Siegerkranz - Germany's Place in the Sun

94. Stalin Acts

Meeting Chambers of the Presidium
Grand Kremlin Palace
Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
7 May 1944

Normally, meetings of the Soviet Union's legislative body were sparsely attended at best; deputies with real power were always elsewhere exercising it. Today, there could be no mistaking Stalin's will. The chamber was filled to capacity and beyond, Pravda reporters and photographers crammed in every space not occupied by a somber-suited deputy or a brown-coated soldier. The soldiers' presence after what felt like thirty years of professional exile raised more than a few eyebrows; just five years ago, many of these men would only have appeared in this chamber if on trial for their lives. Some of them had in fact done so. Their continued survival was nothing short of miraculous, yet most of those men looked troubled rather than relieved.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin mounted the rostrum in quick, decisive steps, masking the shaking of his hands. Kalinin was an increasingly elderly man with a wise-looking, grandfatherly face that concealed a complete irresolution and a lack of any thoughts greater than what had to be done to survive Stalin's whims. He adjusted his glasses and glanced down at the speech which had been prepared for him, wondering still at Stalin's choice of him to deliver it. Normally he would have used Vyacheslav Mikhailovich for something like this, especially since Molotov was Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Did this perhaps mean a rise in his own star in Stalin's eyes? He coughed, covering his mouth and glancing around to see if anyone noticed the momentary imperfection; they were too busy in their own conversations. "Comrades!" the sergeant-at-arms boomed with lungs apparently re-purposed from a smith's bellows. "The Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet!"


Kalinin adjusted his glasses once more, glancing upward at the deputies. "Comrades. We have watched events to the west with great concern. We have seen the reactionary German regime first suppress the workers and people of that country, then work against the flow of history and call for a return of their precious Kaiser. These imperialists, not satisfied with oppressing their own people, chose to impose their will on the people of Poland, through no greater provocation than that a Pole chose to attempt to release the German people from their reactionary shackles! After this imposition, of course the imperialist-reactionary kleptocrats in Berlin have installed as their chosen puppet a German as so-called 'king' of Poland.

"To this, we respond: Never! Never shall we sit idly by while a nation is oppressed beneath a corrupt, German-imposed regime of imperialism and repression! Never shall we stand while our neighbors are plunderde for the benefit of a foreign occupier! Never, never, never!" Kalinin's fist struck the podium on each 'never,' and the delegates began to applaud. He gave a small, prim smile, adjusting his glasses once more before he continued. "Therefore, effective immediately, the Workers and People of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are at war with the counterrevolutionary-reactionist German puppet government of Poland."

Stunned silence greeted this last statement. It had been expected that Kalinin would make some sort of speech in reaction to ongoing German provocations; just the week prior, Stalin had given him an order to arrest every priest and monk remaining free in the Soviet Union. He had signed, and even as he spoke, he was quite certain that the Chekists were doing their duty in protecting the people from the dangerous counterrevolutionary saboteurs in robes and miters. That was all well and good, but this business of agressive war against the reactionaries was borderline Trotskyism! Comrade Stalin had long ago decreed that the Soviet Union must become a workers' paradise before the revolution could be exported, and Comrade Lenin before him.


Perhaps most stunned of all was Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Schulenburg had spent a decade in Moscow, continuously working to keep German-Soviet relations friendly despite the Kaiser's distaste for the Bolsheviks. He had thought that the rhetoric on the German side had become a trifle heated, even if he privately agreed with the Crown Prince regarding Stalin's treatment of religion in general. To have the entire thing blow up in his face, and to have the blow delivered by Kalinin of all people, was simply crushing. "What have we done to deserve this?" he whispered as he listened to the speech on the radio; he could hear the Chekist sirens already approaching the embassy, and the Foot Guards detachment burst into the room with weapons drawn to hustle him to a car. With any luck they could make the airport and escape Russia before word reached them; being an enemy alien in Stalin's hands would be a nightmare indeed, especially for a former officer of the Georgian Legion.


Some of the delegates looked at each other uneasily, others cheered thunderously after a moment's hesitation. One of the leading voices in the cheers was Nikita Khruschev. This war promised an opportunity to unify the Ukraine, after all - take back Lviv and bring the entirety of the Ukrainian people under one flag for the first time in hundreds of years, under Comrade Stalin's glorious leadership! Among the doubters was a dour-faced, steel-jawed major-general. Konstantin Rokossovsky was literally steel-jawed; his teeth had been replaced with stainless steel after an arrest in the Purge. He too was tied to the Ukraine, commanding an armored division west of Kiev, and had come aboard the same train as Khruschev. If anyone here were to feel strongly about liberating Poland, it should be the man born Konstanti Ksawerowicz, but he had seen what Comrade Stalin had done to the Red Army... had, in fact, felt it in his bones, quite literally. He had no illusions about the soft-voiced man that all Russia viewed as a friendly uncle, down there behind Kalinin on the rostrum. Rokossovsky looked around, growling under his breath, "This will end badly," even as his hands chafed from the constant clapping.


On the rostrum behind Kalinin, the stoutly-built man who had orchestrated this entire affair nodded, raising a hand in acknowledgement of the applause and stroking his moustache. He had no doubt whatsoever that the valiant Red Army would steamroller to the west and be in Warsaw in weeks, Berlin before the harvest, and perhaps Paris before the new year. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin would show these Prussian lapdogs who would win in the great trial for the soul of Europe. Europe, and the world, would be remade - in his image, not the Kaiser's.


In Berlin, a messenger burst in upon the Kaiser as he enjoyed a lunch with Marshal Bock. White-faced, the messenger bowed and gasped out his report: "All-Highest, the Reds have declared war!" Wilhelm started, glancing around in apparent confusion. Bock, straight-backed as ever, raised his fork to his mouth before setting it down, daubing his mouth with a napkin, and, voice mildly amused, commenting, "Shall we celebrate the coronation from the Kremlin, Majesty?"

Well, the messed-up thing here was that on 5 May, I had decided not to invade Russia because I took a look at the border and was outnumbered three-to-one. Then Uncle Joe declared war on me. Wilhelm's reaction is basically mine. "Wait, what?"

And the Geschichte was a special case - I mean, a seven-month Kiev-to-Vladivostok Barbarossa... I'm not even absolutely certain that'd be possible for a rail journey given that the Germans would have had to tear up the tracks and put down standard-gauge tracks instead. Given that the first units into Vladivostok marched there (Ringel's parachutists; that was/is a fun game when it moves), I really don't see how it could possibly have worked in real life.

As for Father Winter - he was the Russians' best general, but he arrived rather late to the field. A May start and a very broad front gives Germany an edge like you wouldn't believe.

And Trekkie, I bet Zhukov's remains came close to vibrating down the Kremlin wall, they were spinning so fast...

Next up: The Hausser-Manstein Plan, Rommel in Baku, the return of SMS Goeben, and Guderian of Samarkand.

95. The Hausser-Manstein Plan: An Overview

Germany's war aims at the beginning of the Soviet War were surprisingly limited, compared to the war aims in the west. This was in part due to the nature of the enemy, in part due to the distances involved.

First, the Red Army itself numbered approximately twice the size of the combined Allied army from the assassination of Ernst vom Rath to the signature of the Treaty of Wilhelmshaven. This force was largely strung along the USSR's western frontier, though there were large components in the Caucasus and along the Finnish border, and a few divisions scattered elsewhere along the Asiatic borders. Compared to this, the Reichswehr was stronger than it had been in 1941, but not twice the numeric strength, and it was difficult to assess the effect which new weapons like the Panther, the MKb 43, and the Me 262 would have in Russia.

Certainly, there was no contest at sea, as with Britain: the Soviet navy consisted of three pre-Great War dreadnoughts and a handful of cruisers, backed up by a submarine fleet as primitive and as numerous as that Germany had fielded in 1939, before the great Type IX production boom. If the Soviet fleet put to sea, the Kaiserliche Marine would smash it in a matter of minutes from the first detection thanks to an overwhelming naval air superiority, and if the Soviet fleet failed to put to sea, they would sink them in port. Raeder was so thoroughly convinced of this that upon the declaration of war, he ordered only a partial deployment, with only the ships in the Baltic mobilizing to reassure the European powers.

In the air, at least on paper, the contest was much closer to even. The Red Air Force outnumbered the Luftwaffe by a factor of ten, but only a quarter of those aircraft were flight-ready at any given moment. The situation was strained further by the fact that the Luftwaffe pilots were either veterans, or trained by veterans of the West, and the aircraft they flew had either proven to be superior to their opponents there, or had been rapidly replaced as soon as they were found wanting. There were two components of the Luftwaffe that had not yet been tested - the new jets, which had begun deployment along the Baltic front under the influence of Adolf Galland, and the long-range bomber force, specifically designed for war against the Soviets. These two would combine on 8 May to produce one of the most dramatic, if least effective in terms of damage, aerial attacks in history, when Galland's jets performed a fighter sweep over the Minsk-Smolensk corridor to clear the skies for a flight of four He 277 bombers. These four bombers, led by Major Carl Francke and in constant radio contact with General Wever in Berlin, bombed the heart of Moscow itself in broad daylight, well above the Soviet anti-air guns' effective range. Their bombs were ineffective, but the presence of German bombers over Moscow in any strength shook even Stalin's convictions that the war would be a walk-over.

Ironically, it was on the ground that there were the greatest misgivings. The German military governor in Poland, General von Manstein, was viewed as one of the army's leading strategists, and had deep reservations about fighting in Russia. He had been wounded in Poland early in the Great War, and had been kept thoroughly informed on the status of the Red Army on the eastern border of the German-occupied strip of east Poland. Manstein knew that, nominally at least, the Red Army fielded as many armored divisions as the German army fielded divisions, and they were concentrated here in western Russia. Engaging and destroying those divisions would be one of the prime goals of the Kaiserliches Heer.

Second would be the reduction of the Soviet Union's capacity to replace them. This would be problematic; much of Soviet industry was far out of foreseeable German reach. However, a quick, decisive blow to Soviet industry could be dealt by taking Kiev and advancing southeast along the Dnieper. This "sleeve brush" would both give the Germans a defensible front and likely allow further operations into the Don Basin beyond. Manstein proposed this plan to Brauchitsch while the Chief of Staff was in Lwow to recover from a heart attack; Brauchitsch examined the plans critically and asked why the limited offensive into Russia rather than the vast, sweeping maneuvers Manstein had proposed in France. Manstein candidly admitted that he could not predict the future beyond this point, and the area he proposed to occupy was roughly the same as the area conceded by Petain in France. Past this, he explained, was simply daydreaming without better information in general about anything east of the Dnieper.

A separate campaign in the Caucasus would contribute to this crippling of Soviet industry. This campaign, nominally waged by Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge, but in truth fought by his ambitious subordinate Rommel with extensive aid from the Suez garrison under Busch, was mainly political in nature. It was supposed to exercise the Sultan's claims on the Caucasus region, but a goal of the campaign beyond feeding the bloated Ottoman Empire was the capture of the Soviet oil hub at Baku. Busch's troops, outfitted for summer in Africa, would make poor mountaineers, but they were among the Kaiser's best infantry, operating under a plan conceived by an expert in mountain warfare who himself was partially handicapped by his own command's emphasis on armor. The two forces would largely balance each other out.

The third strategic goal was the breaking of the Soviet will to fight. Broadly speaking, the army leadership believed this would require the capture of Leningrad - still labeled St. Petersburg on the Kaiser's own map - or Moscow at the very least. The quickest path to approach these was through the remaining Baltic states. While this would be a blatant violation of these states' neutrality, German doctrine had cast that particular concern to the winds as early as 1914, and there was no European power which would both care and put up an effective resistance. This operation was left to Generalfeldmarschall Paul Hausser, who had fought over some of this ground in the 1939 Polish war, with the additional fillip of a planned parachute assault outside of Leningrad to secure the southern approaches to that city. Hausser inspected the situation throughout this sector and pronounced the plan feasible; even if the Reds stopped them before Leningrad, he expected that he would be able to deliver a strong hook to the Soviet forces arrayed along the Baltic border and crush the Red Army in the field between Moscow and Minsk.

Brauchitsch approved both of these plans, with the caveat that a strike along the Baltic coast would create a huge salient around the Pripet Marshes, and a brush down the Dnieper would leave Kiev exposed to a counterattack from this same salient. Therefore, forces rushing eastward from Germany would disperse around Minsk, with the goal of encircling that fortress-city and starving out its defenders, piercing the Soviet line, and bypassing the hard-to-reach Pripet region until infantry forces could be brought up to subdue the area. Manstein's follow-on forces would do the same from the south, with the goal of a link-up around Chernobyl to isolate the marshes. Brauchitsch was troubled by the probability that the Soviets might try a breakout from the marsh, but when he brought such suspicions to Bock, the Marshal replied with a crooked smile, "Of course they will. When they do, we'll kill them where they stand."

The last major German offensive of summer 1944 was aimed in a completely different direction: Samarkand. This desert strike was the brainchild of Heinz Guderian, and served little or no strategic purpose. The only reason that the Bendlerblock approved the plan was because it opened a third front against the Soviets that would be completely supplied from the vast petroleum reserves of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, in fact, supported this plan enthusiastically; the painfully young Vizier, Nihal Atsiz, was a rabid pan-Turkist, and saw the acquisition of the central-Asian republics of the USSR as the last logical step in the completion of the Sultan's domains. In private, Guderian was frank about his goals. He simply wished to be away from what he saw as the overly cautious, dead-handed guidance of Günther von Kluge. "Just because he took Karachi," Guderian explained during a staff dinner, "he thinks he's Alexander the Great! Why, if he were Alexander, he would have stopped in Delhi at the earliest, and damn the supply lines!"

The result of Guderian's philosophy was that every single halftrack and truck available and not designated as a troop carrier was hauling fuel, rations, and ammunition. If it was conceivably useless - such as winter clothing in the central Asian summer - it was left behind with the Persian garrisons. "Attack now, supply later" became almost as fixed a mantra in Guderian's forces as "find-fix-kill."

A number of subsidiary operations, of little strategic impact but huge moral significance, happened more or less simultaneously; perhaps the most noteworthy of these was the participation of the elderly Admiral Wilhelm Souchon as the flag officer responsible for the return of the Turkish flagship Yavuz Sultan Selim, once SMS Goeben, to the Turks. The Goeben, still referred to thus by the German navy when no Turkish officers were present, sailed to the port of Constanta on the Black Sea coast for a brief stop before sailing north toward Sevastopol.

While the exact circumstances of operations before Sevastopol remained classified post-war, Souchon returned to Istanbul with a broom tied to his masthead a week after the declaration of war.

Enewald said:

How about problems of not having enough trains and right sized rails?
All plans shall fail with time.

Click to expand...

Not fail so much as stall. Things bog down considerably by winter. Did you know that attacking Irkutsk in winter on foot is a really bad idea?

Kurt_Steiner said:

Me likes that not...


That sentence makes me feel uncanningly odd.

Click to expand...

Well yeah, because the sentence you clipped makes no sense at all. The full sentences, which are:

If it was conceivably useless - such as winter clothing in the central Asian summer - it was left behind with the Persian garrisons. "Attack now, supply later" became almost as fixed a mantra in Guderian's forces as "find-fix-kill."

Click to expand...

... make a lot more sense.

TrekAddict - In that case you'll probably like the next update, which is why the Goeben's operations are classified.

FlyingDutchie - As I recall, Rundstedt is one of the huge concentration of generals in the Polish Strip, and Leeb is the Hungarian equivalent of Kluge: the German officer who's sent to keep the allies' nerves up. I do seem to use Paul Hausser a lot in my games (Hauptgruppenführer and War Minister Hausser there, Generalfeldmarschall Hausser here...), which is odd, because he's not the best German armored general in the game (though he's arguably the best German armored corps commander given that he starts off as a Lieutenant General).

96. The Gates of Sevastopol


Flag Bridge, SMS Goeben
50 Kilometers South of Sevastopol
11 May 1944

Wilhelm Souchon had been in these waters before, aboard this very ship. Now white-haired and somewhat stooped, he paced the flag bridge of his old flagship and ran his hands once more across the brass fixtures. It seemed just yesterday that he had sailed against the Russians - Whites in those days, of course - and fought their battleships Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperatrisa Ekaterina Velikaya to a standstill. He still thought the Russians should have sunk Goeben half a dozen times, but they simply lacked nerve.

Nerve, Souchon thought, was a quality he himself had in abundance, without either excessive pride nor false modesty. Nerve had gotten the Mittelmeerschwadron from the Western Mediterranean to Istanbul, and nerve had seen him through four years of war without ever a proper opportunity to get his ships repaired or even cleaned, most of the time wearing a fez and speaking that incomprehensible Turkish gobbledygook. It had been enough to carry him through the Great War.

It had also made a hero of him, a symbol, and when Papen had decided to refurbish the Yavuz Sultan Selim, the symbol had been needed again. Raeder had approached him in considerable embarrassment - Raeder, Hipper's chief of staff, now carrying a baton! - to ask him to take what should have been a purely ceremonial role. Instead, Vizeadmiral Wilhelm Souchon, still thick-necked and combative despite his eighty years, was once more before Sevastopol, and in German uniform no less. Just as well. The fez had never suited him.

He snorted in amusement at the brief memory of the exchange in Constanta that had led to a crew of sailors swinging over the side to mark over every trace of Yavuz Sultan Selim and re-paint, mere weeks after the last change, Goeben. A young man, probably not even old enough to have children, in the uniform of a Heer Hauptmann with a half-dozen ridiculous-looking bands on his sleeve and the Pour le Merite around his neck, had quietly, stubbornly insisted that every aspect of the ship be German. "I must insist, sir," the man - Völcker? Vogel? Something like that, anyway - had said. "If we are to complete this operation, we must do it in German uniform, from a German ship." He had been quietly insistent, a bit priggish, actually, but the argument ran basically that to launch an operation like this from a Turkish vessel would get them shot as spies or mercenaries if it went wrong. Personally, Souchon thought that it was just as likely the Reds would shoot them as spies anyway if it went wrong, and that was if they were lucky enough to make it to shore.

He turned eastward, toward the sunrise, and inhaled deeply, simply happy to be at sea once more, and aboard the Goeben at that.

"No word from the Seeschweine?" he asked the signal lieutenant on duty, who shook his head, hand clamped over a headphone. "No, sir," the man replied quietly, and Souchon returned to his reverie. If this failed to work, it would certainly draw out the Parizhskaya Kommuna, and if that happened... his hand tightened on the brass railing, smiling in anticipation. If that happened, he'd get another shot at sinking a Russian battleship.

---

Wilhelm Volkmann was cramped, encased in darkness, and wet from the inevitable leaks in the imperfect seal of the Seeschwein cockpit. Behind him was a perpetually cheerful Oberleutnant zur See named Steinbrenner, who had been a private at Westerplatte and one of the demolition-clearing officers the fleet had sent to the Dutch waterfronts. Steinbrenner was a clear improvement over Skorzeny - when they had met, Steinbrenner had loudly bet anyone aboard the Goeben that he could dive off one side, swim under the ship in Constanta harbor, and come back up the anchor-chain on the other side. Wilhelm had thought it one more tiresome stunt by one more tiresome adrenaline addict, but a gunnery lieutenant had foolishly taken the bet, only to have to pass over a ten-mark note. Steinbrenner had used the money to buy the man a bottle of thoroughly illegal vodka, since Constanta was technically the Sultan's. Skorzeny would probably have pocketed it with a knowing wink, which set the two apart in Wilhelm's mind.

The 'pig's' cockpit was near completely dark at this depth, only faint light filtering in through the silty waters off Sevastopol, and they navigated by a miner's headlamp and an infantryman's pocket compass guided by a laminated square of fleet-issue navigational chart. The air, such as remained in the capsule, was terribly stale, for they had been breathing the same closetful of air for the past eight hours, a mind-numbingly long ride in the dark. They were finally almost on the objective.

Four 'pigs' were in the water, though Wilhelm had only the faintest idea where they were. He had elected for the deep route, suspecting that the Russians would think the bottom of the channel up Sevastopol's harbor too difficult to navigate to be worth covering with netting. He could only hope that the others did not trigger an alarm. His eyes closed momentarily, and then Steinbrenner angrily punched him in the shoulder. Their air was becoming dangerously stale; they could perhaps flush it with the snorkel, but that was a dangerous course, especially this close to Sevastopol. Nothing for it but one of the pills. With more than a bit of trepidation, he popped one of the benzedrine tablets.

Within seconds, he felt the rush through his system, eyes popping wide. He felt invincible, sure this mission would work, and impatient to close with the Russians. The submarine sped up at his urging, foot pressed down against the car-like accelerator, and he heard Steinbrenner's slightly slurred query. "Where's the fire, Volkmann?" He glanced back, spending precious air on a joke. "Next time they're looking for a man who speaks Magyar, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish and can drive one of these, remind me to shut up." Steinbrenner's red-rimmed eyes blinked and he snorted. "Crazy damn jumper," he replied with a grin, looking like some sort of demonic Old Believer in the dim light with his black rubberized rebreather bag under his chin. "Make for ten meters," Steinbrenner said, glancing at the chart again. "Straight up the channel, markings say there are rocks to port." Wilhelm grunted in acknowledgement, and the 'pig' came up to that depth. The air hissed around them as presure relaxed somewhat. Ironically, it did nothing to expel water as the air escaped; it just let out more air. Diving would be problematic.

Steinbrenner stayed silent, subdued, as they crept along the bottom, the shadowy rocks to their left confirming the charts. At this depth, there was much more light, and the miner's lamp became a hindrance, so it was extinguished. The submersible worked past the sleeping outer guns of Sevastopol, past the harbor guards, watching for surface or air attack after the world's shock at Scapa Flow. Ironically, a submarine, especially a tiny two-man submarine, was the last thing expected from the country which had given the world unrestricted submarine warfare.


They came closer to the surface, the periscope barely breaking the surface. Within the throat of the Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, there was little of the turbulence of the Black Sea; the water barely had enough waves to conceal their arrival. Thus, they stayed surfaced only long enough to get bearings. There was the Parizhskaya Kommuna, moored dead-center of the anchorage. Amazingly, the Soviet sailors had not thought to post rowing guards around the ship, and the handful of marines standing sentry on the deck looked bored and out-of-place. There was absolutely no expectation that the battleship was threatened from below.

The submersible settled on the bottom directly below the battleship, deliberately stern-up so that the all-important propellers would stay clear of bottom sediments. He reached down, pulling on the fish-bowl-thick goggles that had previoulsy hung neglected around his neck and blowing out through the snorkel to ensure that it was clear. It would not do to get out in the water and discover a beetle had lodged in it or somesuch. Satisfied, he glanced back over his shoulder at Steinbrenner and asked superflously, "Ready?" Steinbrenner shrugged, exhaling loudly through the snorkel, and they each undogged the glass dome overhead, letting it slowly hinge open. A stream of small bubbles rippled upward, deliberately opening the canopy with agonizing slowness to keep from producing a single massive rush of air escaping. This was one of the few weaknesses of Tesei's improved submersibles; they were more comfortable and easier to steer, but the cockpit bubble did not vent easily.

The two swimmers each trailed a tether with a set of explosive charges, their only immediate weapons knives strapped to their thighs. Earlier missions such as this had carried spearguns; they had never proved their use, while the knives were still useful tools even if one did not need a weapon. Fifteen meters above, the long black shape of the battleship's hull loomed over them, casting them directly into its shadow. The swimmers kicked powerfully upwards, ascending from the depths toward their target, arms streaming back at their sides.

Wilhelm saw vague movement off to one side; at least one other set of swimmers had made it into the harbor. That was excellent, meaning that at least two sets of charges would make it onto the battleship's hull. Steinbrenner and Volkmann came close to the ship and began to inspect it, breathing evenly into their rebreathers. The Soviet battleship's hull looked solid enough, but closer inspection revealed that the paint was flaking and the ship was starting to rust. This would never happen in German service, Wilhelm mused. If a German ship were in such a state, it was probably in preparation for sinking. In any case, they made their way aft to their chosen targets.

The Russian dreadnoughts of the Gangut class had four shafts, each driven by a British-designed steam turbine. Based on the results of Scapa Flow, the plan was to open the ship's engine spaces to the sea and wreck its propulsion, because it could not then be driven aground and saved. Additional mines would be placed along its below-water spaces, well below the waterline belt but above its keel. They got to work attaching their limpets, a design captured from the British when London fell. They used powerful rare-earth magnets to clamp to the ship's hull, and a slow-dissolving barrier between primer and explosive. The Germans had refined these further by combining the magnets with the additional British innovation of a shaping chamber atop the explosive. When they detonated, the resulting blast would rupture the hull and hopefully wreak havoc on the components of whatever compartment was breached. It was at least as important to wreck the interior as to breach the hull, as chaos inside would make damage control that much harder.

All of this Steinbrenner had drilled into Wilhelm in the week prior aboard the Goeben. His conscious mind reviewed the material as his hands worked to place the explosives, kicking slowly to keep himself more or less in position against the hull. Elsewhere along the ship, other divers worked, one team doing nothing but concentrating their charges against a perceived weak point in the ship's keel around midships. Whether this would have the desired effect, Wilhelm could not predict, but they were outside his and Steinbrenner's mission, to wreck the ship's engine spaces.

Finally they were done, the Black Sea washing away his sweat as he finished working and crawled surface-ward, pressed close to the ship to present the minimum disturbance of its profile. He sucked air through the snorkel and re-filled his rebreather bag while he was close to the surface, looking over in mute question at Steinbrenner. The sailor gave him a thumbs-up and inverted, diving for the Seeschwein. Wilhelm was right behind him, and they reached the submersible, pivoting themselves into the cockpit and tugging it slowly free of the mud. They turned the submersible for the open sea and Wilhelm stepped on the accelerator once more, eager to get away from the bay before the charges blew. For now, they stayed on the rebreathers.

That changed once they were clear of the breakwater at the harbor mouth. Wilhelm reached down and twisted a release near his left knee, flooding the cockpit with air once more as a torpedo tube was flushed between firings. He took one deep, grateful breath, Steinbrenner using his own first gulp of air to comment wryly, "Well, that was fun, let's hope they go off now."

A tremor swept through the submersible, clear proof that the charges had indeed gone off. In Sevastopol harbor, the pre-Great War dreadnought gave a mighty groan, her back broken and her engine compartments flooding rapidly, and began to sink in two pieces. In this shallow water, when she sank, her funnels still protruded above the water, but the Soviet salvage teams immediately realized that the massive ruptures in her bottom meant that she would never be raised again, unlike the Imperatritsa Mariya, which had been blown apart in this very harbor and raised. The Parizhskaya Kommuna was utterly ruined, and with her the hopes of Stalin's Black Sea Fleet.

---

Wilhelm Volkmann and Jakob Steinbrenner were pulled, shivering and still soaked, from their Seeschwein aboard the Goeben, men clapping their backs and cheering enthusiastically. The mission had been a success, and of the four 'pigs,' only one had failed to return. Korvettenkapitän Alfred von Wurzian, another of Tesei's trainees, surveyed the men who came home and nodded in satisfaction. "Hey, Volkmann," he called out, gesturing to the parachutist. "Tell Hippel I said thank you for letting us borrow you."

The divers were a special breed, Volkmann thought, and the fact that they were led by another obscure 'von' was hardly surprising. Wurzian looked like a recruiting poster, with his slicked-back black hair and his swimmer's build, but he was apparently half-frog. He had been the only one to enter his 'pig' in the water, and the last one back into his submersible in the harbor. He smiled at the Navy man and offered his hand. "Absolutely. Thank you for having me along. If you'd care to come to Stendal or Döberitz, we could probably use a cross-training program that doesn't need Italian supervision, eh?"

Wurzian laughed, slapping Wilhelm on the shoulder. "Deal. I'll ask General von Hippel myself. Steinbrenner! When Volkmann goes back to the Army, you're going with him." Steinbrenner looked duly crestfallen to be taken from the sea, but recovered quickly enough: "Well, at least it isn't Turkey."