‘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 si
xty 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.
For a moment early in the battle it seemed as if some such factor might indeed be present, when the Hood blew up while the first salvos were being exchanged. To this day there is a certain body of opinion which attributes the loss of the Hood to a chance contact with a mine, and not - as is usually held - to an eleven-inch shell from the Scharnhorst which found its way to the magazines through a structural defect. The appalling loss might well have daunted a man of less tough fibre than the British admiral, but, as it was, the sixteen-inch guns of the Rodney, admirably served, were already winning the battle; Lutjens may have even been already dead at the moment when the Hood blew up.
The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau displayed the remarkable capacity to take punishment which had distinguished German ships since they were first constructed, but from early in the battle they were hardly better than floating targets as a result of the damage done to their fire-control apparatus by the British salvos. The attack by the British destroyers, well timed and not to be evaded, because of the proximity of the Belgian minefields, hastened the end. The Scharnhorst, it is believed, took no less than seven torpedoes before she sank on an even keel in the shallows, so that her battered upper works were left awash at low water.
It was a battle of annihilation, as the circumstances made inevitable; the interposition of the German navy had not prolonged the brief German command of the straits by more than three hours at the cost of these frightful losses.
Meanwhile, far down the Channel, a desperate series of minor actions had been fought. Here the two German light cruisers and the other half of the German U-boats had endeavoured to delay the advance eastward of the British forces, gathered in from the Western Approaches. Again it was a battle of annihilation, this time almost of mutual annihilation, for the losses suffered by the British navy, despite the superiority of numbers which they enjoyed here, were very severe indeed. The fighting was as confused as might be expected where submarines intervened in an action between surface craft and where the opposing air forces were continually launching surprise attacks.
The Nürnberg sank off Beachy Head; the Emden went down while struggling to reach the shelter of Cherbourg, but three British light cruisers joined them on the wreck-littered bottom of the English Channel, and two more only with difficulty managed to limp into the protected waters of The Solent. But even so, that left eleven British destroyers to dominate the surface, and in a series of fierce actions they were able to hunt down the U-boats - the shallow Channel with its numerous minefields was no place for submarines on the defensive. The Channel tides, coursing first east and then west, left the coasts of England and France greasy with the oil that welled up from the sunken ships and dotted with the corpses of the men who died.
And like the tides, the British light forces swept into the Channel from the east and from the west, and that night was made vivid by a hundred minor actions as the German small craft fought to the death, motorboats and torpedo boats and minesweepers opposing a crushing superiority of destroyers and light cruisers. The Fritz Reuter was caught, just before dawn, before she had completed her second trip to England - and she came nearer to doing so than most of the unfortunate river craft employed in that luckless venture. Few enough left the invasion beaches at all; the Fritz Reuter actually returned to Calais, loaded herself with troops again and headed back for Rye. But seven miles from Dungeness the fat captain, nodding over his wheel as he struggled against sleep, was roused to full wakefulness as a star shell burst overhead, illuminating the Fritz Reuter and the water around her with a hard, relentless glare. That was the last he saw as shells at point-blank range came crashing into the frail sides of the Fritz Reuter. He was dead before those sides had opened and let in the sea upon the screaming soldiers crammed in the holds.
Once more it must be stressed that these naval actions, important though they were, and effectively though they sealed the fate of the German landing forces, were not necessarily the vital factor in the brief campaign. The air battle began again at dawn over the beaches, to continue through the long and desperate day; if the RAF had been defeated in that air battle, the history of the world might have been different. The military experts to this day argue about every aspect of the campaign. There are many who think that if Hitler had not made his attempt at invasion, but had massed t
he Luftwaffe for an all- out attack upon England sometime in August, 1940, he might have overborne the RAF by sheer weight of numbers, English radar and the defensive attitude notwithstanding. That is a point which can never be settled, but at least it is agreed that the need to provide air cover for the invasion beaches imposed a decisive disadvantage on the Luftwaffe.
In Fighter Command they tried as best they could to take the measure of the situation. The war could be won or lost in the air, and if it were to be won, it would be the fighters that would win it. So the arduous day went on, and fresh figures were added to the revised balance sheets. The dwindling numbers of British fighter planes and fighter pilots could be counted by all who were in on the secret. The German losses could be guessed at with fair accuracy, the German reserves only between the wide limits of optimism and pessimism. There were crashed German fighters to be counted all over the southern counties between the invasion beaches and the Midlands, but within the ten-mile perimeter held by Von Rundstedt there were many more, not so easy to count; we know now that in those eighty square miles no fewer than three hundred German fighters lay wrecked in the fields and coppices, and a hundred British fighters along with them. The reconnaissance planes could report that there was hardly a field without its wreck, piled among the abandoned parachutes.
Fighter Command could only continue as they had begun, accumulating successive striking forces and launching them to the attack at the moments when the reports of the Observer Corps and the radar devices indicated favourable opportunities. During the decisive day of July first there were no fewer than fifteen of these attacks delivered and, as nearly as can be judged from the defective German records, more than half of these delivered with a numerical superiority of at least three to one, and never once without some small superiority. The occasions when the numbers were nearly even were those when German reinforcements had flown in low over the Channel and were not reported to Fighter Command until it was too late to recall the attack.
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