brhugo
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Part XXXIII: The Ancient Mariner
By August of 1945, the allied drive from Normandy through France had driven German forces back to defensive positions along the Rhine. In the East, Soviet forces had similarly pushed back the Germans; most of Poland had been "liberated" although in time the Poles and other eastern Europeans would discover that they had simply traded one oppressor for another. Short-ranged German jet interceptors still controlled the airspace over most of Germany. Although ultimate victory over the last Axis member was no longer in question, the most optimistic timetable projected German surrender in mid to late 1946.
The extensive and expensive Manhattan project had finally borne fruit. Enough uranium had been enriched at the top-secret Oak Ridge facility to assemble one "Nuclear Bomb". Despite the continued expansion and improvement of the facility's gaseous diffusion production lines, enough material for a second bomb would not be available until December. Since material for a second bomb design using plutonium being produced at the Hanford Engineering Works in Washington was not expected in sufficient quantity until March 1946, Oak Ridge's Nuclear Bomb would have to be tested in Germany rather than the New Mexico desert as originally planned.
The Nuclear Bomb weighed 9,000 lbs. Larger bombs were already in service (the 12,000 lb RAF "Tallboy" bombs had been used to sink the German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz in French ports in 1944 and had been used against heavily reinforced underground jet hangers with some success) so the main problem in delivering this new weapon was getting past the German air defenses. To that end, the allies prepared the largest air raid of the war: Operation "Windmill".
The task to deliver the Nuclear Bomb was assigned to a B-29 that had been transferred from the Pacific. Named the "Ancient Mariner" by her crew during her deployment at Batavia; the bomber had been used mostly against Japanese airfields in Thailand. During their training for the mission, the crew practiced dropping 9,000 lb bombs that they had been told were modified versions of the Tallboy bomb and that their target would be underground jet assembly facilities on the outskirts of Berlin.
Operation Windmill consisted of three main waves of bombers. The first wave, strikes against jet aircraft factories, was a feint intended to draw out the jet interceptors. The second wave targeted the air bases where the jets would be expected to refuel after their air battles with the first wave. The third and largest wave was concentrated against Berlin and the airfields surrounding the city; the Ancient Mariner was to be part of this final strike. In the event the jet numbers were not adequately reduced by the earlier raids, the hope was that the Ancient Mariner survive due to the distraction provided by all of the other bombers flying with her.
Operation Windmill was launched on 6Aug45 and would have been judged a success even in the absence of the new weapon. Although there were unusually heavy losses among the allied bombers in the first wave, so many of the German jets were damaged or destroyed (or their runways disabled) in the second strike that the Ancient Mariner and the other bombers faced little opposition other than the extensive AA fire. At the altitude the B-29's were flying, few losses were taken from ground fire.
The Ancient Mariner's crew was not told of the actual purpose of their mission until a Los Alamos technician boarded the aircraft with the bomb's fusing mechanism during pre-flight checks. The navigator and bombardier were given the actual target - the center of Berlin. The nuclear bomb performed exactly as expected and much of Berlin was destroyed when the device exploded 2000 feet above the ground.
Hitler and most of his general staff were in Berlin at the time of the attack, although the allies had not been sure this would be the case when the strike date was selected. Command of the German government and military fell to Admiral Raeder as the ranking officer. The decapitating strike against the German military leadership did not pay off immediately as there was confusion in Germany as to the actual status of Hitler. The German military continued to fight for several weeks since Raeder was unwilling to negotiate with the allies until the status of Hitler and possible surviving senior officers was settled.
When negotiations finally began, the allies declared that another German city would be destroyed by a nuclear bomb unless Germany surrendered unconditionally, and that this would be repeated approximately every three weeks for as long as the war continued. This was an audacious bluff, but the US gave it credibility by leaking information that indicated that a plane carrying a second nuclear bomb had gone down in the English Channel during operation Windmill. German spies duly passed the false intelligence to Raeder and the German government surrendered on 5Sep45.
The Seal and her crew received the news of the German surrender in the middle of a Black Dolphin exercise that was promptly terminated. The war career of the Seal was finally over.
Part XXXIV: Epilogue
Hopes for world peace were dashed when Soviet forces refused to withdraw from territory liberated from the Germans and World War II was quickly replaced by the Cold War. But there was no Cold War mission for the Seal, and she was ordered inactivated and disposed of. In early November, she proceeded to Boston, Massachusetts, where she was decommissioned on 15 November, and after a change in her orders, was retained in the Reserve Fleet. On 19 June 1947, she was placed in service and assigned to Boston as a Naval Reserve training ship, and in March 1949, she was transferred to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she continued to serve the Naval Reserve until placed out of service and struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 May 1956.
The Seal was to be sold for scrap, but a fundraising and public relations effort to save her was successfully conducted by (now retired) Rear Admiral Hurd and many members of her former crew. She remained in Portsmouth as a museum ship until late 1974, when she was moved to Pearl Harbor to her current location as part of the 30 year celebration of the end of World War II (an effort spearheaded by President Nixon in an attempt to deflect growing public dissatisfaction with the long running war against communist insurgents in the Philippines). While preparing her for the move to Oahu, one of the Portsmouth naval reserve units spent several of their drill weekends removing her snorkel mast to return her to her December 1944 configuration.
Although most of her former crew members returned quickly to civilian life following the post war demobilization, several remained on active duty and completed careers in the Navy. George Wunder was the commanding officer of the USS Grayback (SSG-574) in 1958 when she ended Chinese intervention in the Korean War by launching a nuclear tipped Regulus missile at an airbase in Manchuria. CDR Wunder's crew was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, delivered by President MacArthur himself, after the end of the war.
Final war tally for the Seal:
Ships sunk:
Type Name Date sunk Tonnage VPs
xAKL Hokuyo Maru 5/7/42 830 1
xAK Taian Maru 9/28/42 4875 10
xAK Yahiko Maru 4/11/43 3675 7
xAK Eizan Maru 4/11/43 4875 10
xAKL Yamamizu Maru 5/7/43 1650 2
xAK Noto Maru 5/15/43 6400 13
xAK Muroran Maru 6/21/43 4875 10
xAK Fushimi Maru 6/24/43 4675 9
xAK Keisyo Maru 7/30/43 6400 13
xAK Atlas Maru 8/30/43 6475 13
xAK Kureha Maru #3 1/31/44 3425 7
AO Kokuyo Maru 2/25/44 10000 28
TK Kikusui Maru 3/20/44 6400 18
TK Tempi Maru 3/30/44 9910 27
TK Kyokuyo Maru 4/11/44 13340 34
xAK Ryochi Maru 6/17/44 6600 13
xAKL Toten Maru 6/23/44 1900 3
TK Tatsuchiyo Mary 10/25/44 6600 16
Totals 102905 234
Ships Damaged:
Type Name Date damaged Mk-14 hits 3” hits
xAKL Korei Maru 12/16/41 - 11
xAKL Nichiro Maru 5/6/42 - 1
xAK Uyo Maru 4/9/43 - 2
TK Manei Maru 6/27/43 - 7
xAKL Mitsuri Maru 9/1/43 - 3
xAKL Liverpool Maru 9/4/43 1 -
TK Ryoei Maru 9/5/43 1 -
xAKL Fukuyo Maru 12/31/43 - 4
xAK Eiji Maru 2/6/44 - 13
TK Eiwa Maru 3/12/44 1 -
Story Notes
The Seal's history from her laying down until the beginning of the Pacific War was taken from Wikipedia and was intended to be factual. Other than the names of her wartime skippers, all other details of the crew members are fictional. The real Seal had one other wartime skipper, Harry E. Dodge, but by the time I discovered this it was almost time to relieve him with John H. Turner so I left Kenneth Charles Hurd in command.
This was the first time I had played a War in the Pacific, Admiral's Edition campaign scenario. I had played Pacific War for years after having found it in a collection (along with War in Russia and Clash of Steel) in the bargain bin in a mall electronics store in the early '90s. I actually found WitPAE while searching the internet for a faithful computerization of Avalon Hill's Flattop (as far as I know one does not exist) similar to what was done for Third Reich (a game I own but have never played although I DID read a favorable review of it!) I had worked out most of the learning curve with WitPAE by playing the Guadalcanal and Coral Sea Scenarios but was still totally unprepared for the full court press complexity of the campaign scenario. Other than giving the submarines initial war patrol orders as recommended by a spreadsheet I downloaded from the Matrix Games site, I ignored them (left them in automatic) until the fateful day the Seal hit the mine in Pusan harbor.
I accompanied the Seal's narrative with updates on the broader campaign with varying degrees of detail that probably seem as random as they were; it was a function both of how interesting I thought the other events were and how much time I could spend to fleshing them out. I avoided copying combat reports into the narrative because I found myself skipping over these when reading others' AARs, but included some game mechanic details such as damage levels that I thought were meaningful.
Because there was no reason not to, I wove an alternate history through the story that was sometimes plausible and often whimsical. Ironically, the most improbable element was the early surrender of Japan, yet this was driven by the game rules (by December 1944 I was so bored with the one-sided war that had evolved that I did not even consider the option the game gave me to continue the war). I chose much of the alternate history to make the early surrender more plausible:
1. Having previously declared that the US would only accept unconditional surrender from the Axis countries, it seemed impossible that Roosevelt would have softened his stance. To counter his historical high popularity, I reduced the public's tolerance for war losses below what I think it was and delayed the economic recovery that occurred as the US mobilized for war.
2. To give Roosevelt's successors a motivation to negotiate with Japan, I altered the history of the European war. The German's were more cautious in their invasion of Russia, avoiding overextending during the Russian winters and being content with territorial gains they could better hold. There was no Battle of Britain, instead the Germans abandoned any plans for a cross-channel invasion and preserved their air forces to hold territory captured in Western Europe. Instead of V-1 and V-2 rockets, the German's placed more of their research and development efforts on jet aircraft. German submarines never adopted the "Wolfpack" tactics and instead operated much as the US submarines did in the Pacific, minimizing detection by allied radio direction finding with the attendant ASW vectoring and rerouting of threatened convoys.
3. The US never broke the Japanese military codes and did not break their diplomatic code until near the end of the Pacific War. This was a realistic interpretation of my behavior during the game - I reviewed the SIGINT reports occasionally early in the war but couldn't figure out how to use the results and soon ignored this resource completely.
4. The allied invasion of France in 1944 was a failure. This was a reflection of my inability to master the intricate details of amphibious warfare in WitPAE. It is significant that in reviewing the forums, I usually couldn't understand the questions being asked let alone the answers.
5. A peace movement in Japan provided the Japanese government with the ability to respond to the US overtures for a negotiated end to the Pacific War.
Much of the information on the poor early-war performance of the Mk-14 was based on my memory of a paper I had written for a military history class I took in college. The story's "unauthorized" experiments conducted by submariners to prove the unreliability of the Mk-14 had actually been performed as part of the eventual investigation of submariners' complaints about the weapon.
In writing "The Ordeal of the Seal" I was unable to recreate the nail-biting tension of each turn as the heavily damaged submarine attempted to make the long transit to safety. Every few turns I would be treated to something similar to "Temporary flotation repairs failing on SS Seal" and would anxiously wait until the pre-turn autosave was complete to be able to see what had actually happened. System damage built up slowly over the long weeks even though the crew seemed to get ahead of the problem on the flooding. Then the intended sanctuary of Darwin got bombed into rubble followed by the next closest refuge at Broome. It was after the Seal finally made it to unmolested Perth that I decided to write the AAR. I had to recreate the Seal's actions up to the mine explosion using the saved combat and operations reports and the damage and port call data saved WitP Tracker.
When the Seal returned to service I employed her very timidly; this resulted in very poor results as described in Part V "Poor Hunting". I kept the submarine within a close range of ports where she could be repaired, but these areas were being avoided by the computer's Japanese forces. I quickly discovered that the story was going to be very dull unless I put her "in harm's way". Seaman Kinney's error during drills was taken from an actual event on U-505 (see the book by the same name) while that German submarine was attempting to crash dive after being sighted by an allied ASW aircraft.
The Seal's collision with a Japanese freighter is historical; although in the story the ship survived, the Boston Maru was reported sunk in real life (I did not want to exaggerate the Seal's game record with an "actual kill"!)
"Terror at Four Hundred Feet" was adapted from what is known about the Thresher disaster except that the Seal survives this fictional incident. The Seal's system damage had jumped from a few percent to 13% in one turn without any enemy action.
The efforts described in "The Ordeal of the Seal II" understate what I actually did to minimize the chance that the Seal's narrative was going to end in June 1944 with the loss of the boat and her entire crew. Hollandia had no large airfield and the closest source of air cover for the base during the Seal's stay there was Rabaul. So I mobilized an entire carrier task group and parked it off Hollandia to prevent the computer from sinking the support ships I was moving there to support the badly damaged submarine. A good player would probably have developed Hollandia as an advanced base soon after it was captured...
"Busted Again" was perhaps the inevitable result of my efforts to generate action for the Seal despite a Japanese merchant fleet that was getting harder and harder to find. I selected her patrol area based on other submarines having found targets there, but the new skipper had a higher aggressiveness score that the old one and the submarine was usually attacking the escorts rather than the merchants. For the third time in the game, I was worried that the Seal might not survive to reach a friendly port.
"Peace In The Pacific" could have been the final chapter of the story, but I felt the need to continue until long after the actual story ended [similar to the movie "Return of the King" (although the movie's drawn out ending is rather short compared with that of the book!)] With the Battle of the Atlantic still undecided, it seemed plausible that the naval forces freed up from the Pacific theater would be used in some way to turn the tide and that a training squadron to provide an opposing submarines for exercises was plausible.
In "The Ancient Mariner" (which was the actual wartime name of a B-29) I indirectly provided my opinion on whether the atomic bomb would have been used against Europeans. Although some have claimed that only racism allowed this weapon to be used on Japan, my evidence to the contrary is the merciless conventional bombing raids carried out against German population centers during the war.
"Epilogue" provides some guesses on how later events might have been shaped by the course of my game war including it's altered history. With Indochina liberated by the allies, the conditions for the Vietnam War are not established but this Cold War conflict merely moves to the bypassed Philippines. The Korea war breaks out just as happened historically, but now the president is the war hero MacArthur who does not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against the Red Chinese. It is unlikely that a submarine would have been used to conduct one of these nuclear attacks but the Grayback did have this capability and it was a chance for LT Wunder to make a final appearance in the story.
Charles Hurd did actually retire as a rear admiral.
The Seal's final duty station is at Pearl Harbor in place of the Bowfin memorial; the Bowfin was one of the submarines lost in my Pacific War.
I will send a copy (in Microsoft Word) of this story to anyone who wants it. My email address is brhugo@frontier.com.
_____________________________
Bruce R Hugo
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