Chapter 782: Patiently Waiting

It wasn’t that Yamamoto Isoroku had such unshakeable faith in the still-under-construction battleship Yamato; rather, it was that he had lost all confidence in the tactic of relying solely on the Japanese Naval Air Arm to gain battlefield superiority. Originally, Yamamoto had been a staunch supporter of naval aviation development. He had relied on this support to approve the Battle of Pearl Harbor, win the Battle of Wake Island and the Battle of the Marshall Islands, force the U.S. Army out of the Philippines, and sink a number of British warships in the Strait of Malacca. This had further strengthened his belief in his own theories, his conviction in the superiority of the Japanese Naval Air Arm.

But a series of setbacks had forced him to re-examine this trust. After all, the brief era of naval aviation’s invincibility was now gone forever. The current war situation proved time and again that the Japanese Naval Air Arm had lost its former glory.

In the First Battle of Kauai, the fatigue of this force was on full display. As a result, Yamamoto had to abandon his persistent operational plan to crush the U.S. Navy in one fell swoop. This was the first time Japan had voluntarily given up an opportunity for a decisive battle, and it also marked the end of the Japanese Navy’s history of invincible campaigns.

In the subsequent Second Battle of Kauai, the Japanese Naval Air Arm fell into a technological disadvantage. The myth of the Zero fighter’s invincibility was broken by the U.S. Navy’s improved P-40 fighter. And because of their falling out with Germany, the United States had also obtained firsthand intelligence on the Zero from the Germans. The result was that in the Second Battle of Kauai, Japan was forced to retreat due to heavy losses in its air arm.

This time, Japan had lost the carrier Ryūjō in the decisive battle for Midway, once again proving the decline of the Japanese Naval Air Arm. Yamamoto had finally come up with another tactical idea. He felt that the naval air arm was increasingly unable to sustain the needs of an offensive, and that Japan must come up with a more lethal tactic in the next decisive battle.

And so, influenced by the battleship commanders who had always been in the majority in the Japanese Navy, he had turned to believe in the more mature and, for Japan, more advantageous tactic of a decisive battleship engagement.

His thinking was very simple: since the naval air arm could no longer maintain its own advantage, then it should just focus on entangling with the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based aircraft. The task of attacking would then be handed over to the Japanese Navy’s battleships, which had a certain advantage in both quality and quantity. They would use the super-battleship Yamato and other warships like the Nagato, with their super-heavy guns and thick armor, to charge into the American fleet and destroy it.

It must be said that this idea was actually a tactic that the Japanese Navy had tried in another timeline. It could be said that this tactic was, at certain times, in line with Japan’s national conditions. For the Japanese Navy to use this tactic when it was at the end of its rope was not entirely a fanciful and unfounded idea.

Of course, Yamamoto Isoroku’s idea was fundamentally different from the idea of the Japanese high command in the later stages of World War II in another timeline, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In that other timeline, the Japanese Navy had used its carrier-based aircraft as bait, while Yamamoto Isoroku’s core idea was to use his carrier-based aircraft to cover the battleships in a fleet engagement.

This tactic was a bit like the Soviet Navy’s operational thinking during the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s—to use the carrier-based aircraft on their only carrier, the Kuznetsov, to disrupt American air superiority and to cover their other warships as they used long-range anti-ship missiles to “fight with bayonets.” However, this tactic was not an advanced operational concept, but a compromise forced by the limitations of the weapons at hand.

On the other hand, the battleship Yamato had indeed given Yamamoto Isoroku a reason for a decisive battleship engagement. This epoch-making super-battleship, in terms of both armor thickness and cannon caliber, possessed the number one strength in the world at the time. To rely on this battleship, which was sufficient to overwhelm the opponent, was more reassuring than relying on the carrier-based air units that had already lost several times, wasn’t it?

At the same time as the Japanese Navy was retreating to Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, the German Navy’s carrier fleet had been sailing in the North Atlantic for a week. The purpose of this massive fleet’s sortie was to completely cut the supply line between Iceland and the United States.

Lütjens was watching the fighters launched from his carrier fleet take off from the deck. Apart from one carrier, the Bismarck, which was under repair in France, the remaining four German carriers were all present. Now, there were three carriers in the fleet, and launching six carrier-based fighters at once was no difficulty at all.

“Heil Führer! Reporting, General. The first batch of 18 aircraft for reconnaissance and patrol have all been sent out. The destroyers on the periphery have transmitted a message that no suspicious targets have been found in the vicinity,” an officer reported, standing behind Lütjens and saluting. “The alert helicopters on the Imperium are taking off, and the alert helicopters on the Graf Zeppelin are also ready for takeoff.”

“Order the entire fleet to maintain alert. We are likely to encounter enemy aircraft taking off from Greenland on this route. Be careful not to enter the operational radius of land-based aircraft,” Lütjens said, lowering his binoculars and ordering the officer behind him. “Is there any news from the raiding squadron?”

The officer opened his notebook, looked at it, and said, “Apart from the regular reports, no other news has come in. They are maintaining radio silence. According to their pre-arranged course, it is possible they will run into a patrolling British naval squadron.”

The largest carrier formation that Lütjens had organized and commanded was four ships. Now that Germany had another battleship, it was clearly not very suitable to hand the entire fleet over to Lütjens. Therefore, the carrier Tirpitz and the battleship Grand Admiral Raeder had formed the First Squadron and were, over a hundred nautical miles away, acting as a raiding fleet to attack the American transport lines.

The commander of this squadron was Vice Admiral Lindemann, a 45-year-old middle-aged general. Like Lütjens, he had come from the traditional gunship faction of the navy, and his future was also bright with Lütjens’s promotion. Because of his outstanding performance and tenacious fighting in the Battle of the English Channel, he had finally been promoted to vice admiral.

He had originally been a gunship commander, but now, along with Lütjens, he had transformed into a carrier commander. It was precisely because he had first served as a gunship commander and then as a carrier commander that he had been appointed as the squadron commander this time, in charge of the German raiding fleet.

The mission plan for the Third Reich’s navy this time was as follows: the raiding fleet would attack and harass the American transport ships, luring the main British fleet to come to their aid. Then they would draw the enemy out of the cover of their land-based air arm and use the main fleet, composed of three carriers lying in ambush in the open sea, to annihilate the opponent, with the aim of inflicting a heavy blow on the British army.

It could be seen that the German army’s tactics were almost identical to the decisive battle tactics drawn up by Yamamoto Isoroku. The only difference was that the German army was using a carrier fleet for the decisive battle, while Japan was using a battleship fleet.

“Order the modified Fw-190 fighters to be armed with torpedoes, and the Stuka dive bombers to be armed with aerial bombs, and to be on standby in the hangars,” Lütjens said. Unlike Yamamoto, the German Navy had, from beginning to end, never been tasked with capturing islands. To put it bluntly, at its core, the German Navy was still a naval guerrilla force, just a very large one.

There was no need to take on an offensive mission, just to be responsible for destruction, for annihilating the enemy’s effective strength. This was the operational principle of the German Navy, and it was pretty much the principle of all of Germany’s current military operations. The army was the same, the air force was the same, and the navy was the same. Their goal was simply to eliminate the enemy’s effective strength. Whether it was defense or offense, it was just a means to achieve an end.

Happier than the Japanese Navy was the fact that the Fw-190 fighter, equipped with an air-cooled engine, had a slightly better performance than the Zero. After continuous improvements, this fighter’s speed was a full 100 kilometers per hour faster than the Zero’s. And the German pilot loss rate was much, much smaller than Japan’s. These advantages allowed the German army to firmly control the air superiority in the Atlantic. Apart from some trouble over Iceland caused by the deployment of the British secret weapon, the German Naval Air Arm could fly through the skies of the Atlantic as if it were an uninhabited land.

In terms of pilot quality, the German pilots were also much stronger than the Japanese pilots. At least under Lütjens’s command, there were so many German pilots, including Günther Rall, who were aces and even super aces, that they were countless. How strong were these pilots? With just these less than 300 planes, they could probably annihilate the entire Polish Air Force.

Logically speaking, such a powerful German naval carrier-based air force should have long since strangled Iceland in its cradle. But to look at it another way, the geographical location of Iceland really made the German fleet feel like a dog trying to eat a hedgehog, with no way to start. The transport ships from Canada, as long as they took a slight detour to the north, could sail under the protection of the field airfields on Greenland. This had left the German surface fleet with no good solution.

Similar to now, there had been many battles where the German Navy had harassed the supply lines. Each time, the German army had gained a small advantage, but had never been able to achieve the desired strategic effect. After all, a fleet sortie required a large amount of fuel, and to return empty-handed time and again had also deprived the German Navy of its heroic spirit for a showdown.

After all, the large-scale army group operations on the Eastern Front required a not-insignificant amount of fuel. So, in order to raise the fuel, the navy’s surface ships had not appeared in the North Atlantic for two months. This was Lütjens’s helplessness, and the inevitable fate of a continental navy such as Germany’s

“Just wait,” Lütjens said after giving the standby order. He then looked out at the distant sea again. He didn’t know if the Royal Navy would appear as he wished this time, nor did he know how much prey he could find on this hunting trip. All he could do now was to wait patiently.

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