Chapter Nine
Felixstowe, England
“I think that we’ll be in harbour within an hour,” Kapitän zur See Christian Wulff said, as the Hans Bader started to inch towards the green hills of the British homeland. Oberst Frank-Michael Baeck nodded as he studied the darkening hills with his binoculars, silently wondering if he would ever see Bavaria again; Britain had proven to be the graveyard of many reputations. “If we are lucky, they won’t want to inspect until the morning.”
Baeck said nothing. The short voyage had been hard on his men, even though they had trained endlessly for the mission; they all knew that if the British smelled a rat, a single destroyer would end their mission abruptly. A hail of shellfire would be more than enough to sink the Hans Bader, even though it had been covertly designed to be harder to sink than the average freighter.
“You seem quiet,” Wulff said, after a moment. “You’ve done everything you can, so why worry?”
Baeck glanced down at his watch. Rommel had said that there were other operations being planned against the British, but Baeck hadn't understood the sheer scale of the overall plan until a day before when the Hans Bader had set sail from Kiel. The timing had to be precise. If they got it wrong, even slightly, the British would catch on to their plan and unceremoniously sink the Hans Bader. Baeck wasn't given to reflection, but now, facing the British port and defences up ahead, he half-wished that he had turned down Rommel when he had offered him the mission. He had trained for the mission along with the others of his unit, but now…now they would finally put their training into practice.
“I’m a born worrier,” he said, as he lit a cigarette. “Why don’t they inspect our ships well away from anywhere that might be a target?”
Wulff shrugged. “The British Government doesn’t like having to deal with us, or at least having to deal with us openly,” he said, as they passed an MTB heading out to sea. Baeck tracked it with uneasy eyes, knowing that it too could sink their ship if it suspected what they really were. “For some reason their people don’t like us very much, and so we’re officially a German commercial ship rather than anything to do with the Reich itself.”
Baeck laughed. The Hans Bader would never have passed muster as a proper military ship, but it was well fitted to carry troops into a safe harbour, even while disguised as a commercial ship. They had replaced the cargo bays and cargo access points in the interior of the ship with a new structure that would allow his troops to leave the ship quickly and efficiently. If they took the port and its cranes intact, they could get most of the battle group out without any problems, and then secure the port and hold it against anything short of an armoured division. In the British place, he would have had an infantry division dug in at any possible landing place, but they had refused to spread out their forces that way. There was a Home Guard force near, he knew; how long would it take for the British to organise and mount a counter-attack?
“I’m going to check with the men,” he said, and headed down the ladder into the first of the infantry decks. He acknowledged the salutes of his men as he passed, waving some of them back down when they rose to stand at attention, others even tried to sleep. The soldiers enjoyed a relaxed atmosphere on ship; it was when they would be hitting their target that they would have to obey orders and fight as one. The Sergeants had been working overtime, preventing fights from breaking out in the confined quarters of the ship, while others had been studying the maps of their targets again, individual groups planning their actions as part of the overall plan.
He passed soldiers preparing their weapons and nodded in approval as the soldiers went through all of the steps. They’d all had weapons care and safety drummed into them from the first day at the training centre; now, they should all be able to field-strip an automatic weapon blindfolded and under enemy fire. Others held rocket launchers, antitank weapons and smaller grenade launchers and mortars. They were prepared to meet an armoured counter attack if one was mounted. They had practised endlessly; now, finally, they would have a chance to see if it worked as well in practice as it had when they were training.
He whistled once and waited until all of the section leaders had come up to surround him. There was no room on the Hans Bader for a proper conference room, although he would have refused one if it had been offered; he preferred to work with his men in the field. He spread out a chart of the docks and went through all of the objectives one by one.
“When I blow the whistle, you will all send your units towards your targets,” he said, at the end. The first few moments of the assault would be organised chaos, for them as much as for their British opponents; everything would depend upon the courage and experience of the German NCOs and the handful of officers in charge of the separate units. “Remember, we want prisoners, not dead dockyard workers, understand?”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,” they said, one by one.
Baeck nodded as they all confirmed that they understood; if they could press British dockyard workers into service, it would speed up the unloading phase and maybe even earn them some friends, if the workers were paid well.
“Good,” he said. “Have your units prepared in ten minutes.”
Night was falling as he climbed out of the hold and up towards the bridge, slipping past the hidden bulges that normally held lifeboats, and now held small naval guns that could be used to provide fire support if the assault force required it. The dockyard rose up before them as they sailed closer. They headed in through a set of concrete posts and approached a large docking slip. He glanced down again at his watch as the ship slowed down, water spraying around as it turned and started to mosey into the docking slip.
“Good,” Wulff said, almost to himself. Baeck, scanning the harbour with his binoculars, taking in the details of the dockyard, didn’t reply. “They’re allowing us to dock tail-end, as if we were going to unload cars. And they’ve spared us the tugs.”
Baeck’s lips twitched. “We are going to unload cars,” he said, as a small group of British inspectors appeared at the side of the docking slip. The crewmen worked rapidly to secure the ship to the quayside, extending a long plank for the British to walk up, all the while watching the entrances to the interior of the ship nervously. “Is that your friend there?”
“Yes,” Wulff said, tersely. “Remember, we need them alive, if possible”
Baeck signalled to a small group of his men, hidden inside the bridge, as the four inspectors started to walk up the gangplank, heading towards the bridge, and entered as if they owned the ship. Wulff had spoken of them with scorn and disdain; the inspectors had never sailed on a ship in their lives, he’d said, but held themselves competent to judge a real seafarer. He nodded to his men as the bridge door closed behind them and inspectors found themselves seized by the storm-troopers
“You are now prisoners of the Greater German Reich,” Wulff said, to one of them. The expression on his face made Baeck smile. “Heil Hitler!”
Baeck didn’t wait to see what the Englishmen would do; he reached for his whistle and blew it as loudly as he could, drawing his side-arm at the same moment and heading out of the bridge. The side of the ship burst outwards, as if someone was trying to break out of the hull, revealing German commandos carrying ropes and heavy weapons. One group raced down the gangplank, shouting out commands for the dockyard workers to get down on the ground and stay there. Others leapt off the side of the ship, using their ropes to get down to the ground as fast as possible and run towards their targets. A brief burst of automatic fire echoed out, followed by several singe shots from handguns; someone, up head, was resisting as best as they could. The commandos kept charging, leaving the stunned workers on the ground and left them there for their fellows to round up; Baeck barked an order to his secondary groups and watched grimly as the prisoners were herded into a warehouse. It was normally used for goods from the Hans Bader; now it would hold the prisoners until they could be convinced of their duty to serve the Reich.
“I want that
rear-hatch open now,” Wulff shouted. The inspectors were hauled off. One of them shouted insults at Wulff, the others looking as if they’d been hit in the head several times. One of them was muttering under his breath about his wife and family, wondering if he would ever see them again. Baeck didn’t reassure him as explosive charges echoed through the ship and released the rear of the ship.
He heard the roar of engines as the first armoured car charged out of the ship and out onto the dockyards, advancing to support the unit that was attacking the gate. The Home Guard had clearly had a number of guards at the gate, and they were on the verge of breaking. Other forces were offering resistance as well, but his commandos dealt with unarmed dockworkers with ease and rounded them all up, expanding the prison warehouse into several more warehouses.
The armoured car opened fire with its heavy machine gun and the Home Guard position disintegrated. A man in a brown uniform was seen fleeing towards Felixstowe itself, probably to summon help, but a commando shot him in the back and he crashed to the ground with a thud that was far louder than normal. Baeck checked his watch as more firing broke out from the further regions of the docks. One of the ships had had an armed crew and was trying to fight back. The Hans Bader crewmen unfurled their own guns; a moment later, they fired a single shot towards the enemy position and resistance came to an abrupt halt.
“Report,” Baeck ordered, as Hauptmann Johannes Dempfle ran up to him. “What about the Royal Navy?”
“We have them penned into their compound and are preparing an assault now,” Dempfle reported. “The main body of the dockyards is in our hands and we can commence the unloading as soon as Kapitan Wulff is ready. Resistance within the dockyards itself has been light, but several people definitely escaped down towards the city itself and they’ll have spread the word.”
“Understood,” Baeck said. Behind him, the heavy guns on the Hans Bader pounded the British position. The British hadn’t had their ships ready to move, or else they would have attempted to get the destroyers out and pour fire on them from a safe distance; instead, the destroyer was being shelled to pieces by the converted civilian craft. “And the exterior of the docks?”
“The fence remains largely intact and we have parties moving up to secure the gates and prepare to hold them against a counter-attack,” Dempfle assured him. “We have taken several hundred prisoners, mostly workers with a handful of policemen and government inspectors, only one of them is a Home Guard soldier and he’s badly wounded.”
“See to it that he gets the best medical care possible,” Baeck ordered. He lifted his small radio to his lips. “Wulff, this is Baeck; I want you to start the main unloading process now, and signal back to the transports that we’ve taken most of the docks.”
He followed Dempfle down onto the docks and around the stern of the freighter, where a torrent of supplies were being unloaded onto the grounds and rapidly distributed around to the soldiers as they switched around, rounded up prisoners, and spread out to secure and hold the dockyard gates and exterior. The British had left them plenty of material to secure the docks and the soldiers worked rapidly. Meanwhile sailors from the Hans Bader inspected the other ships in the dockyard, preparing to sail them back to a port where they could be loaded up with soldiers. The scene lit up as one of the soldiers discovered the controls for the searchlights, turning night into day and allowing the soldiers to see what they were doing, even as other soldiers unloaded night-vision gear and headed over to the gates, preparing the defences for their inevitable test.
A young Leutnant ran up behind him. “Herr Oberst, we have heard from the transport command,” he said. “The first transport is only an hour away and the main convoy is altering course now; it’ll be here in three hours at most.”
Unless the British intercept it, Baeck thought coldly, careful to keep that particular doubt off his face. He’d gone through all of the logic behind the invasion as best as he could, but he knew that the main battle group, heavily escorted by almost every ship in the Kriegsmarine, would be a target that the British could hardly fail to miss. He’d been briefed on the strike on Scapa Flow and the air strikes that were, even now, being deployed against targets further to the west, but they would only delay the British at best. If the main transport convoy failed to arrive, the invasion was doomed.
“Good,” he said, shortly. “My compliments to Hauptmann Dempfle and inform him that I want the defensive perimeter pushed out as far as it will go without reducing our ability to concentrate our fire. In fact…”
His voice broke off as the noise of aircraft engines echoed overhead, dark shapes moving against the sky, barely visible in the mixed darkness and brilliant lights of the searchlights. He found himself praying, just for a moment, that they were German aircraft, rather than British pilots looking for targets; if the British had reacted in time to send in bombers, a single lucky hit could take out the entire invasion force. The noise faded slowly towards the west, and then, moments later, he heard bombs falling and saw explosions lighting up the skies.
“German aircraft,” he said to the young Leutnant. The young man had never seen combat before, not even the harshest training available to the Reich could match the sheer intensity of real combat. “Inform the Hauptmann at once, if you please.”
A second set of explosions, much closer, signalled the fall of the Royal Navy enclave. He watched grimly as the handful of prisoners were marched unceremoniously from their enclave to another of the warehouses, while assessment teams of his own people went to work, looking for anything that the force could use to hold the docks against the impending counter-attack. He stepped aside as smaller teams unloaded the small artillery guns and started to position them around the docks. Others scrambled up the cranes and took up positions where they could attempt to direct their fire. The longer the British waited, the harder it would be to recover their docks, but at the same time, they would be able to bring substantially more forces to bear on his position. He recalled the map he'd memorised of the surrounding area, running through the maths again; assuming a competent enemy commander, and he dared assume nothing else, they could have had a counter-attack on the way by now.
He walked quickly back to the command post. He glanced down at the handful of radio operators, each one trying to coordinate the defences, and studied the map one of them had set up. A German commander would have made a contingency plan as a matter of course; the British commander either didn’t have a plan or didn’t have the ability to execute it. It was tempting to believe that they'd already killed the commander, but he knew better than to believe that that was what had happened; they couldn’t have been that lucky.
“We recovered some ammunition and weapons from the Home Guard building,” Hauptmann Dempfle informed him. “I have had them distributed back to the sailors to put them out of the way unless we need them.”
Baeck nodded, trying to understand; the noise of aircraft high overhead was rising and falling as the Luftwaffe pounded British targets. His watch was suddenly a heavy weight on his wrist; he checked it absently and found that there were forty minutes until the first transport arrived, bringing reinforcements and the fighting power he would need to hold the docks long enough for Rommel himself to land.
“Herr Oberst,” one of the operators said, suddenly. His voice caught Baeck’s attention at once; junior officers would never interrupt their seniors unless there was an urgent reason. “Gate Three is reporting that there is movement on the main road, approaching the docks.”
Baeck, oddly, felt relieved. “Inform all posts,” he said, “the counter-attack is about to begin.”
Chapter Ten
Scapa Flow, Orkneys
The battleship rang like a bell.
“Direct hit to our stern,” someone shouted. Admiral Fraser barely heard him over the noise as the battleship shook again. The Germans were deploying remote-controlled weapons, glide bombs he’d only seen vague reports about, and the British Home Fleet was taking a beating. If there were
still any British fighters in the air, they were making no apparent impact on the bombers. “Captain, the rear turrets have been disabled.”
The battleship’s guns yammered out again, seeking targets somewhere up in the sky, trying to hit the German planes through sheer luck. They were meant to be slaved to radars, but under all the confusion, the fire control system had broken down; they were effectively shooting at random. If the hit was as bad as it seemed, the King George V had just had her fighting power cut in half.
“Take us out into the channel,” he ordered the Captain through the intercom, hoping that the system still worked. The fleet had been at anchor, making them sitting ducks for the Germans. If they could start the ships moving, the Germans would have problems hitting the remainder of the fleet. The nightmare just raged on and on, with more bombs coming down. He heard the shouts from his men, reporting damaged or sunken ships, and felt cold.
The pounding noise of the engines echoed through the ship as he felt the battleship lurch into motion. The King George V was supposed to be one of the fastest battleships in the world – although both the Germans and Japanese claimed to have built faster ships – but it felt as if the battleship was having real problems moving at only a slow rate. The damage might have been worse than he had feared, even though the anti-aircraft guns were still firing endlessly into the dark. If the stern had been damaged, the ship might not be able to make it to another dock before it was too late. How badly had the Germans pounded the facilities on the islands?
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