‘This is it. Good luck.’ Leaving the engine running, Hilda leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and hurried out of the car. Then she was gone, off at a run to her station.
‘You too,’ Ben murmured. He slid across to the driver’s seat. He gave himself thirty seconds to familiarise himself with the strange controls of this English car. Then he turned the car around with a squeal of tyres and rejoined the traffic stream, heading west towards Pevensey.
XIII
Hot air pulsed over Mary, a compression that squeezed her chest. The whole shelter lifted and shuddered, and bits of stuff, the wireless and the tin cups, rattled and fell off their shelves. The shelter’s roof clattered, as if handfuls of gravel were being dropped on it.
But the noise was muffled. She touched her ears to see if they had been stopped up by dirt or dust. They were clear. She could hear little but a ringing noise.
It made her mind up. Whatever came next, she couldn’t just sit in here, waiting to be bombed out. She had her handbag with her papers, and all her cash, her gas-mask, her rucksack, her briefcase. She glanced around the shelter. She picked up the camping stove and set it carefully on the floor.
Then she clambered up the little ladder and emerged into George’s garden. The soil, and George’s potatoes and carrots, were covered in debris, bits of brick, wood slats, slates, and a layer of dust. There was heat in the air, and a smell of dust and sewage. Yet she could still hear little. The planes washing overhead sounded dull and distant.
She made her way through the house and out to the street. She locked George’s front door carefully behind her.
She walked down the street, heading for the sea front. This was Hastings’ Old Town, a tangle of streets crammed into a valley between two sandstone hills, steep and crowded, long terraces of houses assembled over centuries. Today there was chaos, brick and broken glass spilled all over the road, people running, distant screaming.
She found that the big bomb had fallen slap bang on top of a large corner house on the High Street. Mary just stood and stared. A crater had been dug deep into the ground, and broken pipes and cables jutted out like snapped bones. The house itself had been sliced open, exposing the interiors of rooms, so it looked like an immense doll’s house. In one upper storey room a big iron bed dangled perilously over the drop. There was an extraordinary, repellent stink, of dust, ash, burned meat, sewage.
People swarmed all over the smashed house. A fire tender was pulled up outside, and firemen grappled with a hose, spraying the lower floors with water. Men of a Heavy Rescue Squad were hauling their way through heaps of brick, trying to get through to rooms at the back of the house. Some worked with bare hands, and others laboured to get joists and blocks and tackles in place, to lift heavier beams and slabs of wall. They were already streaked with dirt and sweat.
And people were being brought out of the building, some walking, some not. Stretcher parties bore their inert loads, sometimes just on bits of planking. At hastily assembled first aid stations the victims were treated and marked with labels, a code Mary had come to know through her experience of such raids: X for internal injury, T where a tourniquet had been applied. Two kindly ladies from the WVS, in their bottle-green uniforms and felt hats, handed out the inevitable cups of tea, the reward for every ‘bombee’. But others had been less fortunate. Mary saw a row of bodies lined up on the ground like fish on a slab. An ARP warden, a woman, was checking names off a list, and studying the bodies for identity cards and rings and other means of identification.
Somebody touched her shoulder.
It was George. His face was caked with sweat and dust and dirt, and blood was smeared over his dark uniform. He was speaking to her.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t hear you.’ She tapped her ears.
He leaned closer and shouted, ‘I said, what are you doing here? I thought you were in the shelter.’
‘I couldn’t stay.’
‘If you’re not going to a shelter, get out of town.’
‘George, I can’t go. Not while this is going on.’
‘It’s not your fight.’
She shook her head. ‘But it’s Gary’s. Look, I’ll go help those WVS women. I can pour a cup of tea.’
He eyed her, then stood back. ‘All right. Your funeral.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘What time is it? The light’s going. I don’t think this is going to let up all night—’
There was another shuddering crash. They both staggered, and a bit more of the ruined property collapsed.
George ran off towards the latest catastrophe, blowing a whistle. It occurred to her that she should have taken the opportunity to tell him about Battle. But it was already too late.
She walked determinedly towards the WVS team.
XIV
20-21 September
Transport Fleet D sailed from Boulogne at 1800 hours on 20 September, S-Day Minus One. It was one of four fleets setting off that day, carrying Army Group A, the Ninth and Sixteenth Armies. From west to east, Fleet E was to sail from Le Havre, D from Boulogne, C from Calais, and B from Dunkirk, Ostend and Rotterdam. Fleet A, a figment of Wehrmacht planning, had only ever existed on paper. It was the beginning of an elaborate marine choreography, designed to land nine divisions, two hundred thousand men, on the beaches of southern England in three days.
Ernst’s barge, one of a group of four, was towed by a tug out of the harbour. The men gripped the barge’s reinforced sides, nervous even before they passed through the harbour mouth.
The noise was tremendous. The great guns at Boulogne had been shouting for hours, mighty twelve-inchers firing across the Channel to bombard the English defensive positions even before a single German landed, and when Ernst looked up he saw a curtain of shells flying across the sky above him.
The barge itself had been heavily modified, with concrete poured over the floor, the hull strengthened with steel plate, and the sharp prow replaced by bat-wing doors and a ramp at the front that would drop down to allow them to land. The wheelhouse was cut down and surrounded by sandbags. This barge was meant to carry grain down a river. Now it would carry seventy men and four trucks across an ocean. The barge lay low, and with every wave salt water splashed over the gunwales, soaking the men huddled inside it. The doomsayers said gloomily that the Channel surges could be twenty feet high. Every day of his training Ernst had been struck by the contrast between the sleek perfection of his Army equipment and the ramshackle nature of the transports that would take him and his gear across the Channel. The boatman, the binnenschiffer, laughed at the men’s discomfort.
At last the barge joined its column. Ernst clung to the side and stared out. It was a remarkable sight in the fading light of the September day to be riding across a sea carpeted by barges and men, as far as the eye could see. Ernst’s barge was one of two hundred in this column alone, towed by tugs and steamers, with an escort of heavier ships bearing supplies. While the barges carried the assault troops, the spearhead troopers, the Advanced Detachments who would be the first to land - the Heaven-Sent Command, the men called them - crossed in mine-sweepers. They would land in speedboats and sturmboats, fast, small, unarmoured boats made for river crossings. For them it would be a dawn landing, amphibious, two thousand men for each beach.
Fleet D as a whole would form a column more than a mile wide and twelve miles long - so long that the lead barges would be halfway across the Channel before the last boats left harbour. But the barges could travel at no more than three or four knots, and all the columns had to follow crooked courses, to avoid sandbanks and mines. The crossing would take long hours.
And even as the column pulled away from the harbour, the attacks began. Over Ernst’s head Messerschmitt 109s were taking on Hurricanes, Spitfires and light bombers. Josef had said Goering had been trying to disrupt the RAF’s command systems as much as ruin its planes and airfields; perhaps a weakened RAF was focusing its efforts where it thought it could do the most harm. For Ernst that wasn’t a comforting thought.
They were not long out of the harbour when a Spitfire got through and flew low over Ernst’s column, machine guns blazing. Ernst and the others cowered low in the barge, and the bullets clanged harmlessly from the hull’s steel plates. The plane swept over, and when it pulled up Ernst saw how the metal skin over its wings wrinkled with the stress.
But it wasn’t the RAF that Ernst feared most, as the evening darkened into night, but the Royal Navy.
For days before the barges sailed, the minelayers, protected by destroyers and E-boats, had been setting up a fortified corridor across the Channel, walled by minefields each a half-mile wide, and even now the U-boats, destroyers and torpedo boats, reinforced by ships taken from the French in Algeria, must be fighting desperately to repel the overwhelming might of the British ships. Sometimes Ernst thought he heard the booming voices of that other battle, far away, a battle on the sea just as one raged in the air. But Ernst’s barge sailed on undisturbed.
The night folded over them, imperceptibly slowly, until it became starless and moonless under a lid of cloud. Some of the men were ill, though the sea was mild. They got absolutely no sympathy from the binnenschiffer, the only true sailor on the boat, a leather-faced forty-year-old river worker from Cologne. Occasionally you would hear bits of banter drifting across the ocean between the barges of the tow group, and ripples of laughter coming out of the dark. Some men huddled down and tried to sleep. Coming from one boat Ernst heard murmured prayers. The Nazis looked down on religion, but he doubted anybody was going to put a stop to that tonight. So you crossed the ocean in the dark, in bubbles of companionship, nothing but you and your buddies out on the sea. Ernst wondered if it had been this way for William’s Normans, and Claudius’s superstitious Romans a thousand years earlier still. But those ancient warriors had not had to endure this passage through a corridor of warfare, in the air and at sea.
Later in the night units of Fleet E, the westernmost, linked up with D as had been planned. And rumours began to spread among the men on the barges about what was really going on.
At the fringes of the invasion, the Royal Navy was getting through the flimsy defences of the Kriegsmarine. Though for fear of aerial attack the English had committed no capital ships, no cruisers or battleships, their light fighting ships had sailed from Harwich, Dover, Portsmouth and Portland. Their small motor torpedo boats, like the Germans’ E-BOATS, had been the first to fall on Fleet E, and later the English destroyers had got among them. The German escort ships, mostly civilian ships with machine guns and a few pieces of light artillery, could do little about it. The destroyers’ guns, four- or six-inchers, made short work of the steamers, and the men in the barges had to listen to boom and crash, boom and crash, as the big guns were fired, and the shells found their targets. Within minutes many of the steamers were holed, sinking, burning.
And then these wolves of the sea, travelling at thirty or forty knots, tore through the columns of wallowing river barges, crushing them, drowning them in their wash, or simply dragging them by their towing cables until they were capsized. Any surviving barges were raked with gunfire, shells and flame throwers until the sea was littered with burning wreckage. Men in the water were being wiped out systematically. The destroyers even sent up flares to light up the night, the better to prosecute their slaughter. There was no rescue tonight, no honour of the sea, no pity.
But while Fleet E died, D was spared. Perhaps it was true in the east too, the men muttered, Fleet B soaking it up to spare Fleet C. Perhaps, the men whispered, Fleets D and C would make it to their landing sites, around Eastbourne and Rye. At Brighton and Dover, the destinations for E and B, there would only be wreckage and bodies washed ashore on a tide frothing with blood.
In that case, Ernst thought, listening, appalled, those who landed alive must make these huge sacrifices count.
In the dark, with the water lapping and the tug engines labouring, surrounded by the boom and crash of the fighting planes and ships, Ernst lost his sense of time. He was startled to realise that dawn light was seeping into the sky.
And there ahead of him, a grey line sandwiched between a steel sky and an iron sea, was land. He saw prickles of light. It was 0615, already half an hour after dawn, and, after a softening-up bombardment, the lead echelons must already have landed, were already fighting and dying.
A drizzle started. The sky was murky, charcoal grey. It was 21 September, S-Day. This was England. He thought he could hear church bells ringing distantly, a beautiful nostalgic noise. Hitler had had all the bells in Germany melted down for munitions.
XV
The sound of the tug engines died, and the barge drifted. At last, thought Ernst. It was two hours since his first glimpse of land. Since then they had run parallel to the shore, before finally turning and driving in.
The sound of the long battle raging along the coast was already huge. The men lay as low as they could, sheltered by the barge’s reinforced walls. But Ernst risked raising his head and looked out over the barge’s fortified flank, hoping for his first glimpse of Pevensey, his landing site.
There was a murky light now, and the coast was obscured by haze and drifting smoke. But it was chaos on land and on sea. Assault-troop barges like his own were sliding in towards the shore, jostling for a place to land. On the beach more craft were stranded by a tide that was already receding, the rubber boats and speedboats of the advanced detachments. The beach itself looked littered, as if by bits of seaweed, and it was striped by peculiar black bands that ran parallel to the shore. The invaders were under fire. Ernst saw a tower to his right, and the larger guns of a coastal battery were coughing somewhere to his left; shells hissed as they flew, and landed with crashing explosions, or threw water spouts spectacularly into the air. From the area directly ahead Ernst heard the bark of automatic arms fire, and he saw the bulky silhouettes of pillboxes, fire sparking from the slits drawn in their forbidding faces.
All this was screened by smoke and a spray of water thrown up by the shells. But it was clear that the coastal defences were not subdued by the advance troops, as they had been promised. The very pile-up of boats struggling to find a place to land proved that something had gone wrong, that the beach wasn’t clearing as fast as it should.
The barge’s unteroffizier turned in the grey light. He was younger than Ernst, but his left cheek was darkened by a huge livid scar, picked up somewhere during the Nazis’ dash across Europe. ‘All right, lads. Now, we’ve been over the drill often enough. The first echelon are clearing the beach. They’ll cover us when we land, and in turn we’ll need to cover the command companies. Then we’ll organise into our assault companies, get off the damn beach and through the marshy rubbish further up, and then we’ll be off into the hills before breakfast.’ Even as he said this, everybody could see the plan made no sense. The unteroffizier was faced by rows of wide-eyed faces, many of them pale under their blacking. ‘Right, check your lifebelt,’ he said. This was a bulky item like a motor tyre you wore under your gear. Ernst had his tucked up under his armpits. ‘Remember what the officers said. Don’t stop for wounded. Somebody else will follow up for them. Your job is to advance. Don’t forget that ...’
A motor roared, and their barge, one of a group of four, ploughed forward once more. The tug that had brought them across the Channel had to stand out to sea; a smaller motor-boat was dragging them to land. Whether the plan was defunct or not made no difference. They were going in.
As they neared the beach the barge jostled with those around it, gathering in a throng as tight as in Boulogne harbour. But now they were coming into the range of the shell fire, and Ernst ducked down, into the cover of the barge’s hull. The men were splashed with water thrown up by the detonations, and once by a hail of splinters from some smashed boat.
There were screams nearby, and a rip of metal. Ernst risked another glance. One of the barges in his group was ripped open and was tipping, spilling out its men. Its flank had snagged on a tangle of scaffolding jutting out of
the water, revealed by the receding tide.
Shingle scraped, and Ernst’s barge rocked. It was grounded. The bat-wing doors opened, and the ramp at the front of the boat was let down. The unteroffizier jumped up. ‘Off! Off!—’ The shot hit him in the mouth. The back of his head detonated, and his jaw hung down, flapping, as he tipped into the water.
The men ducked down again. But now some English machine-gunner got his range. The bullets stitched the length of the barge and through the bodies of men who cried out, one after another.
‘Get out!’ Ernst screamed. ‘We’re sitting ducks here.’ He stood again, and men pressed behind him, trying to get off the barge. Ernst realised he would never get to the ramp. Without letting himself think about it, he rolled his body over the side of the barge and dropped into the water.
He was submerged in water a few feet deep. The water’s own bubbling filled his ears. The sea was murky and cold, and the pack on his back, his boots, felt inordinately heavy. He could see others falling into the water around him, and one burly trooper almost landed on top of him. And he could see the bullets lancing into the water, creating trails like tiny diving birds. He thrashed, trying to find his footing. The pull of his lifebelt under his armpits helped him.
His head came up above the water, into air that was filled with shouting and the singing of bullets and the whistle of heavier shells. He thrust his hands beneath him, scraping them on the shingle, and at last got his feet under him and dragged himself up. Head down, hefting his rifle, he just ran forward. The going was hard, the stones slippery, the water dragging at every movement. There were bodies floating around him, some riddled by bullets, but some unmarked - men must be drowning as they tried to get off the boats. And he was cold, by God; that was something he hadn’t anticipated.
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