Gold From Crete (21 page)

Then the sergeant, looking up, saw the air thick with specks, and then he saw the specks suddenly burst open, burgeoning out like flowers suspended in the air, hundreds of them. They would have been beautiful against the sky if an indifferent eye could have seen them.

‘That’s them, boys,’ said the sergeant. ‘They’ve come.’

Even the sergeant, an old soldier, stood transfixed for some seconds before he could act. The planes had swept away, and the parachutes, each with its dangling figure, were perceptibly nearer before he spoke again.

‘You two,’ he said. ‘Run like the devil to the village. Get on the telephone. Wake up the postmaster and the bobby. And you two. Find old Stiles the verger and tell him to ring the bell. Ring the bell and go on ringing it. Come on, you others.’

He led them at a trot for a quarter of a mile before he pulled up and issued orders that spread them out along the bank. He slid one of his ten cartridges into the breech of his rifle and took aim. The first shot of the Battle of Britain echoed across the fields just as the church bells began to ring solemnly over the quiet countryside, bells here and bells there and soon bells everywhere, calling the country to arms against the invader. And telephones began to ring as well, and excited neutral correspondents ran wildly to telegraph offices.

The dawn that came up over New York five hours later saw newspapers for sale in the streets, each with a headline covering half the front page - ENGLAND INVADED! - and, as the day wore on, those headlines appeared in the streets of a thousand cities. ENGLAND INVADED!

II

From the moment the German parachute troops reached the ground, where Kent and Sussex join, the Battle of Britain exploded. At five o’clock on that Sunday morning the BBC was already broadcasting to a small audience; but so rapidly did the news spread that when the broadcast was repeated at 5.30 nearly all England was aroused and listening.

‘German parachute troops,’ said the disembodied voice, carefully free from any emotion whatever, ‘have landed in the neighbourhood of Rye and Winchelsea. They are already being engaged by local troops. Meanwhile, attempts are being made to land considerable forces on the beaches of Dungeness and Winchelsea. Fighting is continuing by sea and air as well as by land. The public is requested to read the instructions issued on June eighteenth last regarding invasion. Fresh copies are already being posted in public places. Remember the first rule stated there.
“Stay put.”
Remain where you are, do not panic, and stay put. And remember the last sentence of those instructions, “Think always of your country before you think of yourself.” The prime minister will address the country later today at an hour which will be announced shortly.’

It was a fact on which Britain can always look back with pride - that there was no panic. There had been no denial as yet, and no disproof, of the multitudinous current stories about German parachutists dropping in Belgium and Holland disguised as nuns and bus conductors. The night before the invasion everyone in England believed these stories and was prepared to see saboteurs at every street corner, but this morning the British public behaved as paradoxically as it had when France fell. It heaved a sigh of something like relief and decided, Now we can get down to business. Anxious people sat by loudspeakers; a few thoughtless people tried to put telephone calls through to relations in the threatened areas, but the main embarrassment to the authorities arose merely from the rush of people to town halls or police stations asking how they could help. The Sunday workers went on with their jobs; fathers on their day off took the children out so as to leave mothers with a free hand. An American correspondent summed up the situation by saying, ‘London appears to be less agitated than I expect Washington is at this moment.’

But the battle was being fought with the utmost fury by land and sea and air, and - as in every battle ever fought - the defenders met with reverses at the beginning as the concentrated weight of the attackers fell on the weak points. At Dover the four destroyers stationed there came steaming out, turning south-westward as they rounded the signal station on their way to attack the German troop transports. Anxious watchers on the cliffs at Folkestone saw them coming, steaming fast. But their speed did not save them from their first casualty. The watchers saw a great fountain of water go up from the side of the last of the four and saw her lurch out of line, disabled and on the point of sinking. One torpedo from the salvos fired by the ambushed submarines, waiting for this very moment, had struck home. And worse was to come. The first the watchers saw of it was when a cluster of pillars of water rose up from the surface of sea close to the leader. It was then that they looked farther out, to see a dark shape rushing to intercept from where she had taken post during the night under the French shore.

‘Pocket battleship,’ said the destroyer captain with his eyes to his binoculars. ’Make this to the - Admiralty.Have sighted--’

The sentence was not finished nor the signal sent, as an eleven-inch shell exploded under the bridge. Somebody took command of that destroyer and swung her round to the attack, limping after the other two. The 4.7s fired back, but even ten of those shells did not equal the destructive power of a single eleven-inch, and a moment later the
Lützow
brought her secondary armament into action as well. The destroyers were hit and hit again; the watchers saw smoke pouring from their hulls and streaming astern, and then the smoke began to rise more vertically as they lost speed, hiding the last act of the tragedy from the eyes of the watchers.

Momentarily at least the Reich had won command of the patch of sea over which the army had to be transported and supplied; later that day the British destroyers at the Nore, hastening to the attack, encountered even more formidable opponents in the battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, and were forced back. In the wider waters of the Channel to the west the mines freely sown and the massed U-boats and the two light cruisers Raeder had stationed there succeeded in the same way in holding back the light British forces hastening up the Channel.

In this desperate struggle Raeder had flung in every vessel that could float, risking - expecting - total loss if for a few days the barges and transports could cross and recross the Channel. Victory on land - the capitulation of England - would render negligible the loss of the German navy. The watchers on the cliffs witnessed other desperate battles, tiny skirmishes, but battles in which men died for their country, where drifters armed with Lewis machine guns fought yachts armed with rifles, where trawler fought trawler hand to hand by boarding, in that frantic struggle to stop or to maintain the traffic to the beaches at Camber.

There were troops to defend the coast where the parachutists struck, and they were not taken by surprise. They were already standing to when the first sound of the approaching air armada made itself heard; they were at their alarm posts and ready for action when the parachutists dropped. But they were only one battalion, and not up to full strength even so. With a thousand miles of vulnerable coast to defend, there could be no hope of posting strong forces everywhere; that battalion was only an outpost, with the usual outpost’s duty of warning and delay. The warning went out, before the parachutists cut the wires, but the delay was pathetically short.

A single company held Camber, and that was assaulted at once by two of the three German battalions dropped inside the perimeter; it must be remembered that in this parachute attack the drops were far more successful than could usually be counted upon, closely spaced and without any intermingling of units. The survivors of the British infantry company later declared that ‘not ten minutes’ elapsed between the first alarm and the beginning of the assault - probably an underestimate. The company was outnumbered by five to one at least, and from the unexpected side - overland. The parachute troops were the cream of the German army, powerful young men, with officers selected for their energy and quickness of thought. The rapidity of their attack was astonishing, and within a few minutes they had reached the frail defences; the brief hand-to- hand struggle that ensued could have only one ending.

The handful of British prisoners had the mortification of seeing, when the fighting had ended and they could take breath, the Camber beaches thick with German landing craft, and Rye Bay covered with other vessels coming in; it was a sight which held the attention even though far overhead the opening phase of that part of the Battle of Britain which was fought in the air was being fought out with a ferocity and determination unequalled in history.

The tiny garrison of Rye Harbour, on the other side of the Rother mouth, held out for some time longer; some of the victors at Camber were diverted to the attack there and, in fact, it was not until midday that the Martello tower was stormed. Rye itself stood no better chance. Four parachute battalions had been dropped on the four roads on the landward side of the town and, leaving small forces at road-blocks, they wasted no time before launching their converging attack. Already the first echelon of the air-landing division was being hustled out of its lanes beside the Winchelsea road where another parachute battalion awaited it, and it was this assault that sealed the fate of Rye. The dive bombers were attacking at the same moment, raining ruin on the town. The Germans burst into Rye from all sides, and the final struggle was fought out in the picturesque old streets, from house to house and from room to room over the wreckage left by the bombing.

Women cowering in the houses were unwilling witnesses, were pitiful victims. Desperate soldiers crouching beside windows ignored them as they peered out for shots at the German attackers creeping forward from corner to corner, and often a well-flung hand grenade left soldiers and women dead and dying on the floor together among the kitchen furniture.

The wave of attackers swept in over the little town like the tide over a rock. A ferocious final struggle ended in the storming of the Ypres tower, whose garrison died to a man in its defence; by ten o’clock in the morning the shattered town was quiet again, with the streets littered with dead, Germans and British, soldiers and civilians, women and men. There were only a few shots still to be heard, here and there, as the moppers-up hunted the last of the defenders down from the rooftops and out of the cellars. Winchelsea succumbed at much the same time - here horror was added to horror by the coincidence that no fewer than seven blazing aeroplanes, shot down from the skies above, came crashing within the narrow limits of the little village while the fighting was in progress.

The whole world was waiting for news, ever since the first announcement, waiting in agonizing anxiety. Even in the opening days of the Battle of Belgium, when the Wehrmacht had its strength first really tested, the tension had not been in any way so acute. It was evening in Australia; it was still night in California. The fate of England was in the balance, and the world knew that its own fate was in the balance too. In Tokyo and in Madrid, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, people waited for news. Then it came, from Goebbels’ organization in Berlin.

‘The forces of the Wehrmacht have landed in England. Progress is already rapid, and the German flag now waves in triumph over the cities of Rye and Winchelsea, two of the once- proud Cinque Ports. The prisoners taken are numerous and the German losses slight. The landing is proceeding satisfactorily. England, which for a thousand years has seen no foreign enemy on her shores, is tottering down to destruction.’

The Battle of Britain was fought in the air, on land, on the sea, and under the sea. In the feverish hours of that Sunday morning there was action at every point, and indeed it is to the credit of the German staffs that this was the case. In less than four weeks they made and executed plans whose flexibility and whose timing can only excite admiration. The first wave of German landing craft came into the beaches a half hour before high water, with the first light, only some minutes after the parachute troops touched ground and - almost incredibly - without a single casualty.

The
Fritz Reuter
was by no means loaded to her full draught not nearly to the extent to which she was usually loaded when carrying cement to Berlin. Forty tons of her present cargo consisted merely of men, and men, even when no allowance is made for their comfort, make an awkward and bulky cargo to carry. The metal containers of supplies, particularly those filled with ammunition, were more congenial cargo, but even so they were bulky and space-wasting because of their limitation to thirty-seven kilograms - about eighty pounds - apiece. With four hundred men on board and eight hundred containers, the
Fritz Reuter
drew only four feet of water.

The fat captain was so distracted by the flight of the Luftwaffe overhead that he actually had not noticed the low shore ahead. In the faint light he could just see, when the naval officer excitedly pointed to it, the line of small breakers, the beach and the low sandhills ahead. He swung his wheel over so as to come in squarely; all around him other craft were racing at their ponderous fastest for the same objective. The fat captain eased his throttle, but the beach was far shallower than he expected, and the
Fritz Reuter
took the ground with a bump that threw the excited soldiers in heaps. But there was an active major in command, who hauled himself up on deck again at once and bellowed orders. The men moved forward in orderly fashion into the bow and climbed up and leaped down into four feet of water. One platoon waded to the water’s edge and pressed forward to the dunes to guard against an attack that was never made. The others formed two parties, one hauling forward the containers and handing them down to the other.

As fast as the containers were handed down the men in the water carried them and dumped them at high-tide mark and returned again for the rest. The
Fritz Reuter
rose with the removal of her cargo as well as with the rising of the last of the tide; the fat captain had to let in the clutch at intervals to keep her bow aground so that the later journeys were far shorter than the first. It seemed hardly any time before the barge was free of its cargo, and the major waved farewell before he leaped down into the water on the heels of his men. In obedience to the young naval officer’s order the fat captain engaged his reverse, and the
Fritz Reuter
drew off the beach, swung round and headed back towards France.