He found his first obstacle, a tripod made of steel, half in and half out of the water, designed to tear out the bottom of landing craft. He pulled a charge from his pack and strapped it onto one of the obstacle’s legs. Trailing a wire, Rogge high-stepped to the next one.
Jim Goldschmidt had never liked small spaces. His sandbag bunker surrounded him and his belt feeder on all sides, except for the narrow aperture facing the water through which his machine gun barrel protruded, and a small exit to the rear. The chamber gave him the heebie-jeebies. He would have hated it in there, were it not for the barrage overhead, which made him grudgingly grateful for the place.
The blasts rippled the sandbags, showering him with dust. The explosions were so loud they sounded like they were inside his head, pushing out his eyeballs. He squeezed the grip of his weapon, as if it might save him from the high explosives walking up and down the beach.
His feeder, Ron Mott, tapped his helmet and pointed out the dugout along the barrel. He yelled, “I think I see something out there, out in the surf.”
Goldschmidt had to open his eyes. He looked over the gunsight. He saw nothing but the faint line of surf, almost lost in the haze and night. He shook his head.
Mott squinted. Again he put his lips to the gunner’s ear. “Jim, I swear I’m seeing something move out near those boat traps.”
Mott was hollering as loudly as he could, but Goldschmidt was picking up only a few words. The rest were lost in the pounding. Mott bellowed, “I’m going to ask Sarge to flare it.”
Goldschmidt nodded, still seeing nothing. Mott slid away. The sky might have been lighter than a few moments before, but he could not be sure. Dawn was coming, and it had never been slower. He had slept only two hours that night, on his stomach, the butt of his Browning stabbing at his chest. He ached from his helmet to his boots.
Mott returned. He shouted, “We’ll see if I’m right soon enough.”
A pinpoint of light opened high in the night sky, quickly expanding to a radiant globe, descending by parachute. Out in the surf, a quarter mile away, caught in the white light and seemingly paralyzed by it, were several dark gaps in the surf. They might have been beach obstacles or men dressed in black. Goldschmidt could not tell. But anything out there was fair game.
“Ready?” Goldschmidt demanded.
He didn’t wait for a response. He squeezed the trigger. The Browning bounced. The belt flew into the breech. The machine gun’s roar hardly registered against the barrage all around. Muzzle flashes reached for the black figures.
Erich Rogge had wired five dragon’s teeth. One more to go for a set. He plunged ahead, the water swirling between his knees and the backtow pulling sand out from under him. Kummetz worked parallel to him thirty feet higher on the beach, strapping explosives to metal-tipped wooden stakes. Other engineers, just visible along the surf-line, worked on the obstacles as swiftly as the darkness and surging water would allow.
The engineers were abruptly cast in a stark white light, making the surf pearl white. The saw-toothed boat traps loomed larger in the flat light, and there were so many of them. Rogge kept moving.
Behind Kummetz, the water bubbled angrily, popping and spitting, more than just surf. The churning moved to him. Kummetz screamed. Rogge turned in time to see his friend torn open, from knee to shoulder, then along his ribcage. Kummetz was quartered before he slid under the surf, his blood tainting the roiling water for only a few seconds. Slapping into the water, the bullets searched for Rogge.
He threw himself behind a concrete cone. Bullets chipped away at it, then moved on. The body of another engineer brushed his leg, then was carried away by the receding surf. Rogge pulled a package of plastic from his pack.
The engineers had been told that if they could stay alive for those forty minutes, they would have a lot of company on that beach. Rogge intended to stay alive. He stuck his head out from behind the cone. The beach was suffering blasts so incessantly that the Luftwaffe planes could not be heard. When the flare sputtered and died, Rogge dashed for the next cone, unraveling wire from the spool.
Safely behind it, he threw the switch. The sound of his detonations was lost in the shore bombing and the surf, but the explosives worked well enough. The concrete cones and metal stakes he had wired toppled into the surf. He lifted another charge from his pack.
Being assigned to fly the Owlet would have been an insufferable humiliation to RAF Lieutenant Sidney Baxter, were it not that many of his fellow pilots had no plane at all. The Owlet was a two-seat training monoplane with a 150-horsepower Cirrus-Major engine and an open cockpit, as far removed from a Spitfire as Cheapside was from Windsor Castle.
Baxter was posted to 48 Squadron, Number 15 Group, Coastal Command, stationed at Thorney Island. He was to fly a figure eight reconnaissance sortie, covering fifty miles of water, and he was to be in position at dawn. He was two minutes into the air when the Luftwaffe found him. The enemy must have been looking for scouts from his base.
A stream of machine gun bullets ripped into the empty student’s cockpit in front of Baxter. Tracer bullets seemed to dust his flight jacket. He pushed on the stick, trying to muscle the Owlet from the sky. It might have worked with a Spitfire. The trainer responded slowly, letting another Me 109 find the range. A portion of the port rudder ripped away. Baxter fought to control the Owlet as it began to roll. The German fighter flashed by, then another appeared off his starboard wing. The RAF pilot twisted the Owlet toward the water.
Twenty seconds later, Baxter brought the trainer under control. He anxiously glanced over one shoulder then the other. He had lost the German fighters in the darkness. His altimeter read two hundred feet. He pulled back on the stick and the Owlet gained altitude. The first pale rays of dawn lit the water below. He had come out of the dive heading north, and the beach passed under him. The port rudder was jammed. He brought the right wing up, intent on finding his base.
A stream of oil splashed across his windshield and his goggles. He tried to wipe it away with his sleeve. The engine fluttered, then froze, the dry pistons glued to the cylinders. The plane began to sink and spin.
The lieutenant threw off his safety harness. The ground below seemed to turn on the axis of his fuselage to appear above him as the trainer rolled. Using the windscreen frame for leverage, he climbed out of the cockpit. The wind fought him, pushing him back. He found the ripcord, then jumped free of the plane.
Not quite free. The ragged rudder caught his parachute pack as it passed, violently twisting him. Baxter heard his pack rip. As he plummeted toward earth, he yanked the ripcord.
The white chute played out above him, but the rudder had done its damage, and several of the lines fouled. Baxter felt a tug as the chute caught the air, but only part of it opened. The rest flapped wildly like a flag.
Before he hit the ground, he plummeted through the branches of a tree, then a large rhododendron, then onto a moss-covered stream bank.
He told me after the war, “It’s not the fall that kills you. It’s the sudden stop.”
He broke both arms, six ribs, his right femur, his right clavicle, four bones in his right hand, eight in his left foot, his nose, and his jaw.
Picking up his tone, I asked levelly, “Did it hurt?”
He grinned over his pint of ale. “A Yank would have thought it hurt, I dare say.”
The lieutenant lay on the ground twelve hours before he was found.