Operation XD

by James Barrington as Max Adams

  ‘We’ve got five main targets. The lock gates are the most important, obviously, because if they’re destroyed the harbour can’t be used until they’ve been repaired or replaced, so they have to be our first priority. Then there are two block ships, one north over there and one south’ – Michaels pointed out across the harbour towards each of the ships as he spoke – ‘and sinking those will also help prevent the harbour being used. And the fourth and fifth targets are the cranes that could be used to help repair the damage, and the floating docks.’

  Michaels looked around the assembled group, where the mood seemed to be changing. Doing damage to the German war effort was why they had travelled to Holland in the first place, and Dawson saw several of the men looking around the harbour area as they picked out the targets that Michaels had just identified.

  ‘And once we’ve done all this,’ he continued, perhaps feeling that a carrot of some kind would be a good idea, ‘we’ll get out of here as quickly as we can and then head back to Dover. Right, the force dispositions will be as follows. A2 section under Captain Rochester will target all the lock gates. A3 section will be commanded by Lieutenant Barber, and their target will be the northern block ship, that one over there. Lastly, A1 section, my group, will target the southern block ship, the floating docks and the various cranes located around the harbour, and A1 section will also be responsible for covering all of these operations, as we’ll be moving around the whole of the harbour. In terms of timing, the last job we do will be to sink the block ships, and that’s important because we have to be able to get out of the harbour and onto the open sea, and so do various other Allied groups here.’

  Michaels paused and glanced around him.

  ‘Where’s Dawson?’ he asked, then spotted him standing at the rear of the group. ‘Good. We haven’t got much of our gun cotton left, but the commander has managed to find some dynamite – quite a lot of dynamite, in fact – that we can use for these demolitions. What I want all the section commanders to do is visit each of their targets as soon as possible, taking Dawson along as well, and to assess the quantity and type of explosives needed to complete the demolition, and where those explosives should be placed. The order of inspections will be section A2 first, followed by A1 and then A3. Once that’s done, we can collect what we need from the commander’s stock and do the job. At least this time we won’t be having to wait for instructions from some other authority to blow the charges. Once they’re placed, we can fire them immediately. And then we can go home.’

  That sounded easy when he said it, and a slightly ragged cheer rang out, but died away almost immediately.

  ‘Right, let’s get moving.’

  Dawson walked over to where Captain Rochester was standing and waited while he exchanged a few words with Michaels and Barber. Then the three officers, accompanied by the corporal, walked along the harbour wall to a position from which they could see the first of the lock gates.

  They were massive steel structures, but Dawson knew well enough that anything fabricated from metal – or from any other material, in fact – could be destroyed. It was just a question of how much explosive was needed, and where it should be positioned.

  ‘So what do you think, Dawson?’ Rochester asked.

  ‘Like anything designed with a fixed part and a moving part, sir,’ he replied, ‘the weakest point is almost always the hinges. Take those out and the whole thing will collapse.’

  He pointed at the two stone walls where the edges of the open dock gates in front of them were attached to huge, and mainly hidden, vertical steel hinges.

  ‘They look massive, but blowing them would be a piece of piss. Keep them open like that and lower a charge made from a few sticks of dynamite into that narrow gap between the harbour wall and the lock gate. Get the explosive as close as you can to the hinge before you fire it. The harbour wall will act like a reflector and multiply the effect of the dynamite. It might blow the lock gate right off the hinge, but even if it doesn’t, it’ll still bugger it up well and good.’

  Dawson noted the amount of explosive he thought they’d need on a piece of paper, and then they walked on to one of the dockyard cranes, because that was close to the lock gates they’d just examined.

  It was a huge structure, steel girders pointing straight up towards the sky, the bracing crosspieces held in place with neat lines of rivets and welded seams.

  ‘Again, this looks strong, and blowing it to pieces wouldn’t be that easy because it’s made with a kind of lattice-work construction, all triangular sections and braces,’ Dawson said. ‘So we’ll need some help to do it.’

  ‘What kind of help?’ Barber asked suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing too difficult. We just use gravity. You need to get a crane driver here and tell him to swing the boom out over the water. Then you pack explosives around the uprights and some of the bracing bars, and gun cotton would be better than dynamite because you can mould it more easily. You’ll need to blow out a section of the steel structure opposite the boom, so that when the charges go off it’ll take away all the support on that side. Then the weight of the boom will cause the crane to collapse in that direction’ – he pointed at the water in the harbour – ‘and with a bit of luck the whole crane will fall down there. Even if it doesn’t completely separate from its base, it’ll still be one hell of an obstruction that the Jerries will have to try and shift before they can use this place.’

  They moved on quickly around the harbour, inspecting each target as they did so, Dawson working out the best way to achieve the greatest possible level of destruction at each, and calculating the quantity of explosives needed to achieve that.

  Minutes after they’d got back to their encampment, a short and somewhat portly red-faced man wearing the distinctive dark blue uniform of a Royal Navy commander with three gold rings on the sleeves appeared from a nearby building and walked over to Captain Michaels. He was followed by another man wearing a similar uniform, but with very different rank badges. Dawson guessed he was either a petty officer or a chief petty officer.

  Michaels turned as he approached and snapped off a smart salute, as did the other two officers and Dawson, who was standing beside them.

  ‘At ease,’ the commander said, casually returning the salutes. He removed his cap to reveal an entirely bald head that gleamed brightly in the morning sunlight, nodded to Rochester and Barber, and looked curiously at Dawson.

  ‘This is your explosives man?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Michaels replied. ‘This is Corporal Dawson. He’s very good at making things go bang.’

  Commander Slater-Jones nodded.

  ‘So I gather. According to George Wilhoughby – whom you met at the consulate – every oil reservoir at the three tank farms you attacked was destroyed, even the heavy oil tanks, which must have been bloody difficult to get alight.’

  ‘Dawson devised a way, sir, and it worked very well.’

  ‘Good. Well, that was the past. We have to think about the present, and the future. You’ll need dynamite to carry out the demolitions here, obviously. Have you worked out how much you’ll need?’

  Michaels looked at Dawson and nodded.

  ‘I have, sir,’ Dawson said, and handed the commander a small and rather grubby piece of paper on which he’d jotted down the approximate quantities of explosive he’d worked out would be required.

  ‘We can probably supply that,’ Slater-Jones said, and handed the list to the man beside him. ‘Get that sorted, Chief, will you? Bring the boxes here as soon as you can.’

  The chief petty officer – the senior NCOs were popularly believed to be the people who actually ran the Royal Navy – snapped off a salute, took the paper and marched smartly away.

  ‘Now, Michaels, we have a bit of a logistics problem, and you need to know about it. When we talked before, I told you we were hoping to get a destroyer in here to pick up you and your men for the trip back to Blighty. Well, that isn’t going to happen because I’ve been told tha
t all the ships are fully committed elsewhere at the moment. The other problem is that once you’ve had your fun here in IJmuiden harbour, we probably couldn’t get a destroyer in here anyway. Or not if we wanted to get it out again.’

  ‘So where does that leave us, sir?’

  ‘Using your own initiative, mainly, and you all seem to be quite good at that. There are plenty of smallish boats around the place, tugs and the like. My advice is that you commandeer something big enough to carry all of your men, blow the charges here in the harbour and then head out to sea.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ one of the KFRE corporals muttered when he heard that. ‘Why doesn’t he just tell us to swim for it? At least that way we’d drown a bit quicker than if we head west in a bloody rowing boat, and it wouldn’t take us as long to die.’

  ‘But a tug or motor launch probably won’t have the range to get us back to Dover, sir,’ Michaels pointed out firmly. ‘Nor will it have the charts and navigation equipment we’d need for the voyage.’

  ‘Well spotted,’ Slater-Jones said. ‘But there are other places you could go. Harwich is a lot closer than Dover, for instance. More usefully, I do know that there are a lot of our ships, Royal Navy as well as merchantmen, sailing up and down the coast of Europe. With a bit of luck, once you get clear of the harbour, if the boat’s got a radio you can use it to whistle up a passing warship or something and hitch a ride on that.’

  ‘And if it hasn’t got a radio?’ Michaels asked.

  ‘If I were you,’ the commander replied, with a wintry smile, ‘I’d make sure that it has got one.’

  Then he glanced around at the KFRE party, nodded encouragingly, and walked away.

  Chapter 15

  15 May 1940

  IJmuiden, Holland

  ‘That isn’t exactly good news,’ Michaels said, watching the commander disappear around a corner.

  ‘It’s bloody bad news, in my opinion,’ Rochester said.

  That seemed like a fair summary of the situation to Dawson. He hadn’t much enjoyed the trip up the coast of Holland in the MTB, and he guessed that bobbing about in the North Sea in something even smaller would empty the contents of his stomach in record time. And the commander’s idea that they should just head off into the waves hoping to get picked up by a passing ship sounded like madness.

  But he doubted if he’d have very much choice in the matter.

  ‘Right,’ Michaels said. ‘If that’s the situation, all we can do is try and make the best of it. Barber and I know our way around small boats, so we’ll go and see what we can find in the harbour. Gordon, you’re in charge until we get back. Once the explosives arrive, get the men making up the charges with dynamite and gun cotton as Dawson has suggested. If we’re not back by the time you’ve finished doing that, start putting them into position, but obviously don’t fire them until we’ve sorted something out. This needs to be a coordinated effort.’

  About a quarter of an hour after Michaels and Barber had walked away to start their search, the chief petty officer returned, a canvas haversack slung over his shoulder, and accompanied by two men each carrying a biggish wooden box.

  ‘Dynamite,’ he said, without elaboration, as the two sailors lowered the boxes to the ground with almost comically exaggerated care. ‘And detonators.’ He placed the haversack beside them.

  ‘How old is that stuff?’ Dawson asked, pointing at the two boxes.

  ‘No idea,’ the chief petty officer said. ‘Not my part of ship. We was just told to go to this warehouse place near the harbour a couple of weeks ago and pick up half a dozen of these wooden boxes and stuff to make it go bang. This is the two we’ve got left,’ he added, tapping his left boot against the side of one of the boxes.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Dawson snapped, instinctively taking a step back. Not that doing so would have done any good if the explosive had detonated.

  He moved forward and bent down beside the boxes to examine them.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he muttered.

  ‘What is it?’ Rochester asked.

  ‘Some bloody idiot has nailed down the lid.’

  ‘And that’s bad because they obviously had to hammer the nails into the wood and that might have made the dynamite explode? Is that what you mean?’

  Dawson shook his head.

  ‘No. When it’s newly manufactured dynamite is incredibly stable. You can hit it with a hammer – almost – and nothing much will happen. You need a blasting cap to cook it off. The problem is that dynamite is mostly made of nitroglycerine, which is a really powerful explosive but also really sensitive. You can detonate nitroglycerine by almost any kind of shock, like giving it a kick.’ He glanced at the chief petty officer as he said this. ‘To sort of tone it down, the nitroglycerine is mixed with absorbents like powdered clay and a stabilizer, usually sodium carbonate, and that combination is called dynamite. The biggest danger is what happens to the explosive when you leave it alone.’

  He slipped his bayonet from its scabbard, slid the tip of the blade under the lid of the box and levered it upwards. He lifted one side of the lid a couple of inches, then repeated the operation on the other side of the box. By alternating in this way, he managed to free the lid completely within just a few seconds.

  ‘Whoever did it used about 3-inch nails,’ he said, ‘which are far too long.’

  He placed the lid to one side and then looked down at the sticks of dynamite that the box contained.

  ‘They don’t look too bad,’ he muttered, then lifted a couple of them off the top of the pile. Each stick – a dull red-coloured cardboard tube – was about 8 inches long and just over an inch in diameter.

  Immediately, his expression changed.

  ‘These are damp,’ he said, placing them very carefully on the ground beside the box.

  ‘Damp?’ Rochester asked. ‘You mean there’s condensation on them? Or water’s got into the box?’

  ‘Nothing as simple as that. Or as harmless. The dampness is caused by weeping, by nitroglycerine seeping out of the dynamite, and the more weeping you get, the more unstable the explosive becomes. In extreme cases, you can even get crystals of nitroglycerine forming on the outside of the sticks, and when you see that, the best advice is to walk away very, very quickly and very, very quietly.’ He looked down into the open box in front of him. ‘Some of the nitroglycerine has pooled at the bottom of the box, but not too much, and I can’t see any crystals.’

  He glanced up at Rochester and noticed that all the KFRE soldiers had moved a short distance away from him.

  ‘That won’t do you any good,’ Dawson said. ‘If this lot goes off now, it’ll flatten everything within about a 100-yard radius. Taking a few steps back isn’t going to help you at all.’

  ‘What can you do about that weeping, then?’ Rochester asked. Dawson noticed that the officer hadn’t moved backwards like everyone else.

  ‘Normally, you turn the boxes of dynamite on a regular basis, and that does help. The other thing you do is don’t nail the lids down so that you can see exactly what state the sticks are in without subjecting the box to any knocks. More importantly, the shelf life of dynamite is usually no more than about a year. That’s why I asked how old this was.’

  ‘So is that stuff safe to use? Or do we just get the chief here to take it away and do something else?’

  ‘No bloody chance of that,’ the chief petty officer said, backing away rapidly. ‘That’s your dynamite now so this is your problem. We’re out of here.’

  ‘We can use it,’ Dawson said, watching as the CPO and his two men walked quickly away down the road. ‘As long as we’re careful. That means that when you’re putting it in position you have to make sure it doesn’t get knocked by anything, just in case. In fact, it might be worth getting some paper or cardboard, or maybe cloth, that we can wrap around the charges to protect them.’

  ‘And is there enough of it there? To do the demolition, I mean?’

  ‘I think so, yes. These are what’s known as 60 per cent dynami
te, and the other box probably has the same grade of explosive. That’s the weight strength, and all that means is that 60 per cent of each of these sticks is nitroglycerine. And that’s the most powerful kind of dynamite that you can normally get, 40 per cent dynamite is much more common. So I reckon there’s plenty of explosive power here to do the job.’

  For almost the next hour, Dawson examined and carefully dried each of the sticks of dynamite to reduce the chance of an accidental detonation. Then he checked the contents of the haversack, before he showed the KFRE soldiers how to make up the demolition charges they’d need to destroy the harbour facilities. And he got one of the men to find some material – a couple of old sheets – to wrap around each of the charges to protect them from accidental damage when they were positioned.

  Once the charges were all prepared, he opened the haversack and took out a couple of slim cardboard boxes and what looked like a coil of wire.

  ‘There are two ways of firing these charges,’ he said. ‘You can either put them in position, and then send a man you don’t like very much along with a hammer to hit the dynamite when you want it to go off – with the explosive in this state, that would probably work, but it’s messy, generates a lot of paperwork and you need plenty of hammers– the other way is to use one of these things.’

  He held up a slim, pencil-like object.

  ‘This is a pyrotechnic blasting cap. We used these all the time in the mines where I used to work because they’re simple and reliable. And these,’ he added, again reaching into the haversack, ‘are the cone pliers you need to make up the fuses.’

  He showed Rochester a pair of pliers about 8 inches long, obviously designed to crimp or squeeze objects, but only to a certain point. There were two openings in the jaws, one much larger than the other, and both serrated for a better grip. Impressed into the steel of the jaws were the name ‘Shelley’ and the distinctive ‘WD’ War Department logo, the letters separated by the usual upward-pointing arrow head.