Kirov Saga Men of War

Chapter 19



The fishing boat slipped away from the rocky shore, off the northeast of Gibraltar, soon joining fifteen others just like it where brown skinned fishermen with gnarled hands tended to their nets and lines, hoping to bring in enough to feed themselves and their family, and still have some left over to sell in the local markets.

Orlov was tired, and settled into a small room below deck to get some sleep. Hours later he found that the small boat had hove to next to a weathered old steamer and soon the three men and their very important charge were scrambling up rope nets and onto the decks of the Sarkoy, and heading east across the Mediterranean Sea.

Neutral Turkey enjoyed a rare privilege in the Med, as both the Axis and Allied forces were interested in bringing her into their respective alliances to gain possession of the vital Turkish Straits. The Vichy French even tried to occasionally dress out their own merchantmen as Turkish ships so they could slip past the watchful eyes of the British at Gibraltar, and a few did exactly that while others were unmasked and caught by wary Royal Navy sea captains. Thankfully, Sarkoy made it all the way through to Istanbul with only one close call when two Italian planes made a low overflight in the Sicilian narrows. One shadowed the ship for some time until it was well past Malta, then vanished in the overhead mist, leaving the hapless steamer to its own fate.

Orlov was content to stay where he was for the moment, though he had already considered how he would kill the three men who kept a watchful eye on him now. He noted their habits, shift rotations, and thought it would be quite easy to slip away whenever he had a mind. In time he actually came to like the tall Russian, Sergei Kamkov, and the two spent long nights talking, smoking cigarettes, and drinking vodka that Kamkov had produced from haversack. Orlov could not help but do a little boasting in those conversations, even though he suspected that Kamkov was working for the Soviet intelligence.

“The British almost had you,” Kamkov had teased. They were going to fly you off to London on plane and go over you with a fine toothed comb. Tell me, Orlov, why are they so interested in you?”

“Why? I suppose because I know so much.” He took another swig of his vodka.

“Oh, what is it you know? Loban is usually very careful. He has never once risked blowing his cover to pass a man over as he did with you. He must have thought you were a really big fish, yes?’

“Big as they come,” said Orlov. “I can tell you things that will amaze you, my friend.”

“Tell me this, then. What’s in the pouch?”

“What pouch?”

“The diplomatic pouch Loban gave me. What’s so special, eh? We were told not to open it or we’d have our fingers snapped off one by one, and with Loban, you believe what he says.”

“Well Loban said nothing to me about it. Let me see it and I’ll have a look inside.”

“I don’t think so,” said Kamkov. “We’ll leave it safe in the haversack for now. So you don’t know much after all, it seems.”

“Bullshit,” said Orlov. “He’s probably got my wireless in there.”

“Wireless? You were wearing a wireless device? A radio set? Where? How could you?”

“We’ve learned how to make things very small where I come from. I had some ear plugs with a microphone and a little speaker. That’s most likely what he stuck in that pouch.”

“Ear plugs? Impossible. That small? Who made this for you.”

“Never mind who made it, Kamkov. Just play your hand.”

If anything, this lot was a far better circumstance than being locked away in a cave beneath that accursed Rock, thought Orlov. The Bosporus would be an easy place to jump ship, when they got there and he wondered where he might go next.

Orlov wanted nothing to do with the war on the east front. He knew that no matter where he went there he would likely be picked up and pressed into service in the nearest Russian company, battalion or regiment at hand. The Germans already controlled the Crimea, and Sevastopol, and were fighting for Novorossiysk by the time Orlov found himself approaching Istanbul.

There, to his great surprise, the Sarkoy was met by a small trawler on foggy night in the Bosporus. Three more men came aboard, wearing black leather jackets, and dark Ushanka caps with insignia, and Orlov realized, much to his chagrin, that he was now being turned over to the Soviet authorities in the Black Sea. So much for his plan to jump ship, he thought with some regret. Kamkov transferred over to the trawler with these newcomers. As he stepped down the ladder Orlov looked around, thinking he might make a jump into the water, but quickly discarding the notion. So far the Russians had handled him a lot better than the Spanish or British might have. As he jumped the last few feet down to the old wooden deck of the trawler he noted the number T-492 on its rusting hull.

The other two men stayed behind on the Turkish ship, and he noted that Kamkov had carefully taken the haversack with the diplomatic pouch. This was a coastal lighter, and Orlov watched his stars to make out their heading, soon realizing that they were gradually working their way along the northern coast of Turkey and over towards Georgia. Of course, he thought. A boat like this would be too small to risk crossing the heart of the Black Sea, particularly with the German Luftwaffe hovering about like black crows. No. They’ll work their way all along this coast to Poti and beyond.

That would be his last chance, he thought. If I let these fur hats get me any farther up that coast they’ll likely drop me at Sochi or Tuapse, right in the middle of the damn war again. If these men are NKVD they’ll soon want to know who I am, and why they have no record on my name in their recruitment books. Yet this has been an easy cruise so far. If the food is good on this trawler I just may stick around a while longer. At least we don’t have to worry about the God cursed German U-Boats out here. And this boat looks like a minesweeper, so there’s little to fear from that as well.

He was very wrong.

* * *



Oberleutnant Klaus Peterson was the second frustrated U-Boat commander that was to become the hand of fate in this strange tale, just like Kapitan, Werner Czygan of U-118. Peterson’s boat was U-24, a sub that had inherited a very proud number, for this was the second boat to bear that designation. The first had been commissioned in 1913, and fought during the Great War with much success and many laurels. On Oct 26, 1914 she had the dubious distinction of being the first German U-Boat to ever attack an unarmed merchant ship without warning, the SS Admiral Ganteaume. Her very next kill was something a little more spectacular, and gained her real distinction when she hit and sunk the 15,000 ton dreadnaught Formidable. Before that war ended, U-24 had hit a remarkable 39 ships, sinking 34 of them, badly damaging three others and taking one more as a prize. In all she inflicted pain and death on 137,560 tons of enemy shipping.

The U-24 of the Second World War was another ship entirely, a small Type IIB boat commissioned in 1936. Unlike her ancestor, to date U-24 had little to brag about. The boat had only one kill, the merchant steamer Carmarthen Coast hit off the shores of the UK on 9 November, 1939, and that by a mine, just as Czygan had scored his hit on the hapless Duero. Since that time three other commanders had taken their turns behind the periscope with no success, and by May 1940 she had come to be thought of as an unlucky boat, and was soon retired as a “School Boat” for training with the 21st Flotilla. Then in late 1942, U-24 had been secreted into the Black Sea by a very devious route, and transferred to the 30th Flotilla there under the command of another U-Boat Kapitän who had been caught up in this bizarre web of fate, Werner Rosenbaum, formerly of U-73.

Kapitän Rosenbaum had just earned his Knight’s Cross in the Mediterranean while in action against the British Operation Pedestal. He was one of the very few German U-boats to claim an aircraft carrier for a kill when he sunk the HMS Eagle, and after a strange run-in with another large enemy ship that he had never been able to identify, Rosenbaum sailed home to La Spezia and was soon transferred to Constanza on the Black Sea Coast for a new mission—command of the 30th Black Sea U-Boat flotilla, Hitler’s “lost fleet” in the inland waters of southern Europe.

In an ingenious and daring operation, the Germans had partially disassembled a flotilla of six Type IIB Coastal U-Boats at Kiel, removing their conning towers by oxyacetylene torches before they moved them overland on the most powerful land haulers and tractors in Germany. They eventually reached the Danube where they were packed in pontoon crates and then made their way slowly by barge to the Black Sea. Originally scheduled to arrive there in October of 1942, they were two months early, and the young twenty-five year old Oberleutnant zur See Klaus Peterson would serve under Rosenbaum and be privileged to go out on some of the 30th flotilla’s very first patrols.

He was excited about the prospect of suddenly surprising the enemy here, who had not seen a whisper of a German U-boat even in their dreams throughout the war. Peterson had trained under another well known U-Boat commander while he was on U-14, Herbert Wohlfarth and remembered the story that man had told him of how he had witnessed the tragic loss of the great battleship Bismarck. Wohlfarth had been there, watching the final battle through his periscope, yet with no torpedoes to make good his pledge to keep the great battleship safe from all harm. He had used his last torpedoes on a couple of old cargo ships days earlier, and bitterly regretted the choice for the rest of his life. Peterson never forgot the story.

Life and fate had a very strange way of crossing life lines and making odd connections like that. For Wohlfarth trained Peterson, and now he would serve under Rosenbaum, a man who was only alive now because Anton Fedorov has recalled the KA-40 that had spotted Rosenbaum’s sub where it hid like an eel in Fornells Bay, Menorca. Fedorov’s avid interest in the Second World War had brought the men who fought it to such life in his mind that he could not bring himself to strike Rosenbaum down. His act of mercy was to have dramatic and far reaching consequences, the first of which was instilling a moment of restraint in another man, Vladimir Karpov. When Karpov had come on duty and learned that Fedorov spared the sub, his first instinct had been to go back and kill it, but he, too, stayed his hand. It would not be the first time he spared an enemy submarine.

So Rosenbaum lived. He took command of the secret 30th U-boat Flotilla in the Black Sea a few months earlier than he might have, and he sent out a hungry young U-Boat commander named Klaus Peterson in a boat that was straining to make its first kill since 1939. It would get its chance against another very fated ship that night, the Russian minesweeper trawler T-492.

The sun had been down for three hours and it was a dark and quiet night on the still waters of the Black Sea. Peterson’s U-24 had made the long journey from Constanza, leaving several days ago and angling southeast to the Turkish coast to look for small Russian craft that used that route to avoid German air operations. At 19:00 hours it was very dark, as the moon would not rise until 22:30, and even then it would only be a slim morning crescent, so conditions were perfect for a U-boat to be riding on the surface in search of unwary prey.

The 325 ton Type-II U-boats were among the very first new boats built by Germany after the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, with twelve being built in secret pens. From the first they were conceived as small coastal boats, just 140 feet in length and thirteen feet wide. With a crew of only twenty-five men and limited range they were only useful for training or deployment in restricted waters like the Black Sea. In the open ocean they would roll too heavily, and came to be called “dugout canoes,” but in quieter inland waters and coastal zones their agile maneuverability and rapid diving speed of thirty seconds made them very effective. The Type IIB could run 1800 miles at 12 knots, more than enough endurance for operations in the Black Sea. The boat had three 21 inch bow tubes for a load of six torpedoes, but that night Oberleutnant Klaus Peterson had only three left, having fired unsuccessfully at a couple of lighters along the Turkish coast the previous day.

At 19:18 hours his lookouts spotted what appeared to be a small tug or barge tender well off Poti, and Peterson silently turned his boat, aiming the nose to fire. More often than not, a U-boat might fire its torpedoes on the surface like this, and the young Oberleutnant was eager for a kill on his first patrol here. He was from the well known “Olympia Crew” of 1936, taking that name from the Berlin Olympics held the year they graduated, and Peterson hoped to win a medal or two before he was through tonight. The ship ahead did not look like much of a prize, yet he would take what he could get without complaint.

“I’m lined up perfectly, Otto,” he whispered to his Executive Officer. “Fire tube one!”

The G7e torpedo was away with a quiet swish, running true and right at the unwary Tszcz-492 where Gennadi Orlov dozed in a hammock below decks under the casual watch of two NKVD guards. Then a man shouted from above and the thump of heavy soled boots was hard on the wooden deck. Orlov was jostled awake, hearing men yelling out an alarm.

The two NKVD men were up and running for the ladder, foolishly leaving Orlov alone. He heard the word torpedo, then submarine, and the boat master was shouting for men to man the forward 76mm deck gun that had been well concealed under a heavy tarp. In that brief moment of uncertainty, Orlov’s eye fell on Kamkov’s haversack, and he moved, almost without thinking, rushing over and fishing about to get at the diplomatic pouch. There it was! He had the looped string open in a heartbeat, and groped inside, finding the earbuds and then quickly securing the pouch again and putting it right back where he found it.

He heard the sound of something warbling in the water, then a high pitched hum that he knew was a torpedo, and his heart raced to think these might be his last moments alive. But the unlucky history that had plagued U-24 since it dared assume the mantle of its illustrious WWI predecessor would continue to plague Klaus Peterson that night. The shot was perfect, dead center on the small ship ahead, which was actually a Soviet mine sweeper trawler, but the torpedo depth was wrong for the target’s shallow draft, and it ran right under the boat!

Orlov heard it pass and sighed with relief. He considered trying to sneak on deck but he did not know where the trawler was and the prospect of diving into the sea was less than appealing. So instead he waited in the noisy darkness, hearing the grind of metal above as the deck crews worked the 76mm gun. Then he heard a loud boom, as they fired their first round back at the enemy sub, and something in him pulled for the Russian crew, not only because his life depended on it, but because they were his countrymen, distant ancestors of the nation he had left, but countrymen nonetheless.

Oberleutnant Peterson was surprised by the gunfire, hearing the round soar in and splash heavily in the water off his starboard side. “Damn! We were dead on and the fish was too deep! And that’s no tug boat, it’s a minesweeper! Dive the boat!”

The harsh claxon sounded and men scrambled from the tiny conning tower above. Thirty seconds later U-24 had slipped beneath the wine dark sea and turned fifteen points to port. Peterson heard another round come in above them but it thankfully missed, and so now he wiped the sweat from his brow and struggled to calm himself. His first pounce had failed to catch his prey, so the deadly game of stalking would now begin. He angled away, thinking the best thing to do now was make the enemy think they had driven him off while he slowly circled to see if he could line up on the target again. First he needed to get well away from the place he had taken his first shot. A periscope here would only invite trouble.

He did not know that fate and time were now watching his every move, inscribing it all in their ledgers, and that one man, Gennadi Orlov, was now about to steal a peek at the books.