Authors: Anthony G Williams
Now he felt no nervousness, only a fierce concentration as the bomber formation steadily expanded in his field of view.
His gaze flicked between the instruments and the gunsight.
Eight-sixty, eight-eighty, nine hundred kilometres per hour!
The jet streaked through the fighter cover, dived underneath the bombers which suddenly seemed to rush backwards past him, then he pulled up and shed speed rapidly to give time to aim.
The huge shape of a B-17 filled the gunsight as the aircraft vibrated to the hammer of the cannon.
One second, two, then the starboard inner radial exploded into flame, propeller spinning crazily away.
Eighty rounds fired, a detached part of his mind
thought, that
was better than two percent!
He banked onto another
target,
saw the ball turret swivel to point towards him, fired again, a raking shot as he swept past.
No time to assess damage, time to ram the throttles open and climb away from the bombers.
The Messerchmitt suddenly juddered and slewed to one side, an engine streaming smoke, as the defending Mustang plunged almost vertically past him.
The Kommandeur cursed and turned the crippled plane away.
Get lower, lose speed,
bail
out, he thought mechanically.
And hope I can persuade the locals I’m not an American bomber pilot before they do anything rash.
The Unteroffizier surveyed his crew with satisfaction, all poised in their allotted places around the FlaK.
The Kanonier 1, whose job was to lay the gun in azimuth, K2 who set the elevation, K3 who loaded the gun and K4, 5, 6 who passed the
ammunition.
He looked around the platform of the huge concrete FlaK tower, raised high above the city in order to give an unrestricted field of fire.
His gun and the other three of the battery were grouped around the Kommandogerät 36 director, which still relied on optical height and range setting in view of the intense jamming of the radar directors by the attacking Eloka aircraft.
The guns were the new 11 cm FlaK 43, developed from the 10.5 cm FlaK 39 by boring out the rifled barrel to create
a smoothbored
cannon designed to take the long, fin-stabilised Peenemünde Pfeilgeschoss arrow shells.
These were not only fired at a much higher velocity of around 1,200 metres per second, but because of their shape did not slow down as quickly so reached the altitude of the bombers much sooner, greatly assisting accurate shooting.
The techs had been right about the fuzes, he thought.
At first, the idea of using contact instead of time fuzes had seemed like madness, but as the techs pointed out, even the beautifully engineered clockwork fuzes were only accurate to half a percent.
This meant that the vast majority of shells were bursting too high or low to do any damage, and in any case had to explode very close to the B-17s in order to bring them down.
It was more effective to rely on direct hits, especially as
this enabled smaller shells
to be used which could be fired at much higher velocity.
There had been some talk of tiny radar fuzes which would explode shells only when they were close enough to damage the target, but these were apparently all being reserved for the new anti-aircraft missiles just entering production.
The Unteroffizier looked hopefully at the sky.
The cloud seemed to be clearing.
Just a bit more and the oncoming bombers would get a warm reception!
The P-51 pilot was simmering with frustration.
His magnificent Mustang, as the British who had ordered their development called them, was as far as he was concerned the best prop-engined fighter in the sky: fast, agile, hard-hitting and with tremendous range granted by the wonderful Packard-built Merlin engine and the lightweight underwing drop-tanks.
He should have had mastery over anything the Luftwaffe could put up – but that was before those damned jets appeared.
He had only managed to get one of the new planes in his gunsight and all he could achieve was one brief, long-range burst before the Messerschmitt sped away.
Still, his instructions were clear: stay with the bombers until well away from the target area,
then
as soon as the defending fighters had gone, go down and attack ground targets.
‘Shoot up anything that moves,’ his CO had said.
‘You never know what it might be adding to the Nazi war effort.’
The P-51 planed down through the thin layer of cloud, emerging over a rural landscape.
Well ahead, the pilot could see movement – vehicles on a road.
He eased the controls, lining up with the road, watching the vehicles as they seemed to rush towards him.
The shape of a bus sank into the gunsight and he pressed the firing button, the Mustang juddering as the six fifties hammered in response.
Seventy heavy machine gun bullets per second ripped up the road behind the bus, then tore through it.
The pilot was vaguely aware of the bus swerving and turning over, bodies spilling from it,
then
the second vehicle was in his sights – a tanker!
The bullets tore through it,
then
the incendiaries took effect with a devastating explosion.
The P-51 bucked violently in the blast,
then
was knocked sideways.
He had been hit – some debris had smashed into the plane!
The pilot climbed hard, anxiously scanning gauges.
Ominously, the oil pressure reading was falling rapidly – a glance in the mirror showed a plume of white smoke.
It was instantly clear that he wasn’t going to make it back.
The pilot nursed the plane carefully, turning to head back to the border.
The engine note roughened, rattled in a final effort,
then
abruptly stopped.
The sudden silence was chilling.
The pilot hastily pulled back the cockpit canopy, undid his straps and heaved himself out as the plane began its final dive.
He tumbled for a few seconds,
then
gasped in relief as the parachute opened.
He looked around as the swinging motion reduced, and uneasily saw that his turn had taken him close to where the vehicles he had strafed still burned.
As he approached the ground a small crowd of people converged on him.
He landed with the approved roll, unclipped the harness,
then
rapidly raised his arms as he heard the angry voices.
Arms seized him, fists punched.
He was dragged rapidly over the field, frozen with panic at the hostility burning from the people.
He suddenly stopped and the crowd parted.
He was in front of the bus.
His burst of fire had riddling it like a colander.
Bodies sprawled in the wreckage, lay beside the road.
They seemed surprisingly small.
The crowd forced him closer, their unintelligible voices a scream of accusation and hatred.
Children, he thought numbly.
They were all children.
‘I didn’t know!’
He yelled.
‘I didn’t know!’
He was still yelling as they dragged him to the roadside tree.
His own parachute harness was suddenly produced and roughly knotted around his neck.
He kicked out desperately as his feet left the ground.
As he swayed above them, his last sight was of a sea of faces filled with bitter fury and contempt.
I really didn’t know, he thought, and died.
‘They won’t be able to keep that up for much longer.’
Peter’s voice was sombre as the Oversight Committee clustered round the table, studying the latest reports from the Eighth Air Force.
The number of B-17s shot down in the last three raids had reached an alarming fifteen per cent.
The escort fighters were almost powerless in keeping the new Messerschmitt jets away from the bomber formations and were taking losses from defending fighters as they tried to attack the jets near their bases.
In cloudy weather the bombing was relatively
ineffective,
in clearer skies the FlaK defences were formidable.
‘This is the report that really bothers me,’ Peter said, pushing forward a summary of the sighting reports from the crews of several bombers on the last raid.
Large rockets had been seen streaking up towards the formations.
The ECM planes had apparently had some success in disrupting the control system, but three bombers had been brought down by rockets exploding nearby.
‘They only appear to be radio command guided at present,’ commented Don, ‘but they’re bound to be working on radar guidance, probably with a choice of frequencies to get around the jamming.
Once they perfect that, we’re in real trouble, not just in clear weather but at night and in bad weather, too.’
The gloom was palpable.
Don walked slowly over to the huge map of Europe and central Asia on the wall.
The vast area occupied by the Germans was marked out in tape, the only defiance on land being shown by the Russians, pushed far to the east, with the support of British and Canadian troops in the north.
‘It seems to be stalemate everywhere,’ he said.
‘The Germans can’t beat the Russians into submission, but are holding them.
We can’t beat the U-boats, but we’re holding them.
Germany is suffering from the bombing raids, but not enough.
We are preparing for an invasion but worried sick about the risk; Germany is still so strong in armour and aircraft.
It can’t go on like this.
Sooner or later, something’s got to give.
We can’t delay the invasion for much longer.’
Charles watched them leaving the room, mulling over the information he had acquired just before the meeting and relieved that he had decided not to pass it onto the others, especially Don and Mary.
The codebreakers had managed to crack the German naval codes in use a few months ago and were catching up with the backlog of decrypts.
One of the messages had been brought to his attention.
It seemed that someone had arranged for the xB-Dienst to know the course of the ill-fated ship carrying the American nurses, but had given them completely wrong information about what the ship was carrying.
Charles was torn by a mixture of disgust at the cold-blooded slaughter of the young women, and professional admiration of the effectiveness of the intelligence trap which had brought the USA into the European war.
He nodded thoughtfully.
That particular decrypt would be destroyed.
CHAPTER 9 - SLEDGEHAMMER
Spring 1943
The night was
moonless,
the sea heard more than seen, gentle waves surging lazily up the beach before withdrawing with a faint hiss.
A different pattern of splashes disturbed the rhythm; starlight gleamed from shiny black rubber.
The frogman crouched in the water, scanning the shore with eyes and ears at full alert.
A lick of wind cooled the exposed parts of his skin, brought with it the smell of tobacco, a quick laugh.
He focused, spotted the red glow.
The men were stationary, talking quietly.
He waited for a few minutes until the glow suddenly curved its ballistic arc towards the beach and the voices receded.
He moved forward, paused to scrape up some samples of sand, carefully sealed them away along with the notes he had already made about the beach obstacles and mines lying in wait for any invasion force.
The frogman came to where the men had stood among the dunes, followed their faint trail as much by touch as sight until a horizontal oblong of light flared briefly ahead, illuminated from behind by light spilling from an opened internal door.
He stopped, reviewing the image of the oblong imprinted on his mind.
It had been interrupted by a metallic gleam, humped at the back, straight at the front but with a regular pattern, which he recognised as ventilation holes in a barrel casing.
An MG 42 machine gun, commanding the beach from its pill-box.
The frogman retreated silently, making no attempt to disguise his footprints leading back into the sea.
With any luck they would be found in the morning, along with many others at different places along the coast of north-west Europe, all part of the scheme to keep the Germans off-balance, guessing where the blow would fall.
He swam smoothly out to the kayak where his comrade waited to take him back to the small Norwegian submarine, lying in wait off the coast of Denmark.
The tent city at
The choice was due to fall on
The Oversight Committee had been allocated a large house backing onto the Gardens, with room for them all to stay while they performed a suitably disguised role as a ‘hush-hush’ intelligence evaluation unit.
On a pleasantly warm and sunny spring afternoon, Don, Mary and Charles relaxed in deckchairs and savoured their cups of Earl Grey while Hope gurgled happily in a playpen.
‘So far so good,’ Don murmured.
Charles picked up the undertone of anxiety and raised an eyebrow.
‘What particular item is troubling you this time?’
A sigh.
‘Nothing specific.
It’s just that so much can go wrong.’
‘Never mind,’ Charles responded lazily, ‘in this kind of business all you can do is prepare as well as possible until it has passed beyond your ability to influence.
An enterprise as great as this slowly gathers its own momentum.
First the big decisions – when and where – become set in stone, then all the smaller ones – how and who – are worked out, each one being set in its place.
The closer we get to D-day, the harder it becomes to make any changes at all, other than adjusting the landing time by a few hours.’
‘He’s right,’ Mary chipped in, ‘there really is little or nothing any of us can do now to make any difference.
We have to trust to the military to carry it out; all we can do is pray.’
‘I know, I know.
The trouble is that there are so many different factors, there’s always something that I might not have said, or communicated clearly enough, which might make a difference; save a few lives, avoid a problem.
Getting the equipment right is the simple part; the biggest uncertainty is with the things I can’t see.
Did I really impress on them sufficiently strongly the need for naval gunfire support officers in the first wave ashore to direct the shooting, or the communication systems between the army and the tactical fighters in support? Not to mention a sufficient quantity of wireless sets with the airborne troops – the lack of those caused some real problems.
These
kind
of things make a huge difference, but I can’t know if they’ll happen properly until, well, until they happen!’
The other two grinned a shade wearily.
‘You’ve been bothering everyone you can get your hands on about everything you can think of for months.’ Mary said gently.
She brightened up.
‘Just run through what has gone right.
You won over Churchill, against the wishes of Sir Alan Brooke,’ – ‘and nearly all of the Imperial General Staff,’ interjected Charles drily – ‘to agree with the Americans, forget about the Mediterranean and launch a direct attack on northern Europe, otherwise it would have been 1944 before we could put together enough landing ships, men and equipment to invade France.’
‘Well, I only hope that was the right decision.
The opposition had some powerful arguments. The Americans are untried in battle, the German army unbroken, the Luftwaffe damaged but not yet crippled by the fighting over Germany.
It’s a terrible risk.’
‘But nearly all of the German Army is far to the east in Russia, too far to be brought back to France in anything less than weeks if not months.
And our forces are much better equipped than they were in your time.
Thanks to you, we know what has to be done and we know how to do it.’
‘You forget
,
the Germans know how we did it, too.
And they still have the best army in the world.
Did I mention that they consistently inflicted casualties at a rate fifty percent higher than they sustained them?’
(Patient nods.) ‘We will need better equipment and tactics just to survive.’
Mary was undeterred.
‘Then you managed to get Churchill to dissuade Roosevelt from making his ‘unconditional surrender’ statement, in order to leave the German opposition to the Nazis some hope.
You said how much harder they fought because they had nothing to lose.’
Charles grinned.
‘Yes, I rather enjoyed that saying of theirs you remembered; “we might as well enjoy the war, because the peace will be terrible!”’
Mary continued firmly, ‘you were quite right to argue against the invasion of Italy.
It’s no threat to us and a liability to the Germans.
We would just have lost tens of thousands of men in a long war there, to achieve nothing.
We must focus our resources where it matters.’
‘Schwerpunkt!’
Charles nodded approvingly.
‘And don’t forget the benefits the invasion will bring, in neutralising those U-boat bases and airfields in France.
That will make a huge difference to the Battle of the Atlantic.
Then there were the casualties.
All those hundreds of thousands of European civilians who will die if the war goes on for another year, among them, over half a million Jews.’
‘Well, the major decisions are taken now,’ Charles pointed out reassuringly.
‘Eisenhower is in charge, with Alexander leading the armies and Montgomery in charge of planning.
The best team, I think you said?
You’ve even managed to get Churchill to insist on including the Fighting French in the invasion force.’
Don grimaced in recollection.
‘Yes, the Americans really don’t like de Gaulle.’
‘Anyway, with the continuing delays being reported in perfecting an atom bomb, we really don’t have much choice. Just as well that we can see no signs of German progress in that direction either.’ Charles rose and stretched in the sunshine.
‘Come on, we have another briefing meeting this evening.
Let’s catch up with the latest.’
The Arado 234B-1 reconnaissance jet streaked over the coast of southern England at seven hundred kilometres per hour and eleven thousand metres altitude, cameras whirring steadily.
The pilot had been given explicit instructions following several similar runs.
There were some areas along the Hampshire coast which the Luftwaffe wanted a closer look at; some interesting shapes barely visible under camouflage netting, possibly a large formation of armoured vehicles being prepared for the expected invasion.
The dockyards were also of interest.
So far, there was no sign of the giant concrete structures the pilot had been briefed to expect – just lots of shipping.
For some reason these structures, which according to Intelligence were apparently known by the curious name of ‘Mulberries’, were important in answering the key question: how ready were the Allies?
Would the invasion be this year or next?
The pilot kept his eyes on the ground – he had been warned that the British had introduced a similar anti-aircraft missile to the type operated by the Luftwaffe. Not surprisingly, they seemed to be concentrated around the ports where they had taken a heavy toll in the recent bomber raids.
The pilot reached the end of the run, then turned and began a smooth descent to gain a closer view of the camouflaged area.
The speed slowly built up to eight hundred kilometres per hour then eased back as the little jet steadied at six thousand metres.
The ground unrolled beneath him rapidly.
He checked the plane’s course then set the cameras rolling again. A brief flash of light in the mirror caught the pilot’s eye; for moment he stared in disbelief and dismay at the sight of a plane – closing on him!
Then the nose of the chasing plane flickered with fire and the Arado began a frantic evasion routine, the pilot concentrating too hard on getting away to use his fixed, rearward-firing cannon.
The Major watched the gradual fall of the remains of the plane, one wing tumbling by
itself,
the black cross clearly visible at it approached the ground.
He turned away from the funeral pyre to look at the camouflage netting stretched behind him.
Underneath, carefully just visible, were the plywood models of tanks.
Hardly a proper war, he thought, but at least this secret would be kept a little longer.
The Flight-Lieutenant climbed out of the Hawker Typhoon, gave a thumbs-up to his ground crew.
‘One down – I got the jet!’ He called out, to be greeted by cheers and applause.
He looked back at the little plane, still officially on the secret list.
It still looked strange to his eyes, sitting straight on its tricycle undercarriage, the slim, pointed nose, now streaked with gunsmoke, naked of any propeller, the side intakes above the swept-back wing, the jet exhaust under the tail.
Had he known it, the Hawker bore a remarkable resemblance to a certain RAF advanced jet trainer from Don’s previous life (‘we know you can’t help us with the technical details,’ Peter had said, ‘but even an idea of what sort of layouts worked well would help.
We’re really in the dark over how to begin!’).
‘How were the guns?’ the armourer wanted to know.
‘Faultless!’
The new Molins Hispanos were capable of a thousand rounds per minute, and four of them nestled under the nose of the plane.
‘The poor chap never knew what hit him!’
The underground command post was brutally functional like all of its kind.
I could be almost anywhere, Herrman thought wearily.
It was odd to think that, for the first time in his life, he was in France.
What on earth was the typically overdramatic name they gave to this one?
Oh yes, FHQ Wolfsschlucht 2, located at Margival, near Soissons.
At least Hitler’s generals had the sense to pick more congenial accommodation: von Rundstedt, the C-in-C Army Group
West
, was installed in a castle at Saint-Germaine, while Rommel’s Army Group B HQ was at La Roche-Guyon, the chateau of the Ducs de la Roche.
Herrman dragged his attention back to General Jodl, the Chief of Staff to the head of the OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or joint defence staff.
As usual, the capable Jodl was doing the briefing while his ineffectual superior, Keitel, sat and listened.
‘We still have no clear idea about Allied intentions, but the build-up of forces in southern England and Norway is obvious.
Unfortunately there has also been much activity in North Africa and an invasion of
We have been warned about the British predilection for ‘disinformation’ in constructing decoy aircraft, tanks and even landing vessels, and in generating false radio traffic, and while no definite information has been gathered from England or Norway, we have intelligence reports from Africa which suggest that much of the activity there might be false.
Furthermore, to use Norway as a jumping-off point for a major invasion would be very risky for them: so close to Germany, the advantage would be with us.
After careful consideration, we have concluded that an invasion of northern France is the most likely eventuality, and it might come very soon.
This causes us certain obvious problems.
As we know, OB West has sixty divisions available, among them twelve Panzer divisions. However, they are of very variable quality. The Seventh Army, responsible for the Cotentin peninsula and the Channel coast, has fifteen infantry divisions but ten of them are bodenständige.’