Gold From Crete (20 page)

‘I wish I could be sure,’ said the air-force member. ‘But they’d do their best to conceal their object in any case.’

‘But are they consistent with invasion plans?’

‘They’re not inconsistent, anyway,’ said the air-force member cautiously.

‘There’s a parachute division and at least one air-landing division, and we’ve heard nothing from them since Rotterdam. Any comments?’

‘There are enough planes to transport the whole parachute division at a single drop - say six thousand infantry with mortars and a certain amount of equipment,’ said the air member. ‘The air-landing troops would have to follow, mostly. A few instantly and the rest in a second wave - three hours later, say.’

‘Enough to be a nuisance.’

The chairman turned back to the naval member. ‘How many can they transport by sea?’

‘Depends entirely on how much equipment they bring with them. They might carry forty thousand infantry at one lift, to land on an open beach. Armour would reduce that number. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t like the job of landing armour on an open beach. You want a port with quays and cranes for that, and those ports’ - the naval member stabbed with his finger at the map - ‘are not only defended but prepared for demolition in case of accidents.’

‘Special landing craft?’

‘A few experimental ones only. We’d have heard if they’d started building in large numbers.’

‘So some armour might be landed?’

‘No doubt. A division possibly, although it’s hard to believe it.’

‘Very well, gentlemen.’ The chairman looked at the clock. ‘We are agreed that invasion can come at any moment.’

It was while the chairman was gathering his papers together - at that very same moment - that at the headquarters at St Omer the chief of staff laid the final orders before the colonel-general for signature. The colonel-general turned the pages over with one hand while he held his fountain pen ready in the other. He scribbled his signature.

‘The code word has gone out, sir,’ said the chief of staff.

‘Excellent,’ said the colonel-general.

But he was enough of a romantic to spare a glance at the map on the table which was revealed when the chief of staff took the orders away. The road to London; there were strange foreign names upon it, Hawkhurst and Lamberhurst, Tonbridge and Sevenoaks - stepping stones on the road to victory, like Warsaw and Liege and Reims.

Motorcycle dispatch riders were already hurtling at speed over the roads of Holland and Belgium and northern France; they pulled up with a clatter, hurled themselves from their saddles to hand over their sealed envelopes to waiting officers. It took only a second for those officers to read the entire message inside - SEA LION. Sea Lion - Sea Lion - Sea Lion - on airfields and at ammunition depots, in railway stations and in field bakeries, in Calais, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, those words were heard, and the Third Reich gathered itself for its boldest leap of all.

As darkness closed over the little harbours excitement mounted. Frenchmen and Belgians and Dutchmen, confined to their houses by a strict curfew, lifted their heads to hear, in each little port, a sudden tonk-tonk-tonking as the diesels started up in their hundreds. Mooring lines were cast off, and barges began to nose their way towards the entrances. There were misunderstandings and minor collisions. The orders that had until now been given in quiet executive tones were now being bellowed through megaphones, as if the officers concerned had suddenly realized that there was, after all, no danger of arousing England from her sleep across the water.

‘Keep them moving! Keep them moving!’ shouted the naval officer in charge of the embarkation into his telephone as the reports came in. It was his business to get as many loaded vessels out to sea as could possibly be managed while the tide served. No one knew better than he did the difficulties of the operation he was directing.

The fat captain of the
Fritz Reuter
spun his wheel urgently to avoid a dark shape looming in front of him. Beside him a young naval officer, no more than a boy, stared down at the faintly illuminated dial of a compass - a very new fitting in the
Fritz Reuter
- and stammered orders.

‘Thank heavens,’ said the young naval officer suddenly, the relief in his voice contrasting oddly with the apprehension in the fat captain’s mind. ‘There’s the light. Follow it.’

It was the faintest red glow, shining back from the stem of an invisible motor gunboat. There were good navigators on board her, and she was detailed to show the way to as many self-propelled barges as could keep her light in sight. The two lectures that had been given to the young naval officer had laid stress on the difficulties of the crossing. It would take a long time to get all the vessels out of the crowded harbour, and during that time the tides of the Channel would sweep them eastward and then westward, scattering them in all directions if they did not cluster behind their allocated leaders. It might well happen that any of the young officers would find himself alone, responsible for his own navigation.

‘In that case,’ the German naval commander who had given the lectures added, ‘no captain can be far wrong who lays his ship on the beaches of Dungeness.’

The
Fritz Reuter
went tonk-tonking over the quiet sea. It was a calm night, as the meteorologists had predicted. The little waves over which she wallowed and plunged were small for the Channel, although far larger than anything she had ever encountered before. The wind was no more than a gentle breeze from the southeast - nothing compared with the icy blizzards through which the fat captain had often steered the
Fritz Reuter
along the Elbe and Havel.

A big harbour tug was following them; the captain of the
Fritz Reuter
could see her silhouette clearly, and faintly behind her he could see the barges she was towing - huge lighters strangely diverted from their usual business in Hamburg. A few minutes later he saw something else away out to starboard. He did not recognize it at first for what it was; it was only after the ship herself became visible that he realized that what had caught his attention was her white bow wave. She was coming along fast, running down-channel, picking her way through the myriad craft’ that dotted the surface of the water. She passed dose astern of the
Fritz Reuter
, between her and the harbour tug, and the fat captain saw plainly the upper works and the guns that marked her as a fighting ship. There was another one following her closely behind.

‘
Emden
, light cruiser,’ said the young naval officer with a gulp of excitement, ‘and that’s
Nurnberg
.’

They passed as quickly as they had come; within a few seconds the
Fritz Reuter
was wallowing in quite terrifying fashion in the steep wash which they left behind them. The passing of those two ships gave an added quality of harsh reality to the strange, nightmare night.

Five minutes later they saw a sudden winking light appear ahead of them. It only endured for a second or two, and then they saw jets of red flame stabbing the darkness, and tiny pinpoints of flame replying from the point where the light had been seen.

There were red threads which the fat captain told himself were tracers, and a sudden burst of flame extinguished almost immediately, and then nothing, except for a second or two the sound of the firing still travelling back to them, in a higher key that made it audible to them over the bass tonk-tonking of the diesels all round them.

It was several minutes later that they heard the cry, a loud call from the surface of the water.

‘Keep on!’ said the young naval officer.

The cry was repeated again and again, louder each time. Only fifty feet away, on the starboard bow, they could see who was calling; someone floating, probably in a life jacket.

‘Keep on!’ said the young naval officer, and they saw the dark spot on the sea pass astern of them, and they heard the cries gradually grow fainter.

For all his inexperience of war the fat captain could guess what had happened. Some tiny patrolling vessel out there had sighted the approaching flotilla, had challenged, and had been instantly overwhelmed by the fire of a motor gunboat or torpedo boat ahead. The fat captain, tense at the wheel, wondered how much of an alarm the enemy had been able to send off first, but he was interrupted in this train of thought by a new sound. At first it was almost inaudible among the muttering of the diesels, but the ear caught it plainer and plainer as it mounted in volume. It was the noise of aeroplane engines, by the hundred, by the thousand, louder and louder and louder, coming from astern, until overhead the din was deafening. Looking up, the fat captain was aware that the sky was already brighter, and against it he could see the planes faintly silhouetted, myriad flecks against the sky, racing over his head to the harsh music of that tremendous chorus, while the young naval officer capered with excitement, waving his arms as the things passed over them.

‘Not long now,’ he was saying, his young voice rising to an excited squeal.

The roar of those engines had been heard in many places. The civilians in Western Europe heard them go - the Luftwaffe. By the mere threat of its existence it had changed the course of history in peacetime. It was because of the Luftwaffe that the French and Belgians and Dutchmen, who had been free men less than two months ago, were now the helpless slaves of an irresponsible and reckless tyrant whose casual word could condemn them instantly to forced labour, hunger, or death. The tyrant had only one enemy left in the world; the civilians who heard the passing of the Luftwaffe could have no doubts as to where its blows were due to fall an hour hence. Few among them had any hope; despair was reaching deep into the hearts of all men on the European side of that strip of water.

Perhaps their children’s children might win back to freedom; they felt that they themselves would die slaves.

On the far side of that strip of water were men who had never thought of losing hope. Some of them were gazing with unflagging attention into strangely illuminated screens, magical apparatus which could reveal danger as it advanced over the horizon. The machines themselves were still crude and comparatively insensitive; the men who sat by them were still inexperienced, almost untried in war. There were less than fifty machines; there were only a few hundred men responsible for their maintenance and handling. The impulses which actuated those machines were so infinitesimal that scientists of twenty years before would have laughed at the thought of their being of any practical important whatever. Yet it was upon the proper interpretation of those infinitesimal impulses as received by those crude machines that the destiny of the world hinged.

Even then it seemed as if all the efforts of a thousand scientists and the planning of a thousand officers were directed towards a trivial object. Danger could be detected as it rose over a distant horizon, many, many miles away, but so rapidly would that danger approach that in twenty minutes it would be overhead. Twenty minutes from the first vague appearances on the screen. Twenty minutes for them to be noted and reported; for the right conclusions to be drawn from the reports; for decisions to be reached, based on those conclusions; for orders to be issued, based on those decisions; for those orders to be received and acted upon; for defenders to climb into the sky to meet the approaching danger. But that twenty minutes meant the difference between disaster and victory.

With those first appearances on the screens countermeasures began. Warning bells were pushed, voices spoke into mouthpieces. Drill and discipline left those voices steady and clear despite the surge of excitement in the breasts of the speakers.

Over the converging wires the messages began to stream into the Operations Room, between whose walls - as the designers had well known - the command would be exercised in the battles for the air. As the bearings were reported, symbols began to appear on the vast transparent map, put there by sober-faced men and moved in accordance with the new information as it came in. Senior officers stood to watch the chessboard on which they were about to play a game whose stakes were not such trivial matters as life and death, but slavery and freedom.

‘It looks like everything they’ve got,’ was the comment of one watchful officer to the other, as the reports flowed in of the immense air forces heading for England.

In the dark days of Munich, international relations had been dependent on one single factor - the thought of a massed attack by the Luftwaffe upon helpless cities. Imaginative people had tried to picture a rain of bombs falling on London, dropped by an airfleet of only vaguely known potentialities, It was that picture which had contributed to the ruin of Czechoslovakia, and which had caused the authorities in London to store up a hundred thousand cardboard coffins so that the sight of the dead being carried through the streets should not discourage the few still living. It was a long-standing tradition that the air war would begin by a massed attack of this sort. London might well be the principal point to be defended, and that seemed the more likely as it appeared certain that the Luftwaffe had put into the air every plane that could fly.

There could be no means of guessing that the objective of this enormous force was a tiny section along the sea of agricultural England, sheep pastures and shingle, ten miles long and five miles deep, containing no town of any importance and only an inconsiderable harbour.

The defending planes were standing by, with some few in the air, when the telephones began to ring and a flood of reports came pouring in to make it certain that the German eagle had swooped upon this minute objective at the farthest edge of the area to be defended.

This was a Sunday morning, the morning of June 30th, 1940.

It was the end of almost the shortest night in the year, and darkness was just beginning to give way before the very first hint of light. Plodding along the lane where the wild roses grew in the hedges was a group of a dozen men. They all wore the brassards of the Local Defence Volunteers, but only eight of them carried firearms. They were returning home after a night on duty, a night of discomfort, voluntary and unpaid - half a million men like them were at this moment doing the same. They stopped when they heard the distant roar of a thousand aeroplane engines, and peered tensely up into the sky. The roar grew louder - louder - louder, so it was no longer possible to hear the dawn chorus of the little birds all round them, even if the birds continued to sing in that frightful din. The sky overhead was still faintly pink with the dawn as the planes came over to darken it.