by Leo Kessler
‘Yes, it was weally wather impwessive, sir.’ The Laird, now in high good humour, gave him a soft raspberry.
* * *
The Laird had just finished inspecting his men still sprawled out on the cropped turf, chests heaving, sweat-glazed faces crimson, when the DR roared in from the main South-sea–Havant road. At sixty he bumped across the uneven ground, scattering the elderly Home Guards, bouncing up and down in his saddle.
‘Bet his knackers hurt tonight, Freddy!’ the Laird said, watching his exhibitionist progress with interest.
‘Wonder what’s the hurry, sir?’
‘Search me. Perhaps Winnie wants me to make me maiden speech in ‘Ouse.’
With an impressive screech of protesting rubber, the leather-jerkined DR braked. He thrust up his goggles and snapped to attention when he recognised the strange little officer’s badges-of-rank. ‘Colonel, the Laird of –’
‘All right, put a plug in it, mate,’ interrupted the CO of the Commando, ‘we don’t want to be all day. What yer got for me, son?’
A little bewildered by the Cockney accent coming from what was supposedly a Scottish lord, the DR opened his pouch and took out a sealed buff envelope. ‘Your eyes only, sir. From Combined Ops HQ,’ he barked.
‘Don’t rupture yersen,’ the Laird said sourly. Taking the envelope, he walked to one side and taking the skean dhu from his sock, slit it open.
He read it slowly, as if he were having difficulty in understanding its contents, his grey face growing grimmer by the second.
A few yards away the Home Guards were jingling their mess tins hopefully, for a ‘pint of real sergeant-major’s tea’. Freddy knew it was his responsibility. But the look on his CO’s face told him that it was not the right time to order a tea-break.
‘Anything the matter, sir?’ he asked finally.
‘Come over her, Freddy,’ the Laird replied.
‘Sir.’
‘Freddy, I can’t let you read this dispatch. It’s from Richmond Terrace – Intelligence – and for my peepers only. But I’ll be buggered if they can stop me telling you roughly what’s in it.’
‘Sir?’
The Laird lowered his voice. ‘Freddy, Intelligence reports that a Jerry battalion is practising speed marches up the road to Berneval,’ he announced gloomily.
‘So?’
‘So, you big streak of piss, doesn’t it tie in with the ruddy fact that it’s exactly thirty-nine days since we abandoned Operation Butter1 and that since then every sodding pub from Pompey to Plymouth has been full of squaddies and matelots spilling their guts to anybody who’d buy ’em a pint! You can bet yer bottom dollar that the Jerries have got on to us.’ He stared gloomily out at the heaving green, white-capped sea. ‘Freddy, I think the Jerries know we’re coming.’
The Guardsman stared down at him aghast. In spite of his ludicrous lower class accent and even more ludicrous attempt to ape an upper class Scottish lord, Freddy knew that Fergus MacDonald was no fool. Since he’d formed his own commando from his tenants and a handful of volunteers from the Glasgow slums in early 1941, the Colonel had learned faster than many a professional officer. He had done well at Vaagso and even better at St Nazaire, winning the MC at the first and the DSO at the second. The CO’s long crafty nose that had once given him his nickname of ‘Foxy Fergus’ could smell trouble a mile away, and where many a professional officer simply bashed on and took his knocks, the CO preferred to ‘use the back door’, as he was fond of explaining at training sessions.
‘I don’t know. I can’t put me finger on it, as the actress said to the bishop,’ the Laird said sombrely. ‘All the same, I can feel it in my bones – they know!’
‘Pon my soul,’ Freddy exclaimed. ‘But sir, they wouldn’t let us walk into a twap, would they?’
The CO didn’t answer. Instead he said, ‘Freddy, you take charge here.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, I’m off.’ He swung round and shouted at the DR. ‘Hey, you.’
‘Sir?’
‘Bring that bike of yours over here at the double!’
The DR thrust down his goggles and rumbled the heavy motorbike across the rough ground towards him. The Colonel flung his leg over the pillion, carelessly revealing that in true Scots fashion, he wasn’t wearing underpants. ‘All right, let her rip!’
‘Yessir!’ The bike roared into noisy life. The diminutive Colonel took a firmer grip of the DR’s waist and tensed expectantly.
‘But where are you orff to, sir?’ the Hon Freddy Rory-Brick demanded, his celebrated calm vanished for once.
‘To the Big Smoke,’ yelled the Laird of Abernockie and Dearth, the wind snatching at his words as the bike tore away, ‘I’m gonnna have a word with his Lordship …’
‘Oh, Chwist!’ Freddy cursed and clutched his forehead.
Notes
1 The first raid on Dieppe cancelled in early July when the attack force was already on board ship. (Transl.)
NINE
The Commando Colonel was not the only officer concerned that day. As midday approached on that Sunday, 16th August 1942, Colonel Geier and Major von Dodenberg cantered to gether down the straight road from Braquemont to Berneval on their hired horses. To any watching peasant preparing to dig into his Sunday rabbit, they looked like a score of other Boche officers they had seen riding down the same road on Sunday afternoons these last two years – immaculate, lordly, aloof, part of a world that had nothing to do with their own lowly existence.
But the two SS officers were not out riding for pleasure; they were on duty. As the Vulture had rasped to von Dodenburg when he had ordered the latter to hire the horses: ‘Von Rundstedt is a damn clever strategist, von Dodenburg. But the old fart has never heard a shot fired in anger since 1918. He doesn’t know that on the battlefield everything doesn’t work out so smoothly as one of his big charts at St Germain.’1 Thus the two of them cantered easily down the road, their horses’ rumps gleaming with sweat, keen eyes searching the countryside on both sides for obstacles, possible sources of trouble, difficulties.
‘Assuming the Tommies will land before dawn,’ the Vulture lectured his younger companion. ‘I feel the Wotan should have little to fear from air attack.’
‘Providing we observe strict blackout control, sir,’ von Dodenburg answered. ‘But what about their naval bombardment?’
The Vulture frowned. ‘I think we’ll manage to scrape through underneath it. We can assume that the naval bombardment will hit the rear areas behind the Battery first, trying to cut it off from reinforcements. Then it’ll move to the immediate vicinity of the Battery to cover their infantry going in. I think we’ll make it before then.’
‘I’ll buy that, sir. But all the same, I don’t like this road.’ He indicated the white gleaming causeway, bordered on both sides by high thick hedges.
‘What do you mean?’ the Vulture looked suspiciously at him as they began to trot into Belleville-sur-Mer.
‘Plenty of cover on both sides. No room for manoeuvre for anybody on the road itself, sir. In other words, sir, a perfect place for an ambush.’
‘We’ll be at the Battery before the Tommies can get this far, von Dodenburg.’
‘It wasn’t the Tommies I was thinking of, sir. I was thinking of the French.’
‘The French!’ the Vulture laughed; it wasn’t a very pleasant sound. ‘My dear Major, the French are an efficiently decadent people and suitably selfish as such people usually are. Unlike the absurd English and Germans who seem to find pleasure in killing each other, the French occupy themselves more realistically with the joys of the flesh. This,’ he made an obscene gesture, ‘and this,’ he slapped his lean stomach with his free-hand. ‘Why should they risk their precious French necks for a bunch of skinny-ribbed, buck-teethed Tommies? No, no, my dear Major, the French have long forgotten the war and got on with the business of living.’
‘All the same, sir,’ von Dodenburg began, but stopped suddenly. The Vulture’s gaze was directed on the be
ach which had revealed itself to the right and below them.
Kuno von Dodenburg reined in his horse and stared at the narrow shelving beach covered with heavy shingle. Beyond it rose a sheer white cliff, its only outlet a narrow, steep-sided gully, filled to a depth of two metres with barbed and rabbit wire. The wire was stretched very tight and pinioned to iron stakes driven into the sides of the gully. ‘It looks very formidable, sir,’ he ventured.
The Vulture nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it does. If the Tommies ever got their eggs caught on that, there’d be a few singing tenors about.’ He jerked the reins. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the Battery.’
They trotted on, past a large, lonely white house perched on the edge of the cliff, which looked like an abandoned church.
‘Mg nest,’ the Vulture observed as they reined their horses once again and took in the Goebbels Battery.
Von Dodenburg knew the details of the Battery by heart now. It had been built by the French in 1936, as part of the coastal defences. After 1940 and the start of the Tommy commando raids, the Wehrmacht had improved it so that its guns had a maximum range of 22,000 metres. Each of its guns was mounted on a thick ferro-concrete platform, revolving on a central pivot, defended against infantry attack by thick wire fences and seven mg posts, each manned by five men under the command of a corporal. To the rear of the guns there were two further mg posts with magnificent fields of fire over a couple of hundred metres of open country flanked by woodland. The whole place was garrisoned by some two hundred artillerymen.
The Vulture licked his thin lips carefully. ‘Not bad, not bad at all, von Dodenburg. But mind you the garrison is artillery and you know my feelings about the devotees of Saint Barbara?’2
‘No, sir.’
The Vulture grinned. ‘All big heads and big arses. All brains and not much pepper in their pants when it comes to action.’
Kuno von Dodenburg smiled. He knew why the Vulture disliked the artillery; their officers, the intellectual cream of the Wehrmacht, got promotion even quicker than the Armed SS, and everything the Vulture did was subordinated to becoming a general as his father had been before him. ‘All the same, behind those defences they won’t need much pepper in their pants on the day, sir,’ he remarked.
‘I suppose not,’ the Vulture said, stroking his monstrous nose. ‘All in all, the place looks good. It’ll hold till we arrive here when the Tommies land.’
‘If, sir,’ von Dodenburg persisted.
‘You’re still worried about that road?’
‘Yessir.’
‘All right, von Dodenburg what do you suggest I should do about it?’
‘Well, sir, I’d feel happier if we had the Battalion’s armour standing by to cover us if anything went wrong.’
‘It won’t,’ the Vulture said.
‘If they were alerted at the same time as the infantry, they could reach us within minutes of trouble, the Major persisted.
‘The crews are only half trained, you know! They’d probably do more damage to each other than to the enemy in the dark.’
‘I don’t care, sir, I’d feel happier if we had them standing by in case of emergency.’
The Vulture looked hard at the younger officer’s handsome, serious face. ‘You know, von Dodenburg, you are going to worry yourself into an early grave.’
‘Better that than a Tommy bullet, sir,’ von Dodenburg said, smiling.
‘All right, you win. The armour will be alerted. But God only knows what will happen when those greenbeaks get behind the wheels of the Mark IVs.’
* * *
That evening the Laird of Abernockie and Dearth staggered from the DR’s motorbike, his face and uniform covered in thick white dust and moved stiffly to the entrance of Combined Ops HQ in Richmond Terrace. Thickly he demanded to be allowed to see Lord Louis Mountbatten.
‘But you can’t expect to see the Admiral just like that, Colonel,’ the elegant aide replied horrified. ‘He’s a very busy man, you know.’
‘Listen, mate,’ the Commando Colonel snapped, ‘if I’m not in there talking to his Lordship within the next five minutes I’ll have them nifty upper class knackers off yer with my winkle-picker,’ his hand dropped to the skean dhu tucked into his stocking top, ‘in no seconds nothing.’
The elegant aide hurried away.
‘It’s the Commander of the Seventh Commando, sir,’ he explained hurriedly to an amused Mountbatten, ‘and he’s in a devil of a mood. He threatened to – well, it doesn’t matter, sir.’
Mountbatten laughed. ‘Old A and D, eh?’ he exclaimed. ‘The ‘orror of the ‘ighlands! Oh well, let him come, I can let him have five minutes, Jenkins.’
The diminutive Colonel in the drooping, dusty kilt got down to business at once. ‘Admiral, I don’t like it – I don’t like it one bit!’
‘What don’t you like, A and D?’
‘The whole op – this bloody Operation Jubilee.’ He leaned forward across the big desk, his shaggy carrot-red hair falling over his forehead. ‘I think the Jerries have rumbled us.’
Mountbatten’s handsome face hardened. ‘Impossible,’ he said firmly in his best quarterdeck manner.
‘Well, what about these SS troops doing speed marches on the road between Braquemont to Berneval, Admiral? Why that particular stretch of road in the whole of France, eh?’
‘Coincidence, A and D.’
‘Get off, Admiral,’ the Laird of Abernockie and Dearth snorted irreverently. ‘Pull the other leg – it’s got bells on it!’
‘What do you mean, Colonel?’
‘Well, just look at the whole ruddy set-up, Admiral. Jubilee was first scheduled for April 1942. Then there were about fourteen hundred second-grade Jerry soldiers in Dieppe. By July when we had originally planned to launch Jubilee, there were three divisions in the area, including a sodding SS division.’ He looked accusingly at Mountbatten, but the Admiral remained stonily silent.
‘All right, what happened then?’ the Colonel continued. ‘The op was cancelled and what did the old Hun do – he withdraws some of the troops.’ He raised a dirty finger warningly. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it, oh no, Admiral. As soon as the op is on again, the Jerries move back. What’s going on over there? Has old von Rundstedt got a yo-yo up his arse, or – do the Jerries know we’re coming?’ The Laird of Abernockie and Dearth breathed out hard and stopped suddenly. With fingers that trembled slightly with surpressed rage, he lit another of his favourite Woodbines.
Mountbatten hesitated. The comic Colonel was not the first to have protested against Operation Jubilee that week. General Montgomery who had been in charge of the operation originally had written from his new command in the Desert to General Paget, C-in-C Home Forces, ‘if they want to do something on the Continent, let them chose another target than Dieppe’. It was obvious that a group within the Army was rapidly losing confidence in the whole nasty business; yet Mountbatten knew how desperately Churchill was pushing the op – and his own star was linked to that of the Prime Minister.
‘A and D,’ he began finally, ‘I think you are concerning yourself unduly about all this.’ He shrugged. ‘Couldn’t we call them a series of coincidences that mount up to exactly nothing.’
‘You might. I don’t!’ the little Colonel replied bluntly. ‘I’m responsible for the lives of four hundred men, I can’t afford to lark around with coincidences. You of all people should understand. They’re my people, I’m their Laird.’
Mountbatten would have laughed on any other occasion at the comparison. But at this moment the irate little Colonel presented too much of a danger. He would not feel himself bound by the caste loyalty of the regular officer. He might well just go and blow his fears to some damn reporter on the Daily Mirror, and then there would be the very hell to play. ‘Yes, I understand, A and D, but what exactly do you expect me to do? The Op begins on Tuesday night. Too many people and too many things are involved. It is too late to make any drastic alterations to the plan now.’
‘I don’t kn
ow about that, Admiral,’ the Colonel persisted doggedly. ‘I’m only concerned about my lads. Now, let’s just assume that them ruddy Jerries marching up to Berneval every other day, as Intelligence states, are the ones who are gonna support the Battery when my chaps move in.’
Mountbatten opened his mouth to protest, but the Laird was quicker. ‘Give us a bit o’ hush, Admiral and let me finish, will you? Let’s assume I’m right. So what happens to my lads when the initial bombardments alerts the Jerries that something is up? I’ll tell you,’ he pointed his finger at the elegant, square-jawed scion of princes. ‘The Jerries’ll catch them with their knickers down, hanging on that ruddy big cliff under the Battery. And it won’t be penny buns they’ll start throwing at us – it’ll be handfuls of shit. Now, all I’m asking for me and the lads is that you take care that those SS men don’t get to the Battery before we do. We’re prepared to take our chance after that, Admiral.’
Mountbatten’s brain raced and he reacted as quickly as he had ever done on the pre-war polo field. ‘All right, A and D,’ he snapped, reaching out for his red-painted scrambler phone, ‘I’ll take care of your SS men. You worry about that damned Battery. Now then would you excuse me, A and D, I’ve got a lot to do before Tuesday morning.’
Notes
1 Von Rundstedt’s HQ just outside Paris. (Transl.)
2 Patron saint of the artillery.
TEN
‘Silence in the whorehouse!’ Sergeant-Major Metzger bellowed at the top of his tremendous voice.
Silence fell on the assembled NCOs of the First SS Assault Battalion Wotan. Slowly the Butcher ran his piglike little eyes around the NCOs’ red, gleaming expectant faces, their big hams already curled round the handles of their beer-mugs in anticipation. Satisfied with their appearance, he raised his glass with ceremonial slowness, until it reached the third button of his tunic as was prescribed in the regulations.
‘Comrades of the NCO Corps,’ he snapped formally. ‘It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our Kameradschaftsabend.1 Up the cups, comrades.’
The one hundred and fifty NCOs raised their mugs to the level of their third button, slopping beer everywhere.
