The Invasion of 1950

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  “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 Brit
ish 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?

  “HMS Victorious has been sunk,” someone said, his voice an expression of doom. Fraser winced. Victorious had been one of the newer carriers in the fleet. She had the finest record for launching her fleet of fighter aircraft and torpedo bombers, but now the carrier had been blown apart.

  The Germans had known about the British armoured flight decks. It was something that had given the carriers their chance of survival in the last war. So they had prepared their weapons to compensate. The glide bombs punched through the armour before detonating right next to the aviation fuel and the torpedoes the carrier crew would load onto the aircraft, blowing the ship apart. “Admiral, the destroyers are clearing the anchorage now.”

  But they’re not here for the destroyers, Fraser thought, grimly. The Germans intended to wreck the fleet; it was the only thing that they could want, even though British destroyers were nothing to laugh at. If the Germans took out enough of them, there wouldn’t even be a chance for raiding the German supply lines at night.

  “We need to get the battleships and cruisers out of the anchorage,” he told himself, wondering if the German admiral on the Bismarck had felt so helpless. The battle was being fought and the outcome was being determined… and he was powerless to affect either. He had to preserve Home Fleet as a viable weapon of war, but his capability to do that was limited, almost non-existent. Once the Germans stopped bombing, all he could do was pick up the remainder of his fleet and start repairing the damage.

  The ship shook again, and he cursed under his breath.

  * * *

  “Keep firing,” Brian Timpson ordered, as the massive anti-aircraft gun fired a shell into the air, aiming at a German bomber that was trying to fly down towards the anchorage, bombs falling and gliding down towards the ships with an eerie precision that sent chills falling down his spine.

  His crew worked like an assembly line, loading, firing, reloading and then firing again, trying to shoot a German aircraft out of the sky. The sky itself was lit up by the strange white light of the German flares and the flames licking up from the dockyards. One massive column of fire thrust into the air from one of the fuel dumps. Timpson silently prayed for the safety of the firemen who would be trying desperately to put the fire out before it spread into one of the ammunition dumps. If it reached the explosives, the area would look like hell on earth.

  His gaze tracked a German aircraft as it flew high overhead launching a bomb, and his crew fired a shell at it. The radar screen was completely fuzzed out, but they knew they had to keep filling the skies with explosions and flying shrapnel. One of the proximity fuses detonated and sent a German aircraft spiralling down in flames. It crashed into the ground and exploded with a noise that he could hear through his earmuffs, over the deafening noise of the battle. His gun’s bark sounded again and again, the noise of the other anti-aircraft guns, the heavy guns on the battleships, the roaring of German aircraft high overhead… all of them were merging into one single terrible noise, as if it were the end of the world.

  “Got him,” he shouted, suspecting that none of his unit would hear him. They might not have been the people who’d hit the aircraft either. There was no way to know with all the shells detonating up there, most of them hitting nothing, or maybe even fired at the wrong side. The RAF was supposed to be up there as well —
he saw a second German aircraft falling out of the sky before exploding in mid-dive — but there was no way to tell the difference between brave British pilots and underhand German pilots; they’d just have to shoot at what looked like bombers and hope.

  Another flare burst in the sky and he covered his eyes, gazing out over the anchorage, and feeling awe… and terror. He’d admired the big ships when he’d been a child. His lame leg had prevented him from becoming a crewman, and it had only been through sheer luck that he’d been given command of a battery. Now, however, half of the big warships were burning, and several of them had been sunk. He watched as flames spread over a small cruiser. Moments later, the magazine exploded and the cruiser shattered.

  The sight held him. He nearly forgot about the need to keep firing at the Germans. A German aircraft went down into the water, narrowly missing crashing into a destroyer as it was steaming out of the harbour. The plane sent a massive fountain of water into the air upon impact. The noise kept growing louder as the German planes came lower, but fewer were plummeting from the air. He could see crewmen abandoning burning ships, trusting to the waters below to break their fall, but the waters themselves were ablaze as fuel oil drifted across the waves. The entire harbour looked as if it were on fire. He saw the dockyards and a battle-cruiser that had been in the docks for servicing, burning with the dull flames of ignited fuel. Just for a moment, as an earth shattering roar echoed out over the harbour. One of the battleships lifted out of the water, before flying apart and crashing down in ruins. The remains wouldn’t stay afloat for long.

  He screamed curses into the air, shouting at the Germans who had ruined the fleet, but all he could effectively do was keep firing into the sky as German aircraft continued their destruction of the harbour… and of his beloved navy.

  * * *

  The sight held Gruppenkommandeur Albrecht Schmidt’s eyes as he took in the scale of the devastation. He’d been warned by some of the older hands in the Luftwaffe that the scale of the damage was sometimes inversely proportional to how impressive it looked, but he was sure that the damage was vast and beyond easy repair. The British fighters had faded from the skies. He allowed himself a moment to relax, and consider the use of the rocket pods mounted under his wings. He hadn’t done much damage on the ground yet, and he wanted to wreak havoc before the order came to withdraw in a body. Some of the bombers had already started to retreat, having run out of bombs to drop on the British. It wouldn’t be long before he got the order to leave.