Above the next bend in the road, the pilot pulled back on his control column and the fighter climbed away. At first, Dawson thought that he was turning back to strafe the road again, but the aircraft continued ascending to probably about a thousand feet, and then began heading north-east, presumably back to its airfield of departure. About half a dozen shells fired from an ack-ack battery detonated pointlessly in the sky, well behind the fighter.
The noise of the aircraft’s engine was replaced by the moans and howls of pain of those who had been hit by the bullets or injured in the stampede to get out of the way, and once it was clear that the aircraft had gone, other people appeared to render what first aid they could, which was very little in the circumstances.
The heavy machine gun bullets did catastrophic damage to anyone that they hit, and most of the victims were already dead or dying by the time Dawson and some of the other soldiers reached them. Bullets that had hit any of the civilians on their torsos killed them virtually instantly, and those hitting a leg or an arm tore the limb away from the body or ripped a massive hole in it. In either case, the ruptured arteries ensured that death would follow in minutes.
The soldiers did what they could, but in most cases that was just a matter of carrying the dead bodies to the side of the road, out of the way of the general exodus that had resumed within minutes at the end of the attack. The injured civilians who could still walk did just that, nursing their wounds and rejoining their friends or family members in the long march, while those too badly hurt to move unaided were lifted onto carts or whatever form of transport was available to them. The slow and steady movement towards the coast continued.
And then the sound of another explosion tore through the air.
Dawson turned round when he heard the noise. It hadn’t sounded like the characteristic crump of a bomb going off, and there were no aircraft in the sky that could have dropped one. But the source of the explosion was very obvious.
Perhaps a mile away, a thick column of smoke, fuelled by leaping orange flames at its base, was rising into the evening sky. It was unmistakably an oil fire of some sort, and it looked like the source was one of the tank farms located close to the harbour.
‘Have our blokes started blowing them already?’ Finch asked.
‘Don’t think so,’ Dawson replied, but very obviously something had happened at the tank farm, and he guessed that one of the officers would want to get there as quickly as possible to find out what. ‘I’ve got to go.’
He ran back into the transit camp and over to the vehicle parking area. The two Captains, Michaels and Rochester, were already there, standing side by side and both looking at the column of smoke.
‘Dawson,’ Michaels said. ‘The very man. Get us over to that tank farm as quickly as you can.’
* * *
Dawson started the engine of the Morris staff car and the two officers climbed into the back seat. He steered the car out of the gate of the transit camp and onto the road outside, manoeuvring around the groups of civilian refugees before taking a side street that looked less congested. In fact, almost all roads in the town were busy, but by sticking to the less direct route to the harbour he was able to make reasonably quick progress, most of the people on foot taking the shortest route for obvious reasons.
The double gates into the tank farm were standing open, but Dawson only drove a short distance inside the plant, because the oil fire was still blazing, right in front of them.
‘Where are my men?’ Michaels muttered. It was a question that the other men couldn’t answer, though it had been in their minds as well.
Four of the KFRE soldiers had been stationed at the tank farm, and there was no sign of any of them.
They climbed out of the car and stared around them. Rochester stared across at a building close to the source of the flames, and then pointed at it.
‘That was their bunk room, wasn’t it?’ he asked.
The small brick-built structure was clearly wrecked, the windows blown out and the wooden door hanging off its hinges and still smouldering.
‘If they were inside when the tank blew,’ Michaels said, ‘there’s no way they could have got out.’
Beyond that building, they could see a large fuel tank that had been completely flattened by the explosion. Pieces of torn, twisted and blackened metal carpeted the ground like surreal sculptures, while fuel blazed in the bund where the tank had originally stood.
‘That was a petrol tank,’ Michaels said. ‘No wonder it got blown to pieces.’
They made their way cautiously past the remains of that tank, looking for any signs of the British soldiers, Rochester calling out their names at intervals.
It wasn’t just one fire and one destroyed tank. A few yards away from the flattened petrol tank another one was also ruined and lying on its side. Not only that, the second tank was nowhere near its bund. It had obviously been blown about 50 yards away from its original location by the force of the explosion, flames still licking around it.
A figure moved into view from behind the tank, and Michaels immediately recognized him as one of the four soldiers he had stationed there.
‘Wilkins,’ he called out. ‘You’re OK? Where are the others?’
The British soldier, his face and hands blackened from the smoke and flames and with his battledress singed in several places, lifted his right hand in salute and nodded.
‘We’re all OK, sir,’ he replied. ‘Just a bit crispy around the edges, you might say.’
‘What happened here?’
‘That last bombing raid. One of the bombs went straight into that petrol storage tank over there and blew it to buggery. We were all outside the bunk room when it happened, which was bloody lucky. When it blew, some of the shrapnel hit that second tank and it took off like a rocket. We did what we could to fight the flames, but there really wasn’t much we could do. The night watchman here gave us a hand as well. But we did have a bit of luck.’
‘You did? What was that?’ Rochester asked.
‘There’s a bit of a slope in this part of the tank farm, and so most of the burning petrol ran down the concrete and ended up over there.’ Wilkins pointed towards a long oblong shape, from which more flames and smoke were erupting. ‘That’s an empty dock, luckily, and where most of the fuel has been burning. If the fire had been concentrated up here, I reckon another couple of tanks would probably have gone up, and maybe taken out the whole tank farm.’
Michaels smiled at Wilkins, and at the other three soldiers who walked over to the small group and stopped.
‘It’s a bit ironic, really,’ he said. ‘We’ve been sent here to blow up these tank farms, and so far all we’ve actually done is help stop one of them being destroyed.’
‘At least the Frogs can’t blame us for this,’ Rochester pointed out. ‘Our men are supposed to be here helping guard these places, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing, and we can prove it. Mind you, it would have made our job slightly easier if all these tanks had been destroyed. That would have been one tank farm we could cross off our list.’
‘Your orders were to guard it, sir,’ Wilkins said.
‘I know, and you did exactly the right thing, so don’t worry about it.’
Dawson had been looking around the site with a professional eye, and another patch of flame some distance away attracted his attention.
‘There’s another couple of tanks burning over there,’ he said. ‘Probably petrol, from the look of the flames.’
‘That’s well alight, by the looks of it,’ Michaels said, staring at the distant leaping flames, ‘and I doubt if there’s anything we could do to extinguish it, even if we wanted to. So we’ll just let it burn out.’
* * *
The bombing raid and the attack by the German fighter aircraft were the last enemy actions that day, but back in the transit camp the distant rumble of heavy artillery somewhere to the east continued for most of the evening.
Captain Michaels appeared a few
minutes after ten and gave the KFRE soldiers an ad hoc briefing.
‘So as I said,’ he finished, ‘no matter what the French may tell you or want to believe, British intelligence reports are perfectly clear. Yesterday, French forces stationed between Neufchatel and Forges – that’s a line about 25 miles north-east of Rouen – suffered continuous heavy bombardment by the Germans, and the Nazi advance eventually broke through. The Germans have spent most of today launching attacks along the length of the Seine River, and British forces stationed outside Rouen were attacked on a broad front by German armour and heavy artillery. Orders have now been issued by the French to their brigade commanders to allow them to blow river bridges at their own discretion. As a result of all this, the French military have ordered the partial evacuation of Rouen, and the admiral here in Le Havre has instructed most of the military personnel to leave, apart from those in key positions. It’s the same story with the civilian workers in the area, and especially those outside the towns. Most of the tank farms have either already been abandoned or will be within a matter of a few hours. All the indications are that the German advance into this area is imminent, and might begin as early as dawn tomorrow.’
Michaels paused for a moment and looked at the soldiers standing in front of him. Though few in number, because most of the sappers were deployed to the tank farms and refineries, they were key to the success of the British operation because they were the drivers, the men whose job it was to evacuate the British soldiers once they had completed their demolitions.
‘As we all know only too well, the Germans have made a habit of moving much more quickly than most people ever expected, and my personal belief is that they’ll get here a lot sooner than the French believe. According to the local admiral here in Le Havre, French intelligence believes that it will take the Germans at least three or four days before they break through the Allied lines to the east of Rouen, if they do it at all. I think they’ll be here sometime tomorrow morning.
‘Obviously we still have no orders to commence the demolitions, precisely because of the French intelligence appraisal, but I’ve decided that we should be ready to move at first light. That means briefing our men at the tank farms and being prepared to react the moment the situation demands it. And that also means that none of us are going to get much sleep tonight. Dawson, you’ll be my driver in the staff car. We’re going to visit every tank farm and refinery between here and Rouen, and then wait at the one closest to that city to see what happens at daybreak. I’ll brief the sappers at each one so that they know what to expect tomorrow.
‘All the lorries will be stationed at suitable locations along the Seine, ready to pick up our men. Captain Rochester and Lieutenant Barber will travel in two of them and proceed to the last two tank farms along the river. Captain Rochester will wait at the last tank farm for us to arrive and Lieutenant Barber at the next to last one. What we do tomorrow will depend upon what happens in the morning, but the overall plan is simple enough. Once it is clear that the Germans have broken through the Allied lines, whenever that happens, we will immediately fire the tanks at that first oil depot near Rouen. The moment we’ve done that, and the sappers at the second tank farm see the flames, they will place and fire their own demolition charges, and so on all the way along the north bank of the river.
‘If you’re interested in this technique, it’s one of the ways signals were sent during the mediaeval period. As the men manning each watchtower or castle saw a fire lit in the neighbouring stronghold, they lit their own fire. It was a much faster way of passing a message than sending a runner or a man on horseback. In fact, with the French telephone system being the way it is, it’s probably faster than that as well.’
A few of the men chuckled, though it wasn’t really a laughing matter.
‘My intention is to create a line of fire all the way along the north bank of the River Seine from Rouen to Le Havre. Once the sappers at each tank farm are satisfied that all their fires have taken hold, they will leave the facility and climb into one of the trucks, which will then drive to the next tank farm where the process will be repeated. I expect that once the first set of tanks have gone up there will be little or no delay in collecting the sappers from the other ones, because of the short distances between them. I’ll be briefing the soldiers to wait outside the gates of each facility if possible, and if there are no delays with the demolitions that shouldn’t be a problem.’
That, in many ways, was the easy bit of the planned withdrawal. They had the staff car, and possibly a second one if the vehicle Rochester had been given was still available, and the 15-hundredweight Morris CS8 lorries. Each of those was supposed to carry six passengers in the rear compartment plus two in the cab, but with a bit of ingenuity a dozen soldiers could fit in the back and another couple could sit surprisingly comfortably on the very front of the vehicle, in the space between the mudguards and the bonnet. So actually moving all of the 120-odd sappers from the tank farms along the River Seine, using the lorries, would not be too much of a problem. But the river itself would be, as Michaels now had to explain.
‘All of you, and the sappers who are now waiting in readiness at the tank farms, arrived here in France after what I’m told was a very pleasant and uneventful afternoon sail from Dover to Le Havre. The return journey is not going to be anything like as easy. Because of the German advance, both Le Havre and Cherbourg, where Dawson and I landed, are no longer available to us as departure ports. According to the latest orders I have been given, we will have to make it as far south-west as Saint Nazaire before we can embark on a ship. That port is about 200 miles from here, but far more importantly, it’s on the other side of the River Seine, and that might be a problem. In fact, it definitely will be a problem.
‘As I said earlier, orders have already been given for bridges across the Seine in Rouen to be blown on the orders of French officers stationed nearby, when they think the time is right and that the Germans are almost upon them. If we’re not very careful, we could find ourselves on the wrong side of the Seine and with no way to escape. Most of the bridges are in Rouen itself or just outside the city, but if the Nazis advance as quickly as I expect them to, those will probably be destroyed long before we could get there, and we would be fighting our way directly towards the German lines if we went by that route.
‘So what I’m ordering is this. All the lorries will be positioned at intermediate points along the north bank of the river. Captain Rochester has prepared sketch maps of that area which he will give the drivers of all those vehicles as soon as I’ve completed this briefing. When they’ve picked up all the sappers, the lorries stationed at the western end of the river will proceed independently to Tancarville, where I hope the bridge will still be standing. If it’s been destroyed, then those lorries will drive east to Caudebec-en-Caux, more or less at the midpoint of the north bank of the river, where there’s another bridge just to the east of the town. That will also be the destination of the lorries based at the eastern end of the Seine, near Rouen. If both those bridges are destroyed, there are a couple of ferry crossings that might still be operating or that we can perhaps operate ourselves. All of these locations are marked on the maps that Captain Rochester has prepared.’
Michaels paused again and glanced at the men, who were hanging on his every word.
‘I know there are lots of uncertainties about this, but this plan is the best we’ve been able to come up with in the circumstances. Assuming we can get out of the area, you are all to drive straight to Nantes, which is under British control at the moment and will be our rendezvous point. From there, it’s only a short distance to Saint-Nazaire, which is hopefully where we’ll find a ship to take us home.
‘The obvious question is what do we do if both bridges are down and the ferries are unusable. We then have three options. First, we drive back towards Le Havre in case the last bridge over the river, the big one near the harbour, is still standing. If it isn’t, we go to the harbour itself and try and find
a boat or something that we can use to get out of the town before the Germans arrive. And if we can’t do that, our only other option is to head north-east and try and find some kind of a vessel we can use at one of the other harbour towns along the French coast, at places like Fécamp or Dieppe. Any questions?’
His statement had been clear, concise and easily understandable, even if it wasn’t totally comprehensive; none of the men listening had had the slightest difficulty in understanding what he was proposing, and their part in it.
‘Right,’ Michaels said, rubbing his hands together briskly. ‘Time’s a-passing, so we need to get on the road.’
Chapter 28
28 May 1940
France
Michaels had been wrong about one thing: they did all get some sleep that night. There were noticeably fewer roadblocks and barricades along the road between Le Havre and Rouen, and the other thing that was very obvious, perhaps because of the very early hour – or very late hour, depending upon your point of view – was that there was very little traffic. And it was also possible that the English lorries had become a more familiar sight in the area, and so what checks were made were much less stringent than they had been previously.
Michaels had been pleased to find that all of his men who were on watch at the tank farms were awake and alert, and in all cases they claimed that they were ready to begin the demolition process the moment they received the appropriate order. The other thing that was very obvious was that apart from the KFRE men themselves, most of the tank farms were either deserted or, at most, might possess a night watchman or a maintenance engineer, and occasionally both. This meant that preparations for the demolition, and in most cases the actual placing of the gun cotton charges, was possible without interruption, and this would greatly speed the firing of the tanks once the final order had been given or the first tank farm was in flames.
Operation XD Page 27