Chapter 21

Germany. October 1942.

Dam Busting.

During 1942, work was progressing on a theory proposed by an Englishman, Barnes Wallis, where a bouncing bomb would be dropped on dams in the industrial centre of Germany, the Ruhr valley. The German high command were aware that the dams were a vulnerable target and had stretched anti-torpedo nets across the lake side of the dams to prevent torpedoes being dropped and ramming the dam walls.

Wallis proposed that a bouncing bomb would skip over these nets, hit the dam wall and then sink. Only minor damage would occur if it exploded as it hit the wall so the bomb was designed to hit the wall and then sink. Equipped with a pressure fuse, the bomb would explode when it reached a water depth of forty or fifty feet. It relied on water, which is not compressible, to provide the maximum force of the bomb against the concrete dam wall.

The bomb that Wallis devised was called the 'earthquake bomb' because of its explosive power.

Reinhardt Heydrich

Reinhardt Heydrich nicknamed the 'Hangman' was the Nazi Reichsprotector of Bohemia/Moravia. In 1942 he was shot, killed by unknown resistance fighters.

Dieppe

In the spring of 1942, the Allies started planning an assault on the French port of Dieppe. Initially codenamed Rutter this was later changed to Jubilee. This attack was designed to draw Germany into fortifying its western front. The raid took place on August 19, and of the 6100 troops, 5000 were Canadians. Only about 2,000 troops returned to England and many of these troops were wounded.

"We're ready," Manfred said to Chris, "let's start out for the drop site."

Chris stood up, stretched and grumbled to no one in particular, "I'm getting too old for this fast life. We're going to have a late one tonight."

"Were you responsible for setting the time for this drop?" Chris asked Manfred.

"Not me Chris, but anyway one thirty isn't late; it's early morning," Manfred said; he was smiling as he looked around and saw Otto and the three other men getting to their feet. Gerry was ready to go; he had his backpack on and his rifle slung on its webbing belt over his shoulder.

"Come on Gerry, we'll go on ahead of these tired old men."

Otto quickly grabbed his rifle and his backpack and ran to Manfred.

"Here, hold my rifle you cheeky bastard," Otto said as he thrust his rifle at Manfred.

Manfred held his rifle as Otto slipped the straps of his backpack over his shoulders and then he passed his rifle back to him.

Otto looked more unkempt than he usually did, his beard had grown wildly and his hair had grown down over his ears.

"You know Otto, I don't think that you've been getting any lately!"

"What do you mean?" Otto asked indignantly.

"Well the way you look right now, only a sixty year old whore in the slums of Berlin would take you on. Even then she'd charge you double."

Otto was six centimetres taller than Manfred; he stayed his forward progress by holding his arm. In the waning moonlight, he placed his hands either side of Manfred's face and pulling his head forward, he kissed Manfred on the forehead.

"If you keep saying such nice things to me like that I could fall for you!" Otto said and burst into noisy laughter.

Gerry was walking on the other side of Manfred and after watching Otto's performance he laughed loudly.

Manfred could not help chuckling, and then he said, "Still running a wife and a girlfriend."

"Yah! I have to be careful though, my wife is getting suspicious," Otto said.

"Why is that?"

"Chris stuffed a pair of women's panties in to my backpack and when I went home last week my wife found them," Otto burst out laughing again.

Manfred turned around to Chris who had caught up and was listening, "That's a low trick Chris."

"I swear I didn't do that. I think his girlfriend was responsible; she's trying to wreck his marriage. Otto doesn't believe me; but I didn't do it."

The seven men, in high spirits, continued trekking through the forest to the drop site five kilometres away, they recovered the flares from the hiding place where they had hidden them after the last drop. One of the men recharged them with kerosene and placed them within easy reach of where they sat on the ground patiently waiting. They were an hour early but each man knew that if the drop was successful they would be mobile again and they wanted more that anything to be active again.

They heard the drone of aircraft high up and many kilometres away to the south of their position. They guessed that there were many aircraft because of the time they took to pass overhead.

"I hope that doesn't interfere with the drop tonight," Chris said.

"If it does they'll try again tomorrow night," Manfred said.

Manfred opened the leather cap over his watch and the luminous hands showed that they had twenty minutes before their plane arrived.

"Time to get the flares in place, I want you men to take a flare to each corner of the drop zone, only light them when you see me light the central flare at the far end here. Let's go."

Manfred picked up the fifth flare and started walking to the centre of the end perimeter of the drop zone; Gerry and Chris walked away to the edge of the forest and readied their rifles.

Manfred trained his eyes on the hill to the south waiting for the signal from the pilot of the aircraft doing the drop. He heard the plane before it appeared flying low over the hill, a half second of light burst from it's landing lights and he leaned down and set the flare on fire. He knew that the others must have seen the plane as flares on each corner were lit immediately after his. He walked quickly away wrenching his rifle from over his shoulder and as the plane flew lower, he started running to join Chris and Gerry. The other men disappeared into the trees nearest them where they were to wait to extinguish the flares after the drop.

They watched as the plane seemed to barely clear the trees, then they heard the roar of the engines increase as the pilot used full flaps and full power of the engines to shed the plane's air speed. From the belly of the plane, eight or nine black objects tumbled out. They were spaced seconds apart to ensure that they landed well away from each other.

The noise was deafening as the plane passed over them, the lower sounds of the engines vibrating their chests. The pilot wound the flaps up and the plane seemed to spring higher into the air as it rapidly gained air speed and climbed rapidly away, it banked to the south and disappeared into the dark sky.

The men moved back to quickly extinguish the flares, when they regrouped, they moved deeper into the protection of the forest and hid the flares.

They waited for half an hour; there were no foreign sounds that might signal that the drop had been discovered. They walked to the edge of the drop zone and Gerry and Otto stood with their rifles at the ready as the rest of the men hurried to find the black painted gasoline containers. The first container was a forty-four gallon round drum that had impacted the ground, edge on, and gasoline was flowing from the ruptured end.

Manfred and Chris manhandled it upright but they could hear the contents sloshing around inside telling them that most of the gasoline had leaked away. One of the men called from nearby and they hurried to him. It was a square flat aluminium tank with rounded corners but it had burst on impact and the gasoline fumes told them that it was empty.

They hurried over to the next man; he was standing near an object that surprised them, it looked like the inner tube from a very large tire. Chris sniffed around but there were no fumes. Manfred pushed on it and it moved like a jelly.

'They've done it, ' Manfred thought, 'but this is going to be a bitch to move.' He moved around it and found a small yellow patch that had been vulcanised to the rubber. Even in the darkness he could read 'Sixty gallons' written on the patch; 10 centimetres from the patch was a doubled over filling tube held in place with a metal clamp.

"What do you think Chris?" Manfred asked.

"Great idea, but how do we get it off the field?"

"Let's have a look at the others," Manfred said.

There were five other large doughnut shaped containers but these had rope netted around them making them easier for the men to drag them off the field.

They found that there was only one other variation and that looked liked a flat square tank, made of rubberised canvas, it too had rope handles; it turned out to be the most easily handled as they dragged it off into the forest. It had a similar flexible tube doubled over and held with a metal clamp as did the other containers did that had survived the fall.

Two men rolled the forty-four gallon drum, on its bottom rim, off the drop zone and left it covered with under brush. The sixty-gallon container without ropes was the last to be cleared away from the drop zone but each container needed five men to move it one hundred metres to the cover of the forest. After the drop zone was cleared, they gathered around in the forest to decide what they would do.

"We now have about four hundred gallons of fuel which will help us get mobile but I'm hopeful that they have more planned than just this?" Chris said.

"We've received this as a test run to prove the useful of the containers, let's not get carried away because we have to report back the best container that survived the drop, and the one that we can handle easily in the field. Let's get some sleep and we'll talk about it tomorrow."

The following day they went back to the drop zone, the men moved around the containers, some were shaking their heads trying to imagine how they would move them to the camp.

Chris called them closer, "Thinking caps on men! How do we move them?"

There was no response until Gerry spoke, "When I was a small boy I had a three wheel trolley, the single front wheel was attached to a handle to drag it around."

There was no eagerness to support his suggestion and it was quickly dropped.

One of the other men spoke up, "There's sixty gallons in each container and by my calculations that would mean one container weighs four or five hundred pounds."

"No wonder we were sweating last night when we rolled them in here," Otto said.

Manfred immediately jumped in, "We can't move them. What small containers do we have back at the camp Chris?"

"About six five gallon drums."

There were groans when the men realised that they were about to make a number of long hikes through the forest toting five-gallon drums.

"You won't have to get all of this back to the camp at one time, just come and get it when you need it. Let's go back and get the drums, I need to top up so Gerry and I can get to Strasbourg."

Manfred, Gerry and Chris remained at the camp discussing the logistics of their fuel supply while the rest returned to the fuel dump.

"Sixty gallons is way too much for us to handle easily, something like fifteen gallons would be more sensible, even that size still weighs one hundred and fifty pounds." Chris said.

As they were discussing this the men returned from the fuel dump. After siphoning gasoline into the five-gallon drums, they had cut two round poles from a tree, then fed the poles through the handles of the five-gallon drums. Suspending three drums on each pole, with a man at either end of the pole, they carried them back to the camp.

Chris waved Otto over, "How was that load? Easy to manage."

"It was hard work, but we coped," Otto said. 'Work' was always 'hard work' to Otto.

"The flat pack with handles, would be ideal if it was just a fifteen gallon container," Manfred said.

"Yes provided that the handles were in the middle of each end so we could get a pole through them," Otto said.

Gerry opened his backpack extracted a pencil and notepad and quickly drew a rough sketch showing what had been decided.

After they had topped up Manfred's car with gasoline, they spent an hour studying the route to Strasbourg. When it was dark, they ate with Chris and his men and then they departed.

"I'll drive to Strasbourg, I know the location of the church and then you can drive back home," Manfred said to Gerry.

They crossed the Rhine without incident, surprised that they had seen very few local police or SS patrols; they took the new autobahn to Strasbourg. Just before they turned off the autobahn an army convoy of trucks heading north passed them, some of them transporting armoured personnel carriers.

It was eleven PM when Manfred drove confidently to the centre of Strasbourg. Instead of pulling up in front of the church, he drove slowly past. Taking the next turn to the right, he found the back lane that ran down behind the church; driving along the lane, he saw a sign, 'No Parking Church Entrance.'

He drove forty metres further on and parked; setting the handbrake, they walked to the back gate of the church. Manfred thrust his hand through a hole cut in the gate to reach the lock. He tried to unlatch the gate but the hasp was held secure with a padlock.

"We'll have to climb over," Manfred said clasping his hands together, "I'll give you a boost."

Gerry buttoned his coat, patted his pistol in his coat pocket, stood on Manfred's hand and hoisted himself on to the top rail of the fence. He reached back, assisted Manfred up, then they dropped to the ground inside the church grounds. Next door, a dog hearing the disturbance charged at the fence, growling and barking loudly.

A porch light on the priest's rear residence came on and the priest thrust his head out the door.

"Who's there?" he called.

"Father, don't be alarmed, we only wish to talk with you," Manfred said as he walked calmly to the porch followed by Gerry. Still the priest waited holding the door only partly open.

Gerry moved forward hoping that his youthful appearance would allay the priest's fear, "If I mentioned the name of a Frenchman called Henri, who we brought here last Christmas, and told you we need help..."

The priest quickly switched the porch light off and opened the door wider, "Come in," he said quietly. The dog next door gave one last bark as it heard the back door close.

"Follow me," he urged as he walked along a narrow hallway. He opened a door leading off the hallway and switched on the light, "Go ahead this is my study, take a seat."

When Gerry and Manfred were seated, "My housekeeper left ages ago, but if you would like coffee?"

When they agreed, the priest left for the kitchen. Gerry looked around taking in the priest's study. A wooden desk with a roll down top and a battered office chair was pushed partly under the desk. Along side was tall cupboard; above the desk was a print of Christ showing the Eucharist. There was a clock on the wall above Manfred's head.

The priest returned with a tray, he passed it in front of Manfred who took a cup, and after Gerry took a cup, he leaned the tray against the edge of the desk. He raised the roll up top and slid the tray onto the desktop.

He settled himself into his chair, "Now, how can I help you?"

Manfred leaned forward eager to enlist the priest, "In order to protect you Father, we don't want to give you particular names and locations but I would like to speak frankly about what we do. You may have heard about the destruction of the oil refinery at Ems. Gerry and I were participants in its demolition, five of us gave our lives to ensure the success of that mission."

"So this man is Gerry, what's your name?"

"I'm sorry we should have introduced ourselves earlier, I'm Manfred."

"You may call me Albertus," the priest said.

"Thank you Father Albertus..."

"No just Albertus," he interrupted, "It'll be much safer for me that way."

Manfred felt relaxed as they talked about their resistance activities, a half hour had passed when Manfred asked.

"How long have you been here in Strasbourg, Albertus?"

"Strasbourg? Strasbourg is French territory just across the Rhine. We're in Kehl the sister city."

Manfred and Gerry looked confused and Manfred spoke up, "I was there when we received the message to bring Henri here. He was to be picked up later by the Maquis resistance fighters. They definitely said Strasbourg not Kehl."

"I can understand that. We're always confused that way; after all, only a narrow strip of water separates us. But you found me easily the first time."

"The first time that I drove in here I didn't see a sign for Kehl and I was looking for Bellestrasse which I found easily," Manfred said.

"The sign was pulled down ages ago by protestors. The local city administration might erect a new sign one day," Albertus said.

"Tell me Albertus how did you get involved in helping people like us."

"When the Pope signed a pact with Hitler promising not to interfere in German political life in exchange for Hitler not interfering in our religion, I felt betrayed. There are many of us clerics who feel the same way. The inhuman policies of Hitler have to be stopped," the priest said with obvious deep conviction.

"We think he should be stopped too and this is why we're acting against his police state and his corruption of our people," Manfred said.

The priest looked up at the clock.

"I think that you are brave people, and I would like to talk longer with you but I have an early Mass tomorrow. What is it that you would like me to do for you?"