Breakout Page 11

  The German squadron was now a most formidable armada. The protecting destroyers Richard Bietzen, Jacobi, Friedrich Ihn, Hermann Schoernann of flotilla 229, and six destroyers of 225 flotilla, sailed ahead of the main force. As the German battle-squadron arrived off Cap Gris Nez, a force of little ships joined them. The Second and Third and Eighth Torpedo Boat flotillas steamed up with five boats each. With them came the Second, Fourth and Sixth E-boat flotillas.

  At 12:15 p.m., exactly according to their timetable, they arrived at the narrowest part of the Channel between Dover and Cap Gris Nez, where the British should be waiting to sink them with massive air-sea attacks and coastal gun barrages. Through gaps in the mist, they saw the English coast and began to catch an occasional glimpse of barrage balloons. Then the white cliffs of Dover came into view and they could plainly see the framework of the radar antennae.

  The first officer, Cdr. Ernst Dominik, who had been on board the Scharnhorst ever since she was commissioned, waited for reports from every department of the ship. All the crews stood to, manning guns, waiting by boilers and engines. Others stood ready for damage and fire control. Every man of the 1,900 aboard Scharnhorst, the leading battleship, was expecting action.

  Admiral Ciliax stood on the bridge gazing into the mist, with the collar of his heavy sheepskin coat turned up and his big Zeiss glasses hanging on their leather slings around his neck. Broad-shouldered Captain Kurt Hoffmann sat on the little emergency seat next to him, also wrapped in a sheepskin coat with a thick scarf wound several times round his neck.

  Acting Chief Petty Officer Willi Goode stood at his director column at the side of the bridge with his night optical lenses which were also useful for day look-out. His telephone apparatus was slung around his neck ready for instant communication with all the ships' commanders.

  Little was to be heard above the slap of the waves as Scharnhorst bounced through the narrow Straits at top speed. There was the occasional slam of a water-tight door, or the clatter of heavy boots down companionways. The faint regular hum of the electric generators spread through the stillness of the control positions and gun turrets. Everyone was conscious that at any minute the alarm might sound, and the silent ship would be suddenly transformed into a fire-belching monster.

  To ease the tension, Admiral Ciliax pulled a packet of cigarettes from his sheepskin coat pocket and gave one to Captain Hoflmann. Tall, blond Chief Quartermaster Jürgens stepped forward to offer them a light. Inhaling deeply, the Admiral thanked him and offered him a cigarette.

  Another officer remarked to Giessler, "It's still like a practice cruise." Giessler nodded, as he checked their position on the chart. He indicated with his pencil, "Hier, Herr Kapitän." Hoffmann checked it and showed it to Ciliax adding, "Jawohl! Herr Admiral."

  They were nearly past the cliffs of Dover. Quietness still reigned. Why were the British so silent? They had almost come to believe they were to force the Straits unmolested, when there came a flash and a bang from the haze and a single shell fell harmlessly into the grey-green Channel behind them, a mile to port of the last ship, Prinz Eugen.

  Although their intelligence reported the British guns were not so formidable, naturally Admiral Ciliax and his captains remained doubtful. They based their fears on their own batteries of 15-inch and 16-inch guns emplaced in the Calais area. So when the first shell splashed into the sea astern of Prinz Eugen, the Germans braced themselves for a ferocious bombardment from the heaviest British coastal guns.

  VI

  THE CHANNEL GUNS OPEN UP

  Just before midday 22-year-old Auxiliary Territorial Service private Nora Smith was sitting in a café in Dover's Market Square eating egg and chips. She was one of the eight ATS girls who for" the past three weeks had been in the process of taking over Dover Castle plotting room operation from the men.

  Channel operations were directed from Dover Castle. A rabbit-warren of a place, standing high over the harbour, it was the command post and nerve-centre of the Channel war. It was commanded by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who had Bobby Constable-Roberts as his RAF liaison officer and Captain Day as Navy liaison officer. Also under his command was Brigadier Raw, who was in charge of the coastal artillery.

  Nora Smith and the other girls slept and ate underground and sometimes a week went past without their seeing daylight. Due on the afternoon shift in Dover Castle starting at 1 p.m., she was enjoying a much-needed morning off when the double-siren went off giving warning of imminent shelling.

  At this period of the war shell warnings were almost a daily occurrence in Dover. Six times in succession she had tried to see Gone With the Wind at the local cinema and each time there had been a shell warning. During them everyone was supposed to stay put. As they often lasted a long time Nora Smith's one idea was to get back to report for duty.

  As Ciliax's battleships began steaming through the narrowest part of the Channel, Nora Smith left her meal unfinished and started running up the hill towards the Castle. Normally it took nearly half an hour to walk that mile-long steep slope. This time she did it in ten minutes.

  She found the morning-shift ATS girls at the plotting table busily marking the position of the German battleships on the grid maps with chinagraph pencils. Although différent plots came in from radar every three minutes the girls working at the large table were not sure what they were plotting. All they knew was that something very big was coming through the Channel. Some of them thought it might be the start of the invasion. Although the morning-shift girls were shortly due for relief they kept on plotting and could not be interrupted. So Nora Smith decided to make herself useful and went off to bring them cups of tea.

  The place was in an uproar. The ten-line switchboard was completely jammed and everyone was shouting at once. Six or seven doors were flung open — a thing no one had ever seen before as most of them led to secret rooms. High-ranking officers darted in and out. Others rushed to the windows to look out to sea. All anyone could see was a swirling mist.

  Admiral Ramsay kept dashing from his own room to the plotting room where the girls were working. Often hurrying people fell over the Admiral's two bulldogs.

  Much of this confusion was caused by the primitive communication arrangements at Dover Castle. The Army plotting room, which directed the coastal guns, was five minutes' walk on the other side of the Castle from the Naval operations room. There was no direct telephone line and everything had to be channelled through signals. If signals were busy, this led to a delay. If a secret message came over the teleprinter in code, messengers had to walk with it as fast as they could through the tunnels to Naval H.Q., which caused further hold-ups.

  Also there was very little co-operation between the three services. For instance, although Flt.-Lt. Kidd's RAF radar at Swingate was better equipped than the coastal gunners, it could not transmit any information direct to them. Some of the girls even had maps with the grids wrongly placed. One officer complained of this but no one took any notice of him.

  In the middle of this confusion at Dover Castle sat Brigadier Cecil Whitfield Raw, studying the first radar reports. A former accountant who had risen as a Territorial to the highest rank normally available to a non-regular, he was the Commander of 12 Corps Coastal Artillery.

  In spite of General Martini's attempt to jam the British radar sets totally, they were now plotting the battleships' course accurately. These were the K-sets which had displaced the M-sets, and their longer wavelengths — since the shorter the wavelength the greater the accuracy.

  The South Foreland battery had a K-type radar set which had just been installed. As its "blips" continued to track the battleships, Admiral Ramsay told Raw to "Engage when ready." Raw gave a "Take post" order to South Foreland's four 9.2s — the only guns capable of engaging the battleships. They were all he had. The much-needed 15-inch battery at Wanstone was not yet completed and the 14-inch guns were useless for this type of target. Although they could reach the ships, they were not tied to the control system and with their sl
ow rate of traverse they could not keep up with a speeding battleship. At their rate of fire, there would only be time for each 14-inch gun to fire one round on a predetermined position— and it was a million-to-one chance that they would hit anything.

  Nor was Raw too optimistic about the 9.2 guns' contribution to the action. For they had not completed their first firing practices. Also it was the first time they — or any other guns — had ever been fired by radar control. As he waited for the moment to open fire, Rrigadier Raw also thought that the 9.2s firing at their extreme range of 34,000 yards — twenty-two miles — might not have much effect against the heavy armour of the great ships.

  On this misty, cold morning the 9.2 Battery was doing practice drills. The plotting officer, Second Lt. Dennis Hagger, a wholesale grocer in civilian life, was in his operations post on the cliffs by the South Foreland lighthouse. For two weeks, he and his fellow gunner officers had been hearing rumours that the German battleships were going to try and force a passage through the Channel. The rumours were so persistent that officers, not wishing to miss their first chance of firing their heavy guns in anger, cancelled their leave. But it had begun to look very like the cry of "Wolf." So when a klaxon sounded giving Brigadier Raw's signal for action stations, Hagger thought it was a false alarm. Telling his gunners to continue their practice drill session, he picked up the telephone and queried the order with his battery commander, Major Guy Huddlestone, who barked, "This is the real thing. Take post!"

  It was three minutes after noon. The Scharnhorst and her sister ships were 32,000 yards away from the South Foreland battery when the gunners' fire control post reported, "Ready for action."

  At 12:10 p.m. their K-type radar showed the battleships 27,000 yards away coming up towards Cap Gris Nez. The clear "blips" on the battery's radar showed their course and estimated speed as twenty-two knots — eight knots below their real speed. As the battery radar was now clearly following the ships, Brigadier Raw gave the order to fire.

  At 12:19 p.m. Huddlestone fired two shells. The flight of these heavy armour-piercing projectiles took fifty-five seconds. When they burst with a splash and a plume of yellowish-black smoke behind the third ship, Prinz Eugen, the battle of Dover had begun.

  Everyone aboard the German ships waited tensely for the heavier attacks which they felt must come. Luckily for the Germans, the mist which had cleared for a brief interval, revealing a glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover, now closed again.

  The German crews saw flashes from the cliffs and several splashes to port. Then came the crunch of more heavy shells bursting. Although their shots fell unevenly and short of the ships, it meant to the German commanders that there was no doubt at last they had been detected. As they steamed on through the narrowest part of the Channel, they began to swing violently on their course to baffle the British.

  Brigadier Raw, looking through captured Italian binoculars, tried unavailingly to watch where their shells were landing. The weather was too thick to see anything from the cliffs but after a minute came the rumbling echo of the shells exploding. Like his Brigadier, Major Huddlestone, the officer commanding the 9.2s, also tried to catch a glimpse of the battleships from his observation post. He too saw nothing but mist. As maximum visibility was less than five miles, Raw realized that the firing would have to be all done by radar. The problem that faced him was that there could be no observation of the "fall of shot" by either sight or radar. For their radar could not indicate where their shells were landing.

  Without seeing where they were falling, they could not make any accurate corrections. Were they on target? No one had fired heavy guns by radar before so it was difficult to know.

  Martini's jamming, however, was not interfering with the K-sets and the echo of the battleships' course came in loud and clear. The K-sets began to track the German ships as they snaked to and fro. This looked as though the shells were landing near them.

  Following the radar tracks, Huddlestone fired two more shots at 12:23 p.m. At 12:28 p.m., after another two shells had been fired and their explosions unobserved, Raw ordered Major Huddlestone to start firing full-battery four-gun salvoes without waiting for fall-of-shot reports.

  A minute later came the crash of the first four shells fired together. A second salvo was fired at 12:30 p.m. Out of the mist came the rumble of heavy shells landing, but they were not followed by louder explosions indicating a hit. As it looked as though they were still missing the battleships, Raw ordered, "Add 1,000 yards to the range."

  At 12:31 p.m., just as they were about to fire at this new range for the first time, extra "blips" showed faintly on the screen. Radar had managed to pick up the second salvo, landing. These "blips" clearly showed their shells were still falling short of the ships, so Raw shouted down the phone to Huddlestone, "Add 1,000 yards."

  When this fourth salvo was fired, one of the new faint radar echoes showed a stronger "blip" which seemed to indicate a shell hitting one of the ships. The gunners looked at each other questioningly. They knew if they had hit a ship in these difficult conditions it was a very lucky shot. Yet even if it had missed it must have landed very near, because clear "blips" on the radar plot showed the German ships drastically altering course. The guns were now on target — but they only had about five minutes left before they were out of range.

  Around midday, Corporal Ernest Griggs and his comrades of "D" Company, the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had been on anti-invasion alert for three weeks, marched along the snow-covered cliffs carrying their tommy-guns to the Green Blinds café at St. Margaret's Bay not far from the 14-inch naval guns, "Winnie" and "Pooh."

  Just as they sat down and ordered cups of tea, there came a nerve-shaking crash as two 9.2 guns opened fire. Peering through the wide sun-trap windows of the café they saw their shells spinning through the air like balls of fire. When the four guns of the 9.2 battery began firing at once, making the air tremble and deafening the troops with the noise, someone shouted above the din, "The guns are practising again!" Griggs replied, "No, they are not! They are firing full charge." Neither he nor the rest of "D" Company had any idea of what was happening — except they knew it could not be an invasion, because as first-line infantry they would have been alerted.

  Then came a different noise as shells whined over the café to land on the farmland behind St. Margaret's Bay. The German cross-Channel batteries had joined in the gun battle, aiming at the South Foreland batteries. Their shooting was as inaccurate as the British coastal guns. Six German shells fell 200–300 yards apart in a straight line near the 9.2s, plopping into soft chalk. Others churned up mud on the snowy ground, but they did not make much of a crater. No one at the South Foreland battery was hurt nor any gun damaged.

  At 12:35 p.m., half a dozen more German shells exploded on the farmland near the 9.2s. They were answered a minute later by four shells from South Foreland.

  As the battleships were now moving out of the extreme limit of the guns' range of 34,000 yards and radar had not echoed the fall of the last three salvoes. Raw ordered the guns to cease fire.

  He and his gunners thought they had been aiming at the leading battleship, Schamhorst, so Raw ordered them to try and pick up the second and third ships in the convoy. Although their radar set succeeded in following the ship they had been firing at to a range of 65,000 yards, they failed to find any new targets within range. This was because shells had been landing near the last ship Prinz Eugen—not the first.

  The radar could not locate any further targets so the 9.2s did not fire again. The salvo fired at 12:36 p.m. was their last.

  The Germans kept up their bombardment. They fired two more salvoes at 12:50 and 12:52 p.m., which burst harmlessly in the snow-covered fields of Kent. Then they also ceased fire.

  At the end of the gun duel Brigadier Raw reported, "This was the first action against German vessels forcing their way through the Straits. The ships, protected by their heavy armour, sailing at thirty knots, were neither sunk nor halted."

 
Neither Brigadier Raw nor his officers caught a glimpse of the battleships they were firing at. It was the first action in which long-range guns were directed to their target by radar. As a result, they had to make up their own procedure as they went along — and a lot of it was guesswork.

  M.T.B.

  Brigadier Raw said, "The action was the first to be fought by new radar equipment, directed by an untried method of fire control still in the experimental stage. In seventeen minutes thirty-three rounds were fired, three of which were possible near-misses and an RAF pilot reported that one ship had been hit. The only matter for regret was that the 15-inch guns of Wanstone Battery were not ready to fire."

  Although the 9.2 battery had failed to halt the German ships, their performance had been satisfactory. If they had had a little more warning, they might have been much more effective.

  The rest of the British coastal guns remained silent. The task of 6-inch batteries was to fire on German convoys coming through the Channel or prevent an attack on Dover Harbour. They were "tight" guns, which meant they could not fire without special orders from Admiral Ramsay, in case they interfered with the operations of the RAF and the Navy.

  Major Bill Corris, duty officer on a 6-inch gun battery at the top of Lydden Spout, spent a typically frustrating morning. Looking down from the top of the cliffs 400 feet up, all he saw below was a cotton-wool eiderdown of cloud. Although visibility was less than 100 yards, he watched all kinds of planes coming towards the Channel and diving into the clouds. Then came the distant firing of guns and excited talk over the telephone told him and his fellow officers there was "a flap on" and "a convoy coming through the Channel." They stood ready to fire — but no orders came. The ships were too far away for them to waste ammunition.