“Because you have turned to starboard,” said Adler, “right into the wind and everything is blowing across our beam!” The Captain was clearly unhappy.
“Kindly look to port, Mister Adler. A turn in that direction would have put us right across the bow of the Normandie. No, we will come about as I have ordered. If these fires cannot be quickly controlled, then this battle is over. I was not given this ship to see it burned to a blackened hulk. The Fuhrer would never forgive me.”
Down in Anton turret, Axel Faust had felt the blow and knew the ship had taken a hard hit, though he had not seen the rocket attack. His turret was still trained on the British battleships, but no data was coming from Eisenberg or Fuchs.
“Trouble with the gun directors!” he shouted, settling in behind the optical gun sights available in the turret itself for just this contingency. “Elevation twenty, five degrees right. Fire!”
The turret roared, and the men leapt to their evolution, human sinew in the workings of this vast machine. The breech opened, the shell loading bogie slid into position and the massive shell was rammed home. The five seconds for the rammer to return seemed like an eternity to Faust now. The gun had to be moved off elevation while the loading progressed, then elevated again and re-trained with the sighting data. Faust saw the fall of his shells and knew the shot was close enough for rapid fire, but he suddenly felt the ship turning.
“Track right! Five degrees! More… one degree more… Hold! Elevation eighteen point five. Steady… Fire!”
The German ships had turned to disengage, but were still firing, with no damage to their turrets beyond the loss of director control. It was Axel Faust that made the difference now, his well schooled eye at the turret optics making good on the reputation he had earned as the best gunner in the fleet. His last salvo had been right on the mark, and Queen Elizabeth would not survive the hit he scored, with the heavy round plunging in behind the funnel. The ship’s recent refit had improved her deck armor over machinery sites to 2.5 inches, but the 16-inch shell from Hindenburg would penetrate twice that at the range fired, and it gutted the ship, exploding three decks below the point of impact, destroying two more boiler rooms.
Down seven degrees at the bow and still listing, it was now only a matter of time before the ship sunk. Captain Barry knew the worst when his chief of engineers reported that damage from that last hit could not be controlled. A fire had reached ready ammo store for one of the secondary batteries, and a second explosion rocked the heart of the ship. With a heavy heart he signaled all fleet units that he was forced to abandon ship. The crews were ordered to any boat they could deploy, but he knew that many men were going to die here today. Axel Faust had signed their death warrants with the guns of turret Anton.
The heavy missiles off Kazan had done more to turn the action than anything else. A British Harpoon weighed only 691kg with booster, and the GB-7 was in that same class. The Onyx missile was nearly five times heavier and three times as long. The shock and fire they delivered was many times that of the British missile, and the results were plain to see. Both German ships were burning badly and now turning away from the main action.
Strausbourg had been slightly ahead of the Germans, firing with her twin quadruple turrets that were ideal in a pursuit scenario like this. But that ship had been struck twice as well, beneath the forward A turret and again much closer to the bow, which was more lightly armored and was rent asunder by the heavy blow. Her fires were not as bad due to the location of the hits away from the main superstructure, but the damage to the bow was causing severe flooding forward and the ship turned, falling out of the battle.
The cruiser Colbert got the worst of it. At 12,700 long tons she had only 20 % of Hindenburg’s displacement. And no more than 60mm armor on the belt. The two supersonic missiles blasted clean through this, erupted in a massive fireball of ignited fuel and broke the ship in two.
Admiral Laborde watched in horror as Colbert died an agonizing death, well out in front of his ship. The Normandie had been screened by the two German battleships, and thus had not been targeted. His ship had taken one GB-7 hit, a close straddle from Malaya, but his gunners were slowly finding the range with the two forward turrets, and at a little under 20,000 meters he raked Malaya with a spread of 15-inch shells, finally getting a hit. He gave an order to turn ten more points to port, away from the Germans, and was soon able to run completely parallel to the British line, and bring all twelve of his guns to the action.
