The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Twenty

Near Ipswich, England

It had been sheer luck that they’d been in the area, although Captain Thomas Bashford would not have used the term luck, not when it meant that their tiny force of tanks was right in the middle of the German advance. Bashford’s small unit of eleven Centurion tanks had been running a small exercise in the fields to the north when they’d been surprised to hear the sound of firing in the distance, coming from the east, just as they lost all of their communications. Bashford had waited, sending runners back to the GHQ to find out what was going on, and finally a Jeep from General Barron had found them. The Germans had invaded Britain!

Bashford’s orders were simple enough; his unit, which had been armed for a live-fire exercise, was to delay the Germans as much as possible. It hadn’t been easy sneaking the tanks into position to the east of Ipswich and they’d lost two tanks to the Germans before they’d taken up their positions overlooking the road towards Felixstowe. If the Germans wanted to advance quickly, Bashford knew, they’d have to use the road… and he would get at least one good shot at them before they returned fire. As the sun rose higher in the sky, Bashford found himself tensing; the presence of German aircraft in the sky proved that the Germans were closing in on his position.

His radio buzzed suddenly. “Attention, Tommy Boy, Mother has gone to market,” it buzzed, the signal wavering in and out of coherence as German jamming systems fought to confuse the British still further. The speaker was positioned on a hill watching for signs of advance; the code words warned that the first Germans were on their way. “Mother wants ten eggs and two loaves of bread.”

She’ll be lucky, Bashford thought, mentally translating the signal into ten enemy panzers and two companies of infantry. The Germans would try to push their panzers as far west as they could and break through the defence lines; his force would have to delay the Germans long enough for defensive lines to be constructed to the south-west, towards London, but he knew that he couldn’t hold them for long. The Germans would advance their infantry as fast as possible, probably armed with portable antitank rockets or German PIAT weapons.

He leaned down into the tank’s turret. “Load HEAT round,” he said, as if they hadn’t been preparing for the fight even before they had suddenly been pitched into a very real war. “Bob, move us as soon as we fire.”

The tension rose as the radio buzzed a second warning, followed by a flight of German aircraft passing overhead, heading towards Ipswich to launch attacks on targets within the town. Bashford tensed as a second flight flew overhead, following up on the earlier mission; if the Germans knew where they were, they would prefer to send a rocket-armed fighter after his tank rather than send one of their panzers. He would be able to shoot back at a panzer. They’d camouflaged the tank as best as they could, but the planes had a bird’s eye view of the surrounding territory and might just see them from above. If that happened…

Something was moving in the distance. He lifted his binoculars to his eyes and peered towards the newcomers, drawing in a breath as he made out the shape of Panzer V tanks. The Germans called them Panthers, if he recalled correctly; they’d built them for service in Russia after encountering the Russian T-34 tank. The Russians might have been lousy soldiers, but they’d been good engineers, and the T-34 had actually proven itself to be better than anything the Germans had had. If they hadn’t had a megalomaniac with a well-developed sense of paranoia commanding their forces, the Soviets might actually have won and defeated the Germans.

If that had happened, we’d probably be standing off a Soviet invasion, he thought, as the next set of German vehicles advanced. They had motorcycle scouts out, and they were advancing fast enough to ensure that they would trip any ambushes the British might have set. Bashford pushed ‘what might have beens’ out of his mind as the gunner loaded the round and carefully brought the Centurion’s massive gun to bear on the lead German panzer. It was one of the command vehicles, Bashford saw. There were dozens of aerials sticking out of its hull, while it was protected by a smaller force of German infantry. The infantry would be a problem; Germans were trained to react quickly to surprises and would advance as quickly as possible against his position when that happened.

“Fire,” he commanded. The tank shook violently as it fired the first shell; the remainder of his unit fired seconds later, their shells racing through the air and striking their targets. Bashford saw a German panzer explode into a ball of flame as the first shell struck it, then a second and a third, and then the driver yanked the tank back just as the German turrets traversed with frightening speed. He cursed as a shell exploded only meters from their position. The Germans were firing back and trying to hit his units before they could escape. He barked an order to the driver and the tank spun around, briefly shielded from enemy fire by the ridge, heading for their second planned firing position. “Reload; antitank round!”

One of his tanks exploded as the Germans found their range, the noise of their shellfire deafening Bashford, even through the helmet he wore. He cursed, seeing that none of the crew had managed to escape, and said a silent prayer for them under his breath. The noise of shellfire suddenly grew louder and a volley of shells came screaming down as the German long-range guns focused in on their position. He smiled grimly as he ducked into the turret; unless the Germans got lucky and scored a direct hit, they were unlikely to actually manage to do more than churn up the ground.

The chatter of the machine gun was deafeningly loud in the confined space as the loader opened fire, aiming at a squad of German infantrymen who had just appeared on the other side of the ridge, lifting a rocket launcher and taking aim at the tank. Two of them scythed backwards in a gout of blood, the others threw themselves down to the ground and tried to aim their weapon, ignoring the danger. The rocket missed by centimetres as the tank lurched away, the main turret traversing to aim at a German panzer that was itself taking aim at them. It fired, destroying the German vehicle.

“Panzer,” the gunner cried, as a third German tank appeared. This one was quicker; they fired a shell towards the tank and barely hit their target, the shell slamming into the tracks. The tank slewed to a halt as the gunner threw a round back at the Germans, but the sudden movement had ruined his aim and put their shell somewhere into the distance.

“Abandon vehicle,” Bashford ordered, and dove for the hatches. They were a sitting duck now, and the Germans wouldn’t hesitate to kill them after they’d hit them. The crewmen followed him as the cabin began to fill with smoke; coughing and gasping, they scrambled out and immediately ran to the west. If the tank was burning, it would only be a matter of time before the flames reached the ammunition and…

The tank exploded. Bashford forced himself forwards, knowing that they would only have moments to escape back towards the British lines, but it was too late. He drew his side-arm with one hand as German bullets began to whistle past them. He threw himself into a ditch, crawling as fast as he could. The noise of shells overhead grew louder as the Germans pounded their targets, but the noise grew and grew to the point where he was wondering if he was the target, him personally. His crew had vanished. He clutched his weapon as he heard German voices and shouts behind him, preparing to make a final stand.

He heard them shouting before he saw them, icy German-accented voices barking a command, ordering him to throw down his weapon and put up his hands. He ignored it, knowing the fate of many German prisoners of war, and took aim in the direction of the voices. The bullet came out of nowhere and cut through his head, sending him down into darkness, but at the end, he was happy. The German advance had been delayed.

“Never mind the British tanks,” Hauptmann Johann Bothe barked, as the line of panzers crested the hill and pushed through the remaining British positions. They left ten wrecked panzers in the wake, all picked off by the British tanks when they had emerged from their hiding places to open fire. The ambush had been a complete surprise.

Bothe glared down at his map. Rommel had divided his forces into two prongs, one heading to the north-west and the other heading to the south-west, catching Ipswich between them and hopefully forcing the British to stand and fight. The Germans had done something similar at Moscow, he recalled, but Ipswich was much smaller than the Russian capital and probably not important enough for the British to make the linchpin of their defences. Rommel’s plan hoped to prevent the British from making more than a temporary stand, but they’d shown themselves to have teeth even if they were on the run. The lost panzers could be replaced quickly, assuming the sea lanes remained secure, but the time spent fighting their way out of the ambush could not be recovered.

Ask me for anything but time, he thought, as he barked orders to the infantry. 7th Panzer was Rommel’s own unit. A core division that had seen action in France under him, before being moved to the Western Desert and then to Russia for the final operations against Beria. It was the best fighting unit in the Wehrmacht, armed with the latest tanks and armoured personnel carriers… and supported by some of the most advanced German technology. A small air force was devoted to covering them from the air and, they even had their own organic support units. 7th Panzer was an army in its own right, one altered and modified by Rommel until it matched his tactics.

The radio hissed in his ear as the artillery units to the east pounded the British position again. The British lines were forming up in front of Ipswich, and Rommel had altered his orders slightly; Bothe’s prong would spread out a little more, in hopes of catching British soldiers before they could escape from the trap. Bothe snapped an order into his own radio and the panzer lurched back into motion, heading towards the west… and then cutting out across the country. A fence, designed to hold horses and sheep inside a farm, provided no barrier at all to the panzers; they just crashed through and kept going, navigating by their maps and the compasses.

“Don’t stop for anything,” he spat, as the infantry advanced in their own units. They were passing through small villages, some of which would have made formidable defence strong points if the British had had a week to prepare them, but there were no signs of any defenders, apart from a handful of Home Guardsmen who opened fire from a prepared position, throwing grenades towards the panzers. Bothe took the measure of the threat at once and ordered the panzers to charge the Home Guard position, smashing through their barricade and driving right down the centre of their village. He held himself low as the Guardsmen tried to hit him, but as the German infantry advanced, they found out that they had worse problems.

The panzers slowed as they left the village, waiting for the infantry to catch up with them again, and then Bothe heard a shot. It was aimed at one of his panzer commanders; he saw, astonished, as the commander collapsed into his panzer. The panzers division turned as one and poured a hail of machine gun fire into the nearest building. As the infantry arrived, they were sent into the building. Bothe had hoped that the sniper was dead, but as the infantrymen emerged, he saw that three of them were holding a young man, and others were escorting an older family. A father, a mother, two daughters…

“This is the one who fired the shot,” the infantry leader reported, shaking the younger man. Bothe examined him thoughtfully; he was nineteen, if he was a day, and wore no uniform. He should have been in the army or the Home Guard, but for some reason the lout hadn’t been anywhere, but at home. “This is his family.”

The father proved to speak German. “Sir, my son didn’t mean to fire at you,” he said. “He…”

“Fired at us from ambush, killed one of my men, and did it without wearing a uniform,” Bothe snarled, unwilling to deal with it. A captured British soldier was sent back to the detention camps, where he would be well-treated. An insurgent had no such options. They needed to discourage resistance or the invasion would bog down. “Did you know that he was going to fire on us?”

He didn’t wait for the answer. “Hang him from that tree,” he called to the infantrymen, who went to work with a will. The mother was screaming as she saw her son being dragged over to the tree; his father lunged forward, only to be brought up short by two of the infantrymen, who sat on him as their comrades rigged up a quick rope. Bothe watched dispassionately as they attached it around the young man’s neck, despite his struggles, and pulled. A moment later, it was all over.

Bothe shook his head, unsure of his own feelings. That young man could have been him, if the war had gone a little differently; like all who’d grown up with the Hitler Youth, he was sworn to the defence of Germany. He might have taken up a weapon and used it himself in the defence, maybe even without any formal training or without a uniform. It was easy to feel sorry for the family, but in the end, there had been no choice. If the young man had wanted to fight, he could have enlisted and fought in the army, instead of wasting his life by attacking a column of German panzers single-handedly That had been folly well beyond some of that produced by the Hitler Youth.

He glanced over at the infantry commander. “Is the house empty?”

The commander nodded. There was one final task to perform, despite the damage that had been inflicted on the house already, a task he personally loathed. At his command, the family was escorted away from the house, and Bothe’s panzer put a high-explosive round through the window, sending the entire house up in a wave of fire. It wouldn’t burn down completely, but in the end, it would be ruined beyond easy repair. He looked over at the family and met the cold eyes of the older daughter; they had just made an enemy for life.

His gunner agreed. “We ought to shoot them all,” he muttered, just loud enough to be heard. “They’re not going to change.”

Bothe cast his eyes over the gathering townspeople, noting with grim amusement a weeping girl, barely eighteen years old, who was staring at the body as she sobbed. There was nothing to say, not now; they’d been shown the price of resistance. As the noise of German aircraft high overhead grew louder, he muttered a command and the panzer roared into life, heading out of the village and back towards Ipswich. In the near future, an SS unit would visit them, order them all to register with the German military authorities, and drive home the message about resistance.

An hour later, they reached the outer defence line around Ipswich.

Ned Archer had kept his face carefully blank as the German soldiers had taken Jonny Atkins, carried him over to the trees, and hung him for taking a pot-shot at them. The young fool had hit one of the Germans, as miraculous as that seemed, but the Germans had reacted quickly and well. They’d had the right to hang Jonny under the laws of war and destroy his house — his family would have to live with other villagers for the moment — but he hoped that it would remind people of just what bastards the Germans could be. He’d fought in the last war and remembered it all-too-clearly. The Germans hadn’t hesitated to punish resistance wherever they found it.

The cable near the village hadn’t been disturbed by the Germans, much to his relief; he’d feared that it would have been cut as the German panzers advanced cross-country. He lifted it, attached a field telephone to the cable, and whispered down the line. Within hours, the story of Jonny Atkins would be on the BBC, and the entire world would know what the Germans had done.

Of course, he knew, they wouldn’t take any notice.