Gold From Crete

by C. S. Forester

  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.

  Then the sergeant, looking up, saw the air thick with specks, and then he saw the specks suddenly burst open, burgeoning out like flowers suspended in the air, hundreds of them. They would have been beautiful against the sky if an indifferent eye could have seen them.

  ‘That’s them, boys,’ said the sergeant. ‘They’ve come.’

  Even the sergeant, an old soldier, stood transfixed for some seconds before he could act. The planes had swept away, and the parachutes, each with its dangling figure, were perceptibly nearer before he spoke again.

  ‘You two,’ he said. ‘Run like the devil to the village. Get on the telephone. Wake up the postmaster and the bobby. And you two. Find old Stiles the verger and tell him to ring the bell. Ring the bell and go on ringing it. Come on, you others.’

  He led them at a trot for a quarter of a mile before he pulled up and issued orders that spread them out along the bank. He slid one of his ten cartridges into the breech of his rifle and took aim. The first shot of the Battle of Britain echoed across the fields just as the church bells began to ring solemnly over the quiet countryside, bells here and bells there and soon bells everywhere, calling the country to arms against the invader. And telephones began to ring as well, and excited neutral correspondents ran wildly to telegraph offices.

  The dawn that came up over New York five hours later saw newspapers for sale in the streets, each with a headline covering half the front page - ENGLAND INVADED! - and, as the day wore on, those headlines appeared in the streets of a thousand cities. ENGLAND INVADED!

  II

  From the moment the German parachute troops reached the ground, where Kent and Sussex join, the Battle of Britain exploded. At five o’clock on that Sunday morning the BBC was already broadcasting to a small audience; but so rapidly did the news spread that when the broadcast was repeated at 5.30 nearly all England was aroused and listening.

  ‘German parachute troops,’ said the disembodied voice, carefully free from any emotion whatever, ‘have landed in the neighbourhood of Rye and Winchelsea. They are already being engaged by local troops. Meanwhile, attempts are being made to land considerable forces on the beaches of Dungeness and Winchelsea. Fighting is continuing by sea and air as well as by land. The public is requested to read the instructions issued on June eighteenth last regarding invasion. Fresh copies are already being posted in public places. Remember the first rule stated there. “Stay put.” Remain where you are, do not panic, and stay put. And remember the last sentence of those instructions, “Think always of your country before you think of yourself.” The prime minister will address the country later today at an hour which will be announced shortly.’

  It was a fact on which Britain can always look back with pride - that there was no panic. There had been no denial as yet, and no disproof, of the multitudinous current stories about German parachutists dropping in Belgium and Holland disguised as nuns and bus conductors. The night before the invasion everyone in England believed these stories and was prepared to see saboteurs at every street corner, but this morning the British public behaved as paradoxically as it had when France fell. It heaved a sigh of something like relief and decided, Now we can get down to business. Anxious people sat by loudspeakers; a few thoughtless people tried to put telephone calls through to relations in the threatened areas, but the main embarrassment to the authorities arose merely from the rush of people to town halls or police stations asking how they could help. The Sunday workers went on with their jobs; fathers on their day off took the children out so as to leave mothers with a free hand. An American correspondent summed up the situation by saying, ‘London appears to be less agitated than I expect Washington is at this moment.’

  But the battle was being fought with the utmost fury by land and sea and air, and - as in every battle ever fought - the defenders met with reverses at the beginning as the concentrated weight of the attackers fell on the weak points. At Dover the four destroyers stationed there came steaming out, turning south-westward as they rounded the signal station on their way to attack the German troop transports. Anxious watchers on the cliffs at Folkestone saw them coming, steaming fast. But their speed did not save them from their first casualty. The watchers saw a great fountain of water go up from the side of the last of the four and saw her lurch out of line, disabled and on the point of sinking. One torpedo from the salvos fired by the ambushed submarines, waiting for this very moment, had struck home. And worse was to come. The first the watchers saw of it was when a cluster of pillars of water rose up from the surface of sea close to the leader. It was then that they looked farther out, to see a dark shape rushing to intercept from where she had taken post during the night under the French shore.

  ‘Pocket battleship,’ said the destroyer captain with his eyes to his binoculars. ’Make this to the - Admiralty.Have sighted--’

  The sentence was not finished nor the signal sent, as an eleven-inch shell exploded under the bridge. Somebody took command of that destroyer and swung her round to the attack, limping after the other two. The 4.7s fired back, but even ten of those shells did not equal the destructive power of a single eleven-inch, and a moment later the Lützow brought her secondary armament into action as well. The destroyers were hit and hit again; the watchers saw smoke pouring from their hulls and streaming astern, and then the smoke began to rise more vertically as they lost speed, hiding the last act of the tragedy from the eyes of the watchers.

  Momentarily at least the Reich had won command of the patch of sea over which the army had to be transported and supplied; later that day the British destroyers at the Nore, hastening to the attack, encountered even more formidable opponents in the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and were forced back. In the wider waters of the Channel to the west the mines freely sown and the massed U-boats and the two light cruisers Raeder had stationed there succeeded in the same way in holding back the light British forces hastening up the Channel.

  In this desperate struggle Raeder had flung in every vessel that could float, risking - expecting - total loss if for a few days the barges and transports could cross and recross the Channel. Victory on land - th
e capitulation of England - would render negligible the loss of the German navy. The watchers on the cliffs witnessed other desperate battles, tiny skirmishes, but battles in which men died for their country, where drifters armed with Lewis machine guns fought yachts armed with rifles, where trawler fought trawler hand to hand by boarding, in that frantic struggle to stop or to maintain the traffic to the beaches at Camber.

  There were troops to defend the coast where the parachutists struck, and they were not taken by surprise. They were already standing to when the first sound of the approaching air armada made itself heard; they were at their alarm posts and ready for action when the parachutists dropped. But they were only one battalion, and not up to full strength even so. With a thousand miles of vulnerable coast to defend, there could be no hope of posting strong forces everywhere; that battalion was only an outpost, with the usual outpost’s duty of warning and delay. The warning went out, before the parachutists cut the wires, but the delay was pathetically short.

  A single company held Camber, and that was assaulted at once by two of the three German battalions dropped inside the perimeter; it must be remembered that in this parachute attack the drops were far more successful than could usually be counted upon, closely spaced and without any intermingling of units. The survivors of the British infantry company later declared that ‘not ten minutes’ elapsed between the first alarm and the beginning of the assault - probably an underestimate. The company was outnumbered by five to one at least, and from the unexpected side - overland. The parachute troops were the cream of the German army, powerful young men, with officers selected for their energy and quickness of thought. The rapidity of their attack was astonishing, and within a few minutes they had reached the frail defences; the brief hand-to- hand struggle that ensued could have only one ending.