Dawson woke up about four hours later, his head slumped forward onto his chest and with a major crick in his neck that he knew would be with him for the rest of the day. The good news was that what had woken him was the unmistakable smell and sizzling sound of frying bacon. And that was always worth waking up for.
Obviously some of the KFRE men had been up and on the scrounge earlier, and from somewhere they’d managed to get sausages and eggs, as well as bacon. They’d even found a few loaves of bread, though not the sort most of them were used to.
Dawson grabbed his eating utensils, found a spot beside one of the portable stoves and waited his turn for a helping of breakfast, washed down with proper tea. With their departure for Britain imminent – they hoped – several of the KFRE men had opened their 24-hour ration packs and used their packets of soluble tea to make a decent brew.
None of them were comfortable, with nowhere to sit except on the stones that formed the harbour, but the hot breakfast definitely helped. And they had done what they had set out to do, and now they were going home, so they were all cheerful.
‘Where’s the boss?’ Dawson asked, using a piece of bread to clean the last of the bacon fat off his plate.
‘He shot off about half an hour ago to check in with the commander,’ one of the soldiers told him. ‘With a bit of luck, he’ll already have sorted out a boat to take us back to Dover, what with him being a naval officer and all that.’
Michaels, accompanied by Lieutenant Barber, returned to their makeshift encampment about an hour later, and quickly gathered all the men into a circle to brief them on the situation.
‘The good news is that the commander’s very pleased with what we did in Amsterdam,’ he began, a statement that immediately raised severe doubts in Dawson’s mind. In his experience, when anyone in the military started talking about ‘the good news’, it usually meant that there was a healthy dose of ‘the bad news’ to follow.
A minute or so later, he was proved right.
‘Now, as you can probably tell from all the activity here, there’s a lot that still needs doing, and Commander Slater-Jones has asked if we’d be able to assist. He already has a naval party here, but we have skills that he would like to call on. Obviously I said that we would be pleased to help as much as we could.’
Dawson had kind of seen something like that coming, but clearly most of the KFRE soldiers hadn’t, and Michaels’ remarks produced a burst of collective muttering amongst them. It was difficult to discern individual remarks, but the general sentiment was along the lines of ‘no more’ and ‘we want to go home’, both decorated with an inventive selection of vulgar and colourful adverbs and adjectives.
Michaels waited until the subdued murmuring had died away to be replaced by a somewhat tense silence.
‘I know you’ll be disappointed that we’re not leaving immediately,’ he continued, ‘but we can do a lot of good work here today, and still be on our way back to Blighty by this evening. So the objective is broadly the same, to try to deny the Germans the use of any facilities, just as we did by blowing up the oil stocks in Amsterdam. What we have here at IJmuiden is a major harbour, dockyard and sea port, and if we just walk away now, that will give the Jerries a vital strategic resource here on the Atlantic coast. So the commander has been tasked with destroying as much of it as he can, and we are his instrument of choice.
‘We’ve got five main targets. The lock gates are the most important, obviously, because if they’re destroyed the harbour can’t be used until they’ve been repaired or replaced, so they have to be our first priority. Then there are two block ships, one north over there and one south’ – Michaels pointed out across the harbour towards each of the ships as he spoke – ‘and sinking those will also help prevent the harbour being used. And the fourth and fifth targets are the cranes that could be used to help repair the damage, and the floating docks.’
Michaels looked around the assembled group, where the mood seemed to be changing. Doing damage to the German war effort was why they had travelled to Holland in the first place, and Dawson saw several of the men looking around the harbour area as they picked out the targets that Michaels had just identified.
‘And once we’ve done all this,’ he continued, perhaps feeling that a carrot of some kind would be a good idea, ‘we’ll get out of here as quickly as we can and then head back to Dover. Right, the force dispositions will be as follows. A2 section under Captain Rochester will target all the lock gates. A3 section will be commanded by Lieutenant Barber, and their target will be the northern block ship, that one over there. Lastly, A1 section, my group, will target the southern block ship, the floating docks and the various cranes located around the harbour, and A1 section will also be responsible for covering all of these operations, as we’ll be moving around the whole of the harbour. In terms of timing, the last job we do will be to sink the block ships, and that’s important because we have to be able to get out of the harbour and onto the open sea, and so do various other Allied groups here.’
Michaels paused and glanced around him.
‘Where’s Dawson?’ he asked, then spotted him standing at the rear of the group. ‘Good. We haven’t got much of our gun cotton left, but the commander has managed to find some dynamite – quite a lot of dynamite, in fact – that we can use for these demolitions. What I want all the section commanders to do is visit each of their targets as soon as possible, taking Dawson along as well, and to assess the quantity and type of explosives needed to complete the demolition, and where those explosives should be placed. The order of inspections will be section A2 first, followed by A1 and then A3. Once that’s done, we can collect what we need from the commander’s stock and do the job. At least this time we won’t be having to wait for instructions from some other authority to blow the charges. Once they’re placed, we can fire them immediately. And then we can go home.’
That sounded easy when he said it, and a slightly ragged cheer rang out, but died away almost immediately.
‘Right, let’s get moving.’
Dawson walked over to where Captain Rochester was standing and waited while he exchanged a few words with Michaels and Barber. Then the three officers, accompanied by the corporal, walked along the harbour wall to a position from which they could see the first of the lock gates.
They were massive steel structures, but Dawson knew well enough that anything fabricated from metal – or from any other material, in fact – could be destroyed. It was just a question of how much explosive was needed, and where it should be positioned.
‘So what do you think, Dawson?’ Rochester asked.
‘Like anything designed with a fixed part and a moving part, sir,’ he replied, ‘the weakest point is almost always the hinges. Take those out and the whole thing will collapse.’
He pointed at the two stone walls where the edges of the open dock gates in front of them were attached to huge, and mainly hidden, vertical steel hinges.
‘They look massive, but blowing them would be a piece of piss. Keep them open like that and lower a charge made from a few sticks of dynamite into that narrow gap between the harbour wall and the lock gate. Get the explosive as close as you can to the hinge before you fire it. The harbour wall will act like a reflector and multiply the effect of the dynamite. It might blow the lock gate right off the hinge, but even if it doesn’t, it’ll still bugger it up well and good.’
Dawson noted the amount of explosive he thought they’d need on a piece of paper, and then they walked on to one of the dockyard cranes, because that was close to the lock gates they’d just examined.
It was a huge structure, steel girders pointing straight up towards the sky, the bracing crosspieces held in place with neat lines of rivets and welded seams.
‘Again, this looks strong, and blowing it to pieces wouldn’t be that easy because it’s made with a kind of lattice-work construction, all triangular sections and braces,’ Dawson said. ‘So we’ll need some help to do it.’
‘What kind of help?’ Barber asked suspiciously.
‘Nothing too difficult. We just use gravity. You need to get a crane driver here and tell him to swing the boom out over the water. Then you pack explosives around the uprights and some of the bracing bars, and gun cotton would be better than dynamite because you can mould it more easily. You’ll need to blow out a section of the steel structure opposite the boom, so that when the charges go off it’ll take away all the support on that side. Then the weight of the boom will cause the crane to collapse in that direction’ – he pointed at the water in the harbour – ‘and with a bit of luck the whole crane will fall down there. Even if it doesn’t completely separate from its base, it’ll still be one hell of an obstruction that the Jerries will have to try and shift before they can use this place.’
They moved on quickly around the harbour, inspecting each target as they did so, Dawson working out the best way to achieve the greatest possible level of destruction at each, and calculating the quantity of explosives needed to achieve that.
Minutes after they’d got back to their encampment, a short and somewhat portly red-faced man wearing the distinctive dark blue uniform of a Royal Navy commander with three gold rings on the sleeves appeared from a nearby building and walked over to Captain Michaels. He was followed by another man wearing a similar uniform, but with very different rank badges. Dawson guessed he was either a petty officer or a chief petty officer.
Michaels turned as he approached and snapped off a smart salute, as did the other two officers and Dawson, who was standing beside them.
‘At ease,’ the commander said, casually returning the salutes. He removed his cap to reveal an entirely bald head that gleamed brightly in the morning sunlight, nodded to Rochester and Barber, and looked curiously at Dawson.
‘This is your explosives man?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Michaels replied. ‘This is Corporal Dawson. He’s very good at making things go bang.’
Commander Slater-Jones nodded.
‘So I gather. According to George Wilhoughby – whom you met at the consulate – every oil reservoir at the three tank farms you attacked was destroyed, even the heavy oil tanks, which must have been bloody difficult to get alight.’
‘Dawson devised a way, sir, and it worked very well.’
‘Good. Well, that was the past. We have to think about the present, and the future. You’ll need dynamite to carry out the demolitions here, obviously. Have you worked out how much you’ll need?’
Michaels looked at Dawson and nodded.
‘I have, sir,’ Dawson said, and handed the commander a small and rather grubby piece of paper on which he’d jotted down the approximate quantities of explosive he’d worked out would be required.
‘We can probably supply that,’ Slater-Jones said, and handed the list to the man beside him. ‘Get that sorted, Chief, will you? Bring the boxes here as soon as you can.’
The chief petty officer – the senior NCOs were popularly believed to be the people who actually ran the Royal Navy – snapped off a salute, took the paper and marched smartly away.
‘Now, Michaels, we have a bit of a logistics problem, and you need to know about it. When we talked before, I told you we were hoping to get a destroyer in here to pick up you and your men for the trip back to Blighty. Well, that isn’t going to happen because I’ve been told that all the ships are fully committed elsewhere at the moment. The other problem is that once you’ve had your fun here in IJmuiden harbour, we probably couldn’t get a destroyer in here anyway. Or not if we wanted to get it out again.’
‘So where does that leave us, sir?’
‘Using your own initiative, mainly, and you all seem to be quite good at that. There are plenty of smallish boats around the place, tugs and the like. My advice is that you commandeer something big enough to carry all of your men, blow the charges here in the harbour and then head out to sea.’
‘Fuck me,’ one of the KFRE corporals muttered when he heard that. ‘Why doesn’t he just tell us to swim for it? At least that way we’d drown a bit quicker than if we head west in a bloody rowing boat, and it wouldn’t take us as long to die.’
‘But a tug or motor launch probably won’t have the range to get us back to Dover, sir,’ Michaels pointed out firmly. ‘Nor will it have the charts and navigation equipment we’d need for the voyage.’
‘Well spotted,’ Slater-Jones said. ‘But there are other places you could go. Harwich is a lot closer than Dover, for instance. More usefully, I do know that there are a lot of our ships, Royal Navy as well as merchantmen, sailing up and down the coast of Europe. With a bit of luck, once you get clear of the harbour, if the boat’s got a radio you can use it to whistle up a passing warship or something and hitch a ride on that.’
‘And if it hasn’t got a radio?’ Michaels asked.
‘If I were you,’ the commander replied, with a wintry smile, ‘I’d make sure that it has got one.’
Then he glanced around at the KFRE party, nodded encouragingly, and walked away.