Hello All,
Looks like we can expect part 3 of III:XXXIX over Thanksgiving weekend. Thanks for your patience!
~TH1
Looks like we can expect part 3 of III:XXXIX over Thanksgiving weekend. Thanks for your patience!
~TH1
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I've got more for you, Metroid17. Update goes up at 10:30 PM Pacific Standard Time tonight!
That's because there are still 12 hours and 40 minutes until the appointed time, sir!
Chapter III: Part XXXIX
Hanging up with Student, Kroh turned to find Heilmann standing behind him with his Luger out.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Numb panic settled into the base of Kroh’s spine. “What?”
“I will not let them move me.”
Kroh was fumbling down his pant-leg for his own holster. “What are you talking about?”
“You said, ‘We will not be moved,’ didn’t you?”
Kroh frowned, uncomprehending. Then he understood. Trembling with giddy relief, he began to laugh uncontrollably.
Heilmann stood silent and impassive. His helmet was missing, and his sweat-caked hair steamed slightly in the chill air of what had been the Drop Redoubt’s signals room.
Kroh fought to regain his composure, but he found himself cackling all the harder. He himself had not slept since the morning of November thirtieth, and eaten just twice in the same period. In quiet moments, he had heard Bräuer’s voice behind him and turned to find himself alone. Twice, he had been staring into his radio set only to see its knobs become the staring eyes of a dead British artilleryman.
“I’m sorry, Heilmann,” Kroh mumbled, finally, “I just didn’t realize what was going on.”
“We should discuss how to hold out through the night.”
“Yes. Get Hackl and Pietzonka. Meet topside in fifteen minutes.” Kroh and Heilmann exchanged salutes. When the third-in-command had gone, Kroh emptied his canteen into his helmet and plunged his face in. He would need to be sharp for who knew how many more hours.
The four company commanders soon stood on the grass near the Drop Redoubt’s observation post. The sleet had let up, and visibility stretched all the way out to the breakwater.
“So,” Kroh began. “Adler and Grassmel have a combined strength of 140 effectives up at the Castle. With my company that makes 210. The Castle could realistically be defended with half that number. Our only other demands, now that we have drawn in our perimeter, are the Drop Redoubt and the waterfront.
“Ludebrecht, Bieber and the divers report just under a hundred effectives, and are very short on ammunition. I propose to shift Kompanie 10 down to the docks within the next hour. There, Grassmel can help shore up our defenses and allow for a thicker and deeper line.
“Hackl and Heilmann, you two can hold the Redoubt itself. Meanwhile, Barenthin’s men and Wulpp’s men can take up positions around the Grand Shaft Barracks and the other abandoned barracks running down the Heights between here and the marina.
“Pietzonka, I think we should keep you down in the city. Your position keeps the pressure on the enemy and ensures that he can’t move too freely. If anything, I might like to organize another thrust into the city before dark -- maybe near King street.”
“Who is in charge at the Castle?” Hackl asked.
“Adler. But if there is a serious attack from the east, I will go back to the Castle and leave Heilmann in charge here at the Redoubt.”
“How is the Oberstleutnant?” Pietzonka asked, voicing the concern of the others. Many of the men still did not know that Bräuer had been wounded, and most of the ones who knew anything had heard only sketchy and contradictory details. When Kroh did not respond, Pietzonka cast his head down and let out breath through his teeth. “Can I see him?”
“Go, but be back at Dover Priory as soon as you can. We have much to do before nightfall.”
While Hauptmann Pietzonka communed with Bräuer in the kitchen surgery, Kroh’s plan went into effect. Kompanie 10 packed up and trudged down to the docks, carrying hot meals for the men already on the lines there. Grassmel sent 10-3 to occupy the Grand Hotel, a large five-story building that dominated the beach to the east of the docks and offered a base of fire down several important city streets. The pioneers found it deserted and quickly sent spotters and machine guns to the roof.
10-2 and men from one of Bieber’s platoons rounded up automobiles and overturned them to block all the major streets running into the heart of the city. Little by little, camouflage netting went up over the MG nests between warehouses.
A captured lorry trundled down the lines picking up the German dead for deposition in the makeshift morgue established in the refrigerated storage unit of one of the docked merchantmen. The British dead were cleared away only where they posed an inconvenience. Instead, men busied themselves piling cover around their own positions, or dousing the scattered fires that still burned across the seafront. Unrelieved by fresh breezes, a pall of smoke hung limply over the whole southern end of the city.
On the Heights, a stitched-up Barenthin joined Wulpp in arraying their two battered companies on the ground between the Drop Redoubt and Ludebrecht’s lines near the marina. There were several abandoned barracks here that had been stormed by Heilmann’s men on the first night of the operation, and these were quickly manned and fortified. Others clawed foxholes along the Heights’ last plunge down to the A20.
Tescher’s Kriegsmarine demolitionists were busying themselves mining the roadway. Some had found a store of volatile old nitroglycerin while ransacking a warehouse for batteries, and now stuffed it into the burned out vehicles that had been ambushed in the roundabout the day before. Another telephoned up to Kroh to politely inquire whether it was permissible to steal civilian fire hoses from the harbormaster’s stores. It was, Kroh said. “But why do you need fire hoses?” The young man answered that he was planning to divert gasoline from one of the underground tanks at the dockside into a ditch cut across the A20 -- in effect, a giant flame fougasse that could be ignited in the faces of attacking soldiers.
Ludebrecht’s men assisted by overturning more automobiles across the road. They attempted to derail a freight car over the A20 as well, but found that the tracks did not cross at the right angle. Grubby pioneers opened concertina wire across the few remaining gaps in the line, then retired to their foxholes for Grassmel’s hot meals.
From atop the Drop Redoubt, Hackl directed a platoon to go out with hatchets and cut down the last of the trees blocking his MG34s’ fields of fire. Even then, though, they had poor lines of sight to the streets around Dover Priory, where Pietzonka’s Kompanie 5 remained quite on its own. Standing next to Hackl, Kroh relayed fire coordinates down to the two U-boats. With the loss of the four guns below the Citadel, Kroh was relying on the two 88 mm deck guns to cover the A20’s approach into the city.
To the north, they could see the London road coming down into Dover. Headlamps stretched into the distance until they were swallowed by the fog.
“It’s just after 1500,” Kroh telephoned Adler, “and the British are unlikely to move for about an hour. I’m ordering all men not otherwise occupied to stand down for rest on a rotating basis.”
“Yes, Major. We see lights stretching back the A258 to the A2, but movement is slow.”
All along the line, activity lessened. Many units continued to dig, but the greatest part of the work had been done. Only the Kriegsmarine men continued unabated -- cutting sheet metal for cover, running telephone line out to the forward pickets, and erecting the carbon-arc lights on rooftops.
Two Jägers presented themselves at the entrance to Kroh’s command post, leading a bound man in a badly-oversized British uniform and galoshes. One of the radiomen waved them in.
“I am named Dr. William MacIntosh,” the bound man said in German. “I am one of three physicians now... now... held, by German soldiers. We have been moved to the Grand Shaft Barracks, along with more than a hundred other men. Are you Major Kroh?”
“Yes, Dr. MacIntosh. I am Major Kroh.”
“Three of our soldiers will be dead without good care. Two are already dead. We have not medicine and not sterile tools. Under the laws of war we are so entitled.”
There was nothing Kroh could do for him. Sturmabteilung Bräuer’s doctors were hard pressed as it was. They still had ample supplies, but it would be imprudent to dilute them. “I cannot do that, Dr. MacIntosh, but I have a suggestion. If you and your fellow physicians agree to help tend to our own wounded, I will send for your wounded and have them treated here at the Drop Redoubt by our own doctors.”
“I would be willing to do this, but I must consult the others.”
The others soon consented, and a lorry brought them and the wounded prisoners uphill, where they were carried on stretchers across the temporary wooden causeway that the assault pioneers had erected and into the Inner Redoubt. Sanitäts-Leutnant Sanger was overjoyed to find that one of the British doctors had been his co-resident at a Paris hospital before the war, and the reunion did much to ease tensions in the kitchen surgery.
It was getting darker. Kroh’s watch read 4:04, and the sun had been down for almost ten minutes. The British were moving in the city, and the company commanders didn’t like it. Men were ordered back to alert, and final entrenchment work resumed with renewed urgency. Along the docks, more assault pioneers plumbed the warehouses for anything that might be useful. The forward pickets were reinforced, and small patrols sent into the fields east of the Castle to investigate suspicious movements in the mist.
Bräuer’s mantra of “Shock and Firepower” dictated action. The Germans could either sit in their foxholes and wait for something to happen to them, or get up and make something happen. Now was the time for the thrust Kroh had contemplated earlier.
At 1615, Grassmel’s 10-1 platoon set out up King street under Leutnant Pohl. Kroh had ordered them northward into the city to make contact with the enemy -- to force him to react rather than act. The three truppen spread out across the wide street, rested and spoiling for a fight.
They found it four blocks ahead, as a machine gun clattered from the church belfry that the Germans had allowed the British to retire to earlier in the day. Two assault pioneers were mortally wounded before the leading trupp could get out of the open. The others found what cover they could as tracers streamed down the street. Pohl sent a machine gun team into the three-story office of a law firm a block back. By the time their MG34 had set up in the upper window, though, 10-1 was engaging British soldiers pouring across a side street to cut off the Germans’ retreat.
The machine gunners drenched the belfry in 8 mm rounds as Pohl pulled his men back out of the forming ambush. More British units were converging on the area, so 10-1 withdrew, chastened, to the docks. Grassmel called Kroh to contemplate a second attack, but the Major decided against it. Darkness fell completely, and calm descended on Dover.
As hundreds of eyes strained watchfully northward, the distant sound of motors wafted across the city. Kroh waited with Heilmann in the observation post, looking into the city with his binoculars. The attack felt like it might begin at any moment.
Seconds, minutes crawled by -- but still and vigilant calm still reigned from the Drop Redoubt to the Castle.
Pietzonka radioed that enemy soldiers had been seen skulking around his position. “I’m about to fire a flare. Be ready for action.”
A blazing white light shot into the air and hung over Dover Priory, but no sounds of gunfire followed. The light went out, and Dover remained quiet. Kroh slipped out of sight to relieve himself. He returned to the observation post to find the darkened Heights as still as ever.
Kroh trained his binoculars on a rooftop that appeared to belong to one of the offices on York street. Several almost imperceptible shapes were moving, crouching around something that could only be a machine gun.
“Major!” hissed Hahn, the radioman. “Major!” He sidled up to Kroh with an outstretched radiotelephone. “Hauptmann Adler.”
“This is Kroh,” he whispered.
The channel crackled with static. “My forward patrols have engaged enemy on foot. Outside my eastern wall. Platoon strength.”
“Alright, keep me informed.”
After several minutes, Adler came back on. “Two enemy killed, no casualties. Enemy is withdrawing back up A258.”
“Good. Keep patrols out there, Adler. I don’t want any surprises. Light it up if you need to.”
“Yes, Major.”
It was fully night, but the sun would still not not come for fifteen hours. Kroh radioed Student, who said he’d just received confirmation that relief had sailed from Boulogne. Kroh went down to the kitchen surgery to consult with Heilmann, who agreed that it was best not to make any announcement to the men. They had had their hopes dashed enough.
Kroh returned to the observation post, staring northward through his binoculars at the dim blackout headlamps still inching down the London road. They crept along, strung into a glistening, rippling chain that bobbed gently. Kroh started. A loud noise had just gone off in his head and his neck had jerked backward. Had it been in his head? He looked around. The other three observers up there with him were all calm and alert. He raised his binoculars again, watching the faint lights coming out of the north.
Again he felt his neck jerk, and realized that he had dreamed a snatch of a conversation. He was still looking through the binoculars.
“van Wingerden, I’m going below. Send someone for me if anything happens whatsoever.”
“Yes, Major.”
Kroh descended the stairs to the signals room that he had made his command post. The generators were out, but there was a covered kerosene lamp on, and light from the doorway to the kitchen surgery spilled into the small, cluttered chamber. A telephone exchange took up most of two walls, and the floor was covered by chairs, tiny desks and dropped combat gear. The radioman was working quietly in the corner by the lamp, and two NCOs were curled up against the exchange’s heavy cabinetry, fast asleep. Kroh found a blanket on the floor, drew it around himself and lay down. It was probably almost freezing outside, and little warmer in here.
Only the vaguest sense of dreaming came to Kroh before he felt someone shaking him awake. “They’re attacking! They’re attacking!” Kroh tried to ask where the attack was, but the shouts grew louder. “They’re attacking!” He couldn’t see the person very well. Kroh tried to clear his mind from sleep, but the shouts echoed loudly in his head. One eye opened, and Kroh became aware of his breathing. He was face down, his lips pressed against the cold concrete. The light from the kerosene lamp flickered on the far wall.
Kroh rolled over. The radioman was gone, and so were the sleeping NCOs, but Feldwebel Mayer was sitting by the light, prying at the Kinarri camera with a screwdriver.
“What time is it?”
Mayer jumped visibly. “Uh, it is about 1945.”
“Thank you, Mayer.”
“Where did it happen?” It was the voice of Hahn, the radioman.
“I’m not sure,” Mayer said.
“Hard luck, to be sure.”
Kroh noticed that his eyes were closed again. His hands were stiff and cold. He blinked and rolled over. Hahn was back in the room, talking quietly with Mayer. Another man was sleeping with his back against the telephone exchange. Kroh looked at his watch -- almost an hour had passed. He closed his eyes.
There was a vivid dream of a being in the glider -- but the glider was going somewhere else. Somewhere wrong. He tried to convince the pilot, but his mouth wasn’t working. A loud crack sounded in the distance. That’s the real assault. I’ve got to wake up. I’ve got to wake up! The glider was going downward. It was about to land hundreds of kilometers off course. What was the pilot thinking? I’ve got to wake up. Wake up!
The command post swam back into focus. Kroh was panting. The kerosene lamp had been put out, and he was alone in the room. All was quiet, but the uneasiness was too much. It was after 2200. Kroh considered taking more stimulants, but he knew that any more in his present condition would impair his aim and judgment. He got up and returned to the observation post. More lorries still seemed to be streaming into the city. Raising his binoculars, Kroh began to count them.
Somewhere over twenty, Kroh heard the hiss of a flare and instantly stopped the count. A blazing white rocket was climbing into the air over Dover Priory, bathing the northern slopes of the Heights in cold light. Within moments, the crackle of submachine gun fire began to drift up the slopes.
It rolled on for five minutes before subsiding to occasional, distinct pops. Hahn raced up the stairs from the command post with word from Pietzonka: “Kompanie 5 attacked from three sides by at least company-strength enemy. Five dead, eleven wounded. Unknown enemy casualties.”
When the last flare had gone out, the Heights were again in darkness -- this time all the deeper for the Germans’ ruined night vision.
Then came another message from Dover Priory: Pietzonka’s men were down to the last ten percent of their ammunition. If they were to hold their position, they would need resupply.
“You were down there,” Kroh said to Heilmann when he found him in the surgery. “How much of a chance has he got?”
The third-in-command bared his teeth. “Not less than the rest of us.”
“I don’t want to pull him out unless we have no choice. You’re telling me we have a choice.” The position at Dover Priory was exposed and vulnerable out in the city -- not on fortified high ground like the Redoubt and the Castle, and not backed up against the water like the warehouses along the docks. Indeed, the way the Heights were shaped, men entrenched atop them had a very poor angle to lend supporting fire. Yet this was exactly why the Priory was so valuable. It represented an incursion into the city that hampered British movement, and defended sheltered ground from which it would be ideal to stage an attack on the Drop Redoubt. Heilmann knew this even better than Kroh, having done just that less than forty hours earlier.
“Yes, right,” Heilmann said. “We have a choice. They just need more ammunition.”
Not long after, Kroh was on with Pietzonka. “Stay where you are. The rest of us are counting on you down there. We’ll send ammunition at once.”
“Yes, Major. We will hold fast.”
Kroh could sense the fear in his voice. Getting the ammunition down there would be trouble. The units at the Drop Redoubt were quite low on ammunition themselves, and even what little they could spare couldn’t be delivered safely. All the road routes off the Heights down to Dover Priory entailed fighting through substantial British forces. Instead, Kroh sent one of Heilmann’s platoons hiking downslope on foot with whatever they could carry.
They had just made it back up to the Redoubt when another flare blazed above the train station, followed by the sounds of furious shooting. This time, the battle lasted almost twenty minutes before tapering off to silence. “2 killed, several wounded,” Pietzonka’s report read. “More sizable enemy units moving into position around me. Ammunition again perilously low. Request immediate resupply.” Kroh was away from the command post when the message came in.
He was on the other side of the Drop Redoubt’s defensive ditch, crouched low with Hauptmann Hackl and one of the Kompanie 2 sharpshooters to get a better view of the cemetery. Since the deadly firefight there the previous morning, the British had kept about a platoon in place to guard against another counterattack. But now, they counted through their binoculars somewhere surely over a hundred men. If those men made a sudden rush for the docks, they would only be subjected to German fire for as long as it took to vault over a picket fence and cross the A20. Kroh and Hackl agreed that a mortar bombardment might be necessary, followed by an assault on foot from the Heights. More dark shapes were pouring through the cemetery’s eastern gate and assuming formation.
The men down at Dover Priory were scared. Sheltering behind crates and low walls, in the station house and on the roof of the school, they poked their muzzles out into the night and waited. Arms and kit clattered at the edge of hearing as scores of black shapes flitted from alley to alley, building to building. Pietzonka’s surviving sergeants crept from man to man, handing out the last of the magazines and whispering words of encouragement.
Breath steaming in the cold, the assault pioneers checked the actions on their weapons and stared down their iron sights. The men on the rooftops reported that enemy soldiers had taken up positions along three sides of Kompanie 5, threatening to cut off retreat up the slopes of the Heights.
Hauptmann Pietzonka conferred with his two remaining zug leaders in the station house. They had 42 men -- half of them wounded -- to defend the station, school and the space between the two. Pietzonka made it five times that number of British. After the assault began, they would have no choice but to fall back toward the station house. The railroad tracks provided a sound line of defense to the west. To the north and east, fences and shrubbery obstructed the enemy’s line of attack. The pioneers would have to keep them at arm’s length so they couldn’t bring their numbers to bear.
On the Heights, Kroh saw the British began spilling through a hole that had been blown in the cemetery’s southern fence earlier in the day. He turned and raced back up over the improvised causeway to the observation post. Grabbing the radioman by the shoulders, he pulled him downstairs and raised Ludebrecht to warn him of the oncoming danger.
Ludebrecht flipped a switch atop his seaside hotel perch, and the power of half a billion candles flooded across the A20 as the carbon-arc lamp switched on for the first time. The light caught onrushing men full in the face and struck them blind.
It was still dark some 500 meters away at Dover Priory, where a rolling storm of fire broke out in just seconds. The British had brought heavy machine guns up to concealed positions around Kompanie 5, and the air became a web of yellow tracers. Rounds cascaded across the darkened lines for several seconds until Pietzonka managed to hoist a star flare over the fighting.
The brilliant light revealed scores of kettle-helmeted figures charging toward the German positions. The pioneers opened fire at once, scything many down, but more were close behind. The last few defensive grenades tumbled out from behind cover and landed on the railroad tracks in the midst of two enemy platoons. The blasts dismembered several of them, but by the time the smoke had cleared, the first of their fellows were scrambling up onto the platform.
A Feldwebel stood in one of the station’s windows, calmly shooting the attackers with his pistol as they scrambled up. Another pioneer lay prone beneath an automobile, picking off British officers rallying their men down onto the tracks. Hand grenades killed both.
On the Heights, Kroh was on the telephone to Ludebrecht. Just as the British company flooded onto highway, the strobe had blinded them -- while illuminating them perfectly for the German gunners in the hotel and along the marina. The enemy would be stopped in his tracks, Ludebrecht assured Kroh. Then Kroh heard him start to curse.
Meanwhile, Gefreiter Martin Sückl led the remnants of Trupp 3 back across the lawns from the priory school toward the station house. The Holland veteran emptied his MP34’s last magazine at the British clambering over the school’s garden wall in pursuit -- then drew his Luger and fired while backpedaling. One of his truppmates had taken a bullet through the spine, and the three others were struggling to drag him to safety.
Tracers from an unseen machine gun across the street snapped around their heads, and by the time Sückl turned to follow them, one had already fallen. Another German trupp, falling back from the other side of the school, caught up with him. He waved them onward, shouting at them to help carry the wounded to safety, and one threw him a fresh magazine. Sückl covered their retreat -- expending the last of his ammunition and then grabbing an Enfield from a fallen Englishman -- but collapsed at last onto the grass, shot eleven times.
Atop the seaside hotel, assault pioneers with asbestos gloves picked through the shattered glass of the strobe lamp, trying to replace the still-glowing contacts that would have burnt their hands off. After a period of total darkness, someone had managed to fire a flare, but the enemy could once again see straight ahead, and were shooting hotly at the hotel roof and through its windows.
Once again, combat devolved to close quarters near the marina, as British soldiers swept past the hotel and engaged the assault pioneers on the water. “It’s bad,” Ludebrecht told Kroh, “and now it looks like there’s armor coming up the A20. This is bad.”
The scene at the Dover Priory station house was worse. Survivors from truppen along the perimeter were reeling back before the renewed assault, often fatally slowed by efforts to carry the wounded to safety. Kompanie 5 was almost completely out of ammunition, and critically short on morphine. Pietzonka radioed up to Kroh for help, but he knew that no relief could be organized in time. He ordered the survivors to the safest positions within the building, and prepared for the final struggle.
One MG gunner was still alive, and had leapt down from the roof, brandishing the red-hot barrel of his weapon at the enemy soldiers who swarmed around the building. They had taken staggering losses over the past two days, though, and would no longer be denied. He and the last of the other defenders outside were quickly overwhelmed by the onslaught.
The battle for the station house was brief but savage. The British stormed the building from all three entrances, throwing hand grenades in ahead of themselves. Pietzonka was the last officer left alive, and fought to the end with his pistol, then his Kampfmesser, then with fists, until physically unable to struggle. A British captain climbed in through a window and called for quarter for the wounded, but none was needed. Sturmpionier Kompanie 5 had been overrun to the last man.
Pietzonka’s last radio contact with Kroh had ended in a rush of static as the fighting reached the station house -- but Kroh was still not immediately certain what had happened. It was several minutes before pickets along the slopes overlooking Dover Priory returned with the hard truth. The silence from below meant the worst.
The overrun of the Priory imperiled the Drop Redoubt, but not immediately. For now, the most pressing threat was the column of tanks driving steadily toward the docks.
Ludebrecht finally reported that the incursion from the cemetery had been repulsed, although at worrying cost. Now, he said, his men were bracing for an attack from the west.
Kroh would have liked to call in support from the heavy artillery across the Channel, but ordering fire with such little distance between the two forces would endanger the Germans just as much as their enemies, and risk further damage to the docks.
“Korvettenkapitän, this is Major Kroh.” He had given one of his radios to legendary U-boat captain Hans Ibbeken, who waited in the harbor with his sister ship, deck guns manned.
“Go ahead. We are ready to fire.”
“Stand by. Armor piercing. Your target will be marked with red flares.”
The column of British tanks was now within a hundred meters of the roundabout where the first column had been ambushed. German pickets overlooking the road fired flares onto the A20 in the path of their advance.
The U-boat gunners in the harbor had a clear line of sight straight up the highway. Kroh saw two winks of fire flash on the water far below, and the streak of the shells toward their target. The crash of the guns drifted up to the Drop Redoubt several seconds later.
Ibbeken and his fellow commander Schuhart had brought their boats into Dover harbor only reluctantly -- out of torpedoes, and ordered by OKM to support Sturmabteilung Bräuer on the surface rather than dropping out of action for a day to rearm at Ostend. The demolitionists who had spoken in person with the submariners insisted that Ibbeken had accounted for four enemy destroyers during the opening hours of the invasion, and was apparently bitter at the lost chance to go out and hunt more -- and bitterer to have had his U-27 damaged and chief engineer killed by friendly fire during his reception. If the U-boat ace was bitter, though, he didn’t let it show.
The two 88 mm deck guns sent fast and accurate fire up the A20, aided by range corrections given by radio. Dodging the carcasses of their predecessors, the MkIIIs sprinted toward the docks as incoming rounds tore out huge sections of the roadway.
The lead tank collided at full speed with one of the burned-out lorries in the roundabout, setting off the nitroglycerin planted inside, and triggering sympathetic detonations in the other hulks. Two MkIIIs were knocked out of action, their tracks and gears hopelessly mangled.
There were eight more behind. At a signal from Ludebrecht, a wall of orange flame roared up directly in their path as the Kriegsmarine demolitionists pumped gasoline into the trench they had cut during the afternoon. As the remaining MkIIIs struggled to negotiate this latest obstacle, Ibbeken’s gunners struck home for the first time. An armor piercing 88 mm round hurtled across the water and bored through the hull of one of the tanks as it maneuvered. The explosion blew out the back half completely, raining searing wreckage on the rest of the column.
One of the tanks managed to maneuver around the mass of wrecked vehicles in the roundabout, driving up onto the sloped flanks of the Heights, and down at full speed toward the German lines 200 meters ahead. Two other MkIIIs followed it, but on the other side of the flames, the remainder turned around and headed back up the A20 as more 88 mm shells came screaming in on them.
Tracers began to stream from the turret machine guns of the tanks still in the attack. More red flares flew out of the darkness at the roadside and into their path. Just as Ludebrecht informed Kroh that he had ordered his men to engage, Hauptmann Adler at the Castle came over another channel demanding to speak to the Major immediately.
“Heavy armor coming down the A258 towards the castle. It looks like my long range patrols were destroyed some time ago.”
“Heavy armor?” Kroh shouted. “Vickers?”
“Looks like, Major.”
“And none of your heavy guns have an angle on the highway up there, do they?”
“Not from this side, no.”
“Then wait. Mortars can’t hold them back, so let them get close, and we’ll hit them when they can’t maneuver. How many can you see?”
“We can’t see well from up here, but my guess is that it’s a whole armored company.”
Kroh spread the intelligence map on the telephone exchange desk in his command post and scanned the legend. “So... That must be from the 4th Battalion, Royal Tank Corps, which is apparently out of Deal. The brigade is out of Canturbury. Let them get close, then we’ll hit them.”
Kroh pictured the layout of Dover Castle. Adler’s men occupied the great square keep raised by Henry II over the site of the original fort which his great-grandfather William had burned after seizing the city in 1066. Around the keep was a high stone curtain wall that enclosed the castle’s inner bailey. As time passed, the castle’s needs had expanded, leading to the construction of a formidable second wall that now enclosed the dozens of outbuildings put up in the centuries since. The oldest of these buildings actually predated the castle itself. An ancient Roman pharos had stood watch over the vital port since the invasion of Emperor Claudius, and now acted as the bell tower of St. Mary-in-Castro church. Overlooking the sheer white cliffs that formed the southern face of Castle Hill, Britain’s Admiralty had constructed a grand officers’ mess for Queen Victoria’s captains. Nearby were the 6-pounder guns overlooking the harbor and the city’s far eastern approaches.
The landward side was much more thinly armed. Although imposing ramparts had been set into the eastern and northern slopes of the hill, they had been defended with nothing stronger than the pair of water-cooled Vickers machine guns that the garrison commander had thought sufficient to defend against airborne assault. Almost two days before, Kroh’s own company had mined the roadway as A258 curved into the city, but such measures could only delay move in force by enemy armor. There were several anti-aircraft Bofors guns emplaced within the outer bailey, but none of these had a clear line of sight to the road. And so, the Germans would attempt to draw the enemy tanks almost under the shadow of the Castle, where they could be pinned in the narrow streets and engaged close-in by Kompanie 8, now led by Leutnant Frischer.
It would not be easy. The MkIIIs were quite dangerous for an airborne infantry force such as Sturmabteilung Bräuer, but were still only a machine gun-armed light tank, quite like the German PzKpfw I. The Vickers medium tanks dwarfed both, towering 2.68 meters tall and sporting a quick-firing 3-pounder turret gun. Each mounted six secondary machine guns from a hull armored with up to 8 mm of steel. The one saving grace was that they were slow by modern standards -- loafing along at 15 kilometers an hour under most conditions.
Pure white light spilled into Kroh’s command post as a long line of flares rose up from the Heights to the Castle. At 0010, the British threw everything they had at the German-controlled crescent of Dover.
Hanging up with Student, Kroh turned to find Heilmann standing behind him with his Luger out.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Numb panic settled into the base of Kroh’s spine. “What?”
“I will not let them move me.”
Kroh was fumbling down his pant-leg for his own holster. “What are you talking about?”
“You said, ‘We will not be moved,’ didn’t you?”
Kroh frowned, uncomprehending. Then he understood. Trembling with giddy relief, he began to laugh uncontrollably.
Heilmann stood silent and impassive. His helmet was missing, and his sweat-caked hair steamed slightly in the chill air of what had been the Drop Redoubt’s signals room.
Kroh fought to regain his composure, but he found himself cackling all the harder. He himself had not slept since the morning of November thirtieth, and eaten just twice in the same period. In quiet moments, he had heard Bräuer’s voice behind him and turned to find himself alone. Twice, he had been staring into his radio set only to see its knobs become the staring eyes of a dead British artilleryman.
“I’m sorry, Heilmann,” Kroh mumbled, finally, “I just didn’t realize what was going on.”
“We should discuss how to hold out through the night.”
“Yes. Get Hackl and Pietzonka. Meet topside in fifteen minutes.” Kroh and Heilmann exchanged salutes. When the third-in-command had gone, Kroh emptied his canteen into his helmet and plunged his face in. He would need to be sharp for who knew how many more hours.
The four company commanders soon stood on the grass near the Drop Redoubt’s observation post. The sleet had let up, and visibility stretched all the way out to the breakwater.
“So,” Kroh began. “Adler and Grassmel have a combined strength of 140 effectives up at the Castle. With my company that makes 210. The Castle could realistically be defended with half that number. Our only other demands, now that we have drawn in our perimeter, are the Drop Redoubt and the waterfront.
“Ludebrecht, Bieber and the divers report just under a hundred effectives, and are very short on ammunition. I propose to shift Kompanie 10 down to the docks within the next hour. There, Grassmel can help shore up our defenses and allow for a thicker and deeper line.
“Hackl and Heilmann, you two can hold the Redoubt itself. Meanwhile, Barenthin’s men and Wulpp’s men can take up positions around the Grand Shaft Barracks and the other abandoned barracks running down the Heights between here and the marina.
“Pietzonka, I think we should keep you down in the city. Your position keeps the pressure on the enemy and ensures that he can’t move too freely. If anything, I might like to organize another thrust into the city before dark -- maybe near King street.”
“Who is in charge at the Castle?” Hackl asked.
“Adler. But if there is a serious attack from the east, I will go back to the Castle and leave Heilmann in charge here at the Redoubt.”
“How is the Oberstleutnant?” Pietzonka asked, voicing the concern of the others. Many of the men still did not know that Bräuer had been wounded, and most of the ones who knew anything had heard only sketchy and contradictory details. When Kroh did not respond, Pietzonka cast his head down and let out breath through his teeth. “Can I see him?”
“Go, but be back at Dover Priory as soon as you can. We have much to do before nightfall.”
While Hauptmann Pietzonka communed with Bräuer in the kitchen surgery, Kroh’s plan went into effect. Kompanie 10 packed up and trudged down to the docks, carrying hot meals for the men already on the lines there. Grassmel sent 10-3 to occupy the Grand Hotel, a large five-story building that dominated the beach to the east of the docks and offered a base of fire down several important city streets. The pioneers found it deserted and quickly sent spotters and machine guns to the roof.
10-2 and men from one of Bieber’s platoons rounded up automobiles and overturned them to block all the major streets running into the heart of the city. Little by little, camouflage netting went up over the MG nests between warehouses.
A captured lorry trundled down the lines picking up the German dead for deposition in the makeshift morgue established in the refrigerated storage unit of one of the docked merchantmen. The British dead were cleared away only where they posed an inconvenience. Instead, men busied themselves piling cover around their own positions, or dousing the scattered fires that still burned across the seafront. Unrelieved by fresh breezes, a pall of smoke hung limply over the whole southern end of the city.
On the Heights, a stitched-up Barenthin joined Wulpp in arraying their two battered companies on the ground between the Drop Redoubt and Ludebrecht’s lines near the marina. There were several abandoned barracks here that had been stormed by Heilmann’s men on the first night of the operation, and these were quickly manned and fortified. Others clawed foxholes along the Heights’ last plunge down to the A20.
Tescher’s Kriegsmarine demolitionists were busying themselves mining the roadway. Some had found a store of volatile old nitroglycerin while ransacking a warehouse for batteries, and now stuffed it into the burned out vehicles that had been ambushed in the roundabout the day before. Another telephoned up to Kroh to politely inquire whether it was permissible to steal civilian fire hoses from the harbormaster’s stores. It was, Kroh said. “But why do you need fire hoses?” The young man answered that he was planning to divert gasoline from one of the underground tanks at the dockside into a ditch cut across the A20 -- in effect, a giant flame fougasse that could be ignited in the faces of attacking soldiers.
Ludebrecht’s men assisted by overturning more automobiles across the road. They attempted to derail a freight car over the A20 as well, but found that the tracks did not cross at the right angle. Grubby pioneers opened concertina wire across the few remaining gaps in the line, then retired to their foxholes for Grassmel’s hot meals.
From atop the Drop Redoubt, Hackl directed a platoon to go out with hatchets and cut down the last of the trees blocking his MG34s’ fields of fire. Even then, though, they had poor lines of sight to the streets around Dover Priory, where Pietzonka’s Kompanie 5 remained quite on its own. Standing next to Hackl, Kroh relayed fire coordinates down to the two U-boats. With the loss of the four guns below the Citadel, Kroh was relying on the two 88 mm deck guns to cover the A20’s approach into the city.
To the north, they could see the London road coming down into Dover. Headlamps stretched into the distance until they were swallowed by the fog.
“It’s just after 1500,” Kroh telephoned Adler, “and the British are unlikely to move for about an hour. I’m ordering all men not otherwise occupied to stand down for rest on a rotating basis.”
“Yes, Major. We see lights stretching back the A258 to the A2, but movement is slow.”
All along the line, activity lessened. Many units continued to dig, but the greatest part of the work had been done. Only the Kriegsmarine men continued unabated -- cutting sheet metal for cover, running telephone line out to the forward pickets, and erecting the carbon-arc lights on rooftops.
Two Jägers presented themselves at the entrance to Kroh’s command post, leading a bound man in a badly-oversized British uniform and galoshes. One of the radiomen waved them in.
“I am named Dr. William MacIntosh,” the bound man said in German. “I am one of three physicians now... now... held, by German soldiers. We have been moved to the Grand Shaft Barracks, along with more than a hundred other men. Are you Major Kroh?”
“Yes, Dr. MacIntosh. I am Major Kroh.”
“Three of our soldiers will be dead without good care. Two are already dead. We have not medicine and not sterile tools. Under the laws of war we are so entitled.”
There was nothing Kroh could do for him. Sturmabteilung Bräuer’s doctors were hard pressed as it was. They still had ample supplies, but it would be imprudent to dilute them. “I cannot do that, Dr. MacIntosh, but I have a suggestion. If you and your fellow physicians agree to help tend to our own wounded, I will send for your wounded and have them treated here at the Drop Redoubt by our own doctors.”
“I would be willing to do this, but I must consult the others.”
The others soon consented, and a lorry brought them and the wounded prisoners uphill, where they were carried on stretchers across the temporary wooden causeway that the assault pioneers had erected and into the Inner Redoubt. Sanitäts-Leutnant Sanger was overjoyed to find that one of the British doctors had been his co-resident at a Paris hospital before the war, and the reunion did much to ease tensions in the kitchen surgery.
It was getting darker. Kroh’s watch read 4:04, and the sun had been down for almost ten minutes. The British were moving in the city, and the company commanders didn’t like it. Men were ordered back to alert, and final entrenchment work resumed with renewed urgency. Along the docks, more assault pioneers plumbed the warehouses for anything that might be useful. The forward pickets were reinforced, and small patrols sent into the fields east of the Castle to investigate suspicious movements in the mist.
Bräuer’s mantra of “Shock and Firepower” dictated action. The Germans could either sit in their foxholes and wait for something to happen to them, or get up and make something happen. Now was the time for the thrust Kroh had contemplated earlier.
At 1615, Grassmel’s 10-1 platoon set out up King street under Leutnant Pohl. Kroh had ordered them northward into the city to make contact with the enemy -- to force him to react rather than act. The three truppen spread out across the wide street, rested and spoiling for a fight.
They found it four blocks ahead, as a machine gun clattered from the church belfry that the Germans had allowed the British to retire to earlier in the day. Two assault pioneers were mortally wounded before the leading trupp could get out of the open. The others found what cover they could as tracers streamed down the street. Pohl sent a machine gun team into the three-story office of a law firm a block back. By the time their MG34 had set up in the upper window, though, 10-1 was engaging British soldiers pouring across a side street to cut off the Germans’ retreat.
The machine gunners drenched the belfry in 8 mm rounds as Pohl pulled his men back out of the forming ambush. More British units were converging on the area, so 10-1 withdrew, chastened, to the docks. Grassmel called Kroh to contemplate a second attack, but the Major decided against it. Darkness fell completely, and calm descended on Dover.
As hundreds of eyes strained watchfully northward, the distant sound of motors wafted across the city. Kroh waited with Heilmann in the observation post, looking into the city with his binoculars. The attack felt like it might begin at any moment.
Seconds, minutes crawled by -- but still and vigilant calm still reigned from the Drop Redoubt to the Castle.
Pietzonka radioed that enemy soldiers had been seen skulking around his position. “I’m about to fire a flare. Be ready for action.”
A blazing white light shot into the air and hung over Dover Priory, but no sounds of gunfire followed. The light went out, and Dover remained quiet. Kroh slipped out of sight to relieve himself. He returned to the observation post to find the darkened Heights as still as ever.
Kroh trained his binoculars on a rooftop that appeared to belong to one of the offices on York street. Several almost imperceptible shapes were moving, crouching around something that could only be a machine gun.
“Major!” hissed Hahn, the radioman. “Major!” He sidled up to Kroh with an outstretched radiotelephone. “Hauptmann Adler.”
“This is Kroh,” he whispered.
The channel crackled with static. “My forward patrols have engaged enemy on foot. Outside my eastern wall. Platoon strength.”
“Alright, keep me informed.”
After several minutes, Adler came back on. “Two enemy killed, no casualties. Enemy is withdrawing back up A258.”
“Good. Keep patrols out there, Adler. I don’t want any surprises. Light it up if you need to.”
“Yes, Major.”
It was fully night, but the sun would still not not come for fifteen hours. Kroh radioed Student, who said he’d just received confirmation that relief had sailed from Boulogne. Kroh went down to the kitchen surgery to consult with Heilmann, who agreed that it was best not to make any announcement to the men. They had had their hopes dashed enough.
Kroh returned to the observation post, staring northward through his binoculars at the dim blackout headlamps still inching down the London road. They crept along, strung into a glistening, rippling chain that bobbed gently. Kroh started. A loud noise had just gone off in his head and his neck had jerked backward. Had it been in his head? He looked around. The other three observers up there with him were all calm and alert. He raised his binoculars again, watching the faint lights coming out of the north.
Again he felt his neck jerk, and realized that he had dreamed a snatch of a conversation. He was still looking through the binoculars.
“van Wingerden, I’m going below. Send someone for me if anything happens whatsoever.”
“Yes, Major.”
Kroh descended the stairs to the signals room that he had made his command post. The generators were out, but there was a covered kerosene lamp on, and light from the doorway to the kitchen surgery spilled into the small, cluttered chamber. A telephone exchange took up most of two walls, and the floor was covered by chairs, tiny desks and dropped combat gear. The radioman was working quietly in the corner by the lamp, and two NCOs were curled up against the exchange’s heavy cabinetry, fast asleep. Kroh found a blanket on the floor, drew it around himself and lay down. It was probably almost freezing outside, and little warmer in here.
Only the vaguest sense of dreaming came to Kroh before he felt someone shaking him awake. “They’re attacking! They’re attacking!” Kroh tried to ask where the attack was, but the shouts grew louder. “They’re attacking!” He couldn’t see the person very well. Kroh tried to clear his mind from sleep, but the shouts echoed loudly in his head. One eye opened, and Kroh became aware of his breathing. He was face down, his lips pressed against the cold concrete. The light from the kerosene lamp flickered on the far wall.
Kroh rolled over. The radioman was gone, and so were the sleeping NCOs, but Feldwebel Mayer was sitting by the light, prying at the Kinarri camera with a screwdriver.
“What time is it?”
Mayer jumped visibly. “Uh, it is about 1945.”
“Thank you, Mayer.”
“Where did it happen?” It was the voice of Hahn, the radioman.
“I’m not sure,” Mayer said.
“Hard luck, to be sure.”
Kroh noticed that his eyes were closed again. His hands were stiff and cold. He blinked and rolled over. Hahn was back in the room, talking quietly with Mayer. Another man was sleeping with his back against the telephone exchange. Kroh looked at his watch -- almost an hour had passed. He closed his eyes.
There was a vivid dream of a being in the glider -- but the glider was going somewhere else. Somewhere wrong. He tried to convince the pilot, but his mouth wasn’t working. A loud crack sounded in the distance. That’s the real assault. I’ve got to wake up. I’ve got to wake up! The glider was going downward. It was about to land hundreds of kilometers off course. What was the pilot thinking? I’ve got to wake up. Wake up!
The command post swam back into focus. Kroh was panting. The kerosene lamp had been put out, and he was alone in the room. All was quiet, but the uneasiness was too much. It was after 2200. Kroh considered taking more stimulants, but he knew that any more in his present condition would impair his aim and judgment. He got up and returned to the observation post. More lorries still seemed to be streaming into the city. Raising his binoculars, Kroh began to count them.
Somewhere over twenty, Kroh heard the hiss of a flare and instantly stopped the count. A blazing white rocket was climbing into the air over Dover Priory, bathing the northern slopes of the Heights in cold light. Within moments, the crackle of submachine gun fire began to drift up the slopes.
It rolled on for five minutes before subsiding to occasional, distinct pops. Hahn raced up the stairs from the command post with word from Pietzonka: “Kompanie 5 attacked from three sides by at least company-strength enemy. Five dead, eleven wounded. Unknown enemy casualties.”
When the last flare had gone out, the Heights were again in darkness -- this time all the deeper for the Germans’ ruined night vision.
Then came another message from Dover Priory: Pietzonka’s men were down to the last ten percent of their ammunition. If they were to hold their position, they would need resupply.
“You were down there,” Kroh said to Heilmann when he found him in the surgery. “How much of a chance has he got?”
The third-in-command bared his teeth. “Not less than the rest of us.”
“I don’t want to pull him out unless we have no choice. You’re telling me we have a choice.” The position at Dover Priory was exposed and vulnerable out in the city -- not on fortified high ground like the Redoubt and the Castle, and not backed up against the water like the warehouses along the docks. Indeed, the way the Heights were shaped, men entrenched atop them had a very poor angle to lend supporting fire. Yet this was exactly why the Priory was so valuable. It represented an incursion into the city that hampered British movement, and defended sheltered ground from which it would be ideal to stage an attack on the Drop Redoubt. Heilmann knew this even better than Kroh, having done just that less than forty hours earlier.
“Yes, right,” Heilmann said. “We have a choice. They just need more ammunition.”
Not long after, Kroh was on with Pietzonka. “Stay where you are. The rest of us are counting on you down there. We’ll send ammunition at once.”
“Yes, Major. We will hold fast.”
Kroh could sense the fear in his voice. Getting the ammunition down there would be trouble. The units at the Drop Redoubt were quite low on ammunition themselves, and even what little they could spare couldn’t be delivered safely. All the road routes off the Heights down to Dover Priory entailed fighting through substantial British forces. Instead, Kroh sent one of Heilmann’s platoons hiking downslope on foot with whatever they could carry.
They had just made it back up to the Redoubt when another flare blazed above the train station, followed by the sounds of furious shooting. This time, the battle lasted almost twenty minutes before tapering off to silence. “2 killed, several wounded,” Pietzonka’s report read. “More sizable enemy units moving into position around me. Ammunition again perilously low. Request immediate resupply.” Kroh was away from the command post when the message came in.
He was on the other side of the Drop Redoubt’s defensive ditch, crouched low with Hauptmann Hackl and one of the Kompanie 2 sharpshooters to get a better view of the cemetery. Since the deadly firefight there the previous morning, the British had kept about a platoon in place to guard against another counterattack. But now, they counted through their binoculars somewhere surely over a hundred men. If those men made a sudden rush for the docks, they would only be subjected to German fire for as long as it took to vault over a picket fence and cross the A20. Kroh and Hackl agreed that a mortar bombardment might be necessary, followed by an assault on foot from the Heights. More dark shapes were pouring through the cemetery’s eastern gate and assuming formation.
The men down at Dover Priory were scared. Sheltering behind crates and low walls, in the station house and on the roof of the school, they poked their muzzles out into the night and waited. Arms and kit clattered at the edge of hearing as scores of black shapes flitted from alley to alley, building to building. Pietzonka’s surviving sergeants crept from man to man, handing out the last of the magazines and whispering words of encouragement.
Breath steaming in the cold, the assault pioneers checked the actions on their weapons and stared down their iron sights. The men on the rooftops reported that enemy soldiers had taken up positions along three sides of Kompanie 5, threatening to cut off retreat up the slopes of the Heights.
Hauptmann Pietzonka conferred with his two remaining zug leaders in the station house. They had 42 men -- half of them wounded -- to defend the station, school and the space between the two. Pietzonka made it five times that number of British. After the assault began, they would have no choice but to fall back toward the station house. The railroad tracks provided a sound line of defense to the west. To the north and east, fences and shrubbery obstructed the enemy’s line of attack. The pioneers would have to keep them at arm’s length so they couldn’t bring their numbers to bear.
On the Heights, Kroh saw the British began spilling through a hole that had been blown in the cemetery’s southern fence earlier in the day. He turned and raced back up over the improvised causeway to the observation post. Grabbing the radioman by the shoulders, he pulled him downstairs and raised Ludebrecht to warn him of the oncoming danger.
Ludebrecht flipped a switch atop his seaside hotel perch, and the power of half a billion candles flooded across the A20 as the carbon-arc lamp switched on for the first time. The light caught onrushing men full in the face and struck them blind.
It was still dark some 500 meters away at Dover Priory, where a rolling storm of fire broke out in just seconds. The British had brought heavy machine guns up to concealed positions around Kompanie 5, and the air became a web of yellow tracers. Rounds cascaded across the darkened lines for several seconds until Pietzonka managed to hoist a star flare over the fighting.
The brilliant light revealed scores of kettle-helmeted figures charging toward the German positions. The pioneers opened fire at once, scything many down, but more were close behind. The last few defensive grenades tumbled out from behind cover and landed on the railroad tracks in the midst of two enemy platoons. The blasts dismembered several of them, but by the time the smoke had cleared, the first of their fellows were scrambling up onto the platform.
A Feldwebel stood in one of the station’s windows, calmly shooting the attackers with his pistol as they scrambled up. Another pioneer lay prone beneath an automobile, picking off British officers rallying their men down onto the tracks. Hand grenades killed both.
On the Heights, Kroh was on the telephone to Ludebrecht. Just as the British company flooded onto highway, the strobe had blinded them -- while illuminating them perfectly for the German gunners in the hotel and along the marina. The enemy would be stopped in his tracks, Ludebrecht assured Kroh. Then Kroh heard him start to curse.
Meanwhile, Gefreiter Martin Sückl led the remnants of Trupp 3 back across the lawns from the priory school toward the station house. The Holland veteran emptied his MP34’s last magazine at the British clambering over the school’s garden wall in pursuit -- then drew his Luger and fired while backpedaling. One of his truppmates had taken a bullet through the spine, and the three others were struggling to drag him to safety.
Tracers from an unseen machine gun across the street snapped around their heads, and by the time Sückl turned to follow them, one had already fallen. Another German trupp, falling back from the other side of the school, caught up with him. He waved them onward, shouting at them to help carry the wounded to safety, and one threw him a fresh magazine. Sückl covered their retreat -- expending the last of his ammunition and then grabbing an Enfield from a fallen Englishman -- but collapsed at last onto the grass, shot eleven times.
Atop the seaside hotel, assault pioneers with asbestos gloves picked through the shattered glass of the strobe lamp, trying to replace the still-glowing contacts that would have burnt their hands off. After a period of total darkness, someone had managed to fire a flare, but the enemy could once again see straight ahead, and were shooting hotly at the hotel roof and through its windows.
Once again, combat devolved to close quarters near the marina, as British soldiers swept past the hotel and engaged the assault pioneers on the water. “It’s bad,” Ludebrecht told Kroh, “and now it looks like there’s armor coming up the A20. This is bad.”
The scene at the Dover Priory station house was worse. Survivors from truppen along the perimeter were reeling back before the renewed assault, often fatally slowed by efforts to carry the wounded to safety. Kompanie 5 was almost completely out of ammunition, and critically short on morphine. Pietzonka radioed up to Kroh for help, but he knew that no relief could be organized in time. He ordered the survivors to the safest positions within the building, and prepared for the final struggle.
One MG gunner was still alive, and had leapt down from the roof, brandishing the red-hot barrel of his weapon at the enemy soldiers who swarmed around the building. They had taken staggering losses over the past two days, though, and would no longer be denied. He and the last of the other defenders outside were quickly overwhelmed by the onslaught.
The battle for the station house was brief but savage. The British stormed the building from all three entrances, throwing hand grenades in ahead of themselves. Pietzonka was the last officer left alive, and fought to the end with his pistol, then his Kampfmesser, then with fists, until physically unable to struggle. A British captain climbed in through a window and called for quarter for the wounded, but none was needed. Sturmpionier Kompanie 5 had been overrun to the last man.
Pietzonka’s last radio contact with Kroh had ended in a rush of static as the fighting reached the station house -- but Kroh was still not immediately certain what had happened. It was several minutes before pickets along the slopes overlooking Dover Priory returned with the hard truth. The silence from below meant the worst.
The overrun of the Priory imperiled the Drop Redoubt, but not immediately. For now, the most pressing threat was the column of tanks driving steadily toward the docks.
Ludebrecht finally reported that the incursion from the cemetery had been repulsed, although at worrying cost. Now, he said, his men were bracing for an attack from the west.
Kroh would have liked to call in support from the heavy artillery across the Channel, but ordering fire with such little distance between the two forces would endanger the Germans just as much as their enemies, and risk further damage to the docks.
“Korvettenkapitän, this is Major Kroh.” He had given one of his radios to legendary U-boat captain Hans Ibbeken, who waited in the harbor with his sister ship, deck guns manned.
“Go ahead. We are ready to fire.”
“Stand by. Armor piercing. Your target will be marked with red flares.”
The column of British tanks was now within a hundred meters of the roundabout where the first column had been ambushed. German pickets overlooking the road fired flares onto the A20 in the path of their advance.
The U-boat gunners in the harbor had a clear line of sight straight up the highway. Kroh saw two winks of fire flash on the water far below, and the streak of the shells toward their target. The crash of the guns drifted up to the Drop Redoubt several seconds later.
Ibbeken and his fellow commander Schuhart had brought their boats into Dover harbor only reluctantly -- out of torpedoes, and ordered by OKM to support Sturmabteilung Bräuer on the surface rather than dropping out of action for a day to rearm at Ostend. The demolitionists who had spoken in person with the submariners insisted that Ibbeken had accounted for four enemy destroyers during the opening hours of the invasion, and was apparently bitter at the lost chance to go out and hunt more -- and bitterer to have had his U-27 damaged and chief engineer killed by friendly fire during his reception. If the U-boat ace was bitter, though, he didn’t let it show.
The two 88 mm deck guns sent fast and accurate fire up the A20, aided by range corrections given by radio. Dodging the carcasses of their predecessors, the MkIIIs sprinted toward the docks as incoming rounds tore out huge sections of the roadway.
The lead tank collided at full speed with one of the burned-out lorries in the roundabout, setting off the nitroglycerin planted inside, and triggering sympathetic detonations in the other hulks. Two MkIIIs were knocked out of action, their tracks and gears hopelessly mangled.
There were eight more behind. At a signal from Ludebrecht, a wall of orange flame roared up directly in their path as the Kriegsmarine demolitionists pumped gasoline into the trench they had cut during the afternoon. As the remaining MkIIIs struggled to negotiate this latest obstacle, Ibbeken’s gunners struck home for the first time. An armor piercing 88 mm round hurtled across the water and bored through the hull of one of the tanks as it maneuvered. The explosion blew out the back half completely, raining searing wreckage on the rest of the column.
One of the tanks managed to maneuver around the mass of wrecked vehicles in the roundabout, driving up onto the sloped flanks of the Heights, and down at full speed toward the German lines 200 meters ahead. Two other MkIIIs followed it, but on the other side of the flames, the remainder turned around and headed back up the A20 as more 88 mm shells came screaming in on them.
Tracers began to stream from the turret machine guns of the tanks still in the attack. More red flares flew out of the darkness at the roadside and into their path. Just as Ludebrecht informed Kroh that he had ordered his men to engage, Hauptmann Adler at the Castle came over another channel demanding to speak to the Major immediately.
“Heavy armor coming down the A258 towards the castle. It looks like my long range patrols were destroyed some time ago.”
“Heavy armor?” Kroh shouted. “Vickers?”
“Looks like, Major.”
“And none of your heavy guns have an angle on the highway up there, do they?”
“Not from this side, no.”
“Then wait. Mortars can’t hold them back, so let them get close, and we’ll hit them when they can’t maneuver. How many can you see?”
“We can’t see well from up here, but my guess is that it’s a whole armored company.”
Kroh spread the intelligence map on the telephone exchange desk in his command post and scanned the legend. “So... That must be from the 4th Battalion, Royal Tank Corps, which is apparently out of Deal. The brigade is out of Canturbury. Let them get close, then we’ll hit them.”
Kroh pictured the layout of Dover Castle. Adler’s men occupied the great square keep raised by Henry II over the site of the original fort which his great-grandfather William had burned after seizing the city in 1066. Around the keep was a high stone curtain wall that enclosed the castle’s inner bailey. As time passed, the castle’s needs had expanded, leading to the construction of a formidable second wall that now enclosed the dozens of outbuildings put up in the centuries since. The oldest of these buildings actually predated the castle itself. An ancient Roman pharos had stood watch over the vital port since the invasion of Emperor Claudius, and now acted as the bell tower of St. Mary-in-Castro church. Overlooking the sheer white cliffs that formed the southern face of Castle Hill, Britain’s Admiralty had constructed a grand officers’ mess for Queen Victoria’s captains. Nearby were the 6-pounder guns overlooking the harbor and the city’s far eastern approaches.
The landward side was much more thinly armed. Although imposing ramparts had been set into the eastern and northern slopes of the hill, they had been defended with nothing stronger than the pair of water-cooled Vickers machine guns that the garrison commander had thought sufficient to defend against airborne assault. Almost two days before, Kroh’s own company had mined the roadway as A258 curved into the city, but such measures could only delay move in force by enemy armor. There were several anti-aircraft Bofors guns emplaced within the outer bailey, but none of these had a clear line of sight to the road. And so, the Germans would attempt to draw the enemy tanks almost under the shadow of the Castle, where they could be pinned in the narrow streets and engaged close-in by Kompanie 8, now led by Leutnant Frischer.
It would not be easy. The MkIIIs were quite dangerous for an airborne infantry force such as Sturmabteilung Bräuer, but were still only a machine gun-armed light tank, quite like the German PzKpfw I. The Vickers medium tanks dwarfed both, towering 2.68 meters tall and sporting a quick-firing 3-pounder turret gun. Each mounted six secondary machine guns from a hull armored with up to 8 mm of steel. The one saving grace was that they were slow by modern standards -- loafing along at 15 kilometers an hour under most conditions.
Pure white light spilled into Kroh’s command post as a long line of flares rose up from the Heights to the Castle. At 0010, the British threw everything they had at the German-controlled crescent of Dover.
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I know, I know: I'm a stinker. The good news is that Part 4 won't be long. The character limit just hit me at an unexpected place.
This is a pretty well written combat piece. You've improved a bit since the Eben Emael operation. I'm still debating whether the Royal Navy has rolled over and died for you...or had a traitor ensure German victory...or whether the morning will resound with RN shells smashing the Citadel. The mere absence of RN ships ATM is good news for the invasion...
dublish - YES. Welcome back, btw!
Kurt_Steiner - They better hope not.
Enewald, c0d5597 - Again, YES. I daresay I might even surprise you.
TheExecuter - Thank you. Sorry it's been coming in dribs and drabs. When the fourth part is up, I'll string them all together into the continuous piece intended. And don't worry - we'll see what's going on with the Royal Navy quite soon enough!
Kurt_Steiner - They better hope not.
Enewald, c0d5597 - Again, YES. I daresay I might even surprise you.
TheExecuter - Thank you. Sorry it's been coming in dribs and drabs. When the fourth part is up, I'll string them all together into the continuous piece intended. And don't worry - we'll see what's going on with the Royal Navy quite soon enough!
I'll wager you a tidy sum it's not that option. I'd further bet this invasion will end in a resounding triumph as well, but I don't think there's anyone silly enough to bet against a certainty!
I'll wager you a tidy sum it's not that option. I'd further bet this invasion will end in a resounding triumph as well, but I don't think there's anyone silly enough to bet against a certainty!
Your wager is a very shrewd one. The Citadel is in British hands already.
I just wanted to let you know that I've been reading for a little over a week and am caught up to the paradrops on England... wow, just wow. This is just completely amazing... I can only hope that the AAR I have proposed is half as amazing.. really will be satisfied with a little over a quarter actually.
Thanks so much for your patience all. As I've said before, apologies are cheap, so an update is the best way to atone!
Update going up now...
EDIT: The full update is now up: parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. Head to Post #1784 for part 4.
EDIT: The full update is now up: parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. Head to Post #1784 for part 4.
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