Chapter 305: A Funeral for Glory
Both British destroyers were gone.
They had vanished beneath the Mediterranean after spilling the last of their blood around Queen Elizabeth, leaving only burning oil, shattered wreckage, and rolling fire upon the water.
The flames churning across the sea looked almost like funeral pyres for an aging empire.
Far below, an English flag slowly disappeared into the blue depths, taking with it a fragment of glory Britain might never recover.
Aboard Queen Elizabeth, the atmosphere was equally grim.
The battleship had already fired six full salvos and, in return, successfully sent a Greek destroyer to the bottom.
The captain lowered his binoculars.
Inside the bridge, the officers stood in oppressive silence. Many stared at the deck or their instruments, as if lowering their heads might somehow allow them to escape the fate already closing around the ship.
Only the captain remained upright.
German aircraft circled overhead like vultures.
Enemy warships were tightening the ring.
He knew precisely how this would end.
Even so, his voice remained firm.
"Prepare to fire."
Other British ships might surrender.
Queen Elizabeth could not.
Since the day she had entered service, the battleship had carried something greater than guns and armor. She embodied Britain's memory of its golden age, the era when the Royal Navy had ruled the seas and the British flag had flown across every ocean.
To surrender such a ship without resistance would mean surrendering more than steel.
The adjutant immediately relayed the order.
"Main batteries ready!"
"Fire!"
Boom!
The great guns roared together.
The entire hull trembled beneath the recoil as another thunderous salvo crossed the Mediterranean.
For a few seconds, every eye followed the shells.
Then immense columns of blue-white spray erupted around the enemy formation.
Miss.
The sea had no pity for courage.
Almost immediately, the German bombers circling above began to descend.
Like vultures finally closing upon a wounded animal, they folded into their dives and came down for the kill.
Queen Elizabeth disappeared beneath a storm of bombs.
And when she finally sank, taking another piece of the old Royal Navy with her, the situation confronting the battleship Ocean deteriorated almost instantly.
After several exchanges of gunfire, Jean Bart and Ocean resembled two wounded beasts tearing at one another.
Both had suffered damage.
Both still had teeth.
For a time, neither could force the other down.
Then the balance changed.
Captain Timmy turned toward the rear and suddenly froze.
Beyond the horizon, where sea and sky seemed to merge into one endless sheet of blue, dark silhouettes were emerging from the haze.
Ships.
Dozens of them.
And above them flew a flag he knew well.
The British ensign.
His chest loosened.
He had expected Port Said to have suffered terribly from the German submarine attack, perhaps even to have been crippled altogether.
The reality was far better.
An officer rushed onto the bridge with a telegram.
"Urgent message, sir!"
"Headquarters orders us to return immediately and reorganize the attack. The harbor was struck by German submarines, but most of the first wave of torpedoes hit merchant vessels. A large number of our warships suffered damage, but most remain operational!"
Timmy looked toward the distant formation again.
Gunboats.
Torpedo boats.
Cruisers.
Destroyers.
Practically every vessel headquarters could still send to sea had been mobilized.
The meaning was obvious.
The Mediterranean Fleet intended to fight to the end.
For a moment, Timmy felt something close to exhilaration.
Then he looked upward.
And saw Germany's iron eagles descending toward their next prey.
The air battle had already begun.
The Royal Air Force had fought the Germans too many times to cling to fantasies of honorable one-on-one duels.
They no longer sought equality.
They sought trades.
Two British aircraft for one German fighter.
Three, if necessary.
It was a brutal equation, but Britain had little choice.
The German Air Force had advanced too quickly.
Britain had shot down German aircraft before, but the surrender of the British Isles had come before their engineers could properly recover, study, and reproduce many of the most important German developments.
The technological gap had therefore widened into something approaching a generational divide.
Germany was already preparing to equip aircraft with airborne radar.
British pilots were still relying largely on their own eyes.
The sky demonstrated the consequences.
British cannon fire carved long lines through the clouds, but cannon and machine-gun range could not compete with rockets.
Two German fighters turned simultaneously.
Their pilots fired.
Rockets streaked forward.
A second later, explosions blossomed among the British formation.
Several fighters were damaged by the blast and flying fragments.
One aircraft caught the full force directly.
It disappeared inside a violent orange fireball.
Even German fighters without rockets held an unmistakable advantage.
They were simply faster.
Again and again, a British carrier pilot would laboriously maneuver into what seemed like the perfect firing position, only for the German aircraft ahead to open the throttle and pull away before the British guns could achieve a decisive burst.
The British response was desperation through numbers.
More fighters were thrown into the fight.
They attempted to box individual German aircraft into smaller and smaller spaces, sacrificing several planes if necessary to deny the enemy room to maneuver.
The tactic occasionally worked.
A German fighter would be trapped.
Machine-gun fire would converge.
A burning aircraft would tumble from the sky.
But such victories were painfully expensive.
Except for a handful of British aces capable of competing on more equal terms, the exchange rate was disastrous.
Within less than an hour, more than half of the twenty-odd British fighters committed to the battle had been destroyed.
The sky belonged to Germany.
Below them, the sea battle intensified as the main French force arrived.
Heavy naval guns thundered from every direction.
Shells fell across the Mediterranean like an iron rain, hammering the surface until the once-calm sea became a boiling field of spray, smoke, and shattered steel.
Britain resisted with remarkable tenacity.
While German carrier aircraft remained occupied with the air battle, the Royal Navy traded fire with the French almost evenly.
For a time, both fleets bled.
But when the last organized British carrier-based formations were destroyed, the balance tipped irreversibly.
Britain could no longer contest the sky.
German bombers were freed.
One formation after another descended upon the remaining British ships.
Ocean's main batteries were systematically destroyed.
Gunboats without meaningful antiaircraft protection became floating targets.
Ships maneuvered desperately beneath falling bombs, wakes twisting across the sea as captains tried to escape the inevitable.
Some succeeded for minutes.
Others for seconds.
By nightfall, the first major phase of the battle had ended.
The Mediterranean Fleet had lost more than seventy-five percent of its strength.
Only a handful of vessels remained capable of meaningful combat.
The German Navy, by comparison, had primarily lost aircraft.
As for warship losses, most had been borne by the French and Greek fleets.
Germany had broken Britain's last major Mediterranean naval force while preserving the core of its own fleet.
When the report reached Churchill's office, he read it in silence.
His face seemed to age with every line.
Another cigarette appeared between his fingers even though the ashtray to his left was already overflowing, cigarette butts piled atop one another like the remains of some tiny battlefield.
He lit it anyway.
"Where is the Japanese Navy?"
His voice began quietly, then rose.
"I need them containing Germany, not wasting time in Asia!"
Churchill slapped the report onto the desk.
"They possess one of the largest fleets in the world. Who exactly are they preserving it for?"
He inhaled sharply and continued before his secretary could answer.
"And the Soviet Union..."
Churchill pressed two fingers against his temple.
"Just thinking about Stalin gives me a headache."
"They need only move troops into the Middle East. One division. One damned division would force Germany to account for another front and reduce the pressure on North Africa."
"But no. Finland!"
He scoffed.
"Is Finland the lifeline of the Soviet Union? Must Stalin cling to that swamp as if the fate of Moscow depends upon it?"
The secretary remained silent while Churchill exhausted his anger.
Finally, the Prime Minister straightened his collar and asked more calmly, "Have the Japanese representatives arrived?"
"Yes, Mr. Prime Minister. They have arrived."
The secretary glanced at his notes.
"We have also dispatched diplomats to the Soviet Union to continue lobbying them, but so far there has been no meaningful progress."
Churchill checked his reflection in the mirror, adjusted his jacket, and forced the fury from his expression.
"No more lobbying."
The secretary looked up.
"It is a waste of time."
Churchill crushed the cigarette into the already crowded ashtray.
"I know the Russians. They are all the same. They refuse to think until they suffer, grow complacent the moment they make progress, and then suffer again because of that complacency."
"A damned endless circle."
He waved dismissively.
"If Stalin wants to bury himself in the Finnish swamps, let him fight there until his heart is content."
"We cannot place all our hopes on him."
The secretary wrote down the instruction, hesitated briefly, then spoke again.
"There is another matter, Mr. Prime Minister."
Churchill's expression hardened.
"Our request for diplomatic negotiations with the United States has been rejected. The White House refused to receive our delegation on the grounds that the United States is currently at war."
Churchill said nothing.
"However," the secretary continued cautiously, "some officers believe the real reason is Saint Pierre and Miquelon."
"The Americans may be using the refusal to express their dissatisfaction with our occupation of the islands."
He turned another page.
"Canada has also reported significant American troop concentrations along the Canadian border. They may be preparing against us."
Churchill's fingers stopped moving.
For several seconds, he stared into empty space.
Then he murmured, "Or they have already reached some understanding with Germany."
The thought settled heavily over the room.
"Everything has been chaos since Roosevelt was assassinated."
Churchill let out a long breath.
Then, without another word, he turned and left the office.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, Jörg von Roman was studying an entirely different battlefield.
Spread across his desk were reports compiled by junior Wehrmacht officers recently dispatched north.
....
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