If Britain Had Fallen (14 page)
German radio was that night surprisingly restrained, contenting itself, apart from dramatic accounts of ‘our brave fellows leaping on to the beach’, largely with repetitions of the first bulletin issued that day: ‘Our troops are ashore at several points and moving inland.’ The generals, still fearing some devastating British counter-stroke, had for once prevailed upon the Propaganda Ministry to be restrained and cautious. As von Rundstedt and his Chief of Staff at Army Group A headquarters, still on the French side of the Channel, reviewed the day’s progress they agreed
that, while the sea crossing had gone better than they had dared hope, the actual landing had met with far more stubborn resistance than they had expected. The outstanding success was the capture of the harbours at Dover and Folkestone, due to the surprise achieved by 7th Parachute Division, whose assault had gone with textbook precision. The same division landing behind the Royal Military Canal, running roughly parallel to the coast just inland, had not, however, achieved its objective of securing and holding a crossing for the 17th Infantry Division, arriving by sea. The division had suffered a heavy mauling, with a third of its troops becoming casualties even before the first units got off the beach, and when the survivors had managed to get across the A259 coast road, south-west of Hythe, and had even landed some tanks and anti-tank guns, they had found themselves hemmed in by the canal and unable to cross it. The situation on the division’s left flank was not much better. Here 35 th Division had successfully occupied Dymchurch and Littlestone and had managed to land tanks and artillery on the foreshore, but the network of dykes just inland, almost ignored by German Intelligence, was slowing up their advance. German troops who had forced their way into New Romney had been driven out again after fierce fighting and, though German patrols had penetrated as far as Lydd and Ivychurch, the main road between New Romney and Brenzett, a key factor in the defence system, was still in British hands.
Further left again, at Camber, a small beach-head had been secured by advance elements of the 7th Division on the right bank of the River Rother and two out of three battalions of amphibian tanks had safely got ashore, the rest succumbing to mechanical breakdowns or sinking as soon as they left their transports. They had, however, encountered an unforeseen obstacle, after turning off the Rye to Winchelsea road to move inland. The details were still not clear, but it seemed that a low-lying stretch of the road had been flooded with petrol and the leading Panzers had been engulfed in a sheet of flame, knocking them out and effectively blocking the way forward. The incident seemed, too, to have affected the men’s morale, for the other tanks had hastily withdrawn under fire from antitank guns and not stopped till they reached the supposed safety of the beach. Their commander, knowing the ways of soldiers, suspected that already rumours of the new British secret weapon, to which increased terrors would be added in the telling, would be spreading all over the division.
But the main anxiety that night of General Busch, in command of the Sixteenth Army, was about the 1st Mountain Division whose commander had proved during training to be so curiously ignorant of the behaviour
of the tides, and had now annoyed his superiors even more by getting himself killed just when he was most needed. Some battalions of his division had landed successfully on Winchelsea Beach and secured the Winchelsea-Guestling road, while a patrol had reached as far as Northiam, ten miles inland, but another battalion, after being put ashore on narrow beaches at Fairlight, had found the cliffs above them unscalable and become trapped between sea and shore, while everyone in the district who could fire a gun had been mustered on the cliffs above shooting at them, and, when their ammunition ran out, pelting them with stones.
Three miles away at Hastings, where formidable hills and cliffs and a Norman castle built by William I overlooked the section of the sea-shore on which the same ill-starred division had landed, the only exit secured from the beach had led into the narrow and easily defended streets of the Old Town, where men of the Devon Regiment and Somerset Light Infantry had deluged the troops struggling to get inland with intense rifle and machine-gun fire, and bombarded the vehicles massed on the shore with mortar fire. The way ahead here seemed for the moment barred.
To Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, considering the reports he had received from the Sixteenth Army, the situation on its front, apart from the capture of the ports, seemed far from hopeful. If this was the resistance on the coast, where the British had clearly thinned out their defences to provide reserves and where the Germans had achieved tactical surprise, what would it be like further inland? Happily, on the other wing of Army Group A’s front, in the area from Brighton to Hastings, the report from General Strauss, Commander-in-Chief of the Ninth Army, was a good deal more encouraging. Assault troops of the 34th Division, supported by amphibian tanks, had got ashore on his right flank on either side of Bexhill with relatively light losses and had penetrated several miles into Sussex, while the 26th Division had successfully landed at Pevensey with only slight casualties. Bitter fighting had admittedly followed around the shacks and chalets along the Crumbles and there had been a determined attempt to halt the advance by men manning defences around the sewage farm at Langney, a mile further on, but they had eventually been killed and the division had pushed on to the outskirts of Hailsham, nearly six miles from the coast. Resistance was now clearly hardening again, but a reconnaissance patrol had managed to reach Hellingly, two miles ahead of the main positions, which augured well for events on the following day.
The 6th Division, coming ashore at Cuckmere Haven, had also learned at first hand the practical results of General Brooke’s defensive strategy of the ‘thin crust’. The division had suffered badly as it fought its way off
the shore towards the Eastbourne-Seaford road near Exceat, but, once across the road, it had advanced with relatively little opposition through Litlington and Lullington as far as the Eastbourne-Lewes road at Wilmington, where it was now dug in. Its neighbour, the 8th Division, landing on either side of Bishopstone, had also had a good day, capturing Seaford and then pushing westwards to overrun the harbour at Newhaven with its cranes still largely intact. Other units had pushed up the valley of the Cuckmere river, through some of the most beautiful scenery in Sussex, though the Germans had little time to enjoy it, for though the main defence had withdrawn there was sniping from the woodlands overlooking the valley and from the bushes beside the river. One platoon, held up for several minutes by a particularly persistent sniper, eventually stalked and shot him. He proved to be an elderly grey-haired man in an ill-fitting uniform, armed with an ancient rifle with a red band painted round the barrel. Though clearly in pain, his only regret seemed to be that he had not killed even more men and he died cursing the Germans. His killers, after looking curiously at the first dead Englishman most of them had ever seen, rolled his body with their feet out of the way and into the shallow river alongside which they were advancing.
By nightfall they had reached Alfriston, another famous beauty-spot, recalling the photographs of historic English towns and villages they had already seen in their guide to Britain. Most of the inhabitants had been evacuated and the few remaining behind stayed silently in their houses, but the German commander, fearing treachery, ordered his men to spend the night in the open which, muttering protests under their breath, they prepared to do. They were more cheerful after those not on guard were allowed to go foraging in one of the abandoned inns, returning with a promising-looking barrel. One sip, however, was enough. What the publican had used to deny the Germans his beer they never discovered, but the taste and the whisper of ‘poison’ which passed from lip to lip was enough to make them settle for the contents of their water bottles, later refilled after one brave soldier had tried the water from a still-flowing tap from the supply in the empty houses. While they settled down for a peaceful night, broken only by guard duty, patrols were pushing on to Glynde and Ringmer and the commander, to his great relief, had established contact with the neighbouring 6th Division at Wilmington. Secure in the knowledge that his right flank was no longer in the air, and allowing himself a luxury denied his men, he spent a comfortable night in a bed in a hastily requisitioned house, with his batman on guard outside the door.
His opposite number to his left, the major-general commanding the 28th Division, which had landed on the extreme west of the invasion
front, slept less well, for his formation had faced the fiercest opposition encountered anywhere by the Ninth Army. Coming ashore at Rottingdean, a suburb of Brighton, they had forced their way off the beach which, except at this point, was everywhere commanded by steep cliffs, only after a bitter battle. The narrow beach had seemed by midday to be littered with dead or dying and, at the road junction just behind the beach, which formed the centre of the village, there had been a hand-to-hand clash with the defenders, a brief, untidy scuffle in which bayonets and even rifle butts had been used, the whole scene, with men rising up and charging forward with wild cries, and the aftermath, of bodies lying twisted and bleeding in the roadway, recalling a scene from the first world war. The general, with dreams of capturing Brighton, a name which was well known in Germany, had tried to widen his front in that direction, but his men had found the road along the cliffs blocked by barbed wire, anti-tank obstacles and, worst of all, anti-tank guns, and by an enemy who was clearly determined not to give an inch. Thwarted there, the division had tried to break out in the opposite direction and link up with the units on his right by securing the shabby bungalow town of Peacehaven, set on cliffs too high to assault from the sea. Here also the first probing attack had been thrown back so decisively that the battalion commander had decided it would be folly to renew it with the depleted and weary companies under his command.
But the day had not been wholly unsuccessful. The division had occupied Falmer later that afternoon and was approaching Lewes when he decided to halt it for the night, while by dusk a patrol had reached Ditchling Beacon, the most conspicuous strategic feature for miles. The cost, however, had been enormous, with one in every three of those who had landed dead or wounded. There had been very few prisoners on either side, the British refusing to give quarter and, even when outnumbered, unwilling to surrender. The general, a professional, had long been sceptical about the tradition of units which fought to the last man but today he had seen it in action. If every day was going to be the same, he reflected, he would by Thursday night not have a division to command. But such reflections were futile. Mentally the general turned his back on the sea and on the immediate past; the future, and the way forward, lay inland.
After the arrival of sufficient forces on English soil, the Army Group will attack and secure possession of the line Thames estuary-heights South of London-Portsmouth.
Instructions of the Commander-in-Chief Army, to Army Group A,
30 August 1940
At dawn the counter-attacks began, as yet only in company or battalion strength: the major offensive which was to clear Kent and Sussex of the intruders was still being planned at GHQ. But, refreshed by a night’s sleep, well dug in, and with morale high now that the hazards of the crossing and landing lay behind them, the Germans fought well. Only on the east of the invaded area near Hythe, where they were already in trouble due to the failure to cross the Royal Military Canal, did the attack have some success. The 28th Maori Battalion of the New Zealand Division, with their strange hats and even stranger war-cries, poured down on to the weakest point in the enemy line, that classically vulnerable spot where two formations met. Here the 17th Division, taken by surprise by these unfamiliar opponents and badly mauled on the previous day, rapidly gave ground, but the situation was restored by the airborne troops of the 7th Parachute Division, now serving as ordinary infantry, tough, resourceful soldiers, not easily dislodged and, though the New Zealanders drove a salient into the enemy front, they failed, as they had hoped, to break through to the sea.
Another attempt, later in the day, to recapture Folkestone harbour, defended by the parachutists of the same division, met an equal rebuff and the exhausted British troops, back where they had started, watched in fascinated horror as the British bombers sent to try and put the port out of action fell victim one after another to the anti-aircraft guns now mounted all round it and along the high ground of the Leas. By the time a squadron of Luftwaffe fighters, flown in that morning to Hawkinge landing ground, arrived on the scene, there were few targets left for them. A few hits had been scored, but the line of ships tied up in the docks and the convoys of vehicles driving away from them, made clear enough that the attack had failed in its main purpose. This failure had repercussions unknown to those who watched it, for it finally convinced the Chiefs of Staff, now meeting almost continuously in London, that in the absence of fighter cover orthodox bomber operations were almost futile and at 11
am the Chief of the Air Staff formally advised the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet that the RAF could no longer be considered an effective fighting force. Reluctantly the Air Ministry ordered that all aircraft from training units which could not be fitted with makeshift bomb-racks or gun mountings should be withdrawn to bases in Wales and Scotland. Those remnants of operational units still able to fly should attack the enemy at will, whenever opportunity offered, until, as was not said but tacitly admitted, they too were shot down.
For the Germans it was a day of consolidation, a day for digging in, setting up signal networks, choosing premises to serve as temporary headquarters, preparing the wounded for shipment back to Germany, and burying the dead. By nightfall much had been done. Every formation had now established contact with its neighbours, so that the sixty-mile front was no longer held by separate units, but by a single fighting force. Some second-line troops had arrived, but most of the shipping which had returned to its home ports on the previous day was now being loaded with supplies for the units already ashore. That day many units, which had lived off cold combat rations on the previous day, had a hot meal for the first time since embarking on Monday night, the cooks having commandeered the kitchens of abandoned restaurants of which the captured resorts offered a vast profusion.