The moment Michaels stepped out of the waves and onto the sand, he turned back and waved towards the torpedo boat. With a rumbling growl from its powerful engines, the boat backed away from the beach, continuing to go astern until it was about 50 yards clear, when the helmsman spun the wheel and pushed the throttles forward. The bow of the MTB lifted out of the water onto the plane as its speed started to increase and the boat turned towards the south-west.
One after the other, the three men walked up the beach and into the undergrowth, getting out of sight before they got dressed again. By the time Dawson reached the treeline, Barber had already dried his feet and legs and was pulling on his trousers. He handed the towel to Dawson and began lacing his boots.
Then the sudden roar of an aircraft engine grabbed the attention of all three men. And just seconds later, the heavy thumping of its wing-mounted heavy machine guns added to the din.
Dawson stared out to sea through a gap between two trees. He was no expert on the military aircraft of any nation, but he guessed it was probably a Messerschmitt because it looked very similar to the German fighter that had attacked the MTB as it travelled up the North Sea about an hour or so earlier. But exactly what type of aircraft it was didn’t really matter, and the only good thing was that this time he and his companions were obviously not the target.
The fighter was diving down towards the motor torpedo boat, which was still only a couple of hundred yards offshore. But the Royal Navy crew had obviously seen it coming, and the vessel had started manoeuvring violently to present as difficult a target as possible to the attacking aircraft. And although the MTB had been heading away from the harbour when the aircraft began its attacking run, the helmsman almost immediately swung the vessel round to head north, towards the aircraft, which meant the heavy machine gun on the foredeck could engage it.
Moments later, it was clear that the fighter pilot had bitten off rather more than he could chew, when the anti-aircraft batteries on a British destroyer that was loitering just to the south of the harbour entrance also sprang into action, sending salvoes of high-explosive shells towards the Messerschmitt.
Taking fire from two directions, the pilot obviously decided that the opposition was too strong, and he pulled his aircraft into a tight platform turn – a turn that kept the aircraft at the same level – away from the MTB and towards the coast, keeping low. Both the destroyer and the MTB continued firing towards it as the pilot made his escape.
‘Down!’ Dawson said urgently as he suddenly saw the danger.
Michaels looked at him blankly, then realized what was going to happen and dropped to the ground.
Seconds later, a salvo of high-explosive shells from the destroyer slammed into the trees only a matter of a few tens of feet from where the three men had taken cover. Just moments after that, another half-dozen or so shells crashed into the woodland, but at least 50 yards further away.
The three men stayed on the ground until the firing from the two vessels had ceased, and they could no longer hear the engine of the German fighter plane.
‘That was close,’ Barber said, getting to his feet.
‘At least they weren’t firing at us,’ Dawson pointed out. ‘We just happened to be downrange. But it’s still embarrassing to be shot at by your own side.’
They quickly finished dressing, and in minutes all three men were ready to go.
‘At least we know which direction we should be heading,’ Barber said, gesturing to the north and the unmistakable sound of the continuing aerial bombardment of the port of IJmuiden. ‘But I suppose the trick will be finding and linking up with the rest of the KFRE party.’
‘How many men are there in the group, sir?’ Dawson asked.
‘There are regular soldiers with us as well, but they’re not directly involved in the demolition operation. That’s our baby. So we’re supposed to be linking up with A Group of the KFRE, and that’s one officer and nineteen other ranks,’ Michaels replied. ‘The second group is B Group, as you might have guessed, and they’re also a demolition party but they’ve got another job to do first. I can’t really tell you what that is.’
‘I probably don’t need to know, do I?’
‘No, not really. Now, as I said before, A Group were scheduled to leave Dover this morning at about eleven on a destroyer, which steams a lot slower than a motor torpedo boat, but even so they should already have arrived here unless they met any major problems along the way. They had stores to unload from the ship, and then they were ordered to get themselves over to Amsterdam to recce the targets.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Barber said, looking through a gap in the trees towards the harbour entrance. ‘They were supposed to be on board the Whitshead, and that looks like the ship just leaving the harbour now. And it also looks as if it’s taken quite a battering.’
Michaels and Dawson turned to stare at the lean grey shape that had just cleared the harbour entrance and was turning south, its anti-aircraft guns pounding away at a Dornier that had just dropped a stick of bombs in a ragged line a short distance behind it. The bombs had missed and, as far as Dawson could see, so had the ship’s ack-ack batteries. Michaels had a pair of binoculars in a leather case around his neck, and he quickly took them out to inspect the vessel.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That is the Whitshead, and I can see holes from machine-gun bullets and a lot of other damage on the superstructure. And there’s what looks like bomb damage on the port side aft.’
He passed the binoculars to Lieutenant Barber so that he could check the destroyer for himself.
Dawson obviously had no artificial optical aids about his person, but he had very good eyesight and to him the signs of damage, of the ship having been in a fairly brutal firefight, were quite unmistakable.
‘So if that’s the destroyer they were travelling on,’ he suggested, ‘and it’s only leaving now, maybe your KFRE lads are still in the harbour. We might be able to join up with them there instead of tramping round Amsterdam looking for them. We ought to get going.’
‘Just what I was about to propose,’ Barber said, and Michaels nodded agreement.
The beach where the MTB had dropped them was just over a mile, maybe about two thousand yards or so, from the southern part of IJmuiden harbour, and Dawson reckoned it should be no more than about a thirty-minute walk to get there, German fighters and bombers permitting.
After checking to make sure they had everything, which didn’t take long because none of the three had a kitbag or anything of that sort, they set off through the woodland area, heading not directly towards the harbour entrance, but in more of a north-easterly direction. Michaels had said that would take them into the western side of IJmuiden town itself, which might avoid them getting too close to the harbour, where bombs were still falling, until they could recce the situation.
Dawson had given the Mauser rifle to Barber, but kept the Schmeisser for himself; they moved in single file, Barber leading, Dawson a few paces behind him, and with Michaels bringing up the rear as he was only armed with his .38 Webley revolver. Normally, Dawson would have expected to be in front of the other two, because they were officers and he wasn’t, but because he was arguably the most valuable of the three men, to the operation, by virtue of his specialist knowledge of explosives, Michaels had insisted that Barber should lead the way.
It was obvious that people quite commonly used the stretch of woodland bordering the beach because there were well-established tracks running through it, presumably created by people visiting the coast for recreational purposes; finding their way out was really only a matter of following one of the tracks that seemed to be heading in more or less the right direction. They saw no one – no British, no Dutch and, most importantly, no Germans – and about twenty minutes after they’d set off they were making their way cautiously through the almost deserted streets of the southern part of the town of IJmuiden.
Once within the built-up area, which had clearly suffered extensive damage in the bombing despite probably not being the Germans’ primary target, Michaels consulted a map he pulled from one of the pockets of his battledress tunic, and ordered a slight change of direction.
‘We need to go more north from here,’ he said, ‘because that’s where the harbour is.’
A few minutes later, they stopped on the southern side of the harbour itself where, perhaps only temporarily, the anti-aircraft guns had fallen silent and there appeared to be no aircraft, German or British, in the skies.
Because of Holland’s peculiar geography, the harbour looked nothing like Dawson had been expecting. With most of the country actually below sea level, much of the huge harbour – it was at least half a mile wide from south to north, and by his estimation over 2 miles from where they were standing to the western end of the harbour and the open sea – was occupied by dams and detached moles. These contained linked sets of locks, locks that would allow ships and barges to safely access the Noordzeekanaal that lay east of the town and the country’s other waterways. And the moles themselves were massive, most of them big enough to accommodate large buildings.
Quite apart from the locks and the moles, the harbour was also unusual because it was teeming with activity. Numerous ships were alongside the various jetties, while others were in the act of either arriving at or departing from other parts of the harbour, and there were what seemed like hundreds of men and just a handful of women on the jetties, moles and the harbour walls, all clearly involved in what was going on. It was obviously not a place for spectators.
‘We need to get across to the northern side of the harbour,’ Michaels said.
‘You mean you spotted some of the people in the group, sir?’ Dawson asked.
Michaels shook his head.
‘Not a chance. In this crowd there’s no easy way we’d be able to find them. No, it’s much simpler than that. Once they’d got ashore here, the orders were for members of A Group to make their way to Amsterdam by train. And the railway station,’ he added, ‘is on the northern side of the harbour.’
‘It looks as if we can just walk across this complex,’ Barber said. ‘There are paths across all the moles and the lock gates.’
He was right. The only potential problem Dawson could see would be if both sets of gates at one of the locks were open at the same time so that they couldn’t get across from one side to the other. And a moment later he realized that that was just ridiculous. The whole point about locks was that both gates could never be opened at the same time, because if they were the lock ceased to be a lock and immediately became part of the river that it was built on. For a vessel going upstream, the downstream gate would open, the vessel would enter, and then the gate would be closed. Water would be allowed into the lock, and only when the level was the same as the upstream part of the river would the upper gate be opened. Going downstream would simply be a reverse of the same process.
So that would not be a problem. What might delay them would be the physical difficulty of forcing their way through the crowds of people that thronged everywhere in the harbour.
Michaels again consulted his map, then shook his head.
‘We could go that way,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s further than you think. Because of the way we’d have to weave about on the moles to follow the path, it would be about a mile to get from one side to the other. And there are so many people out there that it could easily take us an hour to cover that distance. And that’s an hour we really haven’t got. I think we need to go in that direction.’ He pointed to the east, towards the inner end of the harbour. ‘It’s much narrower there than it is here. We might be able to use a boat to get across, and if we can’t find one there are a couple of bridges as well.’
What he was saying made sense, and going the way Michaels had suggested would probably be safer as well. If the German bombers returned to have another go at IJmuiden harbour and they had elected to walk over the locks and moles, they could well have found themselves right in the middle of the target area.
Dawson and Barber slung their weapons over their shoulders, as they weren’t expecting to encounter any German soldiers in the town itself, and the three men walked away, following the road that ran along the southern side of the harbour.
The further away from the harbour they got, the fewer people they seemed to encounter. Dawson guessed that when the first German bombers had appeared over the town that morning, or whenever they’d actually begun their raids, many of the locals would have fled, leaving IJmuiden largely deserted, apart from the harbour where the workers would have been needed because of the number of shipping movements. And of course many of the men they had seen milling around in the harbour would probably have come from those ships.
After about half a mile, they came to a ferry crossing, but the ferry was on the northern side of the water. They stopped and Michaels pulled out his binoculars to look at the vessel.
‘No sign of life over there,’ he reported. ‘I can see it quite clearly, but there’s nobody in it or anywhere near it, so I suppose it’s not running today.’
‘Not too surprising in view of what’s been going on here,’ Barber said.
‘We’ll forge on,’ Michaels replied, replacing his binoculars. ‘There’s a bridge only about another half a mile ahead of us.’
Although they hadn’t encountered that many people once they’d cleared the main harbour area, the bridge itself was crowded with men and women, presumably locals, as they saw nobody in uniform; many of the couples were accompanied by children, moving in both directions, but with the majority heading south, perhaps trying to get out of the town before the next German bombing raid started.
Once they reached the northern side, Michaels again consulted his map.
‘Right, we’re about a mile from the main railway station now, so we just carry on straight along this road and then turn left at that junction up there,’ he said, pointing ahead.
They reached the station about twenty minutes later, to find that it was surprisingly uncrowded.
‘I would have thought this place would be full of Dutch,’ Dawson commented. ‘Trying to get away, like.’
‘Yes, but where would they go?’ Barber asked. ‘We’re on the west coast of Holland. The Jerries are advancing steadily from the east, so the only direction anyone can go from here, if they’re trying to get out of the way, is either north or south. And neither, frankly, would be very much help. You’d still be in Holland if you went north, and in Belgium if you headed south, but both directions are full of Germans, or will be very soon. Here, the Dutch have got their backs to the wall, or at least to the North Sea, which amounts to very much the same thing.’
Michaels had been searching the crowds in the station – because although it wasn’t as busy as Dawson had apparently been expecting, there were still a few hundred people milling about inside and around the building – for any sign of the KFRE soldiers who’d been sent out on this operation. And after a minute or so he caught sight of a group of men in British army uniforms, and guessed that they were the people he was looking for.
‘Over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘On the far side of that platform.’
He led the way, and a couple of minutes later a middle-aged man wearing a uniform with sergeant’s stripes spotted him approaching and snapped off a smart salute. His name tag read ‘Woodston’. Behind him, the other uniformed men turned to look and then walked closer to the three newcomers.
‘Good to see you again, sir,’ he said. ‘And you, Lieutenant Barber.’
‘And you, Woody,’ Michaels replied. ‘Any problems getting here?’
‘It was a bit bloody hairy, sir. We were OK until we got near the Dutch coast, when a Jerry bomber appeared and had a go at us, but the ship did a lot of violent manoeuvring and threw up a serious ack-ack barrage and that drove him away. But when we were about an hour from this place we were attacked by several aircraft, and we couldn’t avoid them all. The ship took a hit somewhere down the back end on the left-hand side, and a few men were lost right then, some killed outright and others badly wounded.’
‘Were any of you involved?’
Sergeant Woodston shook his head.
‘No, sir. We were nowhere near where the bomb hit, and nor was any of our gear. But the bomb going off set fire to some cordite in an ammunition locker on the deck. One of the sailors was able to throw some of the burning cordite over the side, and another really brave lad grabbed the rest and jumped into the water with it.’
‘Was he OK?’ Barber asked.
‘Don’t know, sir. The ship circled round to try to pick him up, but we were under such heavy attack that the skipper couldn’t slow down enough for us to rescue him, so all we could do was toss one of those Carley float things overboard and then carry on trying to avoid the bombers and fighters. Once we got clear of them, we just pressed on for the harbour. And then it took us half a dozen goes to tie up to that jetty because of the bloody Jerry bombers overhead. As soon as the ship stopped, we all grabbed our gear and climbed off onto dry land. The bombs kept falling all the time, but none very close to us, luckily. And then the skipper let go of the ropes and pushed off. It was a bit of a nightmare journey, all in all.’
‘We saw the destroyer leaving,’ Michaels said, ‘and the damage at the stern was very obvious. You were lucky you all got here in one piece.’
Dawson was very conscious that the sergeant, although facing Michaels and listening to what the officer was saying, was also flicking the occasional glance at him. Obviously the captain was also aware of it, and half turned to indicate the big corporal.
‘This man is the reason Lieutenant Barber and I weren’t on the destroyer with you. This is Lance Corporal Dawson and we picked him up in Dunkirk. He’s a regular, and a sapper, but the main reason he’s here is because he’s an explosives expert. Or at least, more expert than most of us.’
Dawson could almost see the sergeant bristling at this introduction.
‘I think we know enough about demolitions to do the job, sir,’ he said, somewhat frostily.
‘You may well be right, Woody,’ Michaels replied, ‘but somebody in the higher echelons has obviously decided that we might need his advice and help, so he will be coming with us. Don’t forget, we still don’t know anything about the target or what would be the best way to complete the operation, and unless things have changed we also don’t have very much in the way of explosives. Dawson here might well be able to suggest shortcuts or methods that wouldn’t have occurred to any of us, and that’s why he’s been ordered to accompany us.’
‘And talking of that,’ Dawson said, speaking for the first time, ‘what explosives have you got, so I know what we’ll have to work with?’
The sergeant looked at him for a long moment before he replied.
‘Gun cotton, mainly,’ he replied. ‘In fact, only gun cotton, and not much of that. We were hoping to take some of the cordite from the destroyer, but that bloody Jerry bomber buggered that idea up well and truly, and there was nothing else useful on the ship as far as we could see.’
Gun cotton, also known as nitrocellulose, flash paper or cellulose nitrate, is an old explosive material, first developed back in 1846, although similar substances formed by combining nitric acid with wood fibres or starch had been discovered over a decade earlier, but these were highly unstable. The name gun cotton came from the commonest method of preparation, involving treating cotton for a short period of time – just a few minutes – with sulphuric acid and nitric acid, washing it in cold water and then slowly drying it. It’s still quite unstable and is normally stored as ‘wet gun cotton’, meaning that the explosive is dampened with a liquid, commonly alcohol. But it is a powerful explosive, commonly being used in military ordnance, including various types of mines and the warheads of torpedoes.
Dawson nodded.
‘Well, it certainly does go bang,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the most powerful explosives available, and that’s what we’ll need. But I was rather hoping you might have some gelignite or even dynamite, because that would make the job quite a lot easier, and dynamite is a lot safer to handle than gun cotton. But we’ll have to work with what we’ve got, and we might well have to improvise depending on how big these tanks are, and how many of them we have to blow.’
Dawson glanced around at the other KFRE soldiers and noticed something that was unusual, at least in his experience. Weapon allocation in the British army was usually standardized: officers were issued with pistols, usually either Enfield or Webley revolvers in .38 calibre, the two weapons being virtually identical as the Enfield was a straight copy of the Webley pistol, and sergeants and foot soldiers with Lee-Enfield Number 1 Mark 3 .303 rifles. But many of the soldiers, he was looking at, were carrying revolvers as well as rifles.
‘A question, Sarge,’ he said. ‘What’s with all the pistols your guys are carrying?’
Woodston looked behind him as if to check the truth of what Dawson was saying.
‘It’s the mission, see,’ he replied, after a moment. ‘We’re not doing regular soldiering and the powers that be reckoned having sidearms for personal protection would be a good thing, just in case we had to fight off a bunch of irritated Cloggies when we started blowing up their oil tanks.’
That made sense to Dawson, and also made him feel happier about having the MP40 sub-machine gun on a sling around his neck. In a close-quarter fight the Schmeisser would be much more effective than a pistol, at least until it jammed.
‘Right,’ Michaels said. ‘We need to get moving. Where’s Captain Rochester?’
‘He’s right behind you, sir.’
Michaels turned and extended a hand as another officer wearing captain’s tabs on his battledress walked up to him.
‘Glad you made it, Andrew,’ Rochester said, then turned to look at Dawson. ‘And this is the man?’
‘This is Corporal Dawson, yes,’ Michaels replied. ‘And now we really do need to move. Amsterdam is about 20 miles from here, and what I don’t want to happen is to hang around any longer and then find that one of those Jerry bombs has blown a bloody great hole in the railway line somewhere between here and the city, and we end up having to walk it.’
‘The last I heard, the track was still intact,’ Rochester said. ‘And that’s our train over there.’
He gestured towards an engine sitting on a platform on the far side of the station, wisps of steam rising from its smokestack showing that the engine was already fired up and running, and with a single coach hooked up to it.
‘That’s not a very big train,’ Barber commented.
‘That’s because there aren’t many of us,’ Rochester said. ‘That’s a one-coach special laid on by the commander.’
Michaels turned to Dawson.
‘Just so you’re aware, we’re working largely independently, but there’s a Royal Navy commander, a man named Slater-Jones, who’s in overall charge of this operation, and who’s been liaising with the Dutch authorities. Hopefully he’s clearing the way in terms of the permissions we’ll need so we can do the job, and he’s also organizing some of the logistical support for us, like that train. And he should have sorted out a lorry as well, for our heavy stuff.’
‘That’s outside,’ Rochester said, ‘and most of the gear is already loaded on it, but not the gun cotton. I thought that should go on the train with us, because if we lose it, that’s the end of the operation.’
‘Good thinking. Right, let’s go.’
‘We need to wait a little bit longer,’ Rochester told him. ‘We’ve only got a few ration packs, as you know, but we were issued with some Dutch currency, so I sent four of the lads into town to buy us some food and drink., so At least we’ll be able to have a meal tonight, even if we end up sleeping rough somewhere. We’ll have to wait until they get back.’
‘How long have they been gone?’ Michaels asked.
Rochester glanced at his watch.
‘About an hour,’ he replied, ‘and I told them to get back here within ninety minutes maximum, whether they managed to get some food or not. We can always try in Amsterdam if we have no luck here.’
‘Right. Well, let’s at least get everyone else on board that train so that we’re ready to head out as soon as they come back.’
Ten minutes later Dawson was looking at what seemed to him to be a remarkably small amount of gun cotton for the stated objective.
‘That’s it?’ he asked.
‘That’s it,’ Sergeant Woodston confirmed. ‘Don’t forget, we’ve had to carry this lot as well as all our other gear, so that limited how much we could bring with us.’
‘Well, we’re obviously going to have to be pretty bloody clever in how we use it. Let’s get it all into that carriage. And we need to make sure it’s spread out a bit, not all in one big pile, just in case we get strafed by a Jerry fighter or something. It’d be pretty bloody irritating to get blown to bits before we even got to Amsterdam. Of course,’ he added, ‘I suppose at least we wouldn’t know anything about it.’
They’d just finished loading the lorry and getting the soldiers in the carriage when the men Rochester had sent out foraging returned with a somewhat meagre haul of food: mainly biscuits and cakes and a selection of tins, which would have to be opened with a bayonet or a knife because they had nothing else to do the job. And whatever was in them would have to be eaten cold because none of the party had a stove. Non-essential items like that had been left behind in England in favour of gun cotton.
‘They didn’t get much, sir,’ Woodston said, ‘probably because none of them speak Dutch and it took ages to even find an open shop. And then they had to use sign language.’
‘It’s better than nothing,’ Rochester replied, ‘and as far as I know nobody in the party speaks Dutch. We’ll save the tinned stuff for later, when we’ve settled down somewhere. But distribute everything else as equally as you can amongst the men so they can at least have a snack on the journey.’
The train gave a sudden lurch and then, with a metallic clatter from the driving wheels and a somewhat asthmatic-sounding series of puffs of steam from the engine, the ‘special’ left the station, gathering speed quickly as it headed east, the small engine obviously not finding the single carriage a particularly heavy load to pull.
The 20-mile journey didn’t take long, the engine maintaining a speed of over 40 miles an hour for most of it.
Dawson stood beside a window and ate a small, and quite hard, cake, and then crunched his way through a handful of peculiarly tasteless biscuits, expecting at any moment to see a German fighter or bomber approaching the train and intent on spoiling his day. But to his slight surprise, he saw nothing at all during the entire trip apart from the dull and flat countryside of that part of Holland. By the time the journey ended, he knew exactly why it was called the ‘low country’.
But when the train arrived in Amsterdam, neither he nor anyone else on board could have anticipated what they saw from the carriage windows.