It was then that he saw the first dark fist of black smoke mushroom up from the ships ahead. The planes had suddenly put on a tremendous burst of speed, flashing in at Conte Cavour and Duilio. They had hurled themselves right at the battleships in a suicidal charge that sent all four to fiery deaths!
“What in god’s name has possessed the British,” said Iachino. “Are they so desperate that they are willing to sacrifice the lives of their pilots like this to get hits?”
Apparently so. But these planes had come in so fast that the battleships had barely trained their flak batteries before they struck home. No plane could travel at such speeds. He soon got the alarming reports from Bergamini. Both his ship and his lead battleship had been struck, and now a fatal flaw in the redesign of Conte Cavour was exposed. The ship had been completed in 1915, given several overhauls between the wars that extended her length and beam, upgraded AA guns, and even bored out her main guns to 12.6 inches. Her deck and barbette armor had also been thickened, adding weight that had caused her main belt armor to be completely submerged at full load. So when the P-900s struck, they hit the ship well above this heavy armor, and the 200 kilogram warheads moving at two and a half times the speed of sound during the final high speed run, carried a considerable impact.
Bergamini reported bad fires amidships on Conte Cavour, and the hull holed in two places with gaping black tears, over ten feet wide, that were now belching torrid flames with heavy smoke. His own ship Duilio had been struck at a different angle, with one hit on the sturdy conning tower about thirty feet below the bridge. The ship had not seen much of the fire of war. It had served only seventy hours at sea in WWI, then went through extensive refits similar to Cavour. She was nicked at Taranto, by the British attack there in the old history, but missed altogether in this altered history, as that attack had never been launched. Her initial wartime patrol had failed to find the enemy the previous year, and so the ship’s first real taste of battle would be this hard slap in the face from a P-900 Sizzler, and a punch to the gut when a second missile also struck her amidships.
In one hot minute a third of Iachino’s battleships were hit and burning. He gritted his teeth, angry that he had not insisted on fighter cover over the fleet. That would be something he would soon have to correct. But if the British were going to simply crash their aircraft into his ships like this… Was it desperate bravery on their part now? They knew they could not face me ship to ship here. Or was it simply madness?
He would soon learn that it was neither, for the missile attack had only just begun. It started with the fires, bright and fierce, but they would soon become burning coals in the guts of his battleships that would burn with unquenchable heat.
“Turnabout is Fair Play.”
Johannes Streich, commander of 5th Light Division, was at his wits end. He had been ordered to move his battlegroup south yet again, in another of Rommel’s wide enveloping movements. Bypassing Tobruk was one thing, and something Streich had real doubts about. It was difficult enough to get fuel and supplies up to the fighting units as it stood, and with the Australians holed up in Tobruk, there was always a threat they would break out and raise havoc if the Germans moved too far east.
For some days now the British seemed to have no stomach for battle, withdrawing first to Bardia and Sollum, and then yielding those positions to move further east. Now the Germans had come up against a new division, the 2nd New Zealanders, and they looked to be well dug in and prepared to make a stand. They spent a day moving units up and reconnoitering the situation, seeing that this was the place the British had determined to make their last stand. About 30 kilometers due south of Bug Bug on the coast, the long escarpment that had formed Wavell’s castle wall in the desert made a dog led at its farthest point from the sea, and then extended northeast in the general direction of Sidi Barani.
Just south of this dog leg the ground was very bad for armor and vehicles, with numerous silted depressions in some places, and hard rocky ground in others. There were also several hills and ridge lines that formed natural defensive barriers, and it was here that the 2nd New Zealand Division had been placed on defense. The remnant of 2nd Armored was held behind the lines of entrenched infantry to act as a fire brigade, and the position looked very strong to Streich. His troops were tired, his tanks needed maintenance, and there was always too little fuel to go around.
“Move south? Again?”
