Gold From Crete (24 page)

Now the headquarters signal station was set up at Rye Harbour and the first weak messages from England could be supplemented by later ones, clear and strong, but yet conveying only a faint picture of the disorder on the beach.

No complete unit had yet formed. Unloading was beginning.

‘Beginning? Are they asleep over there?’

Civilian snipers were causing loss.

‘Civilians? What is he thinking about? Order him to take the strongest measures. Shoot them. Hang them. Take twenty - fifty - a hundred of them and hang them from trees. This village here - Guestling Green - tell him to burn it and teach them the laws of war.’

Enemy infantry patrols had appeared at -- The message ended there abruptly, and there followed a long silence, ominous as well as infuriating, before communication was resumed by a weak transmitter. The beaches had been bombed for the fourth time. Headquarters had been hit, the general was dying of his wounds, the whole command apparatus shattered.

‘That’s a disgrace. Where was our fighter cover? Göring you must do better than this. See that there is fighter cover continuously over the beaches.’

‘Very well,
mein Führer
.’

Göring, who falsified figures, was not the man to point out that this Führer Order was impossible to obey, and dreadfully expensive to attempt to obey.

‘You, General. Cross at once and take command. Put some life into them.’

‘Very well,
mein Führer
.’

The weak transmitter was still sending messages. Every ship in the bay had been bombed and sunk at anchor, and the
Führer
turned an angry glance at his naval commander-in- chief.

‘
Mein Führer
, I have already stated in writing that a landing by sea was a dangerous operation without complete control of the air. When darkness comes I have ships ready to try again.’

‘And what about this confusion on the beaches?’

‘
Mein Führer
, I have stated in writing also that it was impossible with the means available to land a force in instant readiness to fight.’

The naval commander-in-chief had up to now been in high favour not only on account of his remarkable success in landing the army but also because of that morning’s successful battle with the British destroyers off Folkestone. But now a string of reports were coming in which were not so favourable. The British Fleet had been sighted coming south - an aircraft carrier, battleships, cruisers and destroyer screen. With the Fleet moving fast and heavily screened, the U-boats were attacking in vain. The massed onslaught planned for the Fleet’s exit from Scapa had failed, not unnaturally; the British admiral, called forth by the news of invasion, could expect nothing else and was doubly on his guard. Seven U-boats had made the attempt, and now only one was reporting.

‘Is Lutjens ready for them?’

‘Yes,
mein Führer
. He will fight to the death.’

‘Tell him every hour he delays them is precious.’

‘Yes,
mein Führer
.’

‘Have you given orders to bomb them, Göring?’

‘Not as yet.’

‘Then why do you wait for me to tell you? Give the orders at once.’

‘Yes,
mein Führer
‘

It was easy enough to say ‘yes’, but not so easy to carry out the promise. Göring’s forces were at full stretch already. But Göring was Göring, who would never admit that anything was beyond the powers of the Luftwaffe, and he said, ‘Yes,
mein Führer
.’ The mere effort of trying to maintain fighter cover over the invasion beaches while the transport planes dropped supplies was something a trifle beyond the Luftwaffe’s strength, but here was Göring launching air raids on London and diversions from Norway and endeavouring to play a part in the naval fighting in the North Sea and in the Channel all at the same time.

The dashing young general commanding the armour on the invasion beaches was already fretting and champing at the bit. He had forty heavy tanks at his disposal now, armed and fuelled and ready to march, and London was no more than two long marches away from where he waited at Playden, his tanks distributed through the village, while the battle in the air still raged above him. But even forty heavy tanks were not sufficient for a decisive blow. Between him and London there was infantry, he knew; there would be roadblocks, there were a few guns, possibly. He needed artillery to help him on his way and motorized infantry to follow him up; he needed bridging equipment and air reconnaissance, and none of this was available as yet. Moreover, he had only to look behind him, down the hill from Playden, to see a huge column of smoke mounting up into the blue sky from beaches; the last bombing attack there had hit two of his invaluable tank barges, and that smoke was rising from a million gallons of petrol pouring in blazing rivers down into the sea. He drummed with his fingers as he sat high up in his command car in the shadow of Playden church.

That was when the old gentleman came along, the colonel who had first been under fire in the Boer War and who had survived three wounds at Arras and the Somme. He was the only civilian in sight; such of the other inhabitants of Playden who had not fled before the parachutists were sitting apprehensively in cellars and kitchens. But the colonel walked boldly along. The empty sleeve showed that he was only a crippled noncombatant; his remaining hand was in the side pocket of his tweed coat. And running through his mind was Churchill’s phrase, ‘You can always take one with you.’

The keen blue eyes recognized the command car and the general with the Iron Cross under his chin. The old Mauser pistol, which had been his mascot on the Somme, had three rounds still in the magazine - thirty years old, but when he pulled out the pistol and pressed the trigger, they did their work. The young general fell headfirst out of the command car, tumbling to the road with a look of surprise still on his face, and the colonel fell four yards away from him riddled by bursts from the pistols of the general’s infuriated staff.

So when Von Rundstedt climbed out of the Storch plane that put him down beside the Rye road, the first news that greeted him was that the general commanding his armour was dead - a piece of news almost as depressing as the sight of the confusion on the beaches and the smouldering wrecks of planes that littered the fields wherever he looked. Those fields were patched like Joseph’s coat in many colours, when ten thousand parachutes lay scattered over them; and among the parachutes and the smoking wrecks and the guerrillas creeping from one cover to another there were still the sheep grazing industriously and lifting their noses to baa to their half-grown lambs.

The divisional general commanding the parachute troops made his report to Von Rundstedt. British armoured cars had made their appearance at Beckley, exchanging shots with the battalion there; the guerrilla troops were harassing the perimeter at all points from the sea round to the sea again. A single order from Von Rundstedt was sufficient to send the armour rolling forward under a new general. The people of Playden heard the engines roar and heard the ponderous clank of the armour getting under way. Up the road they rolled in a monstrous column, probing forward towards London, clanking in their mechanized might through Peasmarsh and bursting out of the perimeter at Four Oaks and at Beckley. The Local Defence Volunteers strung along ditches and hedges saw the monsters charging down at them by lane and field, and their bullets rang impotently against their steel sides. Some of the volunteers died, some ran for their lives, and some few, crouching in coppices, let the wave roll by and waited on in ambush for more vulnerable targets. In Northiam they fought to the death, holding their pitifully incomplete defence works as the armour came pouring in from all sides into the village. The ‘sticky bombs’ had not been delivered here yet; the few hastily contrived anti-tank weapons - bottles of petrol - were ineffective, although some unknown good soldier set fire to the small amounts of petrol at the filling stations, thus keeping it out of the hands of the Germans. The German armour suffered no loss at all, but at Bodiam and Newenden and Udiam men working furiously with picks and shovels, and helped at the last moment by engineer detachments arriving by car with explosives, destroyed the bridges over the Rother. Von Rundstedt had pushed out his perimeter by half a dozen miles; he had dealt a severe blow to the morale of the Local Defence Volunteers in this sector, and he had provided a line for a bulletin, but he had done no more.

And meanwhile by road and by railway the British army was slowly moving forward to the point of danger. Forty trains could transport a division, and there were a thousand trains available, chugging along branch lines and thumping over points at obscure junctions as trains took unprecedented routes from north to south and from west to east, as Montgomery gathered the Second Corps together to move in from Hampshire and the Second Armoured circled London on its way from Lincolnshire.

And the Fleet was steaming south from Scapa, picking its way through the minefields; and from the west a hastily gathered force of cruisers and destroyers was already moving up the Channel to make an abrupt end of the momentary German command of the sea there.

Yet in a sense none of this was as important as the air battle which was still raging over the invasion area. It was here that the vital decision would be reached, and victory would be owed - if victory were to be won - to the few hundred fighter pilots at the disposal of the RAF. It could be argued that Hitler would have done better for himself if he had held back from launching his invading force and had attacked solely from the air. A great victory by the Luftwaffe over the Royal Air Force might well have been decisive and settled the whole war; with undisputed command of the air the German army and navy would at least have found their task easier. As it was, the Luftwaffe was very seriously hampered by the necessity of maintaining air cover over the beaches; that was a ball and chain attached to the ankle of the Luftwaffe, hampering its freedom of action at every turn; the first radio message sent by Von Rundstedt from Rye was a demand for air cover, and Hitler, with his armour poised no more than sixty miles from London, was bound to insist on Göring meeting that demand.

Already by the end of that first day Fighter Command had been able to evolve a pattern, a plan of action, which promised victory provided the strength of the Luftwaffe was not too overwhelming. With radar and by the aid of the Observer Corps it was possible to estimate with reasonable certainty the strength of the German air cover, and by radio-telephone it was comparatively easy to launch superior forces of fighters at moments when that air cover was at a low figure and while radar could assure Fighter Command that no German reinforcements could arrive for twenty minutes at least. So, technically and tactically and strategically, Fighter Command held important advantages, while the battle raged with an intensity and a ferocity unprecedented in the history of air warfare. Indeed, if night had not put an end to it, the battle must have reached a lull very soon from the sheer exhaustion of the pilots and crews.

So night came down, affording a little leisure to Fighter Command to draw up a balance sheet, to count up losses in pilots and in machines, to revise earlier estimates of German losses, to issue orders for the resting of the pilots - on this, almost the shortest night of the year - and to move down reinforcements of personnel and material from the areas which clearly were no longer threatened. Night came down, while it was still afternoon in New York, upon a breathless and sleepless world, while governments from Lima to Tokyo studied the innumerable bulletins that had been issued. ‘The Admiralty regrets to announce ...’; ‘The Air Ministry announces ...’; ‘Berlin reports that . . .’ Those governments were trying to weigh the possibilities of victory one way or the other; what was in the balance was the destiny of humanity.

It was in the afternoon of July 1st, 1940, that the British navy made visual contact with the German navy, and the Battle of the North Foreland began - the battle of ship against ship, that is to say. Ships had fought submarines, and ships had fought planes; planes had fought planes, and mines laid days or weeks earlier had taken their toll all through that long day. But at three PM a lookout in the British destroyer screen suddenly saw through his binoculars the distant masts as the German ships came out of a patch of slight mist.

‘There they are,’ he said to himself, and yelled his report.

‘There they are,’ said the British admiral to his chief of staff three minutes later - at the very same second as Admiral Lutjens on the bridge of the
Scharnhorst
said, ‘They they are’ to himself. The guns were already firing; this was no Jutland, when each side had dozens of capital ships to bring into action. On the German side there were only three, even including the pocket battleship
Lützow
fresh from her defeat of the British destroyers, fighting today in line with the battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
. On the British side there were six,
Rodney
and
Hood
,
Repulse
and
Nelson
,
Royal Sovereign
and
Ramillies
. Deployment was instant, unlike at Jutland. Nor was the mist as hampering; this time the visibility was almost good. And, unlike Jutland, the tactical and strategical situations were such as to bring about close and decisive action.

Neither side had much room to manoeuvre - in fact, examination of the charted minefields off the Kentish and Belgian coasts leaves the student impressed at the temerity of the opposing admirals in engaging at all. But Lutjens had to fight.

His mission was to delay the entrance of British naval forces into the Strait of Dover, and the British navy had only to push on to compel him to give action - especially with Hitler sending signal after signal, each demanding action. In those conditions, against odds of two to one in capital ships and five to one in destroyers, Lutyens’ fate was sealed; his destruction was certain before the battle began, unless some extraordinary factor altered the balance.