At last the barge joined its column. Ernst clung to the side and stared out. It was a remarkable sight in the fading light of the September day to be riding across a sea carpeted by barges and men, as far as the eye could see. Ernst's barge was one of two hundred in this column alone, towed by tugs and steamers, with an escort of heavier ships bearing supplies. While the barges carried the assault troops, the spearhead troopers, the Advanced Detachments who would be the first to land – the Heaven-Sent Command, the men called them – crossed in mine-sweepers. They would land in speedboats and sturmboats, fast, small, unarmoured boats made for river crossings. For them it would be a dawn landing, amphibious, two thousand men for each beach.
Fleet D as a whole would form a column more than a mile wide and twelve miles long – so long that the lead barges would be halfway across the Channel before the last boats left harbour. But the barges could travel at no more than three or four knots, and all the columns had to follow crooked courses, to avoid sandbanks and mines. The crossing would take long hours.
And even as the column pulled away from the harbour, the attacks began. Over Ernst's head Messerschmitt 109s were taking on Hurricanes, Spitfires and light bombers. Josef had said Goering had been trying to disrupt the RAF's command systems as much as ruin its planes and airfields; perhaps a weakened RAF was focusing its efforts where it thought it could do the most harm. For Ernst that wasn't a comforting thought.
They were not long out of the harbour when a Spitfire got through and flew low over Ernst's column, machine guns blazing. Ernst and the others cowered low in the barge, and the bullets clanged harmlessly from the hull's steel plates. The plane swept over, and when it pulled up Ernst saw how the metal skin over its wings wrinkled with the stress.
But it wasn't the RAF that Ernst feared most, as the evening darkened into night, but the Royal Navy.
For days before the barges sailed, the minelayers, protected by destroyers and E-boats, had been setting up a fortified corridor across the Channel, walled by minefields each a half-mile wide, and even now the U-boats, destroyers and torpedo boats, reinforced by ships taken from the French in Algeria, must be fighting desperately to repel the overwhelming might of the British ships. Sometimes Ernst thought he heard the booming voices of that other battle, far away, a battle on the sea just as one raged in the air. But Ernst's barge sailed on undisturbed.
The night folded over them, imperceptibly slowly, until it became starless and moonless under a lid of cloud. Some of the men were ill, though the sea was mild. They got absolutely no sympathy from the binnenschiffer, the only true sailor on the boat, a leather-faced forty-year-old river worker from Cologne. Occasionally you would hear bits of banter drifting across the ocean between the barges of the tow group, and ripples of laughter coming out of the dark. Some men huddled down and tried to sleep. Coming from one boat Ernst heard murmured prayers. The Nazis looked down on religion, but he doubted anybody was going to put a stop to that tonight. So you crossed the ocean in the dark, in bubbles of companionship, nothing but you and your buddies out on the sea. Ernst wondered if it had been this way for William's Normans, and Claudius's superstitious Romans a thousand years earlier still. But those ancient warriors had not had to endure this passage through a corridor of warfare, in the air and at sea.
Later in the night units of Fleet E, the westernmost, linked up with D as had been planned. And rumours began to spread among the men on the barges about what was really going on.
At the fringes of the invasion, the Royal Navy was getting through the flimsy defences of the Kriegsmarine. Though for fear of aerial attack the English had committed no capital ships, no cruisers or battleships, their light fighting ships had sailed from Harwich, Dover, Portsmouth and Portland. Their small motor torpedo boats, like the Germans' E-BOATS, had been the first to fall on Fleet E, and later the English destroyers had got among them. The German escort ships, mostly civilian ships with machine guns and a few pieces of light artillery, could do little about it. The destroyers' guns, four- or six-inchers, made short work of the steamers, and the men in the barges had to listen to boom and crash, boom and crash, as the big guns were fired, and the shells found their targets. Within minutes many of the steamers were holed, sinking, burning.
And then these wolves of the sea, travelling at thirty or forty knots, tore through the columns of wallowing river barges, crushing them, drowning them in their wash, or simply dragging them by their towing cables until they were capsized. Any surviving barges were raked with gunfire, shells and flame throwers until the sea was littered with burning wreckage. Men in the water were being wiped out systematically. The destroyers even sent up flares to light up the night, the better to prosecute their slaughter. There was no rescue tonight, no honour of the sea, no pity.
But while Fleet E died, D was spared. Perhaps it was true in the east too, the men muttered, Fleet B soaking it up to spare Fleet C. Perhaps, the men whispered, Fleets D and C would make it to their landing sites, around Eastbourne and Rye. At Brighton and Dover, the destinations for E and B, there would only be wreckage and bodies washed ashore on a tide frothing with blood.
In that case, Ernst thought, listening, appalled, those who landed alive must make these huge sacrifices count.
In the dark, with the water lapping and the tug engines labouring, surrounded by the boom and crash of the fighting planes and ships, Ernst lost his sense of time. He was startled to realise that dawn light was seeping into the sky.
And there ahead of him, a grey line sandwiched between a steel sky and an iron sea, was land. He saw prickles of light. It was 0615, already half an hour after dawn, and, after a softening-up bombardment, the lead echelons must already have landed, were already fighting and dying.
A drizzle started. The sky was murky, charcoal grey. It was 21 September, S-Day. This was England. He thought he could hear church bells ringing distantly, a beautiful nostalgic noise. Hitler had had all the bells in Germany melted down for munitions.
XV
The sound of the tug engines died, and the barge drifted. At last, thought Ernst. It was two hours since his first glimpse of land. Since then they had run parallel to the shore, before finally turning and driving in.
The sound of the long battle raging along the coast was already huge. The men lay as low as they could, sheltered by the barge's reinforced walls. But Ernst risked raising his head and looked out over the barge's fortified flank, hoping for his first glimpse of Pevensey, his landing site.
There was a murky light now, and the coast was obscured by haze and drifting smoke. But it was chaos on land and on sea. Assault-troop barges like his own were sliding in towards the shore, jostling for a place to land. On the beach more craft were stranded by a tide that was already receding, the rubber boats and speedboats of the advanced detachments. The beach itself looked littered, as if by bits of seaweed, and it was striped by peculiar black bands that ran parallel to the shore. The invaders were under fire. Ernst saw a tower to his right, and the larger guns of a coastal battery were coughing somewhere to his left; shells hissed as they flew, and landed with crashing explosions, or threw water spouts spectacularly into the air. From the area directly ahead Ernst heard the bark of automatic arms fire, and he saw the bulky silhouettes of pillboxes, fire sparking from the slits drawn in their forbidding faces.
All this was screened by smoke and a spray of water thrown up by the shells. But it was clear that the coastal defences were not subdued by the advance troops, as they had been promised. The very pile-up of boats struggling to find a place to land proved that something had gone wrong, that the beach wasn't clearing as fast as it should.