“You were spared from armed service because you were a skilled engineer,” she said, after a moment. “Good; we will be able to find you work fairly soon. Do you have Jewish blood in you?”
Her tone, the hint of disgust and contempt, made Davall shake. “None,” he said truthfully. He’d only met one Jew in his life, back when he’d been working in an electronics shed. “My family have always been Christians.”
“I must warn you that giving false information is a crime punishable by death,” she said, her voice politely crisp. “Do you have Jewish blood?”
“No,” Davall said shortly, trying to keep the anger out of his tone. He’d thought that some of the teachers he had known were bad, but this woman was worse than any of them… and, he guessed, she could have them all shot on a whim. “There’s no Jewish blood in my family.”
She made a few more notes and then held their eyes. “You have been registered as a citizen of Occupied Britain under the jurisdiction of the Greater German Reich,” she said, formally. It was the first time he heard a hint of emotion in her voice. “As of now, you are subject to the laws and regulations of the Reich and any breakages will be handled in accordance with German law. You will be expected to be loyal to the Reich and work towards its interests at all times; any attempt to impede those interests will be treated as treason and punished accordingly.”
She nodded towards the rear entrance. “Take this slip,” she said, passing them the sheet of paper she’d been writing on. It was covered in German words that even Davall couldn’t read. “Present it to the soldiers there and they will give you a new ID card and some rations for the week, as well as a booklet of Occupation Regulations and Laws. Ignorance of the law does not constitute an excuse.”
Davall led his family out of the room and down into the side room where a pair of Germans took the slip, read it quickly, and worked a small device that Davall didn’t recognise. One of them held up a camera and quickly snapped shots of all three of them; the other took their fingerprints, before waving them into a corner and passing him a copy of the booklet to read.
Davall skimmed it quickly, finding the pamphlet to be almost as he had imagined; the Germans intended to supervise them in almost every detail of their lives. No large gatherings, no parties without German permission, workers to report for work with the Germans if they had no other work to do, German currency to be the only legitimate currency… the list went on and on, with dire warnings of heavy punishment if they were caught doing anything against the rules. The overall tone was all-too-clear; anything not specifically permitted was forbidden.
“Davall,” one of the Germans said. He passed Davall a set of three ID cards; one for him, one for Kate and one for James. Davall examined them quickly, noting the picture of himself, a terrible image that was nonetheless easy to recognise. “These are your cards; keep them with you and present them whenever they are demanded by a German patrol. If you are caught without the card, you will be detained and perhaps sentenced to serve in a work gang.”
He passed them a small box of rations and pointed them out of the school; Davall left quickly before he vomited The fresh air cleared his head, but he knew the Germans had made certain that everyone would be registered, which just added another problem to the Grey Wolves’ growing list. They would all be registered, which meant that if they left fingerprints anywhere, the Germans would be able to identify them and come after them and their families. The female SS officer and those like her was building up a composite picture of who was who in the village, something that would make hiding a stranger very difficult indeed. He thought about it as they walked home slowly, passing some of their neighbours on the way; the Germans would have to be shown that there was still fight in the British, but how?
The German rations weren’t very good, but as Kate examined them, she pronounced that they should last for at least a week, particularly when they were added to what they’d stockpiled. Davall spent the afternoon thinking carefully and wandering around the town, watching the Germans as they sent their patrols out of Felixstowe towards the farms. A plan slowly began to form in his mind.
That night, he kissed Kate goodnight and slipped off into the shadows. He’d practised remaining unseen under the cover of darkness before, but this time he had to be much more careful. The Germans were enforcing a strict blackout regime over Felixstowe. They would be all-too-likely to shoot first and not bother with the questions. The scene was eerily dark but he had little difficulty in finding the paths up to the forest and through the trees to their meeting place, where he encountered two other Grey Wolves, Rupert McAllister and Barton Rigby. The former was a dockyard worker; the latter a farmhand at a farm to the west. They were also the most experienced people in the Grey Wolves.
He listened as they quickly compared stories about what had happened to them at registration and afterwards. The Germans had informed McAllister that he would be continue to work at the docks for the moment, while Rigby might have to work longer hours at the farm in preparation for the harvest in a few months.
“They work us hard, Greg,” McAllister said, finally. “They just rounded us all up and made us work long hours to unload all their shit. They’re bringing in thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles; I saw dozens of those grey tanks of theirs and some support vehicles today, moving west. I don’t know what they have in mind in the long term, but for the moment they’re using us as slaves, with no exceptions for injuries, and locked up the Union Boss when he tried to complain.”
Rigby snorted. “What, all that happened and you didn’t go on strike?”
McAllister glared at him. “The Germans shot the first person they caught dawdling and since then, no one has dared to oppose them,” he retorted. There was bad blood between the two of them. “That’s why we have to hit them now!”
“That’s something that will have to be passed up the chain,” Davall said, after a moment. He didn’t entirely trust the telephone cable; if the Germans located it, they could use it to set a trap for the Grey Wolves, but there was no other way to signal the British authorities. A radio transmitter would be detected at once, while someone travelling cross-country might well be caught and interrogated. “Did you bring your weapons?”
They nodded. Both men had been armed with assault rifles, while Davall himself carried a sniper rifle with a night-vision scope. He briefed them quickly on the target as they walked, reaching one of the roads and taking up their position as they waited for the German patrol. Davall had observed them making semi-permanent patrols of the area over the last few days and had noticed that the Germans sent one of the small troop carriers on a rotating patrol, probably aimed at preventing anyone escaping from Felixstowe. Rigby worked quickly to set up his own surprise for the Germans while they waited. They heard the sound of aircraft high overhead, heading in to land at the airfield Davall had raided, so long ago. Had it really been just over a month?
“Lights,” McAllister hissed. Davall could hear the faint sound of a German engine, slightly quieter than a British design. The Germans made better cars than the British, something that had always galled Davall, whose brother had used to work in a car factory before it had begun churning out tanks instead. The Germans had sold some of their cars through Felixstowe, something, he saw now, that had cleared the way for the invasion. “Sir…”
“I see them,” Davall hissed back. The two German vehicles looked crude and unfinished, but he knew from his briefings that they could be very dangerous. He targeted his rifle on the German manning the machine gun at the rear of the second vehicle and waited patiently as the Germans rolled into the kill zone, until they stuck the mine. The first vehicle exploded in a dazzling shower of sparks, while he squeezed the trigger and sent the machine gunner falling off the second vehicle. The other Germans spilled out of the vehicle, some of them falling prey to McAllister and Rigby, who poured fire onto their ranks.
Davall sucked in a breath as he peered through his scope. The Germans, despite being
completely surprised, had managed to get into a position to fire back at them, sending bullets cracking through the night. The four remaining German infantrymen kept moving forward, but he guessed that they were really trying to pin the British down while they called for help. The German commander would have a quick-reaction force ready for any trouble, and it was anyone’s guess how long it would take for them to get enough infantry into the area to search for the Grey Wolves. By then, they needed to be well away.
Rigby pulled the trigger on the second mine, hidden in the undergrowth. It detonated, pushing a hail of ball bearings down towards the Germans. The Grey Wolves fled, keeping low as they vanished into the woods. The Germans couldn’t match their local knowledge, Davall hoped; they would have to be insane to come in after them, not when they had reinforcements on the way. He heard the noise of a set of German autogyros in the air and took the risk of glancing up, but they didn’t seem to have any idea of where they were in the darkness.
They couldn’t head back to the main ammunition store, but they’d prepared secondary locations to hide their weapons, before fanning out and returning to their homes. Davall could hear the Germans in the distance, their weapons cracking out from time to time, but they never came anywhere near him. He didn’t know what they were shooting at, maybe hares or foxes, but they weren’t shooting at the Grey Wolves.
The crack of gunfire rose and fell as he listened, and the sounds of something moving in the wood almost made him jump out of his skin, but the Germans were still well away from him. He could see a sharp glare in the distance now, some of it being shone down from autogyros in the air, providing a perfect target if he had had a heavy machine gun. The thought made him smile as he found the path down towards the town; there was a heavy machine gun in the ammunition dump, something that could be used to hurt the Germans. There was no way to get a report out to higher authority, but that didn’t matter; one way or the other, the Germans would be hurt.
Their alert hadn’t reached Felixstowe yet, so it was easy to slip into his house, strip off his clothes, and climb into bed beside his wife. Kate hadn’t slept a wink, as far as he could tell, but she was very, very, relieved to see him. Davall held her in his arms until she drifted off, but it was a long time before sleep claimed him; he remembered, far too clearly, the screams of the Germans as they burned inside their vehicle. The German leaders were going to be furious.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Felixstowe, England
“This will not stand,” SS Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl said as he surveyed the burning wreckage. The sun was rising under protest, the first rays of heat burning away the early morning mist and revealing the wrecked patrol vehicles. They had been designed for service in relatively peaceful occupied France, rather than somewhere more extreme like Russia, and their design had been based around that expectation. A heavy armoured car wouldn’t have had so much trouble, or been so easy to disable…
Although heavier armour didn’t guarantee survival. It was easy to disable any vehicle, or destroy it, assuming that the person responsible had enough high explosive at their disposal. It wasn’t that hard to disable a Panther tank with a mine, although actually penetrating the crew compartment and killing the crew would be a different matter; Stahl could tell that it had been a mine that had destroyed the lead vehicle. The second one hadn’t been seriously damaged, although four of the soldiers mounted on it had been killed and two more seriously injured.
“We have swept the forest, Herr Standartenfuhrer,” Hauptsturmfuehrer Grauer Wulfenbach said, as he emerged from the trees. Stahl doubted it was thorough. The forest was large and far too easy to hide in, particularly for an experienced man. He’d seen it happen in Norway as well. The insurgents, the remains of the original Norwegian Army, had appeared, attacked, and then vanished back into the trees. “We have located no sign of the enemy.”
“Indeed,” Stahl said, examining the remains of the first armoured car. “What would you say caused this, eh?”
Wulfenbach wasn’t a particularly experienced man, as SS officers went, but he had some counterinsurgency experience, although it had been in France rather than somewhere more exciting. The French had, by and large, surrendered to the New Order. Those who wanted a life without the Germans sailed to Algeria, or tried to get to America. The Russians, who knew full well what fate the Reich had in mind for them, fought back and tried to hurt the Germans whenever they had a chance.
“It looks like a mine, Herr Standartenfuhrer,” he said. “Do you think we are dealing with an escaping Home Guard force?”
“That was my first thought as well,” Stahl said. “It was not, however, an escaping force caught behind our lines, as they set up the ambush and waited. It could have been an encounter made through sheer chance, but judging by the way they attacked and their position” — the SS team had found discarded shells where the insurgents had positioned themselves — “they wanted to head back towards Felixstowe. Why would they do that?”
Wulfenbach frowned. “Because they live there.”
“Perhaps,” Stahl said. He clicked his fingers, and his driver motored his small vehicle over to the pair of them. “I think it’s time to remind our second-class citizens that accepting citizenship in the Reich carries its obligations as well as its rights, don’t you?”
He smiled as the small convoy drove back towards Felixstowe. The attackers didn’t know it, but they had driven a knife in the SS’s back. The SS was charged with rear-area security, and that security had been very good ever since the invasion had begun… until now. The advancing German supply convoys were only lightly guarded as they advanced through occupied lands to the front. The insurgents ought to be dealt with, quickly, but how could they be found?
Felixstowe looked innocent as he drove though the town, and he felt a cold hatred shimmering in his heart. The townsfolk didn’t know what had occurred, but they knew that something had happened. He was sure that some of the men were exchanging smirks behind his back, celebrating the deaths of German soldiers. They didn’t yet know the benefits of the Third Reich, and if they weren’t as broken as they seemed, he was required to break them before the insurgency spread out of control. He had seen it happen, in Russia, where one act of desperate resistance mushroomed in a colossal disturbance and required extreme measures to quell… and Russia belonged to the Reich. The insurgents might win a few battles, from time to time, but their overall command of the country was never in question. In Britain…
His imagination filled in the details. The war for Britain was far from over, and already, he would have to assign more security forces to escorting the supply convoys as they left the docks and drove west. If the invading forces were pinned down by insurgents in the rear, they would be easy prey for the British forces when they launched their counter-attack and… the entire invasion would be on the verge of failure. If that happened, then he would be blamed for the failure. If he survived, he would end his days in a concentration camp or penal unit.
“Carola,” he barked, as he marched directly into the former Home Guard barracks. He’d thought about taking over the Town Hall, but it was better, or so he’d been told, to allow the Mayor to continue to run his town from his more normal haunt. Stahl hadn’t actually seen the Mayor do much more than chat to a few people — the town seemed almost to run itself — but the principle had seemed important. “Carola, where are you, girl?”
“Herr Standartenfuhrer,” Carola said. She was one of the SS’s ever growing army of bureaucrats, the men and women who ran the SS’s private empire, controlling the destinies of thousands upon thousands of souls caught within their grip. Her bland face, handsome rather than pretty, hid a razor-sharp mind and a devotion to duty that was fully the equal of any man. If she had been male, she would have been a threat to his position. As it was, he could use her talents to their fullest extent. “What can I do for you?”
“We have insurgent problems,” Stahl snapped, passing her his coat as he took his seat in fron
t of his desk. It had belonged to the person who had used to use the office, but that Home Guard officer was now in a camp, until the war ended and his fate was decided. “I want a way of finding them, quickly.”
Carola was very still for a moment as her encyclopaedic mind reviewed the registered citizens in her head. She supervised the registration process and examined all of the cards as they were added to the files, cross-referencing them all to ensure that their picture of who was who was as complete as possible. The files were extensive, but thanks to the filing methods, easy for anyone to use.
“There are a handful of men in town with military experience,” she said finally. Stahl nodded. The men who had attacked the patrol had shown some training in their tactics, and they had definitely fought with modern military weapons. In his experience, insurgents tended to be armed with older weapons, or one stolen from their occupying forces. “We could start by searching their homes for weapons and ensuring that if they do have weapons, they will hang them for their crimes.”
“True,” Stahl agreed, mentally reviewing his thoughts. There might be an ammunition dump around, somewhere nearby, but if there was, it was well hidden. They would search for it, but there was no guarantee that they would find it, not with seven years or more to prepare. They’d heard rumours about stay-behind units hidden within Britain, but how could they be identified? “Find me their details.”
“Jawohl,” Carola said.
Stahl watched her leave the room, allowing his eyes to follow her rear, and then he keyed his radio. “Wulfenbach, I want you to assemble two companies of security troops,” he ordered, shortly. “I have some work for them to do.”
The Invasion of 1950 Page 23