-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Chapter III: Part XXXVII
Chapter III: The Lion’s Den
Part XXXVII
December 1, 1936
The throb of hundreds of engines filled the frigid air above the Pas-de-Calais as the dark flock of aircraft assembled. By the light of the nearly full moon, 92 Ju-52 transports and their towed gliders wheeled in great circles as their fighter escorts took off from the runways below. It was shortly after midnight, and as the last of the biplanes fought their way to altitude, the signal went out for the aerial armada to come into formation. Every pilot had executed these banks and turns dozens of times; each knew his carefully assigned place. Converging into a dark lance more than 10 kilometers long, the planes turned north.
At the tip of the lance, in a glider painted with a large white 1, Oberstleutnant Bruno Bräuer steeled himself to land the first blow of the historic invasion. Tasked with seizing the heavily-defended port of Dover intact, this was the fourth Sturmabteilung Bräuer -- successor in name to the legendary force that captured Fort Eben-Emael and two airfield assaults that Bräuer had led in France -- and was by far the largest. 736 assault pioneers composed a headquarters section and ten companies of 72 men, each one in turn made up of three three-glider platoons. Normally built to carry ten men, each DFS 230(II) glider instead bore a smaller eight-man squad and 360 kg of extra supplies. Every man was armed with an automatic weapon, the reliable and accurate MP34, a Luger pistol sidearm, a folding-variant Kampfmesser knife and a brace of storm grenades. Divided among the 92 gliders’ ready-use crates were a plethora of additional items, of variable practicality. There were 92 MG34 light machine guns (one per squad, each with 3,000 rounds of ammunition), 5,200 hand grenades (assault, defensive high-fragmentation, smoke, phosphorus, thermite and several containing an aerosolized form of capsaicin), 10 leGrW 36 light mortars (two hundred 50 mm rounds each), 10 flamethrowers, 92 Kar98k rifles, 10,000 kg of explosives (shaped, granulated, as putty and in sticks), 20 kilometers of wire and fuses, 300 spikes for gun sabotage, 5 inflatable rubber rafts, 300 liters of gasoline, 25 liters of motor oil, 12 radios, 20 sets of semaphore flags, 5 signal lights, 4 sets of block-and-tackle winches, 36 German flags, 6 British flags, 20 sets of horseshoes and a single light aircraft engine. There were 15 kilometers of telephone cable, 550 entrenchment tools, 257 various other tools (ranging from general-purpose hammers to heavy bolt cutters to special screwdrivers that could be used to disassemble the glider frames), 900 flares (red, red star, green, double green, white star, and yellow mortar), 270 maps and schematics, 3 portable alcohol-burning stoves, 2,578 tinned meal rations, 500 liters of drinking water, 5,225 caffeine tablets, 746 gas masks and 2,000 sets of one-use rubber shackles. In the medical kits (divided among ten company sanitäter), there were enough bandages to wrap around the entire circumference of Dover Harbor and enough morphine to kill every single man in Sturmabteilung Bräuer. The attack force carried 16 still cameras (half of them color), parts to assemble a gasoline-powered electric generator, 5 carbon-arc strobe lights, and a Kinarri movie camera with 8 kilometers of 16 mm film. They carried more than 40,000 leaflets printed in English, £300,000 in large notes (both for bribes and the lawful purchase of any goods somehow omitted from the near-exhaustive equipment list), 200 sets of warm clothing, roughly 5,000 bars of chocolate, 3000 kg of quick-drying cement, a violin, 3 bugles, a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, 15 Bibles (five Roman Catholic, nine Protestant and one Reformed), a set of Pathé loudspeakers, 95 magnetic compasses, 190 sets of binoculars, 8 apothecary’s scales, 11 blowtorches, 2 hectares of camouflage netting and 6 footballs. Weightiest among the hundreds of other entries rounding out the equipment manifest were 260,000 rounds of crated small-caliber ammunition.
For nearly five months, Sturmabteilung Bräuer had trained relentlessly, meticulously -- obsessively -- for this night. Oberst Kurt Student, overall commander of the operation, had given Bräuer full discretion over the training and preparation for the mission, spending most of his own energies on deflecting interference from superiors and ensuring that Bräuer’s every request was fulfilled.
Both men fully appreciated the consequences of failure. Three weeks after the Scholl Memorandum, Student and Bräuer had been summoned to the Berghof. In the study of his mountain chalet, the Führer had inducted them into the tiny cabal then aware of his plan to invade England. Looking almost disappointed at the equanimity with which the two officers took the news, he had handed each a copy of an infant draft of the plan called Löwengrube.
The invasion force would require three deep-water ports in the first hours: Dover, Ramsgate and Harwich. If they were taken intact, destroyers and fast transports could sprint across the Channel laden with enough men and supplies to establish a secure beachhead. If the ports were not captured, or were captured only after the docks and port machinery had been sabotaged, the Wehrmacht would have no way of getting enough men across before the Royal Navy intervened decisively. “Given the necessity of success, you should attack with not less than two thousand men per port,” Hitler said, “and that is final.”
Yet by the start of July, the Parachute and Glider school at Stendal had graduated just under a thousand men. Student and Bräuer had returned to the Berghof on the fourth to pitch their revised plan. They had evaluated reconnaissance photos for potential glider landing sites at each port, and found that none had enough open space to allow two thousand men to be inserted safely. If anything, Student warned, coordinating almost five hundred aircraft over each port -- transports, gliders and fighters -- would lead to more casualties through collisions and accidents than any enemy fire was likely to inflict. Instead, it was preferable to attack each port with less than half that number; even then, more than two thousand extra men would need to be trained, but this was within the bounds of what could be achieved. At last, Hitler had relented.
Student had been adamant that Bräuer personally lead the assault upon Dover, which he considered the most difficult mission. He had found himself hard-pressed to nominate qualified commanders for the other two forces. In the end, he had elected to widen the search outside the present cadre of Parachute/Glider officers. To lead the assault at Harwich, Student chose a highly decorated lieutenant colonel named Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke. A proven and daring leader of men both in the First World War and with a Freikorps in Russia against the Bolsheviks, Oberstleutnant Ramcke fit Student’s specifications to the letter. For the taking of Ramsgate, Student tapped a personal friend. Oberstleutnant Eugen Meindl was a pioneer-trained artilleryman whose name had come up as a possible substitute for Bräuer in leading the attack on Eben-Emael ten months earlier. Square-jawed and sardonic, with an athlete’s chest peppered with Imperial-era knightly orders, Meindl effortlessly commanded the unswerving loyalty from subordinates which Student felt was so essential in airborne operations.
On the ninth of July, Student flew to Rome for further talks with Hitler, who was on a visit there to confer with Mussolini. He traveled with the Führer back to Berchtesgaden, where he introduced him to Ramcke and Meindl. Hitler had been greatly impressed with both, and sent Student to Berlin with instructions to flesh out the operational plans with OKL staffers. There, in a room in the Hotel Adlon, Student and his commanders had spent three days poring over hundreds of personnel files to select their junior officers, glider pilots and NCOs. Student had given Bräuer alone final say over his selections, as well as plum training facilities in Berlin and on the Baltic coast -- Ramcke and Meindl would be jointly training their men at a larger camp in Saxony.
Oberstleutnant Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke (left) with Kurt Student at the Berchtesgaden train station, July 9, 1936.
Ramcke (left), Student and Major Hans Kroh (right) at the station. Kroh had just been confirmed as the reserve commander for the Dover assault.
On July fifteenth, 1,215 men had gathered near Lübeck for the start of a training program that would ultimately prove too much for nearly half of them. Six days a week the hard-driving Bräuer had drilled his men, with Sundays reserved for rest, English lessons and swimming in the icy waters of the Baltic. Bent on increasing the assault pioneers’ efficiency in close-quarters combat, Bräuer had brought in boxers, arms masters, marksmen and a Judo instructor to train them. Demolitionists taught half the men advanced explosives, while Kriegsmarine experts held a seminar on anti-sabotage operations.
To compliment the technical training, the men’s bodies had been honed with their commander’s characteristic intensity. Student, Bräuer and a clique of dietitians had conferred in the second week of July to draw up the ideal nutritional regimen for the men. Fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts and brown rice were provided in abundance -- Student managed to satisfy Bräuer’s request that the men eat nothing canned -- along with protein-rich venison, codfish and duckling. As soon became legendary in the unit, one of the captains had discovered a contraband chocolate bar in the mattress of a young Gefreiter and reported the man to Bräuer expecting him to set a 10 kilometer run as punishment. Instead, Bräuer had become so incensed that he sent the man home on the spot. “Nothing,” he had written Student, “can be allowed to impair the soldiers, whether from within or without.”
Even the relatively brief flight would sap oxygen from the assault pioneers’ blood, and Bräuer was determined that this not hamper the men’s performance. For two weeks in August, he had taken them to camp along the Austrian border for altitude training. From the deserted athletes’ village at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, site of February’s Winter Olympics, they had trained along the shoulders of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. As doctors watched and measured, they had exercised vigorously at its summit, which closely approximated the altitude of the longest portion of the flight in the open gliders. Two collapsed and were hospitalized from heatstroke, but by August fifteenth, Bräuer was ready to make his final cuts.
He posted the names of the 735 men who would make up Sturmabteilung Bräuer, as well as those of the 20 ready alternates who would follow them to their Berlin camp for glider rehearsals. Engineers constructed a scale mockup of the landing sites, aided by continuing aerial reconnaissance over Dover. They rehearsed endlessly -- first with transports only, then with gliders; by day, then by night; empty, then weighted, and then with full men and gear. Some of them were granted special leave in September to take part in combat operations in Holland; seven alternates were called up to replace the fallen. Still they trained, Bräuer obsessively critiquing the smallest errors, until even he had few reasons to complain to Student.
Dover from the air.
Even now, Bräuer could sense the precision in the pilots’ maneuvers as they banked slightly to the northwest, and out over the waters of the Channel. It was a breathtaking sight. Bräuer felt then, for the first time, the true enormity of the invasion. Out the small square window he could see ships -- hundreds of them, piled like cordwood in the harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer. A forest of masts shone white in the moonlight, and Bräuer could see the luminous green wakes of torpedo boats bustling protectively far below, herding the mass of transports as they slipped out of their berths. He went to the opposite window, where he could see the bowed promontory of Cap Gris-Nez. Beyond it, another glinting fleet could be seen gathering, but the Cap itself was dark. Somewhere in that darkness were the batteries of heavy artillery that could be called upon to support Sturmabteilung Bräuer in the event of counterattack.
The lance made another turn northwest, and the Cap, the ships and the harbor swung out of view. Growing anxious without something to look at, Bräuer slipped up to the cockpit. There were only two transport-glider pairs ahead of them. The tow rope slackened slightly as the planes edged off speed. “What is it?” Bräuer whispered to the pilot.
“Some of the planes behind us have to catch up, Oberstleutnant. Nothing to worry about.”
The stark light of carbon-arc searchlights appeared in several places on the blacked-out coastline ahead. The bright beams wandered for a moment, and then began to search the seaward sky. The transports continued to slow, and the nimble shapes of biplane fighters buzzed past them and toward the source of the searchlights. Tracers drifted up from unseen emplacements, followed by the magnesium wink of airburst shells. For several minutes, the shooting drew closer, slipping gradually away to the left. At 0031, they crossed the English coast near Hastings at 3500 meters.
The plan called for the attack force to cross the coast here, more than 50 kilometers west of Dover, to disguise its true objective. They would turn to the northeast and proceed far inland, rounding Ashford and then tacking east-southeast to take Dover from the rear. As the gliders made their silent approach from an unexpected direction, the transports would continue on to Canterbury to draw off any unwanted attention.
Luftwaffe staffers at HKK had initially opposed the plan, preferring an easier direct insertion onto the wide bluffs midway between Folkestone and Dover. But this would have given the defenders at Dover ample warning -- perhaps enough to destroy the port and then mow down the assault pioneers as they crossed the open, coverless ground on the way into the city. Instead, Student and Bräuer had insisted on a much more violent and dangerous insertion that placed men straight onto Dover’s heavily fortified Western Heights.
Glider 1 and four others would land atop the works of Dover Citadel, hoping to occupy the defenders while a much larger group of gliders landed on the slopes below the batteries and further along the Heights to the northeast. These men would join in securing the Citadel and then the nearby landward-facing bastion, while another mass of gliders was landing near the so-called Drop Redoubt, whose guns covered the docks and the approaches into Dover. Meanwhile a second large group of gliders would land in the level fields north of Dover Castle, on the east side of the city, under Bräuer’s second-in-command, Major Hans Kroh. A group of Kriegsmarine engineers and demolitions men would be simultaneously inserted by U-boat and seaplane to secure the docks and inner harbor and thwart sabotage. The HKK planners had predictably balked at the plan’s sending Bräuer into the teeth of the Citadel defenses, but Student was quick to assert his mandate from the Führer. “Bräuer goes onto the Heights or not at all,” he had informed Bayerlein flatly on September thirtieth. The former lieutenant-colonel had been in no position to disagree.
Dover and its harbor. The city and docks were framed by the fortified Western Heights to the west, and Dover Castle to the east.
And so, the lance of Sturmabteilung Bräuer began to turn. They passed deeper and deeper inland, climbing in altitude as the guns of Hastings gradually faded from hearing. The Kentish countryside below was almost dark enough to be mistaken for the sea at this altitude, save for the occasional glow of a motorcar’s blacked-out headlamps winding down an unseen road. HKK’s greatest objection to the inland turn had been navigation, and now that he looked down upon English soil, Bräuer privately began to share in their worry.
“Pilot, can you see any better than I can?”
“Not a bit, Oberstleutnant,” he replied cheerfully. “But we have a clear sky, so Oberstleutnant Drewes in the lead transport can take accurate readings from the headland at Dungeness.”
“At least I hope he can.”
“Don’t even joke, Oberstleutnant. Aha! See, those tracers are coming from Ashford.”
Sure enough, spirited anti-aircraft fire was rising from an area in front of them, joined now by a pair of searchlights scissoring through the darkness. The towrope ahead slackened.
“They think we’re bombers. The fighters are going in to draw fire now, Oberstleutnant.”
The sparking, thudding battle over Ashford slowly slipped to the the right of the transports as they passed to north of it.
“That’s it,” the pilot called, “the lead plane is turning.”
Seconds later, the transport towing Glider 1 banked into a right turn -- east-southeast, and straight for Dover. As the great lance formation became bent rounding Asford, the transport-glider pairs at its tip began to level off. Far ahead, the sheen of the Channel could be seen through the cockpit window, and along the faint horizon, France.
“Altimeter 4500 meters. There’s the signal to release.” The Ju-52 waggled its wings and then resumed level flight.
The pilot pulled the tow rope release, and after a long second Bräuer felt the familiar buck and watched the transport slip upward and away out of sight. Gradually, the engine noise -- a constant companion since arriving at the French airfield three hours before -- faded, leaving only the soft whistle of wind against the glider’s skin. Finality washed over Bräuer with the realization that they were now hurtling unpowered through the air on their seventeen minute descent toward Dover.
When word had come down that the invasion had been confirmed for an autumn date, and consequently would not include landings at Ramsgate, Student had rushed to Berlin to lobby Hitler not to dissolve Sturmabteilung Meindl. The men had already been training together long enough that Meindl’s force couldn’t be broken up and integrated into Bräuer or Ramcke’s units. Holding it back as a reserve or second wave wasn’t practical, because the clearings in which the gliders would land couldn’t be reliably cleared in the dark. Even without landings at Ramsgate, Meindl’s men would still have the advantage of speed and surprise -- as well as firepower sufficient to overwhelm anything short of a direct assault by British tanks. Student envisioned them dispersing into platoons and sowing chaos and confusion on the roads between Canterbury and the coast. He knew that the British command wouldn’t commit their reserves until they had a reasonably clear picture where the Germans were landing and in what strength. Unlike Bräuer and Ramcke, who would fall into defensive postures as soon as their respective ports were secured, Meindl would be free to take the initiative and press his advantage to the fullest. Even when the British defenders realized where the German attack was falling, it would be hard to coordinate a concerted counterattack on Dover with a battalion-sized group of assault pioneers marauding far inland from the beaches. Hitler had seen the wisdom in Student’s proposal, and readily consented.
Operation Rösselsprung -- Knight’s Leap -- the glider operations were now called. The men were flown to their bases in France and Belgium and sequestered in utmost secrecy. On the twenty-sixth of November, a pallet arrived from Berlin with the stimulants for the night of the operation. “Methamphetamine!” Bräuer had fumed as the packets were examined. “What are they thinking?” After relatively mild caffeine-based stimulants had helped assault pioneers maintain combat endurance for more than a full day of fighting at Eben-Emael, the Luftwaffe had become quite taken with the effect, and commissioned several studies on the subject by the Institute for General and Defense Physiology. For the glider operations in Holland, the men had been issued a new and far more powerful agent -- tablets of an unmoderated methamphetamine powerful enough to induce convulsions in some men. Berlin had been convinced that soldiers could be kept in three days of continuous combat with the substance, but the side-effects had been disastrous. Jittery soldiers had caused accidents, shot one another by mistake, and acted recklessly under fire. Bräuer had refused its use in England, and through Student had received confirmation from higher authorities that they would be be returned to the old caffeine pills. Nonetheless, someone had pig-headedly shipped them methamphetamine, and it wasn’t until the afternoon before the operation that the milder stimulants had arrived.
They were getting close now. From what Bräuer could see of Dover through the pilot’s windscreen, there was no great alarm -- only a few pairs of searchlights swiveling around as part of the general air raid warning. Even as he watched, one of them switched off.
Bruno Bräuer was determined to profit from every one of the glider and parachute program’s hard-earned lessons. From Eben-Emael to the Grebbe Line, assault pioneers had made costly mistakes, and success in Dover would require that they learn from each of them. Among the lessons of Eben-Emael was a redoubled impetus to maintain constant pressure on the enemy throughout an assault. Bräuer had spent ten months regretting the time wasted on top of the fortress on the first morning while the radio was being repaired -- a lapse which had allowed commanders in the nearby town to organize the attack which had ultimately dislodged the Germans from their positions.
“Your advantage is shock and firepower,” he had told the men countless times in training. “He who does not allow his enemy to recover from the initial shock of assault shall emerge victorious.” Bräuer clutched the grip of his MP34. At close ranges, the men in the glider with him alone had the firepower of an entire company armed with bolt action rifles. My advantage is shock and firepower.
The glider was passing low over the rolling hills just inland from Dover, in perfect silence except for the wind against the aircraft’s skin. Bräuer looked back at the seven assault pioneers behind him in the glider. “Final approach. Positions for landing.” Each man braced himself against his seat frame. “Good luck.” The smooth, forested crest of the Western Heights came into view dead ahead. Just beyond was the landing site and the Citadel. The glider nosed up, bleeding off speed and fighting to stay above the treetops over the final seconds of the approach. They were just meters away now.
“This is going to hurt,” the pilot whispered as the glider cleared the trees. He sent the nose sharply downward, and an almost instantaneous impact jarred the aircraft. Everything in the glider jolted forward as the nose plowed a deep furrow into the icy ground, rocking back upwards and coming to a stop just a few meters from the wall of a nearby blockhouse.
“This way!” Bräuer leapt from the glider, planting Operation Löwengrube’s first German boots on England’s frost-bitten soil.
Almost before he could regain his balance, a siren began to wail at the other side of the Citadel. After just seconds, it stopped inexplicably.
“Down!” Bräuer shouted to those following him out of the glider, as he turned and tossed a storm grenade up to the blockhouse door and threw himself to the ground. Almost instantly there was a shattering bang, strangely protracted, but when Bräuer opened his eyes, the grenade was still there.
He jumped to his feet and turned toward the source of the sound. Just twenty meters away lay his worst nightmare since those first minutes atop Eben-Emael. Glider 2 had bounced off the frozen ground and smashed into the far corner of the long blockhouse. One wing had sheared off, and the glider’s crumpled belly was torn open along its entire length. Ammunition boxes and radio equipment littered the surrounding turf, and Bräuer saw the glider turn upside down, and the horizon with it.
He felt his head hit the ground sharply, and looked curiously upward at his bare right foot. He wiggled the toes. Why am I barefoot? I shouldn’t let the men see me barefoot. If they see me barefoot, they’ll think that can train out of regulation gear as well.
Bräuer’s heartbeat pounded in his head. He rolled over onto his left side. The crumpled glider brought him back with a jolt to awareness of where he was. He propped himself up on his hands. The men from a third glider were around the wreckage, trying to assist the wounded. My stupid grenade. The grenade! How could I have forgotten?
He stood on weak legs and went over to Glider 2. “How many casualties?” His voice sounded strange to himself, his hearing still reeling from the grenade’s overpressure.
A sergeant mouthed: “Pilot’s dead. Two men with compound fractures.” His breath was steaming in the cold.
“Alright. One man can tend them. I want everyone else on me.”
“Yes, Herr Oberstleutnant!”
Bräuer turned and took stock. All five gliders had now landed on the field -- fortunately there was not yet any sign of gunfire or an alarm. Glider 1’s other seven men were evidently storming the blockhouse nearest their glider, and would proceed to assault the other five in detail. Bräuer ordered the men from Glider 2 who were not badly hurt to set up a light machine gun and mow down any British soldiers who came out of the barracks blockhouses beyond the field where the gliders had landed. He took the remaining 22 men and led them at a run over the causeway that ran over a dry ditch and into the heart of the citadel.
They had crossed about halfway to the citadel’s parade ground when they blundered into a sentry rounding the corner of one of the old barracks. He had a flashlight in hand, rifle still slung over his shoulder. He stood frozen, eyes wide under the brim of his kettle helmet, gaping at the intruders who had fallen under his beam.
“Surrender immediately,” Bräuer said in English. “If you so much as speak, you will be shot.”
Without warning, the sentry flung his flashlight straight at Bräuer’s head and sprinted in the opposite direction, yelling. The flashlight missed, but as it passed out of Bräuer’s field of vision, he found the darkness ahead much deeper than it had been. The Germans fired hotly after him, but they failed to silence the man’s shouts.
Feldwebel Hürtz, one of the trupp leaders, began to run after the man, but Bräuer restrained him. Any more gunfire would prove a far more effective alarm than any man’s bellowing.
Instead, Bräuer ordered Hürtz and his men straight toward a large, low building about a hundred meters to their left. This was the citadel’s armory, and was the most vital objective for the early phase of the assault. In all likelihood it was deserted at this hour, so he ordered them, upon securing it, to set up their light machine gun in a position to rake the parade ground.
Bräuer himself would lead the remaining two truppen toward the long brick building off to their right, which contained the officers’ quarters. They set off running again down the now-floodlit lawns, encountering no further opposition, and soon stacked on each side of the building’s great stone entryway. Bräuer peered around the corner, and saw two elegant front doors. He reduced them to firewood with a single storm grenade, and the assault pioneers charged into the breach.
They fanned up the main staircase and down the narrow, darkened hallways of the old Victorian structure, the alarmed shouts of rudely awakened officers echoing from room to room.
“Keil, Peiper, on me! I’m looking for the roof.” Bräuer found a corridor leading deeper into the building. A uniformed British officer blundered into the way, but Bräuer shoved him over with all his might and shouted for the two machine gunners to keep up. They raced past bedrooms and a suite of offices, where Bräuer had to bowl over several other officers cautiously stepping out their doors. The Germans turned, made it a short way down a second long hallway, and at last came to a narrow landing where a wooden staircase ascended to a closed heavy door. Keil and Peiper trundled up behind him with their MG34. “Stay there.” Bräuer climbed the stairs and tried the door. Locked. Two rounds from his submachine gun cleanly carried away they bolt, and he swung the door open. He was on the building’s long flat roof, just as it had appeared in the reconnaissance photographs. Perfect. As he stood there, a German glider whispered over the rooftop and down toward the field beyond.
He called for Keil and Peiper, and positioned them on the parapet overlooking the building’s entrance. “If any soup-bowled heads show up down there, let them have it.”
From deep within the building, a spurt of gunfire sounded, followed by a lone shot, and then breaking glass. Bräuer raced back down the stairs. He soon found Feldwebel Kross in the library, interrogating a very red-faced Scot wearing not much more than his muttonchops.
“This is Major Brown, Oberstleutnant. Haven’t been able to get much more than spittle out of him, but apparently he’s the battery commander. What should we do?”
“Not much good, Kross,” Bräuer said. “Just make sure that he’s restrained. Where do thing stand as far as the others?”
“We’ve taken about thirty prisoners, and we’re herding them all into the basement. A couple of them tried to fight it out with pistols, but we got the better of them.”
“Good work, Kross. Now I want a team to to search every nook of this place to make sure no one is hiding out on us, and another one to round up all the radio equipment and secret papers they can find.”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant.”
“And, Kross, I want --”
The high rattle of the machine gun sounded from the rooftop. There were a few seconds’ pause, and then frantic bursts. Bräuer ran to the landing, where he found two assault pioneers firing their submachine guns through medieval-style loopholes in the building’s façade -- and then down to the foyer, where the entrance was being barricaded with a dinner table and the stunned prisoner-officers herded into the basement. Another bicker from the machine gun on the roof.
They could, of course, stay in this fortress of a building, but soon the citadel’s defenses would come fully to life, and then even this bastion would prove untenable. Shock and firepower.
“Kross!” Bräuer roared.
From somewhere high above, the sergeant answered.
“Get down here with Trupp 7!”
Kross and five subordinates soon appeared.
“Alright. Weiss and his men are to hold this building at all costs. We, on the other hand, are to have covering fire from the Trupp 9 machine gun. We’ll see if we can make it on foot back to our landing site. Once there, I want to link up with the others, seize the battery, and then relieve Trupp 9 in force.”
At Bräuer’s signal, the barricading table was moved, and the seven assault pioneers sprinted out the open doorway and down the steps. They found the lawns in front of the Officers’ Quarters to be empty at the moment, though now brightly lit. Perhaps half a dozen bodies could be seen on far side of the lawns, near one of the barracks.
The Germans pressed forward, at last spotting a group of soldiers coming out of the barracks to their left, and cut them down with submachine gun fire. They hurled a few incendiary grenades into the windows of both that barracks and the one across the lawn from the Officers’ Quarters, then dashed through the darkness back to the causeway and to the area where their gliders had landed.
Bräuer was pleased to see two Germans marching several dozen surrendered British into one of the blockhouses, and the wounded from Glider 2 receiving treatment inside Glider 1, where powerful lights had been rigged.
Leutnant Christiansen, Bräuer’s second in his own command trupp, emerged from the fuselage and saluted. “Blockhouses 1 through 4, and 6, all taken. The bastards in 5 are holding out. You may notice the extra gliders over there on the far side, Oberstleutnant,” -- Bräuer hadn’t -- “but two pilots from 1-2 got confused and set down here.”
Although Bräuer was pleased to have 16 extra men from Sturmpionier Kompanie 1’s second zug, the imprecision galled him.
“The bad news,” Christiansen continued, “is that apparently one of those gliders was carrying almost all of 1’s morphine.”
Reflecting on the fact that a quarter of their still-more-precious radios were even now strewn about his feet, reduced to scrap and tinsel, Bräuer scarcely registered the outrage. He checked his watch. They had been on the ground for fourteen minutes. It seemed like a short amount of time, but the success or failure of the whole operation would have already been decided more than a kilometer away at the docks. Bräuer winced.
Setting machine guns in place, Bräuer ordered the Blockhouse 5 door breached with a powerful shaped charge. When the smoke cleared, 56 shaken artillerymen recognized the odds and filed out with their hands raised.
From the seaward slope of the Heights, he could now hear Hauptmann Barenthin and Hauptmann Hackl’s men engaging the pillboxes on the citadel’s outer perimeter. It seemed that they had now rounded up a majority of the off-duty garrison, but there would still be at least three hundred men on watch through the night, mainly along these outer defenses, who would be ready to put up a much stiffer fight than their fellows who had been rousted from their beds.
Yet Bräuer had less than forty men here, with whom he could either assault the Citadel Battery and the warren of tunnels below, which lay to the west, or relieve the two truppen now sorely pressed to hold the Inner Citadel. Plainly, he could not do both simultaneously, yet the operation’s timeline now demanded exactly that.
“Christiansen! Send a squad with two flamethrowers and plenty of explosives. They are to seize the Battery, and then work their way down from gallery to gallery, clearing any resistance they encounter. That should soon put pressure on those perimeter emplacements. Even if we cannot kill so large a number, we can at least force them to retreat before the flames. Everyone else -- our improvised hospital excepted -- is to be in your strike force.”
The twenty-two year old lieutenant saluted. The crack of shaped Hohlladungwaffe charges echoed in the distance.
“See there across the causeway, Christiansen? That nearest barracks to the left is to be our first objective. Take it, and we’ll control the parade ground and take the pressure off Feldwebel Hürtz and his men who, as far as we know, are in the Armory. We must then rapidly storm the remaining two barracks: the one further off to the right of the causeway, and then the one which stands between the parade ground and the lawns of the Officers’ Quarters.”
Chapter III: The Lion’s Den
Part XXXVII
December 1, 1936
The throb of hundreds of engines filled the frigid air above the Pas-de-Calais as the dark flock of aircraft assembled. By the light of the nearly full moon, 92 Ju-52 transports and their towed gliders wheeled in great circles as their fighter escorts took off from the runways below. It was shortly after midnight, and as the last of the biplanes fought their way to altitude, the signal went out for the aerial armada to come into formation. Every pilot had executed these banks and turns dozens of times; each knew his carefully assigned place. Converging into a dark lance more than 10 kilometers long, the planes turned north.
At the tip of the lance, in a glider painted with a large white 1, Oberstleutnant Bruno Bräuer steeled himself to land the first blow of the historic invasion. Tasked with seizing the heavily-defended port of Dover intact, this was the fourth Sturmabteilung Bräuer -- successor in name to the legendary force that captured Fort Eben-Emael and two airfield assaults that Bräuer had led in France -- and was by far the largest. 736 assault pioneers composed a headquarters section and ten companies of 72 men, each one in turn made up of three three-glider platoons. Normally built to carry ten men, each DFS 230(II) glider instead bore a smaller eight-man squad and 360 kg of extra supplies. Every man was armed with an automatic weapon, the reliable and accurate MP34, a Luger pistol sidearm, a folding-variant Kampfmesser knife and a brace of storm grenades. Divided among the 92 gliders’ ready-use crates were a plethora of additional items, of variable practicality. There were 92 MG34 light machine guns (one per squad, each with 3,000 rounds of ammunition), 5,200 hand grenades (assault, defensive high-fragmentation, smoke, phosphorus, thermite and several containing an aerosolized form of capsaicin), 10 leGrW 36 light mortars (two hundred 50 mm rounds each), 10 flamethrowers, 92 Kar98k rifles, 10,000 kg of explosives (shaped, granulated, as putty and in sticks), 20 kilometers of wire and fuses, 300 spikes for gun sabotage, 5 inflatable rubber rafts, 300 liters of gasoline, 25 liters of motor oil, 12 radios, 20 sets of semaphore flags, 5 signal lights, 4 sets of block-and-tackle winches, 36 German flags, 6 British flags, 20 sets of horseshoes and a single light aircraft engine. There were 15 kilometers of telephone cable, 550 entrenchment tools, 257 various other tools (ranging from general-purpose hammers to heavy bolt cutters to special screwdrivers that could be used to disassemble the glider frames), 900 flares (red, red star, green, double green, white star, and yellow mortar), 270 maps and schematics, 3 portable alcohol-burning stoves, 2,578 tinned meal rations, 500 liters of drinking water, 5,225 caffeine tablets, 746 gas masks and 2,000 sets of one-use rubber shackles. In the medical kits (divided among ten company sanitäter), there were enough bandages to wrap around the entire circumference of Dover Harbor and enough morphine to kill every single man in Sturmabteilung Bräuer. The attack force carried 16 still cameras (half of them color), parts to assemble a gasoline-powered electric generator, 5 carbon-arc strobe lights, and a Kinarri movie camera with 8 kilometers of 16 mm film. They carried more than 40,000 leaflets printed in English, £300,000 in large notes (both for bribes and the lawful purchase of any goods somehow omitted from the near-exhaustive equipment list), 200 sets of warm clothing, roughly 5,000 bars of chocolate, 3000 kg of quick-drying cement, a violin, 3 bugles, a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, 15 Bibles (five Roman Catholic, nine Protestant and one Reformed), a set of Pathé loudspeakers, 95 magnetic compasses, 190 sets of binoculars, 8 apothecary’s scales, 11 blowtorches, 2 hectares of camouflage netting and 6 footballs. Weightiest among the hundreds of other entries rounding out the equipment manifest were 260,000 rounds of crated small-caliber ammunition.
For nearly five months, Sturmabteilung Bräuer had trained relentlessly, meticulously -- obsessively -- for this night. Oberst Kurt Student, overall commander of the operation, had given Bräuer full discretion over the training and preparation for the mission, spending most of his own energies on deflecting interference from superiors and ensuring that Bräuer’s every request was fulfilled.
Both men fully appreciated the consequences of failure. Three weeks after the Scholl Memorandum, Student and Bräuer had been summoned to the Berghof. In the study of his mountain chalet, the Führer had inducted them into the tiny cabal then aware of his plan to invade England. Looking almost disappointed at the equanimity with which the two officers took the news, he had handed each a copy of an infant draft of the plan called Löwengrube.
The invasion force would require three deep-water ports in the first hours: Dover, Ramsgate and Harwich. If they were taken intact, destroyers and fast transports could sprint across the Channel laden with enough men and supplies to establish a secure beachhead. If the ports were not captured, or were captured only after the docks and port machinery had been sabotaged, the Wehrmacht would have no way of getting enough men across before the Royal Navy intervened decisively. “Given the necessity of success, you should attack with not less than two thousand men per port,” Hitler said, “and that is final.”
Yet by the start of July, the Parachute and Glider school at Stendal had graduated just under a thousand men. Student and Bräuer had returned to the Berghof on the fourth to pitch their revised plan. They had evaluated reconnaissance photos for potential glider landing sites at each port, and found that none had enough open space to allow two thousand men to be inserted safely. If anything, Student warned, coordinating almost five hundred aircraft over each port -- transports, gliders and fighters -- would lead to more casualties through collisions and accidents than any enemy fire was likely to inflict. Instead, it was preferable to attack each port with less than half that number; even then, more than two thousand extra men would need to be trained, but this was within the bounds of what could be achieved. At last, Hitler had relented.
Student had been adamant that Bräuer personally lead the assault upon Dover, which he considered the most difficult mission. He had found himself hard-pressed to nominate qualified commanders for the other two forces. In the end, he had elected to widen the search outside the present cadre of Parachute/Glider officers. To lead the assault at Harwich, Student chose a highly decorated lieutenant colonel named Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke. A proven and daring leader of men both in the First World War and with a Freikorps in Russia against the Bolsheviks, Oberstleutnant Ramcke fit Student’s specifications to the letter. For the taking of Ramsgate, Student tapped a personal friend. Oberstleutnant Eugen Meindl was a pioneer-trained artilleryman whose name had come up as a possible substitute for Bräuer in leading the attack on Eben-Emael ten months earlier. Square-jawed and sardonic, with an athlete’s chest peppered with Imperial-era knightly orders, Meindl effortlessly commanded the unswerving loyalty from subordinates which Student felt was so essential in airborne operations.
On the ninth of July, Student flew to Rome for further talks with Hitler, who was on a visit there to confer with Mussolini. He traveled with the Führer back to Berchtesgaden, where he introduced him to Ramcke and Meindl. Hitler had been greatly impressed with both, and sent Student to Berlin with instructions to flesh out the operational plans with OKL staffers. There, in a room in the Hotel Adlon, Student and his commanders had spent three days poring over hundreds of personnel files to select their junior officers, glider pilots and NCOs. Student had given Bräuer alone final say over his selections, as well as plum training facilities in Berlin and on the Baltic coast -- Ramcke and Meindl would be jointly training their men at a larger camp in Saxony.
Oberstleutnant Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke (left) with Kurt Student at the Berchtesgaden train station, July 9, 1936.
Ramcke (left), Student and Major Hans Kroh (right) at the station. Kroh had just been confirmed as the reserve commander for the Dover assault.
On July fifteenth, 1,215 men had gathered near Lübeck for the start of a training program that would ultimately prove too much for nearly half of them. Six days a week the hard-driving Bräuer had drilled his men, with Sundays reserved for rest, English lessons and swimming in the icy waters of the Baltic. Bent on increasing the assault pioneers’ efficiency in close-quarters combat, Bräuer had brought in boxers, arms masters, marksmen and a Judo instructor to train them. Demolitionists taught half the men advanced explosives, while Kriegsmarine experts held a seminar on anti-sabotage operations.
To compliment the technical training, the men’s bodies had been honed with their commander’s characteristic intensity. Student, Bräuer and a clique of dietitians had conferred in the second week of July to draw up the ideal nutritional regimen for the men. Fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts and brown rice were provided in abundance -- Student managed to satisfy Bräuer’s request that the men eat nothing canned -- along with protein-rich venison, codfish and duckling. As soon became legendary in the unit, one of the captains had discovered a contraband chocolate bar in the mattress of a young Gefreiter and reported the man to Bräuer expecting him to set a 10 kilometer run as punishment. Instead, Bräuer had become so incensed that he sent the man home on the spot. “Nothing,” he had written Student, “can be allowed to impair the soldiers, whether from within or without.”
Even the relatively brief flight would sap oxygen from the assault pioneers’ blood, and Bräuer was determined that this not hamper the men’s performance. For two weeks in August, he had taken them to camp along the Austrian border for altitude training. From the deserted athletes’ village at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, site of February’s Winter Olympics, they had trained along the shoulders of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. As doctors watched and measured, they had exercised vigorously at its summit, which closely approximated the altitude of the longest portion of the flight in the open gliders. Two collapsed and were hospitalized from heatstroke, but by August fifteenth, Bräuer was ready to make his final cuts.
He posted the names of the 735 men who would make up Sturmabteilung Bräuer, as well as those of the 20 ready alternates who would follow them to their Berlin camp for glider rehearsals. Engineers constructed a scale mockup of the landing sites, aided by continuing aerial reconnaissance over Dover. They rehearsed endlessly -- first with transports only, then with gliders; by day, then by night; empty, then weighted, and then with full men and gear. Some of them were granted special leave in September to take part in combat operations in Holland; seven alternates were called up to replace the fallen. Still they trained, Bräuer obsessively critiquing the smallest errors, until even he had few reasons to complain to Student.
Dover from the air.
Even now, Bräuer could sense the precision in the pilots’ maneuvers as they banked slightly to the northwest, and out over the waters of the Channel. It was a breathtaking sight. Bräuer felt then, for the first time, the true enormity of the invasion. Out the small square window he could see ships -- hundreds of them, piled like cordwood in the harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer. A forest of masts shone white in the moonlight, and Bräuer could see the luminous green wakes of torpedo boats bustling protectively far below, herding the mass of transports as they slipped out of their berths. He went to the opposite window, where he could see the bowed promontory of Cap Gris-Nez. Beyond it, another glinting fleet could be seen gathering, but the Cap itself was dark. Somewhere in that darkness were the batteries of heavy artillery that could be called upon to support Sturmabteilung Bräuer in the event of counterattack.
The lance made another turn northwest, and the Cap, the ships and the harbor swung out of view. Growing anxious without something to look at, Bräuer slipped up to the cockpit. There were only two transport-glider pairs ahead of them. The tow rope slackened slightly as the planes edged off speed. “What is it?” Bräuer whispered to the pilot.
“Some of the planes behind us have to catch up, Oberstleutnant. Nothing to worry about.”
The stark light of carbon-arc searchlights appeared in several places on the blacked-out coastline ahead. The bright beams wandered for a moment, and then began to search the seaward sky. The transports continued to slow, and the nimble shapes of biplane fighters buzzed past them and toward the source of the searchlights. Tracers drifted up from unseen emplacements, followed by the magnesium wink of airburst shells. For several minutes, the shooting drew closer, slipping gradually away to the left. At 0031, they crossed the English coast near Hastings at 3500 meters.
The plan called for the attack force to cross the coast here, more than 50 kilometers west of Dover, to disguise its true objective. They would turn to the northeast and proceed far inland, rounding Ashford and then tacking east-southeast to take Dover from the rear. As the gliders made their silent approach from an unexpected direction, the transports would continue on to Canterbury to draw off any unwanted attention.
Luftwaffe staffers at HKK had initially opposed the plan, preferring an easier direct insertion onto the wide bluffs midway between Folkestone and Dover. But this would have given the defenders at Dover ample warning -- perhaps enough to destroy the port and then mow down the assault pioneers as they crossed the open, coverless ground on the way into the city. Instead, Student and Bräuer had insisted on a much more violent and dangerous insertion that placed men straight onto Dover’s heavily fortified Western Heights.
Glider 1 and four others would land atop the works of Dover Citadel, hoping to occupy the defenders while a much larger group of gliders landed on the slopes below the batteries and further along the Heights to the northeast. These men would join in securing the Citadel and then the nearby landward-facing bastion, while another mass of gliders was landing near the so-called Drop Redoubt, whose guns covered the docks and the approaches into Dover. Meanwhile a second large group of gliders would land in the level fields north of Dover Castle, on the east side of the city, under Bräuer’s second-in-command, Major Hans Kroh. A group of Kriegsmarine engineers and demolitions men would be simultaneously inserted by U-boat and seaplane to secure the docks and inner harbor and thwart sabotage. The HKK planners had predictably balked at the plan’s sending Bräuer into the teeth of the Citadel defenses, but Student was quick to assert his mandate from the Führer. “Bräuer goes onto the Heights or not at all,” he had informed Bayerlein flatly on September thirtieth. The former lieutenant-colonel had been in no position to disagree.
Dover and its harbor. The city and docks were framed by the fortified Western Heights to the west, and Dover Castle to the east.
And so, the lance of Sturmabteilung Bräuer began to turn. They passed deeper and deeper inland, climbing in altitude as the guns of Hastings gradually faded from hearing. The Kentish countryside below was almost dark enough to be mistaken for the sea at this altitude, save for the occasional glow of a motorcar’s blacked-out headlamps winding down an unseen road. HKK’s greatest objection to the inland turn had been navigation, and now that he looked down upon English soil, Bräuer privately began to share in their worry.
“Pilot, can you see any better than I can?”
“Not a bit, Oberstleutnant,” he replied cheerfully. “But we have a clear sky, so Oberstleutnant Drewes in the lead transport can take accurate readings from the headland at Dungeness.”
“At least I hope he can.”
“Don’t even joke, Oberstleutnant. Aha! See, those tracers are coming from Ashford.”
Sure enough, spirited anti-aircraft fire was rising from an area in front of them, joined now by a pair of searchlights scissoring through the darkness. The towrope ahead slackened.
“They think we’re bombers. The fighters are going in to draw fire now, Oberstleutnant.”
The sparking, thudding battle over Ashford slowly slipped to the the right of the transports as they passed to north of it.
“That’s it,” the pilot called, “the lead plane is turning.”
Seconds later, the transport towing Glider 1 banked into a right turn -- east-southeast, and straight for Dover. As the great lance formation became bent rounding Asford, the transport-glider pairs at its tip began to level off. Far ahead, the sheen of the Channel could be seen through the cockpit window, and along the faint horizon, France.
“Altimeter 4500 meters. There’s the signal to release.” The Ju-52 waggled its wings and then resumed level flight.
The pilot pulled the tow rope release, and after a long second Bräuer felt the familiar buck and watched the transport slip upward and away out of sight. Gradually, the engine noise -- a constant companion since arriving at the French airfield three hours before -- faded, leaving only the soft whistle of wind against the glider’s skin. Finality washed over Bräuer with the realization that they were now hurtling unpowered through the air on their seventeen minute descent toward Dover.
When word had come down that the invasion had been confirmed for an autumn date, and consequently would not include landings at Ramsgate, Student had rushed to Berlin to lobby Hitler not to dissolve Sturmabteilung Meindl. The men had already been training together long enough that Meindl’s force couldn’t be broken up and integrated into Bräuer or Ramcke’s units. Holding it back as a reserve or second wave wasn’t practical, because the clearings in which the gliders would land couldn’t be reliably cleared in the dark. Even without landings at Ramsgate, Meindl’s men would still have the advantage of speed and surprise -- as well as firepower sufficient to overwhelm anything short of a direct assault by British tanks. Student envisioned them dispersing into platoons and sowing chaos and confusion on the roads between Canterbury and the coast. He knew that the British command wouldn’t commit their reserves until they had a reasonably clear picture where the Germans were landing and in what strength. Unlike Bräuer and Ramcke, who would fall into defensive postures as soon as their respective ports were secured, Meindl would be free to take the initiative and press his advantage to the fullest. Even when the British defenders realized where the German attack was falling, it would be hard to coordinate a concerted counterattack on Dover with a battalion-sized group of assault pioneers marauding far inland from the beaches. Hitler had seen the wisdom in Student’s proposal, and readily consented.
Operation Rösselsprung -- Knight’s Leap -- the glider operations were now called. The men were flown to their bases in France and Belgium and sequestered in utmost secrecy. On the twenty-sixth of November, a pallet arrived from Berlin with the stimulants for the night of the operation. “Methamphetamine!” Bräuer had fumed as the packets were examined. “What are they thinking?” After relatively mild caffeine-based stimulants had helped assault pioneers maintain combat endurance for more than a full day of fighting at Eben-Emael, the Luftwaffe had become quite taken with the effect, and commissioned several studies on the subject by the Institute for General and Defense Physiology. For the glider operations in Holland, the men had been issued a new and far more powerful agent -- tablets of an unmoderated methamphetamine powerful enough to induce convulsions in some men. Berlin had been convinced that soldiers could be kept in three days of continuous combat with the substance, but the side-effects had been disastrous. Jittery soldiers had caused accidents, shot one another by mistake, and acted recklessly under fire. Bräuer had refused its use in England, and through Student had received confirmation from higher authorities that they would be be returned to the old caffeine pills. Nonetheless, someone had pig-headedly shipped them methamphetamine, and it wasn’t until the afternoon before the operation that the milder stimulants had arrived.
They were getting close now. From what Bräuer could see of Dover through the pilot’s windscreen, there was no great alarm -- only a few pairs of searchlights swiveling around as part of the general air raid warning. Even as he watched, one of them switched off.
Bruno Bräuer was determined to profit from every one of the glider and parachute program’s hard-earned lessons. From Eben-Emael to the Grebbe Line, assault pioneers had made costly mistakes, and success in Dover would require that they learn from each of them. Among the lessons of Eben-Emael was a redoubled impetus to maintain constant pressure on the enemy throughout an assault. Bräuer had spent ten months regretting the time wasted on top of the fortress on the first morning while the radio was being repaired -- a lapse which had allowed commanders in the nearby town to organize the attack which had ultimately dislodged the Germans from their positions.
“Your advantage is shock and firepower,” he had told the men countless times in training. “He who does not allow his enemy to recover from the initial shock of assault shall emerge victorious.” Bräuer clutched the grip of his MP34. At close ranges, the men in the glider with him alone had the firepower of an entire company armed with bolt action rifles. My advantage is shock and firepower.
The glider was passing low over the rolling hills just inland from Dover, in perfect silence except for the wind against the aircraft’s skin. Bräuer looked back at the seven assault pioneers behind him in the glider. “Final approach. Positions for landing.” Each man braced himself against his seat frame. “Good luck.” The smooth, forested crest of the Western Heights came into view dead ahead. Just beyond was the landing site and the Citadel. The glider nosed up, bleeding off speed and fighting to stay above the treetops over the final seconds of the approach. They were just meters away now.
“This is going to hurt,” the pilot whispered as the glider cleared the trees. He sent the nose sharply downward, and an almost instantaneous impact jarred the aircraft. Everything in the glider jolted forward as the nose plowed a deep furrow into the icy ground, rocking back upwards and coming to a stop just a few meters from the wall of a nearby blockhouse.
“This way!” Bräuer leapt from the glider, planting Operation Löwengrube’s first German boots on England’s frost-bitten soil.
Almost before he could regain his balance, a siren began to wail at the other side of the Citadel. After just seconds, it stopped inexplicably.
“Down!” Bräuer shouted to those following him out of the glider, as he turned and tossed a storm grenade up to the blockhouse door and threw himself to the ground. Almost instantly there was a shattering bang, strangely protracted, but when Bräuer opened his eyes, the grenade was still there.
He jumped to his feet and turned toward the source of the sound. Just twenty meters away lay his worst nightmare since those first minutes atop Eben-Emael. Glider 2 had bounced off the frozen ground and smashed into the far corner of the long blockhouse. One wing had sheared off, and the glider’s crumpled belly was torn open along its entire length. Ammunition boxes and radio equipment littered the surrounding turf, and Bräuer saw the glider turn upside down, and the horizon with it.
He felt his head hit the ground sharply, and looked curiously upward at his bare right foot. He wiggled the toes. Why am I barefoot? I shouldn’t let the men see me barefoot. If they see me barefoot, they’ll think that can train out of regulation gear as well.
Bräuer’s heartbeat pounded in his head. He rolled over onto his left side. The crumpled glider brought him back with a jolt to awareness of where he was. He propped himself up on his hands. The men from a third glider were around the wreckage, trying to assist the wounded. My stupid grenade. The grenade! How could I have forgotten?
He stood on weak legs and went over to Glider 2. “How many casualties?” His voice sounded strange to himself, his hearing still reeling from the grenade’s overpressure.
A sergeant mouthed: “Pilot’s dead. Two men with compound fractures.” His breath was steaming in the cold.
“Alright. One man can tend them. I want everyone else on me.”
“Yes, Herr Oberstleutnant!”
Bräuer turned and took stock. All five gliders had now landed on the field -- fortunately there was not yet any sign of gunfire or an alarm. Glider 1’s other seven men were evidently storming the blockhouse nearest their glider, and would proceed to assault the other five in detail. Bräuer ordered the men from Glider 2 who were not badly hurt to set up a light machine gun and mow down any British soldiers who came out of the barracks blockhouses beyond the field where the gliders had landed. He took the remaining 22 men and led them at a run over the causeway that ran over a dry ditch and into the heart of the citadel.
They had crossed about halfway to the citadel’s parade ground when they blundered into a sentry rounding the corner of one of the old barracks. He had a flashlight in hand, rifle still slung over his shoulder. He stood frozen, eyes wide under the brim of his kettle helmet, gaping at the intruders who had fallen under his beam.
“Surrender immediately,” Bräuer said in English. “If you so much as speak, you will be shot.”
Without warning, the sentry flung his flashlight straight at Bräuer’s head and sprinted in the opposite direction, yelling. The flashlight missed, but as it passed out of Bräuer’s field of vision, he found the darkness ahead much deeper than it had been. The Germans fired hotly after him, but they failed to silence the man’s shouts.
Feldwebel Hürtz, one of the trupp leaders, began to run after the man, but Bräuer restrained him. Any more gunfire would prove a far more effective alarm than any man’s bellowing.
Instead, Bräuer ordered Hürtz and his men straight toward a large, low building about a hundred meters to their left. This was the citadel’s armory, and was the most vital objective for the early phase of the assault. In all likelihood it was deserted at this hour, so he ordered them, upon securing it, to set up their light machine gun in a position to rake the parade ground.
Bräuer himself would lead the remaining two truppen toward the long brick building off to their right, which contained the officers’ quarters. They set off running again down the now-floodlit lawns, encountering no further opposition, and soon stacked on each side of the building’s great stone entryway. Bräuer peered around the corner, and saw two elegant front doors. He reduced them to firewood with a single storm grenade, and the assault pioneers charged into the breach.
They fanned up the main staircase and down the narrow, darkened hallways of the old Victorian structure, the alarmed shouts of rudely awakened officers echoing from room to room.
“Keil, Peiper, on me! I’m looking for the roof.” Bräuer found a corridor leading deeper into the building. A uniformed British officer blundered into the way, but Bräuer shoved him over with all his might and shouted for the two machine gunners to keep up. They raced past bedrooms and a suite of offices, where Bräuer had to bowl over several other officers cautiously stepping out their doors. The Germans turned, made it a short way down a second long hallway, and at last came to a narrow landing where a wooden staircase ascended to a closed heavy door. Keil and Peiper trundled up behind him with their MG34. “Stay there.” Bräuer climbed the stairs and tried the door. Locked. Two rounds from his submachine gun cleanly carried away they bolt, and he swung the door open. He was on the building’s long flat roof, just as it had appeared in the reconnaissance photographs. Perfect. As he stood there, a German glider whispered over the rooftop and down toward the field beyond.
He called for Keil and Peiper, and positioned them on the parapet overlooking the building’s entrance. “If any soup-bowled heads show up down there, let them have it.”
From deep within the building, a spurt of gunfire sounded, followed by a lone shot, and then breaking glass. Bräuer raced back down the stairs. He soon found Feldwebel Kross in the library, interrogating a very red-faced Scot wearing not much more than his muttonchops.
“This is Major Brown, Oberstleutnant. Haven’t been able to get much more than spittle out of him, but apparently he’s the battery commander. What should we do?”
“Not much good, Kross,” Bräuer said. “Just make sure that he’s restrained. Where do thing stand as far as the others?”
“We’ve taken about thirty prisoners, and we’re herding them all into the basement. A couple of them tried to fight it out with pistols, but we got the better of them.”
“Good work, Kross. Now I want a team to to search every nook of this place to make sure no one is hiding out on us, and another one to round up all the radio equipment and secret papers they can find.”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant.”
“And, Kross, I want --”
The high rattle of the machine gun sounded from the rooftop. There were a few seconds’ pause, and then frantic bursts. Bräuer ran to the landing, where he found two assault pioneers firing their submachine guns through medieval-style loopholes in the building’s façade -- and then down to the foyer, where the entrance was being barricaded with a dinner table and the stunned prisoner-officers herded into the basement. Another bicker from the machine gun on the roof.
They could, of course, stay in this fortress of a building, but soon the citadel’s defenses would come fully to life, and then even this bastion would prove untenable. Shock and firepower.
“Kross!” Bräuer roared.
From somewhere high above, the sergeant answered.
“Get down here with Trupp 7!”
Kross and five subordinates soon appeared.
“Alright. Weiss and his men are to hold this building at all costs. We, on the other hand, are to have covering fire from the Trupp 9 machine gun. We’ll see if we can make it on foot back to our landing site. Once there, I want to link up with the others, seize the battery, and then relieve Trupp 9 in force.”
At Bräuer’s signal, the barricading table was moved, and the seven assault pioneers sprinted out the open doorway and down the steps. They found the lawns in front of the Officers’ Quarters to be empty at the moment, though now brightly lit. Perhaps half a dozen bodies could be seen on far side of the lawns, near one of the barracks.
The Germans pressed forward, at last spotting a group of soldiers coming out of the barracks to their left, and cut them down with submachine gun fire. They hurled a few incendiary grenades into the windows of both that barracks and the one across the lawn from the Officers’ Quarters, then dashed through the darkness back to the causeway and to the area where their gliders had landed.
Bräuer was pleased to see two Germans marching several dozen surrendered British into one of the blockhouses, and the wounded from Glider 2 receiving treatment inside Glider 1, where powerful lights had been rigged.
Leutnant Christiansen, Bräuer’s second in his own command trupp, emerged from the fuselage and saluted. “Blockhouses 1 through 4, and 6, all taken. The bastards in 5 are holding out. You may notice the extra gliders over there on the far side, Oberstleutnant,” -- Bräuer hadn’t -- “but two pilots from 1-2 got confused and set down here.”
Although Bräuer was pleased to have 16 extra men from Sturmpionier Kompanie 1’s second zug, the imprecision galled him.
“The bad news,” Christiansen continued, “is that apparently one of those gliders was carrying almost all of 1’s morphine.”
Reflecting on the fact that a quarter of their still-more-precious radios were even now strewn about his feet, reduced to scrap and tinsel, Bräuer scarcely registered the outrage. He checked his watch. They had been on the ground for fourteen minutes. It seemed like a short amount of time, but the success or failure of the whole operation would have already been decided more than a kilometer away at the docks. Bräuer winced.
Setting machine guns in place, Bräuer ordered the Blockhouse 5 door breached with a powerful shaped charge. When the smoke cleared, 56 shaken artillerymen recognized the odds and filed out with their hands raised.
From the seaward slope of the Heights, he could now hear Hauptmann Barenthin and Hauptmann Hackl’s men engaging the pillboxes on the citadel’s outer perimeter. It seemed that they had now rounded up a majority of the off-duty garrison, but there would still be at least three hundred men on watch through the night, mainly along these outer defenses, who would be ready to put up a much stiffer fight than their fellows who had been rousted from their beds.
Yet Bräuer had less than forty men here, with whom he could either assault the Citadel Battery and the warren of tunnels below, which lay to the west, or relieve the two truppen now sorely pressed to hold the Inner Citadel. Plainly, he could not do both simultaneously, yet the operation’s timeline now demanded exactly that.
“Christiansen! Send a squad with two flamethrowers and plenty of explosives. They are to seize the Battery, and then work their way down from gallery to gallery, clearing any resistance they encounter. That should soon put pressure on those perimeter emplacements. Even if we cannot kill so large a number, we can at least force them to retreat before the flames. Everyone else -- our improvised hospital excepted -- is to be in your strike force.”
The twenty-two year old lieutenant saluted. The crack of shaped Hohlladungwaffe charges echoed in the distance.
“See there across the causeway, Christiansen? That nearest barracks to the left is to be our first objective. Take it, and we’ll control the parade ground and take the pressure off Feldwebel Hürtz and his men who, as far as we know, are in the Armory. We must then rapidly storm the remaining two barracks: the one further off to the right of the causeway, and then the one which stands between the parade ground and the lawns of the Officers’ Quarters.”
Last edited:
Chapter III: Part XXXVII
The attack was soon begun. The assault pioneers stormed across the causeway but soon found themselves pinned down by a Lewis machine gun that had been set up in the window of the far barracks, throwing up tall plumes of frosty soil as the hissing tracers lanced into the darkness. Bräuer was on his back, trying to keep down while peering over a hummock to get a better view of where the fire was coming from. He heard, rather than saw, the bullets crack into the bodies of two of his men, who went down hard.
He rolled over and caught the eye of one of the trupp sharpshooters. His hands flashed quickly. Second floor. First window on the right.
The sharp pop of a Kar98k cut above the crackle of submachine gun fire, and Bräuer saw the head behind the British gun knocked forcefully out of sight.
Christiansen ordered the men up again, and quickly reached his objective barracks, easily suppressing the few artillerymen who dared to take potshots at them from across the parade ground with their service rifles. Meanwhile, Bräuer led one of the machine gun teams bulling through the back door of the righthand barracks, and straight into a hallway where about twenty British soldiers were lining up in good order, donning their helmets under the command of a sergeant.
Four minutes later, they and 67 others filed out the barracks’ main entrance single file with their hands in the air, the MG34 prodding behind them. Shock and firepower.
The lawns were now strewn with Keil and Peiper’s victims, laid out in heaps that suggested a series of failed counterattacks from the far side of the barracks that had the Lewis gun. It soon became clear that this was the only source of continuing resistance in the Inner Citadel, when word arrived that Hürtz and his men had successfully overpowered the Armory’s defenders.
The barracks was of little tactical value, and further casualties could have grave consequences, so Bräuer ordered machine guns brought up. If anyone appeared in the windows, they were to be shot. Other than this, though, no further steps would be taken to subdue the building’s occupants. The assault had to be pressed elsewhere.
Bräuer detached a squad with shaped charges to knock out a particularly quarrelsome machine gun nest just downslope, and another, under Christiansen, to reinforce the flamethrower men who were hopefully now working their way down through the tunnels and galleries of the Citadel’s outer defenses. The rest of the pioneers established a perimeter, and Bräuer returned to the roof of the Officers’ Quarters to survey what he could. On arriving, he congratulated Keil and Peiper on their good shooting -- both men were ankle-deep in spent brass shell-casings -- and looked over the parapet with his binoculars.
Fortunately, the gliders immediately downslope from the Heights appeared to have landed in fairly good order, and in the distance, the towering Norman silhouette of Dover Castle was painted by the magenta glow of three red star flares -- Major Kroh’s signal that the keep had been taken. Looking down and to the right, the port appeared to be intact, from what little of it he could see, but Kapitänleutnant Urich’s double greens were nowhere in sight.
Just eastward along the Heights, tongues of red flame were lapping from what was surely the ruined casemates of the Detached Bastion. Assault pioneers from that battle -- they would be Hauptmann Ludebrecht’s Sturmpionier Kompanie 3 -- could now be seen approaching the causeway on the eastern side of the Inner Citadel, holding their submachine guns in the air to clearly identify themselves to the nervous men on Bräuer’s perimeter.
He came downstairs to meet with Ludebrecht. The captain was to command, Bräuer said, an urgent thrust down to the docks to establish communications with Kapitänleutnant Urich and his Kriegsmarine demolitions men, and if they were either absent or had been defeated, secure the port against sabotage and await further instructions. It was about a kilometer’s march, and Ludebrecht set off at once.
In the meanwhile, Bräuer set a team of radiomen trying to salvage something workable from the crash of Glider 2. This was one night when he could not afford to be deaf and mute.
Shortly after 0200, word began to reach Bräuer that things were going badly at the Drop Redoubt. Kompanie 4 and Kompanie 5, tasked with taking this bastion directly overlooking the docks, had suffered heavy casualties assaulting up the northeastern slopes of the Heights. As the men of Hackl’s Kompanie 2 entered the Inner Citadel, Bräuer ordered them to prepare to join in the assault.
Finally: two green flares from above the docks, followed by a signal lamp from the lower part of the Heights. The demolitions men had chased away the police and succeeded in defusing the explosives wired to the docks. They had been radioing Bräuer’s headquarters section in vain for almost an hour. Ludebrecht was now wondering what to do.
Bräuer attached him to the now four-company assault on the Drop Redoubt, under overall command of Major Heilmann. Once this objective was secured, they had only to hold on until morning. In all, thought Bräuer, Operation Rösselsprung was being executed with astounding precision.
The radiomen at last returned to Bräuer’s rooftop perch with a working set. He immediately raised Heilmann, who had set up a headquarters and field hospital at Dover Priory railway station, just inland and downslope from the Heights. “Major, I have Kompanie 3 on the way to join you. When can you resume the assault?”
“Perhaps by 0240, Oberstleutnant. We have sustained heavy casualties in our first assault -- 21 killed and 20 wounded. Both of our doctors are killed.”
“I’ll send you morphine with Kompanie 2. What else do you need?”
“We have everything else, Oberstleutnant.”
“Then launch the assault at 0240. Get some mortar fire on them in the meanwhile.”
“Yes, Herr Oberstleutnant!”
Bräuer hung up the radiotelephone. “Get me that Major Brown person. I want to question him myself.”
One Gefreiter hurried down the stairs in search of the belligerent prisoner. Meanwhile, Bräuer made his first radio report to Student and his staff at their headquarters on the Cap: all principal objectives taken except the Drop Redoubt, with most of the force intact, and British resistance disorganized.
Several minutes later, Bräuer heard the boots of several soldiers tramp up the wooden staircase and onto the roof’s slate pavers. “Major Brown, what have you to say?” Silence. He turned, and saw two of his sergeants supporting Leutnant Christiansen, whose foot and ankle were thickly bandaged.
Christiansen saluted. “The Citadel Battery is ours, Oberstleutnant. We’re backing them up against the southern magazine, about 200 meters down the tunnels. Could be a hundred of them or more still down there -- I don’t know.”
“Good. Don’t let up.” As Bräuer dismissed him, he began to feel his own helplessness as the battle entered its next phase. Over the next half hour, he saw to consolidating the German positions in the Citadel, emplacing machine guns along the entire perimeter of its works, and unloading supplies from the exposed gliders. Still, sporadic fire harried them from the barracks opposite the Officers’ Quarters, and Keil and Peiper couldn’t seem to suppress them fast enough. The men couldn’t cross the lawns openly, and they were wasting an inordinate amount of ammunition just keeping the defenders’ heads down.
At last, Bräuer had had enough. Wanting his attention free to oversee the assault on the Drop Redoubt, he ordered the barracks taken down. 100 kg of PETN was placed in holes dug around each of the building’s four corners, and TNT and detonator wire run around its partially-exposed foundations.
There was no final demand of surrender. Bräuer pressed the detonator himself from the rooftop. There was a momentary pause, and then an ear-splitting bang as the barracks’ façade disintegrated in a cloud of gray dust. Large pieces of masonry flew through the air and smashed against the walls of the Officers’ Quarters, forcing him to press himself low beneath the parapet. Then came the smaller shards, which pelted the roof in a granite rain lasting several seconds. At last, only the fine particles hung in the air, through which Bräuer could make out a giant heap of smoldering rubble where the barracks had stood.
“Capture anyone who’s still alive.”
As two truppen combed the debris for survivors, another two crossed the west-facing causeway, and effected the move of the makeshift hospital into the Officers’ Quarters. Work proceeded quickly, and soon a modest surgery was running in the building’s basement. Priorities now turned to unloading more supplies from the gliders, and consolidating the prisoners, who were crammed -- now more than four hundred of them -- into the Armory basement. A select few were taken to Bräuer for questioning, including the commander, Brown, who had to be physically restrained at several points during the interview, and managed to spit halfway across the room and onto the Oberstleutnant’s helmet. Bräuer, finally slipping into a spare sock and shoe, dismissed the captives angrily. If another of his officers wanted to question them, he said, that man could have at it.
It was 0240. Bräuer climbed to the roof just as Heilmann’s attack began. The Drop Redoubt was a more modern fortress than the Citadel, with significant expansions made since the start of the present war, and a commanding view of the vulnerable docks barely 200 meters away. It had excellent fields of fire along the surrounding slopes, which were dotted with armored pillboxes. The redoubt itself was set back as a pentagonal fortified island surrounded by a deep, revetted ditch swept with protected machine gun emplacements. Unless it could be captured, the garrison could continuously threaten the docks, and prevent the orderly unloading of men that had to occur in just hours if the invasion were to succeed.
The sounds of combat at the Drop Redoubt were thin and distant, but the fight was clearly a vicious one. The gunfire came in furious rolls now, punctuated by the deeper thuds of larger explosions. Now and then, these were joined by the cracks of Hohlladungwaffe, strangely protracted and distorted at this distance. Surprisingly little could be seen from Bräuer’s position. Through his binoculars, he could see flickers of flash and flame through the trees on the western side of the Redoubt, and a diffuse pall of smoke wafting over it, but no actual fighting. The Oberstleutnant allowed himself to watch silently for several more minutes, but then turned away. There was nothing more that he could do.
Bräuer sent a platoon eastward to run a telephone line down from the Heights and to the docks, and thence to press on through the darkened city and make contact with Major Kroh at Dover Castle.
When he returned to the roof of the Officers’ Quarters, there was considerably less gunfire from the direction of the Drop Redoubt, but no green flare. Bräuer tried to see what was going on by radio, but had a hard time reaching anyone.
At last, Heilmann came on the line at Dover Priory. “The attack has failed, Oberstleutnant. We have sustained nearly a hundred casualties. The position is too well-fortified. It seems that men from the Citadel were ordered to fall back to the Redoubt during the initial assault -- there are very many of them.”
There was nothing else that Bräuer could do, for the moment, so he instructed Heilmann to secure his position and await further orders or reinforcement. Shortly after 0330, the telephone patrol linked up with Major Kroh’s men at the Castle, and they quickly patched the major through.
“The castle is ours, Oberstleutnant. We had a brief firefight to take it, but none of the men were badly hurt. It was only lightly guarded.”
“Have you taken the Admiralty building south of the castle?”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant. I have machine gunners in it to watch the eastern approaches to the city.”
“Good, Kroh. Good. We have not been able to take the Drop Redoubt, yet, but the docks seem to be secure for the moment. Heilmann is taking a defensive posture to keep the Redoubt’s garrison contained. Right now, I’m most worried about any armored cars or light tanks they might have at Deal. Plant explosives along the eastern approaches to the city, and make sure you have clear fields of fire.”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant! I will report back shortly.”
Sturmabteilung Bräuer now controlled a narrow crescent of the city -- some two kilometers long, but in places only a hundred meters deep. Two companies of Germans led by Bräuer himself occupied Dover Citadel and its outlying batteries, while another company reinforced by the Kriegsmarine demolitions men defended the western docks. From the great stone keep of Dover Castle, Major Kroh and Kompanien 8, 9 and 10 dominated the eastern docks and the city center. The four reeling companies of Major Heilmann’s attack were sprawled out around the inland shoulders of the Western Heights below the Drop Redoubt, and were digging in to defend the makeshift hospital and command post in the railway station and a nearby school. For the first time since the start of the assault, silence had fallen over Dover. Dawn was less than four hours away.
“Ship spotted!”
The alarm came from the roof. Bräuer scrambled out of his commandeered office and up the stairs.
“Ship spotted, due south! Appears to be approaching rapidly”
Bräuer burst onto the rooftop and directed his binoculars to the tiny black cinder on the horizon that his men pointed out. The German destroyers that would deliver the first wave of reinforcements were not due until first light.
“Raise HKK-Calais on the radio,” Bräuer ordered as the radio operators trundled up behind him. “I want to know who that ship is.” Can it be a British destroyer?
Eight U-boats had been detached specifically to ambush and sink the surviving Dover destroyers that night, and Student’s headquarters had tentatively confirmed sinking both of them -- one of the most critical aspects of the whole operation -- during their first radio contact.
“Our destroyers have not set out yet,” Bräuer’s radioman said after several minutes. “Naval Staff-Calais believes they’re still on the French coast.”
“Then how --”
“But they say, chief, that they received confirmation that the two Dover destroyers were sunk earlier tonight. Picket boats report this sector is clear of RN ships, with all the action centered on a big fight to our west. Reconnaissance sees nothing.”
Bräuer could take no chances. “Raise Student and have him put me through to the reconnaissance people personally. For now we must treat that as a British destroyer and see to the defenses.”
He set off at a run down the stairs, the radiomen at his heels.
“Second ship!”
Bräuer turned.
“Two ships, Oberstleutnant. They’re about pretty far out.”
He didn’t even bother going back for a look. The British destroyers were not due back until shortly after dawn, when, if they had not been sunk first, they were to be intercepted and destroyed by the light cruiser Emden and a pack of torpedo boats. If these were British destroyers returning, they would have received warning of the glider assault and been summoned back to defend the docks. Each had enough firepower to lay waste to the Germans on the exposed wharves, and, more importantly, the vulnerable port machinery that could take days to repair. Sturmabteilung Bräuer would have to prevent such a thing on its own.
Racing across the western causeway, Bräuer took stock of the Citadel Battery in person. The two great 9.2 inch naval guns had been blown off their laying tracks and their breaches soldered shut with thermite. Four of the six 6 inch guns had received similar treatment, their bores melted through and pooled molten on the concrete floor. The other two, in the farthest gun room, had been knocked loose from their mountings when Christiansen’s men hit the battery with Hohlladungwaffe, but otherwise appeared to be intact. Bräuer ordered them remounted as quickly as possible and made ready to fire if necessary.
9.2 inch gun on open mounting, Dover Battery.
There were also several lighter artillery pieces on the Citadel’s grounds overlooking the approaches to the port: two 12-pounder and two 6-pounder coastal defense guns. These were all still intact, so Bräuer deputized one of the lieutenants to find men to crew them and figure out where the ammunition was and how they could be aimed and fired.
At last, a Kriegsmarine captain at Dunkerque came on the radio. “Oberstleutnant Bräuer, we have not picked up any enemy destroyers in the Channel near you. OKM-Ostend reports that there are two German, I repeat, two German destroyers, crossing near Dover to rendezvous with the cruiser Emden. Do not engage. Do not engage. Those are German ships.”
“We’ve been told that the Dover destroyers have been sunk. Can you confirm?”
The captain’s voice faltered in a burst of static. “Did not understand. Say again.”
“We have been told by Calais that two British destroyers out of Dover have been sunk tonight. Can you confirm?”
There was a pause. “No. The destroyer commanders at Ostend may know.”
While the radiomen tried to get through to anyone in Ostend, Bräuer returned to the Officers’ Quarters to apprise Major Kroh of what was happening. There were a few surviving light guns at Dover Castle, Kroh reported, and his men would ready them for firing as quickly as possible.
“Range approximately 30,000 meters,” one of the observers called. “They’re coming up fast, but in the dark it’s impossible to be sure of anything more.”
If these were enemy destroyers, there would be about fifteen minutes until they would be within range to fire on the port. Bräuer ordered everyone who could dig in to do so. Assault pioneers quickly appeared on the roof carrying sandbags. The demolitions men on the docks took cover as Kapitänleutnant Urich telephoned Bräuer at the Citadel.
“Urich?”
“There are four large ships at the docks, Oberstleutnant. In the event of shelling, they could sink and block offloading. I can commandeer tugs and tow them out into the center of the harbor, so that we can keep the docks clear. If the ships get hit and sink before they’re completely clear, though, they’ll block even more space. Should I proceed?”
“How fast can you work?”
“It will be close, Oberstleutnant.”
Bräuer set down the receiver and cast a glance back toward the Citadel Battery, where his men were trying to rehabilitate two of the heavy 6 inch guns. “Do it. Get as many ships clear as you can.”
Within minutes, the observers announced that the speeding ships were now within 20,000 meters.
“Anything from Ostend?” Bräuer asked the radiomen.
“I’m trying, I’m trying!”
“Keep trying, then.” Bräuer cast about for the telephone line that had been run down to the Battery, and an Oberjäger handed him the receiver. “This is Bräuer. How are the guns coming?”
“We have ammunition for the light guns, and can fire in a few minutes,” came the reply, “but the heavy guns are still in trouble. We’re doing everything possible, but nothing is certain. They’re more badly damaged than we thought.”
Bräuer pounded his fist against the roof’s battlements. “Work harder. Hold fire with the light guns. Without the range charts only the devil could hit anything at distance anyway, so I want to wait until they are closer before opening fire.” He called Major Kroh to relay the same order.
Then, the observers: “15,000 meters.”
“We’re in their range. I need to buy time,” Bräuer said. “Signal them by lamp: ‘GERMAN PARACHUTISTS AT FOLKESTONE. ALL SHIPS TO FOLKESTONE DEFENSE.’”
Laboriously, the message flashed out across the charcoal darkness toward the two onrushing vessels. Through the long range glasses, Bräuer thought he could make out each ship’s bow wave in the moonlight. A stiffening breeze was whipping the Channel into a rippling pattern that made the ships themselves appear to wobble. There was no reply.
“Keep signaling.”
“I have Fregattenkapitän Meyer at Ostend for you, chief.” The radiomen came loping up behind him.
He snatched the receiver. “Bräuer.”
The connection was faint and distant. “Those are our ships, Oberstleutnant. Do not fire on them.”
“If those are our ships, tell them to turn away from Dover. Repeat, tell them to turn away from Dover. They are not to approach the port. Do you understand? ... Do you understand?” Bräuer stuck a finger into one ear. “Kapitän Meyer, come in. Kapitän Meyer, this is Sturmabteilung Bräuer, come in.” Silence. “Meyer? Meyer? Come in. Come in.” Still nothing.
A faint winking out at sea caught his attention.
“Ship signaling!” The light continued to flicker. “Asking us to signal again.”
The observers: “10,000 meters. British destroyers, almost certainly.”
Bräuer rang up the Citadel Battery. “Are you prepared to fire?”
“Ready on your command with the light guns, Oberstleutnant. One of the heavy guns is partially re-secured on its mountings, but we’re still having a hard time aiming.”
“Very well. Hold fire.”
The minutes ticked by slowly, the destroyers growing rapidly larger and more distinct as they sped toward the breakwater: “6,000 meters! They’re slowing down.”
The radiomen still had no luck confirming Ostend’s report, but these vessels were plainly British in construction. Bräuer had no intention of waiting for them to show hostile intent. Down in the harbor, the Kriegsmarine men had managed to tow the largest of the docked ships clear of the wharves. Now the greatest dangers were to the port machinery, and to the bottleneck of the harbor entrance itself. The destroyers could not be allowed to reach it.
Bräuer rang up both Dover Castle and the Citadel Battery again. “Concentrate all fire on the lead ship. Fire on my command.”
The dozen assault pioneers on the roof crouched low against the battlements.
“Shoot!”
Several orange flashes splashed over the Western Heights, followed an instant later by a series of throaty cracks. Bräuer traced his binoculars out across the water to the destroyers. He counted off the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
A cluster of tall white plumes of water erupted around the destroyer, far wide to the left. Spotters called out the range and angle adjustments.
The guns began to bark again. The destroyer began to maneuver hard aport just as the second set of shots landed in the water around it. As the ship drew parallel with the coastline, bright points of fire bloomed along its length.
“Incoming!” yelled a spotter.
Seconds passed, then four widely-spaced shell impacts spattered close to the beach. The German reply was already on its way. All the rounds landed some distance behind the destroyer. “Lead! Lead!” Bräuer shouted, unheard by the gun crews below.
The second destroyer was turning now, too, bringing its guns to bear. One by one, they fired at the Heights. For ten minutes, the two sides traded fire ineffectually. The German guns failed to land a single hit on the nimble destroyers as they weaved back and forth offshore -- while the British, for their part, flung a few errant rounds into the city and peppered the shoulders of the Heights, but could not suppress the German shellfire.
Bräuer radioed the destroyer masters at Ostend: send ships at once. Luckily, the German cannonade was keeping the destroyers out of the harbor, where they would be unable to evade concentrated gunfire effectively. Nonetheless, his men were reporting that the captured ammunition stores were beginning to run thin, and the enemy rounds were landing with increasing accuracy.
The familiar whine of a 4.7 inch shell sent the men on the roof pressing themselves down for cover. A scudding bang sounded on the slopes just below the Officers’ Quarters, and when Bräuer emerged back over the parapet, he saw that one of the gliders had been torn apart and was burning fiercely. More explosions pounded from within the aircraft’s frame: a box of explosives still onboard was cooking off. By the time the conflagration had died down, a thick mantle of smoke hung over the seaward side of the Citadel.
Visibility was diminished to the point that Bräuer ordered his men to cease firing. From the other side of the city, Kroh’s guns could still be heard pounding away from the castle grounds. Ostend promised immediate assistance in engaging the British vessels, and HKK-Calais gave its assurances that the destroyer-borne reinforcements would be despatched several hours ahead of schedule, but Bräuer took minimal comfort.
For another half an hour, the duel continued. The moon was now obscured by thickening clouds, and observers saw no sign of friendly ships in the murky blackness of the eastern horizon. The British destroyers were pacing slowly back and forth now at about 8,000 meters range, firing occasionally, but clearly tiring. Several times they picked up speed suddenly and made for the harbor mouth, but near misses from Kroh’s gunners warned them away.
Bräuer had finally gone downstairs to check on the wounded when whoops and cheers erupted high above.
“We got one of them!” shouted a jubilant Gefreiter as he careered into the basement surgery. “We got one of them!”
When Bräuer was back on the roof, it seemed as if everyone was trying to relate a different version of the event at once. From what he could piece together, there had been what appeared to be a very near miss, followed a moment later by a large fireball amidships. The destroyer was already very low in the water, its cohort speeding away towards France.
The attack was soon begun. The assault pioneers stormed across the causeway but soon found themselves pinned down by a Lewis machine gun that had been set up in the window of the far barracks, throwing up tall plumes of frosty soil as the hissing tracers lanced into the darkness. Bräuer was on his back, trying to keep down while peering over a hummock to get a better view of where the fire was coming from. He heard, rather than saw, the bullets crack into the bodies of two of his men, who went down hard.
He rolled over and caught the eye of one of the trupp sharpshooters. His hands flashed quickly. Second floor. First window on the right.
The sharp pop of a Kar98k cut above the crackle of submachine gun fire, and Bräuer saw the head behind the British gun knocked forcefully out of sight.
Christiansen ordered the men up again, and quickly reached his objective barracks, easily suppressing the few artillerymen who dared to take potshots at them from across the parade ground with their service rifles. Meanwhile, Bräuer led one of the machine gun teams bulling through the back door of the righthand barracks, and straight into a hallway where about twenty British soldiers were lining up in good order, donning their helmets under the command of a sergeant.
Four minutes later, they and 67 others filed out the barracks’ main entrance single file with their hands in the air, the MG34 prodding behind them. Shock and firepower.
The lawns were now strewn with Keil and Peiper’s victims, laid out in heaps that suggested a series of failed counterattacks from the far side of the barracks that had the Lewis gun. It soon became clear that this was the only source of continuing resistance in the Inner Citadel, when word arrived that Hürtz and his men had successfully overpowered the Armory’s defenders.
The barracks was of little tactical value, and further casualties could have grave consequences, so Bräuer ordered machine guns brought up. If anyone appeared in the windows, they were to be shot. Other than this, though, no further steps would be taken to subdue the building’s occupants. The assault had to be pressed elsewhere.
Bräuer detached a squad with shaped charges to knock out a particularly quarrelsome machine gun nest just downslope, and another, under Christiansen, to reinforce the flamethrower men who were hopefully now working their way down through the tunnels and galleries of the Citadel’s outer defenses. The rest of the pioneers established a perimeter, and Bräuer returned to the roof of the Officers’ Quarters to survey what he could. On arriving, he congratulated Keil and Peiper on their good shooting -- both men were ankle-deep in spent brass shell-casings -- and looked over the parapet with his binoculars.
Fortunately, the gliders immediately downslope from the Heights appeared to have landed in fairly good order, and in the distance, the towering Norman silhouette of Dover Castle was painted by the magenta glow of three red star flares -- Major Kroh’s signal that the keep had been taken. Looking down and to the right, the port appeared to be intact, from what little of it he could see, but Kapitänleutnant Urich’s double greens were nowhere in sight.
Just eastward along the Heights, tongues of red flame were lapping from what was surely the ruined casemates of the Detached Bastion. Assault pioneers from that battle -- they would be Hauptmann Ludebrecht’s Sturmpionier Kompanie 3 -- could now be seen approaching the causeway on the eastern side of the Inner Citadel, holding their submachine guns in the air to clearly identify themselves to the nervous men on Bräuer’s perimeter.
He came downstairs to meet with Ludebrecht. The captain was to command, Bräuer said, an urgent thrust down to the docks to establish communications with Kapitänleutnant Urich and his Kriegsmarine demolitions men, and if they were either absent or had been defeated, secure the port against sabotage and await further instructions. It was about a kilometer’s march, and Ludebrecht set off at once.
In the meanwhile, Bräuer set a team of radiomen trying to salvage something workable from the crash of Glider 2. This was one night when he could not afford to be deaf and mute.
Shortly after 0200, word began to reach Bräuer that things were going badly at the Drop Redoubt. Kompanie 4 and Kompanie 5, tasked with taking this bastion directly overlooking the docks, had suffered heavy casualties assaulting up the northeastern slopes of the Heights. As the men of Hackl’s Kompanie 2 entered the Inner Citadel, Bräuer ordered them to prepare to join in the assault.
Finally: two green flares from above the docks, followed by a signal lamp from the lower part of the Heights. The demolitions men had chased away the police and succeeded in defusing the explosives wired to the docks. They had been radioing Bräuer’s headquarters section in vain for almost an hour. Ludebrecht was now wondering what to do.
Bräuer attached him to the now four-company assault on the Drop Redoubt, under overall command of Major Heilmann. Once this objective was secured, they had only to hold on until morning. In all, thought Bräuer, Operation Rösselsprung was being executed with astounding precision.
The radiomen at last returned to Bräuer’s rooftop perch with a working set. He immediately raised Heilmann, who had set up a headquarters and field hospital at Dover Priory railway station, just inland and downslope from the Heights. “Major, I have Kompanie 3 on the way to join you. When can you resume the assault?”
“Perhaps by 0240, Oberstleutnant. We have sustained heavy casualties in our first assault -- 21 killed and 20 wounded. Both of our doctors are killed.”
“I’ll send you morphine with Kompanie 2. What else do you need?”
“We have everything else, Oberstleutnant.”
“Then launch the assault at 0240. Get some mortar fire on them in the meanwhile.”
“Yes, Herr Oberstleutnant!”
Bräuer hung up the radiotelephone. “Get me that Major Brown person. I want to question him myself.”
One Gefreiter hurried down the stairs in search of the belligerent prisoner. Meanwhile, Bräuer made his first radio report to Student and his staff at their headquarters on the Cap: all principal objectives taken except the Drop Redoubt, with most of the force intact, and British resistance disorganized.
Several minutes later, Bräuer heard the boots of several soldiers tramp up the wooden staircase and onto the roof’s slate pavers. “Major Brown, what have you to say?” Silence. He turned, and saw two of his sergeants supporting Leutnant Christiansen, whose foot and ankle were thickly bandaged.
Christiansen saluted. “The Citadel Battery is ours, Oberstleutnant. We’re backing them up against the southern magazine, about 200 meters down the tunnels. Could be a hundred of them or more still down there -- I don’t know.”
“Good. Don’t let up.” As Bräuer dismissed him, he began to feel his own helplessness as the battle entered its next phase. Over the next half hour, he saw to consolidating the German positions in the Citadel, emplacing machine guns along the entire perimeter of its works, and unloading supplies from the exposed gliders. Still, sporadic fire harried them from the barracks opposite the Officers’ Quarters, and Keil and Peiper couldn’t seem to suppress them fast enough. The men couldn’t cross the lawns openly, and they were wasting an inordinate amount of ammunition just keeping the defenders’ heads down.
At last, Bräuer had had enough. Wanting his attention free to oversee the assault on the Drop Redoubt, he ordered the barracks taken down. 100 kg of PETN was placed in holes dug around each of the building’s four corners, and TNT and detonator wire run around its partially-exposed foundations.
There was no final demand of surrender. Bräuer pressed the detonator himself from the rooftop. There was a momentary pause, and then an ear-splitting bang as the barracks’ façade disintegrated in a cloud of gray dust. Large pieces of masonry flew through the air and smashed against the walls of the Officers’ Quarters, forcing him to press himself low beneath the parapet. Then came the smaller shards, which pelted the roof in a granite rain lasting several seconds. At last, only the fine particles hung in the air, through which Bräuer could make out a giant heap of smoldering rubble where the barracks had stood.
“Capture anyone who’s still alive.”
As two truppen combed the debris for survivors, another two crossed the west-facing causeway, and effected the move of the makeshift hospital into the Officers’ Quarters. Work proceeded quickly, and soon a modest surgery was running in the building’s basement. Priorities now turned to unloading more supplies from the gliders, and consolidating the prisoners, who were crammed -- now more than four hundred of them -- into the Armory basement. A select few were taken to Bräuer for questioning, including the commander, Brown, who had to be physically restrained at several points during the interview, and managed to spit halfway across the room and onto the Oberstleutnant’s helmet. Bräuer, finally slipping into a spare sock and shoe, dismissed the captives angrily. If another of his officers wanted to question them, he said, that man could have at it.
It was 0240. Bräuer climbed to the roof just as Heilmann’s attack began. The Drop Redoubt was a more modern fortress than the Citadel, with significant expansions made since the start of the present war, and a commanding view of the vulnerable docks barely 200 meters away. It had excellent fields of fire along the surrounding slopes, which were dotted with armored pillboxes. The redoubt itself was set back as a pentagonal fortified island surrounded by a deep, revetted ditch swept with protected machine gun emplacements. Unless it could be captured, the garrison could continuously threaten the docks, and prevent the orderly unloading of men that had to occur in just hours if the invasion were to succeed.
The sounds of combat at the Drop Redoubt were thin and distant, but the fight was clearly a vicious one. The gunfire came in furious rolls now, punctuated by the deeper thuds of larger explosions. Now and then, these were joined by the cracks of Hohlladungwaffe, strangely protracted and distorted at this distance. Surprisingly little could be seen from Bräuer’s position. Through his binoculars, he could see flickers of flash and flame through the trees on the western side of the Redoubt, and a diffuse pall of smoke wafting over it, but no actual fighting. The Oberstleutnant allowed himself to watch silently for several more minutes, but then turned away. There was nothing more that he could do.
Bräuer sent a platoon eastward to run a telephone line down from the Heights and to the docks, and thence to press on through the darkened city and make contact with Major Kroh at Dover Castle.
When he returned to the roof of the Officers’ Quarters, there was considerably less gunfire from the direction of the Drop Redoubt, but no green flare. Bräuer tried to see what was going on by radio, but had a hard time reaching anyone.
At last, Heilmann came on the line at Dover Priory. “The attack has failed, Oberstleutnant. We have sustained nearly a hundred casualties. The position is too well-fortified. It seems that men from the Citadel were ordered to fall back to the Redoubt during the initial assault -- there are very many of them.”
There was nothing else that Bräuer could do, for the moment, so he instructed Heilmann to secure his position and await further orders or reinforcement. Shortly after 0330, the telephone patrol linked up with Major Kroh’s men at the Castle, and they quickly patched the major through.
“The castle is ours, Oberstleutnant. We had a brief firefight to take it, but none of the men were badly hurt. It was only lightly guarded.”
“Have you taken the Admiralty building south of the castle?”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant. I have machine gunners in it to watch the eastern approaches to the city.”
“Good, Kroh. Good. We have not been able to take the Drop Redoubt, yet, but the docks seem to be secure for the moment. Heilmann is taking a defensive posture to keep the Redoubt’s garrison contained. Right now, I’m most worried about any armored cars or light tanks they might have at Deal. Plant explosives along the eastern approaches to the city, and make sure you have clear fields of fire.”
“Yes, Oberstleutnant! I will report back shortly.”
Sturmabteilung Bräuer now controlled a narrow crescent of the city -- some two kilometers long, but in places only a hundred meters deep. Two companies of Germans led by Bräuer himself occupied Dover Citadel and its outlying batteries, while another company reinforced by the Kriegsmarine demolitions men defended the western docks. From the great stone keep of Dover Castle, Major Kroh and Kompanien 8, 9 and 10 dominated the eastern docks and the city center. The four reeling companies of Major Heilmann’s attack were sprawled out around the inland shoulders of the Western Heights below the Drop Redoubt, and were digging in to defend the makeshift hospital and command post in the railway station and a nearby school. For the first time since the start of the assault, silence had fallen over Dover. Dawn was less than four hours away.
“Ship spotted!”
The alarm came from the roof. Bräuer scrambled out of his commandeered office and up the stairs.
“Ship spotted, due south! Appears to be approaching rapidly”
Bräuer burst onto the rooftop and directed his binoculars to the tiny black cinder on the horizon that his men pointed out. The German destroyers that would deliver the first wave of reinforcements were not due until first light.
“Raise HKK-Calais on the radio,” Bräuer ordered as the radio operators trundled up behind him. “I want to know who that ship is.” Can it be a British destroyer?
Eight U-boats had been detached specifically to ambush and sink the surviving Dover destroyers that night, and Student’s headquarters had tentatively confirmed sinking both of them -- one of the most critical aspects of the whole operation -- during their first radio contact.
“Our destroyers have not set out yet,” Bräuer’s radioman said after several minutes. “Naval Staff-Calais believes they’re still on the French coast.”
“Then how --”
“But they say, chief, that they received confirmation that the two Dover destroyers were sunk earlier tonight. Picket boats report this sector is clear of RN ships, with all the action centered on a big fight to our west. Reconnaissance sees nothing.”
Bräuer could take no chances. “Raise Student and have him put me through to the reconnaissance people personally. For now we must treat that as a British destroyer and see to the defenses.”
He set off at a run down the stairs, the radiomen at his heels.
“Second ship!”
Bräuer turned.
“Two ships, Oberstleutnant. They’re about pretty far out.”
He didn’t even bother going back for a look. The British destroyers were not due back until shortly after dawn, when, if they had not been sunk first, they were to be intercepted and destroyed by the light cruiser Emden and a pack of torpedo boats. If these were British destroyers returning, they would have received warning of the glider assault and been summoned back to defend the docks. Each had enough firepower to lay waste to the Germans on the exposed wharves, and, more importantly, the vulnerable port machinery that could take days to repair. Sturmabteilung Bräuer would have to prevent such a thing on its own.
Racing across the western causeway, Bräuer took stock of the Citadel Battery in person. The two great 9.2 inch naval guns had been blown off their laying tracks and their breaches soldered shut with thermite. Four of the six 6 inch guns had received similar treatment, their bores melted through and pooled molten on the concrete floor. The other two, in the farthest gun room, had been knocked loose from their mountings when Christiansen’s men hit the battery with Hohlladungwaffe, but otherwise appeared to be intact. Bräuer ordered them remounted as quickly as possible and made ready to fire if necessary.
9.2 inch gun on open mounting, Dover Battery.
There were also several lighter artillery pieces on the Citadel’s grounds overlooking the approaches to the port: two 12-pounder and two 6-pounder coastal defense guns. These were all still intact, so Bräuer deputized one of the lieutenants to find men to crew them and figure out where the ammunition was and how they could be aimed and fired.
At last, a Kriegsmarine captain at Dunkerque came on the radio. “Oberstleutnant Bräuer, we have not picked up any enemy destroyers in the Channel near you. OKM-Ostend reports that there are two German, I repeat, two German destroyers, crossing near Dover to rendezvous with the cruiser Emden. Do not engage. Do not engage. Those are German ships.”
“We’ve been told that the Dover destroyers have been sunk. Can you confirm?”
The captain’s voice faltered in a burst of static. “Did not understand. Say again.”
“We have been told by Calais that two British destroyers out of Dover have been sunk tonight. Can you confirm?”
There was a pause. “No. The destroyer commanders at Ostend may know.”
While the radiomen tried to get through to anyone in Ostend, Bräuer returned to the Officers’ Quarters to apprise Major Kroh of what was happening. There were a few surviving light guns at Dover Castle, Kroh reported, and his men would ready them for firing as quickly as possible.
“Range approximately 30,000 meters,” one of the observers called. “They’re coming up fast, but in the dark it’s impossible to be sure of anything more.”
If these were enemy destroyers, there would be about fifteen minutes until they would be within range to fire on the port. Bräuer ordered everyone who could dig in to do so. Assault pioneers quickly appeared on the roof carrying sandbags. The demolitions men on the docks took cover as Kapitänleutnant Urich telephoned Bräuer at the Citadel.
“Urich?”
“There are four large ships at the docks, Oberstleutnant. In the event of shelling, they could sink and block offloading. I can commandeer tugs and tow them out into the center of the harbor, so that we can keep the docks clear. If the ships get hit and sink before they’re completely clear, though, they’ll block even more space. Should I proceed?”
“How fast can you work?”
“It will be close, Oberstleutnant.”
Bräuer set down the receiver and cast a glance back toward the Citadel Battery, where his men were trying to rehabilitate two of the heavy 6 inch guns. “Do it. Get as many ships clear as you can.”
Within minutes, the observers announced that the speeding ships were now within 20,000 meters.
“Anything from Ostend?” Bräuer asked the radiomen.
“I’m trying, I’m trying!”
“Keep trying, then.” Bräuer cast about for the telephone line that had been run down to the Battery, and an Oberjäger handed him the receiver. “This is Bräuer. How are the guns coming?”
“We have ammunition for the light guns, and can fire in a few minutes,” came the reply, “but the heavy guns are still in trouble. We’re doing everything possible, but nothing is certain. They’re more badly damaged than we thought.”
Bräuer pounded his fist against the roof’s battlements. “Work harder. Hold fire with the light guns. Without the range charts only the devil could hit anything at distance anyway, so I want to wait until they are closer before opening fire.” He called Major Kroh to relay the same order.
Then, the observers: “15,000 meters.”
“We’re in their range. I need to buy time,” Bräuer said. “Signal them by lamp: ‘GERMAN PARACHUTISTS AT FOLKESTONE. ALL SHIPS TO FOLKESTONE DEFENSE.’”
Laboriously, the message flashed out across the charcoal darkness toward the two onrushing vessels. Through the long range glasses, Bräuer thought he could make out each ship’s bow wave in the moonlight. A stiffening breeze was whipping the Channel into a rippling pattern that made the ships themselves appear to wobble. There was no reply.
“Keep signaling.”
“I have Fregattenkapitän Meyer at Ostend for you, chief.” The radiomen came loping up behind him.
He snatched the receiver. “Bräuer.”
The connection was faint and distant. “Those are our ships, Oberstleutnant. Do not fire on them.”
“If those are our ships, tell them to turn away from Dover. Repeat, tell them to turn away from Dover. They are not to approach the port. Do you understand? ... Do you understand?” Bräuer stuck a finger into one ear. “Kapitän Meyer, come in. Kapitän Meyer, this is Sturmabteilung Bräuer, come in.” Silence. “Meyer? Meyer? Come in. Come in.” Still nothing.
A faint winking out at sea caught his attention.
“Ship signaling!” The light continued to flicker. “Asking us to signal again.”
The observers: “10,000 meters. British destroyers, almost certainly.”
Bräuer rang up the Citadel Battery. “Are you prepared to fire?”
“Ready on your command with the light guns, Oberstleutnant. One of the heavy guns is partially re-secured on its mountings, but we’re still having a hard time aiming.”
“Very well. Hold fire.”
The minutes ticked by slowly, the destroyers growing rapidly larger and more distinct as they sped toward the breakwater: “6,000 meters! They’re slowing down.”
The radiomen still had no luck confirming Ostend’s report, but these vessels were plainly British in construction. Bräuer had no intention of waiting for them to show hostile intent. Down in the harbor, the Kriegsmarine men had managed to tow the largest of the docked ships clear of the wharves. Now the greatest dangers were to the port machinery, and to the bottleneck of the harbor entrance itself. The destroyers could not be allowed to reach it.
Bräuer rang up both Dover Castle and the Citadel Battery again. “Concentrate all fire on the lead ship. Fire on my command.”
The dozen assault pioneers on the roof crouched low against the battlements.
“Shoot!”
Several orange flashes splashed over the Western Heights, followed an instant later by a series of throaty cracks. Bräuer traced his binoculars out across the water to the destroyers. He counted off the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
A cluster of tall white plumes of water erupted around the destroyer, far wide to the left. Spotters called out the range and angle adjustments.
The guns began to bark again. The destroyer began to maneuver hard aport just as the second set of shots landed in the water around it. As the ship drew parallel with the coastline, bright points of fire bloomed along its length.
“Incoming!” yelled a spotter.
Seconds passed, then four widely-spaced shell impacts spattered close to the beach. The German reply was already on its way. All the rounds landed some distance behind the destroyer. “Lead! Lead!” Bräuer shouted, unheard by the gun crews below.
The second destroyer was turning now, too, bringing its guns to bear. One by one, they fired at the Heights. For ten minutes, the two sides traded fire ineffectually. The German guns failed to land a single hit on the nimble destroyers as they weaved back and forth offshore -- while the British, for their part, flung a few errant rounds into the city and peppered the shoulders of the Heights, but could not suppress the German shellfire.
Bräuer radioed the destroyer masters at Ostend: send ships at once. Luckily, the German cannonade was keeping the destroyers out of the harbor, where they would be unable to evade concentrated gunfire effectively. Nonetheless, his men were reporting that the captured ammunition stores were beginning to run thin, and the enemy rounds were landing with increasing accuracy.
The familiar whine of a 4.7 inch shell sent the men on the roof pressing themselves down for cover. A scudding bang sounded on the slopes just below the Officers’ Quarters, and when Bräuer emerged back over the parapet, he saw that one of the gliders had been torn apart and was burning fiercely. More explosions pounded from within the aircraft’s frame: a box of explosives still onboard was cooking off. By the time the conflagration had died down, a thick mantle of smoke hung over the seaward side of the Citadel.
Visibility was diminished to the point that Bräuer ordered his men to cease firing. From the other side of the city, Kroh’s guns could still be heard pounding away from the castle grounds. Ostend promised immediate assistance in engaging the British vessels, and HKK-Calais gave its assurances that the destroyer-borne reinforcements would be despatched several hours ahead of schedule, but Bräuer took minimal comfort.
For another half an hour, the duel continued. The moon was now obscured by thickening clouds, and observers saw no sign of friendly ships in the murky blackness of the eastern horizon. The British destroyers were pacing slowly back and forth now at about 8,000 meters range, firing occasionally, but clearly tiring. Several times they picked up speed suddenly and made for the harbor mouth, but near misses from Kroh’s gunners warned them away.
Bräuer had finally gone downstairs to check on the wounded when whoops and cheers erupted high above.
“We got one of them!” shouted a jubilant Gefreiter as he careered into the basement surgery. “We got one of them!”
When Bräuer was back on the roof, it seemed as if everyone was trying to relate a different version of the event at once. From what he could piece together, there had been what appeared to be a very near miss, followed a moment later by a large fireball amidships. The destroyer was already very low in the water, its cohort speeding away towards France.
Last edited:
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.
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.
Last edited:
Well, I figured that no amount of mea culpas would make up for my unexpected and unplanned disappearance from the forum a few months ago, so an octuple-length update would be the best possible overture 
.
A few historical notes:
- The Drop Redoubt's defenses have been strengthened and modernized considerably over their OTL 1940 condition.
- The A20 highway has been extended from Folkestone as part of coastal defense efforts. OTL, it was a smaller roadway at the time.
- The general plan of attack is based on actual OKW studies done in 1940, with appropriate accommodations to the differences in Weltkriegschaft's timeline.
- Historically, parachutists were considered the primary threat to the Channel ports. In 1936, though, no combat drops by paratroopers have yet been performed.
EDIT: The update being broken up into 3 parts is not stylistic or intentional. There's a 50,000 character limit per post!
. A few historical notes:
- The Drop Redoubt's defenses have been strengthened and modernized considerably over their OTL 1940 condition.
- The A20 highway has been extended from Folkestone as part of coastal defense efforts. OTL, it was a smaller roadway at the time.
- The general plan of attack is based on actual OKW studies done in 1940, with appropriate accommodations to the differences in Weltkriegschaft's timeline.
- Historically, parachutists were considered the primary threat to the Channel ports. In 1936, though, no combat drops by paratroopers have yet been performed.
EDIT: The update being broken up into 3 parts is not stylistic or intentional. There's a 50,000 character limit per post!
Last edited:
It took me 40 minutes to read that.
I forgive thee.
But you must provide more updates during this year.
I forgive thee.
But you must provide more updates during this year.
Wow! That was a mouth full, but, you have returned! 3 Updates in one, I don't care. EXCELLENT! With your skill, no apology is needed!
Finally! A new Weltkriegschaft chapter to satisfy my hunger for might-have-beens...
Kurt_Steiner (1) - Thank you!
dublish (1), Enewald (1) - Problem solved!
Pershing - Welcome aboard, Pershing, and thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Kurt_Steiner (2) - *bows* Happy to deliver!
dublish (2) -
Enewald (2) - I promise. Now where's that halo smiley...
volksmarschall - Thank you very much!
Atlantic Friend - Indeed. The invasion is afoot at long, long last. Hope you enjoy it!
dublish (1), Enewald (1) - Problem solved!
Pershing - Welcome aboard, Pershing, and thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Kurt_Steiner (2) - *bows* Happy to deliver!
dublish (2) -
Enewald (2) - I promise. Now where's that halo smiley...
volksmarschall - Thank you very much!
Atlantic Friend - Indeed. The invasion is afoot at long, long last. Hope you enjoy it!
Looking forward to seeing the transports and barges sunk by battleship gunfire while the paras watch horrified on the beach.
This isn't going to end well...
This isn't going to end well...
You clearly haven't been paying attention. This is Weltkriegschaft - everything ends well for the Germans regardless of fact or plausibility, why on earth would this be any different?
You clearly haven't been paying attention. This is Weltkriegschaft - everything ends well for the Germans regardless of fact or plausibility, why on earth would this be any different?
Wrong, dear sir. If everything ended well for the Germans, Adolf would have found himself musing what on earth his brains were doing on the roof of his car at the end of the first or the second chapter...
Adolf will conqueror the world (by late 1938 at the latest I reckon) and then conveniently die at exactly the best possible moment followed by an implausibly miraculous transition to democracy.Wrong, dear sir. If everything ended well for the Germans, Adolf would have found himself musing what on earth his brains were doing on the roof of his car at the end of the first or the second chapter...
