Chapter III: Part XXXVII
At once, Sturmabteilung Bräuer set about strengthening its defenses, and preparing the port to receive the flood of transports which would be setting out in less than an hour. Shortly after six, two lifeboats carrying 38 sailors from what turned out to be HMS
Bulldog passed in pounding surf through the breakwater and were taken prisoner. It was not shellfire, they insisted, but rather a torpedo which had doomed their ship. Most of the assault pioneers were quick to dismiss this as mere bravado, but the officers found it the more likely explanation. Bräuer ordered the already-overwhelmed radiomen to try to reach U-boat flotilla command and relay his request that whatever U-boats on station take up defensive positions to guard against the return of the second destroyer.
They had no luck reaching the U-boats, but sure enough, a lone destroyer plunged out of the gloom about an hour later and fired several shots at the port facilities before being again forced back by Kroh’s close-in shooting. Thereafter, it loitered just out of range, zigzagging at high speed.
At last, word arrived by radio from HKK-Calais that the destroyer-borne force was steaming toward Dover at full speed, and that the next wave -- the liners and fast troopships -- was about to push off. “Just hold on until dawn,” Bräuer had told the men again and again during training, “and it all shall be won.” It was after seven now, and dawn was now less than an hour away.
Bräuer instructed his doctors to prepare to transport the wounded. Meanwhile, he sent men to round up as much of a motor pool as possible. They soon had about two dozen vehicles: Royal Artillery lorries, staff cars and a few civilian sedans.
Why isn’t the sky getting light? It was a question that had been edging gradually into everyone’s minds for the past half hour. Dawn was to break at 0744, but the eastern sky was dark and impenetrable. Still the guns from Dover Castle echoed in the distance.
Then, it seemed that Kroh’s artillery was joined by a different kind of gunfire. Small arms, somewhere to the east, were crackling again. Bräuer stared from his rooftop out across the Heights, the port and city, and then the Castle on the opposite high ground. He blinked as a brilliant white flare rocketed up over the docks, followed by a second and a third. The flares reflected brightly off sheets of chilly gloom that seemed to be drawing about Dover. Even the castle’s towering keep, Bräuer realized, seemed little more than a shadow through the magnesium-white mist. The gunfire came in gales now.
Bräuer managed to reach Major Heilmann at Dover Priory by radio. “What’s going on down there?”
“I can’t see a thing from here, Oberstleutnant. The men are on alert, but no one is shooting at us.”
The docks.
Kapitänleutnant Urich was not answering.
“Kroh,” Bräuer yelled into the telephone moments later, “get a platoon down there at once. I am going myself, but we may take longer.” The twenty-nine year old officer promised to despatch a zug to the docks immediately.
Minutes later, Bräuer and 36 men piled into three of the British lorries and tore off down the paved road that ran along the crest of the Heights, looking for a spur that would take them down toward the port. Another flare blazed brilliantly above them. “Drive, drive!” Bräuer shouted as the driver braked. But it was no use -- the road was ending. So down they went, through a shallow notch hill and off the Heights, bouncing perilously down a scrubby slope so steep that the lorries threatened to flip, until they finally jarred onto another paved road not far from the beach. As they sped eastward, the gunfire ahead finally seemed to subside.
The wharves came into view, and Bräuer pointed out a good place to park and dismount.
Shattered glass filled the cab, then the sound of bullets striking rubber and metal. Bräuer forced his head down and screamed at the driver to reverse. He could see the seats disintegrating as slugs split the fabric and sprayed stuffing. Shards of the windshield rained down on his helmet. “Reverse!” The driver was frozen. Bräuer saw the side mirror explode into tiny shards and fall from view. He could hear bullets whipping through the canvas-covered truck bed where ten other assault pioneers were sheltering. The engine gave a wounded heave as rounds burrowed into the cylinders. “Reverse!” What remained of the windshield crumbled on top of him. Bullets just clipping the window frames showered the cab with yellow sparks. One of the tires blew violently beneath him. Bräuer reached for the clutch and threw the lorry into reverse, then reached his leg beneath the steering wheel and blindly mashed the accelerator. They lurched backward, and Bräuer finally lifted his head above the dash once they stopped taking fire.
Assault pioneers were running at them with submachine guns raised.
Oh God, friendly fire.
Bräuer leapt out of the lorry bellowing curses, and managed to wave them off. Once he was assured that they had lowered their weapons, he began to gingerly pick through the wreckage of the lorry, and one by one, the assault pioneers climbed out unscathed. Miraculously, no one had been hit. The lorry was ruined, though, shredded by what was surely hundreds of rounds. It was unfathomable how they had all survived.
The other two lorries, Bräuer now saw, had backed away soon enough to avoid the mistaken ambush. He ordered his men to pile into them, and they drove the rest of the way to the wharves, escorted by the men who had just been shooting at them. Bräuer wanted badly to find their officer and flay him to within an inch of his life, but there would be time enough for that on the ship back to France. There were Kriegsmarine men all around them now, and Bräuer hopped out of the lorry and set off in search of their commander.
He found Kapitänleutnant Urich in a customs house, helping a medic apply pressure to a demolitionist’s hemorrhaging leg. Michael Urich, a thirty-two year old cousin of Admiral Scheer, had been a senior diving and explosives instructor at the Torpedo School before being tapped to lead the Kriegsmarine element in Operation Rösselsprung. He looked up at Bräuer from beneath the rim of his black-painted stahlhelm, and nodded. “I cannot salute, Herr Oberstleutnant. Forgive me.”
Bräuer leaned out the customs house door and ordered one of his assault pioneers to relieve the lieutenant commander. Wiping blood from his hands onto his navy tunic, Urich drew himself up to his full height -- he towered ten inches over the compactly-built Bräuer -- and saluted. He explained that the large British force sheltering in the Drop Redoubt overlooking the docks had suddenly sallied in an effort to dislodge them and, he guessed, blow up the port facilities.
“So the docks were wired with explosives after all?”
Urich whistled. “Yes, and enough to blow us all to heaven. Luckily, they weren’t wired so as to be easily or quickly detonated. When my men first landed, there were just two police officers patrolling the jetty, and a few military sentries farther back. We chased them off, and killed one of them who shot at us. There was a patrol boat on the other side of the harbor, too, but it made the mistake of coming too close, and we raked it with machine guns. Then a police car drove straight at us from the high street, and we made short work of them, too.”
“Slow down. So then the Redoubt garrison came at you from off the Heights?”
“Yes. Come with me.” Urich led Bräuer through a narrow alleyway and into a wide open yard where crates and shipping containers were stacked prior to loading on merchant ships. Railroad tracks ran down the center towards a set of cranes closer to the docks. In the stark light of the star flares that Urich’s men were now using to illuminate the port, Bräuer could see dozens of bodies sprawled in rows around the crates and on the tracks. Bolt-action rifles were strewn where they had fallen, and the dead wore the distinctive British kettle helmets. “We’ve counted more than a hundred. They just kept coming and coming -- we tried to set up fields of fire, but they were charging at us fast, and had machine guns of their own. Some of them made it all the way to the water, where the combat turned hand-to-hand.”
“How many men did you lose?”
“Sixteen.”
Bräuer nodded. He would have liked to say that it could have been worse, but that would have conveyed to this soft-spoken sailor the wrong message. “You did well holding them off,” Bräuer said at last. “We were almost shot coming down from the Heights, though. I want you to identify anything entering your perimeter before firing unless it shows hostile intent. You’ll have reinforcements coming from the Castle soon, so you can get a little bit more depth on your lines. We’re going to hit the Drop Redoubt again, and the survivors might get pushed back down here.”
Moments later, Bräuer was on the radiotelephone to Major Heilmann at Dover Priory. “They attacked the docks in force and took heavy casualties. The survivors will still be retreating to the Redoubt. Take everything you have and hit the Redoubt again -- I want every company with you on the way back up the Heights in five minutes.”
Shock and firepower.
He could hear Heilmann conferring with the other company commanders. “Yes, Oberstleutnant. We will take the Redoubt.”
There were no flares this time, but rather concealing smoke rounds that blanketed the Heights’ slopes as 204 assault pioneers charged uphill toward the Drop Redoubt for the third time. Most of the pillboxes below the fortress had already been destroyed -- those that hadn’t waited to reveal their presence until a cluster of German soldiers loomed out of the smoke, and then chewed them up at close range. As their comrades downslope took what sheltered positions they could and provided covering fire, two men would have to work their way around the position and then come down on it from above. Each carried half of a 50kg shaped charge, and they had to assemble the two halves on the pillbox roof and prime the charge before taking cover.
High explosives within the hemispherical Hohlladungwaffe propelled the charge’s inner copper lining downward, the shape focusing and magnifying the explosive power until the lining had condensed into a jet of molten metal traveling at many times the speed of sound. Most of the pillboxes at Dover were armored much more thinly than the massive concrete-and-steel cupolas at Eben-Emael, and so the slugs of liquified copper punched cleanly through the roofs and killed the crews instantly. In one, though, the charge was not properly fitted against the roof -- there, the stream of metal burrowed deeply into the concrete, but eventually stopped. Its kinetic energy passed through the remaining thickness and blew off the ceiling’s inner lining, murdering the gun crew in a shower of thousands of concrete fragments propelled faster than bullets in the enclosed space.
At last, Heilmann’s pioneers crested the Heights, and found themselves in a blasted no-man’s-land where dozens of fallen Germans still lay. The pentagonal fortress was surrounded by a deep ditch, and was covered with narrow loopholes through which machine guns and rifles could slaughter men trying to find a way either into the ditch or over it. There was no way for the assault pioneers to get close enough to use their shaped charges, and three men had already been incinerated trying to approach the gun embrasures with flamethrowers. The lone causeway across to the island had been blown up after the first unsuccessful assault, and the sally-way down to the docks was dominated by protected machine guns within the fort.
Hauptmann Ludebrecht found Heilmann downslope and led him to one of the damaged pillboxes. The shaped charged had fatally weakened the roof, which had caved in, and one of his truppen had managed to break into the tunnels beyond. The strongpoint within was no longer manned, and they were working their way down toward the Inner Redoubt. Heilmann sent in reinforcements with explosives, and they had soon forced their way under the the ditch and into the heart of the undermanned Redoubt.
The fight for the Inner Redoubt was brief but intense, as assault grenades and covering fire from the Germans on the other side of the ditch forced the surviving defenders into a sheltered open-air gallery outside the ammunition magazines. Men dragging wounded comrades paused here to fire from behind the gallery’s brickwork arcade, felling several assault pioneers as they emerged from the officers’ mess doorway across the Redoubt’s inner courtyard. At a distance of no more than 15 meters, both sides exchanged fierce gunfire, and the Germans hurled several more assault grenades at the gallery. Brick splinters flew in all directions and the courtyard reverberated painfully, but spirited shooting was still pouring from within. Defiant yells dared a German to come out and show his face. At that moment, a dark nozzle poked out of the doorway of the officers’ mess. With a sudden roar, a searing yellow stream of flame leapt across the courtyard and doused the length of the gallery. Droplets of burning gasoline that fell early set a hundred tiny fires on the courtyard grass, but the fire kept coming. The terrible sound carried all the way down to the docks, where men flinched and grimaced, praying that the dying were not their own.
Two green flares arced up over the Drop Redoubt at 0750. Heilmann related the whole story to Bräuer by radio minutes later. The third assault had only cost the lives of ten assault pioneers. The Oberstleutnant was pleased, but troubled. Dawn should have broken already, but the eastern sky was nearly as black as it had been when they landed. A layer of clouds had rolled over Dover, so now even the moon and stars had been extinguished. It seemed as if a smothering black blanket had been pulled over the city, which was now illuminated only by the white flares still being fired over the docks as Kapitänleutnant Urich’s men went building-to-building to ferret out the last survivors of the British sally.
Major Kroh’s men reported that a few civilian automobiles coming down the A258 highway from Canterbury had been detained by his pickets. Bräuer ordered him to question and hold the drivers, and to let any further traffic past the first pickets to ensure that vehicles were surrounded when they were stopped. He ordered Urich to do the same -- with an extra admonition to identify targets before firing -- along the A20 road to the west.
There was more gunfire, as another pocket of enemy soldiers was discovered near the docks. Another flare hissed to life, the low cloud ceiling reflecting and amplifying the stark light, so the waterfront was lit as bright as day. More gunshots, then the rough bang of an assault grenade. As each fresh flare blazed above, the dark shadows on the dockside melted away, but when it was expended, the men’s ruined night vision left them in inky blindness until the next one could be hoist into the air.
“Where’s the sun?” Bräuer asked no in particular, striding back and forth on the docks, “Where’s the cursed sun?”
More importantly, where were the transports? The guns at Dover Castle and on the Western Heights had fallen silent. Visibility had worsened, and the British destroyer was believed to be lingering well out of range. There was as yet no sign of the transports which were due to pull up to the docks and discharge thousands of reinforcing soldiers any minute. With great difficulty, Bräuer managed to get through by radio to the harbormasters at Boulogne-sur-Mer, from which the invasion fleet was to sail for Dover. “How far along is the first wave?”
“The ships are ready, Oberstleutnant Bräuer.”
There was a hesitancy to the man’s voice that to Bräuer meant trouble. “Repeat. Where are the first wave of Dover transports? They were just setting out, I don’t know, an hour or more ago.”
“The transports have not yet been released. We were awaiting confirmation of the destroyers’ arrival, and have not received it. Is that force there now?”
“No.”
“I am sorry, Oberstleutnant. HKK-Calais gives us our orders here.”
Bräuer raged himself hoarse into the radiotelephone for another hour, but it was useless. Calais insisted that the destroyers were on their way. Sturmabteilung Bräuer was to simply dig in and wait. And so, Bräuer drove back up to his rooftop headquarters on the Heights and surveyed the scene. Of the 808 Germans who had landed in Dover, 110 had been killed and 172 were reported wounded. The largest mass of men was centered around the now-subdued Drop Redoubt, to which Major Heilmann was moving his command post from Dover Priory downslope. Some of his wounded were not able to be moved, though, so while Heilmann drew Kompanien 2, 3 and 4 up to the Redoubt, he left Hauptmann Pietzonka and Sturmpionier Kompanie 5 to defend his field hospital. Barenthin’s Kompanie 1 and Wulpp’s Kompanie 6 occupied the Citadel and the surrounding works. Urich’s demolitionists and elements of Kompanie 7 held the docks, while Kroh and Kompanien 8, 9 and 10 occupied the Castle, the Admiralty building, and now the thousand year old Saxon church below, St. Mary-in-Castro. Bräuer ordered the entire force to dig in and stay alert as they waited for dawn, but dawn never came.
At last, as a dull gray light was beginning to seep through the clouds, Student came over the radio with news of a terrible battle in the Channel. Reports were still sketchy, but apparently the two Dover-bound German destroyers had been accosted in the dark by an enemy cruiser. More units from both sides had joined the fray in the midst of a growing storm, and now both destroyers were unaccounted-for and presumed lost. Some Kriegsmarine officials believed that the cruiser had been sunk as well, but further reconnaissance had been thwarted by a powerful storm front sweeping in unexpectedly from the North Sea. By 1130, Dover was being lashed by gale-force winds and a driving sleet. Communications were out with Boulogne-sur-Mer, but Bräuer managed to reach a faint and crackling Student, who promised to sort things out.
Student finally broke the galling news to Bräuer shortly after noon: the harbormasters had been waiting to release their ships until the Ostend destroyers had arrived in Dover. When, following the first news of the naval engagement to the east, they had received orders to weigh anchor anyway, the seas were already too high, and the ships had to remain in harbor. “Stay fast,” he advised the Oberstleutnant, “and we’ll be coming for you as soon as possible.”
There were tentative stirrings down in the city of Dover, and Urich telephoned that his men had sighted police automobiles skulking along York street in sight of the docks. As Sturmabteilung Bräuer broke out its warm clothing, commandeered lorries drove along the line, passing out meal rations, water, and instructions to take a caffeine tablet in half an hour. Another of the lorries was rigged with the loudspeaker set and bales of leaflets. Hauptmann Bieber led two platoons from Kompanie 7 up York street on foot in a show of force, the loudspeaker lorry at their center. Civilians were ordered in English to stay in their homes and make no attempt to congregate -- persons seen out-of-doors would be presumed hostile and treated accordingly. Assault pioneers threw bunches of leaflets along the sodden roadside until a lieutenant approached Bieber with the observation that they couldn’t be read except by defying the order to remain indoors. The column turned around after less than a kilometer, abducting a flat of young men for questioning on the way back, and soon Urich had turned to the business of strengthening the landward defenses around the docks. He posted machine guns every few dozen meters along the wharf, some of them on upper stories of buildings or on warehouse roofs, while two MG34s were emplaced along each major street running into the city. Meanwhile, small teams were sent out to collect the explosives that had been wired to port machinery and assemble them for safe destruction.
Rather suddenly during the early afternoon, the wind and sleet abated, and patches of blue sky appeared over Dover. Bräuer radioed Boulogne-sur-Mer at once. “The first wave must be launched immediately. This weather window may not last long.” But surf in the harbor there was still pounding high enough on the tidal surge to make piloting impossible. HKK-Calais, getting the same reports, informed Student and Bräuer that it could not risk the transport liners colliding or grounding themselves and locking up the whole invasion fleet. “At least,” HKK cabled Student’s headquarters optimistically, “the enemy is probably unaware of the extent of what is happening.”
The drone of an aircraft engine sent the men of Sturmabteilung Bräuer scurrying for cover. For several minutes, they waited, scanning the clouds for the source of the sound. On the roof of the Officers’ Quarters, Bräuer received a telephone call from Major Kroh at Dover Castle. “Single aircraft spotted, coming your way.”
Keil and Peiper, the two machine-gunners from Bräuer’s headquarters zug, had set up their MG34 on a steel post at the center of an emplacement walled with sandbags. They trained their weapon skyward in the direction of the Castle, but there was still no plane visible.
“There!”
Bräuer followed the observer’s outstretched finger. A lone biplane was working its way along the fringe of the dark cloud banks that still hung over the harbor.
“It’s a Hind.”
The aircraft circled several times high over the docks, out of range of German guns. As it wheeled, the Royal Air Force roundels on its wings became visible through Bräuer’s binoculars. The Hind finally swept westward, and up over the Heights. “Take a shot if you can get it,” Bräuer radioed Heilmann at the Drop Redoubt, “but don’t give away your position unless he comes within range.”
Now the aircraft was nosing downward, purging altitude to take a closer look. It was coming in for a pass over the Citadel at less than 500 meters. “Fire!”
Keil and Peiper’s machine gun opened up, a stream of tracers racing toward the Hind. They were too low, and the gunners adjusted their aim. Another burst. The plane was climbing. From somewhere below, another MG34 began firing as well, but it was without effect. The Hind had soon climbed back to a safe altitude, and circled the Citadel twice before turning back inland and disappearing into the clouds.
The men who had been working all night on repairing the two 6 inch guns down at the Citadel Battery reported, exhausted, that the guns simply couldn’t be muscled back onto their mountings properly. Bräuer pulled the crew back up to the Officers’ Quarters for rest and requested that Major Kroh send a lorry with more tools and blocks-and-tackle. He would try to repair the guns again, for sunset would come at 1555, and during the long winter night, the Royal Navy was sure to make fresh attempts to drive Sturmabteilung Bräuer from Dover.
The Union Jack still flying above the Citadel’s parade ground began to snap and flail in the wind again, and soon, slate-gray clouds had again drawn over the city. Two more of the wounded in the basement hospital had died since noon, and with many of the other wounded stable and even motile, Bräuer began to contemplate ferrying the remaining patients and doctors eastward across the Heights to consolidate them with the much larger and harder-pressed hospital in the Drop Redoubt. Heilmann, for his part, was beginning to realize the danger of staying in the exposed positions around Dover Priory overnight, and had ordered Hauptmann Pietzonka to do everything possible to ready the remaining patients in the field hospital there for transport up to the Redoubt.
At 1407, the westernmost pickets, a squad from Hauptmann Wulpp’s third zug positioned on the bluffs above Shakespeare Cliff, reported heavy activity coming up the A20. Within minutes, observers on the Officers’ Quarters roof spotted it too. A relatively small column -- perhaps two armored cars and half a dozen lorries -- was advancing along the highway toward Dover, surrounded by soldiers on foot. It was probably part of the garrison at Folkestone.
Bräuer called for more machine guns on the roof. He had about a company of men dug in on the seaward slopes of the Heights, overlooking the A20 as it approached Dover. The enemy force, he judged, posed no mortal threat to the German beachhead, but that was clearly not what it was intended to do. Rather, it was probably a probing mission meant to learn where the glider-borne invaders -- for there was no concealing the dozens of DFS 230s landed below the Heights -- were positioned. As such, it was highly desirable that no elements from the column be allowed to fight their way back west to Folkestone to report what they encountered.
“Keep everybody’s heads down down there,” Bräuer telephoned Wulpp. “I want to let the column pass, in order to make first contact with 7-1 and 7-2 closer to the docks. Then we swing the trap shut and bar their way back out. Start siting your mortars now.”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant!” Bräuer could see Wulpp now, crouching over a telephone in a foxhole dug about 50 meters downslope. “It looks like one of the 12-pounders has a good view of the road. What should we do with it, Oberstleutnant?”
Looking down, Bräuer saw the gun, mounted on an exposed pedestal just down from the Officers’ Quarters. If it were crewed, the British column would probably notice, and pull back away from the waiting ambush. “Leave the gun unmanned for now, Wulpp. Once they have made contact, we can get people on it and hit them on the way out. Understood?”
“Clear, Oberstleutnant. Will await contact.”
At a walking pace, the column rolled eastward. Bräuer counted 19 kettle-helmeted figures walking warily alongside with battle rifles. Officers questioning the prisoners from the Citadel Battery confirmed that the armored cars had almost certainly come from the 130th Infantry Brigade, 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division, which was headquartered in Hawkinge, near Folkestone. The division’s other two brigades were headquartered at Lydden, about 3 kilometers north of Dover, and at Sandwich, midway between Deal and Ramsgate to the east. Reports differed, and sometimes conflicted with the Abwehr’s own pre-invasion estimates, but there were certainly at least five thousand enemy soldiers along this stretch of invasion coastline -- the less that force knew about what was going on in Dover, the better.
Kent, England.
The British column slipped briefly out of sight, as the A20 passed behind a cluster of cottages girding the Heights. It had no name on Bräuer’s map. “Do you have enemy in visual contact?” he asked Urich, who was watching Dover’s western approaches from the third floor of a small seaside hotel.
The Kapitänleutnant answered,
sotto voce: “Yes. Enemy in sight. 200 meters.”
The column was visible again from the Officers’ Quarters roof -- it was now safely to the east of the Citadel, and was approaching a roundabout with an old brass cannon mounted at the center. Bräuer turned to one of his under-officers. “Tell Wulpp to zero in his mortars on the roundabout.” Turning back to the telephone, he peered over the parapet. “Urich, let them have it as they’re about to exit the roundabout. You have fire discretion.”
Rolls-Royce armored car in Kent. Autumn, 1936.
The lead armored car edged left into the traffic circle. Bräuer half expected the trigger-happy assault pioneers down there to open up at that instant, but they held their nerve. The car, one of the old Rolls-Royces, made its slow turn through the roundabout, several soldiers leading it on foot. One of the soldiers climbed up onto the turret to talk to the commander, and the vehicle came to a halt just short of the roundabout’s outlet. The rest of the column pulled to a stop. The footman was pointing up ahead, as if advising the commander about the route forward. Bräuer pulled the telephone to his ear. “For God’s sake, Urich, fire!”
The men surrounding the armored car fell in unison, as if toppled by a great wind that turned the asphalt into gray dust. Several tried to shelter behind the armored bulk of the Rolls, but were caught in the enfilade -- while others tried to dive across the roadway in search of cover, but were cut down to the last. Fragmentation grenades landed around the column, blowing out tires and tearing through the lorries’ covered beds, as tracer rounds pulverized windshields and bit into engine blocks. At last, the din of the ambush began drifting up toward the Citadel: gunfire so heated and confused that it sounded like a giant bolt of fabric being torn. The Vickers machine gun in the turret of the lead armored car was firing up at the hotel in long bursts, as the second one tried to maneuver for a clear shot. Mortar rounds began landing all over the traffic circle in dark bursts of shrapnel and powder, and the road around the column was now almost totally obscured by the dust driven up by the bullets raking it from three sides.
Soldiers began spilling out of the lorries, but few took more than a few steps before stumbling and disappearing beneath the dust clouds. The rearmost lorry was burning now, its back broken by a mortar round, and a slick of burning fuel pooled in the road, singeing the grass at the roundabout’s center. The armored cars quickly realized that they were trapping the rest of the column in a killing zone, and they lurched forward on shredded tires and followed the roadway’s curve to the right and back up onto the westbound A20. Two lorries tried to follow, swerving across the mortar-churned grass, but one kept going and plowed into a cliffside guard rail and came to a stop. The other, veering madly, took off after the Rolls-Royces, which were straining their engines, but had bodies so battered and tires so ruined that they were not making more than 15 kilometers an hour to the good. The desperate lorry overtook them and sped east.
“Swing the trap, Wulpp,” Bräuer ordered. Men from 6-2 took up positions on the A20 about 250 meters to the east of the lorry. Machine guns all along the Heights opened up now, aiming almost for sport as more mortar rounds vaulted into the air in search of the armored cars. Its frame clearly wrecked, the poor lorry finally slowed under the weight of incoming fire, and rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the road. “Wulpp, wonderful shooting. Now see if you can knock the armored cars out with the 12-pounder.”
“Oberstleutnant!” It was one of the radiomen. “Major Kroh for you.”
Bräuer picked up the other telephone. “Bräuer.”
“I have enemy in sight along the eastern approaches. English soldiers are poking around our landed gliders, well out of range.”
“How many?”
The 12-pounder cracked just below the Citadel and Bräuer smelled cordite. The round sailed just over the armored cars and into the sea beyond.
“Repeat. How many enemy soldiers?”
“Ten, maybe.”
“Leave them alone for now. Keep me informed.”
One more shot, and the 12-pounder hit the lead car, blowing it cleanly in half and heaving the massive engine over the cliff. A rain of mortars accounted for the second.
Most of Kompanie 7 stood up from its foxholes and began advancing cautiously down the slopes, submachine guns raised. They picked through the wreckage of the lorry and the armored cars, but found no one in savable condition. Kapitänleutnant Urich had taken 17 prisoners, all wounded, and arranged for them to be sent up to the hospital at the Drop Redoubt.
Bräuer congratulated his men, then set about arranging distribution of dinner and blankets to the men on the line. If possible, he would summon most of the company commanders to his headquarters for a meeting before dark. He wanted to have his captains back with their respective kompanien in advance of the enemy’s next likely attack. Then, perhaps, he would tour the length of the line -- Dover Priory, the Drop Redoubt, the docks and up to Dover Castle -- during the night.
Just after 1500, Hauptmann Barenthin presented himself on Bräuer’s rooftop and saluted. Barenthin, an experienced combat engineer and pioneer instructor, had lost an eye in Holland, and would have been stricken from the list for Operation Rösselsprung by Student had Bräuer not vigorously interceded. Barenthin held a pair of welding gloves in one hand. “The 6-inchers are no use, Oberstleutnant. We’ve tried rigging them ten different ways, but they can’t be repaired without taking off the concrete roof of the whole battery.”
Swearing under his breath, Bräuer looked out to sea. Destroyers or worse would almost surely return during the night, and Bräuer knew he couldn’t count on Ostend to protect him. Even if Student were able to finagle a second destroyer mission -- which was highly uncertain within the scheme of the wider invasion -- there was no guarantee that it could be pulled together before the Royal Navy arrived. He turned back to the expert pioneer.
“Barenthin, I want you to take off --”
A deep boom in the distance behind him stopped Bräuer mid-sentence. He and Barenthin both rushed to the parapet, where they saw a monstrous column of water rearing up in the harbor. Hanging suspended a hundred meters in the air, it slowly collapsed into a cloud of white spray that rained down over a nearby ship. Before the waters had stopped boiling, there was another sound -- a bass roar like a freight train racing overhead. This time, Bräuer saw the flash as a massive explosion obliterated a section of the western breakwater about halfway along its length. Dark rock and sand mixed with foam in this second massive plume, which had not yet fallen when another, briefer, roar sounded, ending in a shattering explosion. Halfway between the Citadel and the Drop Redoubt a great pillar of earth had erupted, flinging broken trees end-over-end through the air.
“Artillery! Artillery! Artillery!”
It was Peiper. Bräuer thought of the young machine gunner’s brother, a fine pioneer killed by artillery almost a year before atop Eben-Emael. He had to stop those guns. As men scrambled for better cover all around Dover, Bräuer urgently telephoned Major Kroh; he was to prepare a counter-battery listening post immediately.
Five minutes later, another three shells had landed, this time all in the water, and Bräuer’s men were ready to start working out the location of the British guns. With luck, the Oberstleutnant could call in fire from the Framezelle guns to suppress them. As the seventh round thundered in, men at the Citadel and at Dover Castle -- 2 kilometers apart -- tried to take bearings on the sound. Connected by telephone, they timed the precise moment the sound reached them. If it reached Kroh’s men first, the British fire was coming from relatively east of Dover, if the men on the Officers’ Quarters roof heard it first, the fire was coming from relatively west. Bräuer crouched over a map in an office below, waiting for the results with a pencil and protractor in hand. By the ninth round, the listeners still weren’t getting a reliable bearing. From the sound, though, it seemed like the shells were coming from deeper inland. Kapitänleutnant Urich quickly set up a third post along the docks.
The tenth round landed just astern of one of the merchantmen that the demolitionists had seized and towed into the center of the harbor, showering the deserted deck with red-hot splinters. The listening posts conferred. The bearing, they said, was around 340 degrees off true north, plus or minus 10 degrees.
“Range?” Bräuer asked.
“No way to be sure, but they seem to be hitting us at a fairly steep angle.”
As another round roared over Dover and exploded a kilometer beyond the breakwater, Bräuer stared down at his map. The listeners reported that it seemed to be three very heavy artillery pieces, either at the same location or very close to one another. Aerial reconnaissance had not found any large siege guns in Kent -- there were seaward-facing coastal defense guns ranging up to the 9.2-inchers, and a handful of 6 inch Royal Artillery howitzers with the Wessex Division, but nothing capable of inflicting this shelling.
These had to be at least 14 inch guns. Student had been briefed at an HKK conference on the possibility of railroad artillery being used as long-range support of the beach and harbor defenses, but there had been no mention of it since. Bräuer felt his small desk rattle as the latest shell hit. If the guns were as far inland as it seemed, at any rate, the Framezelle batteries wouldn’t have a chance of touching them, and reconnaissance planes would be useless in the bad weather. Even if the weather cleared, the transports couldn’t arrive before first light tomorrow, which was about sixteen hours away.
... times sixty, times sixteen. Bräuer scribbled the arithmetic on the map’s margin.
By God, 720 rounds. The port didn’t stand much chance. If this murderous shelling were allowed to continue, the docks would be destroyed just as surely as if they had been sabotaged in the first minutes of the operation. Bräuer strained over the map. Assuming that this was railroad artillery, it would have to be positioned somewhere along the Southern Railway line running through the Elham Valley just northwest of Dover and up to to Canterbury. He drew a circle around stretch of countryside where the guns had to be.
Bräuer telephoned Major Kroh again and told him what had to be done. Kroh was to take all of Kompanie 8, form a motor convoy, and penetrate inland, following the railway north until he found the guns. He was to also conduct reconnaissance near Lydden to determine the state and strength of the enemy brigade supposedly headquartered there. They would scrape together eight or nine lorries for him, and then he was to set off at once. Bräuer was afraid to part with fifteen percent of his effective force at a time when he was expecting attack by at least battalion-strength units, but there was little else to be done. A company of assault pioneers causing chaos in the British rear might even forestall the attack until morning, he reasoned.
Shock and firepower.
“Good luck, Kroh,” he said. “Give those guns the devil.” Sinking into his chair, Bräuer moistened his lips from his canteen. Fifteen hours had passed, a quarter of his men were dead or injured, and the Heights had fallen, but it seemed that the Battle of Dover was only beginning.