Midnight Raid

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  *

  Oberleutnant Zirkenbach listened to Major Redlich’s request with a growing feeling of irritation. He had only 12 Messerschmitt 109s on his Staffel and 14 pilots; out of a possible 16 and 25 respectively.

  “That shows how little they think of the importance of this dead-and-alive hole,” he would remark at least once a day: “They”, of course, being higher authority. He resented being posted so far from France, where he had served until three months ago. France was where most of the action was, and he took it as an insult to be transferred from there, with a score of 17 victories. He had been told that it was a reward as well as promotion. At the small, remote airfield of Haukeberg he would be very much on his own: a fine opportunity to exercise and develop his powers of command.

  He felt that he was rotting here, where there had never been an air battle. There had not been any land or sea battles in the Olafsund area, either, come to that. All he and his pilots ever did was carry out the whole gamut of laid-down practices: air-to-air and air-to-ground firing, battle climbs, formation practice, aerobatics, dog fighting. Occasionally a pair would be ordered to fly out to sea and reconnoitre for British ships or aircraft: but he suspected that these missions were entirely bogus, an invention of “theirs” to keep up morale.

  And now, with all these calls on the flying hours of his pilots and engine hours of his aircraft, here was that over-enthusiastic Major with a Knight’s Cross wanting him to take part in some futile defence exercise; and all because of a Commando raid six months ago on the Lofotens, and the other day on Spitsbergen. He had received the signal, too, that warned everyone to expect more raids; but that was not to be taken seriously. What was there at Olafsund to warrant an enemy attack? A factory making fish meal and extracting fish and whale oil; a hydro-electric plant; a small shipyard; and a harbour where four minesweepers, two S boats (which the British called E boats) and sometimes a small tanker or two and three or four cargo ships, were to be found.

  “I am sorry, Major, but I cannot supply aeroplanes for such a purpose at such short notice. If you would care to postpone the exercise for forty-eight hours…”

  Redlich cut him short. “The exercise will be held today Leutnant. Are you telling me that if the enemy made a real attack you would be unable to put up any defence? Perhaps you would like the R.A.F. to give you forty-eight hours’ warning?”

  “It is because I am always able to scramble at least a pair of fighters at any hour of the day or night that I cannot squander flying hours, sir.” Zirkenbach, on his high horse, answered with Prussian stiffness.

  “I want at least two pairs of aeroplanes for this practice; is that clear? Not to make a mock interception of enemy bombers, but to carry out dummy attacks on my troops and the naval craft. I am sure your Gruppenkommandeur would approve.”

  The manner in which the last sentence was delivered made it clear that Redlich would be on the telephone, or sending a radio signal, to the Gruppenkommandeur like a shot. Zirkenbach felt sulky. The Gruppenkommandeur was only a Hauptmann: he would almost certainly defer to Redlich’s superior rank. Thanks to the niggardly way in which the Reich’s armed forces awarded promotion, the three squadrons, Staffeln, comprising the Gruppe were each commanded by a lowly first lieutenant. In the R.A.F. Zirkenbach, reflected, a fighter squadron was commanded by a squadron leader, equivalent to a major; and a wing of three squadrons by a wing commander, who was equivalent to a lieutenant colonel.

  “Very well, Herr Major, I shall let you have a pair.”

  “You are not ‘letting me have’ them, Leutnant: you are complying with what amounts to an order; and here is another for you: three pairs.”

  “But, sir…” It was a cry of outrage, which Redlich allowed to go no further.

  “Three pairs.” The telephone went down with a click.

  Zirkenbach sat fuming for a moment. Very well: if that was what that damned foot-slogger wanted, that was what he would get. And I’ll lead the formation myself and we’ll give them such a beat-up that it’ll make them shit bricks.

  Feeling better, he left his office and set off for the crew room.

  *

  Two S boats slipped out of the harbour and raced out to sea, lean and swift as greyhounds. From the little bridge of the leading one, Oberleutnant zur See Kneipe looked back, admiring the long line of bubbling foam it left astern, and the pretty sight of the sister vessel’s creaming bow wave. He looked ahead again, seeking the other four ships of his raiding force, which had sailed an hour earlier: two minesweepers, and two Norwegian trawlers which had been armed and crewed by Germans and were used for sweeping mines. He was happy in his work.

  He surveyed the infantrymen sitting, most of them disconsolately, some showing signs of seasickness, along the narrow decks. He grinned at the coxswain, who was swaying comfortably at the wheel with the boat’s movements. “One thing always puzzles me, Steurmann, about the Staff’s constant anxiety about seaborne raids and invasions: the same thing that used to make me wonder when the Führer was planning to invade England, last summer.”

  “What is that, sir?”

  “They don’t seem to have taken into account the fact that half the soldiers will be weak from puking their rings up by the time they hit the beach and are supposed to charge ashore and launch an assault as though they were fresh and rested after a good night’s sleep and a land passage.”

  “I agree with you, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  “And the soldiers aboard the other four ships must be having an even worse time, the way they wallow. It is going to be fun, seeing how many of them go ashore in fighting trim.”

  The coxswain laughed. “Reeling and retching, most of them, I’ll bet. Not that it matters: I don’t reckon anyone could put an effective raiding force ashore here. Monkeys, maybe, which is what they’d need to be, to scale the cliffs; which is the only way anyone could land here without being shot out of the water.”

  Kneipe liked the idea. “A battalion of trained gorillas and orangutangs, armed to the teeth. I don’t doubt they’d be as intelligent as some of the Wehrmacht I’ve come across in France and over here; and there’s no reason to suppose that English soldiers are any brighter.”

  “You know what they said about France, sir: the English would fight us to the last Frenchman. They’ve got all sorts of blacks in their Army, haven’t they, from what I hear? Perhaps some of them can climb like monkeys.”

  “You’re thinking of the troops they call Gurkhas; mountain men from the Himalayas. That’s a disturbing thought, Cox’n: I wish you hadn’t raised it!” Kneipe laughed, in his turn. “I wouldn’t like to wake up one morning and find little men who climb – and look – like monkeys in my cabin with those long knives in their hands.”

  He looked around at the towering perpendicular cliffs that bounded both shores of the fjord which led from the open sea to Olafsund. It was a mile wide at its entrance, but narrowed quickly to half that width and there were three curves along its length, which ran for a full six miles and gave Olafsund its valuable shelter from the sea and storms. Halfway along the fjord was an island and two more lay only half a mile off the town’s waterfront. Cliffs along the shore, on either side of the town, rose 200 feet, and behind the town a mountain stood 4000 feet high.

  Outside the shelter of the fjord the S boat began to pitch and roll briskly. Sounds of vomiting made Kneipe grin again. But the four minesweepers had turned and were heading in, so the S boats went about also and all six of them began their run up the fjord.

  *

  In his Headquarters, Redlich waited for the Me 109s to come hurtling in, simulating a bombing raid on the town and strafing runs at the naval vessels and then at the landing infantry. He felt alert and exhilarated, even though this was merely a poor substitute for real action. He treated every exercise or operation, however small, as a chance to display the tactical skill which he was determined would one day bring a field marshal’s baton to his hand.

  Bissinger watched his commanding officer
, sharing his excitement, heightened today by the thought that before very long the enemy might oblige them by supplying the real thing. He felt his wounds itching and aching and cursed inwardly at having to be immured in a Headquarters instead of out there with the assault party; preferably in command of it, the first to leap ashore, with a Schmeisser submachine-gun in his hands and grenades in his haversack.

  Aero engines roared overhead, the wind screamed with the turbulence of the aeroplanes’ passage. The air raid sirens shrilled.

  Chapter Three

  The vast entrance hall of the castle made an admirable place for conferences and briefings. Lieutenant Colonel Beauchamp-Ballantrae stood beside a large-scale map of Olafsund Fjord, with a billiards cue in his hand.

  “This is the target for Operation Halberd. Our primary objective is the factory, here. Fish oil is used in the manufacture of nitroglycerine. When we knock out the factory, we hurt the enemy’s capacity for making high explosives. One of the other targets is the hydro-electric plant, which, of course, supplies power to the factory. I’m afraid it also supplies the town: so our Norwegian friends are going to have to live in the dark, by candle light. But I don’t suppose they’ll mind that.

  “Another target is the harbour, with its shipyard. There are usually small enemy vessels in there under repair, and there is usually at least one trawler under construction. The trawlers are for adaptation to armed minesweepers. In the port itself we should find a few German naval vessels: E boats and minesweepers. And, of course, there are oil and petrol storage tanks, and military and naval barracks. We are going to wipe them all out.

  “Getting ashore will offer a certain amount of difficulty, but it will take the enemy by surprise, because we are going to do what he thinks is impossible: scale these cliffs, here and here.

  “To secure our landing and our withdrawal, we shall put parties ashore on the two small islands immediately off the Olafsund shore. Before going up the fjord, we shall take the island midway along its length. That one is quite strongly garrisoned and there are guns on it. More about those later.

  “The airfield, as you can see, is ten miles away, on the other side of the mountain, in a shallow bowl. One squadron of M.E. One-o-nines is based there, so there will be air reaction to our attack. The R.A.F. will not be bombing it, because that would alert the enemy. However, the Norwegian Underground has undertaken to carry out sabotage on the night of the operation. So I don’t expect much threat from the air. And, of course, we shall try to choose a time when the weather will make flying difficult or impossible.

  “We shall make the passage in an L.S.I. and transfer to L.C.As two miles up the fjord, before the bend which will bring us to the first island. To avoid having to learn more names than necessary, the islands will be known as One, Two – the one to the north of the town – and Three; the one to its south.

  “That’s all I’m going to tell you for the time being. We’ll have photographs from the R.A.F. and Intelligence information about the strength of the garrison and defences, which will be up to date to the day we sail.

  “Intelligence report that the enemy is fairly complacent about the immunity of Olafsund from attack, because of the nature of the fjord and its islands, and because the cliffs are regarded as unassailable by a heavily armed force.

  “It is a very good target: interesting difficulties to surmount and worthwhile objectives when we get there. We begin practising the approach up the fjord and the landings on the islands as soon as the assault landing craft are available.”

  The officers of 100 Commando rose to go to the anteroom and their whisky with relief at the knowledge that the commando was already competent to tackle what looked like the hardest part of the operation: the cliff climb. But mingled with it was the knowledge that, although their commanding officer spoke as though in profound and confident communion with an omniscient Supreme Being, which invested his briefings with reassurance and confidence, the reality underlying the bland words was of dismembered bodies, the screams of the dying, and buildings collapsing into burning ruin.

  *

  Major Redlich, addressing his officers, seemed always to project a narcotic intensity of feeling and authority as part of his persona that he normally kept in reserve. It was as though the public speaker and the man in battle were separate from the administrator or the genial presence at a dining table or in the mess anteroom. Some of his audience also had the impression that his six-foot stature added an inch or two to itself by some mystical auto-suggestive process that accompanied his gravity.

  Bissinger, thus reflecting, and admiring his master for his fine soldierly qualities, blinked several times to dispel the illusion. There was no room for the Major to increase his height by a centimetre: he always carried himself erect, as though on parade. But there was a definite tightening of his facial muscles that brought his firm jaw into greater prominence, widened his deepset eyes so that he seemed able to encompass every seat in the room with one hard look, and caused the duelling scar on his right cheek to stand out against the weatherbeaten skin.

  “Gentlemen, I shall speak individually to unit commanders later. For the moment, I intend to deal only with the overall view of the exercise. To deal with the raiding force first: we have had a fair example of the basic problem which besets any attack from the sea: cramp and seasickness. When the enemy raided the Lofoten Islands, the landing did not entail the long approach up a fjord which would be necessary here, and these handicaps were, presumably, very minor. If the enemy attempt an assault on Olafsund, we can count on one quarter to half their troops being far below real fighting fitness by the time they try to come ashore.

  “We saw, also, the effectiveness of air strafing: against both the raiding force and against the defenders. Although the enemy would attack us by night, we could illuminate them well enough with flares to enable our aircraft to massacre them on the open water. If the raid had air support, on the other hand, we would need to show a great deal better discipline in concealment, and the civilians in taking shelter, than was seen today.

  “As for the three islands, where the raiding force did manage to obtain a footing, this would not have happened if the islands’ guns had been in action. Again, on open water, lit by flares, an assault force would be repulsed.

  “If the enemy were able to capture one or both of the islands immediately offshore, however, I am not satisfied that our present defences would be adequate. Commando raids are made by highly trained specialist troops. The cliffs here, on either side of the fjord, look unscalable except by skilled mountaineers; especially by men carrying weapons and ammunition. But when we consider the advantage of being able to climb one of those cliffs, the defence picture changes.

  “Instead of having to land on the seafront and fight their way through the town and up steep roads where they would be dominated from above – to the hydro-electric plant, a group of skilled climbers capable of scaling only one of the cliffs, could attack from a flank: a direct attack on the power station, without the need to fight their way to a landing and then up through the town. That is a possibility against which we have to guard: despite the fact that other factors make it unlikely that a raiding force would survive its voyage up the fjord, and would therefore be unable to attempt a landing down here at the harbour.

  “We must remember also that not all raids are carried out by large forces. Raids on the French coast, such as the one at Ambleteuse, in July, have been made by small parties: as few as twenty men, even. This, I think is the most likely scale of any attack made against Olafsund. The problems of transporting a large force across a sea patrolled by our Navy and Air Force – even more alertly now since the landings on the Lofotens and Spitsbergen – are huge. It would be comparatively easy, however, to insinuate a small force, brought by submarine, into this fjord.

  “Now, I must tell you that our defence today was far from satisfactory.” Several of Redlich’s hearers shifted in their seats and shot sidelong downcast glances at one another.
Redlich’s voice had not risen, but it had taken on an icy tone. “The whole garrison, despite frequent exercises, has obviously lost its keen fighting edge. Had we really been under attack today by an enemy force as large as the one which landed so successfully on the Lofoten Islands, the fish oil factory and the Hydro-electric station would have been taken. The harbour would have been severely damaged.

  “I repeat that I do not believe a force could land here; but, if a miracle aided the enemy and he did come ashore, and it had happened today, we would not have been able to protect the obvious objectives.”

  Redlich stared around the room, his eyes resting in turn on each officer and lingering on everyone who held a command, however small. There was silence, apart from the creaking of chairs when their discomfited occupants moved unhappily from one buttock to another and crossed and uncrossed their legs.

  “That is a situation which will change; immediately.”

  *

  Hauptmann Scherer, who commanded the artillery, was not subjected to the major’s criticism. His gunners had not fired even blanks. They had trained their guns on the boats and claimed to have sunk them all before they passed the first island.

  The battery was equipped with 10.5 cm guns that fired a 32lb shell to a maximum range of 11680 yards. They were the standard German medium artillery piece and could be mounted on self-propelled carriages. At Olafsund there were two of those, one at each end of the waterfront. The rest were towed by half-tracks. Two were positioned on Island One, and one each on Islands Two and Three. There was one halfway between these, near the fish processing plant; and another on the ledge that ran across the mountain behind the town, where the power station stood.

  Scherer was tubby, cantankerous and middle-aged. He had been dragged unwillingly out of the Reserve and his comfortable Civil Service chair to active service. He felt he had contributed enough in the 1914-18 war and had no enthusiasm for this one. He had, in fact, no enthusiasm for anything except his stamp collection. As a senior executive in the Post Office, he had chosen this hobby as the logical one. He was resentful of being under the command of a much younger man and at being shunted to this backwater, where he could not expect the consolation of promotion. He had resigned himself to serving the whole war here and in the spring he had ordered the crew at the gun site up the hill to plant flowers around their huts. A domesticated and uxorious man, he was most unhappy at being wrenched away from his plump wife and cosy home.