The leg was really hurting now and he rummaged in the box and found the medical kit with its morphine ampules. He jabbed one in his leg and, after a moment’s hesitation, used another. Then he found the bailer and wearily started to throw water out through the open flap. God, but he was tired. Too much morphine perhaps, but at least the pain had dulled and he dropped the bailer and pulled the plastic zip at the entrance and leaned back and was suddenly asleep.
On his right, a few hundred yards away, was Start Point. For a while he seemed to be drifting toward the rocks and then a contrary current pulled him away. Ten minutes later, the life raft passed that final point of land and a freshening wind drove it out into the cold waters of the English Channel.
Eisenhower was seated in the Regency bow window of the library at Hayes Lodge having breakfast of poached eggs, toast and coffee when the young aide showed Dougal Munro in.
‘Leave us, Captain,’ the general said and the aide withdrew. ‘Difficult to smile this morning, Brigadier.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I haven’t eaten breakfast for years, General.’
For a moment, Eisenhower’s face was illuminated by that famous and inimitable smile. ‘Which shows you aren’t an old military hand. You prefer tea, don’t you?’
‘Yes, General.’
‘You’ll find it on the sideboard behind you – special order. Help yourself, then tell me what you know of this wretched business. My own people have already given me their version, but I’ve always had considerable respect for your people at SOE, you know that.’
Munro helped himself to the tea and sat in the window seat and gave Eisenhower a brief resume of the night’s events.
‘But surely the naval escorts should have been able to prevent such a thing happening,’ the general said. ‘On the other hand, I hear the weather wasn’t too good. It’s past belief. I visited Slapton myself only three days ago to see how the exercises were going. Went down by special train with Tedder and Omar Bradley.’
‘Most of the crews of your LSTs are new to those waters, and the English Channel at the best of times can be difficult.’ Munro shrugged. ‘We’ve had torpedo boats from the Royal Navy hanging around off Cherbourg regularly during these exercises because Cherbourg, as the General knows, is the most important E-boat base on the French coast. There was a sea mist and the Germans obviously slipped out with their silencers on and probably with their radar sets switched off. They do more than forty knots, those things. Nothing afloat that’s faster and they boxed rather cleverly on their approach. Fired off parachute flares so the people in the convoy assumed they were ours.’
‘Goddammit, you never assume anything in this game. I’m tired of telling people that.’ Eisenhower poured another coffee, stood up and went to the fire. ‘Bodies coming ashore by the hundred, so they tell me.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Needless to say, this whole thing stays under wraps. We’re going to arrange for some kind of mass grave down there in Devon for the time being. At least it’s a defense area under military rule, which should help. If this got out, so close to the invasion, it could have a terrible effect on morale.’
‘I agree.’ Munro hesitated and said carefully, ‘There is the question of the Bigots, General.’
‘Who should never have been there in the first place. No one knows the regulations on Bigots better than you.’
‘It could be worse, sir. There were three in all. Two of the bodies have already been recovered. The third, this man.’ Munro took a file from his briefcase and pushed it across. ‘Is still missing.’
Eisenhower read the file quickly. ‘Colonel Hugh Kelso.’ His face darkened. ‘But I know Kelso personally. He checked out two beaches in Normandy only weeks ago.’
‘Utah and Sword. On those occasions he had commandos nursing him and he also had an L pill with him, just in case he was caught. As the General knows, the cyanide in those things kills instantaneously.’
Eisenhower pushed the file across. ‘He knows, Brigadier, both when we’re going and where. The implications are past belief.’
‘We’ve men on the beaches around Slapton looking for him now, General. I’ve little reason to doubt that his body will turn up with the rest of them.’
‘Don’t try to make me feel good,’ Eisenhower told him sharply. ‘Some of those bodies will never come in on the tide. I know that and so do you, and if Kelso is one of them, we can never be certain that he wasn’t picked up by the enemy.’
‘That’s true, General,’ Munro admitted because there wasn’t really anything else he could say.
Eisenhower walked to the window. Rain dashed against the pane. ‘What a day,’ he said morosely. ‘One thing’s for sure. I can only think of one man who’ll have a smile on his face this morning.’
At that very moment Adolf Hitler was reading a report on the Slapton Sands affair in the map room of his underground headquarters known as Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg, deep in the forests of East Prussia.
Most of those important in the Nazi hierarchy were present. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and Chief of both State and Secret Police, Josef Goebbels, Reichsminister for Propaganda, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Secretary to the Führer among other things, and Oberführer Rattenhuber, Himmler’s Chief of Security and Commander of the SS guard at Rastenburg.
Hitler almost danced with delight and crumpled the thin paper of the message in one hand. ‘So, our Navy can still strike, and hard, right in the enemy’s own backyard! Three ships sunk, and hundreds of casualties.’ His eyes sparked. ‘A bad morning for General Eisenhower, gentlemen.’
There was general enthusiasm. ‘Good news indeed, my Führer,’ Goebbels said and delivered his usual high laugh.
Bormann, who had been the first to see the message, said quietly, ‘If we can do this to them off the coast of Devon, my Führer, all things are possible off the coast of France.’
‘They won’t even get ashore,’ Himmler put in.
‘Probably not,’ Hitler said, in high good humor. ‘But now, gentlemen, to the purpose of our meeting.’ They grouped around the circular table and he tapped the large-scale map of France. ‘The Westwall proceeds, I think.’ He turned to Bormann. ‘The report on Army Group B which I asked for? Has it arrived?’
Bormann turned inquiringly to Rattenhuber who said, ‘I’ve just had a report from the airfield. The courier, a Captain Koenig, landed five minutes ago. He’s on his way.’
‘Good.’ Hitler seemed abstracted now, as if somehow alone as he stared down at the map. ‘So, gentlemen, where do we start?’
On December 26, 1943, a remarkable and gifted young German officer, Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, reported for a meeting at Rastenburg with a time bomb in his briefcase. Unfortunately, the meeting did not take place, as the Führer had already departed for Bavaria for the Christmas holiday. In spite of having lost his left eye and right hand in action, von Stauffenberg was Chief of Staff to General Olbricht of the General Army Office and the center of a conspiracy of army generals whose aim was to assassinate the Führer and save Germany from disaster.
His own abortive attempt at Christmas 1943 was only one of many that had failed. Yet there was no shortage of volunteers to the cause, as witness Captain Karl Koenig traveling in the rear of the military