Dunkirk Crescendo

by Bodie Thoene

  That the Germans did not share this sentiment was proven by a sudden explosion that seemed to lift the floor under the cellar. The walls of the Hotel Pelican shivered, and brick dust filled the air.

  “Hey, Corp,” one of the soldiers called. “Are we safe here?”

  “Safe as houses. This building is three stories tall. Even if Jerry landed one smack on the button, it’d not come clear to us before blowing up, now would it?” The private did not look convinced, but the corporal only said, “Here, have a fig,” and he passed around a box of dried fruit.

  David thought about the giant gas stove that was directly above their heads. One well-placed incendiary and they would all be cooked like holiday geese.

  The raid seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally over, David and Cross went back upstairs for fresh air. All the windows in the lobby had been blown out. Shattered plaster, overturned tables, and fallen chandeliers littered the carpet.

  Outside the Pelican, the street was almost unrecognizable. A brick structure across the street had taken a direct hit and collapsed its upper two floors into the basement.

  “Give us a hand!” called a captain urgently. “There are fifty men trapped below-stairs.”

  The unmistakable hiss of gas was clearly heard. One lick of flame and the whole heap would explode, taking rescuers up with the fifty men beneath the rubble.

  Noticing David’s upper arm and Badger’s bandaged face and hands, the captain waved them away. “Get back inside then. The Luftwaffe is not through yet.”

  A second and a third bombing attack were endured in the confines of the cellar. As Badger placidly waited for his death, a section of wall collapsed on two soldiers, who were dead before they could be dug out. The atmosphere grew more and more foul in both senses of the word. Most of the soldiers were sleeping, but a few took on an edge of belligerence with the champagne.

  “Where is the bloody RAF, anyway?” the corporal slurred. “Glad you two are here . . . get a taste of the real war . . . instead of your la-ti-da fairy planes.” He hiccupped loudly. A bleary chorus of agreement came from the few who remained conscious.

  Badger rose and turned his bulk toward the speaker’s voice, but David stopped him. “Too many,” he said quietly. “Besides, let’s go check on our ride.”

  When they emerged again into the murky sunlight of the Dunkirk afternoon, they ran immediately into the same major David had seen outside the embarkation office. “Don’t bother going back there,” the major said. “The Germans have been bombing every ship that tried to put in at the harbor. Even if—when,” he corrected himself, “when some arrive tonight, there are thousands ahead of you. Best make your way over to the beach and wait there. The Royal Navy will be along. You can count on it.”

  ***

  “Ahoy, Wairakei!” called a tone of authority over a handheld megaphone. “Can you hear me?”

  Annie waved a hand to signal her agreement. Mac doubted that her voice could have been heard over the bubble, drum, and purr of the other engines.

  From his perch on top of the aft cabin of Wairakei, Mac could count fifty vessels of all shapes and sizes. Smelly fishing trawlers followed in the wakes of gleaming white yachts, and barges with rust-colored sails and black hulls idled next to polished mahogany speedboats.

  “Form up on the Triton.” The voice carried over the water. “She’s your guide for this trip. Good luck to you.”

  All afternoon and evening, since Wairakei had arrived off Ramsgate breakwater after her daylong journey down the Thames, more and more watercraft had been joining the strange flotilla. Now, at ten at night, she and her flock mates were setting off on the first leg of the great adventure.

  Annie’s father was belowdecks, checking the engines. The top of his shining head appeared, framed in the hatchway. “Annie, girl,” he bellowed, in a voice that was no doubt heard three boats away, even without a megaphone. “Annie, mind the rev’s on number one. She idles a little fast.”

  “We’re shovin’ off, Da!” Annie shouted back.

  “High time it is, too! Mr. McGrath!”

  Mac jumped and almost tripped over the mainsheet.

  “Make yourself useful! Haul in those fenders. We want to look shipshape. Lively now!”

  Mac was not sorry when the bald dome of John Galway returned below. After hauling in the fenders as ordered, he asked Annie why she was steering instead of her father.

  “Oh, Da knows every vibration and sound. He says he can hear one grain of sand in a fuel line. For this stretch of water there’s no pilotin’ to be done, just follow the leader. He’s happier stayin’ below watchin’ after the engines.”

  The small armada moved out. Already gaps were appearing in the line as some of the bigger vessels could barely throttle down to match the struggle of the smaller boats to keep up. “How long will the crossing take?”

  “Depends on the wind and the currents,” Annie answered. “It’s not but forty miles, and we could do it in four hours if we went straight across.”

  “What do you mean, if?”

  “Oh, we can’t steer direct over. There’s sandbanks and mines between here and there.”

  “Swell.” Mac was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of his decision to join this enterprise. He looked around as the darker hulls of the rest of the fleet faded into the backdrop of night. “Say, I suppose we’re all blacked out because of air attacks?”

  “Only partly . . . there’re the U-boats to consider, too.”

  Mac walked forward to Wairakei’s rounded prow, then continued his circuit of the deck to the stern. When his inspection did not answer his question, he again entered the wheelhouse. Duffy raised his massive head from where he sprawled on the wood floor, then lay it back down. “So, where’s our arms?”

  “Goodness, Mr. McGrath, we don’t have any.”

  “No machine gun? Not even a rifle? What do we defend ourselves with?”

  Annie laughed. “Da keeps a pair of cutlasses hanging on the wall of the cabin. I think they’re used to repel boarders.”

  “Sure,” Mac agreed. “By Nelson at Trafalgar.”

  30

  An Endlessly Long Night

  The heavy overcast had become a soupy fog that clung to Mac’s raincoat and dripped from the matted ends of his hair. His eyes were strained from trying to make out shapes in the lightless crossing of the Channel. The night seemed endlessly long, and the need to keep everything blacked out added to the gloom and apprehension.

  The barest gleam from the stern of the ship ahead was all that could be glimpsed of her, and sometimes that, too, disappeared. How could Mac watch for enemy ships or submarines when he could not even see two boat lengths ahead?

  Moving from the roof of the pilothouse, Mac went to the prow of the ketch. Leaning over and peering at the waves just ahead of Wairakei conjured up a whole new element of evil. Even the smallest swells seemed to rush down on the little ship, and each carried a sinister, unexplained dark shadow, in which it was easy to imagine a floating mine. Mac’s mood alternated between gritting his teeth at the expectation of an explosion and a moment’s sigh of relief when the wave rushed past.

  Mac tried to imitate John Galway’s attention to noises. If sight was impossible, perhaps he could use sound. The Channel was anything but quiet, and that was part of the terror. The drumming engines of unseen ships, muffled by the layer of mist, came from everywhere and nowhere, all at once. More than once the sound of another ship dramatically increased in volume, as if it were on a collision course with Wairakei.

  Mac’s senses were on edge. His whole body tuned for danger. When a looming black bow appeared unexpectedly out of the fog less than twenty yards away, Mac shouted a warning before the hazard had even fully registered. Annie spun the wheel, more by instinct than planning, and the enormous shape of a freight barge slid past, close enough to touch. An instant later, bellowing foghorns came too late to prevent the screech of rending metal and panicked screams. Mac shuddered at the thought
of the victims claimed by the dark water, even without the Nazi killing machines. The blackness and the confusion were enemies enough. He redoubled his efforts to pierce the fog with both eye and ear, still without much success.

  Annie steered Wairakei through course changes while her father continued to tinker with the engines. During one of these swings, Mac turned around to watch one of the few things actually visible in the night: the wake streaming away from the stern. He was trying to make sense of their new heading and had taken his eyes off the ship ahead when something bumped against the hull directly beneath him. Certain it was a mine, Mac flung himself to the far side of the ship as if he were a child again and the floating bomb were an angry dog that could be escaped by running. It was already too late to call out a warning.

  No explosion came. Wairakei continued on without interruption. Mac wondered if her wooden hull had somehow protected her against a weapon designed for metal ships. Racing for the stern, he peered over in time to see a large piece of driftwood spin away on the wake.

  Eventually the fog raised into a gray layer that hung overhead like a theatre curtain drawn halfway. The change allowed Mac to make out the dim shapes of other vessels that he had not known were anywhere nearby. He checked on the ship just ahead and on a fishing trawler to port and astern. Ahead and to starboard, a couple hundred yards distant, was the white, sleek outline of someone’s private yacht.

  As Mac watched the expensive plaything knife through the waves, he saw a vertical dark stripe silhouetted against the momentary brightness of the hull. Something was really there: a solid black pole upright from the surface of the water. It could only be a submarine. “Periscope!” Mac yelled. “U-boat over starboard! U-boat!”

  “Are you sure?” Annie questioned.

  “Absolutely! How do we warn the others? Where’s your radio?”

  “Never had one. Flare pistol? In the locker behind me.”

  “Quick . . . there’ll be a torpedo in the water any minute now.” Mac tore open the locker, throwing out rain slickers and life vests to land all over Duffy. The dog sat up with an enormous woof and shook himself free of the pile.

  Emerging from the heap, Mac snapped open the Very pistol and checked to see that it was loaded. The gun was already raised and his arm outside the cabin when John Galway emerged from the engine room.

  “What’s all the noise, then? What are you about there, Mr. McGrath?”

  “Submarine! A U-boat, Mr. Galway! We need to warn—”

  “Hold on! Where did you see this craft?”

  “Not the whole thing, just the periscope! Right over there,” Mac said, pointing.

  Galway took the flare gun from Mac’s hand but made no move to fire it. Snapping on a tiny chart light, he consulted a map. Annie’s father muttered to himself, “Naw but six fathoms hereabouts . . . not enough water to hide a sub . . . sandbank,” he concluded.

  “What?”

  “What you saw was the mast on top of a sunken freighter. You remember that last turn we made? That was to steer us around the sandbank and the wreck. A good job you didn’t fire this thing, Mr. McGrath! Might have brought down the whole of Germany right on our heads!”

  ***

  Badger and David and thousands of other soldiers waited all night for ships that did not come. Sometime after three in the morning, the bombing raids stopped and David fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed of Annie fleeing down a country road, pursued by a Messerschmitt. In his vision, he tried to scream at her to get off the road. But no sound came from his mouth, nor could he run toward her to push her out of the way. She was only an arm’s length distant when the tracers from the ME-109 caught up with her. . . .

  ***

  “Keep a sharp eye out!” John Galway yelled at Mac. The camerman stood on the canvas-wrapped boom, clinging to the foremast, as he strained for the first glimpse of the Dunkirk shore. It was just past four in the morning and starting to get light.

  “Wait!” Mac called back. “I think I see something!”

  “Where away?”

  Mac did not know the correct ship terminology, but he indicated with his hand the direction toward a white object dimly seen against the gray horizon.

  “I hear breakers, Da!” Annie said. Duffy sat up and whined, as if he, too, had heard or sensed some change.

  “Can you make out the shoreline?” Annie’s father shouted.

  “It’s just . . . yes! I can see it now!”

  The same heavy gray overcast that had protected the little ships from the unwelcome attention of the Luftwaffe had also brought the boats to grief on the shoaling sands of the French shore. A thin horizontal line appeared suddenly on the horizon, separating ashen sky from leaden sea.

  John Galway spun the wheel in his hands, and the boat swung about to parallel the coast. The fog parted just enough for all three to get their first glimpse of their destination.

  A ghostly form welcomed them to France. Mac saw the stern of a white sloop directly ahead of them on the beach. It lay high and dry, marooned on the gravel above the falling tide. Mac searched the wreckage for its crew, only to discover the truth: He saw the stern because that all was of the craft that remained. The front two-thirds of the ship had been torn away and destroyed. It was not an auspicious omen to accompany their arrival.

  And if the first view was a portent of tragedy, the next vision stunned Mac. Overwhelmed was not too strong a word, since it took him some time to remember to begin shooting film. The shore was covered with sleeping men. There were thousands and thousands of them—too many to count. Mac stopped filming long enough to examine the lens with suspicion and then look with his naked eye. The reality just did not seem credible to either man or camera.

  “Right,” Galway observed tersely. “We’ve got our job cut out for us then. Mr. McGrath, let Annie take over as lookout. You’re the leadsman. Wairakei draws five feet, so keep us in fathom to be on the safe side. We’ll load up and ferry the lads to yon great destroyer there.”

  Mac spun about, still filming as he gyrated. Into focus leaped a warship that had materialized unexpectedly out of the fog behind them. He forced himself to slow down. That piece of film would never be usable; it would make audiences seasick.

  “Put away your pretty toy! There’s work to be done!” John Galway barked.

  ***

  David awoke with a start to find his shirt soaked in sweat and dawn creeping over the beach. Somehow during the night, the number of men had doubled or even tripled. It looked like the seashore had been thickly planted with low bushes that rustled and moaned despite the absence of a breeze.

  “There’s a boat!” the artillery captain called. Suddenly the bushes came to life and pursued the retreating tide. The bobbing white object was a motor launch with a crew of four sailors. As they swept onto the sand, twenty times as many men as the little boat could possibly hold crowded around.

  “Where is it, Meyer? Help me to it,” Badger pleaded.

  “Not this time, Badger,” David replied, his heart sinking with the words. “It’s not our turn.”

  “No more, no more! You’ll swamp us,” cried the naval officer, jumping into the shallow sea and wading ashore. “Listen, men, we’re from the destroyer Jaguar. Chin up! We’re here to get you off.”

  If the officer had expected a rousing cheer of welcome, he was disappointed. The wave of humans who had rushed into waist-deep water glared with envy and hatred at the fifty men who received places in the launch. Then, stoically, they turned about and returned to the sand.

  The lieutenant commander stayed ashore. He went from group to group, locating the unit officers and giving them instructions. “Form into proper queues,” David heard him say. The artillery regiment brightened at this. Even though the prospect of a speedy rescue was not at hand, the soldiers preferred to be given clear orders. Even when the order had no immediate benefit, just the sense that someone was actually in charge improved the outlook for many. It was the first sign of organization they had seen
in days.

  Within minutes, serpentine formations of men snaked their way from the dunes down to the water’s edge. There was no reason for the lines to curl and loop, except for a very human wish to feel nearer to the front than the actual number of places suggested.

  It took the first boat half an hour to return, but with it came two more small launches. The line inched toward rescue in an agonizingly slow process. David kept his good hand on Badger’s shoulder as the two moved up, trying to act and sound reassuring. “There’s the next boat coming already. The system is figured out now.”

  Badger nodded without speaking, but David knew that his words were not convincing. A painfully unwelcome but impossible to prevent mental calculation hit: The three small boats were removing only three hundred men an hour from the beach. In the line with David and Badger were five hundred others, and there were queues coiled along the beach every two or three hundred yards.

  Some of those waiting exhibited a mechanical quality, as if their human consciousness was submerged because of fear. The private in front of David dug a hole in the sand and crouched in it. When the launch returned and the men shuffled forward, the soldier abandoned his shelter, moved up a few feet, and began digging again.

  A lone Messerschmitt sized up the beach and found the pickings too good to resist. The fighter plane circled the crowded shore like a fox sizing up a flock of chickens for the fat and the slow.

  The artillery captain abandoned the line and ran toward the cover of the sand dunes. Up and down the coast, others also panicked and turned to flee.

  “Don’t run!” yelled a burly regimental sergeant major. “Stand fast!” The man’s courage was meant to be infectious.

  But even more convincing in David’s mind was the shout raised by the lieutenant commander: “You’ll lose your place!”

  The ME-109 flashed overhead. A row of tracers glinted, and little bursts of sand flew up on both sides of David as the bullets impacted only a few feet away.