Operation XD
Page 14
Two minutes later, Michaels’ lorry started moving down the road, Dawson keeping pace about 50 yards behind. Their speed built slowly – they were not fast vehicles – but within about a minute they were both travelling at around 30 miles an hour.
Then the driver of the leading lorry sounded his horn in a long, continuous wail – it wasn’t the most impressive audible warning device any of them had ever heard – and began turning the truck’s headlamps on and off as he approached the roadblock.
Even over the noise of the engines of the two trucks, Dawson could hear the sounds of men shouting near the barricade, and because his vehicle was some distance behind the leading truck, he could also see dark shapes moving quickly on both sides of the road.
Then the first lorry reached the roadblock.
There was a sudden metallic crashing sound, and the leading truck lurched to one side, then straightened up and carried on.
Dawson pressed down harder on the accelerator pedal as the lights and the shouts and yells of alarm and anger from the Dutch soldiers drew ever closer and louder. He continued sounding the horn and switching his headlamps on and off. Soldiers scattered to both sides as they reached the roadblock, and then the truck bounced through a pothole in the road and reached the barrier.
Or what was left of it.
In the light from the headlamps, Dawson and Rochester could see a red and white striped metal pole, torn from its mounting on the right-hand side of the road and lying bent and ruined over to one side. Obviously it had still been in place across the road, blocking it, when Michaels’ truck had reached the roadblock. And three tons of DAF lorry had made short work of it.
‘Check for other vehicles,’ Rochester ordered as they swept through the gap.
‘I don’t see any trucks or cars,’ Dawson said, glancing to his left, ‘but there’s a motorcycle combination over there, parked off the road. And I think I can see another couple of motorbikes as well.’
‘They won’t be a problem,’ Rochester said, checking the other side of the road. ‘But that will be. That bloody L-180 is parked in the trees over on the right. Now we’ve got trouble.’
Behind them, the shouts were fading. But, more importantly, there was no sound of gunfire, so Dawson guessed that Michaels’ gamble had paid off; because they were in a couple of Dutch army trucks, the Dutch troops had been reluctant to open fire on them.
Less than a hundred yards beyond the barricade was a narrow bridge over the small canal, the bridge that Michaels had spotted on his map. But even before Dawson reached the bridge, he heard the sound of an engine starting up behind them, and a few moments later twin headlamp beams speared through the darkness beside the roadblock. The Dutch soldiers hadn’t been prepared to fire at them, but clearly the officer in charge of the L-180 armoured car had other ideas.
‘I could kill the lights,’ Dawson suggested, keeping their speed up as they approached the bridge. ‘Make us a difficult target for them to fire at.’
‘Not until we’re on the other side of the water,’ Rochester cautioned. ‘If we go over the side of that bridge and into the canal we’re all dead for sure.’
The bridge was just wide enough for the DAF lorry, but clearly incapable of accommodating a much larger vehicle, and Dawson steered straight over it.
As soon as they got to the west side of the canal, they could see that Michaels’ lorry had pulled over on the right-hand side of the road, and that the KFRE soldiers were spilling out of the back of it.
‘What the hell’s happening now?’ Rochester muttered.
Dawson slowed down and stopped beside the other vehicle, just as Michaels walked around from the front of it.
‘Hitting that barrier buggered up the front end,’ he explained. ‘The radiator’s smashed to pieces and one of the tyres has been punctured. We’re all going to have to cram into this truck.’
‘We heard that L-180 start up when we went through the roadblock,’ Rochester said. ‘It’ll catch us quickly enough.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Michaels replied. ‘I saw it as well, and I had an idea that might just stop it.’
As soon as the last man climbed out of Michaels’ lorry, the driver started manoeuvring it, the screeching sound from the engine telling its own story. He swung the battered truck around in a half circle to steer back the way they’d come and drove it onto the bridge, keeping as far over to the right-hand side as the narrow structure allowed. Then he turned the steering wheel to the left, positioning the truck to block the bridge as much as possible. He continued moving forward until the left-hand side of the lorry broke through the flimsy barrier that marked the side of the bridge and only stopped moving when the left front wheel dropped over the edge, jamming the truck in place.
Then he switched off the engine and climbed out of the cab. But before he left the vehicle, he opened the bonnet and did something inside it, before he ran swiftly down the road to where Michaels and the others were waiting for him.
‘Well done, Tom,’ Michaels called out from beside the cab as the driver climbed into the back of Dawson’s lorry. ‘Now get us out of here,’ he ordered, stepping up into the cab and sitting down beside Rochester. It wasn’t really big enough for three men sitting side by side, especially not when one of them was the size of Dawson, but they had no other options.
The bridge wasn’t completely blocked, because people could still walk behind the abandoned lorry, but they knew that no vehicle would be able to cross it until the damaged truck had been shifted. And that could take quite some time, because the DAF Trado truck was one of the largest vehicles in the Dutch army inventory.
‘That should keep them off our backs for a while,’ Rochester said.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that, sir,’ Dawson pointed out. ‘These trucks are six-wheel drive, so they’ll be able to start the engine and just drive that one off the bridge.’
‘No, they won’t,’ Michaels responded. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to see exactly what happened from here, but I told Tom to immobilize it as well as block the bridge, and I guess he ripped out part of the ignition system, the leads and distributor cap, before he left it. They’ll either need to bring along a mechanic with the right spare parts, or rustle up a heavy truck from somewhere on this side of the canal before they can shift it.’
Dawson glanced in his rear-view mirror, where the headlights of the L-180 were now visible as the armoured car approached the bridge. He took a last look at the road in front, then switched off the lights on the truck.
‘That armoured job is almost at the bridge,’ he explained. ‘They might not be able to get across the canal, but that won’t stop them shooting at us from the other side.’
But no shots came, and within a few minutes Dawson had driven around a couple of bends, put over a mile between the DAF Trado and the bridge, and turned the headlamps back on.
‘I reckon we’re well clear of them now,’ he said.
Michaels looked up from the map he’d been studying in the light from his pocket torch and nodded.
‘I hope you’re right. Just stay on this road. It heads north for a while and then runs along the southern bank of the Noordzeekanaal. The next tricky bit is when we reach another canal, the Zijkanaal. According to this map, there are a couple of bridges that cross it, and I’m hoping that the most northerly one doesn’t have a roadblock on it, and that it’s open. If it isn’t, we’ll have to drive quite a long way south until we reach the next one. How much fuel have we got?’
‘According to that bloke at the ack-ack battery, the tank was virtually full when we started out, so we should have plenty left. One of these gauges might tell us,’ Dawson added, pointing at the very basic dashboard in front of him, ‘but I don’t know which one.’
‘That could be it,’ Rochester suggested, pointing at a small gauge with the word brandstofmeter printed on the dial.
‘I didn’t know you spoke any Dutch, Gordon,’ Michaels said.
‘I don’t, but the need
le on that gauge hasn’t really moved since I got in the cab, and the word “meter” suggests that it might measure the capacity of something. The needle is also well over to the right, which could indicate about three quarters of a tank of fuel. On the other hand, I could be completely wrong.’
About ten minutes later, Dawson steered the Trado around a left-hand bend that took them a short distance away from the southern bank of the Noordzeekanaal, and then followed the road around to the right; the bridge was directly in front of them.
They also saw the roadblock.
But this barricade was a much less impressive or formidable barrier than the previous one. A wooden trestle had been positioned just to one side of the road leading to the bridge, and beside that two Dutch army soldiers were sitting on a low wall, their rifles leaning up against it. As the DAF Trado drove into view, they both stood up, slung their weapons over their shoulders and moved forward to stand at one end of the wooden trestle.
‘Right, Dawson,’ Michaels said crisply. ‘Flash the headlights and sound your horn, just like we did before, and hopefully they’ll get out of the way. If they don’t, we’ll have to crash the roadblock, but try not to write off the truck when you do it. We’re pretty close to IJmuiden, but I really don’t fancy walking the rest of the way. Just try and hit that trestle with a glancing blow to knock it aside.’
Dawson nodded and accelerated towards the bridge, the horn sounding and the headlights flashing.
The two sentries stared towards the approaching vehicle, their mouths falling open in surprise at the sight and sound of the speeding truck. For a moment, neither of the Dutch soldiers moved.
Then Michaels, who was sitting on the right-hand side of the bench seat, stood up and leaned outside the cab. He gripped the side of the windscreen with his left hand and waved furiously with his right arm, clearly gesturing for the two soldiers to move out of the way.
Whether it was the realization that the driver of the lorry obviously had no intention of stopping, or the urgency of Michaels’ gestures, wasn’t clear, but moments later the two men turned away, stepped over to the trestle and quickly dragged it to one side.
Dawson steered the Trado slightly left, to keep well clear of both Dutch soldiers, and powered the truck across the bridge.
‘It could have been your uniform,’ Rochester suggested. ‘It might be British, but it’s very obviously an officer’s uniform, and that may have been enough. As I said to Dawson earlier, there’s the old expression that at night all cats are grey. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you weren’t a Dutch army officer because they couldn’t have seen you clearly enough.’
‘You might be right,’ Michaels agreed. ‘All that really matters is that we got across the bridge, and according to my map that was the last canal we have to cross between here and IJmuiden. There are various bits of water out there in front of us, but there are ways around all of those, if this map is correct.’
Once over the bridge, the road followed the south bank of the Noordzeekanaal very closely for about 3 miles, and they saw neither any vehicles nor any people, military or civilian. The road swung inland for a short distance, then returned to parallel the canal as they entered the town of IJmuiden itself. At a crossroads, Michaels told Dawson to turn right, onto Kanaaldijk, and when the road straightened out, the three men saw the harbour at IJmuiden right in front of them.
‘Thank God for that,’ Rochester muttered. ‘Now all we need to do is get back to Dover.’
Despite the early hour – it was then almost three in the morning – IJmuiden harbour was busy with ships and boats of various sizes and types, and with both vehicles and pedestrians, the vast majority of them military. This was in marked contrast to the largely empty roads they had driven along since leaving Amsterdam.
‘I’ll need to report to the commander before we head for home,’ Michaels pointed out, ‘and tell him what we managed to do in Amsterdam. But at least I have a phone number so hopefully we won’t have to go looking for him. He’s probably tucked up in bed somewhere sound asleep, so I won’t be calling him just yet.’
Dawson followed Michaels’ directions along the southern part of the harbour until they found a place where they could park the lorry out of the way, and where there was enough space for all the soldiers to lie down.
‘Sorry there are no beds available, lads,’ Michaels said, when they’d all climbed out of the DAF Trado lorry and were standing in a loose group around him, ‘but we can’t do anything here until first light, so try and get some sleep if you can.’
Michaels decided to try and sleep lying across the bench seat in the front of the Trado, while Rochester and Barber, along with four of the KFRE soldiers, climbed up into the back of the truck and lay down on the bench seats and the floor there. Sergeant Woodston took charge of the rest, checking that their weapons were made safe before they lay down on the groundsheets or whatever other form of protection they had, and making sure that there was space between the men to allow individuals to get up and move around if they needed to relieve themselves.
On that subject, the only facility available was the harbour itself, and before they tried to get to sleep about half a dozen of the men lined up on the harbour wall facing the water and emptied their bladders in unison, a sight that struck Dawson as being somewhat surreal.
The weather was comparatively warm – that part of the world seemed to be enjoying something of an early summer – but lying flat on cold and probably damp stones had never seemed a particularly appealing prospect to him, especially as he had no kit whatsoever apart from his weapon and a tin mug, metal plate and set of cutlery he’d liberated from the barracks in Amsterdam, so Dawson elected to sit with his back to a wall to wait for the dawn.
Woodston spotted him and walked over.
‘You need a groundsheet or anything, Corp?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m fine. And I’m wide awake anyway, so even if I lay down I probably wouldn’t get any sleep.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Woodston said, and walked away to where he’d laid out his own groundsheet.
The sky had begun lightening even before they’d reached IJmuiden, and within about twenty minutes the first streaks of blue and yellow were visible towards the east as the sun started climbing above the horizon. Then Dawson knew he wouldn’t be able to get any sleep, but he closed his eyes anyway and leaned back against the wall.
Chapter 14
15 May 1940
IJmuiden, Holland
Dawson woke up about four hours later, his head slumped forward onto his chest and with a major crick in his neck that he knew would be with him for the rest of the day. The good news was that what had woken him was the unmistakable smell and sizzling sound of frying bacon. And that was always worth waking up for.
Obviously some of the KFRE men had been up and on the scrounge earlier, and from somewhere they’d managed to get sausages and eggs, as well as bacon. They’d even found a few loaves of bread, though not the sort most of them were used to.
Dawson grabbed his eating utensils, found a spot beside one of the portable stoves and waited his turn for a helping of breakfast, washed down with proper tea. With their departure for Britain imminent – they hoped – several of the KFRE men had opened their 24-hour ration packs and used their packets of soluble tea to make a decent brew.
None of them were comfortable, with nowhere to sit except on the stones that formed the harbour, but the hot breakfast definitely helped. And they had done what they had set out to do, and now they were going home, so they were all cheerful.
‘Where’s the boss?’ Dawson asked, using a piece of bread to clean the last of the bacon fat off his plate.
‘He shot off about half an hour ago to check in with the commander,’ one of the soldiers told him. ‘With a bit of luck, he’ll already have sorted out a boat to take us back to Dover, what with him being a naval officer and all that.’
Michaels, accompanied by Lieutenant Barber, returned to their makeshift
encampment about an hour later, and quickly gathered all the men into a circle to brief them on the situation.
‘The good news is that the commander’s very pleased with what we did in Amsterdam,’ he began, a statement that immediately raised severe doubts in Dawson’s mind. In his experience, when anyone in the military started talking about ‘the good news’, it usually meant that there was a healthy dose of ‘the bad news’ to follow.
A minute or so later, he was proved right.
‘Now, as you can probably tell from all the activity here, there’s a lot that still needs doing, and Commander Slater-Jones has asked if we’d be able to assist. He already has a naval party here, but we have skills that he would like to call on. Obviously I said that we would be pleased to help as much as we could.’
Dawson had kind of seen something like that coming, but clearly most of the KFRE soldiers hadn’t, and Michaels’ remarks produced a burst of collective muttering amongst them. It was difficult to discern individual remarks, but the general sentiment was along the lines of ‘no more’ and ‘we want to go home’, both decorated with an inventive selection of vulgar and colourful adverbs and adjectives.
Michaels waited until the subdued murmuring had died away to be replaced by a somewhat tense silence.
‘I know you’ll be disappointed that we’re not leaving immediately,’ he continued, ‘but we can do a lot of good work here today, and still be on our way back to Blighty by this evening. So the objective is broadly the same, to try to deny the Germans the use of any facilities, just as we did by blowing up the oil stocks in Amsterdam. What we have here at IJmuiden is a major harbour, dockyard and sea port, and if we just walk away now, that will give the Jerries a vital strategic resource here on the Atlantic coast. So the commander has been tasked with destroying as much of it as he can, and we are his instrument of choice.