause a magazine explosion. The explosion there blew the ship’s side out where the six bow torpedo tubes were installed. Derfflinger lucked out again, the water rushed through the ripped open side and extinguished the fires before the torpedoes could explode.
Compared with the wrath of the armor-piercing bombs, the two torpedoes that hit the battleship seemed almost insignificant. A few minutes earlier, the towers of water beside C and D turret would have been cause for alarm but the ship was still reeling from the bomb hits. The torpedoes defeated the torpedo protection system and ripped open the side of the ship. That was where Derfflinger’s luck ran out.
A few seconds earlier two rocket-boosted bombs had sliced through the ship’s side beside C turret, just inboard of the torpedo bulkhead. They’d exploded in the area between the bulkhead and the ship’s C turret magazine, reducing the maze of relatively insignificant compartments to a tangled mass of wreckage. The water from the torpedo hit just a few feet away burst through the shambles and flooding started to spread throughout the whole area. A split second later, the second torpedo hit another area beside D turret, one that had also been mangled by a bomb hit. The two torrents of water mixed and merged as they raced through the wreckage, spreading uncontrollably as they did so. It took the water only a few seconds to find flooding paths through the ship and into C and D turret magazines.
Lindemann picked himself up from the deck, stunned by the blasts. The sight had been incredible. B turret had been lifted clear off its mounting amid smoke from the explosion underneath that formed almost a perfect ring. The turret was now sitting drunkenly across its barbette. The damage reports were coming in but Lindemann didn’t need them to tell how bad the situation was. He could see the bow ripped off by one of those parachute rocket bombs, He could feel the ship slow and begin to list. The word penetrated his senses somehow.