The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Thirteen

London, England

They approached from the south-east, heavy turbojets pushing the massive aircraft through the air, each one containing a small number of commandos and their weapons. They were flying lower than any of them would have preferred, but they were all experienced veterans, first at fighting insurgents in Russia and then in jumping from aircraft at dangerously low heights. They held themselves with the confidence that comes from knowing that they were the very best soldiers in the world; the men of the unit knew that with a certainty that was unshakable. Their devotion to the mission was absolute; every man would willingly give his life to ensure that it was completed, or die trying.

Gruppenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny glanced at his men, sitting on the deck of the aircraft, and smiled to himself. He’d put them all through hell, training them over the last few weeks; the injuries that some of them bore stood in mute testament to Skorzeny’s preferred training methods. They’d practised their tactics and operations against the very best, running through a wide series of possible scenarios and outcomes, all of which had been as realistic as Skorzeny’s ingenuity could develop. They sat there, wearing uniforms that were distinctly British and carrying weapons that were very definitely not British, and he felt a rare moment of pride. Some of them had served with him in Moscow, and he knew their merits. Others had only been through training and counter-insurgency warfare, but all of them had been tested in the training sessions. Those who were found wanting had been dismissed from the unit well before they could drag the entire unit down.

Himmler hadn’t understood, but Skorzeny, who cared nothing for political power, didn’t give a shit about the growing list of enemies he was making in the more regular forces. Kurt Student had understood, but he’d been more of a regular officer than Skorzeny himself; he hadn’t liked the idea of sending paratroopers on what was effectively a suicide mission even if Skorzeny himself was confident that they would make it out of London. If the British caught them wearing their uniforms, they would be quite within their rights to shoot them as spies, although that thought made Skorzeny’s smile grow a little wider. They were going to drop in on Atlee personally and kill him; if the British didn’t try to kill them, then maybe some of the odder propaganda from Radio Berlin was actually true.

Skorzeny felt the shape of one of his teeth with his tongue. Himmler had added a secondary mission for him, but both of them had known that it might be impossible to carry out. Himmler, unlike some of the commanders Skorzeny had known, didn’t often try to set impossible targets. Skorzeny and one of his subordinates knew the identity of someone who would help them, but it would be delicate. Himmler had warned him that his agent was unaware of just who he was helping, and when Skorzeny revealed himself, he would have to take control right from the start.

If he were to be captured, something he had privately sworn not to allow, he would have to use the false tooth and kill himself before he could be interrogated. The British wouldn’t be feeling gentle after the commandos had raged through Downing Street, killing everyone they met.

A chime sounded in the aircraft and Skorzeny pulled himself to his feet, making sure to exchange a quick glance with each of his men before they lined up besides the hatch, each man checking his partner’s parachute to ensure that it was perfectly set. a parachute failure would be completely impossible to recover from in time, before the unlucky commando plunged into the ground and died.

He glanced at the hatch as one of the crewmen unlocked it. The chime meant that they were five minutes away from their destination, the patch of air that was directly above The Mall, where they would fall down and only break open the parachutes at the latest possible moment. Skorzeny had lost nearly two dozen men through misjudging their timing, even though every man who tried out for the unit was an experienced paratrooper already, before they tried out for Skorzeny’s own personal badge. Hitler himself had created the silver badge that was the mark of one of his soldiers, a knife crossed with a small gun, and only a thousand German soldiers had the right to wear it. The relationship between the Waffen-SS and the regular army wasn’t very good at the best of times, but even the regulars admitted that Skorzeny’s unit was the finest group of paratroopers and light infantry in Germany, perhaps the world.

London was glowing as the aircraft swept in; his eyes tracked lights on the ground, each one providing a possible target for the bombers that were sweeping along ahead of the transports. If everything went to plan, they would drop their loads on the army barracks near the centre of London, although Skorzeny was too experienced a soldier to assume that they would kill every one of the defenders before they could react. Timing was everything in wartime, and the British would have had at least some warning before the bombers attacked even if everything had gone perfectly. An alerted force on the ground would still be armed and dangerous, particularly if they had armoured cars or tanks as well…

He’d given the soldiers a pep talk before they’d left the base, reminding them that they were the best soldiers in the world and that they’d trained heavily for the mission. The moments seemed to grow longer and longer as the transport levelled out for the drop, and then the aircraft shook as an anti-aircraft battery took a shot at it. Skorzeny refused to show any sign of fear. Statistically, it was much more likely that they would die through a damaged parachute than through being shot down by such a weapon. The British would have done better to have had a permanent combat air patrol over London, but instead they’d chosen to draw down their military as much as possible.

“Ten seconds,” the crewman said, as the river flickered as they raced over it. “Five seconds…”

He was first out of the lead aircraft, as it should be; his body free-falling towards the ground. He’d done it before, but the exhilaration racing through his bloodstream was something he only felt when making a combat jump into a war zone. London was burning — he could see flames rising up into the sky from a number of locations — but if they’d knocked out the barracks, there was no sign that they’d succeeded. He yanked on the cord at just the right moment, grunting as the parachute unfurled and slowed his fall, allowing him to land with a bump. He bent his knees and rolled with the motion, as he had been taught, and removed the parachute before it could land on top of him. His men were coming down all around him, releasing their own chutes and drawing their weapons, assembling quickly into combat groups.

He glanced around quickly, comparing what he saw to the maps he’d been forced to memorise; they’d come down almost perfectly, although some of his men had landed in St James’s Park rather than along the road. He blew a whistle and the first team advanced around him, while the second team headed off in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Shooting broke out almost at once as the security forces on the ground realised that they were under attack, but their firing was off and ill-coordinated, a result of their surprise. Skorzeny pushed his men forward, racing against time, and the paratroopers punched through the British defenders.

“They’ll be bringing up reinforcements,” he cried, to one of his men. The subordinate nodded and detailed off some of the parachutists to block the roads and prevent the British from launching an immediate counter-attack. They ran into more armed soldiers and a brief gunfight broke out, ending when the British soldiers were all wiped out.

They’d fought to the last man, Skorzeny noted. He gave them a nod of respect and kept his team moving, even as more firing could be heard in the distance, coming from Buckingham Palace. The gates of Downing Street loomed up in front of him, barring the way to the unpretentious row of houses that served as the governing centre of Britain, but the team knocked them down. There was no time to waste and they didn’t care about the damage; Himmler had told him, in a rare mood of openness, that Speer had already drawn up the plans to knock down Downing Street and replace it with a building in the best Reich style, one fit to rule an empire. The handful of stunned policemen on guard didn’t put up much of a fight, even though there were more barricades than they’d been led to expect. It puzzled him that there was so little security protecting the British Government. There was a whole division of SS troops protecting Hitler.

He pushed the issue aside as the team placed explosive charges on the most famous front door in the world. Taking cover as the charges detonated and watching as the door literally disintegrated under the impact of the explosives. The remains caved in, allowing the commandos to rush into the building. They immediately ran into a terrified-looking elderly man. Skorzeny knocked him down and kept moving. They’d been supplied with pictures of all of the important men and women in the Downing Street complex, and he wasn’t on the list. There were SS units that wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot down anyone who got in their way, but as long as they weren’t a threat and stayed out of the way, Skorzeny was content to leave them alive.

A female scream from above brought the commandos pounding up the stairs, running into a small room with at least seven beds, each one holding a young lady; Skorzeny checked them all, realised that they were Atlee’s secretaries, and led the team onwards. They weren’t important; the next room turned out to hold one of Atlee’s friends, who was shot out of hand. Henry Teasdale was well known for his hostile attitude to Nazi Germany.

“They’re not in their beds,” one of the commandos shouted, as the team broke into the Atlee’s bedroom. “They must have made it into the bomb shelter.”

Skorzeny led the race back downstairs, ignoring the growing screams and shouts of panic from the girls; they would have much more to worry about if they ever ran into one of the units the SS used to spread terror in an occupied zone. The handful of men he’d left on the ground floor nodded to him — salutes were forbidden in a combat zone — and waved to a set of bodies, one of them unmistakably Lord Halifax. Skorzeny checked quickly, just in case, and confirmed it; the Foreign Secretary had been caught in his rooms and killed by one of the commandos.

The search took only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity to Skorzeny, who was grimly aware that the British were gathering their resources to strike back and exterminate his team. He could still hear gunfire and explosions all over the area, but that might mean that the team had been beaten off from Buckingham Palace, or that they’d succeeded in their mission and were on their way back to rendezvous with the main unit before they started to execute the second part of the plan. The British barracks couldn’t have been totally destroyed, which meant they could expect a counter-attack at any moment, despite the chaos and the fighting in the sky, high above. The British had probably directed their fighters to engage the Luftwaffe high over London, although the transports would have beaten a retreat already; they were useless once their paratroopers had been dropped onto the ground.

“Found it, Otto,” one of his men called, finally. The unit didn’t stand on formality, something else that irked the regulars and most of the remainder of the Waffen-SS as well; if a man qualified to join, as far as Skorzeny was concerned, he could call him by his first name. “They had the entrance well hidden, but we found it once we checked all the walls and floors.”

“A bookcase,” Skorzeny said, shaking his head. The British had been clever; some designer had created a mechanism for allowing the bookcase to move backwards and forwards, as if it were a safe in a bank, hiding the entrance to the underground bunker. He nodded to his engineers and they started work at once, placing more shaped charges against the bookcase and then standing well back as the charges detonated. This time, their target stood up better to their assault; the bookcase disintegrated, but the armoured door behind it barely fell off its hinges. Two commandos grasped hold of it and pulled hard, allowing a third to throw a belt of grenades into the space beyond, causing an explosion that blew the door off its hinges.

Three commandos moved forward quickly and rappelled down the shaft, breaking through into what was clearly a lift. Skorzeny followed them as shooting burst out, painfully loud in such a confined space. Atlee would have a few defenders in a position to hold the bunker, even though they must know that they were trapped without any means of escape. His men were pinned down and radical action had to be taken. He unhooked a grenade of his own and threw it towards the defenders, who were only half-seen in the gloom. The explosion rewarded him with a scream from someone, but the enemy fire didn’t dwindle; he guessed that he’d hit a non-combatant with the explosion. He pulled out several more grenades and threw them, one by one, into the room; this time, the enemy firing trailed off and his men were able to race into the bunker. The noise of grenades and firing grew louder for a moment, shaking the air and sending dust clouds cascading down on his shoulders, and then faded away; Skorzeny lowered himself down and entered the bunker.

It wasn’t dark and drab, but clearly part of a much larger complex, one that his briefing hadn’t suggested existed. Just for a moment, Skorzeny felt a twinge of worry; down in the bunker, he had no way of communicating with his men on blocking duty, or with the group that was supposed to attack Buckingham Palace. His men were trained to seize the initiative at all times, not least because Skorzeny himself might be killed at any moment, but what would happen if the British mounted their counter-attack before he could complete his mission? He might fail… and he had never failed before.

“Search the bunker,” he yelled, as the men raced through. One door proved to be made of reinforced steel, too hard for them to break through without explosives, but the others led to sleeping quarters — empty — a kitchen — also empty — and a small collection of weapons, most of which looked to be as good as his own. The bunker system didn’t end there, but he knew, somehow, that they were right on the verge of success; as the engineers took out the sealed door, he saw the Prime Minister’s personal bunker.

It wasn’t that impressive compared to the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, where Hitler had ruled the Reich during the war, but it was luxurious enough to prove that whoever was intended to use it, they were important. Skorzeny wasn’t too surprised; one thing that all of the regimes he knew about had done was see to the protection of their senior officers and leaders, even though the British had suffered a slight failure of imagination in that regard. He didn’t waste his time staring at the pictures on the walls, but looking at the man staring back at him with wild eyes, Clement Atlee himself.

Atlee looked as if he were grasping for words, his eyes flicking desperately to the woman beside him — Skorzeny knew that she was his wife — and the handful of other people in the bunker. Lord Halifax should have been there as well, but he’d been delayed, and had ended up being killed apart from the others. There was no time for sentimentality or even respect; he lifted his weapon, sighted carefully on Atlee’s head as his wife began to scream, and then fired a single shot into the Prime Minister’s head. Atlee toppled backwards as Skorzeny’s men continued the shooting, picking off the British leaders and their staff; Atlee’s wife caught a stray bullet through the arm and her screams just got louder and louder. Skorzeny finally smacked her on the head to silence her.

He ran through a quick check; most of their targets had been eliminated. The rampage through the other parts of the Downing Street complex had killed most of the others, although there were a couple who remained unaccounted for in the bloody slaughter. Leaving Atlee’s wife behind, Skorzeny led his men back to the shaft and back up the ropes, heading out of the building as quickly as possible. Their time was about to run out… and the British would be out for blood.

All they had to do now was escape.