England Expects el-1
Page 85
As the bombardment finally lifted, the waiting gunships immediately powered in once more and began to patrol freely over the harbour and town centre, ready to attack anyone foolish enough to fire on them, but also taking care not to engage any targets further away. There’d already been a huge loss of life from the shelling and air attacks, but these deaths and injuries had been considered an unfortunate necessity that was an incidental side effect of the assault’s true purpose. There was no intention to target civilians directly, something that’d been made completely clear right from the very top, and the SH-6C pilots therefore took great care to cause as little damage to non-military personnel as was possible.
As the Drache gunships circled over the area, more helicopters appeared on the horizon and swarmed in toward the port in formations of dozens at a time. More than a hundred NH-3D helicopters swept across the waters of The Channel as wave after wave came in low against the eastern horizon. Vast areas around the harbour had been flattened completely by the huge airburst shells, and these blast sites now provided the approaching helicopters with almost perfect landing sites.
As they drew closer, the aircraft would break into groups of three or four at a time, each touching down on the uneven, rubble-covered ground just long enough to deploy a squad of airborne infantry, then powering away into the sky once more to make way for the next flight. Many of the landed troops took up positions to form a defensive perimeter around the Harbour, finding plenty of wreckage and uneven ground for use as cover. Several squads turned back toward the docks, accompanied by experienced pioneers tasked with ensuring that any demolition charges or booby traps that the British might’ve left were disabled safely.
Sporadic firefights broke out around that defensive perimeter as scattered British units that’d survived the bombardment regrouped and made an attempt at dislodging the invaders, however it was a relatively simple task for the supporting gunships to quickly turn the battle against them. With no effective ability for the British to push heavier reinforcements or armour through the human tide streaming out of Dover, the Germans were easily able to hold their positions and link up with some of the fallschirmjäger units already dropped into the surrounding areas earlier that morning.
By mid morning, the invasion had already been a far greater success than the Wehrmacht could ever have hoped for, and by late afternoon on that first day, the XVI Army would have control of the entire English coastline, from Dungeness to just south of Deal, while most of the Sussex beaches would also be under the command of Strauss’ IX Army. Von Reichenau had unbelievably been repulsed and pushed back into the sea off Hampshire with massive casualties, thanks to the modernised arms of the infantry and tanks in that area, but that was no great matter in the grand scheme of things. Seventy thousand men would pour onto the two successful beachheads in hordes on that first day, as ACVs, LSTs and troop transports continued to steam back and forth across The Channel.
Those specialised assault craft were also supplemented by substantial numbers of conventional shipping as ports under German control became fully operable once more from Brighton to Dover, surprise so great in most cases that no effective sabotage of port facilities had been possible. Within three days there would be three hundred thousand German troops on British soil, that figure including ten panzer and five mechanised infantry divisions. As night drew closer on that Wednesday, Lympne and several other coastal airfields also became operational. Transport after transport began to fly in, emptying their cargo bays of light tanks, artillery pieces and tonnes and tonnes of supplies as they added their support to the slower ships in transit across The Channel.
By eight that evening, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd Von Rundstedt had successfully transferred the HQ of Army Group A to Dover Castle as SS-trained military police began to round up any remaining civilians in the area. There was little effective resistance: the most the average farmer or townsperson could field against the might of the Wehrmacht was a shotgun or, more often, a sharpened spade or pitchfork, and as hardy as the British people might be, they were on the whole neither stupid nor suicidal. Most could only accept the situation for the moment, bide their time, and hope for a successful counter-attack.
None of them had any way of knowing that the entirety of Allied armed forces across the whole of Britain numbered little more than 120,000 men, many of them short of rifles or ammunition, or that there were almost no effective tanks or field guns available. The Wehrmacht would land three times as many troops by dusk on Friday, supported by three thousand tanks and twice that many armoured vehicles of various other types. Reichsmarschall Kurt Reuters had been correct in his prophetic statement of some months before… it really had been a matter of ‘too many, too much and too few…’
19. England Expects
Typ-X Unterseeboot U-1004
North Sea, north of The Dogger Bank
‘S-Day’:
Wednesday,
September 11, 1940
The Dogger Bank was a large, irregular sandbank approximately 260km long and up to 90km wide, running east-to-west between the British Isles and the west coast of Denmark. With a maximum depth of thirty-six metres, and as shallow as fifteen metres as it drew closer to the English coast, it was an area of the North Sea that had had figured regularly in British naval history over the last two centuries. The British and Dutch navies met in battle there in 1781, resulting in a Dutch rout, while the Russian Baltic Fleet commanded by Admiral Zinovi Rozhestvenski had opened fire on British trawlers off the bank in 1904 under the mistaken fear that the vessels sighted had actually been Japanese warships.
Russia had been at war with Japan at that time, and the fear wasn’t as ludicrous as it might at first seem in light of the Japanese Navy’s predilection at the time for British-made ships and equipment. A full-scale engagement with the Royal Navy had only been avoided through profuse and continuous apologies from both the fleet’s commanders and the Tsarist government of the time. Even so, the RN was at battle stations as the Russian ships transited The Channel at the beginning of an epic and valiant, if ill-devised war cruise of almost 29,000km for the Baltic Fleet that would end in a resounding defeat at Tsushima Strait in May of 1905.
The most famous event of the sandbank’s more recent history was the almost ‘non-engagement’ that was The Battle of Dogger Bank of 24th January 1915, in which Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty’s battlecruisers clashed savagely with their counterparts in Franz von Hipper’s German High Seas Fleet. Although the Royal Navy held the ‘field’ of battle following the engagement, as would be the case at Jutland the following year, Hipper’s ships nevertheless inflicted severe damage against a British fleet that had missed several opportunities to run down and annihilate the German battlecruisers in return. In the end, although the British press would claim a great victory, there’d be much recrimination within Admiralty circles over lost opportunities in bringing the enemy fleet fully to battle and dealing it a mortal blow.
Fregattenkapitän Gunter Kohl watched the Home Fleet task force intently through his attack periscope as U-1004 glided silently toward them below the surface of the North Sea at a steady 12 knots. He had to be careful, so close to the large sandbanks: the water wasn’t deep in that area, and with the right conditions it might be possible to see a U-boat at periscope depth from above… and for the same reason, there’d be little room to manoeuvre should they be discovered. Kohl would raise the scope every thirty seconds or so and rotate it quickly through a full 360̊ circle, each time relaying important positional information to his XO, who in turn passed the relevant details on to the navigator and the torpedo chief.
Although his mouth was dry, as it always was during times of stress, he never let the crew see his nervousness: it was important that to them, he at all times remained the cool, calm commander. At thirty-four, the stocky, fair-haired officer was the eldest of three brothers in Wehrmacht service, and the only one in the Kriegsmarine. He’d joined the service in 1934, and entered the U-boat arm two years lat
er, rising quickly through the officer corps to his own command just prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. He was well-liked by his crews and went out of his way to look after them, something that drew a great deal of loyalty and effort from his men, and he’d so far proven to be an efficient commander who achieved excellent results.
“Destroyer, bearing nineteen,” he announced softly, professionally. He halted for a moment in the middle of the sweep and noted the nearest escort, watching just long enough to estimate speed and distance before continuing his scan. “Heading one-eighty… speed constant… range two thousand metres . . .” He’d just told the XO the destroyer in question was at a bearing of 19º relative to the heading of his ship, was maintaining a constant speed, and was heading due south… all of which meant that the destroyer was to all intents and purposes heading away from U-1004. At a range of two kilometres, there was no likelihood of it detecting the submarine even if it were equipped with the new ASDIC detection equipment that’d been appearing on Royal Navy ships.
ASDIC — something the Americans and the rest of the world would come to know as SONAR — was a new and potentially effective system for detecting submerged U-boats, but from Kohl’s experience it didn’t yet possess a particularly useful range. He’d personally eluded an ASDIC-equipped corvette a month before that had closed to within three hundred metres, and U-1004 had still gone undetected despite being at only moderate depth. When rigged for silent running, U-1004 and her fellow Type-X U-boats were almost impossible to detect at ranges greater than two or three hundred meters, unless caught suicidally close to the surface.
Kohl turned the scope to the other destroyer he could see, this one further away and to the west of the convoy, and reported the range at 3,500 metres. It was quite overcast that afternoon over the North Sea, with occasional rain squalls and very choppy surface conditions, and lookouts on any enemy vessels would need to be very lucky to see the tiny wake of U-1004’s small, high-powered attack periscope. He returned his attention to the convoy itself: more than thirty warships of various sizes and classes, covering a dozen square kilometres of ocean in a long, drawn-out line-astern formation.
The fleet wasn’t ‘zig-zagging’ as the enemy’s merchantmen convoys were prone to while making their perilous journeys across the Atlantic, something that made targeting substantially easier for the U-boat commander. Even so, gaining a firing position was going to be difficult: the fleet passing across his bow was steaming at better than twenty knots, which was well in excess of U-1004’s top submerged speed of slightly more than 18½… and Kohl couldn’t use anything close to full speed if he wanted to remain undetected by the enemy’s passive hydrophone sensors.
It was several more minutes before the U-boat reached a workable firing position, the enemy fleet still unaware of any danger as it steamed southward toward The Channel and inevitable combat. There were few operational vessels in Dönitz’s infant U-boat fleet, as the construction of capital ships had taken precedence, and capital ships like battleships or carriers also took up far more space, manpower and resources. The small number of U-boats that were available to the Kriegsmarine however were the most modern and advanced in the world, and had already had an effect upon the course of the war that was way out of proportion to their number. Kohl, one of the more experienced of the U-boat service’s commanders, had alone already sunk twelve ships for more than 70,000 tons. Most of that tally had been in the older but nevertheless quite deadly Type-VII fleet boat, but his record had been good enough to accord him the honour of working up a new crew on just the fourth ship of the new Type-X class to come down the slipway.
The Type-X was quite literally a quantum leap forward in submarine technology. To begin with, she’d been designed from the outset as an underwater vessel, rather than a seagoing vessel that could submerge (as was the case with the submarines of the rest of the world’s navies). Until the moment the Type-X left the drawing board and entered service, all submarines had been designed with a shape more conducive to surface sailing; intended primarily to remain on the surface, only submerging in times of combat. As a result, all other submarines, while possessed of adequate capabilities while surfaced, were little better than poor performers when submerged.
The preceding German Type-VII was a good example of conventional submarine technology and better than most, and it’d been capable of just 18 knots surfaced and no more than seven when submerged. The choice of a surface-going layout also meant she was a comparatively noisy vessel when underwater (as were all conventional subs) due to an abundance of nooks and crannies around the hull and conning tower where water could catch and swirl to produce the deadly turbulence and cavitation that cried out like a thunder storm to an enemy’s hydrophones.
The Type-X changed all that, and had been designed from the outset as a vessel intended to spend its time beneath the surface of the ocean. She had a blunt, streamlined nose joined to an equally-featureless hull that was exceptionally ‘clean’ and devoid of protrusions or indentations throughout its entire length, stretching right back to the stern. Its tail was also a departure from usual practice: instead of twin propeller shafts mounted beneath the hull on either side of a single rudder, the stern tapered to a rounded tip, at the end of which was a single large, multi-bladed screw. Instead of a conventional rudder, the tail also sprouted four fins in a ‘+’ shape just ahead of the large propeller that provided the boat with a level of manoeuvrability much improved over other, less advanced models.
The new type of stern design did however precluded the firing of torpedoes to the rear, and all six of the 533mm (21-inch) torpedo tubes the vessel possessed were subsequently mounted forward in two vertical columns of three on either side of the nose. The vessel carried 24 torpedoes for her main armament, and the advanced, semi-automatic loading mechanisms for the six-metre-long ‘fish’ were efficient enough to reload all six tubes in the same time it would take any normal submarine crew to reload one. A secondary anti-aircraft armament consisted of a pair of twin turrets mounted at each end of the long, narrow conning tower. Those turrets each sported a pair of 30mm automatic cannon which, when not in use, could be depressed to point directly downward and were locked away inside sealed hatches along the fore and aft edges of the conning tower so as to leave no projection when submerged. The old standard of a heavy deck gun had been done away with entirely: not only did such a fitting create a great deal of noise and drag when underwater, but it also didn’t fit with the new, altered role of the U-boat. The Type-X was intended to spend its days on patrol entirely below the surface, and as such it would have no use for a deck gun at all.
The layout of her engines was also a massive departure for U-boat construction. Conventional designs usually comprised a set of main diesel engines (usually four, as was the case with the Type-VII) used as the primary source of propulsion when surfaced, and would also charge the comparatively small store of batteries used to power the secondary electric motors used when submerged. The Type-X instead used just one pair of far smaller diesel engines, and those engines were at no time directly connected to her single screw. They powered a 450-kilowatt electric generator that could either drive her more powerful primary electric motors (which were connected to her single screw) or charge the greatly increased store of lead-acid batteries packed into the pressure hull below the crew decks. The lower reliance on diesels meant far less fuel need be carried, and the increased battery power also meant the vessel had much greater endurance and speed when submerged — something that Kohl and his crew were putting to great use at that moment.
“Range to target two-thousand, five hundred,” Kohl noted softly from his position in the conning tower, his eyes never leaving the attack-periscope’s viewing port in the dim, red light of battle-stations. “Bearing fifteen degrees… heading one-eighty and steady… speed twenty… twenty-two knots.” As the XO passed on his observations to the appropriate crew stations, he carried out another 360° sweep, which came up clear of any threats.
For Kohl, there was also something a little more personal. Wolff, the youngest of his brothers, had been serving with the Luftwaffe and had been stationed with a Zerstörergeschwader in France. Upon return to base in August after his last patrol, Kohl had learned that his brother had been shot down during an air raid on the British naval base at Scapa Flow and was listed as ‘missing, presumed killed’. The blow had struck his entire family hard, and he wasn’t sorry to be given the chance to now exact some vengeance on some of the warships that had been stationed at The Flow at the time of the raid.