Hindenburg and Bismarck would both take two hard hits, right amidships on the squadron flagship, with one missile very near the bruised and blackened armor from the GB-7 strike from A rgos Fire. The roar of the missiles thundered in, and the hour that Lutjens had mused on now became a crucible of searing fire. The kinetic shock of the missiles were tremendous, as they were many times the weight of the GB-7. Nearly fifteen inches of cemented, face hardened Krupp steel stood in their way. The armor scheme had been conceived by designers who assumed the ship would most often fight in the misty cold waters of the North Atlantic, where visibility was low and range for gunnery duels was often very short. As such, the layout and angle of the armor was designed to repel flat trajectory attacks, like the one the missiles were delivering, as opposed to plunging fire attacks that might be delivered from shells fired at a greater range.
Like MacRae on the Argos Fire, Gromyko had not had the benefit of the long trial and error that Kirov had, and there had been little time to brief him. So the missiles would strike the ship at its strongest point, a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The face hardened armor was dual density, with the bulk being ten inches of very hard steel that was meant to blunt the nose of an incoming projectile, de-capping the shell and therefore reducing its penetrating power. The inner four or five inches were of softer density, designed to prevent the armor from fragmenting and producing shrapnel splinters that could wreak havoc inside the ship. The slope of the armor itself further increased its resistance to penetration, an ingenious design that would make the ship all but invulnerable to full belt armor failure from a flat trajectory attack-or so the designers believed.
Two blazing battering rams struck at the hardened citadel of the ship that day, the place where Hindenburg’s defense was meant to protect the machinery, boilers, generators, power switchboards and the gun plot rooms. It was struck with a combined warhead weight of 500kgs, but had been designed to resist single shell hits twice that heavy, in the range of 800 to 1000kgs-but not shells moving at Mach 2 driven by a 3000 kilogram rocket! The armor would de-cap the warheads, and they would fail to penetrate, but the tremendous force behind the attack would buckle the steel and blast it with massive heat and shock. The fire that erupted from all that excess kerosene was terrible. Men anywhere near the point of impact literally had the oxygen sucked from their lungs, and the ship was scalded with searing heat. Most of the damage control crews that had been fighting, and slowly suppressing the fire from the GB-7 hit, were now simply immolated by the attack, and Hindenburg burned, a fierce, raging fire that enveloped the entire starboard middle segment of the ship, with flames so hot that the gunwales above the point of impact literally melted.
Amazingly, the armor held, just as it was designed, for in fact, it would have taken an 18-inch gun from the Yamato at near point blank range to fully penetrate due to the ingenious scheme against flat trajectory rounds. It would be the damnable fire that would eventually rule the hot hour Lutjens had come to. He could feel the ship roll with the punch, and he also saw that Bismarck had taken two hard hits as well, one slightly aft and a second amidships. One look at the fires that enveloped the ship told him what was happening now on Hindenburg. Unless these fires were quickly controlled, they might spread and do damage that could put both vessels in the repair docks for a very long time.
“Starboard twenty,” he shouted. “Come about!”
The helm answered, and the ship turned, the wind fanning the flames and driving the heavy smoke past the bridge viewports.
“We are turning?” Captain Adler had been watching Bismarck with his field glasses. “What are you doing, Admiral?”
“One look at those fires should tell you that. Signal Bismarck to follow.”
“Then you are breaking off? We must continue! There is nothing wrong with our guns.”
“There will be if those fires reach a magazine. Look at them! Look at Bismarck!” Lutjens was pointing at the raging smoke and flame, and the desperate struggle to get more damage control parties to the scene, but Adler’s eyes were trained with the big forward turrets of Hindenburg. Bruno turret fired, the power of the volley shaking the ship.
“Look at that fire,” he said. “We can crush the British!”
“Those flames are nearly as high as the bridge, Captain. If they aren’t controlled soon we may not be able to even breathe here, let alone have these nice little arguments in front of the men.” He paused to let that sink in, but Adler had the heat of the battle on him now, and propriety was the farthest thing from his mind at that moment.
“Sir,” came a report from a young officer, “Main gun director reports the smoke is too heavy for accurate sighting.”
