“There was a pause in the Tommy fire,” he recalled. “They yelled something at us. I stood up slowly, still waving the rifle. The others put their hands in the air. Just then, Lieutenant Pruess ran toward us, cursing and waving his Luger, calling us cowards.”
The Wehrmacht had been ordered never to surrender. Some officers, fresh to the front, were still burning with the spirit of the Fatherland. “Pruess yelled that we were traitors and wagged his pistol in front of us. I said, ‘Lieutenant, haven’t you got eyes? We are one minute away from being annihilated.’ He turned red and sputtered something, then brought up the pistol. I believe he was going to shoot me.”
He did not have the chance. “I smashed the butt of my rifle alongside his head, and he collapsed. We left him there, the fool. I held up the white flag again, and my friends and I walked toward the British line.”
Bernhard Schenk was pulled onto a minesweeper, then in turn helped others behind him. When the boat was filled rail to rail with soldiers, the pilot threw the throttle forward, and it churned away from the beach. “I thought I had escaped. My joy at leaving that hellish island made me forget the shells overhead and the soldiers we were leaving behind. I wanted to dance. I was free. Then a heavy machine gun found our boat.”
A steady stream of bullets turned the pilothouse into chaff. The wheel station and the pilot disintegrated. “The mate rushed to the wheel, but there was nothing remaining to control the ship. The boat was out of control.”
It veered right in a long circle, toward France and freedom, then toward the open channel to the west, and finally, agonizingly, back to the English shore. It powered over Wehrmacht soldiers, living and dead, then rammed the shore.
“I jumped into the surf, and swam away from the beach. I was picked up by a motor torpedo boat a few minutes later.”
Lieutenant George Quedenfeldt’s platoon had survived almost intact the entire invasion. Thirty-five of them entered the channel water toward a Kriegsmarine supply ship fifty yards offshore. The ship’s mate had signaled that it could get no closer to the shore. The platoon began swimming, stronger swimmers helping the weaker.
Quedenfeldt told me, “We were halfway there when a British machine gunner opened up. The water boiled with bullets, and my soldiers began bursting apart. The water seethed with bullets and blood. A bullet ripped off my left arm just below the elbow, and a corporal pulled me along. Only twelve of us made the boat. The screams still wake me at night.”
Rudolf Liebe won a bronze medal in the hundred-meter freestyle at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Artillery and rifle fire had chased away most of the Kriegsmarine ships and barges. Liebe had been pinned to the ground in a dune thicket near Dymchurch. He told me after the war, “The air overhead sang with British shells. I looked up, and I swear the sky was rippling with all the projectiles. If I stood, I would have been mowed over by random shots. But I saw the last ship pull away from the shore, leaving me. I had to take a chance to reach it.”
Liebe sprang upright and sprinted toward the water, stumbling over bodies and waving an arm to alert that last ship. “They either did not see me or decided it was too risky to bother with me. I waded into the surf, then dove forward. My arms glanced off a body. I started stroking to sea, but every few seconds I’d bounce into another body. All around, the water was squirting with shells. I was awash in bodies, more dead German soldiers than waves, it seemed. Germany’s best, a sea of them, rising and falling with the swells.” Liebe swam for six hours until he was pulled from the water by the crew of the Erwin Wassner, a Kriegsmarine submarine depot ship.
Liebe believes he may have been the last German soldier to leave British soil.
25
I was the last person to see Wilson Clay alive. Two days after being removed from his position as the American Expeditionary Force’s commander, he and I were in his Grosvenor Square flat packing his belongings for his journey home. Our gas masks were nearby. The Luftwaffe had dropped several phosgene and mustard gas bombs on the city, but Londoners were well prepared, and there were few casualties. Rain was falling against the window.
Clay was packing his military treatises into a sea trunk when he looked up and said, “Jack, I haven’t had much to do these past few days, as you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So I read your journal.”
I was aghast. “Sir?”
“Even though it makes me appear a pompous know-it-all, it’s fairly accurate.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But how about doing your old commander a favor by omitting reference to my so-called Mystery Flight with Lady Anne. The public can do without that.”
“I will, sir.” There was a time when my word was my bond. An accurate account is of more consequence.
Wee Wee was sleeping at the general’s feet. Before she died, Lady Anne had sent the pekinese in her Bentley to the general’s London flat, maybe as punishment. They had taken a liking to each other.
He continued, “How many times have I busted you in rank this past month?”
I laughed. “Twelve or thirteen.”
“What a nightmarish, topsy-turvy army career you’ve had.”
I laughed again.
“Well, your roller coaster ride isn’t over yet.” He fished a small envelope out of his pocket. He opened it. “Here are your silver birds. In what may be my last official act in England, I’ve promoted you to full colonel.”
I was nonplussed, then thrilled. He brusquely removed my silver oak leaves and replaced them with the eagles.
I said, “You can bet I’ll push through the paper on this right away.”
“I already have, Jack.” He patted my shoulder and said, “And just remember, if Napoleon had been born two years earlier, he would have been Italian, since Corsica was ceded to France just before his birth.”
I nodded. To this day, I have no idea what he meant by that.
He returned to his packing. He was not a collector of mementoes, and he had little more than the few articles he brought to England. He picked up the copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations he used for writing speeches and tossed it to me. “I’m giving this to you. You need it more than I do, I’ll guarantee you that.”
He carefully wrapped his framed family photographs. He stared for a long while at one of his wife. Then he abruptly said, “Jack, invading England was the German’s first mistake. It won’t be his last. We’ll see the end of him, and it won’t be long.”
As in so many other things, General Clay was correct here, too. As all world citizens know, with less than a year to recover from the debacle of the English invasion, Hitler next swept into Russia. From that moment, his days could be counted. Bloodied and softened on the endless Russian steppes, the Germans could not mount an effective defense to the Allied D-Day invasion, launched from the very English shores the Wehrmacht had briefly held. I wish Clay could have celebrated the war’s triumphant end with the rest of us.
Several questions dogged me while I compiled this narrative. The first was whether the general’s relationship with Lady Anne Percival colored his battle judgment. Her tragic end is clear evidence that it did not. He knew she would be at her country home, and he knew the poison cloud would sweep over it. If he were capable of causing her death, then it is inconceivable anything she did in her life would have influenced his conduct of the battle.