Sporadic firefights broke out around that defensive perimeter as scattered British units that’d survived the bombardment regrouped and made an attempt at dislodging the invaders, however it was a relatively simple task for the supporting gunships to quickly turn the battle against them. With no effective ability for the British to push heavier reinforcements or armour through the human tide streaming out of Dover, the Germans were easily able to hold their positions and link up with some of the fallschirmjäger units already dropped into the surrounding areas earlier that morning.
By mid morning, the invasion had already been a far greater success than the Wehrmacht could ever have hoped for, and by late afternoon on that first day, the XVI Army would have control of the entire English coastline, from Dungeness to just south of Deal, while most of the Sussex beaches would also be under the command of Strauss’ IX Army. Von Reichenau had unbelievably been repulsed and pushed back into the sea off Hampshire with massive casualties, thanks to the modernised arms of the infantry and tanks in that area, but that was no great matter in the grand scheme of things. Seventy thousand men would pour onto the two successful beachheads in hordes on that first day, as ACVs, LSTs and troop transports continued to steam back and forth across The Channel.
Those specialised assault craft were also supplemented by substantial numbers of conventional shipping as ports under German control became fully operable once more from Brighton to Dover, surprise so great in most cases that no effective sabotage of port facilities had been possible. Within three days there would be three hundred thousand German troops on British soil, that figure including ten panzer and five mechanised infantry divisions. As night drew closer on that Wednesday, Lympne and several other coastal airfields also became operational. Transport after transport began to fly in, emptying their cargo bays of light tanks, artillery pieces and tonnes and tonnes of supplies as they added their support to the slower ships in transit across The Channel.
By eight that evening, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd Von Rundstedt had successfully transferred the HQ of Army Group A to Dover Castle as SS-trained military police began to round up any remaining civilians in the area. There was little effective resistance: the most the average farmer or townsperson could field against the might of the Wehrmacht was a shotgun or, more often, a sharpened spade or pitchfork, and as hardy as the British people might be, they were on the whole neither stupid nor suicidal. Most could only accept the situation for the moment, bide their time, and hope for a successful counter-attack.
None of them had any way of knowing that the entirety of Allied armed forces across the whole of Britain numbered little more than 120,000 men, many of them short of rifles or ammunition, or that there were almost no effective tanks or field guns available. The Wehrmacht would land three times as many troops by dusk on Friday, supported by three thousand tanks and twice that many armoured vehicles of various other types. Reichsmarschall Kurt Reuters had been correct in his prophetic statement of some months before… it really had been a matter of ‘too many, too much and too few…’
19. England Expects
Typ-X Unterseeboot U-1004
North Sea, north of The Dogger Bank
‘S-Day’:
Wednesday,
September 11, 1940
The Dogger Bank was a large, irregular sandbank approximately 260km long and up to 90km wide, running east-to-west between the British Isles and the west coast of Denmark. With a maximum depth of thirty-six metres, and as shallow as fifteen metres as it drew closer to the English coast, it was an area of the North Sea that had had figured regularly in British naval history over the last two centuries. The British and Dutch navies met in battle there in 1781, resulting in a Dutch rout, while the Russian Baltic Fleet commanded by Admiral Zinovi Rozhestvenski had opened fire on British trawlers off the bank in 1904 under the mistaken fear that the vessels sighted had actually been Japanese warships.
Russia had been at war with Japan at that time, and the fear wasn’t as ludicrous as it might at first seem in light of the Japanese Navy’s predilection at the time for British-made ships and equipment. A full-scale engagement with the Royal Navy had only been avoided through profuse and continuous apologies from both the fleet’s commanders and the Tsarist government of the time. Even so, the RN was at battle stations as the Russian ships transited The Channel at the beginning of an epic and valiant, if ill-devised war cruise of almost 29,000km for the Baltic Fleet that would end in a resounding defeat at Tsushima Strait in May of 1905.
The most famous event of the sandbank’s more recent history was the almost ‘non-engagement’ that was The Battle of Dogger Bank of 24th January 1915, in which Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty’s battlecruisers clashed savagely with their counterparts in Franz von Hipper’s German High Seas Fleet. Although the Royal Navy held the ‘field’ of battle following the engagement, as would be the case at Jutland the following year, Hipper’s ships nevertheless inflicted severe damage against a British fleet that had missed several opportunities to run down and annihilate the German battlecruisers in return. In the end, although the British press would claim a great victory, there’d be much recrimination within Admiralty circles over lost opportunities in bringing the enemy fleet fully to battle and dealing it a mortal blow.
Fregattenkapitän Gunter Kohl watched the Home Fleet task force intently through his attack periscope as U-1004 glided silently toward them below the surface of the North Sea at a steady 12 knots. He had to be careful, so close to the large sandbanks: the water wasn’t deep in that area, and with the right conditions it might be possible to see a U-boat at periscope depth from above… and for the same reason, there’d be little room to manoeuvre should they be discovered. Kohl would raise the scope every thirty seconds or so and rotate it quickly through a full 360̊ circle, each time relaying important positional information to his XO, who in turn passed the relevant details on to the navigator and the torpedo chief.
Although his mouth was dry, as it always was during times of stress, he never let the crew see his nervousness: it was important that to them, he at all times remained the cool, calm commander. At thirty-four, the stocky, fair-haired officer was the eldest of three brothers in Wehrmacht service, and the only one in the Kriegsmarine. He’d joined the service in 1934, and entered the U-boat arm two years later, rising quickly through the officer corps to his own command just prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. He was well-liked by his crews and went out of his way to look after them, something that drew a great deal of loyalty and effort from his men, and he’d so far proven to be an efficient commander who achieved excellent results.
“Destroyer, bearing nineteen,” he announced softly, professionally. He halted for a moment in the middle of the sweep and noted the nearest escort, watching just long enough to estimate speed and distance before continuing his scan. “Heading one-eighty… speed constant… range two thousand metres . . .” He’d just told the XO the destroyer in question was at a bearing of 19º relative to the heading of his ship, was maintaining a constant speed, and was heading due south… all of which meant that the destroyer was to all intents and purposes heading away from U-1004. At a range of two kilometres, there was no likelihood of it detecting the submarine even if it were equipped with the new ASDIC detection equipment that’d been appearing on Royal Navy ships.