Hitler's Spy by James Hayward

Author:James Hayward [Hayward, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471132636
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

9

Summer and Snow

On the morning of 7 September, Black Saturday, code-breakers at Bletchley Park ascertained that the Luftwaffe were again preparing for action on a grand scale. By the middle of the afternoon Chain Home radar plots confirmed that approximately 350 bombers and 600 fighters were poised to cross the Channel, a vast formation one and a half miles high and occupying 800 square miles of sky. Having travelled from Carinhall to assume personal command of the renewed aerial assault, Göring watched from a collapsible chair perched on the cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez, the sense of imperious valedictory picnic underscored by a nearby table groaning under the weight of sandwiches and champagne.

The target, finally, was London. ‘The moment is a historic one,’ the chubby Reichsmarschall crowed above the hum of a thousand aero engines. ‘The Führer has decided to deliver a mighty blow!’

As the huge aerial armada formed up in the skies above Northern France, intelligence gleaned from the growing menagerie of spies at Camp 020 seemed to confirm that the British Isles were about to be invaded. Waldberg, the leader of the Romney Marsh Four, had hoped to hold out until Saturday, thirst permitting. Caroli, too, anticipated liberation within a fortnight. Furthermore, two miles to the north across Richmond Park, Snow’s new Afu transmitter hummed with a series of urgent requests from Stelle X: ‘Where are troops, tanks etc stationed for counter-attack? What kind, how many? Fortifications near coast between Isle of Wight and Margate – guns – anti-aircraft – barbed wire – mines – are they flooded at high tide? Are they stronger where coast is steep, or where it is flat?’

On any view, the disparate fragments gathered by the Joint Intelligence Committee during the course of Saturday afternoon promised Armageddon by air and sea.

Finally Hitler was coming.

At five-twenty that afternoon, as the first German bombs began to fall on the East End, Churchill assembled his Chiefs of Staff in Whitehall. Weighing the evidence provided by Ultra, radar, MI6 and Agent Snow, as well as additional data on moonlight and tides, and the rising number of landing barges in the Channel ports, it was decided to bring Britain’s defences to the highest possible state of alert. At 20.07 GHQ Home Forces flashed the ominous codeword ‘Cromwell’ to Eastern and Southern Commands, signifying that invasion was imminent and probable within twelve hours. Regular troops stood to as instructed, while in several areas eager Home Guards set church bells tolling in the mistaken belief that landings were already in progress. Bugles sounded on the cliffs at Dover, and in Lincoln a party of Royal Engineers attempted to blow up the railway station. Countless sticks of German paratroops were reckoned to have been shot on the wing, Mass Observation recording one wild rumour that 500 had landed near Newport, all but one of them dispatched in three seconds flat.

Meanwhile London endured its first night of aerial Blitz. Fresh from his own interrogation of the Romney Marsh spies at Camp 020, Maxwell Knight watched the conflagration from the roof of Dolphin Square.

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