19. The Spanish Ulcer
Cartagena, Spain (Contested Territory)
15 February 1937
Johann Volkmann yawned, stretched out on the engine deck of his Panzer IIc. It was a mild day, perfect as far as Johann was concerned for doing absolutely nothing - not that the Condor Legion ever agreed particularly with his assessment. He had had the misfortune of being assigned to Eicke's battalion with the new armored platoon; they had spent the first week he was here just trying to find Theodor Eicke, who seemed to have attached himself to the Spanish Foreign Legion. He expected he would never get the sound of their calls of "¡Viva la muerte!" out of his head, and Eicke had indulged them shamelessly: For a bunch of Papists, they're not half bad, the bull-headed former NCO had growled on more than one occasion.
Eicke had two major disadvantages, as far as Volkmann was concerned. First, his idea of sophisticated tactics was to make a headlong assault from two directions at once. Second, he had decided to make Johann's life hell the moment he heard that the young tanker was a Lichterfelde graduate. As a result, rather than the find-fix-kill mantra ingrained in Johann by Guderian, it was an endless round of up and at them, unless you're too fucking busy hemming your skirt, Volkmann! As a result, they had put perhaps a year's worth of wear on their tanks with inadequate maintenance facilities, fired a year's worth of rounds, and achieved what Johann suspected was an hour's worth of actual fighting, mostly to chase down villagers who scattered before their tanks. Rumor had it that the Soviets had slipped in some of their tanks for testing, same as the Reich, but there was no real evidence for that as far as Johann could see. The Nationalists had pretty much mopped the floor with the Republicans, Soviet aid or no, and the world had essentially turned a blind eye to German intervention after Schleicher's death.
Mueller, his driver, was idly picking mud out of the treads, enjoying a few minutes out of the tank, when a runner came up. "Hauptmann Eicke's compliments, sir," the runner said breathlessly, "and Coronel Yagüe says that the Reds're mustering for another attempt at a breakout. He wants you to take your treads forward and see what they're up to." Volkmann sat up, stretching and sketching a salute at the runner. "Tell Eicke that we're moving," he muttered as he slipped into the commander's hatch. Mueller was shortly behind him, and their third, Gustafsen, a big Schleswiger, wormed his way uncomfortably into the loader's seat. Volkmann stood upright in the cupola, cupping his hands to yell to the rest of the platoon. "Hey! Saddle up!" he roared in a passable parade-ground voice. "The Old Man wants us to scare the Reds again!" Mutters, grumbling, and even a couple chuckles greeted him in reply, and he saw his crews go from engines-cold to formed up behind him in ten minutes, a creditable time all told.
The five light tanks slipped forward of Eicke's pickets, careful to keep a low rise to the south between them and the Reds. As Guderian had drilled into them, they rode unbuttoned, the commanders' heads swiveling intently. He knew they had a dust plume behind them, and it was near impossible to stay stealthy in an armored vehicle, but he saw no point in exposing them before he had to. Finally, eight hundred meters forward of Eicke's encampment, he raised a hand, the tanks rumbling to a halt behind him. He scrambled down off his tank, binoculars in hand, and crawled to the top of the ridge to take a look at the Red positions. All seemed quiet enough until he swept his glance over the village that provided the Red bivouac in the area; he could see a shape over the low town wall that he had not seen before.
Shit, he thought grimly, I was wrong. Well... we're here now, see what we can do about it... He skidded back down to the waiting platoon and pulled his headseat on, flipping to the platoon net rather than the intercom. "All right, boys. There are a minimum of three Red tanks in that town. Anybody who slept through the briefing, that's a Red platoon, which probably means Russians... which if we're lucky means they're already fairly well lit. After all, it's after noon." He got a dutiful chuckle from the other tank commanders before continuing. "I figure we have exactly one shot per gun before they get moving, so... wheel left in place, traverse turrets to the rear, and reverse up the slope 'til you can sight in. Make your shots count, then roll for our lines fast as you can. Range is... three-fifty, tops. Good luck. Volkmann out."
With that, he traversed his turret around until it faced back over the engine deck, ducking down only so far as needed to sight the gun, guiding Mueller with a nudge from his boot every now and then to signal that he could proceed. The turret finally broke the ridgeline, exposing him to the Reds. He took one deep breath, sighting the gun one last time and praying for the seam between turret and hull. He glanced along the line one last time, then gritted his teeth as they came into position. All right - all in, Hans, here we go. He yanked the trigger back, the breechblock jumping past him and opening to expose the casing. Gustafsen jerked the casing loose, working smoothly to slot another 20mm round; Johann ignored him to focus on the target. He had missed the joint, but lucked out: clean silver metal showed around the driver's hatch, and he could see a hole where no hole should have been. He kicked Mueller viciously, and the tank sped down the slope, Johann pumping his fist in the air and howling triumphantly.
The howl was short-lived; one of his tanks threw a tread in its hull-down position, and his head was still out moments later when he saw the turret blossom orange as the Reds returned fire. The turret, Obergefrieter Lautner presumably still in it, tumbled in midair before landing with a thud on the ridge face. Ashen, Johann saw the effects of the Soviet guns on the turret: a penetrating hit on the front side, and an exit wound on the rear of the turret. The shot had passed clean through the turret while they were loading, setting off the round in the loader's hands. With an explosion like that in the crew compartment, not to mention the resulting spalling, there would be no survivors. He hoped Lautner and his two crew had died quickly; anything else was too horrible to contemplate.
The other four tanks scurried down the slope until Johann again kicked Mueller, yelling into the intercom, "We're not leaving them out there, damn it!" The Panzer II reluctantly slewed around, Johann breathing heavily, awaiting the inevitable Red rush over the ridge. He did not have long to wait. "Action front!" he yelled into the radio again, instinctively sighting as one of the Red tanks breached and jerking the lever. Gustafsen responded exactly as he should, and he was rewarded with the results of a penetrating hit to the Soviet tank's relatively delicate underside. The Red machine brewed up completely, a ball of angry black, orange, and red that its crew, too, could never escape. He smiled savagely, the Panzer backing away from the remaining Red tank as its turret traversed toward him. He was doomed, and knew it, watching with sick fascination as the barrel's aspect ratio shortened, that black muzzle calling him.
Two shots struck the Red tank on its sloped glacis plate, sparking along its armor and leaving long streaks of bare metal, but not penetrating the steel. They did what Johann himself could not, and distracted the Red gunner. He felt the hot wave of the shot not three meters from his head before it arced on to bury itself in the soil and explode harmlessly. Without consciously sighting the gun, he returned fire, banging at the Red tank with the twenty-mil and the coaxial MG34, though from this angle a penetrating hit with the main gun was unlikely - which was horrifying enough by itself, but he could contemplate that later.
Eventually, the Red crew piled out of their tank, abandoning it on the field alongside wreckage of Lautner's and their own man's. Johann, breathing hard, collapsed down into his seat. Mueller opened his hatch, taking a deep breath before he rubbed his bruised shoulder. "We did it, sir," he said in apparent surprise. Johann just nodded numbly. Lautner.
---
KMS Hindenburg
Between Minorca and Denia, Mediterranean Sea
18 February 1937
The Reds were doomed, and everyone in Spain knew it. Thus, the British Battlecruiser Squadron and the German Mediterranean Squadron had engaged in unofficial exercises together, Canaris and Cunningham trading jokes, though the atmosphere had cooled significantly between the two when the Germans had run the Sultan to Greece. Cunningham had bitterly called it "another sealed train," and the suspected presence of German and Italian submarines in these waters had made the British very leery. Today, therefore, Hindenburg was alone, more or less, escorted by Deutschland and Admiral Scheer. Carefully nestled between the three ships were two submarines, U-33 and U-34. The four other captains were aboard the Hindenburg for a celebratory dinner. Grosse, of U-34, had an especially interesting story.
"Hell of a thing," he was explaining, positioning knives and forks to demonstrate the story. "Here we were, see, about eight klicks off Malaga, running at periscope depth, when along comes this Spanish boat. We figured we had maybe one chance at this... after the disaster with that cruiser..." He shot a look at Freiwald, the captain of U-33 and one of the most experienced submarine captains in the fleet. Freiwald raised an eyebrow and nodded. "That cruiser... Cervantes, I think? Anyway, should've been on the bottom, but... we had a dud. Two hits, though." He smiled grimly. "Enough to hole her, just not sink her." Grosse nodded before resuming his story. "Anyway. We'd been seeing naval traffic out of Malaga all winter, Kurt here even had what he would have sworn was their big battleship just sail right in front of him, no clue he was there, just no way out of their screen. Finally we spot one of their C-class boats, just a few days ago. So I line up..." He repositioned cutlery as Canaris and his officers listened with varying degrees of interest, highest with Canaris himself. "There are Spanish patrol boats here and here, and you can see the coast over here. It's going to be a hard shot, and no mistake, and we only had one shot, because of all the watchers. So here we go... about fourteen-hundred, we're just at periscope depth when I tell 'em 'Aale los,' then pull the 'scope down quick as we can!" He looked around, wide-eyed. "I figured they'd see the tracks and I wanted to run while I could, so we sprinted clear. We waited ten minutes... I was sure it was a dud! Turned out," he grinned, "Turned out we'd masked the explosion with our escape run. Hydrophone chief hands me his headphones, and we have a kill. FINALLY."
As Canaris went to compliment him on the difficult shot - the knives had made clear the angle was nigh-on impossible based on his experience - the general-quarters klaxon sounded. Immediately, on deck, the crews scrambled to launch aircraft while the two adjoining U-boats dove with neither officers nor captains - all were in Canaris's wardroom. Peter Volkmann made his apologies to the table and sprinted clear, headed for the hangar and his Stuka, where Vogt was already wrestling his machine gun into its pintle mount. "Took you long enough," Vogt grunted. Peter ignored him until the canopy was forward. "Vogt, what happened?" he asked as he plugged into the intercom.
"Two big twin Tupolevs sighted, ETA about... uh... now." As if to emphasize Vogt's report, the Hindenburg shuddered and rolled. Though Peter had no way of knowing it based on his experience, they had been lucky - the bombers at high altitude had missed them completely, though a bomb had struck the Deutschland's Anton turret. Peter heard the orders flying out over the radio and could see it in his head - Arado fighters leaping off the deck, chasing skyward to try to bring down the bombers before they could reach the safety of land. The mere fact that they had tried to bomb the German squadron was a clear Parthian shot as the Republican side of the war collapsed.
Within minutes, a voice came over the radio. "Volkmann. My quarters with your operations man. Now." It was unmistakably Canaris's voice, and it was as hard and sharp as Peter had ever heard. Peter sighed, dismounting from the aircraft, still in his formal dining uniform, and made his way back to the disturbed dinner, bringing Leutnant von Gosse, the operations officer, with him. The stewards had already cleared the table and Canaris had brought the charts of the Spanish coast by the time they reached him. "Where," he was asking the U-boat captains quietly, "would you kick him if you wanted him to hurt?" Wordlessly, Freiwald pointed at the stretch of coast from Malaga to Almeria, and Grosse nodded. "Anywhere in there. They keep their ships bottled up at Malaga, but that's probably closed to you." Canaris, eyes blazing, turned to Peter. "Volkmann. You are hereby ordered, on my authority, to launch a continuous operation against the Spanish coast engaging anything that moves, and if you find yourself loaded up with no moving targets, bomb anything that stands. If you can't find something still standing, bomb 'em 'til the rubble jumps." He swallowed, growling, "They have seventeen dead on the Deutschland. Their A turret's going to be out until they can get back to Kiel. Make 'em pay, Peter."
For seventy-two hours, the coast of Spain was subject to continuous attack from German dive bombers. Escorted by their Arado biplanes, Peter's Stukas flew a sortie every four hours around the clock. Miraculously, they lost not a single pilot - though perhaps that was because both Gibraltar and Seville were left open to them as emergency landing fields. Cunningham's earlier hostility vanished in the cloud of smoke over the Deutschland, which laid her dead to rest at Gibraltar in the British military cemetery there. They only stopped when Canaris came down to see them in their ready room, looking more than half-dead with the remnants of three days' worth of hurriedly slopped down meals across the fronts of their uniforms. "My God!" he exclaimed, quickly putting the projector screen away, "have any of you slept?"
Peter muttered something that not even he thought were truly words. The true answer was that they had been so active that the squadron could communicate with nothing but wing wags and subtle variations in propeller speed. "That's it," Canaris announced with some finality, "the lot of you are grounded."
The effect on Almeria was terrifying; the world press cried out against the "terror bombing" of Almeria, but Luftwaffe planners took note of the terrible effect of shuttle bombing, even by such a small number of bombers. Within twenty-four hours of Canaris grounding them for their own safety, the city of Almeria threw its gates open to Franco, the delegation pleading merely that the Nationalists pass them by and leave them in what was left of their city. Franco magnanimously agreed; he had a clandestine meeting north of town with four men, of whom three spoke fluent Spanish and one was finally picking up the rudiments.
Admiral Cunningham looked decidedly uncomfortable at being on Spanish soil, but his presence was required as the official commander of the blockade squadron and the highest-ranking British officer in the region. Canaris looked haggard but triumphant, his personal plot apparently successful. Peter Volkmann was still exhausted, and spent most of the meeting sleeping in the Stork's cockpit, stretched out across its seats with his jacket thrown over him. The final participant was Juan, Principe de Asturias, son of Alphonso XIII, the last reigning king of Spain.
Franco nodded brusquely to the others, saluting the Prince. "Prince Juan," he said with a smile, "it is a pleasure to see you on Spanish soil again." The prince nodded gravely, but said nothing, in keeping with his station. Canaris spoke for him, because the unholy agreement which had brought them all together was largely his work. "General. We had an agreement... which, incidentally, cost us a national hero." Franco spread his hands. "How were we to know that General Schleicher was flying with him?" he asked rhetorically. Cunningham, not as fluent in Spanish as either of the others, looked back and forth, unsure of what they spoke.
"Nevertheless - we did our part, General," Canaris stated flatly. "Now - Admiral Cunningham has been excellent enough to provide the Prince passage to your shores. I wish to hear your word, as an officer, that you will instate him in his rightful place on his father's death." His hand slipped into his coat for a moment before settling at his side. "Of course, Capitan. I promise you, at the right time, Prince Juan will be made king." Canaris smiled wolfishly, lifting the object from his pocket - a small recorder. "Excellent, General." Franco paled, eyes bulging with anger as Canaris bowed to the prince. "Highness, I hope that this meeting proves as fruitful for you as it has for us. Admiral, may I offer you a ride back to Gibraltar?" The last exchange was in English, and the prince smiled, offering Canaris a hand. "Of course, Captain - and it is very good to be home." Cunningham shrugged, raising an eyebrow. "Of course, old boy, and if I may, what was that bit about a hero?"
"Sometimes," Canaris replied slowly, "the less you know, the better you sleep, Admiral."
Cartagena, Spain (Contested Territory)
15 February 1937
Johann Volkmann yawned, stretched out on the engine deck of his Panzer IIc. It was a mild day, perfect as far as Johann was concerned for doing absolutely nothing - not that the Condor Legion ever agreed particularly with his assessment. He had had the misfortune of being assigned to Eicke's battalion with the new armored platoon; they had spent the first week he was here just trying to find Theodor Eicke, who seemed to have attached himself to the Spanish Foreign Legion. He expected he would never get the sound of their calls of "¡Viva la muerte!" out of his head, and Eicke had indulged them shamelessly: For a bunch of Papists, they're not half bad, the bull-headed former NCO had growled on more than one occasion.
Eicke had two major disadvantages, as far as Volkmann was concerned. First, his idea of sophisticated tactics was to make a headlong assault from two directions at once. Second, he had decided to make Johann's life hell the moment he heard that the young tanker was a Lichterfelde graduate. As a result, rather than the find-fix-kill mantra ingrained in Johann by Guderian, it was an endless round of up and at them, unless you're too fucking busy hemming your skirt, Volkmann! As a result, they had put perhaps a year's worth of wear on their tanks with inadequate maintenance facilities, fired a year's worth of rounds, and achieved what Johann suspected was an hour's worth of actual fighting, mostly to chase down villagers who scattered before their tanks. Rumor had it that the Soviets had slipped in some of their tanks for testing, same as the Reich, but there was no real evidence for that as far as Johann could see. The Nationalists had pretty much mopped the floor with the Republicans, Soviet aid or no, and the world had essentially turned a blind eye to German intervention after Schleicher's death.
Mueller, his driver, was idly picking mud out of the treads, enjoying a few minutes out of the tank, when a runner came up. "Hauptmann Eicke's compliments, sir," the runner said breathlessly, "and Coronel Yagüe says that the Reds're mustering for another attempt at a breakout. He wants you to take your treads forward and see what they're up to." Volkmann sat up, stretching and sketching a salute at the runner. "Tell Eicke that we're moving," he muttered as he slipped into the commander's hatch. Mueller was shortly behind him, and their third, Gustafsen, a big Schleswiger, wormed his way uncomfortably into the loader's seat. Volkmann stood upright in the cupola, cupping his hands to yell to the rest of the platoon. "Hey! Saddle up!" he roared in a passable parade-ground voice. "The Old Man wants us to scare the Reds again!" Mutters, grumbling, and even a couple chuckles greeted him in reply, and he saw his crews go from engines-cold to formed up behind him in ten minutes, a creditable time all told.
The five light tanks slipped forward of Eicke's pickets, careful to keep a low rise to the south between them and the Reds. As Guderian had drilled into them, they rode unbuttoned, the commanders' heads swiveling intently. He knew they had a dust plume behind them, and it was near impossible to stay stealthy in an armored vehicle, but he saw no point in exposing them before he had to. Finally, eight hundred meters forward of Eicke's encampment, he raised a hand, the tanks rumbling to a halt behind him. He scrambled down off his tank, binoculars in hand, and crawled to the top of the ridge to take a look at the Red positions. All seemed quiet enough until he swept his glance over the village that provided the Red bivouac in the area; he could see a shape over the low town wall that he had not seen before.
Shit, he thought grimly, I was wrong. Well... we're here now, see what we can do about it... He skidded back down to the waiting platoon and pulled his headseat on, flipping to the platoon net rather than the intercom. "All right, boys. There are a minimum of three Red tanks in that town. Anybody who slept through the briefing, that's a Red platoon, which probably means Russians... which if we're lucky means they're already fairly well lit. After all, it's after noon." He got a dutiful chuckle from the other tank commanders before continuing. "I figure we have exactly one shot per gun before they get moving, so... wheel left in place, traverse turrets to the rear, and reverse up the slope 'til you can sight in. Make your shots count, then roll for our lines fast as you can. Range is... three-fifty, tops. Good luck. Volkmann out."
With that, he traversed his turret around until it faced back over the engine deck, ducking down only so far as needed to sight the gun, guiding Mueller with a nudge from his boot every now and then to signal that he could proceed. The turret finally broke the ridgeline, exposing him to the Reds. He took one deep breath, sighting the gun one last time and praying for the seam between turret and hull. He glanced along the line one last time, then gritted his teeth as they came into position. All right - all in, Hans, here we go. He yanked the trigger back, the breechblock jumping past him and opening to expose the casing. Gustafsen jerked the casing loose, working smoothly to slot another 20mm round; Johann ignored him to focus on the target. He had missed the joint, but lucked out: clean silver metal showed around the driver's hatch, and he could see a hole where no hole should have been. He kicked Mueller viciously, and the tank sped down the slope, Johann pumping his fist in the air and howling triumphantly.
The howl was short-lived; one of his tanks threw a tread in its hull-down position, and his head was still out moments later when he saw the turret blossom orange as the Reds returned fire. The turret, Obergefrieter Lautner presumably still in it, tumbled in midair before landing with a thud on the ridge face. Ashen, Johann saw the effects of the Soviet guns on the turret: a penetrating hit on the front side, and an exit wound on the rear of the turret. The shot had passed clean through the turret while they were loading, setting off the round in the loader's hands. With an explosion like that in the crew compartment, not to mention the resulting spalling, there would be no survivors. He hoped Lautner and his two crew had died quickly; anything else was too horrible to contemplate.
The other four tanks scurried down the slope until Johann again kicked Mueller, yelling into the intercom, "We're not leaving them out there, damn it!" The Panzer II reluctantly slewed around, Johann breathing heavily, awaiting the inevitable Red rush over the ridge. He did not have long to wait. "Action front!" he yelled into the radio again, instinctively sighting as one of the Red tanks breached and jerking the lever. Gustafsen responded exactly as he should, and he was rewarded with the results of a penetrating hit to the Soviet tank's relatively delicate underside. The Red machine brewed up completely, a ball of angry black, orange, and red that its crew, too, could never escape. He smiled savagely, the Panzer backing away from the remaining Red tank as its turret traversed toward him. He was doomed, and knew it, watching with sick fascination as the barrel's aspect ratio shortened, that black muzzle calling him.
Two shots struck the Red tank on its sloped glacis plate, sparking along its armor and leaving long streaks of bare metal, but not penetrating the steel. They did what Johann himself could not, and distracted the Red gunner. He felt the hot wave of the shot not three meters from his head before it arced on to bury itself in the soil and explode harmlessly. Without consciously sighting the gun, he returned fire, banging at the Red tank with the twenty-mil and the coaxial MG34, though from this angle a penetrating hit with the main gun was unlikely - which was horrifying enough by itself, but he could contemplate that later.
Eventually, the Red crew piled out of their tank, abandoning it on the field alongside wreckage of Lautner's and their own man's. Johann, breathing hard, collapsed down into his seat. Mueller opened his hatch, taking a deep breath before he rubbed his bruised shoulder. "We did it, sir," he said in apparent surprise. Johann just nodded numbly. Lautner.
---
KMS Hindenburg
Between Minorca and Denia, Mediterranean Sea
18 February 1937
The Reds were doomed, and everyone in Spain knew it. Thus, the British Battlecruiser Squadron and the German Mediterranean Squadron had engaged in unofficial exercises together, Canaris and Cunningham trading jokes, though the atmosphere had cooled significantly between the two when the Germans had run the Sultan to Greece. Cunningham had bitterly called it "another sealed train," and the suspected presence of German and Italian submarines in these waters had made the British very leery. Today, therefore, Hindenburg was alone, more or less, escorted by Deutschland and Admiral Scheer. Carefully nestled between the three ships were two submarines, U-33 and U-34. The four other captains were aboard the Hindenburg for a celebratory dinner. Grosse, of U-34, had an especially interesting story.
"Hell of a thing," he was explaining, positioning knives and forks to demonstrate the story. "Here we were, see, about eight klicks off Malaga, running at periscope depth, when along comes this Spanish boat. We figured we had maybe one chance at this... after the disaster with that cruiser..." He shot a look at Freiwald, the captain of U-33 and one of the most experienced submarine captains in the fleet. Freiwald raised an eyebrow and nodded. "That cruiser... Cervantes, I think? Anyway, should've been on the bottom, but... we had a dud. Two hits, though." He smiled grimly. "Enough to hole her, just not sink her." Grosse nodded before resuming his story. "Anyway. We'd been seeing naval traffic out of Malaga all winter, Kurt here even had what he would have sworn was their big battleship just sail right in front of him, no clue he was there, just no way out of their screen. Finally we spot one of their C-class boats, just a few days ago. So I line up..." He repositioned cutlery as Canaris and his officers listened with varying degrees of interest, highest with Canaris himself. "There are Spanish patrol boats here and here, and you can see the coast over here. It's going to be a hard shot, and no mistake, and we only had one shot, because of all the watchers. So here we go... about fourteen-hundred, we're just at periscope depth when I tell 'em 'Aale los,' then pull the 'scope down quick as we can!" He looked around, wide-eyed. "I figured they'd see the tracks and I wanted to run while I could, so we sprinted clear. We waited ten minutes... I was sure it was a dud! Turned out," he grinned, "Turned out we'd masked the explosion with our escape run. Hydrophone chief hands me his headphones, and we have a kill. FINALLY."
As Canaris went to compliment him on the difficult shot - the knives had made clear the angle was nigh-on impossible based on his experience - the general-quarters klaxon sounded. Immediately, on deck, the crews scrambled to launch aircraft while the two adjoining U-boats dove with neither officers nor captains - all were in Canaris's wardroom. Peter Volkmann made his apologies to the table and sprinted clear, headed for the hangar and his Stuka, where Vogt was already wrestling his machine gun into its pintle mount. "Took you long enough," Vogt grunted. Peter ignored him until the canopy was forward. "Vogt, what happened?" he asked as he plugged into the intercom.
"Two big twin Tupolevs sighted, ETA about... uh... now." As if to emphasize Vogt's report, the Hindenburg shuddered and rolled. Though Peter had no way of knowing it based on his experience, they had been lucky - the bombers at high altitude had missed them completely, though a bomb had struck the Deutschland's Anton turret. Peter heard the orders flying out over the radio and could see it in his head - Arado fighters leaping off the deck, chasing skyward to try to bring down the bombers before they could reach the safety of land. The mere fact that they had tried to bomb the German squadron was a clear Parthian shot as the Republican side of the war collapsed.
Within minutes, a voice came over the radio. "Volkmann. My quarters with your operations man. Now." It was unmistakably Canaris's voice, and it was as hard and sharp as Peter had ever heard. Peter sighed, dismounting from the aircraft, still in his formal dining uniform, and made his way back to the disturbed dinner, bringing Leutnant von Gosse, the operations officer, with him. The stewards had already cleared the table and Canaris had brought the charts of the Spanish coast by the time they reached him. "Where," he was asking the U-boat captains quietly, "would you kick him if you wanted him to hurt?" Wordlessly, Freiwald pointed at the stretch of coast from Malaga to Almeria, and Grosse nodded. "Anywhere in there. They keep their ships bottled up at Malaga, but that's probably closed to you." Canaris, eyes blazing, turned to Peter. "Volkmann. You are hereby ordered, on my authority, to launch a continuous operation against the Spanish coast engaging anything that moves, and if you find yourself loaded up with no moving targets, bomb anything that stands. If you can't find something still standing, bomb 'em 'til the rubble jumps." He swallowed, growling, "They have seventeen dead on the Deutschland. Their A turret's going to be out until they can get back to Kiel. Make 'em pay, Peter."
For seventy-two hours, the coast of Spain was subject to continuous attack from German dive bombers. Escorted by their Arado biplanes, Peter's Stukas flew a sortie every four hours around the clock. Miraculously, they lost not a single pilot - though perhaps that was because both Gibraltar and Seville were left open to them as emergency landing fields. Cunningham's earlier hostility vanished in the cloud of smoke over the Deutschland, which laid her dead to rest at Gibraltar in the British military cemetery there. They only stopped when Canaris came down to see them in their ready room, looking more than half-dead with the remnants of three days' worth of hurriedly slopped down meals across the fronts of their uniforms. "My God!" he exclaimed, quickly putting the projector screen away, "have any of you slept?"
Peter muttered something that not even he thought were truly words. The true answer was that they had been so active that the squadron could communicate with nothing but wing wags and subtle variations in propeller speed. "That's it," Canaris announced with some finality, "the lot of you are grounded."
The effect on Almeria was terrifying; the world press cried out against the "terror bombing" of Almeria, but Luftwaffe planners took note of the terrible effect of shuttle bombing, even by such a small number of bombers. Within twenty-four hours of Canaris grounding them for their own safety, the city of Almeria threw its gates open to Franco, the delegation pleading merely that the Nationalists pass them by and leave them in what was left of their city. Franco magnanimously agreed; he had a clandestine meeting north of town with four men, of whom three spoke fluent Spanish and one was finally picking up the rudiments.
Admiral Cunningham looked decidedly uncomfortable at being on Spanish soil, but his presence was required as the official commander of the blockade squadron and the highest-ranking British officer in the region. Canaris looked haggard but triumphant, his personal plot apparently successful. Peter Volkmann was still exhausted, and spent most of the meeting sleeping in the Stork's cockpit, stretched out across its seats with his jacket thrown over him. The final participant was Juan, Principe de Asturias, son of Alphonso XIII, the last reigning king of Spain.
Franco nodded brusquely to the others, saluting the Prince. "Prince Juan," he said with a smile, "it is a pleasure to see you on Spanish soil again." The prince nodded gravely, but said nothing, in keeping with his station. Canaris spoke for him, because the unholy agreement which had brought them all together was largely his work. "General. We had an agreement... which, incidentally, cost us a national hero." Franco spread his hands. "How were we to know that General Schleicher was flying with him?" he asked rhetorically. Cunningham, not as fluent in Spanish as either of the others, looked back and forth, unsure of what they spoke.
"Nevertheless - we did our part, General," Canaris stated flatly. "Now - Admiral Cunningham has been excellent enough to provide the Prince passage to your shores. I wish to hear your word, as an officer, that you will instate him in his rightful place on his father's death." His hand slipped into his coat for a moment before settling at his side. "Of course, Capitan. I promise you, at the right time, Prince Juan will be made king." Canaris smiled wolfishly, lifting the object from his pocket - a small recorder. "Excellent, General." Franco paled, eyes bulging with anger as Canaris bowed to the prince. "Highness, I hope that this meeting proves as fruitful for you as it has for us. Admiral, may I offer you a ride back to Gibraltar?" The last exchange was in English, and the prince smiled, offering Canaris a hand. "Of course, Captain - and it is very good to be home." Cunningham shrugged, raising an eyebrow. "Of course, old boy, and if I may, what was that bit about a hero?"
"Sometimes," Canaris replied slowly, "the less you know, the better you sleep, Admiral."
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