Assuming that French rules and regulations were similar to those employed by the British during conflicts, treachery, sabotage and cowardice – running away from the enemy – were probably treated in exactly the same way, and could end up with the accused soldier facing a firing squad. So what the general had just said was not an idle threat, or one that Michaels could ignore.
‘I understand that, sir,’ he replied. ‘But all I have done so far is station my men at the tank farms with instructions to defend each establishment as best they can. I have issued no orders to them to commence demolition operations.’
Michaels didn’t think it would be helpful to mention that as well as mounting guard, his men were also already beginning their preparations for blowing up the tanks, including fabricating the charges they would need to use when the time came.
‘So you say, Captain, so you say. You will forgive me if I do not necessarily take you at your word. So that there is no possible confusion over this, I have prepared an order written in both French and English which you are to sign.’
The general snapped his fingers and the adjutant stepped over to an adjacent filing cabinet, pulled it open and removed a slim folder from the top drawer. He passed it to the general who opened it and handed a four-page document to Michaels.
Still standing in front of the General’s desk, Michaels quickly read through the English version of the order, the French officer’s signature marked on the final page along with a space for Michaels to sign. It was clear enough, though not particularly fair in its terms. He noticed straight away that the British soldiers would come under the direct command of the French, and would only be permitted to act when orders were transmitted to them through the liaison officer, who of course was Captain Laurent, and a long way from being Captain Michaels’ favourite person. They would also be expected to remain on station ‘until the last’, by which time there was a good chance that the French forces would all have disappeared.
The final paragraph spelled out the implications of any unauthorized activity, stating that if any independent action was taken by a member of the British party, he would be regarded as a saboteur and immediately be subjected to French law and dealt with in accordance with the normal punishment meted out to such people. The order didn’t actually say that they would be shot, but that was the clear implication. The only piece of good news in the entire written order was that the French would provide the British troops with supplies of food and drink, which at least would save Michaels from having to organize supply runs from Le Havre and Rouen to his soldiers.
He guessed that the terms of the order were set in stone, but he wondered if there was any leeway.
‘Regarding my men as saboteurs seems to be rather harsh, sir. As far as I’m aware, the British and the French forces are fighting on the same side in this conflict.’
‘I do not regard your men as saboteurs, Captain. I will only regard them as saboteurs if they disobey my specific and precise instructions, exactly as that order states.’
‘And if I refuse to sign this order, sir? What happens then?’
‘That’s very simple,’ the General said. ‘I will give you precisely twelve hours to collect your men and all their supplies and equipment from the tank farms. You will then assemble your men at the transit camp in Le Havre and remain there awaiting further orders. If any of your men do not reach the camp within that time, they will be arrested and held in French military custody. If they leave that camp without having been ordered to do so, they will also be arrested and placed in custody.’
Michaels didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do about the situation other than simply sign the last page of the order. What he couldn’t afford to do, if he were to have any hope of completing his mission, was to withdraw his men. It had taken long enough to get them into position in the first place.
The adjutant picked up the signed copy and replaced it in the folder, handing another copy of the same order, bearing the general’s signature, to Michaels.
‘Ensure that you abide by the terms of this order, Captain,’ the General said bleakly. ‘I am not in the habit of repeating myself, and I do not expect to have to summon you here again.’
Michaels was silent for most of the drive back to the transit camp, and Dawson had spent enough time with him to know that trying to engage him in conversation would be a mistake.
* * *
At the camp, in the fading half-light of dusk, Michaels spent a few minutes with Rochester and Barber explaining the situation to them, while Dawson headed off in search of food and drink. He had been expecting to eat something that had come out of a tin or a packet from one of the British ration packs, but that did not prove to be the case.
He found another corporal, one of the handful of KFRE soldiers, mainly drivers, still left in the camp, unenthusiastically stirring what looked like a lamb stew inside a large cooking pot over a chemical stove, and sat down on the ground near him.
‘So what’s that, then?’ he asked.
The corporal glanced over at him and shook his head.
‘It might be lamb,’ the corporal replied. ‘We had a visit this afternoon from a lorry driven by a couple of Frenchies, and they dropped off a few boxes of supplies for us. The tins this lot came out of were labelled mouton, and that sounds like mutton to me. They left plenty of red wine too.’
‘If it’s anything like the stuff that the captain had the other day, it’ll be bloody nearly undrinkable.’
‘A couple of the lads tried it,’ the corporal told him, ‘and they reckoned it was the closest thing to vinegar that they’d tasted since the last time they’d had fish and chips back in Blighty.’
But any further discussion on culinary matters was immediately cut short by the distant wail of an air raid siren. Dawson swallowed three or four mouthfuls of the stew that might have been lamb, or alternatively might not, decided that that was actually quite enough, then grabbed his helmet and rifle and followed the other men to the closest air raid shelter. This was the basement of a building just outside the transit camp, a cramped space that Dawson doubted would offer much more than token protection against any serious or sustained bombing raid.
As he reached the open doors, he glanced back and could both see and hear the first wave of high-level German bombers approaching. There were no fighters in the sky, apart from a handful of Messerschmitts flying above the line of bombers, and nothing to disrupt the raid apart from a scattering of anti-aircraft batteries, mainly concentrated around the harbour area, which immediately began pumping high-explosive shells into the air.
From talking to Captain Michaels, Dawson had learned that there were half a dozen barrage balloons in the Le Havre area, but the French had decided not to launch them as a deterrent to air raids on the grounds that the German aircraft would probably see them and then shoot them down, in which case they wouldn’t have any barrage balloons. It was a somewhat peculiar logic – Michaels had referred to it as a kind of circular argument, whatever that meant – and it really didn’t seem to make sense. Dawson didn’t understand why the French wouldn’t, as a matter of course, deploy everything they had to protect the harbour and the ships using it.
What he wasn’t expecting to see in the sky were Allied fighter aircraft. He knew that the speed of the German advance and the threat from the Luftwaffe meant that the Royal Air Force had had no choice but to consolidate its position in Britain, and that a lot of RAF fighters in France had been destroyed or damaged, and many had been withdrawn to English airfields. The French air force, the Armée de l’Air, was more or less a joke, flying obsolete aircraft carrying ineffective weapons, and Dawson hadn’t been in any way surprised not to have seen a single French fighter in the air since he’d arrived in France.
The only defence against the German bomber raids at Le Havre were the ack-ack batteries, and in reality they were more of a deterrent to the bombers than a threat, although occasionally a battery would get lucky and bring down an aircraft.
Sometimes that wasn’t the ideal result, the crashing aircraft doing far more damage on the ground than its total bomb load would have achieved.
Of all the threats to life and limb in wartime, high-level bombing raids were the most feared, and often the most destructive. The attacking aircraft were usually high enough to avoid the flak, and apart from hiding in a shelter, there was nothing the people below could do except wait and pray. And there were few more terrifying sounds than the sudden explosions of bombs detonating on the ground, the noise of each detonation louder than the previous one as the stick of bombs headed towards you. Being on the receiving end of that was a truly terrifying experience.
Somebody had also told Dawson that if you could actually see the bombs falling, if you were close enough to pick them out as they plummeted towards the ground, you were dead for sure.
The men taking shelter in the basement were mainly French, but there were probably fifty or sixty British servicemen there as well, soldiers and sailors. Dawson walked down the staircase and crossed straight over to one side of the basement where he saw uniforms that that he was familiar with, and sat down with his back against the wall. The mood was sombre, because everyone there, irrespective of rank or service, knew that a direct hit on the building with a stick of even medium-sized bombs could turn the basement into a death trap. They’d all seen that kind of thing before. So there was little talking as they all strained their ears, listening for the distant drone of the aircraft engines and the thumping detonations as the German bombs exploded.
The good news was that the obvious target in the harbour town was just that – the harbour – and whatever ships were berthed there or out in the approaches; not the scatter of anonymous buildings in the vicinity of the transit camp.
But sometimes the obvious wasn’t what actually happened, and with the distant and sporadic clamour of the ack-ack batteries providing a counterpoint to the heavy crumps as the bombs detonated, Dawson and the others in the shelter were all suddenly aware that the explosions were getting closer. It sounded as if one stick of bombs had been released some distance from the harbour, and the high explosive detonations were moving steadily across the ground directly towards the basement air raid shelter.
There was nothing they could do. They were safer where they were than out in the open, and even if they’d wanted to leave the building they could never outrun the bombs raining down from the sky.
Dawson tightened his helmet strap, wrapped his arms around his knees and tucked his head down, trying to make himself as small a target as possible, not an easy task for someone of his size.
A bomb exploded so close to the building above their heads that they could hear the sound of breaking glass as windows shattered from the blast.
‘The next one could do it for us,’ a soldier sitting near Dawson muttered. ‘Bloody bastard Boche.’
And then there was complete silence in the air raid shelter as every man listened intently, hoping that the next bomb in the stick wouldn’t smash into the building above them.
Chapter 27
27 May 1940
France
The silence after the last bomb explosion could only have been a matter of a few seconds, but to Dawson it felt as if time was standing still. At least, he thought, if the next bomb does come through the roof, it’ll be bloody quick and we won’t know much about it.
But it didn’t. No more than two or three seconds after the last detonation, there was another heavy explosion: from the opposite side of the building. And, just like the previous explosion, it was followed by the noise of shattering glass. The two bombs had bracketed the building, each exploding on either side of it, and the next detonation, another couple of seconds later, was some distance further away.
When it was clear that the basement was still intact – although they had no clue about the state of the building above them, except that it had clearly been damaged – somebody at the far end of the shelter began clapping his hands, and that was immediately picked up by everybody else. Then the cheering started, and within seconds the cellar was full of the sounds of celebration – a celebration that Dawson hoped wasn’t premature.
Almost as quickly as it had started, the clapping and cheering died away to nothing as another explosion somewhere in the vicinity again shook the battered building above them. But no further bombs dropped anywhere nearby.
And that was more or less that. The entire bombing raid didn’t last long, and within about half an hour of the sirens going off, the all-clear was sounded.
Along with the rest of the men who’d taken shelter, Dawson climbed up the stone steps out of the basement, emerged into the daylight once again and looked around him. The most notable feature – or rather features – of the landscape were the two new bomb craters on either side of the building, which surprisingly looked relatively intact apart from having had almost every window blown out by the twin blasts.
Now that the skies were clear of enemy aircraft, it wasn’t just the soldiers who were back on the streets. As they had all seen since they’d arrived in France, the streets were thronged by refugees clutching what possessions they had decided to salvage before leaving their homes, and all were heading wearily towards the harbour in the probably mistaken belief that they would be able to obtain passage on a ship going to England, or indeed anywhere else that wasn’t France. Dawson knew from his own experiences in Rouen that the numbers of refugees passing through that much larger city were even greater than those he was seeing in Le Havre, because at least Rouen offered the chance of getting away from the German advance on foot. He knew there was a very real danger that the men, women and children he was then watching in the harbour town would end up like rats in a trap and unable to escape, their backs to the sea and facing the might of the Wehrmacht.
He didn’t know the geography of France very well, but he had heard that most of the refugees passing through Rouen had claimed to have a single destination in mind – Toulouse – which he did know was somewhere down in the south of the country, close to the Pyrenees mountains. It looked as if many French civilians were hoping that the Germans wouldn’t get that far south or, if they did, that they could escape across the border into neutral Spain.
‘Poor bastards,’ Dawson muttered, looking at yet another family group – probably the father and eldest son pulling a small and heavily laden cart fitted with two wheels, followed by two younger children pushing bicycles with so many possessions lashed around the frames and over the handlebars that riding them would be completely impossible, and by a woman holding a baby in her arms – all walking slowly along the road outside the entrance to the transit camp. And that was just one group. He glanced up and down the road, and it looked to him as if there were literally hundreds of civilians following the same path, some of them herding their livestock, mainly cattle and goats, along with them, and most accompanied by dogs that trotted obediently along beside them. There were even a few motor cars, crammed full of passengers and with tottering piles of bags and boxes lashed onto their roofs, grinding along in first gear and unable to make any better speed through the press of humanity, despite the drivers leaning repeatedly on their horns.
‘God knows where they think they’re going,’ a private, standing next to Dawson, remarked. His nametag read ‘Finch’ and he was smoking a Woodbine as he watched their slow progress. ‘Far as I know, none of the ships in the harbour are going to have any space for passengers, or not civilian passengers anyhow. I’m just bloody hoping that they’ll have room for us.’
‘Amen to that,’ Dawson replied.
‘And it ain’t just the Frog civvies that’s running scared,’ Finch continued. ‘Back when we was in Rouen, we saw a whole lot of French army units tracking south, and they weren’t just squads of soldiers. Some of them was motorized. Field artillery, a lot of howitzers, and one of the lads even said he’d seen a few of those tank transporter things carrying armoured cars and tanks.’
That, Dawson knew, was very distur
bing, because as far as he was aware the somewhat ragged front line between the German and the Allied forces was in the north of the country, not the south. And that meant that those tanks and field guns and squads of soldiers were definitely heading away from the conflict, not towards it. Their movements may have been ordered as a tactical retreat, but to Dawson it looked a lot more like desertion, and that always left a nasty taste in his mouth. But whatever the orders given to them, and whatever their motive, the troop movements could only be weakening the French defences, and that would probably mean the Germans would reach Rouen and the oil reserves sooner rather than later.
Both men were suddenly startled by the sound of an aircraft engine, and the almost simultaneous hammering of a pair of heavy machine guns.
‘Down,’ Dawson instructed, ducking down behind an adjacent stone wall, Finch right behind him. He had no idea where the aircraft was, but he was certain that it had to be German. And that wasn’t good news.
Seconds later, a sleek German fighter – Dawson thought it might be a Messerschmitt because it looked very much like the aircraft that had attacked the motor torpedo boat on the way to Amsterdam – dived quite low over the road along which the refugees were streaming. The pilot was clearly targeting the civilians, triggering his wing-mounted machine guns in short bursts, presumably to conserve ammunition.
His actions caused panic, people scattering in all directions, dropping their bags and boxes as they desperately sought to get out of his sights. Despite the press of people, those who were actually hit by his bullets were small in number, but many more were being trampled underfoot as they tried to escape. And there was nothing anyone could do to help them, not until the threat was over.
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