“And only then did the color of the smoke register on me. Not black or grey or white. It was a faint yellow-green.”
Cohausz realized it also. He yelled, “Get us out of here, Franz.”
Stenzel does not remember making any firm conclusions about the haze passing before him like veils, but he spun the Stuka around and headed for the end of the runway. With a hand, he pasted his mask against his face. He glanced west. He saw no fires, only the ominous haze. Bodies of the fire-crew were scattered across the pasture. He threw forward the throttle.
A moment later they were again airborne. Ground support required arming twice for every fueling. His last touchdown had been for bombs and shells. They would soon be low on fuel. For thirty minutes they searched behind friendly lines for a landing zone free from the green smoke. They could not find one.
For the second time in a five days, Oberleutnant Stenzel put a Stuka down in the sea. He and Cohausz were rescued by a hospital ship an hour later, but not before Stenzel lost his Scapa Flow medal as he scrambled out of the cockpit and jumped into the channel.
All Wolfgang Kleber knew about England he had read in translated Sherlock Holmes stories. The land was a place of bog and murk and unstable people. The hand of God had helped Kleber up the beach, but now, deep within a Sussex forest, God had disappeared, leaving him with the exhausted survivors of his platoon.
Because trucks could not penetrate the woods, the soldiers were acting as mules. Wurmbach was laden with a tripod. Detmers was carrying the mortar and Busse its base. Busse stumbled over an exposed root, almost sinking to the undergrowth. Luth was burdened with ammunition boxes. Bringing up the rear, all Kleber carried was his pack, respirator case, rations, and rifle.
Kleber had yet to see a bog or any murk, but the woods were eerie enough, with the trees rustling in the wind and the muffled sounds of explosions coming from all directions. He hoped the platoon leader knew where they were; unable to see more than ten meters ahead, Kleber had no idea. When the soldiers in front of him disappeared in the trees, Kleber increased his pace. They were descending a wooded ravine.
The English woods at last fulfilled Kleber’s Sherlock Holmes–fired expectations when a turbid haze reached for them from between the trees, following the contour of the land, descending into the ravine.
“It came at us in long cords, winding around tree trunks as it poured into the small valley.”
Clutching his face, Luth fell, buried beneath his ammunition cases. Detmers screamed, “Gas! Gas! Get out—” His words were choked off as he sank to the ground.
“I thought God was finished with me, but I was wrong,” Kleber told me after the war. “Burdened with equipment, my friends were thirty seconds slower than I in opening their gas mask cases. And they were deeper in the ravine, where the clouds were thick. They began spitting and gagging, and that made them fumble with their equipment. I had mine on, tight over my face, before any of them.”
Detmers, Buse, Wurmbach, and the others in the platoon died of suffocation within minutes. Wolfgang Kleber sat in the woods alone for two days.
“I almost went mad with thirst, because I was afraid to remove my mask.”
He did not know the phosgene persisted in the forest less than a quarter of an hour.
Lieutenant Del Mason did, but hoped not to have to test the knowledge. Mason was the practical joker with the flour near Royal Tunbridge Wells. He commanded a battery of 4.2-inch mortars. His CWS platoon had been held in reserve, always retreating, but at that hour had been rushed to the line. Mason had received the next order with disbelief, and in a breach of decorum demanded confirmation from Lieutenant Colonel Rhone, rather than asking Company C’s captain. Rhone radioed “Obey your orders,” so the lieutenant broke open the canister cases.
Mason admits his command of the battery was a fumbling, myopic affair. “It’s tough to see out of a gas mask, with the glass misting over. And I had on rubberized boots and gloves, and a cape over everything. It was stifling and awkward. It felt like I was wading in a stream. Everything slowed down. And I was shaking with what I was about to do.”
Mason tested the wind, then checked that the battery crew was buttoned up in protective gear. He could hear the roar of battle beyond the ridge, perhaps four hundred yards away. He gave the order. His crew, looking like beached seals in their gas cloaks, let the phosgene shells fall down the mortar throats. The mortars yelped. Working like machines, his crew lifted shells and let them plunge, lift and drop, lift and drop.
“Then, maybe four minutes later, the unseen battle over the rise quieted, as if someone had placed a muffling blanket over the area. I felt sorry for the bastards, really.”
Sergeant Gottfried Pfaffinger yelled into the turret voice tube, “Left forty, Erich, then steady.”
Yet his Panzerkampfwagen trundled straight ahead, plowing over an apple tree, then another. Pfaffinger thought he had seen a target just west of the orchard, glimpsed between curtains of smoke.
“Erich, left forty,” the sergeant shouted over the wail of the engine, “and be quick about it.”
The tank rumbled straight ahead, deeper into the orchard. Pfaffinger wiped the vision block. The apple trees were old and gnarled, with their branches propped with poles.
“And the fog, of course, the fog, rolling between the trees.”
Pfaffinger was from Freiburg and had a Swabian accent, which to other Germans sounds lisping. “I remember thinking England has fog too, like we do.”
Pfaffinger told his loader to investigate. The loader disappeared into the belly of the tank and never returned.
“Then I looked below,” the sergeant said during the interview. “There was a green, cotton haze in the driver’s compartment. I squinted at it. My hull gunner was slumped over the radio, and Erich Ruhland was being held up only by his steering levers. His gas mask container was opened, but he hadn’t had time to get it out. He might have yelled, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of the engine. My loader was there also, fallen to the deck. The poison had entered through the vent and had settled below and didn’t rise.”
The tank commander frantically climbed back into the turret and threw a mask at the gunner. They wrestled them on, then abandoned the tank.
Pfaffinger and the gunner ran through the orchard, searching for a way out of the deadly cloud. “Through the haze, I saw another panzer that had butted against a high stone fence. The tank was tilted almost upright on the stones, its treads whirling uselessly away, like a wind-up toy. Its entire crew must have been surprised by the gas.”
Pfaffinger furled his brows a moment, then told me, “You know, that’s my most frightening memory of the war, the utter hopelessness of that panzer, grinding futilely away at an English garden wall.”
Flugmelder (Aircraft-Spotter) Rolf Ruckteschell had been at sea for six years. On the fourth day of the invasion, he was aboard the naval supply vessel Dithmarschen, lying three miles off Brighton. The ship was transporting rations and ordnance. Channel weather had deteriorated over the prior twenty-four hours. Dithmarschen was stalled off the coast because the surf had severely slowed the resupply operation.
“I remember having to lean into the port rail against the wind.” Ruckteschell told me after the war. “I had gained some knowledge about weather, gazing at the sky all day looking for British airplanes, which was the easiest duty in the Kriegsmarine, because the Royal Air Force was about out of planes by then. But I had never seen anything like that fog, not on the channel or the North Sea, not anywhere.”