“One machinery room has gone, Sir. Direct hit. We’ve lost Bruno, Caesar and Dora turrets. I think Anton will flood soon. Stern’s been hit. We’ve lost steering and the port and centerline screws. We’re trying to restore power to the starboard screw but we’ve, the gearing has, it’s all a wreck back there. Those damned bombs went straight through our armor deck. We’d probably have been better off without it. All it did was set the damned things fuses working. There are fires down below but they’re under control. It’s the flooding. The bombs smashed us up inside, the torpedoes opened up holes to let the water in. Admiral, Sir, the flak guns, they’re gone. Those little parachute bombs exploded just above the decks, what the jellygas didn’t finish off, they did. The crews in the open mounts, they were already dead, we only had the enclosed 105s. Fragmentation bombs did for them.”
“Message from Moltke, Sir.” The Signals officer was reading from a piece of paper, his face white with shock. “Ten hits, all from bombs. Anton and Dora took direct hits, they’re gone. One bomb hit beside Dora, it’s blown the whole side out there. She took three hits dead aft, their whole stern section had detached, she’s dead in the water. Bow’s gone, she took four hits forward of Anton. She’s flooding freely up there and settling by the bows.”
Lindemann shuddered, Derfflinger and Moltke were already slowing, Seydlitz and von der Tann overhauling them. “Signal Z-28 to come alongside. I must transfer my flag. Order Von Der Tann to be ready to take command of the fleet. How long to the next wave hits us?”
“Ten minutes Sir. At most.”
Incredibly their air search radar was still working. Ten minutes gave him just enough time to shift his flag to Z-28. Then, he could transfer to Von Der Tann in the next gap between waves. That raised the obvious question. “Any more waves of Ami aircraft joined the attack.”
“Oh yes, sir. One more in the last few minutes. They’re holding steady launch rate by the look of it. One wave every fifteen to twenty minutes. No sign of it ending.”
Boiler Room, KMS Gneisenau, North Atlantic.
They were coming under attack again, Rheinbeck knew it. Orders came down on the telegraph, for every tiny fraction of steam that could be forced from the boilers. The violent changes in machinery orders; the canting of the deck. Rheinbeck had heard it all before. Only an hour ago. He still remembered the screaming protests of the boiler plant forced far beyond its capacity; the reversing and full ahead orders following in bewildering succession. The swerves as the battleship tried to dodge the weapons launched at her. Captain Lokken had worked wonders that time, dodging torpedo after torpedo. Then Rheinbeck had heard the crash and felt the ship shake as one of the Ami torpedoes had struck home. The torpedo defense system had held. Gneisenau had survived.
That had been an hour before and now it was starting all over again. Rheinbeck wondered what is happening up there, what is happening to the rest of the fleet. Are our guns bringing down the Ami bombers as the officers had so confidently predicted. An hour since the first attack and we havn’t been struck again. It has to be going well doesn’t it? So why are we being hit now?
If a needle could be bending against the stop mark on the gauges, the ones on the steam pressure indicators were. 52 kg/cm atmospheres pressure, 450 degrees centigrade in theory, the Good Lord alone knew what the temperatures and pressures in there were really like. The piping was already groaning as it was forced beyond its capacity. Then, the deck under Rheinbeck’s feet canted and he knew the attack was coming in for real. Captain Lokken was on the bridge, fighting for them all again, maneuvering his battleship as if it were a destroyer.
The vibration in the boiler room was intense, yet even through it Rheinbeck could feel the shattering effect of the hit aft. A rocket-powered 1,600 pound bomb slashed through the roof of Caesar turret. It plunged down the barbette and exploded in the ammunition hoist. It was empty. The flashtight doors to the magazine were closed and that ruled out a catastrophic explosion. The blast from the bomb’s detonation went downwards, rupturing the centerline shaft tunnel and bending the middle of Gneisenau ‘s three shafts. The bend wasn’t that great but it caused the long, racing cylinder to rip open the tunnel and its seals. Water surged in from the sea and started to spread through the stern quarter of the ship.
The hammering of the bent shaft against the seals in its tunnel told Rheinbeck Gneisenau’s luck had run out. The second bomb hit told him just how badly. It punched straight through the 80-millimeter thick armor deck and exploded in Rheinbeck’s boiler room. The armor-piercing bomb had a low explosive charge. It didn’t disintegrate into a hail of small, man-killing fragments the way a high explosive bomb would have done. Instead, it split up into a small number of large chunks that crashed into the over-strained machinery in Gneisenau’s port boiler plant. That started a chain reaction that caused the whole installation to disintegrate. The boilers themselves were finally stressed beyond their physical limits and erupted. Pressure surged through the steam pipes, causing them to rupture also.
A few men were in the direct path of the fragments. They were the luckiest ones; the flying lumps of steel crushed the life out of them. Others were standing in front of the boilers when they flashed back.
They were less lucky. They were instantly incinerated and died where they stood. For the rest of the boiler room crew, hell was just about to start.
Rheinbeck was one of the unlucky ones. He was immersed in a scalding cloud as the ruptured boiler plant filled the compartment with superheated steam. He’d never felt anything like it; never in all the years he’d worked down here in the bowels of the ship. Searing agony as raw steam saturated the air. It filled his lungs and eyes, blinded him, ripped at his throat and nose. He ran, staggering for the hatches that lead out of the scalding hell that now surrounded him. There was something, someone? Between him and the way out. A figure already with his feet on the rungs that were the way to escape. Insane with pain, Rheinbeck grabbed him and threw him out of the way. His only idea was to find a way out, up to where there was no steam, where the pain would stop. He climbed up, three, then four rungs. Then he was seized around the waist and thrown to one side. He felt himself slipping, he tried to hang on but a boot crushed his fingers. He fell, back down to where the superheated steam was condensing into near-boiling water on the deck.
He could see again, slightly, as if he was peering through a dense fog. Thankfully, the pain stopped. The burns from the superheated steam had finally penetrated deep enough to sear the nerve endings in Rheinbeck’s skin. He was dying but he didn’t know that. All that he did know was the pain had stopped and he could see the struggling men frantically trying to escape upwards, out of the boiler room that was killing them. He crawled across the deck, leaving glove-like imprints of skin stuck to the steel. He never made it back to the way out. One of four torpedoes that slammed into Gneisenau’s side burst open the torpedo defense system and let a flood of blessedly ice-cold water into the boiler room.