The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Twenty-Five

Felixstowe, England

The building had once been a school before the Germans arrived, and it had been converted into one of their reception centres where they registered everyone who lived in Felixstowe and the surrounding area. A police officer had told Gregory Davall that everyone in the area had been ordered to register within a week or face possible arrest and detention. The entire town had seen a handful of young men that were caught breaking curfew, marched off to the docks to assist with clearing up the rubble caused by the fighting. The message was clear. For the moment, the Germans were too strong to interfere with, so it was better to cooperate until times changed.

Davall listened to the BBC, although the SS had warned everyone that listening to them was a punishable offence; the Germans would have preferred them to be listening to Radio Berlin, which had an English language channel. Radio Berlin didn’t have much in the way of interesting news, reporting endless German victories, thousands of surrendering British soldiers, and even a report that Churchill himself had scuttled away under fire, abandoning his men just before the Germans captured them. The BBC was more inclined to report on the progress of the invasion, although it was long on heroic stories such as a young sailor who had torpedoed a German submarine, and short on actual details.

Davall had access to one of the hidden telephone cables, but he hadn’t wanted to risk using it until after the manhunt for the killer of PC Johnston had died down. The Germans didn’t seem to care, if they’d even noticed. They certainly weren’t tearing down Felixstowe to find the killer.

“I don’t want to go to school,” James said, struggling slightly. Davall remembered being that age and walking up the same steps, separated from his sisters by the strict rule that girls and boys were to enter separately and be educated separately. Kate might have gone to the same school, but they hadn’t met until after they had entered the working world.

“Don’t worry,” Davall said, hoping his son wouldn’t say anything stupid as they passed the German sentry standing guard on the steps. “I don’t think you’ll be coming back here for a long time.”

Inside, he was suddenly struck by a sense of dizziness. The scene was almost surreal; German soldiers were everywhere, while lines of British citizens wound into classrooms and even the headmaster’s office. Davall wondered what had happened to the headmaster before dismissing the thought. It hardly mattered at the moment. A German guard pointed them towards one of the queues, and they waited in line, watching as their friends and neighbours advanced toward a classroom. They never saw them re-emerge

A sense of hopelessness welled up within him, and he fought it down savagely. The Germans were tightening the noose around their necks, and it wasn’t even a noose that most of their friends and neighbours could see. The German procedure was always the same. First, they would register, then they would put people to work, and finally they would achieve complete control of the area.

The signs that had been hastily tacked up reinforced the sense of having stepped into a different world. the crying children, the mothers trying to shush them, the fathers watching helplessly… all had no place in Britain. He felt Kate’s hand squeezing his, hard, as the line advanced towards the door, each family beckoned inside… and then, presently, they were called into the room.

He’d been in the classroom before, studying geography under a teacher who had marched off with many of Davall’s classmates and fallen at Dunkirk, but it looked very different now. The child-sized desks had been pushed to one wall, while the teacher’s desk had been pushed into the middle of the room, with a SS officer standing beside it. Davall’s eyes went wide for a moment. The German was a woman, wearing a uniform that showed off her figure… and cold, dispassionate eyes. He almost didn’t notice the soldiers at the rear of the room as the woman pointed them towards the seats in front of her desk.

“Name, please?” Her voice, cold and unaccented, almost made him tremble.

“Gregory Davall,” he replied, and produced his British identification card for her. She took it, made a series of notes on a sheaf of paper in front of her, and then placed it to one side. She fired off a series of questions at him, ranging from innocent ones like when he and Kate had married to stranger ones such as who they were related to in the city, what relatives they had outside the area, and to his non-existent military service.

“You were spared from armed service because you were a skilled engineer,” she said, after a moment. “Good; we will be able to find you work fairly soon. Do you have Jewish blood in you?”

Her tone, the hint of disgust and contempt, made Davall shake. “None,” he said truthfully. He’d only met one Jew in his life, back when he’d been working in an electronics shed. “My family have always been Christians.”

“I must warn you that giving false information is a crime punishable by death,” she said, her voice politely crisp. “Do you have Jewish blood?”

“No,” Davall said shortly, trying to keep the anger out of his tone. He’d thought that some of the teachers he had known were bad, but this woman was worse than any of them… and, he guessed, she could have them all shot on a whim. “There’s no Jewish blood in my family.”

She made a few more notes and then held their eyes. “You have been registered as a citizen of Occupied Britain under the jurisdiction of the Greater German Reich,” she said, formally. It was the first time he heard a hint of emotion in her voice. “As of now, you are subject to the laws and regulations of the Reich and any breakages will be handled in accordance with German law. You will be expected to be loyal to the Reich and work towards its interests at all times; any attempt to impede those interests will be treated as treason and punished accordingly.”

She nodded towards the rear entrance. “Take this slip,” she said, passing them the sheet of paper she’d been writing on. It was covered in German words that even Davall couldn’t read. “Present it to the soldiers there and they will give you a new ID card and some rations for the week, as well as a booklet of Occupation Regulations and Laws. Ignorance of the law does not constitute an excuse.”

Davall led his family out of the room and down into the side room where a pair of Germans took the slip, read it quickly, and worked a small device that Davall didn’t recognise. One of them held up a camera and quickly snapped shots of all three of them; the other took their fingerprints, before waving them into a corner and passing him a copy of the booklet to read.

Davall skimmed it quickly, finding the pamphlet to be almost as he had imagined; the Germans intended to supervise them in almost every detail of their lives. No large gatherings, no parties without German permission, workers to report for work with the Germans if they had no other work to do, German currency to be the only legitimate currency… the list went on and on, with dire warnings of heavy punishment if they were caught doing anything against the rules. The overall tone was all-too-clear; anything not specifically permitted was forbidden.

“Davall,” one of the Germans said. He passed Davall a set of three ID cards; one for him, one for Kate and one for James. Davall examined them quickly, noting the picture of himself, a terrible image that was nonetheless easy to recognise. “These are your cards; keep them with you and present them whenever they are demanded by a German patrol. If you are caught without the card, you will be detained and perhaps sentenced to serve in a work gang.”

He passed them a small box of rations and pointed them out of the school; Davall left quickly before he vomited The fresh air cleared his head, but he knew the Germans had made certain that everyone would be registered, which just added another problem to the Grey Wolves’ growing list. They would all be registered, which meant that if they left fingerprints anywhere, the Germans would be able to identify them and come after them and their families. The female SS officer and those like her was building up a composite picture of who was who in the village, something that would make hiding a stranger very difficult indeed. He thought about it as they walked home slowly, passing some of their neighbours on the way; the Germans would have to be shown that there was still fight in the British, but how?

The German rations weren’t very good, but as Kate examined them, she pronounced that they should last for at least a week, particularly when they were added to what they’d stockpiled. Davall spent the afternoon thinking carefully and wandering around the town, watching the Germans as they sent their patrols out of Felixstowe towards the farms. A plan slowly began to form in his mind.

That night, he kissed Kate goodnight and slipped off into the shadows. He’d practised remaining unseen under the cover of darkness before, but this time he had to be much more careful. The Germans were enforcing a strict blackout regime over Felixstowe. They would be all-too-likely to shoot first and not bother with the questions. The scene was eerily dark but he had little difficulty in finding the paths up to the forest and through the trees to their meeting place, where he encountered two other Grey Wolves, Rupert McAllister and Barton Rigby. The former was a dockyard worker; the latter a farmhand at a farm to the west. They were also the most experienced people in the Grey Wolves.

He listened as they quickly compared stories about what had happened to them at registration and afterwards. The Germans had informed McAllister that he would be continue to work at the docks for the moment, while Rigby might have to work longer hours at the farm in preparation for the harvest in a few months.

“They work us hard, Greg,” McAllister said, finally. “They just rounded us all up and made us work long hours to unload all their shit. They’re bringing in thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles; I saw dozens of those grey tanks of theirs and some support vehicles today, moving west. I don’t know what they have in mind in the long term, but for the moment they’re using us as slaves, with no exceptions for injuries, and locked up the Union Boss when he tried to complain.”

Rigby snorted. “What, all that happened and you didn’t go on strike?”

McAllister glared at him. “The Germans shot the first person they caught dawdling and since then, no one has dared to oppose them,” he retorted. There was bad blood between the two of them. “That’s why we have to hit them now!”

“That’s something that will have to be passed up the chain,” Davall said, after a moment. He didn’t entirely trust the telephone cable; if the Germans located it, they could use it to set a trap for the Grey Wolves, but there was no other way to signal the British authorities. A radio transmitter would be detected at once, while someone travelling cross-country might well be caught and interrogated. “Did you bring your weapons?”

They nodded. Both men had been armed with assault rifles, while Davall himself carried a sniper rifle with a night-vision scope. He briefed them quickly on the target as they walked, reaching one of the roads and taking up their position as they waited for the German patrol. Davall had observed them making semi-permanent patrols of the area over the last few days and had noticed that the Germans sent one of the small troop carriers on a rotating patrol, probably aimed at preventing anyone escaping from Felixstowe. Rigby worked quickly to set up his own surprise for the Germans while they waited. They heard the sound of aircraft high overhead, heading in to land at the airfield Davall had raided, so long ago. Had it really been just over a month?

“Lights,” McAllister hissed. Davall could hear the faint sound of a German engine, slightly quieter than a British design. The Germans made better cars than the British, something that had always galled Davall, whose brother had used to work in a car factory before it had begun churning out tanks instead. The Germans had sold some of their cars through Felixstowe, something, he saw now, that had cleared the way for the invasion. “Sir…”

“I see them,” Davall hissed back. The two German vehicles looked crude and unfinished, but he knew from his briefings that they could be very dangerous. He targeted his rifle on the German manning the machine gun at the rear of the second vehicle and waited patiently as the Germans rolled into the kill zone, until they stuck the mine. The first vehicle exploded in a dazzling shower of sparks, while he squeezed the trigger and sent the machine gunner falling off the second vehicle. The other Germans spilled out of the vehicle, some of them falling prey to McAllister and Rigby, who poured fire onto their ranks.

Davall sucked in a breath as he peered through his scope. The Germans, despite being completely surprised, had managed to get into a position to fire back at them, sending bullets cracking through the night. The four remaining German infantrymen kept moving forward, but he guessed that they were really trying to pin the British down while they called for help. The German commander would have a quick-reaction force ready for any trouble, and it was anyone’s guess how long it would take for them to get enough infantry into the area to search for the Grey Wolves. By then, they needed to be well away.

Rigby pulled the trigger on the second mine, hidden in the undergrowth. It detonated, pushing a hail of ball bearings down towards the Germans. The Grey Wolves fled, keeping low as they vanished into the woods. The Germans couldn’t match their local knowledge, Davall hoped; they would have to be insane to come in after them, not when they had reinforcements on the way. He heard the noise of a set of German autogyros in the air and took the risk of glancing up, but they didn’t seem to have any idea of where they were in the darkness.

They couldn’t head back to the main ammunition store, but they’d prepared secondary locations to hide their weapons, before fanning out and returning to their homes. Davall could hear the Germans in the distance, their weapons cracking out from time to time, but they never came anywhere near him. He didn’t know what they were shooting at, maybe hares or foxes, but they weren’t shooting at the Grey Wolves.

The crack of gunfire rose and fell as he listened, and the sounds of something moving in the wood almost made him jump out of his skin, but the Germans were still well away from him. He could see a sharp glare in the distance now, some of it being shone down from autogyros in the air, providing a perfect target if he had had a heavy machine gun. The thought made him smile as he found the path down towards the town; there was a heavy machine gun in the ammunition dump, something that could be used to hurt the Germans. There was no way to get a report out to higher authority, but that didn’t matter; one way or the other, the Germans would be hurt.

Their alert hadn’t reached Felixstowe yet, so it was easy to slip into his house, strip off his clothes, and climb into bed beside his wife. Kate hadn’t slept a wink, as far as he could tell, but she was very, very, relieved to see him. Davall held her in his arms until she drifted off, but it was a long time before sleep claimed him; he remembered, far too clearly, the screams of the Germans as they burned inside their vehicle. The German leaders were going to be furious.