KING GEORGE’S COMPUTERS
DAVID SHAW
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 David Shaw
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INTRODUCTION
This story is based on a single piece of pure speculation. Suppose the transistor had been invented in the United Kingdom in 1937, instead of in the United States in 1947?
There are no particular reasons why it could not have been. Semi-conductors had been used in "cat's whisker" radios since the 1920's. And once transistors were available it would have been quickly recognised that digital computers could now be built. Construction of the world's first digital computer in fact began in 1938 at Iowa State University. Of course, it had to use vacuum tubes and was extremely primitive.
Shortly afterwards came ENIAC, incorporating 18,000 hot and unreliable tubes. Providing less computing power than a modern wrist watch it weighed 30 tons, occupied 1,500 square feet and dimmed the lights of the building when it was switched on. A transistorised equivalent would have fitted inside a wardrobe. Transistors were everything tubes weren't -- they were small, reliable, cheap, with a meagre appetite for electricity.
We know that well before the war began the British government was straining every nerve to crack the German 'ENIGMA' codes. It's likely that transistorised computers would have been developed as quickly as humanly possible with virtually unlimited financial support. And in Alan Turing the British had the one thing money couldn't buy -- genius. In fact it was the British who built the first true computer in 1948 at Manchester University, the first computer which held a program stored in its memory and which could be re-programmed without needing to be re-wired.
Apart from that imaginary scientific development, all other historical facts at the beginning of the story are correct. Kampfgruppe 100 certainly existed. This Luftwaffe pathfinder unit led the attacks which crucified Coventry and almost ripped the heart out of London.
The beauty of KGr 100's special X-Gerat electronic bombing system was that it enabled a last minute check on the bomber's actual ground speed and so enabled it to correctly calculate the exact moment to release its load. The accuracy of the system was usually within 100 yards of a target at 200 miles from the Luftwaffe's high frequency transmitters. X-Gerat was certainly the most accurate method of night bombing yet devised by any air force up to that time.
In comparison RAF staff officers were convinced that British bomber crews could achieve pin-point accuracy at night using traditional star sighting techniques with a sextant. Not for another year would they realise that only ten percent of Bomber Command crews were dropping their bombs within five miles of any given target.
Unlikely as it sounds, the glider 'snatch' technique described was in fact used operationally in Burma to retrieve wounded soldiers from Chindit columns. John Masters gives a fine description of the technique in his fascinating autobiography: "The Road Past Mandalay".
Lord Mountbatten is also on record as making a very shrewd comment on the technique the first time he saw it demonstrated: "Jesus bloody Christ!"
As far as the story itself is concerned, all characters are fictional, bar one senior Luftwaffe officer. However, I did have great difficulty with the genesis of 'E.E. Crampton'. I needed to create a well known person in British political and academic circles with quite remarkable powers of imagination and insight. Since any such fictitious character would have been somewhat unbelievable, I was forced to borrow one from real life. There was indeed a Member of Parliament for Oxford University in 1940, and he was indeed a Petty Officer in the Naval Reserve. As for his imagination -- well, if you've never read Mr A.P. Herbert or his collection of misleading legal cases, you have a treat in store.
One final quirk of fate: William Bradford Shockley was the man who led the team which invented the transistor and founded Silicon Valley. He was actually born in London of American parents. Had they decided to stay there instead of returning to California, who knows what might have happened.
But still, this is only a whimsy of fiction, merely a re-arranged war game with some new pieces set out on the patterns of history. A handful of scientists, the first electronic computers and a young officer of ferocious ability. Arrayed against them are the armed forces of Nazi Germany, the best soldiers to conquer Europe since the fall of Rome. The game begins with a pawn being moved, an unwitting pawn in a desperate defence.
CHAPTER ONE
Captain Henry Arthur Winfield, Royal Engineers, was cramped and cold and bewildered. A soldier on active service was expected to suffer discomfort without complaining and any man in uniform who didn't anticipate being continually buggered about was either a one day recruit or a general. But at least you usually had some idea of where you were going and why. All he knew right now was that he was flying south to carry out some duties of extreme importance. Henry sincerely hoped he wasn't going to be expected to repeat his previous most outstanding performance.
Five months before Henry had been attached to the staff of the Commander Royal Engineers, Third Division, British Expeditionary Force. In that capacity he had probably done more damage to an army than any other junior office in history.
Unfortunately it had all been inflicted on his own side. Henry's principal contribution so far towards the downfall of Hitler had been to lead a squad of gun-cotton laden sappers through a mass of British military equipment abandoned outside Dunkirk, charged with the duty of destroying as much of it as possible. His piece-de-resistance had been the thorough wrecking of eighteen 3.7 inch anti-aircraft guns, the pride of the Royal Artillery, each one worth the unbelievable sum of five thousand pounds.
It had been a bitter experience, for he was a man with one consuming passion in life, and that passion was weapons. Why this should be was a great puzzle to Henry. In his heart of hearts he considered himself much more of a weakling than a born warrior: in fact he'd never willingly become involved in any fight that he could avoid. None the less he was a military engineer whose great interest in life was in the most minute details of any and every man made artifact for waging war, from bayonets to aircraft carriers.
Like George Bernard Shaw Henry believed that mankind's heart and soul was lavished on its weapons. It was a philosophical viewpoint which certainly seemed true as far as the Germans were concerned and Henry had tremendous professional respect for German engineering and military skills.
The Whitley he was riding in skittered through an air pocket, falling and then rising again in the turbulent currents. The interior of the obsolescent bomber was packed tight with bodies encumbered with clumsy 37 pattern webbing, all sitting in great discomfort on the fuselage floor, feet jammed against the opposite side of the narrow crawl way. Ten men, including himself, part of a half Troop of Number Two Commando, detached for extra-regimental duties under Captain Winfield.
Which made it all about as confusing and annoying as anybody could need.
In the first place the Commandos had been established three months ago, in July 1940, as a token of Churchill's determination to raid newly conquered France. Since no such raiding units then existed the Commandos had been hastily formed from volunteers detached on sufferance from their regiments or corps.
To be detached from a parent unit once might be considered rather glamorous; to be ordered away from the only unit in the Army that Henry wanted to serve in was a disaster. In many ways it was a unique unit.
For example, Number Two Commando was the only military unit in the entire British Empire which was parachute trained. At the Prime Minister's insistence the War Office had been obliged to create the Central Landing School at Ringway aerodrome near Manchester to train its handful of airborne troops.
This homespun answer to Goering's Fallschirmjagers consisted of three hundred novice paratroopers, a handful of RAF instructors and five 'elephant arse' Whitleys, so called because of the extemporised jumping hatch cut in the bottom of each aeroplane's fuselage.
It was a lousy modification to a mediocre paratroop carrier, resulting in a growing list of broken noses and facial injuries caused by men hitting the opposite rim of the hatch as they jumped. Since the RAF had little interest in airborne forces no quick improvements in jumping technique seemed likely to be developed.
Which was just one of the many reasons why Henry was flabbergasted at finding himself being flown to his destination. Film stars like Ronald Coleman or Clark Gable might live in a world where travel was simply a matter of packing a bag and stepping on an aeroplane, but it wasn't the way the Army or the Air Force worked. Until he'd arrived at Ringway Henry had never even seen the inside of an aircraft, nor had he ever met anybody else who had. A bunch of squaddies had as about as much chance of travelling to a new posting by air as they had of being billeted in the Savoy on arrival.
Just as astonishing was the fact he had been allowed to handpick the men he was to take with him. The single strongest factor against the formation of the Commando units had been the determination of line battalions to fight tooth and nail against releasing their best soldiers to some crackpot special purpose force.
For a Commando unit, in turn, to willingly offer up its own best men to a mere captain must have taken some awesome pressure from above. Whatever the hell was going on that at least was a chance of lifetime. Their improvised volunteering system of recruitment was sending Two Commando the oddest and perhaps the best drafts ever received by any British Army unit. Some of the strangest newcomers were a group of continental Jews, an alarmingly high proportion of whom spoke German as their mother tongue.
It had seemed unlikely that these Hebrews could be turned into soldiers -- until the Commandos realised the ferocious eagerness and intelligence these new recruits showed in all their efforts. Henry had included several of them on his 'most wanted' list, plus a couple of the razor slashed Gorbals' laddies; McCaughan, the jockey sized sergeant from Skye with the accent of an angel . . . and Cantrell.
Corporal Cantrell, six feet and one inch of slim Dublin jauntiness, had his knees almost drawn up against his face as he slowly chewed an haversack ration sandwich, apparently unbothered by the Whitley's heaving motion. Rumour had it that on November 21st, 1920, he'd been a fifteen year old member of the Dublin Republican Brigade's Special Action Squad, on that quiet Sunday morning when the IRA carried out their brilliant coup of murdering eleven British intelligence officers while they were still in bed.
Which was why Henry had selected the Irishman. He knew about guerrilla warfare from the other side of the fence, as the weaker force. It was a skill the British were going to have to learn now. In any case it was hard to pass over a man who had been sentenced to death by the British in the Dublin Four Courts for being a member of the IRA and reprieved by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, only to be badly wounded in the very same courtroom building by a shell fired by the army of the Irish Free State from an 18 pounder battery willingly donated to their cause by a Mr Winston Churchill. After an experience like that Cantrell's decision to join the British army seemed almost natural.
"And the Irish move to the sound of the guns, like salmon to the sea." Kipling had the right of it, as usual.
There was a disturbance at the forward end of the plane as one of the passengers got to his feet, stared forward into the cockpit, then sank down again, to shout something in his neighbour's ear. The message was slowly relayed up the reverberating tunnel from man to man.
"Lieutenant Cunliffe-Brown's complaints, sor, and he says he can see London."
Well, it sounded like that, only the soldier next to Henry was Private Rosedale, a Geordie who virtually needed an interpreter to communicate with anyone not born on Tyneside. Fortunately he'd earned his living as a journalist in Durham before joining up, so he'd only ever had to worry about writing English and not speaking it.
As for Cunliffe-Brown it was conceivable that he might seriously frame a message with the word "compliments" in it. The man seemed to have acquired most of his social upbringing from reading the 'Boy's Own Annual'.
Take another officer the Adjutant had said, that's the order from above. At least Henry hadn't robbed the Commando there because Cunliffe-Brown had only finished his basic parachute training a few days before and had not yet been allotted to a Troop, or more to the point, to a Troop Sergeant to wet nurse him. He was one of the 'hostilities only' officers now arriving, wartime volunteers. Skinny and rather awkward in his movements, deeply tanned, his family farmers in East Africa, no previous military experience or background.
Still, even an East African at five thousand feet on a cloudy day should recognise London when he saw it. The Whitley had been flying south-east for the whole trip, so the speed and distance figures were about right for London as their destination.
It wouldn't have been necessary to guess if the aircrew had bothered to mention the plane's destination, but the stupid ponces apparently thought it was beneath their dignity to talk to army brown jobs. Ever since the Battle of Britain had begun to die down every officer in light blue uniform seemed to have become convinced that the survival of the country was due to his own efforts alone.
Henry was well aware of his own ignorance about what the RAF had really achieved in the last four months of daylight dogfights. The only passing comment he'd allowed himself was that, if after the war, the Air Ministry claims for Luftwaffe losses proved even half way accurate, he'd eat his boots, studs and all.
Since he'd made his offer whilst being entertained as a guest in the Air Force mess at Ringway it had been received in frigid silence. Impelled by an often dangerous character trait of argumentative logic, Henry had then inquired if the ground crews at Manston aerodrome had finally been persuaded to come out of their air raid shelters, now that winter was coming in?
Very few people knew about that episode, and how the gallant lads in blue had mutinied at a front line fighter station and gone underground for nearly two weeks, only emerging at night to scavenge for food. Not only did Henry know the details, he took great pleasure in quoting them chapter and verse, until a Squadron Leader on the verge of apoplexy threatened to have him arrested for defeatism. It was also made clear that Captain Winfield was unlikely to be invited into that mess again.
Henry idly wished that he'd been able to look down from the aircraft as it passed over the small and thickly hedged fields of the East Midlands. His home would have been down there, somewhere near to the Whitley's flight path. A crumbling farm workers tithe cottage, full of kids and smells and a few battered pieces of furniture.
Henry was the eldest of seven children, all bright, the offspring of a ploughman who could quote more scripture from memory than the parish vicar had ever known. His father was a man who spent his days walking the furrows but who loved to spend his evenings delving just as deeply and thoroughly into any good book he could beg, buy or borrow.
The memories of his family were driven from Henry's mind as the Whitley began to wallow downwards, the engines throttled back, with a horrible sensation of half flying and half falling just before the aircraft's wheels hit the ground. Several of the passengers seemed far more relieved to be back on terra firma than they normally did after descending under opened silk canopies.
When Henry dropped out of the hatch under the aircraft he was surprised to find grass underneath his feet instead of hard standing.
Parked very close to the Whitleys were two Bedford three ton lorries, canvas covers lashed down tightly from cabs to dropboards.
A stalwart military police sergeant with a face burnt leathery by many years of overseas service was standing by the hatch. He threw Henry a fierce salute and bent down to help him pull his bulky kit bag from underneath the fuselage. Then the MP instinctively stamped his feet in a double shuffle, resettling the lead weights inside the bottoms of his razor creased trousers, so the baggy material resumed the correct 'plus fours' shape over the polished web anklets they were tucked into.
Henry looked around. It was a small airfield, about a thousand yards long in an east-west direction and much less across. A railway embankment ran at right angles slap across the eastern end. There were two small and very old-fashioned hangars on the south side of the field, probably dating back to the '14 -'18 war, and a kind of clubhouse near to them. The absence of concrete runways and barrack blocks made it almost certain that this was a private flying club's field pressed into emergency service. The only sign of life was a Spitfire parked outside one of the hangars with a group of erks around it staring at the Whitleys as they landed.
Not surprisingly either, because it was almost certainly the first time that heavy bombers had been landed on this half-arsed apology for an aerodrome. Surely this wasn't London? At least the sky was considerably clearer than it usually was over the Pennines, with only some mares' tails streaking the crisp blue autumn sky. Henry was quite certain he could smell ozone on the light southerly wind.
"Where are we?" he asked.
The MP looked puzzled. "Beg your pardon, sir?"
"Where are we? What's the name of this aerodrome?"
"This is Rochford, sir, just outside Southend."
Southend, the stuff that music hall songs were made of, the near legendary playground for yer genuine Cockney sparrer'. As far as Henry could remember it was twenty or thirty miles east of the outer London suburbs, on the northern side of the Thames Estuary.
A second Whitley bumped down, rolling to a quick stop as the lush grass slowed its wheels.
The third and final aircraft in the flight seemed to be coming in rather too low towards the embankment as the pilot sought to adjust for the cross wind. At precisely the most awkward moment a small locomotive towing half a dozen goods wagons appeared on top of the embankment as the Whitley flew overhead, fate happily preventing an accident but arranging for the Whitley's undercarriage to flick through the smoke lifting up from the locomotive's funnel.
Henry smiled in relief at the near miss and also in some delight at the thought of the consequent correspondence between the Southern Railway Company and the RAF. Whether the war was won or lost it was certain that in years to come there would be a huge file buried somewhere in the dusty archives of the Air Ministry dealing with the near collision of a train and one of his Majesty's aircraft on the seventh of October, 1940, at Rochford in the county of . . . well, wherever they were.
What a pity the Germans and the British couldn't let their paper pushers fight the war out on their own with claims, counter-claims, forms and rubber stamps. The British would probably win hands down, not that it mattered, because in a Europe dominated by bureaucrats the French would rule supreme.
Anyway, thirty trained Commandos, available for whatever needed to be done. Visible on the Bedfords was the yellow and black portcullis insignia of 1st London Division. Divisional transport, laid on for a scruffy little half Troop, at a time when most front line anti-invasion forces had nothing but commandeered London buses for transport. Who the devil was pulling so many strings, and why?
Henry's heart sank as deeply as it had risen, down to a black bitter pit. There was only one explanation which made sense. They were going to be used to protect some Very Important Person, a Praetorian guard for somebody the nation couldn't afford to lose in case of invasion or an attempted assassination attempt by fifth columnists. Maybe even Churchill himself.
And there was cause for mixed feelings: if there was a man whom Henry admired unto love, it was Winston Churchill. Listening to him delivering his defiant speeches on the wireless was enough to set any man's blood on fire. But when that lisping voice had finished plucking down the finest fruits of the English language since Shakespeare then rationality set in, and Henry could see Churchill's overweening pride and stubbornness for what they were, a recipe to lead the British Empire into disaster after disaster.
Far from guarding the Prime Minister, it might realistically be a lot better for everybody to give the Germans every chance of shooting him. Because there was no way that Britain could be on the winning side in this war now unless the Americans or the Russians came in against Hitler. And why would they do that?
"Sir, I've got special orders for your movement: verbal orders."
Henry realised that he'd been staring at the MP sergeant without seeing him, a day dreaming trait which was all too common to him.
"What are they?"
The sergeant seemed disconcerted again. Henry could guess why. It was his own accent, the harsh, nasal and unlovely dialect of the East Midlands, where the entrenched Saxon tones had never fully adapted to the alien language bought in by the last lot of invaders in 1066. In many regiments and corps an officer who sounded like Henry would have had a very difficult time of it from both their men and in the officers' mess.
Fortunately a great deal of social allowance was made for the Royal Engineers, that most plebeian of all military arms.
"Sir, I've been ordered to ask you to make sure all members of your unit travel in the back of the lorries with all the tarpaulins laced up securely. Nobody is supposed to look out during the journey."
Well, that had to be some sort of security notion. Number Two Commando soldiers were the most distinctively dressed troops in the country. Their cropped helmets and knee length body overalls were straight copies of German paratroop equipment captured in Holland, copied because nobody in the War Office between the wars had given the slightest thought to preparing British parachute forces.
Henry found that Sergeant McCaughan had quietly arrived at his side, ready to organise matters at the nod of a head. Another regular, he was twenty and thus a year younger than Henry, both of them holding ranks which they had only been able to reach so early because of wartime expansion.
Not that either of them felt out of their depth. Each had joined up at fourteen years of age, McCaughan as a boy soldier and Henry as an entrant at the Beachley Army School for Apprenticed Tradesmen. In their own and each other's estimation they were both old sweats, with matching mutual respect.
There were a few smiles from the men as Henry clambered onto the nearest lorry, smiles which broadened as he almost fell on his backside when the vehicle jerked forward. It was normal practice for officers to ride in vehicle cabs, leaving the rest of the passengers with the customary freedom to sing cheerfully obscene songs and wolf whistle any halfway decent looking girls they saw.
In truth, many officers would have considered the notion of riding in the back of a lorry with their troops as a prelude to bolshevik rebellion. Their feelings would have been further outraged by being addressed by a mere corporal who never even asked permission to speak.
"Would you have any idea what's in the wind, sir?" Cantrell asked cheerfully.
"We've been sent for in a hurry, and the only thing special about us is that we're paratroopers. So you can draw your own conclusions."
"Well, sir, if you were to guess?"
"If I were to guess, corporal, I'd guess we're going to drop into Dublin, looking like Germans, so that Mr De Valera will get a big fright and invite the British back into Eire to protect it. If so, I'll suggest we land on top of the biggest brewery in Ireland and fight it out to the last barrel of Guinness."
There was a rush of laughter along the wooden benches, as Cantrell grinned easily. "Ah, Captain Winfield, sir, you have the mind for thinking up the worst places to hit people. A great asset you would have been to the organisation in the old days."
"Don't get your thirst up yet, Corporal. It's just possible I may be wrong. Is there anybody here who knows these parts?"
Private Owens put up his hand hesitantly. He was the only Londoner in the lorry. Like many of the commandos, including Henry, he was short and stocky, though spared Henry's overabundance of freckles.
"I came up this way to Burnham-On-Crouch once, sir, working on a Pickford's van. Nothing but flat fields and miles and miles of mud, what they call the Maplin Sands, only I didn't see much sand around."
Henry shrugged. "OK, now you all know as much as I do. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see."
The lorry suddenly slowed down, and then waddled slowly over a series of bumps; possibly a planked bridge.
As it speeded up again afterwards the Bedford started to sway from side to side almost as disconcertingly as the Whitley had done, without even the advantage of fresh air to counteract any resulting nausea. There were too many Woodbines being smoked underneath the laced up canvas for any further hint of ozone to be detectable. But Henry hoped they were still near the sea, wondering if the Bedford was perhaps driving along some twisting road on the edge of a beach, or threading through the cobbled streets of a little fishing port where the sign of the Admiral Benbow creaked in the wind outside a mullion windowed inn.
He had a very active imagination, probably too much to have a satisfied life either as a regular soldier or as a civilian engineer. His father might have been right about his son's acceptance of the King's Shilling.
"You're a damned fool, our Henry. Anybody in this day and age who goes sowing, soldiering or sailing wants his head read. Get yoursen an office job in a nice warm factory and start saving for a decent house of your own. There's enough silly bastards in the world wearing uniforms already."
Which was exactly the same advice as every other survivor of the great war gave to their sons: "Never again, never!"
But how did you tell a kid anything? Most of them had to find the hard way to be convinced. Before the May blitzkreig Henry had thought of war almost purely as an intellectual and physical challenge.
Looking back at the wholesale death and suffering, the crying child between its machine-gunned parents, the wanton destruction of a beautiful country, the useless butchery of helpless soldiers on the sands of Dunkirk, he knew now that it was the result of ultimate stupidity, not reason.
It was perhaps almost possible to excuse Chamberlain and the British people for the betrayal of Munich. Anybody who wasn't insane should fear war. But if the allies had only shown their teeth years before, when Hitler had made his first aggressive move, into the Rhineland! If a real fear of a stalemated war had existed on both sides, not just one, negotiations might have achieved something.
Henry was still deep in thought about the past mistakes which had brought Britain to the very doorstep of hell when the lorry shuddered to a halt. Cab doors clattered open, the lacing on the rear canvas panels was loosened from outside.
"Out you get, gents."
If Rochford had been flat this terrain was straightforwardly bleak. Large irregular meadows of tussocky grass, water shining in the early afternoon sun along the channels which bisected the countryside, with a rime of thick black mud visible on the nearest ones. A pair of curlews mewed at each other as they sideslipped overhead in a strengthening wind.
The only sign of civilisation immediately visible was the third class metalled road the lorries had come along, so narrow that it seemed to vanish like a pantomime backdrop into the clumps of reeds growing in the ditches on each side of it. Only where they were parked did the road suddenly broaden out for a short distance, providing just enough room for the convoy of clumsy Bedfords to make three point turns and retire in biblical order, he that was last becoming first.
Looking around, Henry first saw an old stone windmill, blades removed and the building apparently long deserted. Huddled around the base of it were some slate roofed cottages, perhaps ten or fifteen of them, the nearest about two hundred yards away. Long strands of green moss seemed to be so well established on some of the walls that the sodden ground looked to be digesting them.
Lieutenant Cunliffe-Brown appeared alongside the road`s edge, his face white and pinched.
"I'd be happy to offer some advice, sir, if only I could think of anything useful to say. I`m feeling a bit lost at the moment."
"And the cold too, hey, Eric?"
"Just a smidgeon. I think it's the scenery more than the actual temperature."
"You have a point. Boris Karloff would be at home here. What the hell are we supposed to be doing in this hovel? I'll see if I can get some sense out of that MP Sergeant."
"Shall I fall the men in?"
Henry sucked his teeth thoughtfully as he saw the Military Police NCO marching ponderously in their direction.
"No, start sorting them out into sections, so they know whose face fits where in the tactical set up. Sergeant McCaughan and the corporals can pick and chose who goes where."
The MP saluted with full regimental panache again, the hand travelling the longest way and the shortest way down. After Henry had returned the salute, he was offered a brown OHMS envelope with a seal on all corners, together with a receipt book.
"These are your orders, sir. Could you please sign for them?"
Henry checked the overstamped number on the envelope against the one in the receipt book very carefully before signing. He'd long ago learnt that the most important man in any Army unit was the ORQMS. The Orderly Room Quartermaster Sergeant was the warrant officer responsible for all the paperwork, a man who could help or hinder you at every turn. And wherever they were bound for, it certainly wasn`t beyond the reach of the Army`s strangling bureaucracy.
"Right, Sergeant, I'd appreciate a look at your map before you go -- unless you've had orders to the contrary."
"No sir, I'm sure you're welcome to look. We’re at grid reference 44568783. I was told to debus you here and leave you to proceed on foot.”
Henry took the offered ordnance survey map and found the grid reference. It was close to a peninsula about eight miles wide, south of the river Crouch and due north of the wide mouth of the Thames as it ran into the sea. The peninsula was composed of three islands, separated from the mainland and each other by tributaries of the Crouch flowing from north to south.
The outer island of Foulness was by far the largest of the group, merging into the huge expanse of the Maplin Sands. Nestled against Foulness' south-eastern flank was Potton island, two miles long and a mile wide, and Havengore, a third of the size of Potton.
On the mainland opposite the middle of Potton island a tiny and isolated hamlet was marked. The only thing of any note about it was the conventional map symbol for a windmill. According to the map, this hamlet was called 'Petty Bowling'. The grid reference the sergeant had supplied was half a mile to the west of Petty Bowling, on the only road going into the habitation.
Henry decided it might be better thought of as the only way out of the place. There was nothing shown on the far side of Petty Bowling, no bridge, no ford. Just the cottages, the river, and the apparently deserted island on the other side of the river.
According to the map, should he take it into his head to order his men to about face and march back into civilisation, they faced six twisting miles of the road before seeing the lights of Little Wakering looming up out of the marsh mists. And Little Wakering appeared to be about as interesting a place as Petty Bowling. The local tendency for diminutively suggestive place names could hardly be described as misleading.
The Commandos stood clear of the road as the lorries noisily turned around and roared off towards the distant horizon. A few black faced sheep nearby stared at the vehicles with mild interest before resuming their grazing. A couple of Henry's men made two fingered gestures at the MP's retreating backs, though without the zest they would normally have shown in being rude to the hated redcaps.
Henry stared along the road to the village, which still showed no sign of life. He recited, slowly:
"See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns,
That smote King Philip's fleet."
"Sir?" Cunliffe-Brown responded, clearly puzzled.
"When I was a boy I won a book at school, the verses of Rudyard Kipling. I read it a lot, and still do. And I presume our presence here has something to do with smiting Herr Hitler. Let's see if the orders throw some light on the subject."
Henry opened the envelope and read the single sheet of paper inside. Then he shrugged his shoulders in disbelief and beckoned Sergeant McCaughan over to join them.
"We're to report to the post office in that village over there. That's all it says, before anybody asks any questions. Sergeant, we'll double march to the place to get some fresh air into our lungs. And the first man who asks if we're being posted somewhere is next in line for kitchen duties."
"Yes . . ." The sergeant's eyes suddenly narrowed as he stared up in the air over Henry's shoulder. "What's that, sir?"
Henry turned and looked up.
About a quarter of a mile away at an altitude of around a thousand feet was some kind of an aircraft, heading almost directly towards them. There was nothing to be heard from it and as it got closer the silhouette became recognisable as a Hotspur. Two of them had already arrived at Ringway, since the Hotspur was the first British military transport glider to go into production. They carried a pilot and seven men and were Britain's answer to the German gliders which were rumoured to have captured the supposedly impregnable Belgium fort of Eban-Emael by landing troops on its upperworks.
Yet there was definitely something strange about the way this Hotspur was being flown. The assumed tactical procedure was for a glider to be cast off from its tow plane near to the landing site and then to dive down quickly to dodge enemy fire. This one seemed to be travelling as far as possible for every foot of height lost, keeping to a dead straight line. Nor was there any sign at all of the towing plane -- the Hotspur might as well have appeared out of thin air for all Henry could see. As it got closer he stared at the glider, wondering if he was suffering from double vision.
For a second or two Henry thought he was seeing two gliders wingtip to wingtip in an incredible piece of formation flying. Then he realised the truth, that there were two fuselages side by side, married together by a shared centre section and an extended horizontal tail surface. It was obviously a way of building a large capacity glider as quickly and easily as possible with components already in production.
Together with his men he gaped at the strange aircraft as it passed close by with a faint fluttering noise of disturbed air. Both fuselages were painted dark green and both had cockpit canopies on their nose, one with a head visible inside it, the other canopy apparently painted over for some odd reason.
Henry estimated the twin Hotspur's glide angle at something around fifteen feet across the ground to one foot of height lost. It seemed impossible the pilot could fly such a steady course for so long and still land anywhere near where he wanted to. But if the glider didn't break off quickly it was going to come down dangerously close to the cottages or the river behind them. Henry waited for the Hotspur to nose down into the last piece of flat ground.
It didn't. It flew on in a straight line over the rooftops of the village. One thing was for sure, if it didn't hit the water it was certainly going to land just on the other side of the tributary, on Potten island.
"What do you make of that, sir?" Sergeant McCaughan asked.
Henry shrugged. "God knows. Probably the Air Force playing silly buggers as usual. The stupid prats are likely swimming ashore by now." He raised his voice. "Right turn, double march."
The Commandos, Henry in the lead, began doubling towards the mysteries of Petty Bowling, kit bags bouncing on their shoulders. Even running, there was plenty of breath to spare in the half Troop. One man somewhere in the rear began whistling a tune, to have it quickly picked up and sung by his comrades, a tune from the latest and certainly the greatest Hollywood film musical yet made:
"We're off to see the Wizard,
The wonderful wonderful Wizard of Oz,
We hear he is a Whiz of a Wiz,
If ever a Wiz there was . . ."
CHAPTER TWO
The main street of Petty Bowling hardly seemed big enough to accommodate the half Troop, even when spread out in tactical formation. At the entrance to the village a wooden bench was occupied by a dirty looking woman about thirty years old, wearing a pinafore and a head scarf. She was gently rocking a pram with her left hand, the other holding a pinched dog end from which she dragging out the last few lungfuls of smoke.
On the opposite side of the road next to a wall was a stone block with steps up the side. Its utility might not have been instantly clear to the urban reared soldiers, although shire boys like Henry had often seen them used by upper class ladies of the old school, mounting their horses side saddle before riding to the hunt. Except that at the top of this one was an additional wooden block, six inches thick, apparently intended to give a little extra height to the user. In fact it was about at the right level to let an average sized man stand on it and peer over the top of the wall.
Henry lifted the block, very cautiously, surprised to find how light it was. Nestled inside the hollowed out centre was a mark seven anti-personnel pressure operated mine. Anybody who decided to use the mounting block as a vantage point would keep on going, straight to heaven. The resulting waist high blast of fragments off the top of the solid stone would be devastatingly effective against any troops within thirty or forty feet.
"You're a careful one aren't you, Captain Winfield?"
Henry stared at the grubby baby minder. Her accent sounded completely wrong, even to his tin ear. More like Girton than Gravesend. He walked over to the pram and lifted the top blanket. Inside, held level by clips, was a fine bouncing Thompson sub-machine gun, with a fat tum of a fifty round drum. Her yellow stained fingers had reached in through a hole cut into the back of the pram, to rest lightly on the pistol grip and trigger.
"That's interesting," Henry snapped. "A Tommy gun. My battalion of three hundred parachute trained Commandos has managed to acquire exactly seven of those. They're the only sub-machine guns we've ever seen, except for the odd times the Germans help out our military education by killing us with their Schmeissers. But, by God, at least our housewives aren't lacking in military supplies. That's a great comfort."
The woman smiled -- faintly.
"I'm Patrol Leader Braddock of Home Guard auxiliary unit 202. Our priorities are higher than yours, Captain. Show me the left side of your chest, please."
The Troop watched with surprise and wry amusement as their Officer Commanding unbuttoned his para jacket and khaki flannel shirt and held them open. The woman's hand felt cold as it slipped in underneath the warmth of Henry's shirt and across the large patch of scar tissue underneath his left nipple.
"How old were you when that happened, and what caused it?"
"I was three. I pulled over a pot of boiling water from the hob plate in the fireplace."
Henry didn't think he was telling her something she didn't already know.
"Stupidity," he muttered surly.
"We have to be sure of your identity."
"I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a woman who dresses up as a village housewife when she's never scrubbed a door step or turned a butter churn in her life. I'll give you a tip; German officers and NCO's are experts at picking out genuine workers. They wouldn't even have to look at your hands -- one touch is enough to give you away."
"If I touch one, he won't be in a condition to know the difference -- come on".
This time the tone of her voice had the unmistakable tone of confidence of one of nature's aristocratic whippers-in, of dogs and slow witted peasants. Even pushing the battered old pram, she seemed to exude a kind of overawing presence. As he followed her along the street and past the crumbling cottages, a not inconsiderable amount of Henry's attention was distracted by the elegant dimensions of the hips and buttocks hidden underneath the unbecoming pinafore.
The post office was located next to the 'Horse and Trumpet', a pub with a thatched roof and an alarming inclination to overhang the street. Presumably the result of old age, although it clearly wouldn't need much of an explosion to bring the whole edifice down, thus effectively blocking access to the other half of the hamlet.
Inside the dirt streaked window of the post office was a hanging coil of yellow fly paper carrying a burden of winged corpses left over from the summer, and a scrawled notice saying: "NO CHOCOLATES OR RAZOR BLADES LEFT IN STOCK. BLAME HITLER, NOT THE PROPRIETOR."
Standing in the doorway was the only other visible citizen of Petty Bowling, a small lean faced middle aged man smoking a big pipe. His suit was of ancient tweed, the leather patches on the coat elbows worn to a shiny patina. Whatever its vintage, it probably postdated his black leather shoes, which had the sort of deep shine that only geological layers of spit rubbed polish could achieve.
A large gold wristwatch and the sweet smell of the tobacco in the air helped confirm the initial impression of long held wealth.
"Good evening, Captain. I'm Chief Petty Officer Crampton. Pleased to meet you."
Chief Petty Officer! That was a naval rank equivalent to a sergeant, or thereabouts. Absolute balls! Another piece of bloody nonsense!
Henry opened his mouth to give a blistering retort. Crampton's held a glint of puckish humour. Henry snapped his fingers as something flickered in his mind, a recent memory of a book he'd read.
"Not E.E. Crampton, the writer?"
"The same, at your service."
Crampton looked mildly surprised at being known, although his fame as an author and barrister was widespread. He specialised in short stories which explored the odder intricacies of English law. He also found time to be a regular contributor to Punch, a crusader against the existing divorce and tax laws, the member of parliament for Oxford University and a Freeman of the Brotherhood of the Thames.
Crampton's love of legalistic minutiae was only matched by his love of London’s river and the sprit-sailed Thames barges he sailed at every opportunity. Hence he was indeed a petty officer in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
The only other thing Henry could remember about him was a small but very important item: Crampton's last collection of stories had been prefaced by an introduction written by one of the author's oldest friends, a discredited political hack called Winston Spencer Churchill.
Patrol leader Braddock snorted with amusement. "You've obviously had a good literary education, Captain Winfield."
"Not really. It's just that I never had the sort of schooling which enables me to enjoy mess nights with a clear conscience. While the well bred are throwing food around and breaking the furniture, I go off and read a book. It stops me getting ideas above my station."
The woman stared at Henry as if she had come down to dinner to find the estate's pig man sitting at the head of the high table.
"I think we're straying from the point a little," Crampton said gently. "Captain, behind the inn there is a skittles alley. Inside are sacks of straw and blankets for your men, rations, and a petrol stove. Can they settle in and organise a scratch meal for themselves? I'm afraid all our arrangements are rather extemporised at present."
"Before we worry about anything else, can I remind you that I've got troops without even a pistol to their names? If Hitler attacks this place tonight, whatever it is, we couldn't do a damn thing to help defend it. Or have we been flown here to put up the tents for a garden party?"
"I'm sure Patrol Leader Braddock can fix your men up with whatever they need. She has a particularly well stocked armoury."
Henry called Cunliffe-Brown over and tried to explain the unlikely situation.
"If these people have got weapons then draw what we need as soon as possible, get settled in and organise a guard roster -- officers to take a turn as guard commanders. And for God's sake, see if there's any spare ammunition so we can try to get some zeroing done. At least there's no shortage of space for range work."
Patrol-Leader Braddock seemed upset.
"My unit is responsible for the security of this area and no firing of any kind will be allowed in it."
"Very well," Henry answered grumpily. "Then if you're in charge of security I'd better warn you that some of my men speak German amongst themselves. Tell your guards so they don't get trigger happy."
Crampton blanched: "German? Why do they speak German?"
"Probably because they're ex-German citizens. I've got five of them, all Jewish. Got the makings of the best bloody soldiers you'll ever see."
Crampton and Braddock appeared to be suffering from simultaneous attacks of chronic bowel gas.
"We can't possibly have people like that here," the woman gasped, clearly horrified. "The risks would be intolerable. Whatever possessed you to bring them?"
"Because nobody told me I had to consider any security implications when asking for volunteers," Henry explained patiently. "I was simply given a free hand to pick men I thought would be the best in a fight. Every one of those Jewish soldiers has relatives who've been tortured and murdered by brown shirted thugs. They're like the Polish fighter pilots in the RAF who do the real damage to the Luftwaffe. They don't piss around dog fighting, they get up close, shoot a Jerry in the back, then sod off quick."
Henry nodded towards his troops.
"Incidentally, you see that tall Corporal over there? His name is Cantrell and I have every reason to believe he was, and may still be, a senior officer of the Irish Republican Army."
"Oh, marvellous!" the Patrol Leader snapped. "And whose side are you on?" Henry didn't bother to answer.
Crampton sucked loudly on his pipe, then spoke again. "Captain, would you trust these men to keep their mouths shut under all circumstances."
"No. I don't think any of them would willingly help the Germans. But I wouldn't trust any of those Jews as far as I could throw them in connection with information which might be useful to the Zionist movement.
“As for Cantrell, apart from any Dublin connection he's got, the Irish and the Yanks stick together like turds to a blanket. For a hundred dollars and place of honour in the Saint Patrick's day parade he'd probably spill everything he knows about us to the New York Sanitation Department, let alone Washington."
Cunliffe-Brown blinked, possibly shocked by Henry's bluntness. Crampton turned to him.
"Carry on, please, Lieutenant. The Patrol Leader will give you every assistance. Come with me, Captain."
Henry walked beside him, past a gravel bordered chapel towards the narrow estuary. Small wavelets kicked up by the wind lapped against the piles of a sagging wooden jetty tottering on barnacle encrusted piles. Crampton paused beside it.
"Why did you bring the Irishman, Captain Winfield?"
"He's an expert on guerrilla war. More than that, his expertise was gained on the irregulars’ side of the fence. Despite what the 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' would have you believe, it's not the sort of warfare we know much about."
"Hmm. Well, you'll realise you've landed me with quite a security headache?"
"Bollocks."
Henry was tired, and suddenly cold in the breeze blowing off the dirty looking water.
"We're here to do a job which requires parachute troops. If any of my lot get captured they'll tell the Germans no more than any other men under Gestapo interrogation, which means, eventually, everything. So would the most patriotic Englishman: a red hot poker up your arse tends to loosen your faith, along with everything else. On that score it doesn't matter who you drop into the lion's den."
"Suppose there are survivors? Survivors with important and highly secret information who return to England to tell stories about what they've seen?
"I'm no expert, but counter intelligence is surely only a matter of manpower. With just a few suspects you should be able to watch them all the time, even if it takes a hundred field police dressed in civilian clothes to do the job. You might even get some interesting leads. I don't know about the IRA or the Yanks, but I've got a notion the Soviets are further into us than anybody suspects. I reckon there's one committed communist in every twenty of the twats that come out of a university."
Henry laughed harshly.
"Except maybe those that come out of Russian universities."
"And Oxford and Cambridge, of course. I judge from your conversational tenor that you never graced either of those establishments?"
"You are perfectly correct in that assumption. As for the political purity of the public schoolboys' post puberty pleasure palaces, I hope you're equally correct."
There was a pause while Crampton took out his pipe and looked at as if it had just materialised in his mouth.
"Captain, when you were granted a commission after finishing your time at the Army's Apprentice School, you went through the same training as all regular Army engineers do. You read the mechanical science tripos at Cambridge -- Christ's College, in your case. Because sapper undergraduates only get two years study instead of the normal three years it's very unusual for Royal Engineer students to gain a three part honours degree. There was only one officer in your year who achieved such a distinction. We both know who that officer was, don't we? So why are you lying to me?"
Henry shrugged.
"Even the War Office can't spend forever re-organising itself from the chaos of Dunkirk. When they finally realise they've let the Commandos take a trained engineer officer I'll be posted back to the RE's. I don't want that, I want to help run the war. The only chance we have against the Germans' massive military superiority is fight them like Apaches, with quick raids against key targets. The bastards not only have a lot more men than us, their training and equipment is far better."
"And you think you have a talent for such warfare?"
"Well, there's clearly no other bugger in the British Army who knows what he's doing."
Crampton fell silent while he pondered on this latest example of Winfield tact. Henry took the opportunity to examine the scene. On the other side of the narrow river were the reeds marking the edge of Potton island. Moored up amongst them was a wooden vessel about seventy foot long with a stumpy mast. It was no surprise to Henry to recognise her as a Thames barge.
"The last of the breed," Crampton said lovingly, following his eyes.
"The 'Lady of the Lea,' only nine years old and almost certainly the last wooden spritsail barge ever to be built. We're using her as a floating barracks, store room and workshop while we play our little games in this lonely spot. Do you see the red trim just visible underneath all that horrible green paint? She used to earn her living carrying explosives -- so she has scuttles fore and aft which allow her to be sunk very quickly if necessary. If she caught fire, for example.”
Henry nodded, not very interested.
"Talking of explosive ladies, who is that lunatic woman with the panzer pram?"
"Mrs Braddock is a member of Home Guard Auxiliary Unit 202. Although described as Home Guard units the auxiliaries are in fact responsible for organising and arming the underground cells of the British resistance movement. They have hideouts all over the country, with weapons and supplies laid up against the day the Germans invade."
"It's pointless having a resistance movement in a country this small unless it contributes to the main battle while it's actually being fought," Henry explained, trying to keep his patience. "Once the Germans have won that, everything else is irrelevant. A group of guerrillas sitting in the marshes won't make any difference at all to the final conquest of Britain."
"You're quite right. The reason the auxiliaries are here is because we need to temporarily guard this area without drawing attention to it. Those damned high flying Junkers 86's range all over southern England with their cameras. If we'd surrounded the place with regular troops and tanks we might as well have sent Luftwaffe intelligence a map with a ring drawn around Petty Bowling."
"Brilliant tactics -- except it would be easier all round if you put your secret establishment on the west coast of Scotland, well away from all the bombers or reconnaissance planes, and then surrounded it with troops."
Crampton fiddled with his pipe and a small horn-handled knife, scraping carbon out of the bowl.
"Your geographical argument is sound enough. The snag is that I'm administrating a most secret research section under the direct control of the Prime Minister. What we're developing are devices with revolutionary implications. Which means that Winston wants us as close to London as possible, so he can keep us right under his thumb. He might have to leave the Middle East to Wavell, he might not be able to lead the Home Fleet out of Scapa Flow on the bridge of the leading battleship, but, by God, he makes sure we're not going to be under anybody's control but his."
Henry tried to come to terms with what Crampton was saying. This was a man who spoke with trained legal precision, not some witless bullshitter. This was something big, something important, and Captain Henry Winfield was miraculously close enough to find out about it.
"Does that odd twin fuselaged Hotspur we saw a few minutes ago have anything to do with what you're talking about?"
"Yes, it certainly does. So do you, Captain. In fact you're the reason for a lot of the things that are happening here. I'll take you over and show you."
Crampton carefully knocked the ash out of his pipe and dropped the briar into his jacket pocket. Then he bent down to undo the rope holding a small rowing boat to the jetty. Standing inside the small boat, he held it against one of the piles while the soldier clambered into it.
Once seated in the stern Henry watched Crampton use the oars with casual grace to pull towards the barge. But all his attention was focused on Crampton's last enigmatic remark.
"You don't mean that suggestion I put in about snatching gliders off the ground, do you?"
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