Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (22 page)

Marc leaned over the fence and looked down the concrete face to the puddles and silt on the floor of the dock. More than a hundred prisoners and skilled foremen worked there. Sparks flew from welding gear on one side while another crew used wooden levers to jack a small barge on to its side so that the flat bottom of its hull could be inspected.

‘You’ve gotta watch yourself on those,’ Kuefer warned, as he pointed at the rusting metal ladders spaced every twenty metres along the dock wall. ‘Your boots pick up silt and oil off the dock floor, which ends up all over the rungs. Then it rains and it’s as slippery as hell. We’ve lost three welders from falls in the last seven weeks.’

‘How many men have you lost altogether?’ Marc asked.

Kuefer shrugged. ‘Nobody keeps count. I only know about the welders because there’s a shortage. If we lose a labourer or a painter they just draft a new man from the camps. If we lose a good welder it slows everything down.’

‘How many barges are needed for the invasion?’ Marc asked.

‘All we can get,’ Kuefer said. ‘We’re taking every barge, motor launch and tug we can lay our hands on out of northern France, Holland, Belgium and even a few from Germany. Originally the army asked for a minimum of ten thousand barges, but we’ll be lucky to get seven thousand – and a good third of those are in no state to reach the open sea. Come on, I’ll take you to the drafting room.’

A two-minute drive brought the Mercedes to one of the small number of dockside buildings that still had four walls and most of a roof. Every window was boarded and electricity came from a pair of diesel generators mounted on flatbed trucks.

‘Kommodore, good to see you,’ a bearded Frenchman said, speaking in French. ‘We have eleven barges – arrived from Belgium yesterday.’

Kuefer pointed at Marc. ‘I have a translator now. He’s young, but Oberst Ohlsen assures me that he’s capable. Marc, meet Louis – my head draftsman and engineer. Before we start, I want to show Marc what we do. This is our starting point,’ Kuefer continued, as he led Marc towards a large draftsman’s board on which was a partially drawn outline of a coal barge. ‘How many of these do we have?’

Marc took a moment to realise that he was supposed to translate. After asking Louis he replied to Kuefer in German. ‘He says there are six identical barges. Five are in reasonable condition, the sixth has suffered a collision on the way here and only appears to be afloat by the will of god.’

Kuefer smiled. ‘Identical barges are desirable because it means there’s less designwork per vessel. Now, once the drawing of the ships is complete decisions have to be made.’

Kuefer headed across to a bank of wooden school desks with doors laid across the tops.

‘This is a completed drawing and is usually accompanied by a condition report by a ship’s surveyor. Under normal circumstances an architect such as myself will survey the ship, study these plans for a few days, make some suggestions and supervise the draftsman in drawing up plans for refurbishment work.

‘At present we don’t have that luxury. With thousands of barges to convert, I need to make rapid decisions based upon instinct and experience so that repairs and modifications can be completed quickly.’

‘And if you get it wrong the boat sinks?’ Marc asked.

‘Hopefully not.’ Kuefer smiled. ‘But with four naval architects converting thousands of barges in the space of a few months, there’s always a chance that things will go wrong.

‘Now,’ Kuefer continued, as he leaned over the completed drawing. ‘My task is to turn this barge, which looks like it was designed for towing lumber along a river, into something that’s seaworthy, capable of rapid embarkation and disembarkation and of carrying heavy equipment such as tanks and artillery pieces.’

As Kuefer slid a set of drawing instruments from his leather coat, the bearded draftsman pulled tracing paper over the drawing and cut it from a roll before clamping it in place with bulldog clips.

‘Decisions,’ Kuefer said, as his pencil hovered over the paper. ‘So Marc, this is a nice sized barge, designed for lumber. It’s wide and metal hulled, so it’s basically seaworthy. It might catch the wind and capsize in a gale of force eight, but there’s nothing you can do about that. The barge floor is wood and any tracked vehicle or even a truck is likely to splinter it. In an ideal world, we’d lay aluminium over the whole deck, but the aviation industry has dibs on the entire supply.

‘That leaves me with two options – either a thin layer of tar … actually, how much tar is available at present?’

Marc opened his mouth to translate, but Louis understood and Marc only had to translate the answer.

‘He said we have enough for wooden hull repairs and deck patching, but it’ll be weeks before there’s enough supply to lay over the floor of eleven barges.’

‘As I expected,’ Kuefer murmured. ‘Which means we have to go with a concrete floor. Concrete weighs twice as much and takes a full week to set. But it’s all we have.’

As Kuefer explained, his hands were a whirl – jotting marks, lines and comments on the tracing paper. He drew crosses where anchor points should be set in the concrete. These would hold chains to strap down vehicles or cargo, or else they’d be threaded with ropes for soldiers to hang on to.

‘Finally the ramp,’ Kuefer said dramatically, before giving Marc a smile. ‘Ideally, every self-powered barge would have the front chopped off. We’d install a drop-down ramp that would enable tanks and troops to run on to a beach and start fighting. Unfortunately we have no chains or gears and we certainly don’t have electric winches or the welders and electricians we’d need to make them work efficiently. So we have this.’

Kuefer used a ruler to draw a pair of metal ramps with a hinge at their centre. One end was welded to the floor of the boat, while the hinged parts swung out over the front of the barge, enabling vehicles or men to run down the ramps on to the landing beach.

‘
Voilà!
’ Kuefer said, as he signed off his drawing and smiled at Marc. ‘One Belgian lumber barge, expertly converted into a state of the art landing ship.’

Louis spoke in Marc’s ear and Marc translated for Kuefer.

‘He says the army have been rejecting a lot of barges as unstable and that four centimetres of concrete across the whole deck might be too heavy. He suggests strips on either side where tracks and tyres would run, leaving the centre of the deck as wood.’

‘Obviously,’ Kuefer roared. ‘That’s what I meant. Why would you lay concrete across the whole deck?’
ever

Marc got the impression that Kuefer hadn’t meant that at all, but didn’t like being told he was wrong by a mere draftsman.

‘Tell him to show me the next one,’ Kuefer said sourly. ‘The only food around here is army swill and I want to be back in Calais in time to get a decent table for lunch at Heuringhem’s.’

A week after starting work with Kuefer, Marc was fed up with his boss. When the Kommodore was in a good mood he’d take time explaining how things worked, reminisce about childhood and speak fondly of his previous role designing gun turrets for cruisers and battleships. But he was under huge pressure from Berlin to convert thousands of barges with limited material and an under-skilled workforce, so mostly he was crabby and miserable.

Kuefer worked late nights and weekends and his young translator was expected to be available at all times. Marc often fell asleep on the way home and he even spent one night on the sofa in Kuefer’s hotel suite when his boss demanded a five a.m. start for a meeting in Paris.

Most days they travelled between dockyards, supervising barge construction along a three-hundred-kilometre stretch of coastline running from Le Havre in the west and as far east as Ostende in Belgium.

The thing that most irked Marc was that Kuefer and his German driver, Schroder, would make arrangements for lunch in a decent restaurant, leaving him to his own devices. While the Germans had three courses with wine and cigars, Marc found himself wandering around a strange town with nothing but a sweaty sandwich from home, or left at some dockyard or in the draftsman’s office to eat whatever was served to the prisoners.

Each port had a slightly different atmosphere. The huge dry docks at Dunkirk were as miserable as the watery broth served for lunch. At Le Havre nobody spoke to Marc in case he snitched to his boss; Calais was OK because Henderson wangled him a pass to eat with the Germans at headquarters; but Marc found himself in Boulogne on this drizzly Wednesday.

Twenty small boatyards were situated along a broad canal behind the harbour. A few had gated dry docks for big boats, but most work was done on sloping concrete embankments. Although Germans gave the orders and prisoners did all the unskilled work, the yards remained in the hands of family businesses that had run them for decades.

Most of the owners were making good money from the conversions and treated their unpaid labour force in a decent fashion that extended to a proper lunch and safe working conditions.

Marc sat on a bollard close to the canal’s edge. The lunch ladies seemed to like him and his plate was stacked with fresh rolls, roasted vegetables and a huge slice of pork. He ate with fingers that were grubby from a morning spent clambering around boatyards.

Although conditions were better in Boulogne than in the other ports, there was still a hierarchy amongst the prisoners which determined what work they did and who they sat with at lunch.

Skilled labour was at the top of the pile. The Germans had advertised for welders, electricians, riveters and carpenters to come into the area, and these free men earned good wages. Next came the largest group, regular French prisoners of war. These men worked alongside tradesmen, carrying lumber, making repairs and painting. They worked twelve-hour shifts, but they were all volunteers who preferred hard work to being bored and hungry in the prison camps.

At the bottom of the pile were Poles and North Africans. The Nazis hated all Poles, but Polish prisoners in these parts were particularly disliked because they were fanatics who’d volunteered to fight for Britain or France after their own army surrendered.

The French Army had recruited more than a million fighters from North African colonies. According to Hitler’s racist theories, people with dark skin were little better than animals. White French soldiers were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, but the Africans were regarded as subhuman and suffered great brutality. In some areas, surrendering African troops had been moved into holding pens and machine-gunned by the SS.

In the dockyards the Africans and Poles got the least pleasant jobs, from hauling the barges up and down the embankment, to scraping barnacles off hulls and steam cleaning engine parts inside the workshop.

After half an hour for lunch the dock foreman rang a bell and more than six hundred men went back to work at the various yards along the embankment. Marc had nothing to do until Kuefer got back from a restaurant in town so he helped the lunch ladies to stack up the enamel mugs and plates. His reward was a big slice of the fruit flan reserved for the foremen.

As Marc ate he sat at the top of the nearest embankment and watched as six Africans began to haul a small cargo barge up the embankment.

To begin with four men crossed a bridge to the opposite bank and caught ropes thrown from the back of the boat. They pulled the back out until the bow faced the embankment. As they rushed back over the bridge, their colleagues jumped aboard and looped a metal chain through the mooring holes in the bow. The thick chain was wound around a pulley with an attached breaking lever, and finally linked up to an electric winch inside a building atop the embankment.

The next phase of the operation was the trickiest. The boat’s wooden hull would get shredded if it was dragged up the concrete, so two men rushed forwards and placed a wooden roller under the bow. As the boat was hauled up, more rollers were wedged under the hull.

Once a third of the vessel was out of the water, wooden props shaped like a pair of triangles were slid under the hull-rollers and then turned upwards to prevent the ship from toppling on to its side. The six Africans had done this dozens of times and Marc marvelled as their heavy physiques coordinated ropes, rollers and props while the electric winch moved the boat slowly up the embankment.

But as the rear of the ship emerged from the water, a metallic grinding sound ripped from the shed containing the main winch motor. Marc looked over his shoulder and heard rattling as the broken chain dragged over the concrete.

‘We lost it!’ the winch operator shouted desperately.

The operator pushed his whole weight against the brake lever, but the pulley wasn’t designed to support the weight of the boat and the juddering chain torn off the brake shoe. Realising that the end of the chain might lash back as it cleared the pulley, he dived backwards as the boat began rolling back towards the dock.

Marc saw the tension in the broken chain as it whipped around the pulley and feared it might fly in his direction as it broke loose.

‘Clear out!’ the foreman shouted.

As Marc ditched his soggy flan and dived back behind the winching shed, the crew pulling the cargo ship up the embankment abandoned their positions, as did the crew working on the next barge less than five metres away.

Marc and everyone else expected the end of the chain to slide around the pulley and break free, but its jagged end wedged in the brake mechanism. The sliding boat juddered to a halt halfway back in the water.

It seemed the end of the chain would remain jammed in the cogs, and the yard foreman stepped out gingerly to inspect it.

The shipyards were always full of noise, but Marc could hear his heart beating as he stood on the dockside surrounded by sweating prisoners. As the foreman crouched in front of the winch there was a sharp crack.

The twisted end of the chain remained jammed, but the weight of the boat had torn the brake lever and the pulley out of the concrete floor. As the cargo boat began sliding back on its rollers the chain whiplashed across the embankment with the pulley attached.