As Marc ate he sat at the top of the nearest embankment and watched as six Africans began to haul a small cargo barge up the embankment.
To begin with four men crossed a bridge to the opposite bank and caught ropes thrown from the back of the boat. They pulled the back out until the bow faced the embankment. As they rushed back over the bridge, their colleagues jumped aboard and looped a metal chain through the mooring holes in the bow. The thick chain was wound around a pulley with an attached breaking lever, and finally linked up to an electric winch inside a building atop the embankment.
The next phase of the operation was the trickiest. The boat’s wooden hull would get shredded if it was dragged up the concrete, so two men rushed forwards and placed a wooden roller under the bow. As the boat was hauled up, more rollers were wedged under the hull.
Once a third of the vessel was out of the water, wooden props shaped like a pair of triangles were slid under the hull-rollers and then turned upwards to prevent the ship from toppling on to its side. The six Africans had done this dozens of times and Marc marvelled as their heavy physiques coordinated ropes, rollers and props while the electric winch moved the boat slowly up the embankment.
But as the rear of the ship emerged from the water, a metallic grinding sound ripped from the shed containing the main winch motor. Marc looked over his shoulder and heard rattling as the broken chain dragged over the concrete.
‘We lost it!’ the winch operator shouted desperately.
The operator pushed his whole weight against the brake lever, but the pulley wasn’t designed to support the weight of the boat and the juddering chain torn off the brake shoe. Realising that the end of the chain might lash back as it cleared the pulley, he dived backwards as the boat began rolling back towards the dock.
Marc saw the tension in the broken chain as it whipped around the pulley and feared it might fly in his direction as it broke loose.
‘Clear out!’ the foreman shouted.
As Marc ditched his soggy flan and dived back behind the winching shed, the crew pulling the cargo ship up the embankment abandoned their positions, as did the crew working on the next barge less than five metres away.
Marc and everyone else expected the end of the chain to slide around the pulley and break free, but its jagged end wedged in the brake mechanism. The sliding boat juddered to a halt halfway back in the water.
It seemed the end of the chain would remain jammed in the cogs, and the yard foreman stepped out gingerly to inspect it.
The shipyards were always full of noise, but Marc could hear his heart beating as he stood on the dockside surrounded by sweating prisoners. As the foreman crouched in front of the winch there was a sharp crack.
The twisted end of the chain remained jammed, but the weight of the boat had torn the brake lever and the pulley out of the concrete floor. As the cargo boat began sliding back on its rollers the chain whiplashed across the embankment with the pulley attached.
It catapulted several metres off the ground and crashed through the hull of the neighbouring barge. The momentum of the chain was enough to topple the cargo boat and it hit the bottom of the canal, leaning on its side.
The dilapidated hull had splintered and began flooding with water. To make matters worse a backwash rolled up the embankment, flushing everything from paint cans to welding gear into the canal.
‘Is anybody hurt?’ a foreman shouted.
Everybody had cleared the area in time, but the winch was wrecked, the little cargo ship lay on its side blocking the canal and the boat next to it had a lump the size of a motorbike ripped out of its hull.
Marc looked on as the foreman and the yard’s owner inspected the remains of the winching system, eventually reaching the conclusion that the Algerian named Houari who’d been operating the brake lever had let the clutch out too fast, causing the chain to snap.
Houari was a powerfully-built twenty year old and unofficial foreman for the African workers.
‘We’ve pulled boats three times that size up the ramp,’ Houari shouted furiously. ‘My work is good. It’s your equipment that’s decrepit.’
Foremen from neighbouring shipyards had come across. Some offered to send men over to help pull up the barge blocking the canal, others came to complain that they’d lost paint and tools in the backwash. The six Germans who guarded the prisoners had also come across to see what was going on and this was the melee into which Kuefer returned from lunch.
‘Where’s my translator?’ Kuefer shouted. ‘Get over here and tell me what’s going on.’
Marc pushed through the adults and saw his boss’s eyes bulge at him.
‘Tell me what they’re saying.’
Marc explained that the foreman blamed Houari for letting the chain out too quickly, but that Houari denied this and said it was down to the overworked braking system on the electric winch.
‘How do we fix it?’ Kuefer asked.
The foreman replied and Marc translated. ‘He says that he can’t get a boat in or out of this yard until the winch is repaired. The barge that’s blocking the canal will have to be pumped and pulled out by a tug which will have to be brought down from Calais.’
‘The it will be,’ Kuefer shouted. ‘I want this canal cleared hell today. I want men swimming in that canal salvaging all the equipment we’ve lost. Get horses and ropes and as many prisoners as you need from the nearest camp, then drag that boat out of the water. And if they have to pull boats in and out of water by hand until the winch is repaired, that’s what they’ll do.’
Marc had learned to use a notepad to translate Kuefer’s longer rants, but he’d left it in the back of the car so he just had to hope that he translated the complex instructions accurately.
Houari approached Marc. ‘Tell your boss that we can’t send men into the canal. Drums of lead paint went into the water along with oil, tar and god knows what else. Any man who goes in that water will be blinded.’
Marc explained, but Kuefer exploded.
‘Let him go blind,’ Kuefer shouted, before pointing at Houari. ‘Guards, get this black bastard and his incompetent friends diving in that canal, fishing out tools and equipment. If you get any complaints, shoot them.’
Marc thought he was going to get strangled when he translated the instructions for Houari, but the big Algerian shoved Marc aside.
‘Screw your canal, screw your barges,’ Houari shouted, as he pulled a screwdriver from his trousers and aimed at Kuefer’s neck.
Houari missed, instead thrusting the end of the screwdriver up through the base of Kuefer’s jaw and skewering his tongue. Marc backed away as the German guards grabbed Houari’s arms and Kuefer’s mouth flooded with blood.
‘Bollocks to Hitler,’ Houari shouted, as the guards slammed him against the concrete.
One German booted Houari in the face as another pulled his service revolver and shot him through the heart.
Part Five
20 August 1940 – 10 September 1940
Hermann Goering, Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe named 13 August Aldertag, or Eagle Day. It was the beginning of a major aerial offensive designed to destroy the Royal Air Force and clear the skies ready for the full-scale invasion of Britain, one month later.
After two years of military success, the Germans were confident. August 15–17 saw the heaviest fighting of the aerial battle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. Both sides lost planes, but instead of the expected victory, two German planes were shot down for every British loss.
On 20 August the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, gave a speech to the House of Commons:
‘The gratitude of every home in our island goes out to the British airmen who are turning the tide of the world war. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
20 August, Natural History Museum, London, UK
The stroke of a minister’s pen had turned Eileen McAfferty from an admin assistant in an obscure intellig
ence unit to one of the most senior women in the Royal Navy. She still felt like an impostor in her uniform, however, and couldn’t help smiling to herself every time someone saluted her in the street.
‘How are the shoes?’ Eric Mews, Deputy Minister for Economic Warfare, asked brightly.
‘Very comfortable.’ McAfferty nodded as she sat at a long but empty meeting table.
‘You know Air-Vice-Marshall Paxton, don’t you?’ Mews asked.
McAfferty nodded before the stocky RAF officer spoke.
‘Settling in, old girl?’
‘Typewriters and filing cabinets arrived for the new offices last week,’ McAfferty answered. ‘The only thing is, I keep getting letters from the Admiralty telling me that I need to attend a two-week etiquette and decorum course for female Navy officers. I don’t know when I’ll find the time.’
‘After the war, probably,’ Paxton laughed.
‘How’s Henderson holding up?’ Mews asked.
‘Well enough, I assume,’ McAfferty said. ‘Because of the short transmission windows and the risk of detection, our communications are strictly matter of fact.’
‘Of course,’ Mews said, as he reached for his pipe. ‘His intelligence has been absolutely top notch. It ties in with everything else we’re hearing and at this moment it feels like we’re on top of the entire German invasion plan.’
‘Henderson’s tip-off on Eagle Day was a huge help to the RAF,’ Paxton said. ‘From our point of view it’s a pity he’s not down in Beauvais getting specific information on Luftwaffe strategy, but the information meant we knew the assault was coming our way and we hit the ground running.’
‘But now it’s time to act,’ Mews said, as he lit his pipe. ‘We’ve intercepted a huge quantity of German military traffic and the entire German command is in agreement on three things. First, Hitler is absolutely determined to launch an invasion of Britain on September sixteenth and second and third, the two critical factors in a successful German invasion are control of the skies over the Channel and the assembly of a barge fleet.’
McAfferty nodded. ‘I’m sure the Air-Vice-Marshall knows more about the air battle than I do. Henderson is getting information about the barge fleet from a source who works as a translator for their chief naval architect. As far as we can tell, the Army would like more boats but believes it will have enough to get the job done by mid-September.’
‘And that’s something we have to change,’ Mews said.
Paxton explained. ‘By early September the Germans will have to start moving their barge fleet into the harbours along the coast, ready for the invasion.’
‘Northern France is home to a dozen German fighter bases, so it’s not the ideal spot for a bombing raid,’ Mews added. ‘A daytime mission would be suicidal and even night bombing won’t be easy.’
‘We have a three-hundred-and-fifty bomber raid planned for September ninth,’ Paxton continued. ‘That’s a little over two weeks. What I need from Henderson is accurate information on where the barges are and navigational markers for the locations.’
McAfferty didn’t understand. ‘Markers?’
‘Anything that will help our pilots pinpoint the bombing zones at night,’ Paxton explained. ‘A large ship or building, a distinct curve in the river. Anything that’s likely to be visible to a bomber pilot flying through darkness at two hundred miles an hour. Good visual markers can raise the accuracy of a raid from ten per cent to sixty or even seventy per cent.’
‘The success of this raid is now Henderson’s number one priority,’ Mews added, as McAfferty jotted down some notes.
Pas-de-Calais, northern France
The Germans now practised daily on the beach near the farm. The exercise that had failed so dramatically in front of Goering a month earlier was now performed up to five times a day, with four hundred troops and up to eight barges each time.
Barges and canal boats converted in the yards at Boulogne and Calais were held in the natural harbour on the far side of the pier and tested for speed and seaworthiness by a specially assigned crew.
Another part of the beach was used to give swimming tests in the choppy waters. Anyone who failed to swim twenty metres out to a marker buoy and back again was subjected to the attention of burly swimming instructors. Their teaching technique mainly consisted of screaming in faces before throwing men over the side of a boat and whacking them with wooden oars if they tried grabbing at the ropes along the side.
Paul was fascinated by the way an army reduces men to cogs. A man lost his legs when he fell in front of a tank, several died when an unseaworthy barge caught a high wave and non-swimmers collapsed on the shore, only to be dragged back out to sea, but despite all this, the Germans kept improving.
More men could swim, the barge pilots were mastering tides and tank crews became expert in driving up the access ramps. In good weather eight barges could be loaded, taken back around the pier and unloaded on the neighbouring section of beach in twenty minutes. Soldiers repeated four cycles of loading and unloading, by which time new barges and new troops had arrived to repeat the exercise.
Paul’s love of drawing had been consumed by an appetite for money. All the regular officers and instructors on the beach were used to him now and he’d even been given an authentic black SS helmet. It was supposed to be for protection during the occasional air raids, but Paul liked it and kept it on his head unless it got really hot.
All Germans received part of their pay in French francs, but there were few shops and little to buy in them. Paul drew from photographs of wives, girlfriends, daughters and cats, and he even did the occasional caricature of a commanding officer. Taking photographs home didn’t work because most soldiers only came to the beach once, so he’d evolved a new style of simple pencil drawings.
Each one took less than fifteen minutes and Paul discovered that the soldiers were happy to pay twenty-five francs (or the equivalent in jam or chocolate) if he drew on large pieces of draftsman’s paper which Marc stole from the dockyards and sold to him for two francs a sheet.
This probably made it the most expensive paper in France, but Paul didn’t mind because on a good day he could sell a dozen drawings and he earned more in one week than a French factory worker made in a month. When Paul wasn’t busy drawing he fantasised about all the things he’d buy when there were goods in the shops again.
Depending upon the tide the Germans usually finished their training for the day somewhere between two and six o’clock. Today was one of the earlier days and, after he’d been paid for his last batch of drawings by three soggy Germans, he grabbed his wicker basket and headed back to the farm under a dull sky.
The farm had changed significantly over the previous month. It was harvest-time for many crops and the Germans were anxious to avoid a winter famine. Some landowners and their families had been allowed back into the area, while prisoners of war were now allowed out of the camps each day to work the land.
Henderson had used his many contacts at headquarters to secure the daytime release of an experienced farm manager and two labourers, and a permit to buy diesel for the truck. With Henderson, Marc and Paul earning money and Maxine selling eggs and vegetables at market in Calais they’d become quite prosperous.
The house had been fixed up and painted, they’d bought three extra cows from Luc Boyle and taken over harvesting several of Luc’s neglected fields on neighbouring farms.
‘Afternoon, Eugene,’ Paul said cheerfully as he saw the youngest of the prison labourers resting up against a dilapidated outbuilding.
Eugene was a villainous looking eighteen year old from Lyon, who was usually in good spirits. ‘Ahh, it’s the little collaborator!’ He smiled, as Paul walked towards him.
‘Chocolate?’ Paul asked, as Eugene looked into his basket. ‘Take a couple for your friends back at the camp. I’ve got more than I can eat.’
Eugene nodded gratefully as he took three bars and ripped the foil from one before sticking the end in his mouth. ‘How m
uch did you make today?’
‘Only a hundred and fifty francs,’ Paul said. ‘But I’m asking for food and stuff whenever I can get it. There’s plenty of food on the farm now, but with no transport and all the farms in a state I reckon there’ll be a shortage this winter. So I’m telling the Germans to bring me tinned food and coffee and stuff and in a few months I’ll be able to sell them for a mint.’
‘You’re a proper little capitalist,’ Eugene said, grinning.
‘What’s a capitalist?’ Paul asked.
‘A greedy pig like you who thinks about making money on the back of other people’s hunger.’
‘I just you three bars of chocolate,’ Paul noted. ‘If I was greedy, would I have done that?’gave
‘I know,’ Eugene said. ‘I’m teasing. You’ve got a good heart, so I expect we’ll spare you after the communist revolution.’
‘Are you OK?’ Paul asked. ‘You look tired.’
‘Shattered dreams,’ Eugene said vaguely, as he rubbed sweat off his brow. ‘I’m starting to wonder about getting home, you know? It’s better working here than being cooped up in the camp, but my own family has a farm. At first everyone was saying we’ll be home in a few weeks. Then it was , but now they’ve started sending prisoners to Germany. Six hundred went off to help with the harvest in Germany last week. I got back to camp last night and found that two trainloads more had been shipped off to Schwarzheide to work in a chemical plant.’They’ll have to send all us prisoners home before it gets cold
‘Crap,’ Paul said. ‘They wouldn’t do that if they were about to release everyone.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’ Eugene nodded dismally. ‘I’m a slave, and I’ve got a nasty feeling that the Germans won’t be setting me free any time soon.’
‘That’s rough,’ Paul said. ‘But things change, you know? I mean everything’s got worse this year, but who’s to say it won’t turn around some time soon?’