by Alan Evans
*
In London they telephoned Quartermain at his hotel in Falmouth and told him of the wireless signal just received from St. Nazaire. It was the moment he had dreaded for so long. He thought that it was all going wrong and had a dread premonition of disaster.
*
Phoebe slid past the old tower of Les Morées standing out of the river. Only ten minutes left to go; less than two miles. Campbeltown and the M.G.B. in the lead were steadily increasing speed for this final dash and the launches were conforming. Green had brought them through the shoals, and so far they were undetected.
Ward could see the loom of the land to port, could smell it. He was no stranger to the tension before action but had never felt it so strongly as now. It was an atmosphere that pervaded the little ship, of high hope, excitement, and an apprehension thrust to the back of the mind.
Jameson the sub was aft with the Oerlikon. Madden stood by Ward, and his commandos crouched or knelt on the deck below on either side of the bridge. Each of them, Madden included, was armed with a Thompson submachine-gun and grenades. Joe Krueger, on Ward’s other side, wore a Colt .45 pistol belted about his waist. Ward’s hung from a hook below the screen, the spare magazines in the pockets of his jacket. He knew all of Madden’s men by name from the last time, could recognise them despite the darkness.. Sergeant Beare, his broad figure unmistakable, little Jimmy Nicholl, Lockwood, Driscoll and the rest. He knew the names of his own crew as well, but little else about them. This was not Boston with her close-knit family, forged by long days and nights at sea. He might never learn any more of those men of the Fairmile. The thought brought a chill so that he shivered.
Joe Krueger glanced at him and said softly, “Maybe we’ll make a home run?”
Ward did not answer. Was it possible they could slip right in without being detected? It was a dark and silent shore. Were the crews of the searchlights and guns stood down—or watching? At the briefing in Falmouth Joe Krueger had listened in silence as the port’s defences were spelled out, the long list of guns. Afterwards he said to Ward, “From the moment they spot us we’re ducks in a barrel.”
Ward answered, “You heard Commander Ryder. We’ll try to act like friendly ducks.”
Campbeltown had been converted to look German, was now flying a German ensign, and Ryder had some other tricks up his sleeve. But would they work? If they did not—
To port a searchlight stabbed out a wide beam. The one beam was joined by others and they washed over the whole squadron as it forged up the placid river, M.G.B., German-looking destroyer with the German ensign flying and the long columns of launches. All of them were making big bow waves now as they worked up speed.
Peter Madden said, “That’s torn it!”
A Bofors gun hammered from the shore by the search-light, its muzzle flash winking quickly, one-two-three-four; and again one-two-three-four. Ward saw no hits but a signal lamp was flashing from the shore and another in the darkness ahead, challenging. A lamp flickered in reply from the M.G.B. at the head of the squadron. That was Leading Seaman Pike, acting on Ryder’s orders, able to send and receive signals in German and armed with a list of enemy callsigns and morsenames. He would be sending: “Proceeding up-river as ordered”—and the bluff was working. The guns ceased firing and some of the search-lights blinked out.
The exchange of signals continued, Pike sending and the lamp ashore flickering acknowledgment. The minutes were creeping by, the ships running on, every second taking them nearer their target. Ward had no thought of Catherine, Patrick, Quartermain, of anything but his ship and his task. The image of the port ahead, Southern Entrance, Old Mole, Old Entrance, Normandie Dock was stamped into his brain.
Gunfire burst out again but it was sporadic, hesitant and still no ship was hit. Pike was flashing his signal lamp: “I am being attacked by friendly forces!”
It worked again. The Germans were confused. The guns fell silent.
Ward knew, however, that it couldn’t possibly last much longer. German ships would have stopped when fired on. He said clearly into the silence so that all aboard could hear him, “Stand by!”
The storm broke. The shore on both sides of the estuary, and the dark port ahead, were lit by gunfire. This time it did not stop. Ward bellowed, “Fire!” He saw the Oerlikons aboard Campbeltown open up an instant before those of Phoebe. The whole squadron was firing now and the weight of their fire brought a slacking in that from the shore.
Their briefing promised a flakship out in the channel opposite the Southern Entrance and now it rippled with muzzle-flame. The pom-pom aboard Ryder’s M.G.B. hosed it from stem to stern and the muzzle flashes died away. Ward squinted against the glare of the searchlights. They almost blinded him, as had the lights off Devonport. But there was the Southern Entrance! Campbeltown swerved away from the breakwaters, racing on past them for the mole and the Normandie dock beyond, and still increasing speed. She flew the White Ensign now.
*
Engel’s eyes left the girl briefly to seek Pianka as the gunfire broke out again, then ceased. “Find out what the hell is going on out there, but look out for yourself.”
“I will.” Pianka picked up his rifle and worked the bolt to ram a round into the breech. “But I don’t reckon her friends are coming tonight. That’ll be the guns firing at the RAF trying to sneak back in.”
Out in the street he turned left and walked along close to the buildings, down to the bridge over the Old Entrance. He did not cross it but turned left again and went along the side of the Old Entrance towards the Normandie Dock until the estuary opened out before him. He paused, looking up at the sky.
Suddenly searchlights illuminated the water, guns opened up from both sides of the river and from the flakship anchored out in the stream. The Bofors on the pumphouse close by him burst into thunderous, flaming life. There was a destroyer bearing down on him in the estuary, flanked by lines of launches, all of them flying White Ensigns streaming in the wind, and all of them firing. He stood rooted for one shocked, stupefied instant then turned and ran.
The gunfire caused the dust to fall from the ceiling again but Engel ignored it except to raise his voice. Silence had not broken the girl so he would try another tack. “You had packed a suitcase. Where were you going?”
Catherine Guillard answered as if repeating a lesson: “To Paris. I have an elderly—”
“I know about her. I know you leave here to visit her but do you always arrive?” His memory stirred. “You were supposed to be in Paris at the end of last month, when the British attacked Bruneval and another base further along the coast. Somebody laid out lights to mark a landing ground. Were you in Paris then?” His hand went to the telephone. “This relative of yours is frail. I can ask people in Paris to get the truth out of her.” Would he? It might not be needed, anyway. The girl’s eyes had widened: he was getting to her. He pushed: “Well?”
He heard shouting, then boots pounded in the hall and Pianka threw the door wide open. “The British! They’re on the river! A torpedo-boat and motor-boats! They’re invading!”
Rubbish! Not invading! But after Bruneval just a month ago—another raid? Why here? Why tonight? There was a pause in the firing, brief seconds, but in that pause they heard the steps of a man crossing the room above, pacing quickly. Engel saw the girl’s mouth twitch, her gaze flick up to the ceiling then return to him.
Now he knew. “You bitch! Somehow you found out when the admiral would be here and told them in London!” His mind harked back to that day when he proposed to Grünwald that the rooms upstairs should be fitted out for Admiral Dönitz to spend the night in St. Nazaire. He had told Grünwald, “You need have no fears for the admiral.” The plan to trap the saboteurs had depended on the Resistance hearing that Dönitz would come here, so the men working on the apartment had been told it was for Dönitz and had naturally talked about him in the dockyard. It had also depended on the Resistance not knowing exactly when, so that they would be presented with the opportunity to
attack but only at short notice. They would make their plans hastily and walk straight into the trap.
But now the British were landing.
“Guard!” His bellow brought the boots of the Feldwebel pounding down the stairs. Engel dragged open a cupboard and snatched the Schmeisser machine-pistol from the rack inside. He thrust his face close to that of the girl, speaking softly and his eyes holding hers, taunting her. The Feldwebel burst into the room and stood at attention. Engel barked at him, “Take the woman down to the cells! Then fetch in the others!” The men in the Citroën and in ambush in the buoy-yard, he wanted them in here now. “And quick! The British are coming!” He pointed at Pianka as the Feldwebel hustled Catherine Guillard away. “You take the car and drive like hell to the barracks.” That was more than a mile away. “Tell them what you saw and that the Tommies are making a landing. Then you stay there! That’s an order! You try to come back here and I’ll have you transferred, I swear to God!”
Pianka opened his mouth to argue but for once changed his mind in the face of Engel’s stare. He pulled open a drawer of the desk, took a silver flask from it and shook it to make sure it was full then jammed it in the side pocket of Engel’s tunic and muttered, “You look out.”
Engel watched him tramp from the room then lifted his notebook from the glass of cognac on his desk. He drained the glass, gasped and hurled it at the wall. Then he prepared to fight for his life.
*
Phoebe and the long columns of launches chased after Campbeltown along the side of the eastern breakwater. The firing from the shore built on itself again. Gun flashes, interweaving streams of tracer, red, yellow and green, the beams of searchlights, all destroyed Ward’s night vision. Then one beam seeking the ships picked out instead the end of the Old Mole with its lighthouse. Ward saw it as Campbeltown swept past it and marginally altered course. There was the bend in her wake and he followed it, “Port ten!” Beattie, her captain, had her on course for the last run at the Normandie dock gate.
“Meet her! Steer that!” Campbeltown was being hit, shells bursting on her sides and deck. So was Phoebe.
Joe Krueger bawled above the thunder, “Goin’ to check on the wounded and damage!”
Ward nodded and Joe swung away, headed for the wheelhouse, the dressings and morphine. Ward saw him go from the corner of his eye, all his attention on Campbeltown.
The M.G.B. leading them swung away to starboard, getting out of Campbeltown’s way. There was the dock gate ahead of her and the black opening of the Old Entrance lying to port. She was hit forward of the bridge where her 12-pounder was now hidden in flame. Her narrow length was washed in brilliant white light from the searchlights in which sparked the orange flashes of the Oerlikons firing from their bandstands above the dock.
She seemed to stumble, hesitate and Ward thought, torpedo-net. There was one laid outside the Normandie dock gate. Then she surged on. Somebody lunged against Ward and he glanced sideways and saw Joe back on the bridge and gripping the screen by his side, eyes fixed on Campbeltown. She swerved to port, Beattie making the last fine adjustment so that she aimed straight at the gate and also swung her stern to starboard to leave the way clear to the Old Entrance for the launches of the starboard column.
Now it was almost finished. In the glare of the lights Joe Krueger’s face was screwed up to take the shock as if he were aboard the destroyer—once the U.S.S. Buchanan that had patrolled the warm seas off Florida. Now she roared in from the cold Atlantic to hurl herself at the gate of the Normandie dock. She struck in a din of rending steel and thumping concussion below as the bulkheads were squashed in like a concertina. Her bow below was driven back close on thirty feet but her fo’c’sle rode on to and over the gate so that what was left of the stem overhung the inside of the dock.
Campbeltown was still.
15: No Way Out
“Port twenty!” Ward watched Campbeltown as the head of the Fairmile swung away. The Bofors and Oerlikons on either side of the dock-gate were pumping shells into her from barely a hundred yards away. There were men already climbing down ladders or ropes from her crumpled bow to the gate, he could see them in the glare from the searchlights and from the fire on her fo’c’sle. They would be Roy’s and Roderick’s assault parties who had to silence the guns on either side of the gate.
“Meet her! Steady…steer that!” The Old Entrance opened before him, light reflecting on water between the stone walls on each side. He screwed up his eyes against the glare from the lights and the red tongues of muzzle-flame, from the Oerlikons aboard Phoebe and the enemy guns ashore. A cone of fire was concentrated on the Old Entrance, a spider’s web of tracer, and Ward took the Fairmile into it. They were possibly forty yards from the steps on the south side though that was only a guess because they were invisible behind the glare. Ward sensed as much as he saw the commandos moving across the deck, getting ready to leap ashore. Then the cone of fire hit Phoebe and the Oerlikons stopped. He felt the launch lift under him, shudder and fall away to port. He shouted into the voicepipe, “Starboard ten!” There was no answer from the wheelhouse and the bow still swung to port. A fire broke out aft, the engines stopped and the Fairmile drifted.
Ward saw Joe Krueger now forward of the bridge and shouted down to him, “Man the wheel! See the Chief!”
Joe lifted a hand in acknowledgment and disappeared below the bridge.
Peter Madden’s voice yelled from the deck, “The gun’s a wreck!”
He meant the forward Oerlikon. Ward wondered about its crew and that of the gun aft, and young Jameson. The Lewis on the bridge was not firing. He went to it, stumbled over a body and came up against the place where the Lewis was—had been—mounted. There was nothing but mangled steel. He stooped to the body and felt enough to know he could do nothing for this man. He straightened and stepped up to the screen. He was alone on the bridge, like that time when the Messerschmitts hit Saracen, only this was much worse. He had never experienced anything like this.
Another launch was trying to fight its way into the Old Entrance and running into the same curtain of fire. His head turned. Phoebe was trailing flames from her stern as she drifted back down-river past the dock area of warehouses and towards the Old Mole. A Fairmile blazed near the mole and another was alight out in the channel. They were paying the price for having petrol engines. A gun fired rapidly from a blockhouse halfway along the mole. If the attacking force was to re-embark there then somebody would have to settle that gun.
A launch swung around Phoebe, headed in to the mole and slid neatly alongside the landing slip. Men leapt ashore and Ward thought he saw the wiry little figure of the young second-lieutenant in the demolition control party commanded by Captain Pritchard, one of the experts. Their targets lay inland and they ran along the mole and out of Ward’s sight.
Joe Krueger stumbled on to the bridge and bawled, “The Chief thinks he can fix the motors—but she’s sinking! She’s shot full of holes below and making water fast! Bowman’s at the wheel—Doyle’s dead!”
Madden appeared, demanding, “Put us ashore, Jack! You’ve got to get us in somewhere! Anywhere! I’ve lost half my men already!”
The engines started. Ward told Madden, “I’ll do that. Now get out of here.” Madden could do nothing on the bridge and he might be safer off it, though God knew they had suffered enough casualties below. Ward bent over the pipe: “Starboard twenty! Full ahead!”
The Fairmile was sluggish but she answered the helm. They had drifted down past the mole now. Try again for the Old Entrance? But he could see launches burning there, and his own was aflame and going down. Madden had said ‘anywhere’. All right. He turned the launch to run in to the shore downriver of the mole. The plans of the port they had studied showed a landing slip about forty or fifty yards south of it. They had been told not to attempt a landing on this side of the mole because of shoal water but now they had no choice. They went ashore here or not at all.
There was yellow light around them where petrol burned
on the surface of the river and it stank in Ward’s nostrils. The Fairmile was working up speed despite the water already in her and the holes in her sides that gulped in more. Fifteen knots? Maybe. It felt fast; they were charging in along the side of the mole and fifty yards or so from it. The bow pointed at the quayside ahead. A sweeping searchlight jerked its beam along the quay and he saw the angled line leading down that was the sloping concrete slip and they were steering straight for it.
The searchlight’s beam jerked on, slid along the mole, jerked again and settled on Phoebe. It glared into Ward’s eyes and he lifted a hand against it, grabbed hold of the screen with the other and braced his legs. He shouted at Joe Krueger, “Get down and tell them to be ready to swim for it! Tell Jameson to clear them from aft!”
“Jameson’s dead!” Joe flung it at Ward as he turned to drop down from the bridge. “They’re all dead back there!”
The quay rushed at Ward. He saw it through watering eyes, narrowed against the glare. It loomed above him and there was the slip. Phoebe was being hit again and again by the gun on the mole and another beyond the quay. There was an explosion aft then a whooshing! roar and the bridge was flooded in red light. It shook under him, jumped beneath his feet as shells burst in the wheelhouse below. Then Phoebe struck and despite his bracing hand he was thrown forward and doubled over the top of the screen. She drove on with the way on her, riding on to and over the rocks and sand under her bow as Campbeltown had run on to the dock gate. She finally collapsed with her bow smashed against the quay and resting precariously on the slip.
Ward shoved himself upright and saw the commandos jumping from the bow, plunging up to their waists in water then struggling out of it and up the slip. Seven of them. Only seven? He remembered Madden: “I’ve lost half my men already!”