The handful of British prisoners had the mortification of seeing, when the fighting had ended and they could take breath, the Camber beaches thick with German landing craft, and Rye Bay covered with other vessels coming in; it was a sight which held the attention even though far overhead the opening phase of that part of the Battle of Britain which was fought in the air was being fought out with a ferocity and determination unequalled in history.
The tiny garrison of Rye Harbour, on the other side of the Rother mouth, held out for some time longer; some of the victors at Camber were diverted to the attack there and, in fact, it was not until midday that the Martello tower was stormed. Rye itself stood no better chance. Four parachute battalions had been dropped on the four roads on the landward side of the town and, leaving small forces at road-blocks, they wasted no time before launching their converging attack. Already the first echelon of the air-landing division was being hustled out of its lanes beside the Winchelsea road where another parachute battalion awaited it, and it was this assault that sealed the fate of Rye. The dive bombers were attacking at the same moment, raining ruin on the town. The Germans burst into Rye from all sides, and the final struggle was fought out in the picturesque old streets, from house to house and from room to room over the wreckage left by the bombing.
Women cowering in the houses were unwilling witnesses, were pitiful victims. Desperate soldiers crouching beside windows ignored them as they peered out for shots at the German attackers creeping forward from corner to corner, and often a well-flung hand grenade left soldiers and women dead and dying on the floor together among the kitchen furniture.
The wave of attackers swept in over the little town like the tide over a rock. A ferocious final struggle ended in the storming of the Ypres tower, whose garrison died to a man in its defence; by ten o’clock in the morning the shattered town was quiet again, with the streets littered with dead, Germans and British, soldiers and civilians, women and men. There were only a few shots still to be heard, here and there, as the moppers-up hunted the last of the defenders down from the rooftops and out of the cellars. Winchelsea succumbed at much the same time - here horror was added to horror by the coincidence that no fewer than seven blazing aeroplanes, shot down from the skies above, came crashing within the narrow limits of the little village while the fighting was in progress.
The whole world was waiting for news, ever since the first announcement, waiting in agonizing anxiety. Even in the opening days of the Battle of Belgium, when the Wehrmacht had its strength first really tested, the tension had not been in any way so acute. It was evening in Australia; it was still night in California. The fate of England was in the balance, and the world knew that its own fate was in the balance too. In Tokyo and in Madrid, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, people waited for news. Then it came, from Goebbels’ organization in Berlin.
‘The forces of the Wehrmacht have landed in England. Progress is already rapid, and the German flag now waves in triumph over the cities of Rye and Winchelsea, two of the once- proud Cinque Ports. The prisoners taken are numerous and the German losses slight. The landing is proceeding satisfactorily. England, which for a thousand years has seen no foreign enemy on her shores, is tottering down to destruction.’
The Battle of Britain was fought in the air, on land, on the sea, and under the sea. In the feverish hours of that Sunday morning there was action at every point, and indeed it is to the credit of the German staffs that this was the case. In less than four weeks they made and executed plans whose flexibility and whose timing can only excite admiration. The first wave of German landing craft came into the beaches a half hour before high water, with the first light, only some minutes after the parachute troops touched ground and - almost incredibly - without a single casualty.
The Fritz Reuter was by no means loaded to her full draught not nearly to the extent to which she was usually loaded when carrying cement to Berlin. Forty tons of her present cargo consisted merely of men, and men, even when no allowance is made for their comfort, make an awkward and bulky cargo to carry. The metal containers of supplies, particularly those filled with ammunition, were more congenial cargo, but even so they were bulky and space-wasting because of their limitation to thirty-seven kilograms - about eighty pounds - apiece. With four hundred men on board and eight hundred containers, the Fritz Reuter drew only four feet of water.
The fat captain was so distracted by the flight of the Luftwaffe overhead that he actually had not noticed the low shore ahead. In the faint light he could just see, when the naval officer excitedly pointed to it, the line of small breakers, the beach and the low sandhills ahead. He swung his wheel over so as to come in squarely; all around him other craft were racing at their ponderous fastest for the same objective. The fat captain eased his throttle, but the beach was far shallower than he expected, and the Fritz Reuter took the ground with a bump that threw the excited soldiers in heaps. But there was an active major in command, who hauled himself up on deck again at once and bellowed orders. The men moved forward in orderly fashion into the bow and climbed up and leaped down into four feet of water. One platoon waded to the water’s edge and pressed forward to the dunes to guard against an attack that was never made. The others formed two parties, one hauling forward the containers and handing them down to the other.
As fast as the containers were handed down the men in the water carried them and dumped them at high-tide mark and returned again for the rest. The Fritz Reuter rose with the removal of her cargo as well as with the rising of the last of the tide; the fat captain had to let in the clutch at intervals to keep her bow aground so that the later journeys were far shorter than the first. It seemed hardly any time before the barge was free of its cargo, and the major waved farewell before he leaped down into the water on the heels of his men. In obedience to the young naval officer’s order the fat captain engaged his reverse, and the Fritz Reuter drew off the beach, swung round and headed back towards France.
It had been unbelievably simple; the fat captain could hardly believe that his mission was accomplished. But he was so engrossed with the business of handling the Fritz Reuter that he had had eyes for little else - for the numerous boats that had not succeeded at all in getting their cargoes ashore, for the confusion and the accidents all round him. Overhead a chaotic din of engines and gunfire heralded the beginning of an air battle; he had been awake all night and was stupid with want of sleep. He could not think at all while the Fritz Reuter, empty now, plunged and flapped on the waves.
At Fighter Command Headquarters the situation revealed itself with instant clarity. It was as if a curtain had risen so that now the stage with its cast and its scenery was suddenly disclosed, fully lighted, to a waiting audience. One moment everything was uncertainty, and the next there could be no doubts at all.
A thousand planes in the air might have meant anything, and then the reports poured in, from the Observer Corps and the army, from the Local Defence Volunteers and the navy. Parachute troops and dive bombers; the Channel covered with shipping; the whole German plan was plain instantly, without any doubt at all. The attack from Stavanger upon the east coast, which the Luftwaffe intended as a powerful distraction, could not divert attention from their real objective for a moment. Fighter Command sent its squadrons speeding over the southern counties to deal with the invaders, leaving a minimum force to meet the eastern attack - and incidentally to gain one of the most striking victories in the war. The surprise which the Germans had sprung gained them only a few minutes of immunity - valuable minutes, but no more than that.
The Luftwaffe had planned as carefully as they could, drawing upon the experience gained in a hundred recent battles in which they had given air support to the ground troops, but the problems they faced here were hard of solution. It was a turning of the tables; a month ago the RAF had struggled to provide air cover at Dunkirk, over a distant beach against enemies with bases near at hand; today the Luftwaffe was trying to do the same thing at Rye Bay. They could put f
ighter squadrons in the air over the invasion area, but the time they could stay there was limited and was greatly reduced by the need to fly from France and to return. Against them was ranged an enemy who could mass his forces for an attack at his selected moment, and who enjoyed at the same time the advantage of radar to make the selection of that moment all the easier.
For the first twenty minutes of the air war the Luftwaffe had had the advantage of surprise, and had made the utmost use of it. The parachute troops had been dropped, a fair proportion of the air-landing troops had reached ground, and the dive bombers had begun their fearful and accurate attack upon Winchelsea and Rye. Then the picture changed like a dissolving view, and it never was to change back again. The Spitfires and the Hurricanes came in to the attack, the squadrons roaring in across the southern counties in obedience to the radio orders. There were fighters to meet them - Messerschmitts waiting high in the sky to protect their charges, but only a limited number, for the Germans’ Third Air Fleet had to plan to have Messerschmitts in the air over there all day long.
While the battle was being fought in the upper strata, the slaughter took place in the lower - when two squadrons of Spitfires got in among the dive bombers and the troop-carrying planes. The Junkers 87s stood no chance against them at all; for a few wild minutes shattered and blazing wrecks rained down out of the sky into the sea, and into Sussex and Kent. The troop carriers were more vulnerable still. The latecomers of the first wave and the leaders of the second wave alike succumbed. German soldiers loaded down with weapons, squatting stolidly in the planes winging their way to the invasion coast, had mercifully only a few seconds in which to anticipate their fates. Squatting there, deafened and stupefied by the roar of the engines, their only warning came when bullets ripped through the fuselage, killing a few, wounding a few, before pilots and engines alike were struck dead by a concentrated burst. Then the planes rolled over and crashed to the earth, where death awaited the wounded and the unwounded.
The initial planned timing of the Luftwaffe had been perfect, as was only to be expected of that force with its very considerable experience. The parachute drop, the beginning of the air landing, the bombing of Rye and Winchelsea, and the intervention of the first escort fighters had taken place at the exact moments of greatest effect. But as the morning wore on, the standard could not be maintained. Keen minds at Fighter Command were watching the developments, and the reports came in more and more smoothly as the staffs settled down to their work. Cool calculation revealed the selected moment; one force of German fighters on its way back to France to refuel and rearm, another heading for England, but only just making its appearance on the screens, and a very limited force over the invasion area. That was the instant to seize the opportunity, to send the Spitfires and the Hurricanes roaring into action to strike at the Messerschmitts with odds of more than two to one, nearly three to one. Ten minutes of wild fighting almost emptied the sky of German planes, and after the second of these battles there was a moment when Bomber Command could intervene, to roar over the beaches raining explosives on the huddled shipping, on the crowded men and the dumped supplies.
Those keen minds at Fighter Command - and the keen mind at Downing Street - watched with anxiety the rising figures of reported losses, British and German. The RAF had had a month in which to recover from the wounds inflicted at Dunkirk, a fortnight in which to recover from those inflicted in France, long enough to complete the training of a considerable number of pilots; while for six weeks now the factories had exceeded all previous records of production. Reserves were scanty, but on the other hand the Luftwaffe had not recovered from its efforts in France either. The total of shattered British planes rose steadily; the total of dead and disabled pilots rose more slowly, with the recovery of many unwounded pilots. Even allowing for duplication and for error, it was becoming apparent that the balance was heavily in favour of the British; the German losses were close to, if not over, that figure of double the British losses which meant that in this deadly game of beggar-my-neighbour the Luftwaffe would be beggared first.
‘Nothing new? No surprises?’ asked the voice on the telephone.
‘No, sir, nothing new,’ was the reply from Fighter Command.
There had always been the lurking fear that when Hitler struck his blow he would employ some new weapon, some unexpected technique, but it was becoming clear that there was no new weapon in his armoury. Dive bombing, air landing, parachutists - all these were familiar already; it was comforting to know that some new defence had not to be hurriedly improvised against some new form of attack.
At eleven in the morning the Luftwaffe staff attempted what some among them had believed beforehand to be a masterstroke. They launched a fleet of bombers with fighter escort against London, in the hope both of finding a weak spot in the defences and of confusing the general issue. That was the first of the bad raids on London; five hundred tons of explosives killed a thousand civilians, laid streets in ruins, called forth the utmost efforts of the rescue and fire-fighting parties, but hardly forwarded the invasion in the least; German experts later believed that the same attack directed against roads and railways leading to the invasion area would have brought more decisive results, but that is doubtful to say the least. In any case the cost to the Luftwaffe - for the RAF inevitably attacked the raiders before they could escape - was very considerable, while the necessity of escorting the bombers left the invasion area almost unguarded.
The radio announcement of the invasion had appealed to the British public to ‘Stay put’, and it was notable how this instruction was obeyed by all sections of the community - save one. The Local Defence Volunteers for fifty miles round, and farther, without orders and without organization, spontaneously went into action, the first in the field with a unanimity that astonished neutral observers out of touch with British feeling. In hundreds of villages and towns, in thousands and thousands of cottages and semi-detached dwellings, the volunteers kissed their wives goodbye and went off to the scene of action with their rifles - such as had rifles - and a pocketful of ammunition, if they had any. The nearest came on foot, the more distant on bicycles - within an hour of the first alarm the Hastings road and all the others leading from Maidstone and Chatham and Ashford and Guildford were crowded with cyclists pedalling on, ignoring the efforts of police and military police.
The later arrivals served to swell the forces already gathered about the focal points on the dozen roads radiating out from Winchelsea and Rye. Here there was German infantry, fierce, hard men who had seized farmhouses and cottages, driving the women and old men out across the fields. They had set up their strong points, and they had posted their machine guns sheltered in ditches and behind banks with a good field of fire, establishing themselves in a perimeter to guard the invasion area from attack. Round the perimeter gathered the clouds of volunteers, under no general command, most of them in groups of twenty or so led by sergeants or self-appointed leaders.
There were many rash groups and individuals - some of them mere sightseers - who exposed themselves and were mowed down by bursts of machine-gun fire. There were plenty whose curiosity was easily satisfied or whose courage evaporated and who drifted homeward as evening approached, but many remained, and among them were individuals, and groups commanded by individuals, with their fighting instincts aroused. There were two foolish attacks at Udimore, there was at least one at Peasmarsh, when madness overcame the huddled masses and they rose to their feet and went forward, yelling, to be mowed down in rows leaving heaps of pathetic corpses in the fields.
There were other individuals and groups better trained or more intelligent. They came creeping along the hedges, filtering through the copses, crawling along the ditches. Many a German infantryman, peering forward to guard against an attack from the front, died from a bullet fired from behind him. The higher country, along which ran the roads, was so broken up with orchards and woods that it was not difficult for a determined man to make his way through the slender cordon
of German troops. In the flats there were ditches and drains; a man who did not mind getting wet could crawl along those for miles, literally, screened by reeds. The men who did so were not the type who would waste ammunition, especially with no more, usually, than ten cartridges. There were targets in plenty within the perimeter, where the Germans were toiling to assemble their forces. It was easy from a bank of reeds to send a bullet winging into a working party of a battalion forming up - a smoothbore bullet, often enough, for a week ago there had been the first issue of bullet-loaded cartridges to fit a twelve gauge shotgun; big bullets that could kill a man at two hundred yards. So while the battle was being fought overhead in the air and out at sea, it was being waged on land by these guerrilla troops.
By late afternoon in England it was still only midday in New York, where an eminent commentator was trying to explain the situation to a radio audience.
‘The world is holding its breath awaiting the result of this battle,’ he said. ‘Everything depends upon it - the continued existence of Britain as a nation, the fate of Europe and, I need hardly tell you, the future of the United States as well. It appears as if the Germans have been fantastically fortunate in being able to slip a considerable force across the Channel, although that has always been considered possible. How big that force is and of what it is composed, we do not know, and nobody is likely to tell us. What we do know is that the Germans have not succeeded yet in seizing a harbour of any importance. Rye Harbour is only a tiny place, fit for only the smallest vessels to use, and it dries out at low water. It can contribute almost nothing to the maintenance of the invaders. Supplies and reinforcements will have to be landed on open beaches in so far as they are not brought by air.
‘The Royal Navy may have been caught napping - we don’t know - but I think we can safely say that they will soon cut off all means of supply by sea unless the Luftwaffe is able to keep them away. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe and the RAF are fighting desperately for the command of the air. We hear of continuous fighting in the air over the invasion areas. Berlin is claiming victories, but so are the British communiques in a more quiet way. Everything may hinge on the results of the air fighting.