Dawson looked straight at the officer and waved his left hand in what he hoped was a friendly manner, holding the MP40 in his right, but well out of sight.
For what seemed like a long time, but was in reality only a matter of a few seconds, the Dutch officer did nothing. Then, apparently satisfied with what he was seeing, he issued orders that were inaudible to Dawson over the noise of the engines of the two vehicles, and would in any case have been incomprehensible if he had been able to hear them.
Then the officer dropped down out of sight into the turret, and moments later the armoured car accelerated away and disappeared into the distance.
‘That looked almost home-made,’ Dawson said.
‘Actually, it was made in Sweden,’ Rochester replied. ‘That was a Landsverk L-180, and it’s a commercially manufactured armoured car. I think the Dutch have bought about a dozen of them, and by all accounts it’s a pretty good and fast vehicle, despite its rather ungainly appearance. It can do about 50 miles an hour and it’s also got teeth. The weapon in the turret is a Bofors 37-millimetre autocannon, manufactured in Sweden, like the car itself. It’s designed for anti-tank use, and spits out about twelve shells a minute with an effective range of around two and a half miles. It also carries three Lewis machine guns. It’s a well-armed, tough and effective fighting vehicle, and you definitely don’t want to get on the wrong side of it.’
Dawson nodded slowly, staring at the rear of the L-180 as it drove away from them.
‘I don’t think we’ve got anything like that, have we, sir? I’ve seen tanks and trucks back home, but nothing that heavily armoured and that small.’
‘The British army has got quite a lot of armoured cars, but nothing that looks quite like the L-180. Probably the closest I can think of is a vehicle called the Morris CS9. That’s built on a truck chassis, and it’s fitted with a Boys anti-tank rifle in a turret and a .303 Bren light machine gun. It’s only got four wheels, not six, but apart from that the design is fairly similar.’
Dawson replaced the MP40 on the seat beside him.
‘Not that this would have been much use to us if the Cloggies in that armoured car hadn’t liked the look of us and decided to ventilate this lorry,’ he said, gesturing to the weapon. ‘I wonder why they didn’t at least stop to check our documents.’
‘They were probably in a hurry. And don’t forget that at night all cats are grey.’
‘What? Sir?’
‘This is a Dutch army lorry parked beside a road on the outskirts of Amsterdam, with the lights on and the engine running. In the dark, they wouldn’t have been able to see the colour of our uniforms, so they would probably have assumed we were Dutch troops and on some kind of official mission. That’s what I meant by all cats being grey at night. You can’t see colours or details in the darkness, so our identity is obscured.’
As Rochester finished speaking, the twin headlamp beams of another approaching vehicle showed in Dawson’s rear-view mirror.
‘There’s another truck or something coming up behind us,’ he reported. ‘It looks bigger than that armoured car, and a lot slower as well.’
‘You’re right,’ Rochester said, again leaning out of the passenger side of the cab and looking back down the road. ‘It’s a lorry of some kind. I just hope it’s Captain Michaels, not another bunch of Dutch soldiers.’
With a shudder from the tyres as the driver braked on the loose and broken surface of the road, the approaching truck stopped right alongside Dawson’s lorry, and Captain Michaels, sitting in the cab beside the KFRE soldier at the wheel, leaned over to talk to him and Rochester.
‘It took a bit longer than we expected to collect everyone,’ he said, ‘but they’re all on board now. Right, I’ve got a map, so we’ll take the lead. Follow behind me, but not too close. Just remember that we’re driving two lorries that we’ve technically stolen, because we should have returned them by now. So it’s quite possible that the officer in charge of that ack-ack battery might have already put out the word to detain us. That means we don’t stop for anyone or anything, unless we’re faced with a main battle tank or something. Luckily, the Dutch don’t have any main battle tanks, or any tanks at all, actually.’
Dawson nodded, then glanced at Rochester, who leaned across him to talk to Michaels.
‘But they do have some quite impressive armoured vehicles,’ he said. ‘Just so you know, we were passed by a Dutch L-180 a few minutes ago, and it carried on along this road so it has to be somewhere ahead of us. And that Bofors cannon mounted in its turret is more than enough to blow us to pieces.’
Michaels grinned at him.
‘Then we’d better hope it’s not blocking the road to IJmuiden,’ he replied. ‘Because of the present situation, we may well encounter roadblocks on the way. There’s no point in trying to talk our way through them, because we have no authority to do what we’re doing, so my plan is to just drive straight on, straight through them. These trucks will make short work of a bunch of trestles or a pole barrier. If we see anything more substantial than that, we’ll have to think again. Understood?’
Dawson and Rochester both nodded, and with a final wave Michaels sat back in his seat and gestured to the driver to proceed.
‘You heard the officer,’ Rochester said. ‘Let’s go, and keep your eyes open for any problems. Keep that MP40 next to you. I’ve got your Lee-Enfield.’
Technically, it wasn’t Dawson’s weapon, being the rifle he’d liberated from the sniper’s nest in Amsterdam, but that was just a detail. He had, reluctantly, abandoned the Mauser rifle, simply because keeping the Lee-Enfield meant he had access to the ammunition stocks carried by the KFRE troops, and he’d only had a handful of rounds left for the Mauser, and no obvious way of obtaining any more.
He put the truck into gear and began accelerating along the road to take up station behind Michaels’ truck, but a couple of hundred yards back. The road surface wasn’t particularly smooth, with numerous potholes across its entire width, and lots of loose chippings, and the driver of the leading lorry was clearly doing his best to pick a speed that offered the minimum of discomfort to his passengers and was also slow enough to allow him to avoid the bigger potholes. And that wasn’t just a matter of comfort: if one of the tyres went down a particularly deep or sharp-edged hole, there was a danger that it could get punctured, and they really had no time to stop and change a wheel.
Sometimes art imitates reality, but almost as often it’s the other way round.
The road ran straight, but only for about a quarter of a mile. Then it swung around to the north-west a short distance after a junction with another road that headed south. As Dawson steered the car towards the bend, he was suddenly aware of a brief flash of light somewhere ahead of him and to the right of the road, followed almost immediately by a sharp cracking sound.
Immediately, he hit the brake pedal, hauling down the lorry’s speed as he stared intently through the windscreen, looking for the threat that he knew was out there somewhere.
‘What’s going on?’ Rochester asked urgently.
‘That was an explosion,’ Dawson replied. ‘A small controlled detonation. The kind of charge you’d use to bring down a tree.’
Even as he said that, just above and outside the loom of the headlights he saw a dark shape moving down towards the road and, an instant later, the trunk of a quite substantial tree crashed to the ground a few tens of yards ahead of them. If he hadn’t braked, the tree would almost certainly have fallen right in front of the lorry, or maybe even on top of it.
Dawson engaged reverse gear, lifted his left foot off the clutch as he planted his right boot firmly on the accelerator pedal and then started the lorry moving backwards, holding the steering wheel straight to try and keep the vehicle on the road. Even as he did so, most of his attention was focused on the road in front of them, because that was where the danger lay.
The headlights picked out three or four shadowy figures moving around the fallen tree, and Dawson imm
ediately recognized who they were, their somewhat peculiar-looking long jackets, which terminated in over-shorts worn outside their uniform trousers, being quite unmistakable. Michaels had used the excuse of rounding up German paratroopers to requisition the two lorries, and the soldiers Dawson was looking at right then were exactly that: German paratroopers. The convenient fiction had become the unpleasant fact. The aircraft they’d seen earlier that day had obviously been dropping paratroopers, but out to the west of the city.
‘Paratroopers,’ Rochester said.
Dawson switched off the headlights, then drove the lorry over to the left-hand side of the road.
‘Without the headlights,’ he explained, ‘they’ve got nothing to aim at, and now we aren’t in the same place where they last saw the lights.’
Rochester nodded, but didn’t reply, simply stepped out of the vehicle and yelled to the KFRE sappers in the back.
‘Everybody out. Bring your weapons.’
They heard a crackle of rifle fire as the Germans loosed a few rounds in their direction, but none of the bullets hit either the truck or the sappers.
‘Suggestions, Dawson?’ Rochester asked.
‘Get them flat on their stomachs, like in a rifle range, so they’re really small targets, and not all bunched up. Then I’ll hit the lights again. We all see the Jerries, but they won’t be able to see us. It’ll be like a shooting gallery.’
Rochester issued the orders and the sappers spread themselves out across the road, aiming their Lee-Enfields in the general direction of the German troops.
Dawson switched on the lorry’s headlights, and at the same time loosed off a burst from his MP40. He was too far away from the targets to have much chance of hitting them with such an inaccurate and small-calibre sub-machine gun, but he knew the psychological effect of being shot at by an automatic weapon.
Around the felled tree, perhaps 70 yards ahead, the figures of the German paratroopers were dimly illuminated, a couple of them aiming their Mausers towards the lorry.
Over to his right, Rochester was issuing orders.
‘Five rounds, rapid fire. Shoot when ready.’
A volley of shots rang out almost immediately as the sappers acquired their targets. Two of the Germans fell backwards and then lay still on the surface of the road, and another man doubled over, his shouts of pain clearly audible. Two of his companions dragged him away into the undergrowth that bordered that side of the road.
Then a pair of headlights appeared on the road beyond the fallen tree, and just a few seconds later they heard the sound of rifle shots from that vehicle as well.
‘That must be Michaels and the others,’ Rochester said. ‘We’ve caught the buggers in a crossfire.’
Silence fell as the sappers no longer had targets to fire at, and the noise of rifle shots from the other vehicle also ceased. But for a few minutes, nobody moved, just in case the German paratroopers reappeared.
‘I think they’ve legged it,’ Dawson said.
‘I think you’re right. Right, everybody back in the lorry.’
Just in case, Dawson kept the headlights extinguished as they approached the tree, the moonlight providing sufficient illumination for him to see where they were going. In the back of the lorry, the sappers stared out towards both sides of the road, their rifles cocked and ready for immediate use.
Beside Dawson, Rochester was alternating his attention between the fallen tree in front of them and the shrubs and undergrowth into which the paratroopers had vanished.
‘Can you get around that tree?’ he asked.
Dawson flicked on the headlights – they were now so close to the obstacle that the enemy troops would be able to see them whether or not the lights were switched on – and stared straight in front of him.
‘Not around it so much as over it,’ Dawson replied. ‘Hang on, because this bit is going to be bumpy.’
He shifted the gear lever into second, pressed the accelerator pedal down and steered over to the left-hand side of the road, towards the top of the fallen tree, where the branches would be thinner. The lorry bounced and shuddered as the wheels rolled over the obstacle, and for a few heart-stopping seconds it felt as if the engine didn’t have enough power to force the truck over it.
Dawson double-declutched into first and accelerated as hard as he could. The front wheels bounced up into the air over one of the thicker branches, and then suddenly they were through and back on the hard surface of the road.
Ahead of them, the other lorry – and it was now obvious that it was the one carrying Michaels and the rest of the sappers – backed up and turned around. Then both vehicles continued quickly along the uneven road, getting out of any possible danger as quickly as they could, though it looked as if the German paratroopers, clearly outnumbered and outgunned, and with two of their number probably dead and a third one wounded, had no stomach for continuing the fight.
Another junction came into view as the two trucks steered around the bend, again on the left –everywhere to the right was water: the inlets and associated quays and jetties of the industrial area – and Michaels’ lorry steered across the road and took the turning.
This road ended almost immediately at a T-junction, and both trucks came to a stop there. Left was due south and the road to the right headed north before turning gently towards the north-west.
‘They’re probably checking the map,’ Rochester suggested, when the lorry in front of them remained stationary for well over a minute. ‘But logically we have to turn right here.’
Which they did, a few seconds later. Then they followed the road around to the left until it straightened up to head due west, according to the position of the moon, which was all Dawson had to go by.
As the truck in front started accelerating, the distance between the two vehicles increasing, Dawson tensed at the wheel and then eased the lorry over towards the centre of the road.
‘What is it?’ Rochester demanded.
‘Lights up ahead of us,’ Dawson replied, pointing through the windscreen. ‘Maybe half a mile in front. I saw them as the other truck made the turn.’
Rochester looked where the corporal was pointing and nodded.
‘I see them. It doesn’t look like another vehicle to me.’
‘Nor to me, sir,’ Dawson agreed. ‘They seem to be stationary, and on both sides of the road, as far as I can tell. I think that’s a Dutch roadblock, so things might get a bit noisy and bumpy from now on. Again.’
Chapter 13
15 May 1940
Noord-Holland
Less than a minute later, and still over a quarter of a mile from the cluster of lights in front of them, Michaels’ lorry pulled over and stopped, Dawson following suit behind it.
‘Everybody out,’ Michaels ordered as he stepped down from the cab of the truck.
The KFRE soldiers hopped out of the open backs of the two lorries and assembled in a loose group in front of the second lorry and around the three officers: Michaels, Rochester and Lieutenant Barber.
‘Right,’ Michaels began. ‘I’m pretty sure that the clump of lights we can see in front of us is a Dutch roadblock, and according to my map there’s a bridge just beyond it, so it’s a good place to put a checkpoint. Now, for those of you who don’t know, we borrowed these lorries from an ack-ack battery near the Petroleum Haven tank farm, and we should have returned them about half an hour ago. That means we’ve technically stolen them. I don’t know how good the local communications are, but it’s possible that the soldiers manning that roadblock will have already received orders to stop us.’
He glanced around the assembled men, their faces pale ovals in the darkness, their bodies partially illuminated by the glow from the sidelights on Dawson’s lorry.
‘The obvious complication is that we’re not at war with the Netherlands. In fact, the country is one of our allies, so what we can’t do is blast through that roadblock with all guns blazing. But we do, definitely, need to get through it, and I doubt very m
uch if stopping and trying to talk our way past the soldiers manning it would be likely to work. Quite apart from the language problem – not all Dutch soldiers will be able to speak English, obviously – we don’t have any kind of official permission to be in this part of Holland, we don’t have permission to use these lorries, and we don’t even have any orders we can wave at them.’
Michaels looked around again.
‘So the plan is simple. We head for the roadblock at a decent speed, at least 30 miles an hour. That’s about 50 kilometres an hour on the speedometers in these trucks. My vehicle will be in the lead, the other truck close behind. When we get to about a hundred yards from the roadblock, we start sounding the horns and flashing the lights on both lorries, trying to give the impression that we’re on an urgent official mission. With a bit of luck, that will convince the people manning the barricades that they should just let us through. We are, after all, driving Dutch army lorries.’
‘And if they don’t move the barricades, sir?’ one of the soldiers asked.
Michaels shrugged.
‘Then we have no other option. We keep the speed up and hit whatever they’ve put across the road square on. It’ll probably be either a hinged steel pole mounted on a fixed post at the side of the road, or maybe two or three wooden trestles positioned to block the road. In either case, one of these trucks, which probably weigh at least three tons each, travelling at 30 miles an hour, will have no trouble knocking whatever it is to one side.’
‘Just suppose that L-180 we saw earlier is parked there, across the road, with its Bofors cannon pointing straight at us?’ Rochester asked.
‘In that case we’ll have to stop, because if we don’t we’ll get blown to pieces. We can’t outrun that armoured car, and we’d be hopelessly outgunned by the Bofors. Let’s hope it’s gone somewhere else.
‘Now, one final point. If we do have to crash the roadblock, there’s a good chance that the soldiers guarding it might fire at us, though I hope they will realize it’s a Dutch lorry and won’t shoot for fear of hitting some of their countrymen. If they do fire, what we don’t do is shoot back. Crashing a barricade is one thing. Starting a firefight between British and Dutch soldiers is something else altogether, and I won’t be a party to it. Is that clear?’
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