Operation Diver
Robert Jackson
© Robert Jackson 1981
Robert Jackson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1981 by Arthur Barker.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Chapter One
The March wind that came gusting out of the darkness down the valley of the River Authie was bitterly cold. Driving from the south-east, it sent black clouds scudding over the moon and filled the night with rustling movement as it stirred the long grasses and set the branches of trees creaking in unison with one another.
A small group of people — four men and a woman — crouched in the shelter of a small copse that lay on the edge of a broad meadow. All the men were armed, one with a German Schmeisser and the others with British Sten sub-machine guns. Only the woman carried no weapon, although — unknown to her companions — the bulging briefcase she held tightly to her, in addition to the documents it contained, carried enough explosive to blow them all to oblivion if they were overwhelmed by the enemy.
Out in the meadow, invisible in the darkness, stood three more men, a hundred yards apart, their positions marking the points of an imaginary triangle. Each carried a masked lantern, which would be exposed at the appropriate moment for the briefest possible period — just long enough for an incoming aircraft to locate the field and touch down. The pinpricks of light could just as easily bring a German patrol to the location. It was a nerve-racking business, and one fraught with the utmost peril.
One of the men by the copse spoke suddenly, his slow, almost lazy accent that of the province of Languedoc, in southern France.
‘I do not think that it will come,’ he said ‘It is already long past the appointed time…the wind is too high, and soon it will bring the storm.’
The woman turned to him, reaching out a reassuring hand and placing it on his shoulder.
‘Rest easy, Victor,’ she murmured. ‘It will come. It always comes, even in weather much worse than this.’
She shivered, recalling nightmare hours on a previous occasion, torn by air-sickness in a freezing, lurching cockpit as her pilot rode through turbulent squalls of sleet a few feet above the icy waters of the English Channel.
She was desperately tired. For Julia Connors, alias Madeleine Lefèvre, one-time war correspondent for the New York Globe and now a top agent with the highly secret Special Operations Executive, there had been little respite during the past three months. She had worked as a courier between Resistance cells all the way across France, from the Belgian border to the Pyrenees, leading shot-down Allied airmen on the first leg of their journey home; she had briefed and organized other agents whose task it was to keep a continual watch on the German defences of the Atlantic Wall in the sector between Dieppe and Cherbourg.
Then, suddenly, she had been given another assignment: one which, she had been told, was the most important she had so far undertaken. In a crumbling tenement building on the outskirts of Paris, she had made contact with a man who handed her the briefcase she now carried. Inside it, next to the compartment that held the explosive, a fat wad of papers were sealed inside a waterproof pack. She had no idea what the papers were; no questions had been asked, no explanations volunteered. All she knew was that she had to get the documents to London, and that time was vital.
She had no means of knowing that the mysterious documents had travelled a long and dangerous path across Occupied Europe. Three months earlier they had been stolen from Peenemünde, the German secret weapons research establishment on the Baltic coast, by a scientist who, for a variety of reasons, was opposed to the Nazi regime, and had subsequently been smuggled across Germany and into France by members of the communist resistance organization known as Red Orchestra. The fact that the documents had reached SOE at all was something of a miracle, for no love was lost between the Anglo-American organization and the communists; but someone, somewhere down the line, had made the right decision, and it was to be instrumental in saving thousands of lives.
Nor could she know that the papers she carried were the missing link in a chain of events which had baffled and alarmed Allied Intelligence experts for some time. In the early weeks of 1944, as soon as the winter snows had begun to thaw, London had received word from the French Resistance that the Germans were building curious structures at various points along the Pas de Calais under conditions of strict security. Air reconnaissance had already confirmed that the structures appeared to be long, angled ramps, which had one alarming feature in common.
All the ramps located so far were pointing in the direction of London.
Julia Connors had long since ceased to speculate about the contents of the briefcase. All she knew or cared about was that its possession meant a ticket home, if wartime London could be called home, and a few more hours — perhaps days, if they were lucky — snatched with the man she loved. He, too, lived with danger and fear as his constant companions, although in different forms. With a sudden pang, she realized that she might already be too late, that he might have gone from her, his life snuffed out like a candle flame…
A sudden exclamation from Victor jerked her mind mercifully away from morbid thoughts.
‘Ecoute! I think I hear it!’ His head was turned slightly to one side, his eyes straining to penetrate the darkness.
A moment later Julia also heard it, faintly at first above the wind, then more clearly as it swelled in volume: the drone of an aero-engine. From the direction of the sound it appeared that the pilot was following the line of the river.
The three men positioned in the meadow waited until the last moment, until they were positive that the engine was British — German aero-engines had a quite different and distinctive note — before exposing their lanterns. First one red light, and then all three, cast their glow over the field.
The black-painted Westland Lysander came sliding down over the western boundary, the noise of its engine dying away as the pilot closed the throttle. It touched down with a rumble, settled on its sturdy, spatted undercarriage and rolled quickly to a stop.
Julia and her companions ran out to meet it. Two shadowy figures disembarked and were greeted by the lantern-bearers, who had now extinguished their lights. There were hasty handshakes and farewells and then Julia was scrambling into the cockpit, strapping herself into a seat recently vacated by one of the other passengers. Even before she was settled in the pilot, gauging that plenty of field remained in front of him, was opening the throttle again to send the Lysander thrusting forward over the grass. After an incredibly short take-off run the machine became airborne and the pilot turned steeply over the tree-tops, setting course north-westwards towards the coast.
The Lysander had been on the ground for less than three minutes, which was about the average time it took one of the highly experienced pilots of No. 161 (Special Duties) Squadron to make a pick-up.
The pilots had no idea of the identity of the people they were carrying; the agents were known simply as ‘Joes’. In any case, the concentration needed to accomplish a night flight at low level into the heart of enemy territory was such that few pilots had time to worry about anything other than staying alive. Their workload had been high in recent weeks, following a sharp increase in traffic to and f
rom the Continent, and the risks they ran had increased in proportion. The Abwehr, the Germany military intelligence service, had succeeded in making inroads into the ranks of the various resistance movements in Occupied Europe, and aircraft had been lost when, instead of resistance workers, they had been greeted by heavily-armed German troops.
Flak and fighters were becoming a growing problem, too. On more than one occasion recently, a Lysander had only been able to escape thanks to its high manoeuvrability; the pilots had developed tactics that involved putting the aircraft into a deliberate spin, pulling out right on the deck and then entering a series of steep turns that no fighter could hope to match.
So, on this March night in 1944, the Lysander pilot did not trouble himself with idle thoughts about who his passenger might be, or what her mission was. Anyway, the less he knew, the better for all concerned, the only communication between the Lysander’s two occupants came when the pilot, safely out over the Channel now, pointed to a pocket on the side of the cockpit; it contained a flask of coffee and a pack of sandwiches, which they shared.
An hour later the Lysander touched down at Tempsford, 161 Squadron’s base in Bedfordshire. The weary and thankful pilot watched his passenger climb into a waiting car and disappear into the night, and then dismissed all thoughts of her from his mind. Later, after debriefing and the traditional post-flight meal of bacon and eggs, he went to his room and fell into an exhausted sleep, assisted by the two pills prescribed by the station medical officer which were now an indispensable part of his 25-year-old life.
*
‘OBERKOMMANDO DER LUFTWAFFE — STRENG GEHEIM!’ The words, flanked by the Nazi swastika and surmounted by the German eagle, stood out starkly at the head of every page. Luftwaffe High Command — Top Secret.
The hands of the wall clock in the Air Ministry’s Room 512 pointed to 0800. Outside the tall windows, the streets of London were stirring into life.
The Senior Scientist placed his pipe carefully in an ashtray and surveyed the grave faces of the men seated around the big oak table. Some, like himself, were scientists; others were high-ranking RAF officers, the breasts of their blue tunics splashed with the medal ribbons of a bygone war, a war in which — as boys of nineteen or twenty — they had piloted flimsy biplanes against the cream of the Imperial German Flying Corps. Now, in 1944, they directed the lives and destinies of thousands of men as young as they themselves had once been, flying aircraft with performance and striking power undreamed of a quarter of a century earlier.
The Senior Scientist turned to a young man at his elbow.
‘Well, Geoffrey,’ he said, ‘you are the expert in technical German. How soon can a translation of these documents be made ready?’
The young man wrinkled his brow thoughtfully and rolled a pencil between his fingers.
‘If I divert the efforts of all my translation team to the job…then I think we can have it completed by this evening. Say seven o’clock. I’m worried about one or two security aspects, though. At least one member of my team does not have a sufficiently high clearance to handle material of this kind.’
‘It will be obtained by midday,’ the Senior Scientist told him. ‘Otherwise, the chap will be off your team immediately. We can’t afford to take risks. If news of this business leaked out, the adverse effect on public morale would be incalculable. I am sure that the Prime Minister will agree, when I confront him and the War Cabinet with the facts this evening. The people of London have endured enough; for something like this to threaten them, just when we are gaining the upper hand…’ He left the sentence unfinished.
One of the RAF officers, an air marshal, spoke suddenly.
‘We’ve got a problem on our hands,’ he said. ‘No one can deny that. But your problem is to find out as much as you can about the working of these infernal things; my business is to stop them, and I’d like to get cracking on some plans right away. It would help, though, if Geoffrey here could refresh our memories about what we know so far — that is to say, what he has gleaned from a preliminary scrutiny of the enemy documents — without going into too much technical detail.’
The Senior Scientist looked slightly annoyed; too much time, he felt, had already been wasted. Nevertheless, the suggestion brought murmurs of assent from several others round the table, so he reluctantly agreed. ‘All right, Geoffrey,’ he said, adding pointedly: ‘For the Air Marshal’s benefit.’
The technical translator cleared his throat and consulted his notes. ‘Very well, sir. Basically, what we are dealing with is a pilotless bomb — or, more correctly, a small pilotless aircraft with an explosive warhead. The concept is not new; in the 1930s, the Italians experimented with —’ He was interrupted by the Senior Scientist, who testily told him to stick to the facts that concerned them here and now. The young man blushed, then continued:
‘The weapon developed by the Germans, according to these documents, is extremely simple. It consists of a torpedo-like fuselage, about twenty-five feet long, fitted with stubby, square-cut wings spanning less than eighteen feet. The tail unit is conventional, with tailplane, elevators, fin and rudder. Most of the construction appears to be of wood.’
He peered at his notes again, turning a page.
‘The power-plant is really interesting. It is mounted above the aircraft’s rear fuselage in a cylindrical tube and is a reaction motor — the nearest I can get to its name in translation is “pulse jet”.’
He stretched out a hand and tapped the German documents, which lay on the table in front of him. ‘These,’ he went on, ‘these, which appear to be a fairly detailed technical precis on the German weapon, presumably for the benefit of senior Luftwaffe officers rather than for scientific staff, give details of the pulse jet’s development. Personally, I found the whole concept ingenious in its simplicity. Air is forced into the motor through a series of hinged shutters at the front intake and mixed with a finely atomized spray of fuel, the mixture then being ignited by a form of spark plug. The shutters open and close in rapid succession to admit charges of air, so instead of a continuous burning process the engine operates on the principle of a fast chain of low-frequency explosions. After each one, the expanding hot gases are expelled from the rear of the engine, so providing forward thrust.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Air Marshal, waving a hand, ‘but how fast will the thing go?’
The translator consulted his papers, hurriedly converting kilometres into miles per hour.
‘About four hundred,’ he said, ‘although I must emphasize that these figures appear to be based on test flight data. In its operational version the weapon may have a higher performance.’
The Air Marshal’s face fell. ‘Then we’re going to be hard put to catch the damned things. The only fighter we’ve got in service that can match that sort of speed is the Tempest, and so far we’ve only two squadrons of them. And we’re having trouble with their engines.’ he added grimly.
The translator looked thoughtful for a moment, then said: ‘Well, sir, there might be one thing in our favour. According to this data, the operational ceiling of the weapon is not greater that seven thousand feet. That’s well within the range of most of our anti-aircraft guns, isn’t it?’
The Air Marshal nodded. ‘True. Nevertheless, trying to hit such a small target at speeds of 400 mph or more will present enormous problems. And if the Huns launch swarms of the bloody things at the same time — well then, by God, most of them will get through to London, no matter how good we are.’
‘Defending London might not be our only problem, either,’ the Senior Scientist interjected quietly. ‘According to Geoffrey’s notes, these weapons have a range of something like two hundred miles. London lies only half that distance from the enemy launching sites which our air reconnaissance has detected on the other side of the Channel. Furthermore, it seems that the Germans have experimented with launching the bombs from aircraft; if that technique is adopted operationally, no target in the British Isles will be safe.’
‘Can the weapon be jammed?’ asked an elderly civilian, an electronics expert, who was sitting next to the Air Marshal.
The Senior Scientist shook his head. ‘We don’t think so. But Geoffrey can explain that more fully.’
‘It isn’t radio-guided,’ the translator said, ‘I’ve seen references here to an Askania gyroscope, which corrects its direction and attitude once it has been launched. Some sort of automatic timing device — I haven’t yet had time to work out exactly what kind — cuts out the motor after the weapon has flown the required distance.’
‘And then it dives to the ground,’ mused the Air Marshal, ‘and its ton of high explosive goes off in the middle of London, or wherever the target happens to be.’
He leaned forward suddenly in his seat, his hands clasped together. His mind had been working overtime for the past few minutes, and already he was coming to grips with the problem.
From the little he had heard so far, assuming the technical details were correct — and there was no reason to think that they were not — there appeared to be two ways of stopping one of these infernal devices once it was airborne: either by shooting it down with a direct hit, or by somehow toppling it over — with a near miss from a heavy shell, for example — so that its gyroscope ceased to function and the weapon fell short of its target, with any luck in open country.
He knew, however, that this was not the real answer. The solution was to prevent the new enemy weapons ever getting off the ground by destroying their launching sites. It could be done. A few days earlier, in the middle of March, the combined British and American bomber forces had begun a series of massive attacks against enemy rail centres in northern France in preparation for what everyone in positions of high authority now knew was only weeks away: the Allied invasion of western Europe. Surely some of that awesome striking power, he thought, could be diverted to destroying what might turn out to be the biggest imaginable threat to the success of the invasion.
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