harbour, it was the command post and nerve-centre of the Channel war. It was commanded by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who had Bobby Constable-Roberts as his RAF liaison officer and Captain Day as Navy liaison officer. Also under his command was Brigadier Raw, who was in charge of the coastal artillery.
Nora Smith and the other girls slept and ate underground and sometimes a week went past without their seeing daylight. Due on the afternoon shift in Dover Castle starting at 1 p.m., she was enjoying a much-needed morning off when the double-siren went off giving warning of imminent shelling.
At this period of the war shell warnings were almost a daily occurrence in Dover. Six times in succession she had tried to see
As Ciliax's battleships began steaming through the narrowest part of the Channel, Nora Smith left her meal unfinished and started running up the hill towards the Castle. Normally it took nearly half an hour to walk that mile- long steep slope. This time she did it in ten minutes.
She found the morning-shift ATS girls at the plotting table busily marking the position of the German battleships on the grid maps with chinagraph pencils. Although different plots came in from radar every three minutes the girls working at the large table were not sure what they were plotting. All they knew was that something very big was coming through the Channel. Some of them thought it might be the start of the invasion. Although the morning-shift girls were shortly due for relief they kept on plotting and could not be interrupted. So Nora Smith decided to make herself useful and went off to bring them cups of tea.
The place was in an uproar. The ten-line switchboard was completely jammed and everyone was shouting at once. Six or seven doors were flung open — a thing no one had ever seen before as most of them led to secret rooms. High-ranking officers darted in and out. Others rushed to the windows to look out to sea. All anyone could see was a swirling mist.
Admiral Ramsay kept dashing from his own room to the plotting room where the girls were working. Often hurrying people fell over the Admiral's two bulldogs.
Much of this confusion was caused by the primitive communication arrangements at Dover Castle. The Army plotting room, which directed the coastal guns, was five minutes' walk on the other side of the Castle from the Naval operations room. There was no direct telephone line and everything had to be channelled through signals. If signals were busy, this led to a delay. If a secret message came over the teleprinter in code, messengers had to walk with it as fast as they could through the tunnels to Naval H.Q., which caused further hold-ups.
Also there was very little co-operation between the three services. For instance, although Flt.-Lt. Kidd's RAF radar at Swingate was better equipped than the coastal gunners, it could not transmit any information direct to them. Some of the girls even had maps with the grids wrongly placed. One officer complained of this but no one took any notice of him.
In the middle of this confusion at Dover Castle sat Brigadier Cecil Whitfield Raw, studying the first radar reports. A former accountant who had risen as a Territorial to the highest rank normally available to a non-regular, he was the Commander of 12 Corps Coastal Artillery.
In spite of General Martini's attempt to jam the British radar sets totally, they were now plotting the battleships' course accurately. These were the K-sets which had displaced the M-sets, and their longer wavelengths — since the shorter the wavelength the greater the accuracy.
The South Foreland battery had a K-type radar set which had just been installed. As its 'blips' continued to track the battleships, Admiral Ramsay told Raw to 'Engage when ready.' Raw gave a 'Take post' order to South Foreland's four 9.2s — the only guns capable of engaging the battleships. They were all he had. The much-needed 15-inch battery at Wanstone was not yet completed and the 14-inch guns were useless for this type of target. Although they could reach the ships, they were not tied to the control system and with their slow rate of traverse they could not keep up with a speeding battleship. At their rate of fire, there would only be time for each 14-inch gun to fire one round on a predetermined position— and it was a million-to-one chance that they would hit anything.
Nor was Raw too optimistic about the 9.2 guns' contribution to the action. For they had not completed their first firing practices. Also it was the first time they — or any other guns — had ever been fired by radar control. As he waited for the moment to open fire, Rrigadier Raw also thought that the 9.2s firing at their extreme range of 34,000 yards — twenty-two miles — might not have much effect against the heavy armour of the great ships.
On this misty, cold morning the 9.2 Battery was doing practice drills. The plotting officer, Second Lt. Dennis Hagger, a wholesale grocer in civilian life, was in his operations post on the cliffs by the South Foreland lighthouse. For two weeks, he and his fellow gunner officers had been hearing rumours that the German battleships were going to try and force a passage through the Channel. The rumours were so persistent that officers, not wishing to miss their first chance of firing their heavy guns in anger, cancelled their leave. But it had begun to look very like the cry of 'Wolf.' So when a klaxon sounded giving Brigadier Raw's signal for action stations, Hagger thought it was a false alarm. Telling his gunners to continue their practice drill session, he picked up the telephone and queried the order with his battery commander, Major Guy Huddlestone, who barked, 'This is the real thing. Take post!'
It was three minutes after noon. The
At 12:10 p.m. their K-type radar showed the battleships 27,000 yards away coming up towards Cap Gris Nez. The clear 'blips' on the battery's radar showed their course and estimated speed as twenty-two knots — eight knots below their real speed. As the battery radar was now clearly following the ships, Brigadier Raw gave the order to fire.
At 12:19 p.m. Huddlestone fired two shells. The flight of these heavy armour-piercing projectiles took fifty- five seconds. When they burst with a splash and a plume of yellowish-black smoke behind the third ship,
Everyone aboard the German ships waited tensely for the heavier attacks which they felt must come. Luckily for the Germans, the mist which had cleared for a brief interval, revealing a glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover, now closed again.
The German crews saw flashes from the cliffs and several splashes to port. Then came the crunch of more heavy shells bursting. Although their shots fell unevenly and short of the ships, it meant to the German commanders that there was no doubt at last they had been detected. As they steamed on through the narrowest part of the Channel, they began to swing violently on their course to baffle the British.
Brigadier Raw, looking through captured Italian binoculars, tried unavailingly to watch where their shells were landing. The weather was too thick to see anything from the cliffs but after a minute came the rumbling echo of the shells exploding. Like his Brigadier, Major Huddlestone, the officer commanding the 9.2s, also tried to catch a glimpse of the battleships from his observation post. He too saw nothing but mist. As maximum visibility was less than five miles, Raw realized that the firing would have to be all done by radar. The problem that faced him was that there could be no observation of the 'fall of shot' by either sight or radar. For their radar could not indicate where their shells were landing.
Without seeing where they were falling, they could not make any accurate corrections. Were they on target? No one had fired heavy guns by radar before so it was difficult to know.
Martini's jamming, however, was not interfering with the K-sets and the echo of the battleships' course came in loud and clear. The K-sets began to track the German ships as they snaked to and fro. This looked as though the shells were landing near them.
Following the radar tracks, Huddlestone fired two more shots at 12:23 p.m. At 12:28 p.m., after another two shells had been fired and their explosions unobserved, Raw ordered Major Huddlestone to start firing full-battery four-gun salvoes without waiting for fall-of-shot reports.
A minute later came the crash of the first four shells fired together. A second salvo was fired at 12:30 p.m. Out of the mist came the rumble of heavy shells landing, but they were not followed by louder explosions indicating a hit. As it looked as though they were still missing the battleships, Raw ordered, 'Add 1,000 yards to the range.'
At 12:31 p.m., just as they were about to fire at this new range for the first time, extra 'blips' showed faintly on the screen. Radar had managed to pick up the second salvo, landing. These 'blips' clearly showed their shells were still falling short of the ships, so Raw shouted down the phone to Huddlestone, 'Add 1,000 yards.'
When this fourth salvo was fired, one of the new faint radar echoes showed a stronger 'blip' which seemed to
