Operation XD

by James Barrington as Max Adams

  But still they neither heard nor saw anything, and the only real comfort that they could take was that the boat was by then probably too far away from the coast of Holland for it to be subjected to any further attacks by the Luftwaffe. It was a low-value target, its exact position was obviously unknown to the Germans, and they would have no reason to risk an expensive aircraft and pilot in another attempt to destroy it.

  As midnight approached, the wind began to moderate somewhat and the sea state improved, the height and frequency of the waves diminishing, but still Barber maintained a speed of around 10 knots, and continued to keep a watchful eye on the fuel gauge. This was now showing about half a tank remaining, and was the principal focus of the attention of all three officers. Although he still didn’t know what the vessel’s most economical cruising speed was, Barber did know that, in general, boats burnt more fuel the faster they went. In his own experience he had encountered some small vessels where an increase in speed of only 3 or 4 knots could virtually double the amount of fuel the engine used to push the boat through the water. Ten knots seemed to him to be about right, fast enough to cover the distance they needed to go at a reasonable rate, but not requiring the engine to be running at much more than half of its maximum revolutions, based upon the throttle setting needed to maintain that speed.

  And then Michaels, who was standing outside the wheelhouse, leaning on the side of it and talking to Rochester, was suddenly aware of a noise. A sound that neither man could immediately identify, a kind of distant throbbing accompanied by a faint whooshing noise. Several of the soldiers on the open deck heard something as well, and most began to focus their attention to the north of the launch.

  ‘That could be a ship,’ Michaels said urgently. ‘Everyone. Keep your eyes open. When you see anything, point at it, and keep pointing at it until we can all see it.’

  Chapter 17

  16 May 1940

  The North Sea

  Michaels stepped back into the wheelhouse, seized the Morse key and again transmitted the letters KFRE, repeating the message a few seconds later, and then again, a third time.

  ‘What is it?’ Barber asked. Inside the wooden structure, he had heard nothing.

  ‘There might be a ship out there. We can hear something but not see it yet. Stay on this course and speed, and make that same transmission on the radio at least once every minute until we know what’s going on.’

  The noise was louder, and definitely seemed to be coming from the north. And then, almost simultaneously, three of the KFRE soldiers pointed towards the north-west at a dim and ghostly shape cutting through the water. It was definitely a ship, but more than that none of them could say.

  ‘The three of you,’ Michaels ordered, pointing at a trio of soldiers standing and staring over the side of the launch, ‘load your rifles. I want three rounds, fired into the air at one second intervals, on my command.’

  He waited until the three men nodded that they were ready, and then gave the order.

  The three shots, unnaturally loud in the silence of the night, crashed out one at a time. But nothing else happened. The ship – and now they could all make out its raked bow and the trail of white foam left behind by its propellers – didn’t react in any way.

  ‘Do the same again,’ he ordered.

  The metallic clattering of the bolts on the soldiers’ Lee-Enfield rifles was the only sound in the launch until Michaels again gave the command to fire another salvo of three rounds.

  But this time, there was a response.

  The brilliant white beam of a searchlight suddenly stabbed through the darkness from somewhere on the unidentified ship.

  ‘If that’s the bloody Bismarck or Tirpitz,’ Rochester said from somewhere near the wheelhouse, ‘then we’re really in the shit.’

  The beam traversed the waves in front of them, the horizontal column of white light moving towards the south-west, pausing briefly whenever the operator presumably thought he had spotted something. Then it reversed direction and moved much more slowly back towards the launch.

  Night turned instantly into day as the beam stopped moving and steadied on the launch. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the searchlight beam snapped off.

  ‘Now what?’ Dawson muttered.

  From about the same location on the vessel as the searchlight, an Aldis lamp began flickering, sending a message in Morse code.

  The searchlight had comprehensively destroyed Michaels’ night vision, and it took him a few seconds to focus on the lamp and translate what the operator was sending for the benefit of the men around him.

  ‘The message reads, “aveto” – I think that probably means “heave to”,’ he clarified. ‘Then it continues, “make your weapons safe and I will come alongside”, and now the same message is being repeated. Well, at least we know it isn’t either the Bismarck or the Tirpitz, Gordon. I’ve still got no idea what ship that is, but it’s certainly British, and right now that’s all that matters.’

  Michaels looked around at the men standing on the open deck of the small launch that had carried them all the way from IJmuiden harbour. They were all grinning and yelling and clapping their hands, and he smiled back at them.

  ‘Right, lads, that ship over there is our ride back to Blighty. All of you, unload your rifles and do the same with your revolvers if you’ve been issued with them. Dawson, make sure that Schmeisser is made safe and don’t forget the Browning that you sort of borrowed. I definitely don’t want any accidents when we’re getting on board.’

  It took the British warship a few minutes to manoeuvre around to come alongside the launch, and by the time it did so the Royal Navy crew had already rigged scrambling nets over the side.

  As they closed with the warship, a man with a loud voice – possibly the captain on the bridge – shouted at them through a loudhailer, telling them to get on board as quickly as they could. A few seconds later, he used the loudhailer again and offered them his congratulations.

  Michaels assumed that he was just referring to the fact that they’d managed to rendezvous with his ship, but what the officer said next cast a different light on his remark.

  ‘Yes, very well done. Quite how you managed to make it through that minefield without hitting anything I have no idea.’

  Both the North Sea and the English Channel had been heavily mined against a possible German invasion. Michaels and Barber had known that, but what they hadn’t known was where the minefields were, because that was classified information, only marked on Admiralty charts, which of course they didn’t have in the launch.

  For the last part of the manoeuvre, it was easier for Barber to inch the launch close to the grey-painted steel side of the destroyer – they could now identify the type of ship, even if its name was still unknown to them – and then hold the vessel in position as the KFRE soldiers, their rifles slung diagonally across their backs, stepped off the side of the boat and began climbing hand over hand up the scrambling nets. Michaels and Rochester waited until all their men were on board the destroyer before they began their own climb up the side of the ship.

  ‘Do you want me to scuttle this launch?’ Barber asked. ‘There’s probably a cock somewhere in the bilges that I can open.’

  Michaels shook his head.

  ‘That boat probably saved our lives,’ he replied. ‘Just shut down the engine and then leave it. It might drift ashore somewhere and do someone else a good turn.’

  Barber nodded, stepped back into the wheelhouse, closed the throttle of the diesel engine and switched it off. Then he walked quickly across the deck to the side of the launch, reached out and took a firm grip on the bottom of the scrambling net as the boat began slowly drifting away from the side of the destroyer. A minute later he stepped onto the deck and walked over to where Michaels and Rochester were standing, checking the men who had assembled there.

  The superstructure of the ship bore very obvious signs of battle damage – hastily repaired gashes and holes that could only have
been the result of an exchange of fire using heavy weapons – and Rochester made the obvious remark.

  ‘You look as if you’ve been in the wars,’ he said.

  The young lieutenant – his name tag read, Boulton – who had been supervising the operation nodded.

  ‘We have, in a manner of speaking,’ he replied. ‘We had a difference of opinion and an exchange of views with a number of German warships last month.

  ‘So what ship is this?’ Michaels asked.

  ‘This is the destroyer Havock,’ Lieutenant Boulton said, pointing at the number H43 painted on the side of the superstructure.

  That name meant something to both Michaels and Rochester. In the previous month what became known as the Battle of Narvik had taken place. The Second Destroyer Flotilla, comprising five H-class destroyers – Hardy, Hotspur, Hunter, Hostile and of course Havock – had entered Narvik Fjord early in the morning on 10 April and inflicted huge losses on the German Kriegsmarine, sinking two destroyers, damaging four others and sinking a total of eleven merchant ships, plus an ammunition supply ship, though not without losses of their own. HMS Hardy, the flagship, and Hunter were both sunk in the action, and the Hotspur badly damaged, but by any standards it had been an impressive early British naval victory in the war, fought against a significantly superior force. The commander of the British forces, Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, who had been mortally wounded when a German shell smashed into the bridge of the Hardy, was given a posthumous Victoria Cross, the first to be awarded in the conflict.

  The destroyer was not a big ship, but the difference in the motion after the hours they had spent bouncing around the North Sea on board the launch was quite startling. By comparison, the Royal Navy vessel was completely stable, and even those KFRE soldiers who had been suffering badly and persistently from mal de mer immediately felt better.

  ‘Now you’re all aboard we’ll sort you out,’ Boulton said, turning to give orders to a petty officer to get the scrambling nets removed from the side of the ship. Then he looked back at Michaels and the others. ‘You could probably all do with some hot food and drink,’ he said, ‘but the first thing we need to do is get the master-at-arms out of his scratcher to find a safe storage for your weapons. Can’t have a bunch of pongos running around the ship armed to the teeth.’

  He led the way below decks and along a passageway to an open steel door, behind which they could see a small room lined with racks holding rifles, and with ammunition boxes piled on the floor. Inside, a bearded chief petty officer was sitting at a tiny desk with an open ledger in front of him. The badge identifying his position was a crown inside a wreath, in addition to his chief’s badge.

  ‘This is the master-at-arms,’ Boulton said, addressing the KFRE soldiers, who’d formed up in a straggly line along the side of the passageway. ‘Hand all your weapons and ammunition over to him and show him your pay books to make sure that you get your own rifle back when you leave the ship.’

  Then he turned to Michaels and the other two officers.

  ‘That applies to you and your pistols as well, gentlemen. Once we’ve sorted this out, I’ll get someone from the ship’s company to take your men down to the mess, and I’ll show you where the wardroom is. Luckily, there aren’t many of you, so we can fit you in below decks rather than leaving you topside. And as soon as we spotted your boat, we rousted a couple of chefs to get some hot food on the go for all of you, so it should be pretty much ready by now.’

  The wardroom, when they walked into it a few minutes later, was small and cramped, a handful of off-watch officers sitting there playing cards or reading books. Boulton made the introductions, hands were shaken all round, and then he led them through to a small dining space on one side of it, where a table with four place settings had been prepared.

  ‘I presume you received a signal, or rather a radio message, about us from IJmuiden?’ Michaels asked.

  Boulton nodded as a steward appeared from a doorway on the opposite side of the dining area carrying two plates of food.

  ‘I’m not privy to all the details,’ he replied. ‘But I gather the SNO – senior naval officer – there sent out a general broadcast requesting all Royal Navy vessels in the vicinity to watch out for a bunch of British army men in what amounted to a big rowing boat. And he passed us your call sign or identifier, this KFRE code, though we had no idea what that meant. We presumed it was a sort of random code word used to identify your mission.’

  Michaels smiled as he tucked into his plate of bacon, eggs and sausages.

  ‘Nothing so exotic, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘KFRE is who we are. It’s our unit’s designator. We’re part of the Kent Fortress Royal Engineers.’

  Boulton looked confused.

  ‘I’m not familiar with all British army regiments, obviously, but that’s a unit I’ve never heard of.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Rochester said with a grin, ‘because we’re not actually in the army, or not the regular army anyway. The KFRE is a part of the TA, the Territorial Army. We’re just weekend warriors, civilians wearing uniforms.’

  Boulton looked even more confused.

  ‘So why were a couple of dozen TA soldiers involved in the mayhem at IJmuiden? We saw a couple of signals claiming that the harbour had been pretty much wrecked.’

  ‘That was us,’ Michaels admitted, ‘though that wasn’t why we were there. We had a few fires to light over in Amsterdam. We’re getting quite good at making things go bang.’

  Boulton nodded.

  ‘We heard about that as well. You’ve had a busy few days, one way and another. Right, I’ll leave you to enjoy your meal in peace. If you need anything – anything else to eat or drink, I mean – knock on that door. You’ll find a steward somewhere in the compartment behind it and he’ll sort you out. For anything else, just ask one of the officers sitting over there.’

  They took their time over the food, the first proper sit-down meal they’d had for what seemed like weeks, though in reality it was only a few days. When they finished, they found seats in the main part of the wardroom and talked with the naval officers there.

  Immediately after they had been picked up, the destroyer had accelerated to its normal cruising speed, which had considerably increased the movement of the ship. They presumed that the vessel was returning to a port in Britain, but Michael suddenly realized that they didn’t actually know that for certain.

  ‘One question,’ he asked, during a break in the conversation. ‘Where, exactly, is this ship going now?’

  A couple of the officers glanced at each other before one of them replied.

  ‘Most probably Malta,’ he said, ‘but the chances are we’ll be stopping at Harwich or Dover or somewhere else on the south coast to get rid of you and your men before we start making tracks for the Mediterranean. And we’ll need to refuel and rearm before we leave Britain, obviously.’

  ‘We’ve actually got quite used to these kind of ferry jobs,’ the other officer said. ‘We’ve just left the Hook of Holland where we dropped off the survivors from the ferry Prinses Julianna. She was carrying about five hundred troops, but the Jerries launched an air raid and she was hit by a few bombs. She didn’t sink, but only because the captain managed to beach her, and it was all quite messy for a while. Then you lot turned up, but at least that was a fairly straightforward rendezvous at sea.’

  About twenty minutes later, Michaels stood up.

  ‘I just need to check that my men are OK,’ he said. ‘You two hang on here. I won’t be long.’

  Lieutenant Boulton, who had walked back into the wardroom a few minutes earlier, stood up as well.

  ‘I’ll take you down there,’ he said. ‘You’d never find the mess on your own.’

  * * *

  The KFRE men had been accommodated in one of the seamen’s messes, and when Michaels followed Boulton through the door, he was pleased to see that they were talking and joking with the matelots who called the space home.

  ‘All happy, lads?’
he asked

  ‘We were all bloody delighted to be off that boat,’ one of them said, raising a beer bottle in a kind of salute. ‘And we’ll soon be home.’

  That produced a brief round of applause and cheers from the TA men, and a few grins and waves from the sailors.

  * * *

  Back in the wardroom, Rochester told Michaels that one of the navigating officers had confirmed that they would be calling in at Harwich, but only very briefly, just long enough for them to disembark, and that they would be arriving there in about an hour and a half, in the early hours of the morning.

  A little over ninety minutes later, the ever-present noise of the engines changed, and so did the motion of the vessel, the thumping as it ploughed through the waves diminishing as it slowed down.

  ‘We might as well go up on deck,’ Boulton suggested. ‘We must be about to enter the harbour.’

  ‘Via your master-at-arms,’ Michaels said. ‘The lads will need to collect their rifles and pistols, and so will we.’

  ‘The jaunty, yes,’ Boulton replied.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sorry, navy slang. The master-at-arms is usually known as the jaunty or the joss-man. It’s a corruption of the French word gendarme, meaning an armed man, because he’s responsible for arms on board a ship. We have nicknames for almost everything.

  When they reached the room guarded by the steel door, the KFRE soldiers were already standing in a line down the passageway, but there were sounds of raised voices within the room itself. Boulton pushed through, Michaels right behind him.