In the tension and activity, Duffy their captain seemed to have lost control of the larger picture. Sigerson realized that if they brought on many more men, all of them might perish. He had to take command from back here in the water. “Five more, lads,” he called out. “Sorry. Five more. We’re full up.”
“Five more.”
“Five more.”
The call went down the ranks of men, and the sixth man stopped in his tracks, turned and bellowed to the men behind him. “It stops with me, mates. Hold the queue, please. Another boat will be along shortly.” Then, to Sigerson’s astonishment, he broke into a popular ditty, “Oh, I do like to be by the seaside.”
And the men behind them in the queue first laughed, then picked up the lyrics and sang along.
Meanwhile, an all-business Sigerson counted the last men down. “Three, two, one, up and over. There you go now.”
The old man himself stood up to his chest in the water. He knew how cold he was, and realized that these men had been standing out in the water for hours. How many of them would still be alive in seven more hours, when morning finally came? The first man among those left stood five meters from him, still leading with his singing, his face barely visible in the dark. He lifted a hand to his helmet in salute.
Duffy gunned the engine—the signal—and Sigerson stepped to the ladder himself, up and over the side. Men were packed like cordwood over every inch of the deck. When Sigerson reached over to pull up the ladder, he looked down over the boat’s railing. They were riding deeper in the water than when they’d come in—and they’d dragged a sand bar then. But that had been nearly a half hour before, and the tide was rising.
Duffy didn’t hesitate. Slamming the boat into forward, he started out to the open water. They hadn’t gone more than two hundred meters when they came upon another boat—this one a fairly-decent sized trawler—moving north parallel to the shoreline.
Duffy yelled across the water, describing the line of men waiting directly in from where they now were.
“We pull too much draft,” came the reply. “We’re touching bottom out here as it is. We’ve got to pick up at the mole,”—the rock jetty that formed Dunkirk’s harbor—“but we’ll pass the word back.”
Sigerson looked behind him, hoping that they’d put enough distance between themselves and the men they’d had to abandon that the latter wouldn’t have heard the trawler’s response. He needn’t have worried. The men they’d left were already out of sight—one of hundreds of identical lines of men, each waiting for a small boat to appear out of the black and trackless sea, to pick them up and take them home.
They got back to Dover by about 4:00 a.m. It would have been sooner, but they were so overloaded that Duffy ran at half speed or less as the chop came up with the rising tide. They’d boarded seventy-two men, almost twice Duffy’s maximum allowance. For future trips—and they’d be going around the clock until Operation Dynamo ended—Sigerson and Duffy pegged the number they’d allow aboard firmly at sixty. They were hearing rumors at the docks that the numbers of troops who’d made it back to England during these first hours was already in the thousands.
This was galvanizing news.
After they’d filled the petrol tanks and again cleared the harbor at Dover, the eastern sky lightened to a gunmetal gray. Duffy had the wheel while Sigerson put the boys to sleep below, then mounted to the bridge.
The huge high plumes of smoke from the oil fires, which had been so helpful during the night, continued to mark their destination by day. Duffy corrected his steering, then stood off the seat and stretched. “How are you holding up?”
The old man nodded. “The dry clothes help.”
“Not too tired to take us halfway over?”
“All the way if needed.”
Duffy shook his head. “And here I thought—meaning no disrespect—that you’d be a burden. What about your own sleep?”
“There’ll be time later, I’m sure.”
“All right. You’re a tough old bird, I’ll grant you that. Give me one hour, then wake me up and I’ll take us in. I want to let the boys get as much rest as they can. It might be a long few days.”
Sigerson moved into the seat behind the wheel, pushed the speed up a couple of knots. All around them now, in the dull gray morning, other boats of all sizes, designs, and draughts were making their way east.
In spite of his admitted fatigue, Duffy made no move to go below. Instead, he walked across the cabin and stood looking out over the water. He rubbed the back of his neck, glanced below to where the boys slept, shook a cigarette from his pack, and lit it.
“They’ll be all right,” Sigerson said. “The boys.”
Duffy wheeled on him. “How did you . . .? Did I say something about the boys?”
“Not aloud, no. But clearly.”
“You’re a very observant fellow, Mr. Sigerson. Has anyone ever mentioned that to you?”
A small smile lifted Sigerson’s lips. “I’ve heard it remarked on,” he said. “And you are worried about the boys.”
The captain sighed. “My sister will kill me if anything happens to either of them. But I didn’t see any way I could leave ’em—they wouldn’t hear of it. And they do know this old crate better than anyone.”
“They do good work.”
“Oh, sure and that. I’m not worried about that. They’re fine boys and good seamen. But it might get ugly as sin over there any time now. This trip.”
“You could assign them both below.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. If there’s shooting. Any of the regular troops can handle the ladder once they’re aboard.” Duffy, now obviously relieved by the adjustment in their plans, drew heavily on his cigarette.
Until Friday, he’d been working as a clerk in Churchill’s War Office under Whitehall, taking dictation for orders, dispatches, and reports, and then typing them up. He still looked the quintessential bureaucrat. Sallow in complexion and thin-chested, he was swimming in a black slicker sea coat.
The responsibility of what they were doing was clearly starting to weigh on him. Operation Dynamo wasn’t intended to be one quick trip to save seventy-five men, but a concerted operation to bring hundreds of thousands of troops back over the water to England. They might be doing this for a week or more if the Germans could be held up in their relentless advance on Dunkirk. And at some point—perhaps already—as Duffy had said, it seemed destined to become more a battle than a mere rescue operation.
“Go below and get some sleep,” Sigerson said. “You’re going to need it. I can get us to those plumes.”
The first wave of Stukas appeared out of the smoke to Sigerson’s left, banking steeply as they cleared the covering oil smoke and diving in formation down nearly to the waterline. The Doll had convoyed with a couple of dozen other small craft on the way over, all of them running more or less in the wake of the larger British naval vessel, The Canterbury, whose guns now opened fire at the approaching fighter planes.
“Scatter, man, scatter,” Duffy yelled as he appeared on the bridge. “Get out of their line!”
“Already done, sir.”
Duffy clapped Sigerson on the shoulder. “I might have known. Of course you’d know what to do. Do you mind letting me get back at the wheel?”
“You’re the captain, sir.” Sigerson stepped to one side, letting Duffy once again take control of the boat.
The German planes were coming in from the north, strafing The Canterbury, and continuing straight on into the line of the smaller companion boats to the Doll. The entire convoy was still several kilometers from shore and had plenty of sea room, but the individual boats were close enough to one another that the maneuvering was tricky.
Beyond that, the chop came up in a hurry as the vessels began to scatter. Foam flew over the Doll’s bow and into the windshield in front of Sigerson—the bridge on the Doll was not fully enclosed—as Duffy turned the boat south. And then suddenly, directly crossing into their path, another boat from b
ehind them careened at full speed. Duffy swore as he pulled back on the throttle, stalling the Doll as she lay. He reached for the key and gave it a turn, but the engine didn’t catch. He tried it again.
“You damned fool, you’ve flooded her!” Duffy swore to himself, looking out behind them. “But get us movin’, man, get us movin’.”
More than twenty Stukas made up the strike formation, and most were concentrating on The Canterbury—sweeping low to strafe, then banking up for another run. But one fighting group of three coordinated wing to wing and continued straight on low over the water, firing on the smaller boats as they came to bear. Even as Sigerson and Duffy both watched, one of their companion boats exploded into a ball of flame two hundred meters off their stern.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Duffy was pleading with the ignition, which rolled over and over, unresponsive.
“Captain,” Sigerson stepped in next to him, “excuse me.” He reached down and closed the choke all the way. His voice tense but controlled, he said. “Let it sit a minute.”
Looking back over his shoulder as the trio of fighters rose and turned for another run, Duffy shook his head. “We don’t have a minute. If we’re not moving, we’re sitting ducks.” He tried the key again, with the same results.
Wrrr . . . wrrr. . . wrrr . . .
“Let me.”
Sigerson’s tone was commanding and made Duffy shrug reluctantly out of the seat. Behind them, adjusting their line, the birds were now heading straight for the Doll. Behind Sigerson, Duffy called below for the boys to open the hatch, get some air in over the engine, let some of the gas evaporate.
Sigerson did not even try the ignition.
“They’re leveling right at us, man! We’ve got to move.”
“We will.” Then, out the window over the side, he yelled with a real urgency. “You boys stay down! Don’t even look out! Hit the deck!”
In the distance, the sound of the first strafings reached Sigerson’s ears, deep staccato poppings blending into an uneven roar over the deeper scream of the fighters’ engines. They had almost closed the gap now. In seconds, the Doll would be in range—he could already see the water stitching up with their rounds approaching.
Another second. Two seconds. At last he reached out tried the ignition. The engine caught!
“Yaahh!” Duffy yelled.
Sigerson threw the boat into gear. The strafing line boiled the water behind them as the Stukas streaked by overhead with a deafening roar.
Duffy turned and yelled to Sigerson. “We hit?”
“Missed. Just.”
Sigerson wasn’t about to slow Doll down and admire their position. They’d escaped one pass, but were still sitting unarmed in the open ocean, and now with their prolonged stall, they were all alone in an ever-widening circle of fleeing watercraft.
But Sigerson realized what perhaps Duffy did not—that this was to their advantage. The Stukas would be more efficient attacking groups of boats in almost any type of formation. One lone craft would be a tougher target, and more difficult to hit. The fighters would be wiser to leave the solo boats alone, and instead attack where the vessels had concentrated.
Duffy was back at his side. “Where are you going?” he yelled over the sound of the engine.
“The smoke cover’s thicker in toward shore. They won’t be so much strafing there.” He moved to one side. “The wheel is yours, captain.”
Duffy nodded and stepped in to take over. He cast his eyes to his left—”Well, you haven’t been wrong yet”—and swung the wheel around. A little way north, the Stukas were still concentrating on both The Canterbury and another regular British navy ship that they could now see in the water about two kilometers beyond, up close to the Dunkirk mole. The noise of cannon and strafing fire was continuous, though now more distant, as the Doll broke at near full-speed for the shoreline.
Almost immediately the queues waiting in the water came into sight. Another very small navy vessel—only slightly larger than a battleship’s lifeboat—was suddenly on their port side running alongside them. Both boats pulled up to adjacent queues and both swung around to face away from the shore just as a lone Stuka broke under the cover of cloud and smoke and dove toward the troops packing every inch of the beach.
Sigerson had spent all of this time and attention so far on the aerial attack and only incidentally on the queues in the water. Now he looked up and saw the enormous concentration of the troop convergence at the shoreline. He’d never seen so many people assembled in one place.
The lone Stuka, now at treetop height although there were no trees, cut across his line of sight from left to right, its machine guns raining death down on the men who stood waiting for one of the boats to approach their queue.
And then Sigerson was overboard again, at his place in the water behind the boat, grabbing the hand of the nearest man, directing him to the boat’s ladder. He was surprised to discover that this man—in fact, this entire queue—was French.
At the southern horizon, the Stuka banked high with a whining scream, then turned back and cut low for another run at the massed men on the beach. “Bâtard,” the lead man said, and got answering nods from the men behind him in the queue.
Still, in spite of the extreme danger, there was no panic. Sigerson announced the number of men that the Doll could accommodate—soixante hommes—and the men seemed to understand. They were counting themselves off aloud as they got up the boat’s ladder and aboard onto the deck.
“. . . dix neuf, vingt, vingt-et-un . . .”
As Sigerson had suggested, one of the soldiers had replaced George at the ladder.
But by now Sigerson and everyone else was preoccupied with the Stuka’s next strafing run. There were a few machine guns on the beach, and now they heard the sound of steady return fire, which was welcome but did little to hamper the fighter’s effectiveness. The plane ducked and rolled and its gun continued to fire in regular and devastating bursts.
Then the sixty troops were aboard the Doll, and Sigerson was over the ladder on board with them. At the next queue, only fifteen or twenty meters away, the boarding had obviously been going less smoothly than their own, possibly because the boat was so small, with a steep hull and a different kind of makeshift ladder. Whatever the cause, though, friction obviously was high.
At the back of the boat where the men were loading, someone in a British navy uniform now was yelling, panic in his voice. “I don’t care about your rank, sir. The boat can’t accommodate everybody back to where you stood. There’s just not room. You’ve got to get back in your place in the queue. You’re holding us all up.”
“I’m not going back. I’ve been standing here all night . . .”
“So’ve we all, mate!” From the queue.
The queue-breaker turned and fumed back. “I’m not your mate. I’m a major in the British Expeditionary Force.”
“You’re a horse’s ass!” someone yelled. “Mate!”
At that moment, the Stuka dove out of the sky again and opened fire at the waterline perhaps thirty meters directly behind them. Men at the water’s edge fell like sheaved wheat. The cries of those who’d been wounded carried over the water.
On the boat next to them, the major had a foot on the ladder and was pulling himself up, now halfway aboard. The man in charge of the lifeboat screamed over the declining roar of the airplane. “I’m warning you, sir, I can’t allow you to board. There are men in the queue before you.”
Those men were pressing forward now, shouting obscenities, terrified by the Stuka’s attack and, perhaps more so, by the breakdown in discipline. The mood in the queues all along the shore that were hearing all this was beginning to turn now and in the closer lines was becoming decidedly ugly.
Sigerson had pulled the Doll’s ladder up. But meanwhile, they had drifted close enough to the boat next to them to make out faces and hear the individual strained voices.
“I’m telling you, sir. This is my last warning.”
“God damn
your eyes, son. I’m coming aboard.” The major got a leg over the side of the boat, and this added weight forced the stern low enough to break the pitching surface of the water. Seawater spilled over onto the deck.
The young commander’s voice rose a notch as it took on an even more terrified tone. “By God, you’re swamping us, major! Get down! I order you to get down.”
“I won’t, blast you! I’m coming aboard.”
“Sir, we’re taking water. You’ll get us all killed.”
“Shoot the bugger!” someone in line yelled.
And then—it was very fast—Sigerson saw the young man raise his arm. He heard the sharp crack of a pistol shot. And the major’s body pitched back into the water.
The men in their queue broke into a cheer.
With a despairing gesture, holding up his pistol, the commander of the dinghy glanced over at the Doll and yelled over. “He was going to sink us! We’d all have gone down!” Then, over the stern to the rest of the waiting men. “All right, now, next six men is all we have room for. Step lively, please, and keep your places.”
Duffy put the boat into gear as the Stuka turned again through the smoke cover. Dead low in the water, the Doll started throwing a low wake as she picked up what speed she would be able to handle on the westward crossing.
They had run out of the food tins by the fourth crossing. All of the blankets were either gone or soaked. There was no more medicine left, and no gauze.
For all of Sigerson’s planning and forethought, for all of his observations and cleverness, he realized that he hadn’t made much difference after all. A bit of solace or comfort for a very few men, perhaps.
He was at the wheel, approaching Dover with a full boat for the seventh time. They would be going out again. It felt endless.
He did not think in terms of being glad, or of being disappointed, that he had come. He was, and had habitually throughout his life been, all but completely unaware of his emotions. He had spent much of his life in the intellectual pursuit of solving crimes, coming upon murder victims long after the fact. He had joined this quixotic mission so late in his life because he believed that evil was on the march in the world, and that perhaps he could play some role in thwarting it.
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 14