Brighton was still held by Allied troops, as the Wehrmacht was avoiding cities as too costly to take. German units had pivoted inland behind the city.
Ruckteschell said, “The fog began at the eastern edge of the city, and the blustering wind quickly carried it east along the shore and over the breaking waves. The haze drained the coastline of perspective.”
The spotter raised his binoculars. “Then I saw the artillery burst over the beach, with grass-green gas erupting from the shells while they were still airborne. I could see some of our barges and landing craft vanish into the cloud, too late to reverse engines and pull back, their crews already dead.”
Ruckteschell added, “I hadn’t been ill since my first days onboard a ship, years before. But I was sick then, sick for my fellow sailors disappearing into that lethal mist.”
When General Stedman read the first draft of this manuscript, he brought to my attention a gap in the narrative. I had yet to touch upon the German invasion command. The reason was pardonable, I thought: I had not yet found any survivors. After my conversation with Stedman, I spent another two weeks searching Germany for a witness to the Wehmracht forward command. I found one, Corporal Joachim Zenker, who had been a sentry posted to von Rundstedt’s Army Group A headquarters. Under von Rundstedt was the entire Wehrmacht invasion force except those units hitting the British VI Corps at Lyme Bay west of the Americans.
Army Group A’s headquarters that day were at a country house near Wisborough Green, southwest of Horsham. The house was in an elevated position near the hamlet and in the middle of a five-acre garden. The house was thirteen miles east of the furthest German advances. It was also fourteen miles, one hundred yards, east of the U.S. Army’s 13th Field Artillery Brigade.
Corporal Zenker guarded the home’s front gate, once wrought iron, he guessed, but removed and contributed to the British war effort. He walked idly back and forth between two brick gate posts, a Schmeisser submachine gun hanging from a leather strap over his shoulder. Zenker had never seen anything like this country house, with its paddock, grass tennis court, chapel, and five secondary cottages. The corporal had not been inside the main house. “To be under a roof was not my position in the Fatherland’s war effort,” he told me after the war. “I stood in the wind, just looking at the place, knowing that inside huge decisions were being made by von Rundstedt, who nodded at me once, I think.”
Corporal Zenker’s view of the house was along a hundred-yard driveway, which was bordered by azaleas and lady’s mantle in front of purple-leaf maples. “I could see right down the drive to the front entrance, where more sentries were posted among scout cars and a few black sedans.”
The artillery shell hit midway down the drive. “An enormous explosion. I jumped a meter off the ground. I expected to see a crater the size of a tank in the ground when the smoke cleared. Well, it cleared, and there was nothing to see.”
Zenker debated leaving his post at the gate to investigate. Moments later, the guards at the door were on the ground, “scratching at the pebbles, as if digging a foxhole with their hands, and kicking. I decided I’d better have a look.”
The corporal ran toward the house, passing the blackened ground where the shell had landed. When he saw the maples were still standing, instead of blown over by the blast, he knew the nature of the shell, though not the nature of the chemical, tabun, the nerve gas that cannot be smelled or seen. He removed his gas mask from its canister on his service belt. “I’d only put it on three or four times in drills. Never comfortable with it. I wasn’t even sure it worked.”
He passed three sentries, now dead from suffocation induced by the gas. He peered into one of the sedans. Its driver was spilled sideways on the seat, still twitching and jerking. Zenker pushed open the house’s door. “The heaviest door I’ve ever opened, I thought then. But I discovered that a major had fallen against the inside of it, his legs splayed out in front of him. I pressed my mask to my face. Bodies were everywhere, in front of maps pinned to the wall, draped over desks, one officer hanging out a window. Several were still having convulsions. Vomit was everywhere. An aide had opened a case of gas masks, but hadn’t had time to issue them or get one on himself. Five or six of the masks were at his feet.”
Von Rundstedt was wearing his modified piped field service tunic. Instead of collar patches normally worn by a field marshall, he favored the parade uniform collar patches worn by infantry officers below the rank of general. In his hand was his interim-stab, the everyday version of his field marshal’s baton.
“And he was dead, all that Prussian military grandeur, very dead,” Zenker recalled. “Trying to breathe, the field marshall had clawed a hole in his neck with his fingers. Two of his fingers were inside his neck. I wondered who would lead us now.”
The 13th Field Artillery Brigade was the only unit capable of delivering the shell that far behind enemy lines, so the origination of the killing shell was not hard for me to figure out. The gas shell had been delivered courtesy of a 4.5 Gun M1, which weighed six tons and fired a fifty-five-pound shell. The gun was near the tiny village of Bramshot, and von Rundstedt’s headquarters was about two hundred yards inside the gun’s maximum range.
I spoke with one of the brigade’s battery officers, Lieutenant Dennis Pritchard. He said, “CWS companies were shelling them close in, and we had a number of big gas shells, so we decided to hit their reserves. I figured, why let our heavy shells go to waste? Why not give some anonymous German assholes some time-on-target? I didn’t have target coordinates. We just raised the barrel and let them have it.”
In other words, the shell that devastated the Wehrmacht command was a lucky shot. Pritchard was unaware of his gun’s accomplishment until I told him after the war. He was then a shoe store manager in Moline, Illinois. He replied, “The hell you say.” And that’s all he said. “The hell you say.”
I witnessed General Clay give the order to use phosgene and the nerve gas. The suggestion by the British historian Forbes Wooden that I have denied giving interviews about the event to boost sales of this narrative is specious and undeserving of comment except to say that I was determined to have my recollection appear in its entirety, not edited to support one hardened viewpoint or another.
The most controversial question of the invasion, and perhaps of the war, was with whom did Clay consult before deciding to use the gas? I do not know. I have a theory, which I will press on you later in this chronicle, when all my evidence has been set forth.
The first I knew of his decision was the instant he gave the order. AEFHQ’s forward headquarters that hour, 4:45 P.M., Sunday, May 31, 1942, was near Woking, twenty miles southwest of the City. The western edge of General Clay’s command was at Woking. Beyond that lay the British V Corps. If the Wehrmacht had pushed west beyond that town, tactical decisions regarding defending against the German encirclement would have passed to a British corps commander.
So Clay ordered the chemical shelling just before such a decision would have been taken out of his hands. Many post-invasion critics say it was never in his hands.
Headquarters near Woking was in the barn of a destroyed country home. Present were I Corps’s Alex Hargrave, the 2nd Infantry’s Burt Jones, G2 David Lorenzo, and others.
When signalman Captain Branch called out, “General Clay, General Alexander on the wireless,” Clay growled, “What does he want?”
Branch’s head came up from his equipment. “I’m a lowly captain, sir. It’s not really my place to ask the C in C of Joint Army Operations what he wants.”
“Ask him anyway. He’ll expect no less from an American.”