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‘Tras is Bringle Sands.’ The accent was unmistakably that of Boston, Massachusetts. The US Marine Corps Captain tapped the map, so that the transparent protective covering flashed in the light of the yellow bulbs. ‘Your boats will hit the beach at dusk. The tide condition will be low enough to expose fully any im-derwater obstacles. You Marines will be crossing about three hundred yards of tidal flat. . .’ he hurried on with the briefing, lest his audience dwelled too much upon that danger. ‘. . . But it gives the engineers a chance to clear and mark a lane. And it also means that, at high-water, the boats will be coming in real close to pick you up.’
He looked at the men, packed tightly together on the metal folding chairs so incongruous in the seventeenth-century style gold and white panelling that the French Line had chosen for their passenger ships. He turned and touched the map of the Devon coastline but the men had eyes only for their Captain’s face, trying to see there some pre-knowledge or premonition of success or disaster. The mouth of the River Frane, Exeter, Yorkshire, Timbuctou; it made no difference to them, these were just forgotten names
Out of schoolbooks. Most of these Marines were farm boys from America’s mid-west, with no ambition to see Europe. The lawyers had insisted upon them all being discharged from the USMC and re-enlisted (as Canadians) in the British service. To support this deception, they wore small Union-Jack badges on the sleeves of their xmiform jackets, but a wise decision of the Marine Corps planners had enabled them to keep their Browning automatic rifles. ,
An Englishman — Major Albert Dodgson — left the briefing room, nodding to the armed sentry at the door. He’d heard it all before. In fact he’d helped to write that part of it that described the countryside behind Bringle Sands, so near to his parents’ home.
Major Dodgson had been attached to the 1st Marine Division, at its base at Quantico, Virginia, ever since it was first alerted for an amphibious attack upon the French island of Martinique (just after that French colony declared itself loyal to the pro-Nazi government of Vichy). By the time President Roosevelt had authorised this armed raid on Bringle Sands, these Marines — with their amphibious assault training and specially designed landing craft — were the only men who could do it.
Dodgson made his way along the dimly lit passage. One of the turbo-generators had failed for the third time. With only 2000 kilowatts, the ship was reduced to emergency lighting and one hot meal a day. Thank goodness the ship’s heating came from auxiliary boilers and so was not affected. They’d been at sea twelve long, cold, winter days. Even when this liner was launched in 1931, it had taken her seven days to cross the Atlantic. Now the ’tween-deck space forward, designed for cars and general cargo, held two large landing craft. Another two LCMs were fitted into what had once been the aft cargo hold and twenty thousand cubic feet of refrigerated space. And inside each of the landing craft there was a curious hybrid vehicle; front-half heavy truck, and rear-half tank. And inside two
Of these newly invented M.3 half-tracks, there was a piece of macMnery designed and built in the Marines’ engineering workshops at Quantico. There, a month earlier, a demonstration had proved that the ‘iron maiden’ could rip the back from even the strongest German filing cabinet in under ten minutes. Without damaging the papers inside.
Major Dodgson was not a Marine. He’d won his DSO with the Royal West Kents in - France in 1940. He’d always hated the sea and this voyage had done nothing to lessen that prejudice. He could not adapt himself to the ceaseless movement, to the cramped accommodation that gave him mild feelings of claustrophobia, and to the loud metallic groans and rumbles that came from the bowels of the ship. But most of all he hated the vibration. One of the screws had been slightly damaged in the first day at sea, and the ship had not been still since. Now, as he made his way up to A deck, and what had once been the cabin-class promenade, the great white marble staircase shuddered underfoot.
It took Dodgson several minutes before he could discern, through the heavy rain, the dark shapes of the other ships. They were wallowing along with no more than station-keeping lights to prick the grey overcast sky that pressed down upon the smoke from their funnels. He found the other American officers exactly where he’d left them, staring through the wet windows. There was a smell of cigar smoke.
‘Have they nearly finished the briefing?’ asked Captain Waley, who would be in the first landing craft. Like most of them he was a regular officer. He’d been integrated into the Corps from the Reserve, ami frequently complained that he’d have been a Major by now, except that his group had been given seniority in alphabetical order. Waley’s task was to join a party of British Resistance men, who would take them by a specially prepared route across country to the Research Establishment. Three of the half-tracks would
Be under his command. His orders were to take the Establishment, and hold it imtil a man called Ruys-dale told him to retire or until his entire force was eliminated. No one who knew Waley doubted that the order would be interpreted quite Uterally, Significantly, every man in Waley’s party had filled out and signed the printed Last Will and Testament forms that had been given to them.
‘Can you spare me a cigar, Jakie?’ Dodgson asked Hoge, an oflScer who was reputed never to be without a pocketful of them.
‘Sure thing,’ said Hoge. Dodgson got along well with the Americans. Kfis experience fighting the Germans had won him respect; his modesty and some calamitous encounters with Virginia’s high society, had won him their friendship. ‘Seems to me,’ said Hoge in the Alabama drawl that, in his cups, Dodgson tried to mimic, ‘that these here Krauts have got to be plumb crazy to have this secret laboratory near the seashore.’
Hoge and Dodgson would be together in the diversionary attack, calculated to draw the Germans away from the Research Establishment, while the main force attacked it from the other side.
‘Unless the sons of bitches have relocated it to somewhere safer,’ said Waley, voicing a fear that was an echo of those in Washington.
Then the last of the group spoke. He was much older than the others, a small, awkward, unsoldierly man, with a harsh German accent. ‘An atomic reactor, of the sort they have built, needs water, lots and lots of water.’
‘Wouldn’t a river do?’ asked Dodgson.
‘The re-circulated water will contain radio-active material,’ said the German. ‘It would not be safe to release it into a river.’ The others nodded. He was the only one of them who understood the real purpose of their unprovoked aggression. His papers described him as Lieutenant Ruysdale, a Canadian citizen of
Dutch descent, but no one knew his real name. The others usually called him ‘Professor’. All they’d been told about him was that, after Waley captured the Research Establishment, Ruysdale would be giving him his orders about which filing cabinets got the embrace of the ‘iron maiden’, and which documents, what material and which people were to be put into the half-tracks and taken back to the ships; with or without consent. .
‘Professor,’ said Waley without turning away from the rain-splashed windows of the promenade, ‘they say that Hitler could knock out the USA with this brass-knuckle we are going to snatch out of his glove. Is that the truth. Professor?’
The others did not look at him, but Ruysdale knew it was the question to which every man on the ships needed an answer. ‘It’s true, my friends,’ he said. But even to him, who’d stood alongside the great Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhehn Institute for Chemistry that day just before Christmas 1938 when he realised that he’d split the nucleus of the uranium atom into two, even to him the promised destructive power of an atomic explosion was scarcely conceivable. The man they called Ruysdale wanted to tell them that this was a mission for which it was worth-while sacrificing their lives, but he’d learned that Americans do not welcome such speeches. Instead he accepted one of Hoge’s cigars and said, ‘What time are they showing that Betty Grable movie?’ '
‘Two-thirty,’ said Waley. It would bring them right up to the time when they must prepare for the landing, unless they encoimtered German naval forces first.
Now all the men looked through the windows and watched the other transport. That too had once been a ship of the French Line, carrying 643 cabin-class passengers between Le Havre and New York in considerable luxury. But she had none of the jumbo derricks that were needed to take the weight of the four big landing craft. She had only the assault landing
Craft, small enough to be suspended from the regulation 99-person lifeboat davits. But most of these LCAs had been damaged by the mountainous seas of their Atlantic crossing. The new plan used only two of them. After Waley and his main force were landed, the four LCMs would have to return to the second transport to get the second wave of men, who would move up through the beach parties to deliver the diversionary attack.
Ruysdale had the mind of a scientist rather than that of a soldier, and he found it difficult to reconcile himself to the fact that there would be only half as many places on the landing craft as there were men in the assault force.
World History
