If Britain Had Fallen (13 page)

The Germans had another name for it, S—1, the evening the weathermen, so often wrong in the past, were proved triumphantly right. The seas were calm, the skies clear. It was, the German soldiers joked as they checked their equipment and moved towards the embarkation points, a lovely night for a sail. This, too, was the verdict of the German Navy. On the western flank of the invasion route the German minelayers had been busy all day putting down a defensive barrier of mines, guarded by all ten of the Navy’s available destroyers and twenty small but powerful E Boats. On the eastern flank of the cross-Channel corridor another thirty E Boats protected a second defensive minefield, while a third minefield, designed this time to entrap enemy warships, had been laid under cover of darkness between the English coast and the Goodwin Sands.

Knowing Churchill’s obsessional determination to sink any German capital ship whenever it ventured out of harbour, the German Admiralty had assigned two of their few powerful units an important, if unheroic,
role in the invasion plans. On S—2 the battleship
Scheer
was already at sea, having sailed from Trondheim in Norway out into the Atlantic, followed by the cruiser
Hipper,
making for the gap between Iceland and the Faroes. Bait of this size proved, as Admiral Raeder had foreseen, irresistible to the Prime Minister, and the result provided the British with their one cheering item of news of the day. The aircraft carrier
Furious
and cruiser
Naiad
were sent after
Hipper
and, having slowed her down with air attacks, finally overhauled and sank her. The two ships then set off in pursuit of the
Scheer,
a worthy objective but one which drew them further and further from the narrow sea-lanes of the Channel where the real battle was so soon to be fought.

A second diversion was practised in the North Sea. On S—2 a force of five large liners and ten transports, escorted by four cruisers, left Stavanger on a course for Northumberland, designed to nourish any remaining fears the British might have on a landing in the largely unprotected northern counties. Once they had been met and challenged by the battle-cruiser
Repulse
and the cruiser
Southampton,
which rapidly destroyed the escorting cruisers, the transports turned back and the British ships were recalled to base, but not in time to escape attack by long-range torpedo bombers based on Norway. Once again the contest between air and sea power went in favour of the former, and both ships were sunk and several of the escorting destroyers damaged before, laden with wounded and survivors from the sunken ships, they reached port.

As darkness fell on S—1 day, fifteen empty transports slipped out of Cherbourg on a third mission of deception, to make a feint attack on Lyme Bay, all of the original plan for a landing in Dorset that had survived. But the thoughts of the Army commanders were now elsewhere, on the troops filing, silent and grim-faced, aboard the transports, and on the tanks and guns and crate upon crate of stores already piled in the holds or now being swung into position by dockside cranes. On a calm sea, and in bright moonlight, with not an English aircraft in the sky and only the sound of the ship’s engines, an occasional order, uttered in an unnaturally subdued voice, and the distant ‘neigh’ of a horse protesting at the sudden motion, to break the silence, the vast fleet slipped its cables and stood out to sea.

Crossing the Channel that night under their own power were about 170 4000-ton steamships, carrying mainly the heavier stores. The troops, ‘soft’ vehicles and horses mainly travelled in 1200 river and canal barges, some of them self-propelled but most towed by a larger ship or by one of the 390 tugs and trawlers mustered for the purpose. The fleet was completed by a motley armada of 1000 motor-boats, fishing smacks and even
sailing boats with auxiliary motors, whose task it would be to transship men, horses and equipment from the larger ships on to the enemy beaches. One force of three convoys of troopships set out from Dunkirk, Calais and Le Havre, preceded by minesweepers and towing behind it the smaller craft to be used during disembarkation. It was followed, from Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne and Etaples, by a second force made up of eight convoys of fifty barges each, towed in pairs or, due to a last-minute shortage of tugs, in threes. The men aboard, had the sea been higher, would have had a rough passage, but once again, as so often during the past few days, fortune seemed to be on the side of the attackers.

The planners of Army Group A had divided the coastline on which they were to land into two sectors, the Western, from Rottingdean near Brighton to Hastings, being the responsibility of the Ninth Army, the Eastern, from St Leonards to Folkestone, being that of the Sixteenth Army. The two armies’ immediate objective, after securing the initial foothold, was to push inland until they were entrenched along a line running roughly from Brighton to Uckfield, thence across the centre of Kent to Etchingham and Tenterden, then through Ashford to Canterbury and finally back towards the sea at Deal. A bridgehead on this scale, more than seventy miles across and fifteen deep, was, the Germans believed, needed to give them room in which to accumulate stores and reinforcements, to resist the inevitable counter-attack, and to prepare to break out towards the next objective, bounded by a line from Gosport on the Solent to Guildford and thence across country to Gravesend on the Thames.

For the British, planning in the dark without radar or reconnaissance aircraft, the first news of the approaching landing came half an hour after midnight from a motor torpedo boat stationed at Calais, which had discovered and sunk two minesweepers; and as the night wore on further reports reached the Admiralty of tugs and trawlers sighted towing barges. Everyone was eager to avoid another false alarm but at 4 am a special meeting of the Chiefs of Staff was called in Whitehall, the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, being summoned from his headquarters at St Paul’s School, Hammersmith. The Prime Minister, who had given instructions that he was only to be awakened for news of invasion, had so far been allowed to sleep on, but was roused at 0435 hours when it was decided to send out the codeword ‘Cromwell’, which would ensure that the men on the coast, after standing-to at dawn, would remain on watch ready for an attack. It was also decided to authorise the local commanders in Southern and Eastern Commands to begin evacuation of the coastal area, but fortunately, everyone agreed, there were now few left in places like Folkestone and Hastings apart from members of the Home Guard.
‘What about the church bells?’ asked someone, producing the only laugh of the conference, and it was agreed that these could be rung when any area seemed directly threatened, but not before.

And then at 5.30 am, with the first signs of light already in the sky, came news which put an end to all uncertainty. ‘Vast numbers’ of parachutists, ‘too large to count’, it was reported, were coming down on the hills north and west of Folkestone. The Chiefs of Staff had heard more than enough of parachutists in the last few weeks. ‘Probably only a platoon,’ remarked one sceptical officer. ‘Or a bomber crew baling out,’ suggested another. But before long a further message proved them wrong. The force was now revealed as ‘several thousand’ strong and before long a ‘most immediate’ signal reported that the parachutists had, after a bitter fight, captured the small forward airfield of Lympne, on which, soon after dawn, small aircraft bringing Army and Luftwaffe liaison officers began to land, despite harassing fire from the British troops still dug in on the perimeter.

The lack of wind had made it easy for the airborne troops to descend precisely on their dropping-zone and the perfect weather conditions had also made the sea crossing far less hazardous than the Germans had feared. The Royal Navy, badly hit by its losses in the last few days and now impatiently held back while the Chiefs of Staff waited to see where the main German landing would fall, had so far hardly interfered at all. But the Germans, too, had had their problems, with no warships to spare for preliminary bombardment of the beach defences and as at 6 am, dead on schedule, the first barges touched down, the ramps in their bows collapsed with a bang and the tense but determined troops charged down on to the beach, they seemed to the officers on the transports anchored off-shore, watching through their binoculars, to be charging an impenetrable wall of barbed wire and iron posts. Already ragged salvoes of rifle-fire were coming from the pillboxes commanding the exits from the beaches and, as the first troops splashed their way through the shallows, the first machine-gun opened up, and as the leading troops moved higher up the beach and prepared to demolish the barricades, the first mines, planted just above high-water mark, began to explode and hurl sand, pebbles, metal and men into the air. Taking what shelter they could behind groynes or rocks, or frantically digging in to give themselves a little head-cover, the first men ashore waited for reinforcements, and especially for engineers to clear a way through the minefields and obstacles ahead, while rifles, machine-guns, grenade-throwers and even an occasional mortar poured down a heavy fire from the trenches and pillboxes commanding the shore below.

This was the scene on some beaches. On others, which there were not
enough men to defend adequately, or where dive-bombing had blown a hole in the usual wire and concrete obstacles, units managed to get on to dry land almost unscathed and then deploy off the shore on to the promenade or road behind. Field-guns, horses, ammunition wagons, bicycles were ferried on to the beach and then led and heaved on to the sea-front, less because the assault troops needed them at this stage than because the captains of the ships concerned were eager to unload their cargo and get away.

While civilians elsewhere in the country were waking up and listening on the 8 am news to the first, very guarded, reports of the landings, Bomber Command was sent to try to mend the breaches in the island’s defences. The crews’ instructions were simple: to bomb any transports and barges they could find along the south coast and any concentrations of enemy forces, especially tanks, which had forced their way off the beach. It was a hard assignment. The Whitleys, Wellingtons and Hampdens, designed for high-level bombing after dark and, as bitter experience had already proved, ill-equipped to carry out a low-level, close-support role in daylight, did heroic work, often taking the Germans by surprise by coming in from the direction of the sea, flying low above the waves, and they did much to raise the morale of the defenders, but they were too few to do more anywhere than slow down the build-up of men and guns ashore. The Navy, also hastening to the rescue, had on the whole less success. Destroyers from Harwich and Sheerness, charging down at full speed towards the eastern flank of the invasion fleet, ran headlong into the newly-sown enemy minefield and suffered grievous losses. On the west the British were more fortunate. The cruiser
Newcastle
and a force of eleven destroyers made their way unscathed through the enemy minefield and did great havoc among the diversionary force steaming towards Lyme Bay, sinking six of the transports and three of the escorting destroyers. Interrogation of a rescued merchant seaman, although survivors were few, for the British captains were in no mood to linger with one wave of bombers only just beaten off and another probably approaching, revealed the news, intensely disappointing to the victorious sailors, that the ships had been empty. But to the British Chiefs of Staff when, much later, it reached them, the report was reassuring: the attack towards Weymouth was clearly only a feint. ‘Our appreciation is’, a junior officer at GHQ Home Forces recorded that night in the war diary, ‘that any further landings that may occur will only be diversions.’

The 9 pm BBC news that Tuesday was cautiously optimistic. Some enemy units were ashore, they admitted, and Dover harbour had been conquered from the landward side by enemy parachute troops - that same
7th Parachute Division which had secured Lympne airfield that morning - but not till blockships had been sunk at the entrance. Many enemy troops had been killed as they came ashore and some were believed to have drowned in holes in the sea-bed, weighed down by their equipment. The evacuation of civilians from the affected towns was proceeding smoothly, an announcement heard with a derisive snort by more than one recent resident of Hythe and Sandgate who, like many thousand others, had been woken that morning by police pounding on their doors, forced to leave home with a single suitcase packed within the hour, and were now, after an uncomfortable journey in a slow and crowded train, huddled into school halls in Reading, an unwelcoming town already choked with evacuees. So far, said the announcer, civilians had obeyed the order to keep off the roads and any who found themselves in an area where military action was taking place - a BBC euphemism for getting caught in the middle of a battle - should take refuge in the nearest house and await further instructions.

After the news came a broadcast from the King, a brief, unemotional but stirring call to arms, intended primarily to let the nation know that, contrary to the stories that German radio had been putting out all day, he was still, as he had promised, ‘with his people’. The national anthem followed and then a special announcement about future radio services. Henceforward, explained the BBC, the Forces Programme would disappear and all transmitters would carry the Home Service, which would broadcast frequent news bulletins, separated only by light music and other recorded programmes. If the government, which had asked the press to play down the initial success of the Germans in securing a number of beach-heads, had wished to divert attention from the subject by its orders to the BBC it could not have succeeded more completely. Next day the newspapers, recalling those weary, wireless-ridden days at the start of the war, with continuous records varied only by Sandy Macpherson on the theatre organ, devoted almost as much space to the coming entertainment famine as to the Germans who had just spent their first night on British soil.