Allied parachute drops were launched in the early hours of 6 June. Soldiers were weighed down with weapons, food and supplies. Those landing in Sainte-Mère-Église found it hard to dodge the intense German gunfire.
FIFTY MILES TO the west of the parachute landings, at the 84th Army Corps headquarters in Saint-Lô, General Erich Marcks was enjoying a glass of chilled Chablis, one of the many deliciously ill-gotten perks of life in France. Marcks was in unusually good humour. The clock had just struck midnight (occupied France was an hour behind British Double Summer Time*) and it was his birthday. He was turning fifty-three, although he looked somewhat older, and had the air of an old warhorse, with a vulpine face ‘expressing self-discipline’ and a strong will ‘that might have been that of a scholar’. But his most striking feature was his artificial leg, a souvenir of the Eastern Front, that ‘creaked as he rose to greet his visitors’.1 He sounded like an antiquarian relic from the reign of old King Friedrich, all stiff back and aching bones.
On this particular night, his visitors included Major Wilhelm Viebig, Major Friedrich Hayn and Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich von Criegern, all senior staff of the 7th Army. They had arrived at the general’s operations room with a birthday cake, the bottle of chilled Chablis and the intention of introducing a touch of levity into General Marcks’s life. But they knew the celebration would be perfunctory, just like the general himself. He was a no-nonsense puritan with a frosty disdain for frivolity: ‘ascetic, with a thin face, strong, earnest and absolutely correct in his manner’.2 Commander of the 84th Corps, Marcks was in charge of the divisions manning the Normandy beaches.
The cork was popped, a toast was raised and the Chablis briefly savoured. ‘In a few minutes the ceremony was over.’3 And then the general turned back to the huge situation map of the south coast of England, which showed the disposition of the thirty Allied divisions preparing for the invasion – Canadians in the east, British in the middle and Americans in the west. Marcks was studying intently ‘the little flags, the red or blue lines and curves, the shaded ovals and overlapping curves’.4 He was paying particular attention to the five airborne divisions set out neatly on the maps.
There was good reason for his attentiveness. On the very next morning, at dawn on 6 June, all the divisional commanders of the 7th Army were due to meet in Rennes in order to discuss how best to deal with an Allied landing on the Cotentin peninsula. General Marcks himself was to play the role of an Allied paratrooper commander, deploying his forces from the air. The others were to demonstrate ‘how they would wipe these paratroopers out’.5
Marcks was taking the exercise extremely seriously. After examining the map of the Allied forces, he turned to a second map – this time of Normandy – that marked the various developments over the previous two months. It made for uncomfortable viewing. Allied bombing targets had been highlighted in red pen and they revealed an alarming pattern to the destruction.
Marcks’s bony finger slid across the map from east to west as he joined up the red dots: Hamm, Maastricht, Amiens, Rouen, Caen, Cherbourg – all the major railway junctions had come under heavy aerial bombardment. So had the subsidiary lines, such as the one connecting Metz with Bar-le-Duc. And it was not just railways that had been targeted. The road bridges over the Seine between Paris and Rouen had been knocked out, along with those over the Loire at Orléans and Nantes. As Marcks studied the map, he got a chilling insight into the Allies’ strategic planning. He felt sure that their aim was to trap the 7th Army on a small island of land. It was every general’s nightmare.
One of the trio of officers with General Marcks that night was Friedrich Hayn, his intelligence expert. Along with the Chablis, Hayn had brought a birthday message that was rather less welcome. He warned Marcks that ‘methodically and with ever-growing accuracy, the Allies were aiming at inshore targets.’6 These included the Ginsterhöhe radar station, the V1 site south of Cherbourg and several synthetic fuel plants. The German 7th Army was in a precarious situation.
General Marcks was studying a plan of German artillery positions when the field telephone rang loud and shrill in the operations room. It was precisely 1.11 a.m. – an unforgettable moment, according to Hayn. ‘The general’s body stiffened, his right hand clutched the edge of the table and with a jerk of his head, he beckoned to his chief of staff to listen in.’ The message was as stark as it was sensational: enemy parachutists were landing in huge numbers along the banks of the River Orne. The report, said Hayn, ‘struck us like lightning’.7
There followed a heated discussion in the operations room. Some felt the paratroopers were merely liaison parties sent to help the French resistance. Hayn disagreed. ‘Too close to our front line,’ he said. ‘The resistance people would never risk that.’ He was adamant that they had come to capture positions of tactical importance. If so, ‘the situation had become serious indeed’.
The men were still discussing the landings when the phone rang again. It was 1.45 a.m. ‘Enemy parachutists south of St Germain de Varreville and at Sainte Marie du Mont.’8 Colonel Hamann, acting commander of the 709th Division, had just received the reports from Valognes. There were also rumours of parachutists landing at Sainte-Mère-Église and on both banks of the Merderet River.
Hayn was by now seriously alarmed. ‘Three jumping areas near our front line. Two of them, moreover, near important passages across our flooded districts.’9 He turned to General Marcks and gravely informed him that the invasion was imminent. Marcks was not so sure. ‘Let’s wait and see.’10 But he was sufficiently worried to cancel the wargame planned for the following morning: he ordered the various divisional commanders to remain at their posts.
‘The kriegsspiel [wargame] is countermanded: the gentlemen are requested to return at once to their units.’11 Some of the generals were successfully contacted, but others could not be reached. General Hellmich, General von Schlieben and Lieutenant General Falley were already en route to Rennes.
News of the landings was swiftly phoned through to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon. The duty officer, Lieutenant Borzikowski, immediately raised the alarm, waking everyone by sounding the sirens. Among those roused from his sleep was Rommel’s personnel officer, Colonel Leodegard Freyberg. He sat bolt upright in bed, listened to the sirens for a moment and decided ‘it was just another false alarm’. He was about to go back to sleep when there was a heavy pounding on his door. He switched on the light and found himself staring at his chief clerk, Sergeant Heine, in full combat dress.
‘Are you crazy, Heine? What’s happening to you?’
‘Sir, the invasion has begun. All personnel must immediately proceed to their respective bunkers.’
Freyberg threw off his bed covers and immediately got dressed. ‘Well this is it,’ he thought. ‘At last it’s started.’12
But not everyone was convinced. Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel, glanced at the overcast night sky and felt sure that it was a false alarm. ‘Darn it, that’s odd! That’s no way to start an invasion, and in weather such as this, of all things!’13 He decided not to trouble Rommel until he was sure that this was indeed the start of the landings.
‘This is the invasion.’ From his base in Cherbourg, General Max Pemsel, the 7th Army’s chief of staff, put in a frantic call to General Hans von Salmuth, commander of the 15th Army. But the general was sceptical, for he refused to believe the Allies would land in such bad weather.
‘Have any sea landings taken place?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Pemsel. ‘Not one man has landed. Nothing so far.’
General von Salmuth thought it was a fuss about nothing. He hung up the phone and said to one of his staff, ‘Now I’m going to sleep.’14
By now, reports were being received from across Normandy. Many were wired through to Caen, where Eva Eifler was struggling to keep up with the transmissions coming through her headphones. It was impossibly exhausting. No sooner were they deciphered and transcribed than they were forwarded to General Marcks, as well as to all the commanders in the coastal area.
Hayn felt as if everyone had been given a shot of adrenalin. ‘Our Army Corps Command Post was humming like a beehive.’15 But he also felt a profound sense of disquiet. The old general had been wrong-footed by the paratrooper landings and it was some time before he was prepared to accept that this might indeed be the invasion.
‘Alarm coast!’ He suddenly snapped these two words to Wilhelm Viebig, his chief of operations. It was a codeword that everyone knew: it signified that the Allied invasion was under way.
‘Alert!’ A call also flashed out from the 15th Army’s wireless operators. It was the invasion. This was it. The 7th Army’s operators responded in kind.
‘Alert! Alert!’16
While General Erich Marcks and his staff tried to make sense of what was going on, others were getting more direct experience of the Allied paratrooper landings. Walter Ohmsen, the senior commander of the huge gun battery at Crisbecq, was studying the night sky with his field glasses when he heard a thunderous roar sweeping in from the sea. Ohmsen harboured no illusions as to what would happen next. For the last six weeks, his battery had been relentlessly pounded by enemy bombers.
There was good reason why it was being targeted. Crisbecq was situated on the eastern coast of the Cotentin peninsula, less than five miles to the north of Utah Beach, and Allied reconnaissance planes had spotted a serious danger lurking inside this concrete and steel redoubt. It was armed with three long-barrelled 210mm Czech Kanone that had a range of twenty-one miles and were powerful enough to punch a hole in the largest battleship. They also presented a formidable threat to the planned beach landings, for they were within range of every beach from Morsalines to Pointe du Hoc.
Sub Lieutenant Ohmsen was almost thirty-three years of age (it was his birthday on 7 June) and one of a breed of professionals who had joined the navy during the Weimar Republic. After fifteen years at sea, he was more used to life on the waves than on dry land. But Crisbecq’s proximity to the coast had led to it being placed under the direction of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, with Ohmsen as its commander, so he spent his days staring at the sea rather than sailing on it.
There was a touch of the hangdog about Ohmsen, a look that was accentuated by his jug ears and tired eyes. He was suffering from severe sleep deprivation after weeks of aerial raids that had caused extensive damage to his armour-plated home. Forty of his men had been injured and their living quarters reduced to ruins. The trenches and foxholes that surrounded the battery had also been destroyed. After such intensive carpet-bombing, Crisbecq looked like the surface of the moon.
‘Let’s hope the enemy waits till we are ready.’17 These words were the constant refrain of Ohmsen’s colleague, Corporal Hermann Nissen. But Ohmsen knew that his men would never be ready unless the bombing raids came to a halt.
He made his final inspection of the day’s work at 11 p.m. on 5 June: his men had spent much of the afternoon repairing the communications wires damaged after the previous night’s raid. Now they had changed back into their naval dress uniforms with their characteristic gold buttons and epaulettes.
Once the inspection was complete, Ohmsen ordered two gun crews to man each battery, some fifty men in total. The rest were sent to relax in the nearby Château de Fontenay, a fine country manor requisitioned as their billet. Ohmsen himself joined Lieutenant Krieg in the small command bunker, an underground concrete room that housed the radios, telephones and technical equipment for the big guns. He was expecting another long night.
‘Enemy aircraft!’18 The familiar cry went up shortly after midnight. It heralded a sprint to the underground bunkers, whose ten-foot reinforced ceilings could withstand almost anything. Moments later, hundreds of Allied planes swept in from the sea. As they passed over the battery, a stream of high explosive fell through the air.
‘There wasn’t a man who wasn’t scared to death,’19 admitted Ohmsen after the raid. The explosions packed such a punch that the concrete shuddered violently in its earthen tomb. He feared the entire structure would collapse on top of him.
‘It looks to me like it’s going to start tonight,’20 shouted Lieutenant Krieg over the din of the explosions. His reasoning was that the raid was far heavier and longer than usual. By the time it ended, the battery had been hit by some 600 tons of high explosive.
No sooner was it finished than there was a loud hammering on the door of the command bunker. ‘Herr Oberleutnant – a direct hit on the chateau. The quarters are wrecked. Lots of men are buried. The ruins are burning. There are many dead and wounded.’
Ohmsen remained cool under pressure, ordering Lieutenant Krieg to head to the château with all the available men. ‘Get them to draw spades and shovels. And hurry up. We can’t afford any losses now.’21
The men bounded through the darkness towards the dull orange glow of the burning château. But they soon found themselves running into trouble. A burst of machine-gun fire erupted from nowhere and hit two of the men, killing them instantly. The rest beat a hasty retreat to the battery.
‘Herr Oberleutnant, we came under fire! I presume from enemy paratroops.’
Ohmsen was shocked by this piece of intelligence: a difficult night was turning into a desperate one. ‘Get a fighting patrol ready!’ he snapped. ‘Oberleutnant Krieg will lead the patrol.’22
The men were issued with machine guns and grenades and ordered to find out what was taking place. They returned soon enough, bringing with them twenty prisoners of war that included ‘an American captain dressed in camouflaged uniform’.23
A search of their kitbags left Ohmsen stunned. They contained the most sophisticated equipment, including miniature compasses, radio sets and highly detailed maps of the area around Crisbecq. What impressed him most was the fact that they had the exact map coordinates of his machine-gun posts. This was something that he had tried to calculate himself, but had never succeeded in doing.
Ohmsen did his best to interrogate the men, but they refused to answer his questions so he locked them into an underground room. He then reached for his field telephone and called Commander Hennecke at Cherbourg in order to warn him that Allied paratroopers were landing in the area around Crisbecq.
‘Are you quite sure, Ohmsen?’
‘I have twenty prisoners of war to prove it.’
This was evidence enough for Hennecke: he hung up the phone and sounded the general alarm.
Ohmsen now sent a second group of men over to the burning château with orders to dig out the survivors of the bombing raid. The group would eventually return with a large number of wounded comrades, many of whom had suffered terrible injuries to their ‘stomach, legs and so on’.24 It made for a sickening sight. Twenty of the most severely wounded were given morphine and assured that they would be evacuated at first light.
Ohmsen’s most pressing concern was his three naval guns. He needed to know if they had been damaged in the raid. He now went to check on them and was pleased to note that all three were still in perfect working order. It was a welcome early birthday present.
By 1 a.m., the parachute landings in and around Bénouville were causing total confusion to German commanders on the ground, not least because the British had dropped dummy soldiers alongside real ones. There was a corresponding confusion among those doing the jumping. Major Tim Roseveare had been parachuted into the countryside close to Bénouville Bridge, one of some 7,000 airborne troops. Shortly before his jump, RAF pathfinder planes had dropped beacons to mark the various landing zones. Now, as Roseveare neared the ground, he found himself landing within a stone’s throw of the beacon. He thanked his lucky stars and gave silent thanks to the plane’s pilot. ‘By a splendid piece of navigation, Squadron Leader Miller had put me down 50 yards from the Rebecca-Eureka homing beacon.’25 This beacon – a specialist piece of kit – enabled an airborne paratrooper equipped with a Rebecca transceiver to locate a ground-based Eureka transponder.
But as he peered into the gloom, Roseveare recognized none of the features he had been expecting. No clock tower. No villages. No river. Even the fields looked different. It suddenly dawned on him that he had landed at the wrong beacon. He and his men, who were scattered across the surrounding meadows, had been dropped in entirely the wrong place.
This realization might have triggered panic, but this was no time to lose one’s head. Roseveare prided himself on his crisp efficiency and was delighted when his squadron’s sergeant, Bob Barr, picked himself out of the dirt, brushed down his fatigues and ‘gave me a smart salute’. The world suddenly felt better again. ‘It did my morale a lot of good,’26 he later admitted.
This was just as well, for Major Roseveare was in charge of an operation of equal importance to the one undertaken by John Howard and his men. His squadron (the 3rd Parachute) was to penetrate deep into enemy territory and destroy five bridges over the River Dives, a crucial act of demolition that would prevent the Germans from bringing heavy armoury to the coastal area.
Of the five, the bridge that crossed the River Dives at Troarn presented the greatest difficulties. Not only was it deep behind enemy lines (it was almost ten miles from the coast) but it had been built to endure, a squat fortress of solid masonry with buttressed pillars and five low arches. If the bridge-busters were to be successful in its demolition, they would need speed, daring and luck. Necessity outweighed the risk: the bridge carried the main road from Caen to Le Havre and was therefore a strategic imperative.
Tim Roseveare was the perfect leader for such a mission, a splendid-looking young adventurer with a twinkle in his eye and an impeccable moustache. When he posed for the camera, he did so in style, astride an Ariel motorcycle and sporting an Airborne beret and a pair of metal-framed tinted glasses. In the years before the war, he had worked for M.G. and R.W. Weeks, a firm specializing in sewerage and water supply. Now, he was entrusted with supplying water to the very place where the Germans least wanted it – on the principal highway through Normandy.
Roseveare had landed more than three miles from his intended drop zone, as he discovered when he saw a road sign at a nearby crossroads. Undaunted, he began gathering men and locating the parachute-containers filled with explosives and equipment. Not all of his men had experienced such soft landings as his own. One chirpy young sapper named Bill Irving had landed virtually on top of a German soldier, or so he thought. He grappled for his knife and was about to slit the man’s throat when he realized it was Sapper O’Leary, one of his comrades. O’Leary was not best pleased – ‘he nearly bottomed me for it’27 – but Irving managed to talk him around.
After half an hour spent gathering men and supplies, Roseveare took stock of his situation. He had thirty sappers, a small troop of soldiers and a large quantity of armaments – including the 500 pounds of plastic explosive needed to blow the bridge at Troarn. These were all loaded into a collapsible trolley and then the party set off across country, looking for all the world as if they were heading home from the local store with the week’s groceries.
Not for the first time, Roseveare had luck on his side. ‘Out of the murk, a jeep and trailer appeared.’ It had been landed by glider and designated as a field ambulance. Roseveare peered inside its canvas hood and saw it was ‘packed to the gunwales with bottles of blood and bandages and splints and all the sort of field dressing equipment and instruments and this and that’.28 Medicine was important but so were jeeps. Pulling rank, he commandeered the vehicle, reasoning that it ‘might make all the difference between success and failure’.29 Ever gracious, he told the medics they could come with him. Then he jumped into the driving seat and prepared for the joy-ride of his life, pumping his foot hard on to the accelerator of his newly acquired set of wheels.
The jeep was comically overladen, with more than a dozen men squeezed inside, more on the trailer and two extras clinging on to the bonnet. ‘A bit dodgy,’30 thought Bill Irving as he clung on for dear life and tried to anticipate the twists and turns of Roseveare’s erratic dash through the pitch-black country lanes. Nerves, excitement and the sheer thrill of being set loose behind enemy lines engendered a spirit of recklessness among the men. They skirted Ranville at high speed then burned a passage through Hérouvillette and Escoville, whose windows were shuttered to the world.
Roseveare drove with such cavalier abandon that they were soon approaching Troarn. But as the inclines stiffened, the weight of the jeep and trailer began to act like giant brakes. Roseveare took the decision to shed the medics and their supplies. ‘We unloaded the old bottles of blood and splints and bandages’31 and transferred most of the explosives from the trailer into the jeep. He also divided his men into two groups. Eight of them, including himself, would head towards Troarn in the jeep. Another party, led by Tim Juckes, would set out on foot to destroy the two bridges at Bures-sur-Dives. A third group, Canadians, had already been entrusted with blowing the other bridges.
He revved the engine and headed for Troarn, but soon found himself driving into trouble. As he steered through ‘a murky gloom’, he drove ‘crash-bang’32 into a barbed-wire barricade (thankfully unmanned) that was blocking the road into Troarn.
Bill Irving jumped down from the bonnet to take a closer look. It was not good news. ‘The jeep was well and truly enmeshed in the barbed wire’ and could move neither backward nor forward. The men, their car and their explosives were sitting ducks. Someone located the wire-cutters and Irving was tasked with crawling under the vehicle and snipping the jeep free, while Roseveare directed his torchlight on to the tangled mess. Irving wryly noted that this would have been ‘very helpful’, were it not for the fact that it made him a perfectly illuminated target for any passing German patrol. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘like a pea waiting to be plucked out of a pod.’
But on this occasion both pea and pod were safe. Irving freed the jeep and cut through the barricade: Roseveare meanwhile sparked the engine and inched the vehicle rather more cautiously towards the crossroads that led into Troarn. Irving had run ahead of the jeep and was about to wave the all-clear when he got an unexpected surprise. ‘Whistling past me was a German on a bicycle, obviously returning from a night out.’33 He was cycling fast, but not fast enough, for he was dragged off his bicycle, thrown to the ground and shot with a Sten gun.
‘That’s done it,’34 hissed Roseveare, furious that his men had not knifed the cyclist to death. ‘Very foolish.’35
It was indeed foolish, for the burst of Sten fire woke all the Germans in Troarn. In a flash, Roseveare’s troop found themselves in a hostile town whose every window seemed to conceal an enemy soldier.
There comes a moment in each operation when the momentum falters and stalls. Roseveare knew this from his long months of training. At such a critical juncture, leadership is crucial. He might easily have slammed his jeep into reverse and made his escape, but a surge of adrenalin overrode all thoughts of retreat. He shoved his foot hard on to the accelerator and rounded the corner that led into the main street. And it was then, as he put it, that ‘the fun started’.36
It was crucial to pass through the town at high speed, but the jeep and trailer weighed the same as a small lorry and responded to the accelerator with sluggish indifference. Try as he might, Roseveare could not get it above 35 mph. As they bowled down the main street, they came under a hail of gunfire. Roseveare was in his element. This was far more exciting than his desk job at M.G. and R.W. Weeks. ‘There seemed to be a Boche [German] in every doorway, shooting like mad.’37 One of the sappers, Sam Peachey, was clinging to the rear of the jeep and blasting away with his Bren gun. Bill Irving was doing the same at the front bonnet, ‘blazing away with my Sten gun at anything that moved’. Roseveare was meanwhile slamming the wheel from left to right, zigzagging down the street. ‘Some crazy mad driving,’38 thought Irving as he was lurched sideways. It felt even crazier to Joe Henderson, who had started the ride on the bonnet and ended it on the trailer. He could never quite work out how.
Others were less fortunate. At some point during their dash through town, Sam Peachey was flung from the jeep and jettisoned on to the pavement. (He was later captured and made a prisoner of war.) Another of Roseveare’s joy-riders, David Breeze, found himself musing on ‘the cost of replacing all the plate-glass shop windows, so rudely shattered’.39
They were halfway through town when they saw an alarming sight. A German soldier had set up a machine gun in the middle of the road and was about to open fire. Undaunted, Roseveare squeezed every last drop from the jeep’s overheated engine. ‘As the speed rose rapidly, we careered from side to side of the road.’40 He bore down on the machine gunner, who chose prudence over bravery and dashed into a nearby doorway. He ‘got the hell out’, noted Bill Irving from his precarious vantage point on the front bonnet. Just seconds after they passed his gun, the soldier was back behind the trigger ‘and in a moment a stream of tracer went out over our heads’.41
The men were now on a downhill slope and fast approaching the river. Roseveare mumbled a brief prayer of thanks. ‘By the grace of God, those steep hills were the only thing that saved us.’42 He knew, as did the German machine gunner, that the MG-34 couldn’t fire effectively down such a gradient.
The men leaped out as soon as they reached the riverbank and prepared to blow the bridge as fast as possible. They had trained for this moment for months and knew exactly what to do. Joe Henderson and David Breeze covered the road behind them while Bill Irving clambered on to the bridge with another of the sappers, Corporal Tellers. Their task was to lay the demolition charges intended to destroy the middle of the structure.
They strung a line of charges right across the roadway and connected all the wires and fuses to the detonator – ‘a very simple process’. As additional fireworks, the men wired the trailer, laden with explosives, and left it on the central arch of the bridge. Once done, Roseveare yelled to everyone to get back aboard the jeep.
Irving asked him if he wanted to light the fuse.
‘No, you light it.’
Irving wondered if Roseveare declined out of courtesy or prudence. He decided it was the latter. ‘If the damn thing didn’t go off, it was nothing to do with him.’
He was still lighting the fuses when Roseveare started to drive away. Irving made a final check and then legged it after the vehicle. ‘It was rather like trying to catch the bus that you’ve just missed.’ He was hauled on board just as the night sky was lit by a brilliant flash and a ‘great bang’.43 The fuses had worked.
‘Down, down, down she goes!’44 hooted Roseveare. He was jubilant with success. Tons of shattered masonry were rent apart and lifted far into the night sky, before crashing back down into the River Dives. The entire central span – some twenty feet in length – was no more. For Roseveare, an expert in water management, it was his Moses moment, only one that came with an exquisite twist. Instead of parting the waters, he had parted the bridge that spanned those waters. In doing so, he had cut the principal road that led towards the planned Allied beachhead.
This news was good enough, but Roseveare would soon learn that there was further cause for celebration. Tim Juckes’s party had managed to destroy both bridges at Bures-sur-Dives while the Canadian group had blown their two targets at Robehomme and Varaville. Five key bridges had ceased to exist. It was a job well done.
As Roseveare and his men made their escape through the night, avoiding Troarn, they came across an elderly Frenchman milking his cow. Roseveare paused for a chat.
‘When I informed him that he was being liberated, he was not impressed.’ Roseveare thought that ‘perhaps he did not understand my accent’.45 This may have been so. But that elderly farmer may also have been nervous as to what additional terrors that troubled night might bring.
Allied parachute drops were launched in the early hours of 6 June. Soldiers were weighed down with weapons, food and supplies. Those landing in Sainte-Mère-Église found it hard to dodge the intense German gunfire.
* Double Summer Time – two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time – provided an extra hour of evening daylight for British workers to get home before the blackout.