After Dunkirk
Lee Jackson
AFTER DUNKIRK
Copyright © 2020 by Lee Jackson.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Severn River Publishing
www.SevernRiverPublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-64875-028-1 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-64875-029-8 (Hardback)
Contents
Also by Lee Jackson
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue
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Thanks for Reading
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Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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Vortex: Berlin
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Target: New York
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Robert Gordon Hall
You were one hell of a pilot.
Your family and friends are proud of you
and miss you.
RIP
“We really ought to be waterskiing!”
Prologue
June 9, 1940
Sark Island, Guernsey Bailiwick, English Channel Islands
The Dame of the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel hurried from her home onto Rue de la Seigneurie for a better view of the northeastern horizon. Far out over the water, black smoke rose to the sky in huge billowing clouds. She knew fully what caused them: the good citizens of Normandy had blown up their oil storage tanks, an early act of resistance to the armies of Adolf Hitler, Führer of Germany.
Five days ago, the British Royal Navy, in a herculean effort, had evacuated the British Expeditionary Force, commonly called the BEF, and large units of the French army in a ten-day evacuation of over three hundred thousand troops at Dunkirk. They had faced overwhelming pressure from Nazi forces that had flanked the Maginot Line and descended into the north of France in a blistering blitzkrieg. The German divisions pushed south along the Atlantic coast in a wide swath to overrun and control the northern and western regions of France, and threatened Paris.
Hitler would no doubt set a priority on occupying Sark and the other islands belonging to Great Britain in the Channel simply for the propaganda value of taking British territory. And Normandy was only twenty-five miles across the waters.
1
One day earlier
Dunkirk, France
Jeremy Littlefield held his breath, a near-impossible feat after crawling in whatever shallow ground he could find in the low hills and dunes above Dunkirk’s flat beaches. He scrunched under a small outcropping of sand held in place by protruding roots of scraggly vegetation, willing his body to meld into the space he had hurriedly carved at its base.
Just as he pulled in his legs, his back to the crumbly wall of sand whose grains already worked their way between his sweat-soaked blouse and skin, he heard men above him speaking in German. He could not make out how many there were—at least two, maybe three—but they did not seem to be searching for him. On the contrary, these soldiers he had barely avoided seemed to be casually looking out to sea.
Jeremy had used every bit of cover and concealment in his headlong flight to the beach for one purpose: survival, ahead of the German behemoth that pursued the escaping British and French armies. Out of ammunition, the bolt of his rifle broken, he had lost the weapon as he lunged from one hiding place to the next through a wretched night of crackling small arms fire, blasts from tanks obliterating another of their opposite number, brilliant flashes from artillery breaking the darkness, and then the whistle of projectiles followed by ear-splitting concussions until he emerged at dawn among the dunes and furrows leading down to the shore.
Spread before him, the carnage of war assaulted his senses with sights of dismembered bodies, separated arms and legs, animals caught in unworldly repose, crumbling rooftops, cratered roads, and every sort of vehicle cast at odd angles amid the stench of torn and scorched flesh, all under an overcast sky.
Jeremy’s hope, one he expected to be futile, was the same as that of thousands of soldiers who had protected the evacuation and fled to the beach for want of any other alternative to avoid capture: maybe there’s one last boat to take me home to England.
Now, despite the voices overhead, curiosity overcame him to see what remained of the British and French armies that had been trapped there. Far in the distance along the shore, lines of abandoned cars, trucks, tanks, and field artillery vehicles were set in well-ordered ranks stretching into the gently lapping wavelets, with some buried halfway up their wheels in the sand. Rifles leaned against cars and trucks. Boxloads of ammunition had been stacked in neat rows, the machine guns they accompanied still looking menacing.
As the murmur of voices above Jeremy continued, he looked across the vast expanse of sand marked with the patterns of huge formations of soldiers who had waited anxiously to be rescued over nine hair-raising days while being shelled by Hitler’s armies or strafed or bombed by Hermann Göring’s air force.
For indiscernible reasons, Hitler had stopped his ground forces short of finishing off the escaping British and French troops of Operation Dynamo, and he had held back as the flotilla of small boats, yachts, and warships loaded desperate soldiers onto their decks and sailed
