Dunkirk Crescendo

  It took fifteen minutes of simply hanging on the line before Andre had strength enough to even attempt to pull himself into the boat. Even then, it took three tries before he slumped into the bottom.

  The tide and the currents running through the Channel played games with the lifeboat and its barely conscious occupant. After having been blown up twice and sunk twice, Andre and his unmanaged craft drifted east toward the German-held shore.

  ***

  “Commander Galway!” called the spotter on Intrepid’s bridge, “Take a look at this! I think I’m seein’ things!”

  “After thirty-six hours nonstop, what would make you think that, Collins? What is it that you think you see?” Trevor pivoted in the direction indicated and raised his binoculars as he asked the question.

  “Over there, sir,” the lookout replied. “A mile on the port quarter. It . . . I think it’s a dog!”

  Peering through the glasses, Trevor confirmed that a large rust-colored canine was poised like a figurehead on the bow of a half-submerged ship. “All ahead full,” he ordered, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “Good eye, Mr. Collins. That not only is a dog . . . that’s my dog and my dad’s ship!”

  Wairakei had sunk to her rails. The deck aft of the wheelhouse was awash, and the triangular bow jutted skyward like a tiny wooden island. Shattered windows and riddled hull made it seem as if the Luftwaffe had been using her for target practice. As Intrepid idled up alongside, Duffy gave a mournful howl, announcing his readiness to leave his perch as soon as possible.

  Trevor anxiously scanned the deck and the water around the ketch for the figure of his father. He was on the point of jumping across to Wairakei when John Galway stood up inside the battered remains of the cabin and climbed the slanted deck. “Shut up, daft dog,” he bellowed. “So,” he said to Trevor, “it’s yourself come at last?”

  “Da! Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not all right! Look what those bloody Huns have done. Had to stay out of sight to keep them from strafing again, but yon demented beast would not keep quiet!”

  Trevor sighed with relief. His father’s temper left no doubt that he was in fact unhurt. “Come aboard then.”

  “Send someone across to help me with Annie.”

  “Annie? Is she—”

  “I’m all right, too!” Annie Galway likewise emerged from the devastated pilothouse. A bandage was clumsily wound around her head, but the smile she flashed Trevor convinced him of the truth of her words. “Be quiet, Duffy,” she scolded. “Look, Trevor is here to take us home.”

  ***

  The first shells whistled into Lys a little after nine at night. Sepp was at his post in the bell tower of the church. There was a rushing sound overhead, and then the night exploded as a house one block behind St. Sebastian took a direct hit. The fragments of roof slates that flew through the air were as deadly as the metal slivers from the artillery round.

  A second shell dropped into the square in front of the church. It crashed against the fountain, showering the plaza with bits of stone and a geyser of water.

  The third detonated on a car parked outside the church. The hood of the auto spun into the air, a glowing, red-hot evil spirit that swooped down the street as if alive, and killed two cadets.

  These visions created an instantaneous new thought for Sepp: The arms of war turn even commonplace things into weapons of destruction.

  “Down!” Sepp yelled at his fellow lookouts. They lunged for the ladder, groping in the darkness for the skinny uprights. “Hurry, hurry!” Sepp urged in a rhythmic monotone. He waited until all the others had preceded him, then swung his leg onto the rungs.

  Another 155 mm round arrived. This explosion hit the church tower about halfway up. In a thunder of shattering bricks and mortar, the top of the column collapsed. Sepp was knocked off the ladder and hurled to the level below.

  Almost by accident, he reached out and grasped the bell rope swinging nearby. The wildly oscillating cord wrapped itself around him as much as he succeeded in grasping it. He slid and fell through a newly created gap in the floor, down to the center of the sanctuary.

  An hour later, Sepp was at his post by the river. Despite the pain from his cracked ribs, he had time to wonder why the Germans had not attempted to cross the bridge again. The shelling went on and on, without letup, but no assault came.

  He drew a careful breath, since an unguarded one hurt. He thought the Germans must not know the true strength and disposition of the troops guarding Lys. Perhaps they believed there were more than actually held the town.

  A shadow moved on the far bank. Instantly a dozen rifles and two machine-gun positions opened fire. The night was braided into woven strands of light and dark by the flashes and streams of tracers. When the German side of the river responded, the lines of bullets so crossed in midair that it seemed they must knock each other down and fall into the river. Then the crackle of arms tapered off, and both banks of the Lys were silent again.

  “In the dark,” Sepp remarked to Cadet Treville, “they cannot gauge our capacity. The fact that a lucky shot took out that first armored car makes them wary of the bridge.”

  “Will you tell Captain Gaston that it was a lucky hit?” Treville teased.

  “Get back to your post,” Sepp ordered, feeling the ache under the yards of sheet wrapped around his middle. “Dawn will change things, and we must be ready.”

  34

  The Bridge at Lys

  Horst was in the half-track he used as a command vehicle, receiving a reprimand from the newly arrived SS General Reuf.

  “Why are you not across the river already, von Bockman? Here I am with a division of infantry, ready to move onto the beaches and capture fifty thousand Britishers, and I find the road blocked and our armor sitting idle on this side.”

  Horst tried to remain patient. “Resistance was stiffer than we anticipated.”

  “Why have you not called in the bombers? Level the entire town, especially that obvious command post up on the hill.”

  “That command post is a hospital and clearly marked,” Horst said, his anger rising in spite of his effort to control it. “Would you bomb a hospital?”

  “If it serves the Reich,” said the SS officer with menace behind the words. “In fact, I have already asked for air support but was told that the Luftwaffe is completely engaged in attacking the shipping and the beaches. In any case, that is not our immediate concern. Why are your tanks not across that bridge?”

  “The fact that the bridge is still intact worries me.”

  “Worries you!” exploded the general. “Seize the opportunity at once!”

  “It should not be intact. It makes me wonder what sort of trap the French are trying to lure us into. I propose sending a flanking movement downstream to come in behind the town.”

  “Nonsense,” the general exclaimed. “Major, you will clear the roads of your machines. I will bring up my own tanks, and we will get this advance moving again!”

  ***

  The main building of the Ecole de Cavalerie rapidly filled with additional wounded, for whom there was no more room in the damaged dormitory. Paul Chardon was in his office, meeting with the newly arrived commanders of the British Guardsmen contingent and the French cavalry detachments.

  “With our five hundred men and those you gentlemen have brought up to the line,” Paul said across his heavy oak desk, “our strength is in the neighborhood of two thousand. That should give us the ability to hold out here for at least a day, perhaps two.”

  “But your five hundred men, as you call them, are schoolboys,” protested the senior French colonel. “They should be withdrawn at once.”

  “My ‘schoolboys’ have been preparing for this defense for months, Colonel. Your officers would do well to heed what my cadet officers have to say. How many more reinforcements may we expect?”

  The Allied officers exchanged a look.

  “There will be no more reinforcements,” the French colonel said. br />
  A cadet, crisply dressed in his uniform, presented himself at the door. “What is it, Denis?” Paul asked.

  “Captain Gaston reports armored vehicles approaching the bridge, sir.”

  “Tell him to blow the span to the south shore at once,” Paul ordered.

  Denis saluted and had turned to leave when the whine of an artillery shell screamed down. The round came through the roof at the front of the building and burst in the corridor outside Paul’s office.

  The concussion knocked Cadet Denis across the room and into Paul. The body of the sixteen-year-old received the shrapnel and the stout oak desk absorbed the blast, saving Paul’s life. The other Allied commanders were not so fortunate; they were exposed to the full force of the concussion and died instantly.

  ***

  Artillery fire raked the town all night long. Shells from the German 155 mm guns rained down on Lys. The Hotel de Pomme d’Or, once-favored haunt of the titled nobility in the nineteenth century, disappeared in a cloud of brick dust and shattered mortar. The tower of the church took several more hits until it was reduced to a heap of shattered stone.

  Explosions also rocked the school, but because most of the barrage was directed at the heart of the city and the buildings on the island, the Ecole escaped serious damage.

  The cadets and the other defenders wisely held their fire, knowing that a rifle shot aimed in the dark could scarcely damage the panzers but would certainly draw a twenty-pound bomb in return. Inside the crypt of the church and the cellar of the Hotel de la Cité, the cadets bided their time, waiting for the shelling to cease.

  At daybreak on June 3, the shelling lifted. Gaston returned to his command post on the island and, under cover of the sandbagged parapets, repaired the damaged lines that ran to the demolition charges.

  A pall of smoke hung over the town and floated over the river, an acrid curtain of biting fog. Gaston could not see across the river, but the sudden resumption of machine-gun fire ripping into the barricade and singing off the stonework into the town let him know what was coming.

  The rumble of tanks approached the bridge. A 37 mm round shattered the cornice of the building just above him. The raining fragments killed Cadet Lieutenant Beaufort, and a chunk the size of a man’s fist landed on Gaston’s head. It knocked him to the paving stones and left a gash behind his ear.

  When Gaston was struck down, his antitank crews began to fire without waiting. They loaded and launched cartridge after cartridge of the 25 mm shells, wasting much of their ammunition when it bounced off the front armor of the panzers.

  More shells landed nearby, tearing apart the gun crew. Bullets from across the river and from the tank weapons poured in, keeping other cadets from being able to take their places.

  The forward tank rolled to the midpoint of the bridge, blocked by the remains of the armored cars. It nosed against them, then pushed them aside. There was a momentary contest between the strength of the tank and the stone wall. Then the three-hundred-year-old rampart yielded. The tank pushed the carcass of first one and then the other Kfz 231 over the edge and into the river.

  Gaston felt someone shaking him. He did not know where he was. In fact, he believed that he was home in bed and his mother was trying to awaken him. “I don’t have to get up yet,” he mumbled. “And I have a terrible headache.”

  “Captain!” Cadet Plachet urged. “Wake up! The tanks are on the bridge!”

  Gaston awoke to the danger. Despite the throbbing in his head and the distraction of seeing everything double, he pulled himself over to the plunger of the detonator. The tanks opened up on the island with their machine guns and cannons, blasting chunks of stonework out of the walls and ripping into the sandbags.

  The French soldiers and the cadets stationed on the island and on the Lys shore fired their antitank weapons, but this morning nothing seemed to be working.

  Gaston waved his men back to cover behind the heaps of rubble that had been the buildings on the island. The third tank in the column that rumbled onto the bridge bore the personal pennant of an SS general.

  There was not an instant to spare. Gaston twisted the plunger to unlock it then, pulling it up, jabbed it home. The force behind the blow on the handle made it seem that he was trying to knock the bridge down by the strength of his arm alone.

  The lead tank gunner spotted Gaston at the same instant and swiveled the machine gun toward him. Flecks of rock spun into the air from the ricochets, blinding Gaston and lacing his face with fragments.

  Then the bridge erupted with a roar. Beginning at the end nearest the island, the centuries-old arches heaved upward, as if living things were emerging from under the water. Each vaulted span shattered in turn, catapulting boulders into the air. The tanks reared on their treads like startled elephants, then dropped submissively into the river.

  ***

  The course of the Seine turned south again after Rouen. The farmlands of Normandy spread out in a peaceful carpet of vivid color. There was no war here.

  “Up on deck!” Rose ordered when the first stirrings were heard below. She scouted the banks of the wide river and brought the Garlic into a lee where a stand of willows dipped their branches in the quiet waters. There the boat was moored. Lewinski, Jerome, and the five brothers went to work gathering branches to camouflage the dark hull of the péniche.

  Personal needs were taken care of on shore. Boys walked or were carried by Lewinski to the bank on the left. Girls all traipsed to the right. Faces were washed. Clean underthings put on. Dirty clothes rinsed in the river. Only then did the children gather on deck for prayer and a breakfast of tinned biscuits and jam. A jug of apple juice was cautiously sniffed by Rose, then declared drinkable and shared all around.

  Lewinski, looking oddly happy and at peace, held Yacov on his knee and watched over the congregation from a place in the sun. He did not wear the obligatory gas mask. His nervous hands were twirling a willow branch.

  “I will carve whistles if you will bring me sticks,” he told the boys and Juliette and Marie.

  Then Josie said to Rose, “Even sailors and the daughters of sailors must sleep sometime.”

  It was noted by those who had lived at No. 5 Rue de la Huchette with Madame Rose that in all the time they ahd known her, no one had ever seen her sleep. They all assumed Madame Rose never needed sleep. She had always been up and dressed before they arose and never to bed before they were all tucked in.

  Therefore, it was a matter of great interest when she growled at them now to all go away. She placed a blanket on a cotton sack in the bow, where the willow branches made a curtain, and promptly began to snore.

  Madame Rose snoring? It was much more amazing than the sound of bombs.

  ***

  “Send that SS engineer company here on the double,” Horst ordered.

  When the captain of engineers arrived, he looked around for the SS commander.

  “Your general,” Horst informed the man, “is at the bottom of the Lys. You are now under my authority.” Whether true or not, the claim worked.

  The bridging unit brought up pontoon sections to construct new spans for the river and inflatable boats. Horst ordered the SS infantry into the rubber rafts. “We will supply the covering fire. Your job is to get across the river and establish yourselves on the island.”

  The south shore of the Lys disappeared in the smoking roar of cannon and machine-gun fire. The defenders on the island and Sepp’s troops in the city were reduced to shooting back blindly over the tops of their shelters.

  35

  Guessing Games

  Throughout the morning Madame Rose rested while the children played or simply sat and watched from the shelter of the willows. A half-dozen times the moaning of aircraft passed overhead. They were too high to identify. French Moranes? British Spitfires? German ME-109s?

  Josie did not want to know, but the boys played guessing games. If their conclusions were correct, then four formations out of the six had been Luftwaffe. They were head
ed in the direction of Le Havre. It was not a good sign.

  Richard Lewinski had carved willow whistles for all passengers before the Garlic chugged away from the bank around noon. The Seine snaked south to La Bouille, then north to Duclair. One more long U brought the Garlic to Caudebec, and then the bends began to straighten. The wide mouth of the Seine River opened to the sea and the great port of Le Havre in the late afternoon. The Canal de Tancarville, fifteen miles long, connected the Seine directly with Le Havre, enabling ships to escape the tidal changes in the estuary.

  Today Rose chose not to go to the port city by way of the canal. She guessed rightly that the planes that had swept over them had been heading for the Tancarville and the vessels in the locks. Tall plumes of smoke marked where those craft had been spotted and destroyed.

  “Ducks in a barrel,” Rose said grimly as the shallow-bottomed Garlic moved easily across the estuary at slack tide.

  Entering the bay, it was plain to see that like Rouen, Le Havre had been hit hard. The gray film of dissipating smoke was visible from miles away. Its shipbuilding and sugar refineries were the envy of all Europe. Eight miles of quais and 190 acres of water area made the port of Le Havre one of the most important harbors of France. The Bassin de l’Eure alone was seventy acres, and it was there that the great ocean liners of the Compagnie Géneralé Transatlantique were berthed.

  “I had hoped to get fuel there.” For the first time Madame Rose’s voice registered concern, Josie thought. The masts of the péniche were still down, lashed to the decks. Fuel in the tank was alarmingly low. Perhaps not enough to reach England, Rose confided to Josephine and Lewinski.

  But to chance being in the harbor of Le Havre could be fatal.

  “We will sail north along the coast,” the old woman decided as she inhaled the fresh salt aroma of La Manche. The color returned to her cheeks. “There is the little port of Fécamp. They might have fuel. And if Fécamp is being attacked, then Veulettes. Or Dieppe north of that. And farther . . .”