Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Read online

  FORTRESS FALLING

  A Moon Brothers WWII Adventure

  By

  William Peter Grasso

  Novels by William Peter Grasso:

  Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series

  Moon Above, Moon Below, Book 1

  Fortress Falling, Book 2

  Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series

  Long Walk to the Sun, Book 1

  Operation Long Jump, Book 2

  Operation Easy Street, Book 3

  Operation Blind Spot, Book 4

  Operation Fishwrapper, Book 5

  Unpunished

  East Wind Returns

  KINDLE EDITION

  Copyright 2017 William Peter Grasso

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Alyson Aversa

  KINDLE EDITION, LICENSE NOTES

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fortress Falling is a work of historical fiction. Events that are common historical knowledge may not occur at their actual point in time or may not occur at all. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales or to living persons is purely coincidental.

  Author’s Note

  This is a fictional work of alternative history, not a history textbook. Deviations from commonly accepted historical facts are intentional and provided only for the purposes of entertainment and stimulating the reader’s imagination.

  The fortress city of Metz was, in actual history, a roadblock to the progress of Patton’s 3rd Army from September through December of 1944. Fort Driant, an amazingly well-fortified artillery base, became the linchpin in the efforts to stop the Americans’ rapid advance. Built in 1902 for a very different type of warfare and seemingly obsolete, it nonetheless denied Patton avenues of access to the city and prevented his army from crossing the Moselle River in force. The fort itself was never taken by direct military action. Instead, its small garrison finally surrendered once it was isolated and its situation made hopeless.

  Operation Aphrodite was, in actual history, a US Army Air Forces attempt to use the new technologies of television and radio control to crash unmanned bombers laden with enormous amounts of explosives into targets of strategic significance. From summer of 1944 through early 1945, the Air Force flew thirteen Aphrodite missions. None hit their targets; technical faults, anti-aircraft fire, and operator error were to blame. The US Navy conducted two missions as part of an associated effort known as Project Anvil. Neither of these missions were successful, either, the first causing the death of Lt. Joe Kennedy, Jr. and his co-pilot when their aircraft exploded shortly after takeoff.

  Note: in actual history, an Operation Aphrodite flying bomb was not used in conjunction with the Metz campaign.

  The designation of military units may be actual or fictitious.

  In no way are the fictional accounts intended to denigrate the hardships, suffering, and courage of those who served.

  Contact the Author Online

  Email: William Peter Grasso

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  William Peter Grasso, Author

  Dedication

  To those who scale the walls others choose to build.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Map—Third Army Front

  Map—Fort Driant

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  About the Author

  More Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Chapter One

  12 August 1944

  1730 hours

  “You really think she’s gonna fly, Mr. Kennedy?” the mechanic asked. “She’s awful heavy for a war-weary bird.”

  The question put a smile on the face of Lieutenant Joe Kennedy, Jr., USN. “She’ll fly just fine,” he replied. “It’s where she lands that’s going to matter.” His broad Bostonian a in matter made it sound like another word entirely: maaada.

  The mathematics of flying or not flying was on Joe Kennedy’s side. He’d flown plenty of PB4Y-1 patrol bombers—the Navy’s designation for the Army’s B-24 Liberator heavy bomber—just like this one on those seemingly endless antisubmarine patrols from Great Britain over the Atlantic. Those four-engined monsters, laden with ordnance and full of fuel for missions that could take up to ten hours, had takeoff weights just as heavy as this machine. And being war-weary didn’t mean she couldn’t fly, just that she no longer met all the stringent standards for a combat plane and it would cost too much to make her so. Uneconomical to repair, in government lingo.

  But Kennedy knew the cause of the mechanic’s concern: it was how this plane had come to achieve that takeoff weight. On a standard patrol, three-quarters of the useful load—almost 15,000 pounds—was fuel; bombs and depth charges made up the remaining 5,000 pounds. The baby Kennedy and his co-pilot were about to take up, however, was carrying 21,170 pounds of the highly potent Torpex explosive for her payload. To permit the weight of all this destructive power, she’d been stripped of her defensive armament and non-essential equipment and would carry only two pilots as crew, not the usual ten-man complement. The pilots would only be on board long enough to get her off the ground, fly her to 2,000 feet, confirm the remote control was functioning properly, and arm the explosives. Then they’d bail out over the English countryside. There was a minimal fuel load in her tanks since she didn’t have to fly very far, just across the English Channel into coastal France.

  The baby wouldn’t be coming back. This would be a one-way mission. Her final one. The reason: she wasn’t a B-24 or PB4Y anymore. Her new designation was BQ-8: a radio-controlled bomb.

  “You know, Mr. Kennedy,” the mechanic said, “it would be really something if this remote-control stuff was good enough to do the takeoff, too.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?” the lieutenant replied, genuine in his agreement. “But we’d have to evacuate half of Norfolk to be on the safe side. Project Anvil still has a way to go on that score, I
’m afraid. In the meantime, the least dangerous way to do this is to have a human pilot get her up in the air.”

  They looked up to the sound of aircraft engines overhead. Three twin-engined planes were doing lazy orbits over the airfield. Two of them—Navy PV-1 Ventura motherships—carried the radio-control transmitters and their operators. The third—an F-8 Mosquito photo recon ship from 8th Air Force—would film the mission and provide damage assessment of the flying bomb’s strike.

  “Looks like they’re ready to rendezvous,” Kennedy said as he ducked to enter the open bomb bay. “I’d better get the star of the show up there with them.”

  He climbed up to the cockpit. It was swirling with furious activity as three bickering civilian engineers struggled with one of the television cameras installed in the BQ-8. The co-pilot—another Navy lieutenant named John Williams—was already in the right-hand seat, trying to ignore the chaos in the cramped space around him and focus on the pre-start checklist.

  The camera, one of two on board, was the one that relayed the flight instrument data to the motherships. The other was mounted in the glazed nose and provided a view forward of the aircraft. When she was in her terminal descent, that camera would—hopefully—be painting a clear image of the target on the motherships’ monitors.

  “You lads almost done?” Kennedy asked the engineers. The impatience in his voice was impossible to ignore.

  “The video was all washed out,” the lead engineer replied. “We had to bring the gain up and—”

  A second engineer interrupted him. “I’m telling you, Frank, the gain’s up too damn far. The contrast on the ground image when she’s upstairs will be so strong the controllers won’t be able to make out any target details at all.”

  The third engineer chimed in. “We need to change out the camera. This’ll never—”

  Joe Kennedy had had enough. “Hold it, gentlemen,” he said. “This isn’t a debate club. Is your system ready to go or not?”

  All three engineers began to talk at once, a jumble of impassioned but disparate opinions. Kennedy broke in: “Let’s just hear from the boss, okay?”

  The lead engineer replied, “It’s ready, Lieutenant. We’ll get out of your way.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Kennedy replied, “because we’re running out of daylight. If we don’t get her in the air soon, it’ll be too dark over France for your camera to see a blessed thing, anyway.”

  He slid into the left-hand seat as the engineers gathered their tools and co-pilot Williams waited for the clear to start engines signal from the ramp.

  “It’ll be another minute or two before we’re clear,” Kennedy said. “There are still a lot of vehicles around the ship.” He tapped the fuel quantity gauges with his fingertips, trying to make sure their pointers weren’t stuck. He’d never before taken off with so little fuel on board. Thinking you had fuel you didn’t could result in running a tank dry and losing one or more of your engines, a crash and burn mistake of epic proportions. She’d never take off, climb, or even hold altitude on anything less than all four engines.

  Williams asked, “You did watch them stick the tanks, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did. But like the crew chief said, it’s hard to get an accurate reading with a dipstick when the tank’s nowhere near full to begin with.”

  “So those gauges are right, Joe?”

  “They’d better be.”

  The thought occurred to Kennedy that neither he nor Williams needed to be in this cockpit. They were both highly experienced pilots and had already chalked up enough combat missions to go home. But both had volunteered to stay on for Project Anvil, the US Navy’s contribution to Operation Aphrodite, the American attempt to match the explosive power of the British six-ton blockbusters dropped from Lancaster bombers. Lacking an aircraft capable of lifting such a bomb load, the only American solution seemed to be turning war-weary heavy bombers into radio-controlled missiles. They were just going to be scrapped, anyway. Even though the radio-control technology was far from perfected yet, why not scrap those planes while they were destroying some key German targets in the process? There was no way either of these pilots would miss the chance to crew this flight—Anvil’s inaugural mission—which would target a suspected launch site in occupied France for German missiles falling on Britain.

  Joe Kennedy, Jr. not only didn’t need to be in this cockpit, he didn’t need to be in this uniform. The scion of one of America’s wealthiest and influential families, his father had brashly predicted that Joe Junior would one day be the first Irish-Catholic President of the United States. There were any number of ways politically connected young men like him and his younger brother Jack could’ve stayed in safe, cushy desk jobs or avoided military service entirely. But both had taken commissions in the US Navy and volunteered for combat duty.

  In a world where the term usually meant you were unlucky enough to have been within sight of someone looking for men to do undesirable jobs, Joe Kennedy and John Williams were true volunteers. They were in that cockpit of their own free will.

  They got the clear to start signal. As each engine rumbled to life in turn, a voice over the radio—one of the pilots of a mothership loitering overhead—said, “C’mon, already, you guys. We’re burning gas like crazy up here…and we’re gonna lose the sun pretty damn soon.”

  “Tell them to keep their drawers on,” Kennedy said to Williams as the taxi-out began. “The baby’s on her way.”

  Turning onto the runway, they noticed every vehicle on the airfield hurrying to get as far from the BQ-8’s takeoff run as they could. “They aren’t dumb,” Kennedy quipped. “They know what’ll happen if we fuck up this takeoff.”

  Even with the throttles to the stops, it seemed to take forever for the lumbering beast to get up a head of steam. “Halfway mark,” Williams said, his voice tense as they roared past the point beyond which aborting the takeoff was no longer possible. They had to fly now.

  But the ship didn’t seem convinced of that necessity. Kennedy’s eyes were fixed on the trees at the runway’s end. They loomed larger with each passing second, like a wall his ship lacked the energy to scale.

  Precious yards of runway slipped beneath her wheels, but she still wasn’t at flying speed. “One-ten,” Williams called out, his eyes dancing from the airspeed indicator to the runway’s end. It didn’t take much estimating to realize that at their sluggish rate of acceleration, they’d probably never reach the 120 miles per hour needed to lift off before hitting the trees.

  They were down to the last thousand feet of runway. “One-twelve…no, one-thirteen,” Williams said.

  “Never mind,” Kennedy said, “I’ve got no damned choice.” He pulled back hard on the yoke, the heavy control forces fighting him every inch of the way.

  Her nose reluctantly pitched up, freeing the nose wheel from the grip of the runway. But the rumble and jostling of the takeoff roll continued—her main wheels were still firmly stuck to the ground.

  Williams grabbed his control yoke and pulled back with Kennedy, as if the urgings of two men on the controls might coax her into the air. But it made little difference.

  C’mon, you son of a bitch…

  It was no use. She wouldn’t fly; they were sure of it now. The ten tons of explosives on board would very shortly be obliterating them and the Norfolk woods, not a German missile site.

  They were already bracing themselves for the inevitable impact with the trees—one hand still pulling back on the yoke, the other outstretched against the glareshield—when the miracle of physics happened.

  The rumble and jostling of the takeoff roll stopped. She was slipping through the air as if held up by the angels. She wasn’t climbing very quickly, but at least she was flying.

  “Unbelievable,” was all Joe Kennedy could say. “Probably got a branch or two stuck in the undercarriage, for sure.”

  It wouldn’t matter, though, because she’d never land on her wheels again.

  After ten minutes of a to
rtuously slow climb, they reached 2,000 feet. Kennedy gingerly removed his hands from the yoke and throttles as a controller in the lead mothership attempted to take control. He and Williams breathed a sigh of relief as the baby held her attitude and heading.

  The controller put the BQ-8 through a gentle turn, which went without a hitch. Then he pitched her down a few degrees, letting the speed build a little before advancing the throttles for the climb back to 2,000 feet.

  “Looks like we’ve got a winner here,” Williams radioed to the mothership. “We’re moving on to Phase Two.”

  Phase Two: arming the explosives. There really wasn’t much to it; just operate several switches. The triggering circuit for the Torpex would then be active.

  Joe Kennedy hesitated for just a moment. An impassioned plea from one of the ordnance technicians flashed through his mind. I don’t think that system’s safe, Mr. Kennedy, the tech had said. There’s just too many ways for it to glitch. A short circuit, a little leakage in a fusing mechanism, radio interference…

  With all due respect, Mr. Kennedy, you’re crazy to want to fly that thing. Too much room for error. Waaaay too much room.

  He shrugged it off. The tech had a reputation in the squadron as a habitual worrywart, a Chicken Little who thought the sky was always falling.

  If you listened to people like that, Kennedy told himself, you’d never accomplish anything in this life.

  He threw the first switch.

  One of the mothership pilots finally broke the moments of stunned silence: “What the fuck just happened?”

  Joe Kennedy’s plane had vaporized in a blinding flash. There was nothing left of her but a huge cloud of smoke that rained smoldering fragments of what had once been the BQ-8 on the English countryside below.