“I can’t get even one reading, sir,” Barnett said. “There’s nothing to hear.”
For weeks Army Group C had filled Commander Morehouse’s recorders, day after day and night after night, a relentless onslaught over the airwaves. Now, utterly nothing. The Army Group had suddenly covered itself with a blanket of radio silence. Morehouse sprinted to his desk and lifted a telephone. “Get me Admiral Reynolds immediately. Yes, I know what time it is. Do as I tell you, and quickly.”
George Stephens was a dairyman in Lincolnshire, a few miles south of where the Humber empties into the North Sea. Stephens was a veteran of the Somme. “Trenchfoot, trenchmouth, ringworm, scabies, dysentery, prickly heat, and that’s my entire war record.”
That early morning he woke to his dogs’ barking. They were border collies, three of them, reliable and earnest, not often causing a commotion. Like everyone else in England, Stephens was aware of Invasion Alert No. 2, and he had just heard planes overhead. He climbed out of bed, stepped into his pants, and reached for his shotgun, which he brought into the bedroom whenever there was an alert. The gun was an over-under, and so well handled over the years that the maker’s mark had almost vanished.
Without opening her eyes, his wife Carlene said, “It’s just the bombers, George. Like always.”
“I heard something else,” he answered. “So did the dogs.”
He stepped out of his house toward the barn. The collies were confined to a run next to a milking shed, and they were still yelping when he got there.
He held a finger to his lips. “Hush, you.”
The dogs paid him no heed. Crouched like an infantryman, Stephens rounded the barn. Just to the west was a low-rising hill, too stony even for grazing. There, caught in a passing glimpse of moonlight, was a man in a parachute harness.
This was not a doll. The fellow was gathering up his parachute, rolling it under his arms. Strapped to the parachutist’s stomach was a large pack.
“I’ve thought back over the next fifteen seconds so many times, it seems like an hour in my memory now,” Stephens recalled. “I walked closer to him, praying he wouldn’t turn to see me. I know my bare feet were making sounds on the rocks, but he didn’t hear me because my dogs were still yowling.”
“It was dark,” Stephens continued. “In my mind I saw a German army uniform and was quite struck later to see his farmer’s clothes, pants just like mine, and a blue shirt.”
Stephens was forty feet away when the parachutist heard him. The man turned slightly and at the same time drew a Luger from a holster strapped to his leg.
“I was going to say something like, ‘Friend or foe?’ but he didn’t give me time, you see.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
Stephens looked at me as if I’d gone daft. “Why, I shot him, of course.”
The burst of birdshot hit the German squarely in his stomach pack. It jolted him, and he staggered back a step, dropping the chute.
“But I don’t think it hurt him—just destroyed his fancy radio. It got a bit dicey then.”
“How so?” I ventured again.
“I glimpsed his pistol, coming up toward me once more, but I raised the shotgun a fraction and pulled the other trigger.” Stephens added with mischief, “He lost his head over that one.”
So he did. George Stephens gloried in the showdown. The German war machine had personally tested him, and he had triumphed. If only his country would do as well.
Gunboats, motor torpedo boats, minelayers, antisubmarine trawlers, sloops, and drifters patrolled the perimeter of Britain. In 1940, the Royal Navy had two to three hundred of these craft at sea at any given time, predominately on the most threatened eastern and southeastern seaboards. By May 1942, however, the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine had exacted their heavy toll, and the Navy was hard-pressed to have fifty ships on patrol.
Lieutenant Richard Keyes was the mine engineer aboard the minelayer HMS Pettibone, which that morning was four miles off Benacre Broad, on the Suffolk coast, northeast of London. At 5:30 that morning, Keyes was overseeing the repair of a launcher on the aft deck—a tedious, cold duty. He could not have known he was three minutes from earning the Distinguished Service Cross, the first of the invasion.
Keyes was on one knee, a pair of pliers in his hand, when the battle stations klaxon rang and the Pettibone veered hard to starboard. He dropped the pliers and ran forward, catching up to an AA gunner sprinting to his weapon.
“What is it?” Keyes yelled over the alarm.
“U-boat off the starboard bow, sir. On the surface.”
The gunner swung the barrels of his dual Polsten 20-mm guns to starboard. Keyes steadied himself against the rail and peered into the night.
“That’s when I stopped thinking, I believe,” he told me after the war. “Our searchlight flicked on and caught the submarine spot on its beam. The sub was dead ahead. It was a tiny thing, really, looking for all the world quite harmless.”
The submarine was one of the Kriegsmarine’s Kleine Kampfmittel (small battle units), a V80 midget, seventy-two feet long with a six-foot beam and a crew of four.
“Three German submariners were on deck, trying to keep their balance as the sub rolled in the sea. The midget was sinking. The bow was in the air, and the Germans were inching higher and higher along the deck to keep above water, all the while trying to keep their hands in the air, surrendering—small wonder with our AA gun aimed at them.”
Just as the British armed forces are penurious in granting bravery decorations, the recipients of those awards are usually hesitant in describing their heroics. I prompted him: “What spurred you to dive overboard?”
“My captain stepped out of the bridge and yelled down, ‘They’re scuttling their sub. Stop them.’”
“So you jumped into the sea?”
Keyes had a broad forehead and heavily lidded eyes. He paused before every sentence. “Colonel, in the Royal Navy your superior tells you what to do, not how to do it. I had just been given an order to prevent the submarine from sinking.”
His expression was purposely deadpan, so I adopted his tone and asked fatuously, “So tell me, was the North Sea cold?”
He smiled. “I thought I was living my last moments, it was so cold. And it was enough of a swim, perhaps forty yards, for my stupidity to chill me further.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I had no idea what had brought the sub to the surface disabled, or why it was now sinking.”
Lieutenant Keyes grabbed the sub’s metal deck grating, now at a considerable cant, and pulled his feet under him. One of the Germans stood between him and the small conning tower. The others were forward, standing on the nose. All still had their hands above their heads. Keyes moved on all fours toward the tower, the water following him as the sub continued to slide under the water.
The sub’s aft hatch was secure. He crawled higher. The German said something, indecipherable to Keyes, and positioned himself between the lieutenant and the tower.
“Get out of my way,” Keyes ordered as he approached. The lieutenant was backlit by the searchlight. The sub had a two-dimensional quality, like a photograph, all in shades of gray and black, as had the crewmen, wearing shining wet suits and appearing otherwordly.
The German blocked him and said something more. He sounded calm and reasonable. Keyes pushed him off the deck into the water and clambered for the tower.