The Invasion of 1950 (12 page)

“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.”

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.