So he lapsed into an expectant silence while he waited for the officer, a clean-shaven man in his mid-twenties with dark hair, brown eyes and a tanned complexion, framed by slightly prominent ears, to deliver whatever piece of bad news he had in mind.
‘I understand you’re a demolitions specialist?’
That wasn’t exactly what Dawson had been expecting, and he nodded cautiously, remembering that the first conversation he’d ever had with Major Sykes had begun in a fairly similar way.
‘Before I joined up I was a mining and quarry engineer, sir,’ he replied, ‘so I do know my way around most kinds of explosives. If you want me to open up a new seam in a coal mine, then I’m your man, but I don’t think what I know makes me a specialist in blowing things up.’
The lieutenant – the name tag on his battledress jacket read ‘Barber’ – smiled briefly.
‘Not much call for coal mines around here at the moment,’ he said, ‘but there’s a strong probability that we will need you to do a bit of demolition.’
‘You mean the Germans have got here already?’
‘I didn’t say they were German structures, Dawson,’ Lieutenant Barber replied, ‘and I didn’t say they were anywhere near here. Come with me, and you’ll find out what we need you to do.’
Chapter 3
13 May 1940
Dunkirk, France
‘Is this him?’
‘This is Lance Corporal Dawson, sir, yes,’ Lieutenant Barber replied.
Dawson was standing near the eastern side of the harbour, at the end of a protective mole, a long stone breakwater that extended out from the shore towards the choppy waters of the English Channel. The port was busy, a line of ships and boats of various sizes and types – most belonging to the Royal Navy, Dawson guessed, from the universal grey paintwork that was so much in evidence – moored beside the mole and in the harbour itself, while still other vessels appeared to be waiting their turn to come alongside and were holding position a short distance out to sea. Squads of men were being formed up and then marched down the mole as they disembarked from the ships, while other smaller groups were heading in the opposite direction.
The lieutenant had led him to another officer, this one a captain, who had apparently been waiting beside the mole, possibly for Dawson to appear. Like Barber, he was wearing battledress, both officers with holstered revolvers on their belts, and the captain was also carrying a leather binocular case around his neck. He was clearly an older man, probably in his late thirties, with light brown hair and a somewhat world-weary expression on his regular features. To Dawson, he looked more like a bank manager than a serving officer.
‘Right,’ the captain said briskly. ‘I’m Captain Michaels, and I’m in charge of this unscheduled excursion to Holland. Let’s get going.’
‘Where, sir?’ Dawson asked.
‘Haven’t you been given any orders?’
‘Nothing, sir. Only that I’m supposed to be going to Amsterdam. Nobody’s told me why or what I’m supposed to be doing when I get there.’
‘Know anything about the Territorial Army, Dawson?’ Michaels asked, an apparent non sequitur.
Dawson nodded.
‘I’m a regular now, sir,’ he replied, ‘but I was in the TA for five years before I joined up.’
‘Good. That might make things easier. I’ll explain what’s happening once we’re on board.’
The two officers led the way down the mole. At first Dawson thought they were heading for the troopship that was moored near the end of the breakwater, black smoke belching from its funnel, but instead they stopped at a point where no vessel was actually visible.
‘Here we are,’ Michaels said, pointing to one side of the mole.
‘We are?’ Dawson said quietly, almost to himself.
‘Look sharp,’ Barber instructed, stepping over to the side of the concrete structure before dropping to his knees and backing out of sight down a rope ladder that was secured to one of the bollards.
Dawson walked over to the edge and peered down, just as Barber stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder onto the foredeck of a speedy-looking powerboat, that part of the vessel dominated by what appeared to be a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount. The grey hull and white ensign hanging limply from a short mast more or less in the centre of the boat, confirmed that it was a Royal Navy vessel. He had been to sea precisely once before, on the troopship – in reality a rusty freighter pressed into service by the navy – that had delivered him to Calais from Dover, and to him that had looked like a proper, full-sized ship. What Dawson was looking at now seemed more like a biggish rowing boat, and he hoped he wasn’t going to be travelling far in it. Perhaps it was a kind of tender or harbour boat that would ferry him to one of the ships waiting outside the port.
‘Down you go,’ Michaels ordered.
Dawson slung both the Mauser and the Schmeisser over his shoulders, got down on his knees as Barber had done, and cautiously eased his legs over the side of the mole, his feet feeling for the top rung of the ladder. The whole thing swayed somewhat alarmingly as he lowered his weight onto it, and he tightened his grip on the ropes at either side.
‘Get a move on, man,’ Michaels said. ‘It’s easily strong enough to hold you.’
That was good news, Dawson supposed, as long as it was true, though the way the rope was creaking and the feeling as the whole ladder swayed from side to side as he shifted his feet on it didn’t fill him with any particular sense of confidence.
But it didn’t break, and once he got used to the wobbly sensation as he descended, he managed to get down the last few feet quite quickly, to be joined on the deck of the vessel a few moments later by Captain Michaels.
‘Right, Sub,’ Michaels said, as a young man wearing a dark blue uniform with a single strip on the epaulettes appeared on deck from somewhere near the centre of the boat. ‘Let’s get going.’
The sub lieutenant nodded and turned away. Moments later, the dull throb of a powerful engine brought the vessel to life, and a couple of men appeared on deck and started releasing the mooring hawsers that had kept the boat secured to the side of the mole.
‘Come with me, Dawson,’ Michaels ordered, and led the way aft.
‘Is this a kind of ferry, sir?’ he asked, looking down at a long grey tube roughly 2 feet in diameter that ran along the side of the vessel, the structure balanced by an identical tube on the other side of the hull. He had no idea what they could be. ‘To deliver us to a proper ship, I mean.’
Michaels laughed shortly as they walked down a short flight of steps into a saloon below the cockpit or whatever the correct term was for the bit of the boat where the controls were located. Dawson knew that on a ship it would be called the bridge, but he wasn’t sure if the same term applied on a small boat like the one he was standing in. Barber was already there, sitting at a table on one side of the tiny saloon, studying a map that he’d spread out in front of him.
‘Definitely not,’ Michaels replied. ‘The Royal Navy doesn’t really do ferries, and certainly not armed ones. This is an MTB, a motor torpedo boat.’
Immediately the grey tubes he’d seen made sense to Dawson.
‘It’s powered by three bloody great engines and can do about 35 knots – that’s nearly 40 miles an hour to you and me. It may be small, but it’s one of the fastest boats afloat, and it’s got teeth, two torpedoes in those tubes on deck plus the Oerlikon 20-millimetre cannon mounted on the foredeck, and a couple of Lewis machine guns on single mounts on the rear deck. The navy is still trying to sort out the best weapon fit for these vessels, so they’re all a bit different. This one is number twenty-two, which is a blatant lie because the navy’s only got eighteen of them.’
Michaels paused, apparently waiting for Dawson to ask the obvious question, which he duly did.
‘So why is this one number twenty-two?’
‘Deception,’ Michaels replied shortly. ‘If you have eighteen boats, and you number them one to eighteen – in f
act, one to nineteen because nobody wants to go to sea in a boat numbered thirteen, obviously – that tells the enemy exactly how many of them you have. So the navy keeps on changing the numbers to keep them guessing. According to the sub lieutenant who’s driving this thing, it used to be number nine, now it’s number twenty-two and no doubt in a few weeks it’ll have some other completely different number painted on the side.’
That made sense, but Dawson felt he was still missing the point. Missing several points, actually, and Captain Michaels was also puzzling him. He was talking to him almost as an equal, something that no officer he’d ever met before – with the obvious exception of Major Sykes – had ever done.
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you don’t really sound like a regular officer.’
‘Spotted that, did you?’ Andrew Michaels said, a smile crossing his face. ‘That’s because I’m not, really. I’m more like a civilian who just happens to be wearing a uniform. In fact, until a couple of weeks ago I was just a civilian, but I was also in the TA, just like David Barber over there. But with Adolf on the warpath even some parts of the Territorial Army are now heading for the front line, whether we like it or not.’
Barber looked over at the two men and grinned.
The noise of the engines suddenly increased, and Michaels and Dawson both grabbed hold of the door frame to support themselves when the hull of the boat heeled over to starboard and the craft turned and accelerated. The speed increased, and the motion of the hull changed, banging and crashing as the bow of the craft slammed into the waves and swell of the North Sea.
At that moment, another figure appeared in the doorway, wearing the same dark blue uniform as the sub lieutenant, but with two bars on his epaulettes.
‘Life jackets, now,’ he instructed. ‘Locker on the forward bulkhead. Don’t fanny about. Just get them on. It’s going to get a bit bumpy.’
And with that he turned away and disappeared.
‘Understood, Lieutenant,’ Michaels called out to his retreating back.
Barber walked to the other end of the cabin, lifted the lid on a kind of box, then reached inside and pulled out three life jackets. He walked back to where Michaels and Dawson were standing and handed one to each man, then pulled the third one on himself over his battledress before returning to the table to study his map.
‘Let me save a bit of time here,’ Michaels said, once they had the lifejackets secured around their torsos, and raising his voice above the roar of the engines and the banging and crashing from the hull as the speed increased even more, ‘and I’ll try to answer the questions that I’m sure you’re working your way around to asking me. First, this MTB is our transport up to Amsterdam, or IJmuiden if you want to be pedantic about it. That’s a port on the Atlantic coast of Holland. Amsterdam is a fairly short distance inland from there, and that’s where we’re heading. Second, the reason you’re here is because I’ve been told you’re an expert with explosives, and that’s exactly what we’re going to need. Third, have you ever heard of the KFRE?’
Chapter 4
13 May 1940
North Sea
‘You’re looking a bit green, Dawson,’ Barber commented, standing up from his seat at the table and walking over to the lance corporal. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Not really, sir,’ Dawson admitted.
‘Not a good sailor?’ Michaels asked.
‘Not a sailor at all,’ Dawson replied, his breathing faster than normal as he tried to keep his stomach under some sort of control. ‘Just the one trip across the Channel to Calais. Pretty rough. Threw up a few times.’
‘David,’ Michaels began, but Barber was already ahead of him, opening the door of a cupboard beside the entrance door to the saloon and pulling out a somewhat battered metal bucket. He handed it to Dawson and then took a cautious step backwards, Michaels mirroring his action on the other side of the lance corporal.
‘I think I’m OK for a few minutes,’ Dawson said, then almost immediately lifted the bucket up to chest height and vomited copiously into it.
The two officers each simultaneously took another pace backwards as the sour and unmistakable smell filled the saloon.
‘Sorry,’ Dawson said thickly.
‘Not your fault,’ Michaels replied. ‘Mal de mer can affect anyone. Probably the only reason David and I aren’t doing the same as you is because we’ve both done a fair amount of yachting over the last few years, and we’ve got used to the motion of a small boat on the ocean. Better?’
Dawson nodded.
‘Good.’ Michaels pointed at the bucket Dawson was still holding. ‘You should get rid of that right away, before it stinks the place out.’
‘Where, sir?’
‘Just empty it over the side of the boat. Let the North Sea take care of it. Don’t forget to hang on to something while you do it.’
Dawson weaved his way up the stairs to the open deck, emptied the bucket into the foaming waves, and then made his way back to the saloon. Throughout the entire operation, he clung on to anything substantial within reach, because as well as being a very poor sailor, he couldn’t swim and was terrified of falling into the water.
‘Sorry,’ he said again.
‘It might be better if you lean against the side of the staircase, so that you can see the horizon,’ Michaels suggested, waving off his apology. ‘Sometimes that helps to keep your stomach under control.’
‘And there is of course one infallible way to cure seasickness,’ Barber said with a smile on his face.
Dawson looked at him hopefully.
‘Just go and sit under an oak tree,’ Barber stated.
Dawson looked blank.
‘It’s an old and not a very good joke,’ Michaels explained. ‘Oak trees don’t grow on ships, so the only way to sit under an oak tree is to be on dry land somewhere, and being on dry land is an infallible cure for seasickness. All rather silly, really.’
‘I don’t know,’ Barber said. ‘It made me laugh the first time I heard it.’
‘I do feel a bit better now that I’ve thrown up,’ Dawson said.
‘Good. I asked you if you had ever heard of the KFRE,’ Michaels went on. ‘I take it you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about?’
Dawson shook his head.
‘OK. The KFRE is the Kent Fortress Royal Engineers. The reason I asked you if you knew anything about the Territorial Army is because that’s what the KFRE is. It’s a volunteer Territorial unit that was formed back in 1932 by a man named Clifford Brazier. He was like you, a sapper, or at least a former sapper, and at the time he was also the manager of the Blue Circle cement works down at Northfleet in Kent. Since its formation, virtually all the members of the KFRE have been drawn from the staff of the cement company. His idea was to form a volunteer TA unit to provide coastal defence in the Kent area because that would release regular troops for other duties.’
That information was interesting, but not particularly helpful, because Dawson still had no idea what a Kent-based Territorial Army coastal defence unit had to do with Amsterdam.
‘Because of the expertise Brazier had in demolitions due to his military career, the higher echelons of the army have somehow managed to get the idea that because he was a sapper and an expert with explosives, all the other members of the KFRE are also sappers and experts with explosives. Which they’re not, obviously. It’s the old codfish argument – the cod is a fish, therefore all fish are cod. In fact, part of our training in the KFRE has involved the study of explosives and their use in various situations, but most of the men probably have no more knowledge of things that go bang than the members of most other TA units. But once the army gets an idea into its collective head, shifting it is almost impossible.’
Light was starting to dawn. At least Dawson now knew why he had been ‘volunteered’ to work with this unit.
‘As I’m sure you know, the Germans invaded Holland in the early hours of 10 May. Even before that, we had known that Adolf was going to do somet
hing, and so three parties of men from the KFRE were selected and briefed and placed on standby at two hours’ notice to move. Once it was clear that the Germans had advanced into Holland, those three parties were sent down to Dover and placed under the command of the Royal Navy. One officer and the first party then embarked on a destroyer to travel to Holland. I doubt if it would have been an easy journey, because they would be within easy range of German bombers off the French and the Dutch coasts, but with any luck the ship should by now have made it into the harbour at IJmuiden.’
‘I understand all that, sir,’ Dawson said, ‘but I still don’t know why these men were sent to Holland in the first place.’
‘That’s easy. There’s no doubt at all that the Nazis are going to roll across Holland all the way to the coast, and probably do the same in Belgium as well. The sad thing is that from a military point of view Holland is fairly easy to defend against an invasion.’
‘I thought it was all flat, like,’ Dawson said. ‘I thought there’d be nothing much out there to stop the Jerries.’
‘You’re right about the terrain. It is flat, but because most of Holland is technically below sea level there are a lot of waterways. To cross them, you need bridges, so blow the bridges and you stop, or at least you can delay, an invading army. And the Dutch have suffered invasions in the past, and to prevent future attacks they built defensive lines, like the Grebbe Line that dates back to 1745, and the Peel-Raam Line and the Maas Line. Properly maintained and then manned, they would be enough to slow down or stop an attack from the east, but the Dutch have almost no military resources. For example, they’ve got no tanks and their air force is still flying biplanes. What they have got is basically what they ended up with at the end of the First World War, and since then they’ve done almost nothing to upgrade it. Static fortifications can never defeat an enemy attack unless the weapons and troops manning them are properly trained and equipped. The reality is that the Dutch have literally nothing that can stop a German advance.
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