If Britain Had Fallen (18 page)

It had already been decided that the main crossing would be made elsewhere and shortly after midnight the inhabitants of Streatley, Pangbourne and Wallingford, already roused by the noise of German transport rattling through their streets, finally gave up the attempt to sleep as the German barrage opened up with a roar against the British positions on the far bank. Two hours later, with the glare of burning houses reflected in the surface of the river, and the darkness lit every few seconds by the flash of exploding shells or the thin lines of tracer bullets, curving with apparent slowness towards their targets, the assault troops began to paddle across, some in collapsible rubber boats brought from Germany, the rest in rowing boats, motor launches and even punts hastily collected from boathouses up and down the river or unearthed from hiding places beneath the bank. Some boats, while being towed to the assembly points, had sunk, from holes concealed beneath the planking, and others, where a slow leak had been more carefully concealed, began to fill with water as they crossed the river. But the Thames was, by Continental standards, not a major obstacle; a few of the leading infantry only just managed to scramble ashore, soaked and cold in the chilly air of an early October night, and a very few, whose craft had drifted into a patch of darkness and whose shouts went unheard above the noise of the barrage, were drowned, their bodies drifting slowly downstream to start false rumours wherever they came ashore that the Germans had suffered a resounding defeat.

The German plan was for the three infantry divisions to secure a bridgehead for the two Panzer divisions to cross the river, and engineers of the 7th Panzer Division had gone ashore with the leading elements of the infantry at Pangbourne to build three temporary bridges, two of them strong enough for tanks. Within hours one was ready, but the exit from the rest was, the engineers reported, blocked by rubble which would have to be cleared in daylight. But the commander of the 7th Panzer Division, Major-General Erwin Rommel, was not the man to accept delay if he could help it. Two tank battalions were ordered across by the one
available bridge and told to go forward without waiting for the rest of the division.

Behind the Thames, in addition to the regular forces now forming the British strategic reserve, there had assembled the remnants of a vast variety of units overtaken by the German advance. The headquarters staff of Aldershot barracks, many of them more accustomed to handling brooms than rifles, sergeant-majors without barrack squares, mechanics without workshops, sailors without ships and airmen without aircraft – everyone who had become separated from his unit, or been caught up in the great retreat as the Germans swept across Southern England, had somehow found his way towards the Thames and reported to the posts set up on the Berkshire bank to deal with just such stragglers. The men had been sent to hastily-formed training units; some, hoping to justify the old remark about the Battle of Waterloo, had even had a crash course in the use of cover and basic weapon training on the playing fields of Eton. There was no lack of instructors, for half the barracks in Southern England were now in German hands, though some, accustomed to the leisurely procedures of more normal times, proved unable to adjust to a world where a man who had barely seen a rifle before had to be turned into a soldier in a day. But this, of course, was just the problem the old LDV had faced back in May and June and, to their ill-concealed delight, some Home Guards now found themselves teaching the basic military skills to members of the regular forces who up to now had fought their war with a screwdriver or typewriter or a carving knife, for among what General Brooke had named his ‘Irregulars’ were many RAF ground crew, several units of the Catering Corps, dislodged from their barracks on Salisbury Plain, and the 12th Training Battalion (Clerks), from Aldershot, speedily nicknamed by their little more military comrades ‘the Fighting Twelfth’.

While the officers and NCOs of units which had survived Dunkirk and even the great withdrawal from the coast and the Uckfield to Etchingham line struggled to weld this ill-assorted army of civilians in uniform into some sort of fighting force, one small group among them needed little such instruction, having already learned the grammar of their trade and making up in fighting spirit what they lacked in military experience. These were the Sandhurst cadets, several hundred strong, who, when their seniors had been sent to fill the gaps in the regiments which had borne the brunt of the fighting in Kent and Sussex, had reluctantly surrendered to the Germans without a struggle (though not without planting a number of lethal booby-traps) the hitherto sacred buildings of the Royal Military Academy and made their way in good order towards the west. Already they knew well enough that in a straight-encounter battle the Germans,
with their overwhelming air power, were likely to have the best of it, but ambushes were another matter, and while the Germans had been forming up for their assault the cadets, after an intelligent appraisal of the most likely area for a crossing, had been busy laying an extensive minefield just where the tanks of Rommel’s leading battalions were now beginning to deploy to left and right to take the defenders of the river line in the rear. The result was the most heroic action of the whole campaign. The cadets were armed only with small arms and grenades, but as one tank after another ground suddenly to a halt, its tracks blown off, or its way ahead barred by a wrecked neighbour, they leapt upon it, pounding on the roof, thrusting grenades through any opening they could find and greeting with furious volleys any Germans who, as the stranded tanks began to ‘brew up’, climbed out and ran for cover. In an hour the two tank battalions had ceased to be an effective fighting force, and by the time the German infantry arrived to rescue the survivors 200 cadets lay dead or seriously wounded and the rest were stumbling away, battered, bleeding but, most of all, exultant, supporting their walking wounded. Too tired to get far, they sought refuge in a barn and there that night were captured, but not before the story of their exploit had thrilled a public desperate for good news.

But this mishap was insufficient to halt the German advance. On the left of the front the engineers of 10th Panzer Division, assisted by pioneers and engineers, had already rebuilt the bridge linking Goring to Streatley and, to speed up the build-up on the far bank, had built another temporary bridge close by and a second at Wallingford. By the early hours of the morning the whole of 10th Panzer Division was across the river, being followed by elements of 7th and 8th Panzer Divisions, so that by nightfall on 15 October they and their supporting infantry controlled the whole area of Oxfordshire enclosed in the bend of the Thames, nearly fifteen miles across, from Wallingford to Henley, with other units established along both sides of the river as far as Windsor. So far the main forces had barely come into contact, for the British troops had made full use of the breathing space of the last few days and everywhere the infantry were well dug in but, with only meagre artillery support, and with their positions dive-bombed the instant the defenders revealed them, the enemy armour was advancing almost at will.

Now, the British realised, was the moment for a supreme effort, and from the headquarters of Home Forces went out an appeal to the RAF for every aircraft that could stagger into the air to be loaded with whatever bombs it could carry and sent against the German river crossings. This was the RAF’s equivalent of the ‘irregulars’ now fighting on the
ground and the result was an epic as glorious as any in British history. From still operational bases in Wales and Scotland, halting to refuel at unbombed airfields in the Midlands, the last machines in the British reserves flew south; from factory landing strips, with test pilots at the controls, new aircraft just off the production lines, prototypes not yet in production, and unfamiliar types still on the secret list rose up, some of them a little uncertainly, into the autumn sky; from supply and storage units, from which the civilian pilots of Air Transport Auxiliary delivered new and repaired machines to the squadrons and where now men and women eagerly competed to be given an aircraft to make what, they well knew, might be their last flight, brand-new planes which had never been in action and battered old veterans hardly fit to fly soared upwards towards the battle. From all over the British Isles an extraordinary variety of machines made their way towards the middle reaches of the Thames, briefed with the simple instructions that any troops or tanks crossing the river, and any vehicles or concentrations on the right bank, could be attacked at will. Those on the ground looking up as raggedly, and at long intervals, the fleet of aircraft passed overhead, as once Drake’s little ships had stood out of Plymouth Sound to harry the Spaniards all the way up the Channel, could hardly believe their eyes at the number or variety of machines that, by a supreme effort, had this day been brought into action.

There were battered Blenheims, already damaged in many a sortie against the invasion beaches and far too slow to escape the Messerschmitts; long, slim Fairey Battles, fatally slow and ill-protected, which had suffered such appalling casualties in France; Wellingtons and Hampdens and Whitleys from Bomber Command in the black paint they wore for night bombing; twin-seater Defiants with their high turrets, long-since withdrawn from daylight operations as no match for the German fighters; single-engined Harvards with their yellow Training Command paint still on their wings, flown by instructors or their most advanced pupils, and easily identified from afar by the ugly, raucous grinding noise of their engines; flimsy Tiger Moths piloted by cheerful young men who had only just done their first solo; ancient Gloster Gladiator biplanes dragged from the hangar where they were awaiting breaking up or despatch to an RAF museum – all passed overhead in a gallant, ungainly procession, like a history of the RAF through the ages at an air display. Only after the most heated argument were a group of enthusiasts who wanted to load up with bombs the vast but derelict airship R100, lying idle in her hangars at Cardington since the disaster to her sister ship the R101, persuaded that to make her airworthy would take too long and that, if they did get her
into the air, the brisk wind would make her almost unmanœuvrable for an inexperienced crew.

But they were almost the only would-be aviators to be frustrated that day. Every plane that could get off the ground, every man and woman with a pilot’s licence – and a substantial number who had not – was got into the air for the RAF’s last stand. All those concerned knew well enough that only the few operational aircraft were likely to do much damage to the enemy, but the urge to strike some sort of blow against the apparently invincible Germans was irresistible and dedicated fitters and armourers had managed to give almost all a weapon of some kind. Many had machine-guns, hastily fixed to a temporary mounting, to be fired from an open cockpit, some had a 50-lb bomb slung behind the cockpit or beneath the wings and controlled by improvised release gear; a very few had no more than a determined pilot armed with a tommy-gun or even a bag of grenades like a pioneer of air warfare in 1914, useless against enemy aircraft but sufficient perhaps to kill a few Germans on the ground. All those at the controls that October day knew only too well that their chances of coming back were slight. (‘Just as well,’ one unpromising pupil at an elementary flying training unit had told his instructor, as they made for their separate aircraft, ‘I never was much good at landings.’) But Churchill’s ‘Take one with you!’ appeal had not been made in vain. None of those now waiting anxiously for the first signs of enemy fighters as the familiar soft and green landscape of Southern England, which had rarely looked more worth protecting than on this clear autumn day, slid beneath them, was given to heroic gestures. If asked they might, a little shamefacedly, have confessed that they would rather die than live in a country ruled by a foreign enemy, but they were not asked. Instead they talked of ‘having a go’ and joked, rather tensely, of giving Hitler and Göring a lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

The resulting attacks, with ancient biplanes roaring out of the sky just above their heads, firing a single machine-gun, or dropping a solitary bomb while heavy bombers bombarded the temporary bridges from several thousand feet, briefly threw the Germans into confusion. The very lack of planning, due to the vastly differing speeds of the attacking aircraft and the fact that many had not been ordered to fly at all, was more disruptive than a better coordinated and more predictable attack. No sooner had one Battle or Whitley or Swordfish flown away, firing as it went, or been shot down by ground fire, than some other unfamiliar aircraft would appear in the distance, making an equally heroic attack. By the time the slower machines arrived the Luftwaffe, summoned by half a dozen indignant commanders who had been told that no danger of attack from the air
existed, was waiting for them and the massacre began. One Tiger Moth, spiralling down after some impressive aerobatics by a flying instructor in which it had out-manœuvred a Messerschmitt no, only to be easily overtaken and shot down as it flew away, crashed on to the temporary wooden bridge at Marlow and briefly set it on fire. But the flames were rapidly put out, and though elsewhere some gutted lorries, a few dead soldiers and a cluster of craters round the approaches to the bridges showed that the attack had not been wholly in vain, by late afternoon the enemy reinforcements were once again pouring across them.

While the RAF had been making its final gallant stand in the skies above them, the last major land battle of the invasion, later known to historians as the Battle of the Chilterns, was being fought out on the ground. With the Germans’ crushing superiority in armour aided by the desperate British shortage of both tanks and anti-tank guns, the result was never really in doubt, but the German infantry found the opposition facing them far tougher than their comrades of the armoured divisions. As darkness began to fall, they were exhausted. Soft-hearted British civilians in the Buckinghamshire villages, watching from behind their curtains as the enemy columns passed, felt almost sorry for the young Germans, many of them no more than twenty, who marched sullenly forward like automatons, too far gone to sing or even talk, or, when ordered to halt, fell to the ground where they stood.