I tell Lieutenant Baxter’s story because it is a fair representation of the intelligence regarding the invasion available to the Defense Committee that morning.
Captain Jonathan Goodrich’s spotter called, “Sir, I’ve got something.”
Standing between the barrels of Winnie and Pooh, Goodrich raised his binoculars. The darkness and fog hid whatever was out there below the cliffs. “Locate it for me, Lieutenant.”
“I’ve lost it, sir.” A moment passed. “There it is. One o’clock.”
The captain lifted the pack telephone, spoke a few words, then announced, “If there’s a ship out there, it’s not one of ours. We’ve got permission to fire.”
In the concrete room behind the guns, another lieutenant was preparing a firing chart pinned to the plotting board, marking the position of the illusive target. Yet another lieutenant, the Plans and Training Officer, was speaking into a telephone.
“I see it, a ship,” Goodrich said, his field glasses at his eyes. Again he lifted the telephone.
An electric bell rang and thirty seconds later sounded again. At each ring, an observer trained his telescope on the ship and from the scope’s dials read aloud the compass bearing of the line of sight.
In the chart room, a soldier wearing earphones immediately plotted the same compass bearing in a straight line on his chart. He placed a ruler along the line.
A mile away in an observation post, another soldier repeated the process with his telescope when his bell sounded. A fourth soldier in the chart room plotted the second line of sight. The intersecting lines showed the ship’s position.
A fifth artilleryman threw down a calibrated pointer. One end was attached to Winnie and Pooh’s map location. “Fifteen hundred yards, sir.”
There were ten other soldiers in the plotting room, each a specialist, factoring the ship’s course, the wind, the curvature of the earth, and much else. Some read scales, others traced coordinates, another worked with logarithms. Adjustments were made. Ninety seconds had elapsed from the first sighting. The bell rang again, and all measurements were retaken, tracing the ship as it slipped in and out of the haze.
A row of pin holes appeared on the chart, the ship’s course at thirty second intervals. The final pin hole, the set-forward point, was placed on the map, the target location. Hydraulic engines hummed, and the barrels lifted and swiveled. The guns would fire the next time the bell rang, fifteen seconds away.
“Number one ready,” reported the gun commander. “Number two ready.”
Gunners held the lanyards, ready to yank them on command. The gunroom was silent, everyone waiting for the bell. Ten seconds.
A burst of submachine gun fire came from cliffside, an impossibility, as there was nothing there but a sheer precipice down to the water-washed boulders.
Goodrich called, “Sentries report. Hold steady, gunner.”
A concussion grenade flipped into the gunroom, with a delay just long enough for the artillerymen to find it with their eyes. The blast blacked out Goodrich on his feet.
He awoke later bleeding from his mouth and ears, and with his hands bound behind him. A Wehrmacht commando guarded him and two other gunners who had survived the grenades and automatic weapons’ fire. Everyone else in the captain’s crew was dead.
I have been unable to locate any of the German commandos who took part in the raid on Goodrich’s coastal battery. We know they were the Adler (Eagle) Regiment of the 1st Mountain Division, and we know they arrived by inflatable rafts, scaled the cliffs below the battery using ropes and grappling hooks, thought an impossible feat. We also know they blind-sided the sentries, getting close enough to use knives.
Winnie and Pooh played no other part in the invasion, never loosed a single shot at the invaders. Up and down the beach, other coastal guns were meeting similar ends.
The motor antisubmarine boat had been built by British Power Boat in 1938, but had found few Kriegsmarine submarines in coastal waters, so had been converted to a motor gunboat in 1940. Then its primary mission had been to draw the fire of enemy Schnellboots while RN motor torpedo boats rushed in for the attack.
All that was in the past, however, when the Royal Navy had the equipment to put up a fight. Now, in the early morning Lieutenant Neville Sanders’ boat was on patrol, watching and waiting for the invasion, cruising three miles off the coast, its three Napier Sealion engines pushing it along at seventeen knots, half speed. Two of his six-man crew had binoculars to their eyes. Two other sailors manned the Lewis guns.
The night was lessening its grip, and the lieutenant judged he had two hundred yards of visibility. Fog was drifting toward the coast. Sanders was acutely aware that his mission was only to report and flee. This passive role ran against his grain.
After the war, Sanders told me that the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine must have had little else to do but gang up on his ship, not much of a war prize by naval standards. From the German standpoint, the attack must have been quite boring.
It began with a strafing run by an entire squadron of ME 110c’s, eleven planes in all. “Not their best fighter,” Sanders said, “but good enough for this job, I’ll tell you.”
Five came out of the darkness aft of the gunboat, one after another at over 320 miles an hour, two Oerlikon guns and four Rheinmetall Borsig machine guns spitting metal from each fuselage. Then six more of the fighters roared in from off midships, yellow tracers preceding each of them.
“I don’t think our Lewis guns found a single fighter,” Sanders recalled. “They came too low and too fast.”
Sanders’ most vivid memory was of the slivers of his boat filling the air, dug out by the streams of bullets. The lieutenant rushed from the bridge and found one of his spotters lying on the port gangway, bleeding from a ragged tear in his leg. Sanders dragged him to the edge of the boat, which by then was almost cut in two. He called the abandon ship. An AA gunner dove overboard, followed by another spotter. The wounded crewman’s life jacket was secure, so the lieutenant dropped him overboard.
Sanders was running along the torn up deck toward the engine compartment looking for the oiler when he saw a periscope off the beam. “My only thought then was how silly all this was, a whole squadron of fighters and a submarine, all for my little sixty-footer.”
The U-boat commander may not have seen the Luftwaffe fighters and how well they were doing their job. He launched a torpedo at the gunboat. At that range, it was a dead shot. The torpedo coursed into the gunboat’s aft quarter, which erupted skyward. The blast sent a foot-long wood splinter into Sanders’ thigh and another into his scalp, lifting a hand-sized flap of hair and skin from his head. He collapsed to the deck, and, finding he could crawl to the gunwale, dropped himself over the side.
Little remained of his gunboat, “not enough to sink, really, just enough for us to cling to as we bobbed in the water.”
Sanders and two others in the crew were picked up by a German patrol boat an hour later. Sanders was almost dead from exposure and loss of blood. He never again saw the wounded spotter he had helped overboard or any of the rest of his crew.
The long night had done nothing to lessen Private Douglas Stubbs’ fear. His sergeant had not allowed barrel-clearing of his Browning during the night, and Stubbs had nothing else with which to treat his fright. He had spoken only a few words with his mates of the 3rd Platoon at Pett Level that night. He was not alone in his fear, but that didn’t help.
The Luftwaffe’s bombardment, which must have lasted three hours, had left him partly deaf and gasping for breath, but otherwise unhurt. The beach and the hill behind it were crater-pocked expanses. Amazingly, no one in Stubbs’ platoon had been hurt.