The barge itself had been heavily modified, with concrete poured over the floor, the hull strengthened with steel plate, and the sharp prow replaced by bat-wing doors and a ramp at the front that would drop down to allow them to land. The wheelhouse was cut down and surrounded by sandbags. This barge was meant to carry grain down a river. Now it would carry seventy men and four trucks across an ocean. The barge lay low, and with every wave salt water splashed over the gunwales, soaking the men huddled inside it. The doomsayers said gloomily that the Channel surges could be twenty feet high. Every day of his training Ernst had been struck by the contrast between the sleek perfection of his Army equipment and the ramshackle nature of the transports that would take him and his gear across the Channel. The boatman, the binnenschiffer, laughed at the men's discomfort.
At last the barge joined its column. Ernst clung to the side and stared out. It was a remarkable sight in the fading light of the September day to be riding across a sea carpeted by barges and men, as far as the eye could see. Ernst's barge was one of two hundred in this column alone, towed by tugs and steamers, with an escort of heavier ships bearing supplies. While the barges carried the assault troops, the spearhead troopers, the Advanced Detachments who would be the first to land – the Heaven-Sent Command, the men called them – crossed in mine-sweepers. They would land in speedboats and sturmboats, fast, small, unarmoured boats made for river crossings. For them it would be a dawn landing, amphibious, two thousand men for each beach.
Fleet D as a whole would form a column more than a mile wide and twelve miles long – so long that the lead barges would be halfway across the Channel before the last boats left harbour. But the barges could travel at no more than three or four knots, and all the columns had to follow crooked courses, to avoid sandbanks and mines. The crossing would take long hours.
And even as the column pulled away from the harbour, the attacks began. Over Ernst's head Messerschmitt 109s were taking on Hurricanes, Spitfires and light bombers. Josef had said Goering had been trying to disrupt the RAF's command systems as much as ruin its planes and airfields; perhaps a weakened RAF was focusing its efforts where it thought it could do the most harm. For Ernst that wasn't a comforting thought.
They were not long out of the harbour when a Spitfire got through and flew low over Ernst's column, machine guns blazing. Ernst and the others cowered low in the barge, and the bullets clanged harmlessly from the hull's steel plates. The plane swept over, and when it pulled up Ernst saw how the metal skin over its wings wrinkled with the stress.
But it wasn't the RAF that Ernst feared most, as the evening darkened into night, but the Royal Navy.
For days before the barges sailed, the minelayers, protected by destroyers and E-boats, had been setting up a fortified corridor across the Channel, walled by minefields each a half-mile wide, and even now the U-boats, destroyers and torpedo boats, reinforced by ships taken from the French in Algeria, must be fighting desperately to repel the overwhelming might of the British ships. Sometimes Ernst thought he heard the booming voices of that other battle, far away, a battle on the sea just as one raged in the air. But Ernst's barge sailed on undisturbed.
The night folded over them, imperceptibly slowly, until it became starless and moonless under a lid of cloud. Some of the men were ill, though the sea was mild. They got absolutely no sympathy from the binnenschiffer, the only true sailor on the boat, a leather-faced forty-year-old river worker from Cologne. Occasionally you would hear bits of banter drifting across the ocean between the barges of the tow group, and ripples of laughter coming out of the dark. Some men huddled down and tried to sleep. Coming from one boat Ernst heard murmured prayers. The Nazis looked down on religion, but he doubted anybody was going to put a stop to that tonight. So you crossed the ocean in the dark, in bubbles of companionship, nothing but you and your buddies out on the sea. Ernst wondered if it had been this way for William's Normans, and Claudius's superstitious Romans a thousand years earlier still. But those ancient warriors had not had to endure this passage through a corridor of warfare, in the air and at sea.
Later in the night units of Fleet E, the westernmost, linked up with D as had been planned. And rumours began to spread among the men on the barges about what was really going on.
At the fringes of the invasion, the Royal Navy was getting through the flimsy defences of the Kriegsmarine. Though for fear of aerial attack the English had committed no capital ships, no cruisers or battleships, their light fighting ships had sailed from Harwich, Dover, Portsmouth and Portland. Their small motor torpedo boats, like the Germans' E-BOATS, had been the first to fall on Fleet E, and later the English destroyers had got among them. The German escort ships, mostly civilian ships with machine guns and a few pieces of light artillery, could do little about it. The destroyers' guns, four- or six-inchers, made short work of the steamers, and the men in the barges had to listen to boom and crash, boom and crash, as the big guns were fired, and the shells found their targets. Within minutes many of the steamers were holed, sinking, burning.
And then these wolves of the sea, travelling at thirty or forty knots, tore through the columns of wallowing river barges, crushing them, drowning them in their wash, or simply dragging them by their towing cables until they were capsized. Any surviving barges were raked with gunfire, shells and flame throwers until the sea was littered with burning wreckage. Men in the water were being wiped out systematically. The destroyers even sent up flares to light up the night, the better to prosecute their slaughter. There was no rescue tonight, no honour of the sea, no pity.
But while Fleet E died, D was spared. Perhaps it was true in the east too, the men muttered, Fleet B soaking it up to spare Fleet C. Perhaps, the men whispered, Fleets D and C would make it to their landing sites, around Eastbourne and Rye. At Brighton and Dover, the destinations for E and B, there would only be wreckage and bodies washed ashore on a tide frothing with blood.
In that case, Ernst thought, listening, appalled, those who landed alive must make these huge sacrifices count.
In the dark, with the water lapping and the tug engines labouring, surrounded by the boom and crash of the fighting planes and ships, Ernst lost his sense of time. He was startled to realise that dawn light was seeping into the sky.
And there ahead of him, a grey line sandwiched between a steel sky and an iron sea, was land. He saw prickles of light. It was 0615, already half an hour after dawn, and, after a softening-up bombardment, the lead echelons must already have landed, were already fighting and dying.
A drizzle started. The sky was murky, charcoal grey. It was 21 September, S-Day. This was England. He thought he could hear church bells ringing distantly, a beautiful nostalgic noise. Hitler had had all the bells in Germany melted down for munitions.
XV
The sound of the tug engines died, and the barge drifted. At last, thought Ernst. It was two hours since his first glimpse of land. Since then they had run parallel to the shore, before finally turning and driving in.
The sound of the long battle raging along the coast was already huge. The men lay as low as they could, sheltered by the barge's reinforced walls. But Ernst risked raising his head and looked out over the barge's fortified flank, hoping for his first glimpse of Pevensey, his landing site.
There was a murky light now, and the coast was obscured by haze and drifting smoke. But it was chaos on land and on sea. Assault-troop barges like his own were sliding in towards the shore, jostling for a place to land. On the beach more craft were stranded by a tide that was already receding, the rubber boats and speedboats of the advanced detachments. The beach itself looked littered, as if by bits of seaweed, and it was striped by peculiar black bands that ran parallel to the shore. The invaders were under fire. Ernst saw a tower to his right, and the larger guns of a coastal battery were coughing somewhere to his left; shells hissed as they flew, and landed with crashing explosions, or threw water spouts spectacularly into the air. From the area directly ahead Ernst heard the
bark of automatic arms fire, and he saw the bulky silhouettes of pillboxes, fire sparking from the slits drawn in their forbidding faces.
All this was screened by smoke and a spray of water thrown up by the shells. But it was clear that the coastal defences were not subdued by the advance troops, as they had been promised. The very pile-up of boats struggling to find a place to land proved that something had gone wrong, that the beach wasn't clearing as fast as it should.
The barge's unteroffizier turned in the grey light. He was younger than Ernst, but his left cheek was darkened by a huge livid scar, picked up somewhere during the Nazis' dash across Europe. 'All right, lads. Now, we've been over the drill often enough. The first echelon are clearing the beach. They'll cover us when we land, and in turn we'll need to cover the command companies. Then we'll organise into our assault companies, get off the damn beach and through the marshy rubbish further up, and then we'll be off into the hills before breakfast.' Even as he said this, everybody could see the plan made no sense. The unteroffizier was faced by rows of wide-eyed faces, many of them pale under their blacking. 'Right, check your lifebelt,' he said. This was a bulky item like a motor tyre you wore under your gear. Ernst had his tucked up under his armpits. 'Remember what the officers said. Don't stop for wounded. Somebody else will follow up for them. Your job is to advance. Don't forget that…'
A motor roared, and their barge, one of a group of four, ploughed forward once more. The tug that had brought them across the Channel had to stand out to sea; a smaller motor-boat was dragging them to land. Whether the plan was defunct or not made no difference. They were going in.
As they neared the beach the barge jostled with those around it, gathering in a throng as tight as in Boulogne harbour. But now they were coming into the range of the shell fire, and Ernst ducked down, into the cover of the barge's hull. The men were splashed with water thrown up by the detonations, and once by a hail of splinters from some smashed boat.
There were screams nearby, and a rip of metal. Ernst risked another glance. One of the barges in his group was ripped open and was tipping, spilling out its men. Its flank had snagged on a tangle of scaffolding jutting out of the water, revealed by the receding tide.
Shingle scraped, and Ernst's barge rocked. It was grounded. The bat-wing doors opened, and the ramp at the front of the boat was let down. The unteroffizier jumped up. 'Off! Off!-' The shot hit him in the mouth. The back of his head detonated, and his jaw hung down, flapping, as he tipped into the water.
The men ducked down again. But now some English machine-gunner got his range. The bullets stitched the length of the barge and through the bodies of men who cried out, one after another.
'Get out!' Ernst screamed. 'We're sitting ducks here.' He stood again, and men pressed behind him, trying to get off the barge. Ernst realised he would never get to the ramp. Without letting himself think about it, he rolled his body over the side of the barge and dropped into the water.
He was submerged in water a few feet deep. The water's own bubbling filled his ears. The sea was murky and cold, and the pack on his back, his boots, felt inordinately heavy. He could see others falling into the water around him, and one burly trooper almost landed on top of him. And he could see the bullets lancing into the water, creating trails like tiny diving birds. He thrashed, trying to find his footing. The pull of his lifebelt under his armpits helped him.
His head came up above the water, into air that was filled with shouting and the singing of bullets and the whistle of heavier shells. He thrust his hands beneath him, scraping them on the shingle, and at last got his feet under him and dragged himself up. Head down, hefting his rifle, he just ran forward. The going was hard, the stones slippery, the water dragging at every movement. There were bodies floating around him, some riddled by bullets, but some unmarked – men must be drowning as they tried to get off the boats. And he was cold, by God; that was something he hadn't anticipated.
At last the water shallowed, and he found himself crunching over slippery shingle. The beach was long and sloping. It looked an awfully long way to the pillboxes beyond the sea wall which still spat their spiteful fire. And the beach was already littered with men lying still where they had fallen, and by the wreckage of boats and barges.
Automatic fire hissed through the air. He threw himself flat. He landed heavily, his pack slamming between his shoulder blades like a punch.
He saw there was a low wooden wall only a few feet to his right, like a groyne. Men huddled behind it. He might get a bit of cover there, if he could reach it. He rolled towards the groyne, over and over, his pack bumping under his back. A stray bullet smacked into the shingle, only inches from his right eye, and a pebble splintered and peppered his face with a kind of shrapnel. He cried out, feeling the sting of blood.
But he got to the groyne. He pressed himself against the thick wood, which was dark and slippery with seaweed. It wasn't much protection, but it was better than nothing, better than being out there exposed on the shingle like a beached porpoise. The men already here were soaked, wild-eyed, some of them wounded. None of them was from his company.
He risked a look over the groyne. There was a pillbox directly ahead of him. He was right in its line of fire. He could not imagine the men inside it, fighting for their lives; it seemed like something superhuman, brooding, a slit-eyed monster spitting lead at him. Before it the beach was chaotic, cratered, men crawling or lying still, looking for cover in shell-holes or behind the wreckage of boats. He saw the black plumes of mortar fire, the crack of bullets, and toxic fumes and sprays of red-hot shrapnel rose up from shell falls. Overhead the aerial battle continued, much of it hidden by the murky low cloud. The RAF fighters dipped low enough to scour the men on the beach with their guns. And there were Luftwaffe planes in there too; he saw a Stuka dive bomber coming down to take on some English gun nest. There was a smell of cordite and salty sea spray and the rich, sickening tang of blood.
And there was a wall further up where more men crowded, seeking shelter, their soaked battledress dark. Ernst realised that he had joined one of the black lines he had seen from the sea: bands of black that were mortal men huddling behind whatever cover they could find, trying to stay alive.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, he reminded himself. Evidently the English resistance had been underestimated. A shot slapped the wood close to his face, and he ducked back down.
Well, he couldn't stay here. Looking around, he saw that others drawn up against the groyne had the same idea. One man, an unterfeldwebel, raised his arm.
Ernst moved with the rest. And for the first time since landing in England he raised his weapon and fired.
The troops advanced up the beach in turn. It was a long slog. It was a question of lift your head, take a shot to cover the rest, and then when they were firing take your chance to crawl a bit further forward, before ducking down again. Still the pillboxes fired. There were hazards on the beach too; Ernst nearly fell into a dugout improvised from a bit of drainpipe buried in the shingle, but the Englishman inside was already dead.
And then a mortar emplacement got its range, and the shells rained down on the beach all around Ernst. Men and bits of kit were thrown high in the air, men torn to pieces in an instant, their limbs scattered. Ernst found himself crawling desperately over the bodies of the fallen. You could even get a bit of cover, if you ducked down behind a corpse.
But gradually, he saw, inch by inch – life by life – the tide of the German offensive was rising up towards the defenders, and one after another their emplacements fell silent, put out of action by a rattle of gunfire or the pop of an explosion.
And as he climbed the beach, and the daylight gathered, he began to see the scale of the operation unfolding around him. To right and left, all along the four miles of this shallow beach as far as he could see, men were making their advance, fighting and dying, Twenty-sixth Division slowly achieving its objective. Back at the edge of the sea, beyond the litter of assault boats and spl
intered barges, more troop carriers were pressing to land, a great crowd of them still stuck off shore. But already the sapper companies were landing their heavier equipment. He saw mortars and machine guns being assembled, and a big PAK anti-tank gun, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. The first horses were landing, bucking nervously as they were led through the spray. There were even men struggling to drag the barges out to sea, so they could be towed back across the Channel to be loaded with the second wave.
When he reached the head of the beach, he had to crawl around anti-tank obstacles, big concrete cubes. And then he came to the barbed wire, already snipped and pulled back by the first wave of engineers.
At last he was almost under the face of that damn pillbox itself. It was sheer concrete that glistened as if still moist. A man rushed it, lobbed a grenade through that slit, and ducked down. The grenade detonated with a dull thud, smoke and fire billowed briefly from the slit, and the pillbox was silenced. Ernst cheered with the others, wishing he could have thrown the grenade himself.
And then one more push and he was on grass, the beach at last behind him.
He heard a throaty roar. He turned, lying on his back, breathing hard.
An amphibious tank was coming out of the water, its snorkel raised like an elephant's trunk, a monster rising from the deep. On a day of extraordinary sights, this schwimmpanzer was the most remarkable. But a wounded man, lying behind a heap of corpses for cover, was right in its tracks. He screamed and tried to crawl out of the way, wriggling. But the tank driver could not see him and he was crushed into the shingle. His guts were forced out of his mouth and his arse, like toothpaste from a tube.
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