Gold From Crete (23 page)

The dozen experimental amphibious tanks sent at the same time - all there were - were not so successful, five of them foundering when launched. But the young and active German general, looking about him as his command car carried him out of the landing craft and up to the road to the Golf Club House, was at that moment much encouraged. Ahead of him the firing had ended with the storming of Camber; behind him the beaches were thick with vessels disgorging men and cargoes. The sight filled him with hope; it might have filled a British onlooker with despair.

But a closer look, a more understanding appraisal, might lessen the hope and temper the despair. The
Fritz Reuter
had landed four hundred men with food and ammunition and had got away again in half an hour, but she was exceptional. A big river barge can be laden with artillery, can be run across a narrow arm of the sea, and can be beached on the far side in four feet of water, but what happens next? How to get those guns out and up onto firm land? There were no cranes to heave up the five-ton monsters, no ramps to haul them along, even when the ebbing tide left the barges dry on firm sand.

The German staffs had foreseen these difficulties, but it was not so easy to remedy them. German engineers with small explosive charges set to work blowing off the bows and blowing open the sides of the barges - a heroic remedy indeed. Then the guns could be hauled out onto the sand, to sink axle-deep, and the weighty ammunition cases dumped beside them, under the warm sun of that Sunday morning. But there were more than a hundred craft which had not succeeded in beaching themselves properly. They had taken the ground at an angle, had found an uneven patch of beach, and they rolled over with the receding tide, helplessly, their cargoes tumbling down, crashing through decks and hulls in confusion and ruin.

There were barges full of horses - it is very hard to realize at this late date, that the German army in 1940 was largely horse drawn - and when those horses had been coaxed onto the beach, fodder had to be found for them, and water; water above all, thousands and thousands of gallons of fresh water. Horses in this first wave of invasion had been kept to a minimum, but the half-tracks and the light armoured cars and the troop-carrying trucks were, if anything, more difficult to get onto the beach, and for them petrol would be needed soon; the full tank trucks were the most obstinate vehicles of all to disembark, while hoses had to be run from the beached tank barges up to firm ground.

What complicated all these operations was the confusion of the landing. The German navy had done its best to minimize the confusion, but they had not achieved a great deal in face of all the handicaps. The need to use widely separated small harbours, the mixing of the flotilla by the tides, the unsuitable craft that had to be employed, the small tonnage available, all conspired to create muddle. The advance echelons of no fewer than four infantry divisions and two armoured divisions had reached the beaches, but in no order at all.

The close-packed rank of beached craft extended for ten miles, from Pett Level almost to Dungeness; and men and vehicles, guns and generals, supplies and spares, were scattered from end to end of this line; the German navy had had to accept this muddle because they could not contemplate for one moment any plan to sort out the invasion fleet in sight of land; that would have taken hours if it could have been done at all.

So from right to left to right huddles of men were seeking their battalions, and colonels ran about under the hot sun trying to assemble their regiments. Generals shouted themselves hoarse - one at least died of heart failure hurrying over the sand dunes - and through the confusion half-tracks ploughed their way, seeking their guns, and frightened horses galloped whinnying, while overhead raged the air battle.

It was into this confusion that Britain’s Bomber Command struck in the intervals when the Luftwaffe could not maintain air cover over the beaches. They dropped their bombs like beads on a string along the crowded strip. The damage done was not overwhelmingly severe nor the causalities oppressively great, but the confusion and demoralization were enormous when the half-assembled battalions dispersed for cover all over the flats; it was as well for the landing force that the third bombing raid devoted itself to the seagoing vessels anchored out in Rye Bay trying to hoist out their cargoes; those were easy targets, and not a single ship escaped.

Quite early in the day the first bullets fired by the LDV began to be noticed. There were not many of their volunteers skilful enough, or devoted enough, to make their way, after penetrating the paratroop cordon, within range of the beaches, by ditch and gorse clump; two or three hundred perhaps in all, but they played a useful part. A colonel standing, trying to get his regiment formed up, would break off in the middle of a word and fall dead to the ground; a group of men hastening along a track would hear a shot in the distance and would see one of their comrades tumble down with a shattered thigh. So harassing were these continual losses that the first-formed troops had to be dispersed again at once and sent out to scour the flats. They accomplished the task in great part - many unknown Englishmen died that afternoon - but at the cost of being unavailable for unloading, and they fired off thousands of cartridges, and every cartridge on this side of the Channel was worth a thousand, a hundred thousand, over in France.

In London, telephones were ringing, orders were being sent out, reports coming in.

‘Isn’t your division on the road by now? Report in half an hour that it’s moving, or someone else will be in command.’

‘What’s the latest from the First London?’

‘Send this order to Montgomery ...’

The central government, volcanic in its energy thanks to its prime minister, was moving every available man concentrically against the invasion area. Inexperienced staff officers were tackling the task of pulling a division out of London and hurrying it south.

‘Is there any chance of this being just a feint, and the real landing somewhere else?’ asked a cautious voice.

‘None at all,’ was the prompt reply; the prime minister had gauged accurately enough the limits of the capacity of the German air force and navy. ‘No need for more than a battalion in Dover and Folkestone now. The rest of that division ought to be moving to the attack.’

‘Are those trains assembled yet? The first one should leave by noon.’

‘Has the Fleet cleared Scapa?’

‘What are the last figures from Fighter Command?’

‘Roadblocks are all very well, but I won’t have the movement of our troops hindered.’

Until the actual eve of the invasion the staff responsible for the defence of England had held to the opinion that the German attack, if it came at all, would be launched against the east coast; the difficulties of the long sea passage had been underestimated and the advantages of the Lincolnshire area for armoured movement had been given too much weight. It was in Lincolnshire that the Second Armoured Division was stationed, and it was to the north of the Thames that the greater part of the ready divisions were distributed. But England is a small country, and it is covered with a network of railways accustomed, on such occasions as bank holidays, to transporting as many people as would outnumber a dozen divisions. There was enough rolling stock available for any conceivable effort, and to supplement the work of the railways there were large fleets of buses. The means to effect a rapid concentration were there; what was needed besides were the drive to bring it about and the staff work to make it possible. There were some incredible blunders made - fantastic to look back on today - but the civilian railway authorities were on hand to correct most of them. And there was no lack of drive; that need hardly be said, considering who was at the head of the government. By noon on that Sunday British forces were rolling forward everywhere in England to the attack.

The quality of those forces was another question entirely. The loss of the whole of the equipment of the Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk had almost disarmed the army. There were divisions which could not be considered as fighting forces at all; they had never exercised as divisions - indeed had never been formed up in one place - their artillery amounted to a single battery each of obsolete guns, and their transport simply did not exist, so that if they set out on a march it was doubtful if the men could be provided with a daily meal. It was a remarkable achievement to the credit of the division in garrison in East Kent - the luckless battalion annihilated at Winchelsea and Rye was a part of this - that it managed to get itself on the move westward at all. Using trains and buses and marching on foot, it pushed forward two weak brigades to New Romney and Appledore and patrols from there to make contact with the parachute troops. They had four field guns between them, and they were dependent for their communications on tradesmen’s delivery vans commandeered in Folkestone and Dover.

On the other side the small garrison of Hastings had not so far to go to gain contact with the enemy. A short march up the road through Ore found them exchanging shots with the parachute battalions at Fairlight and Guestling. Mothers in their houses saw soldiers abruptly entering and heard the brief words ‘Better get out, Ma, while you can.’ Evening services in churches were interrupted - and terminated - by the entrance of clattering platoons. Inexperienced subalterns under the direction of hardly more experienced engineer officers set about the task of turning cottages into strongpoints, heaving the poor sticks of furniture to one side, digging up the rich mould of the flower beds to fill sandbags, fortifying themselves on roadblocks that would at least delay the movement of the invaders; while all the time, it must be remembered, the air battle went on overhead, sometimes dying down, sometimes flaring up, but never quite lulled.

The blue sky above was streaked everywhere with the white condensation trails of a thousand planes, and often a soldier would raise his eyes from his task of filling sandbags or a volunteer would spare a moment from his watch over a hedgerow to see a plane come hurtling down out of the upper blue, trailing smoke behind it, to plunge into the fields with a shattering crash.

‘There goes another. Can’t be many left by now.’

The British soldier never doubted that these were all German planes crashing down.

There were in England on this Sunday, June 30th, one hundred and thirty heavy tanks all told, no more. And even that number represented a great increase on the figure after Dunkirk, when there were hardly more than seventy. These were the lumbering old tanks, but highly efficient fighting machines by the standards of 1940. There were, on the other hand, more than five hundred light tanks. Most of this armour was distributed over two armoured divisions, the First in Dorset - a war-hardened force with experience in France - and the Second in Lincolnshire, and these two divisions were the principal concern of the railways, moving them ponderously to interpose them between the invaders and London. There was no certain knowledge as yet of how great a force had landed, but every British pilot returning from a sweep over the invasion area could report having seen the squat, foreshortened shapes of German tanks moving along the roads and lanes beside Winchelsea and Rye.

German tanks! The word reached headquarters speedily enough. What was there to stop them if they came raging up the roads to London?

In war there is always the likelihood of attributing to the enemy strength and mobility and knowledge quite beyond reality. It was in the fear that German tanks might appear in the suburbs that very afternoon that the precautions were hurried on. Explosives were taken from every storage depot and hurried by car and truck along the Surrey roads, where Royal Engineers, whirled by car from their billets, set about preparing the bridges for demolition. The LDV toiled to create roadblocks; it was actually no later than four o’clock in the afternoon that the first ‘sticky bombs’, made by hand in frantic haste in London factories, were being issued to LDV on the main roads. A devoted man, with the greatest good fortune, could perhaps cripple a tank with one of these - might even conceivably destroy it, at the cost of his life. There were dozens of men who took those ‘sticky bombs’ in hand in the fixed but almost wordless intention of giving their lives to help to stop the German armour.

Guns would stop armour if given a chance; there were five hundred field guns in the whole of England, mostly scattered in single batteries here and there among scores of units, mostly manned by half-trained artillerymen. But some were attached to the divisions brought back from Dunkirk, to which more could be sent. A day or two would see those divisions, fully trained and half equipped, rolling forward to attack the invaders. Meanwhile?

Meanwhile a few batteries could be dug in to cover the roads leading into London, and supported by packets of battalions painfully made mobile, while an ex-cavalry officer with a cigar chafed at the delay and demanded an instant offensive, and women and children stood in the sunlit streets and lanes to watch the buses packed with soldiers rolling by.

III

The Fuhrer at his headquarters was chafing no less. He knew what there was at stake. Habitual gambler though he was, he could not keep calm while the dice were still rolling, while he waited for the enemy to show his hand. The first reports had brought elation, but the ones that followed brought first irritation and then anger. By good management the parachute troops had landed; by a miracle of good fortune the invasion flotilla had reached the beaches; by a combination of management and luck there was a squadron of tanks ready for action on British soil; by hard fighting Winchelsea and Rye were in German hands. But then the Luftwaffe began to straggle back to the airfields to rearm and refuel - and to count their losses.

At first Göring handed the figures over to his chief without checking them, but the explosion of wrath and the cutting sarcasm which they provoked made him more cautious. After that he edited the figures. He began to allow ten per cent for planes descending at other than their own airfields; he omitted all mention of the damaged planes which had crawled home and would not fly again for days or weeks; to be on the safe side he added ten per cent to the estimated British loss, even though that could not be checked and was certainly overestimated already. Then he could show figures that at least made optimism possible.