Now that he was there, he hardly knew what to do about it. No preparations at all had been made for a cross-Channel attack; the means were not there, the Navy to cover them was not there. There was only the Luftwaffe, which over Dunkirk especially had already had a taste of the R.A.F.
Dunkirk was no miracle: the British got away because the Germans were not powerful enough to stop them. But to the German troops, as they made their way through the burning streets, wary of toppling buildings and the whine of snipers’ bullets, it seemed that ‘Old Adolf’ had worked his usual miracle. Here was all the chaos of retreat — wrecked 3-ton lorries on the promenade, abandoned guns and all the strange, incongruous litter of war, the sunken ships in the harbour and off the beaches, the thousands of steel helmets making crazy patterns on the sand dunes, the dirty, dusty, unshaven prisoners wearing the stunned small-boy look of recent captivity.
They had smashed through to the Channel coast in three weeks, had been part of the armoured columns moving resistlessly and in overwhelming power through a stunned, sullen and blazing countryside. They felt like Gods.
A few weeks later the staff car of Field Marshal Kesselring, commander of Air Fleet 2, came whining down the dusty, poplar-lined roads of the Pas de Calais. Here and there it stopped, the Field Marshal got out, followed by his staff, alert with map-boards and binoculars.
For his own command post, he chose a site on the great, gaunt headland of Cap Gris-Nez, that juts out towards England from between Calais and Boulogne, the nearest part of the continent to the defiant and still fighting island.
After him came the Labour Service battalions — the German Pioneer Corps — and ground administrative units, the signals units, and the airfield flak artillery of Lieutenant-General Dessloch, an old cavalryman and airman. The corn went down, beaten flat; trees on the boundaries fell under the axes of the Labour Service men, stripped to the waist. Vehicles bumped over the ruined fields, signal wires were run out, telephones installed and tested. Lorries groaned along the roads from Germany, bringing bombs, petrol, ammunition, the ten thousand and one spares that an air force or an army needs.
When the men paused in their work, they could see, out across the Channel, the English ships passing under the white cliffs in monstrous convoys, between twenty and thirty ships at a time.
The sea gleamed silver in the sunshine, gay and inviting under the summer sun.
The first planes came in, Junkers 87s, circling the new airfields, throttling back, and as they lowered their flaps, sinking onto the ground and running to a standstill in clouds of dust. Then the fighters, the Me 109s and 110s of General Osterkamp’s Wing. And the Heinkels of Coder’s IX Group, recently — very recently — trained in minelaying. And the Junkers 88s of the crack squadrons which had attacked Scapa Flow and the Firth of Forth — the Eagle Squadron — the trained ship-destroyers.
They were accustomed to victory, they swept forward with the smoke of battle. They had led the advance into Holland, had flown and fed the fires of blazing Rotterdam. The Ju 88s of the Eagle Squadron had destroyed the aerodromes and flak defences of Rotterdam, the Hague and Delft. The long-range bombers had set the city on fire behind the defenders, as they surrendered, and Holland had capitulated next day. It was called an atrocity then, but it was merely the first of a long series which was to include Cassino, Caen and Cleve. They had turned and led the panzers to Dunkirk; and met the R.A.F. high above the beaches; and had there suffered their most severe losses. For all their skill and courage, they had not been able to prevent the evacuation. And there were new faces in the mess, new pilots and aircrews from the training schools, as well as the old hands, some of whom could remember the harsh mountains of Spain and the practical lessons they had learned there against the Russian Ratas.
Every night now, there were briefings for the minelayers of IX Group. Searchlights, cutting a tunnel of light through the darkness for a moment, the heavily-laden aircraft lumbering forward. Blind take-off, mainly on instruments; the aircraft barely clearing the hedge, then airborne at last and lumbering up into the night sky. Set course for Dover, Thames, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Portland. Still new to the job, and a vivid flash below the aircraft. Hell! misjudged it. That one must have drifted on to the land, or on to the rocks down there.
The sea, like a black carpet, speckled with moonlight; and the flak that comes up at you slowly, and then suddenly seems to increase speed as it whistles by. The land, much darker than the sea, but more vague, with no moon reflection and no lights at all, except the little winking fireflies of the guns. Woof! The aircraft rocks. Last mine gone now what’s the course for home?
*
The Germans knew, and none better than Hitler, that the British Empire was not Belgium; they could not blow it down — nevertheless, they tried to puff it down. From every radio station in ‘Great Germany’, and relayed to the Armed Forces occupying the conquered nations of Europe, came the most-plugged tune of the period: ‘Bomben auf En-ge-land’. The lyric, describing the bombers soaring like eagles over their prey, was mixed with the recorded, swelling roar of aero engines and punctuated by the boom of a big drum, as in the more famous ‘Wir fahren gegen En-ge-land’, which had earned for a certain composer the honorary title of ‘Herr Professor Boom-Boom’. The bomber pilots loved ‘Bomben auf En-ge-land’ as much as the British soldiers did comparative ditties, like ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and ‘The Washing’. That is, it made them sick.
It was too obviously written by a parlour-patriot in an ill-spent five minutes for pecuniary gain. The only recording which really caught on, and that was much later, was ‘Lili Marlen’ sung by Lala Andersen.
There were many other similarities. In the R.A.F. the automatic pilot was ‘George’; in the Luftwaffe it was ‘Emil’. (In the U.S.A A.F. it was ‘Iron Mike’.) The Station Warrant Officer’s patier for aircraftsmen was: ‘Thought? Whatdermean — you thought? You’re not paid to think.’ An Oberfeldwebel’s line was: ‘Leave it to the horses, they’ve got bigger heads.’ Mess etiquette in the Luftwaffe was more formal — but the bows and heel-clicks had to be just right, just sufficiently casual, like the difference between ‘How d’you do?’ and ‘Pleased to meet you’, or you were damned, in spite of Hitler’s social levelling. The only major difference was that, at table, one German hand rests on the table, the other on the lap; the English put both on the lap.
Bedrooms were more likely to contain pin-ups than pictures of the Führer. In fact, the two nations were extraordinarily alike; and they both agreed that there was, in fact, a Master Race; the only difference of opinion, and that slight, was as to which one of them it was; and this was now to be fought out.
*
Field Marshal Kesselring was confident. From his command post on Cap Gris-Nez the Channel convoys passed, so to speak, under his window. He could see, directly, the operations of Group Captain Fink’s 2nd Bomber Wing; and the battle fought by General Osterkamp’s 1st Fighter Wing. Reports came in of the successes further afield of Air Groups VIII and IX against shipping in the Channel, off the east coast, and in harbour. He saw the convoys pass and the bombers plunge at them, while the fighters held the R.A.F. in check; he saw the gaps torn in the long lines as sinking colliers turned away, wreathed in smoke, foundering under his eyes. The battle, he thought, went well. The merchantmen were being murdered, there was no sign of the Royal Navy, little of their air force. The barrier to invasion was being broken down.
One thing he did not see, which his airmen did not notice, was the behaviour of the masters of the coasters and their engine-room staff. No ship sank in the swept channel unless she was actually blown to bits or thrown out of control. The ships went ashore to die. Hit and burning, listing over in the water, with the sea pouring in, the colliers drove towards the land, sinking even as they steamed ahead. The unwritten rule of the road was that no ship must sink in the fairway and block the channel for other ships. And with stubborn pride and courage they obeyed.
By the end of the first week of August
, all Kesselring’s airfields were ready and the main forces of Air Fleet 2 moved in, including Air Groups I and IV, the latter being strategic bombers, and the C.A.I. — the Italian contingent.
In that month, the Italians wandered over to Dover; and were then directed to try for Channel convoys as they passed Margate at dusk. They did not add to the ‘paling fence’ of sunken ships at the side of the fairway. Indeed, as a collier master put it, ‘We hoped they’d get the job permanent.’
They were not, in fact, particularly lacking in courage, but their aircraft and their technique left something to be desired. The Germans were a different matter; and they were by now very experienced.
As the bombers go, they can look down at Cap Gris-Nez below. Some squadrons now take care to rendezvous with the fighters well to one side or the other of Cap Gris-Nez, so that there will be no chance of an irate R/T recall from the Field Marshal’s command post.
They flew west, climbing. The sea fell away, a sheet of many-coloured glass, scored by frozen waves; not the waves a sailor knows, for they had no height when seen from above, they were merely long wedge-shaped patterns permanently scarred on the water, motionless, like tadpoles, and getting smaller. The sea was very dark in places, not from clustered seaweed, but cloud shadow; and away to starboard it broke in a white line against the shores of the moated island.
And over there a huddle of ships going down Channel, flying balloons; small ships, but many of them, more than twenty. Still coming.
But today they were not the target. In each of the Ju 88s, the front gunner, sitting on the right of the pilot, had switched on the dive-bomb sights; the red light glowed. He reported: ‘All clear.’ The rear formations were still in ‘Vs’ but the leader’s section was going into line-astern already. They went in directly over the Isle of Wight, changing into their attack formation with the speed and ease of long practice.
It had been like this at Scapa Flow, on the first operational flight of a crack squadron, newly equipped with the Junkers 88 — the ‘Wonder Bomber’. Rearing columns of water alongside the battleship Iron Duke — only a training ship, out of commission, but still, a battleship. The British had had to beach her in Longhope Sound — and admitted the loss of a rabbit.
Then Norway. British warships again, and this time without the flak protection of a fleet anchorage. Even so, the smoke of the shell-bursts had looked like a carpet suspended in mid-air. After that — Holland. Only two months ago. Now, here was the Isle of Wight, with the Needles Channel to port — and on the southern side, the ‘Needles Graveyard’, with masts and funnels and half-submerged hulls lying in the surf, the place where bombed and mined ships went to die, limping out of the convoy lines by day and night.
Away to starboard was another squadron of Ju 88s, also going into attack formation, as the coast-line leapt towards them.
The two squadrons crossed the coast, out of the sun, at over 300 m.p.h. and attacked with blinding speed; the guns began to fire only as the leaders started to dive. They came down almost vertically, from 10,000 feet.
Above the pilot’s head, a number of red lines were painted on the perspex; as he pushed the stick forward and the nose sank down, the horizon rose up to the first red line — 40 degrees of dive. Then 50, 60, 70. Degrees of dive, like degrees of bank, always seem steeper than they are; and this was the simple check. Beside the pilot, the front gunner had cocked his gun, his finger was curled round the trigger, ready to blaze away as they came near the ground.
The pilot was looking straight down, now, at the target. He could see the hangars through the dive-bomb sight — a parallelogram of wire enclosed the aerodrome; and the aerodrome seemed to be growing in size all the time, growing outside the bomb-sight. The pilot steered gently, to take in a particular hangar, as that in turn came up at him, expanding as it came. To the pilot, it did not seem that he was moving; merely that the aerodrome was getting bigger, blown up in a few seconds from a pocket-handkerchief to a size where individual aircraft, parked round the perimeter, became clear, and men — yes, men, running, or simply standing, looking upwards, the white blur of their faces perfectly distinct. But the pilot was not thinking of them, he was thinking of the wind; it was drifting him slightly so that the hangar began to slip away from the bomb-sight, under him. He pushed the stick forward a trifle, and increased the angle of dive: now, he was almost vertical.
He was falling out of the sun, and the sun was high; the perspex canopy was lit up by the sun, the cockpit was in shadow. There was very little noise. To the men below, the diving bomber seemed to come down like an express train, screaming like all the fiends in hell. The dive-brakes which in normal flight lay flat underneath the wings were now extended; like Venetian blinds in appearance, they obstructed the passage of the air past the machine, and the air screamed in fury. They held the bomber steady in its plunge, prevented the speed from rising above a certain safe figure, kept the aircraft comfortably plummetting down, so that it could come right down to the deck and still pull out.
But the pilot heard nothing of this, only a distant howling scream. He had a helmet on, earphones tight; oxygen mask over his mouth, and a microphone; he was conscious of a whisper only of the gale of sound that accompanied his split-second plunge from the heights. As the pilot pressed the button of the bomb release, the gunner fired, raking the running figures on the ground, the sand-bagged Lewis gun emplacement.
The machine had already started to pull out, before the bombs had even been released, for in that way only would they follow the line of flight and hit the target. And as the bombs fell away the pilot felt a backward pressure on the control column — an ‘automatic pull-out’ device had come into operation, trimming down the tail to help him flatten out in time. Even so, the big twin-motor bomber came very close to the ground, pulling out 50 feet above the trees on the aerodrome boundary and seeming to bounce back into the sky, almost grazing the hangar roof.
Below it, one corner of the hangar roof took off, separated from the rest, and went cartwheeling through the air; smoke and flame came bursting out of the hangar, and it seemed to sag in the middle. But the Ju 88 was away, all gunners ripping off long bursts at the ground to cover their escape, for this was the most dangerous point of the whole performance. For a few breathless moments, the pilot had to fly steadily, straight ahead and climbing slightly, as he pulled up the dive-breaks. Some pilots preferred to go right down on the deck to do this, when the flak was heavy; but few people had the nerve — or the knowledge — to let a dive-bomber put in its attack first, and then shoot it down when it was a sitting bird.
There was a sudden yell from the gunner, and his gun stopped firing. ‘Verdammte Scheisse!’ Just the right moment to have a gun jam. But behind him, the other bombers of the squadron were plunging down into the smoke of the already burning aerodrome; there was a long line of them, coming down and looking like a ladder standing up in the sky. Nose to tail, at three second intervals, they fell towards the inferno, adding to the chaos. Both hangars were on fire, the girders fallen onto the trapped aeroplanes within. The wing of an aeroplane was blown, fluttering, across the grass like a piece of paper. Other aeroplanes, around the perimeter, were fluffing up in flames and slowly collapsing in sparks and smoke. One aeroplane rose into the air, vertically, like a helicopter and came down on top of another. Clods of earth rained down upon the wreckage, as fresh bombs exploded. Then it was all over. The Ju 88s had gone, and one of their escort, diving casually in farewell, fired a balloon.
The balloon left a black smear down the sky, burning halfway down to the ground. The attack had taken three minutes.
*
The Junkers 87 so imprinted itself on the minds of its enemies that it still carries its class-label as a personal, particular name. It was one of many different types of stuka, from the original Curtiss ‘Helldiver’, through the Henschel 123, to the twin-motor Junkers 88. But to the men who sailed in the convoys, ‘Stuka’ means the Junkers 87 and nothing else. It was the plane that dep
rived them of their grub and grog, perversely attacking at noon or shortly after. They liked resentfully to believe that that was why many of the stuka attacks came at mid-day.
They came when they could at that hour because, flying out of the south, they had the sun high and behind; they came down on the ships, unseen until the last moment, and when seen, hard to make out and harder still to hit. Few people ever saw a Ju 88 squadron go into line astern — they came too fast. But the Ju 87 was a different proposition. The visual difference was that the Ju 88 was a big twin-engined bomber, with a crew of four crammed tightly in the nose; the Ju 87 was single-engined, with a pilot and rear gunner under a raised canopy, and a fixed undercarriage — the extreme dihedral angle of the wings made them appear, from some angles, to be swept forward.
For the toad beneath the harrow, the difference was that the Ju 88 carried four 550-lb. bombs externally under the wings and sixteen 110-lb. bombs (or an extra fuel tank) in the fuselage; the Ju 87 brought them a single 1,100-lb. bomb under the fuselage (swung clear by two arms, when released, so that it cleared the airscrew), and four 110-lb. bombs externally under the wings.
For the aircrews, the difference was that the Ju 88 was an extremely fast ‘evader’ bomber capable of well over 300 m.p.h.; it could nip over to the English coast, cripple a convoy or smash an aerodrome, and be halfway back to France before the British fighters even reached the smoke plumes from the blazing target. But it was poorly-armed and could not fight.
The Ju 87 was much slower — it could neither fight nor run. It was tied to the Army — part of what we would now call the Tactical Air Force — and could operate only under fighter cover or against countries whose air force had already been beaten down. It was the main weapon used against the convoys in the opening phases of the battle but, up against first-class fighter opposition for the first time, lost heavily and was eventually withdrawn. It had one last kick in November 1940, against targets in the Thames Estuary, and then never saw England again — in daylight. But it was used for occasional ‘moonlight stalking’ attacks on Channel convoys during 1941.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 7
