The Twilight of Empire: Starting from Dunkirk

Chapter 173 The Burning of Calais and the Father of the Panzer Troopers in His Pajamas

1940年8月25日，深夜23：30。法国北部，加来海岸，德国陆军第19装甲军临时营地。

The sea breeze swept across the wide beach, and under the starlight, the port of Calais and the surrounding coastline presented an extremely eerie, even somewhat unsettling, sense of density.

More than two thousand inland barges and flat-bottomed cargo ships that originally transported coal on the Rhine or in the Ruhr region had their bows removed by German engineers in an extremely brutal manner, and simple wooden gangplanks were welded on.

They were painted with gray military-grade anti-rust paint and anchored end to end with iron chains in the near sea and harbor. With the rise and fall of the tides in the strait, these wooden shells, which were completely incapable of ocean voyages, creaked and groaned, as if they might disintegrate at any moment in the microwaves.

General Heinz Guderian has just finished an extremely bad day.

Strictly speaking, this armored warfare genius has been in a depressed mood ever since the grand commissioning ceremony in Berlin last month.

The good news is that, thanks to his brilliant record of commanding armored forces to advance across the plains of Poland and France, leaving most of the Wehrmacht generals far behind, he was promoted from General of Armored Forces to General (Generaloberst).

The bad news was that he didn't get promoted to marshal; he remained a general. Undeniably, at his level, whether he gained or lost a star didn't affect his ability to command an army group or even an army corps via radio from his command vehicle. Marshal was more of an honorary title; the true extent of his power depended on his specific position and the specific troops he commanded.

But this did not stop the dictator with a small mustache in the Berlin Chancellor's office from deliberately disgusting him with this seniority-based system. Most importantly, he was indeed disgusted by it.

At that glittering ceremony in Berlin, the Führer bestowed the title of Reichsmarschall upon twelve men. Those veteran Junker generals who had been pointing fingers at maps from the rear and even tried to hinder his advance in the early stages of the campaign, all accepted the marshal's baton adorned with the golden eagle emblem with satisfaction. But he, the man who had personally driven tank tracks to the English Channel and truly created the miracle of Blitzkrieg, was deliberately excluded from the list of marshals.

In terms of military achievements and seniority, he was no less capable than those people.

This kind of defensiveness and suppression from the Supreme Command left Guderian feeling deeply humiliated and exhausted.

Lying in his tent, where the sea breeze was howling, Guderian tossed and turned, when suddenly, without warning, the scene from the port of Le Havre a month earlier flashed into his mind.

Before calmly retreating with his remaining troops, the British commander named Arthur Sterling arrogantly left a note specifically for him in the underground command room.

He still remembers the extremely arrogant words on it: "I sincerely hope that one day in the future I will also have the opportunity to address you as 'Your Excellency Field Marshal'—if that hysterical corporal with the mustache in Berlin allows it. After all, a soldier as excellent as you should not be buried in the roar of a madman."

At the time, Guderian simply sneered dismissively after reading it, regarding it as a pointless psychological warfare tactic and bluff by the defeated.

It wasn't until Rommel was actually transferred to that godforsaken desert in North Africa that the first part of the prophecy on the note came to be.

When reality slapped him hard across the face, Guderian suddenly opened his eyes again in the darkness, a fine layer of cold sweat seeping down his back.

That damn Sterling!

That British commander in London, that capitalist businessman reeking of money, even though he was not at the center of power in Germany, had already clearly and accurately grasped the corrupt political ecology within the Third Reich and the high-level people's attempts to exclude him!

In that man's eyes, he, the father of the armored forces who was renowned throughout Europe, was nothing more than a toy that could be predicted and interpreted at will.

Damn it!

With this bitter feeling of being suppressed by political enemies and completely seen through by his mortal enemies across the strait, he was forced this afternoon to inspect the inland river barges he called "floating coffins." This brought his bad mood to its absolute peak.

This directly led to his current situation: this once-arrogant armored warfare genius is now lying in a command tent less than 500 meters from the coastline, tossing and turning on a simple field folding bed.

For Guderian, being able to relocate his command tent so close to the front-line soldiers was a long-lost psychological comfort. Just over a month earlier, during the Battle of France, he had left behind a scene that still haunted him.

It leads to a sense of shame and psychological trauma.

That near-death experience, known as the "Ahe Horror," directly led Guderian to develop a near-hysterical caution regarding the location of the forward command post during the subsequent two weeks of fighting. He was hesitant to move the command post forward, fearing that it would be crushed into mincemeat again by those steel monsters that appeared out of nowhere.

Rommel even privately mocked Heinz, wondering when he had become so cautious. This was a stain on his reputation.

But now, things are finally different.

The French mainland had been largely cleared, and the arrogant Gallic rooster had bowed its head to the Führer. The British expeditionary force at Dunkirk abandoned all its heavy weapons on the beach and fled back to the island like stray dogs.

The mainland is safe, absolutely safe. Although the fighting is raging across the strait, that's nothing for that idiot Göring to worry about. The British tanks won't just cross the river out of thin air. He can sleep soundly—this is a rare source of psychological comfort for him.

So Guderian finally let down his guard and prepared to huddle together with his soldiers, listening to the sound of the waves as he fell asleep.

Despite his extreme aversion to the sea and to the junk the German Navy had prepared for Operation Sea Lion.

Just as Guderian was cursing the navy in his half-asleep state.

"Buzzing—buzzing"

A deep, dense roar, like the convergence of a swarm of millions of bees, suddenly rose from the dark sky across the strait.

It came from the horizon. It wasn't just one or two night reconnaissance planes; the low-frequency noise that caused air resonance was an acoustic monster that could only be produced by hundreds or thousands of high-powered aircraft engines running simultaneously.

"Air raid alarm! Enemy aircraft approaching! Sound the alarm!"

The piercing sirens of air raid sirens and the frantic shouts of anti-aircraft artillerymen echoed outside the tent. Huge beams of searchlight began sweeping erratically across the dark night sky.

Guderian sat bolt upright in his cot, his soldier's instincts instantly waking him. Before he could even put on his general's coat, a blinding white flash of light exploded in the sky.

That was definitely not the instantaneous, expanding red flame of an ordinary high-explosive bomb, but an extremely pale, intensely chemically reactive magnesium light that was impossible to look at directly. The entire Calais coast was illuminated as if it were daytime in that instant.

Immediately afterwards, hundreds and thousands of tiny, deadly bright spots, like a meteor shower thrown down by God, fell densely from the clouds.

The 300 tons of thermite incendiary bombs that Sterling Arsenal had been working day and night to produce and dump have arrived.

"Boom!"

A hexagonal thermite bomb, weighing only a few kilograms, struck precisely the roof of an inland river barge moored in the harbor. There was no deafening explosion, no flying shrapnel, only an extremely violent roar of a chemical reaction that seemed to tear the air apart.

The mixture of magnesium powder and iron oxide filled inside the projectile is instantly ignited by the firing fuse.

Physics and chemistry combined to unleash their most brutal industrial allure that night. This devilish formula, specifically developed to destroy heavy industrial facilities and urban buildings, caused its combustion temperature to soar to a terrifying 2500 degrees Celsius in less than two seconds.

The blinding white light from the aluminothermic reaction and the dark red molten iron flowing like lava instantly melted through the barge's pitiful wooden deck. The thick tar coating that was originally used to protect the hull from corrosion and water seepage became the perfect accelerant at this moment.

"Fire! Fire! Quick, get the fire hose!"

Awakened, the German sailors and engineers ran desperately across the deck, trying to extinguish the palm-sized burning pipes with the harbor's high-pressure water cannons.

But this is precisely the most insidious design feature of this incendiary bomb—water is utterly incapable of extinguishing this chemical flame that contains its own oxidizer. Besides instantly vaporizing, triggering a violent steam explosion, and scattering the dark red molten iron like projectiles, the remaining seawater molecules are violently torn apart under the extreme heat. The hydrogen-oxygen bonds are forcibly broken, releasing massive amounts of hydrogen and oxygen.

"Bang!"

That was an even more violent secondary combustion of hydrogen and oxygen. Fireballs mixed with molten iron sprayed everywhere, instantly burning through the flesh and blood of the German soldiers' uniforms.

In less than ten minutes, the entire port of Calais was transformed into a giant, boiling cauldron of fire at sea.

Two thousand closely linked wooden barges were utterly helpless against this targeted massacre. Fueled by the fierce winds of the English Channel, the most devastating burning of camps in the history of World War II took place.

The fire spread faster than anyone had imagined.

A barge caught fire, and flames, traveling along the connecting iron chains and gangplanks, could engulf three adjacent ships within seconds. German sailors anchored on board didn't even have time to decide to jump overboard before being roasted alive by the intense heat exceeding two thousand degrees Celsius. The deck's cargo of ammunition and barrels of gasoline were detonated in succession, the shockwaves of the explosions hurling burning logs into the air, which then rained down like fire.

Those burning ships whose anchor chains had been broken by the intense heat became true sea monsters. They drifted on the sea, blindly crashing into other ships and port facilities that had not yet caught fire, spreading hellish flames across the entire northern coastline of France.

This visually stunning destruction even cast a terrifying, blood-red reflection on the White Bank of Dover, thirty miles across the Channel. It was a death blockade drawn by the British Empire using chemical agents.

But this was merely the prelude to Arthur Sterling, the Royal Air Force, and the retaliation that London and Free France would take tonight.

"BOOM!!!"

Just as Guderian rushed out of the command tent, staring dumbfounded and his mind blank at the towering flames stretching for kilometers in the harbor, a row of neat, orderly lights suddenly and without warning appeared on the dark sea five kilometers from the coastline.

A huge yellow flash, like a thunderstorm.

The color reminded Guderian of the scene when the British fleet bombarded Le Havre.

Two seconds later, a piercing howl, as if the air were being torn apart by violent mass, engulfed the entire beach, like hundreds of fully loaded steam trains simultaneously sounding their whistles.

"Naval guns! Large-caliber naval guns! It's the British fleet! Take cover!!"

Guderian's adjutant let out a desperate, distorted scream. He lunged at his superior and slammed the renowned armored general, who was famous throughout Europe, down into the cold sand pit.

The Royal Navy's 7th Destroyer Flotilla, including the light cruiser HMS Galatea, stealthily approached the doorstep of Calais under the cover of night and the "perfect illumination" provided by the incendiary bombs from the bombers in the sky.

Behind this squadron were three enormous, dark shadows, like steel mountains at sea.

Those were the pride of the Free French Navy—one or two Dunkerque-class battleships, and the Richelieu battleship, which had just been completed and symbolized the pinnacle of French naval industry.

For the German army, which had been rampaging across the land and considered itself invincible, the main gun barrage from the Royal Navy and French battleships was a completely unconventional and utterly devastating blow that defied the norms of land warfare.

The British Empire's six 152mm main guns and dozens of 120mm naval guns were the first to begin rapid firing. At this distance, they didn't need to aim at all; they only needed to empty their ammunition magazines.

Immediately afterwards, the Free French fleet roared in revenge.

The iconic two quadruple 330mm main guns on the forecastle of the Dunkerque-class battleships fired first, followed by the deafening roar of the Richelieu's terrifying 380mm super-heavy main guns.

Then their dozens of secondary guns joined the chorus.

Tears streaming down their faces, French sailors loaded nearly a ton of high-explosive shells into their cannons. They aimed at their homeland's coastline, but they were firing at the German invaders who had trampled Paris.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

These steel hammers, imbued with terrifying kinetic energy, slammed into the 19th Armored Corps' camps, supply depots, and mudflats in parabolic arcs. Each 330mm shell that landed meant the creation of a massive crater, thirty meters in diameter and over ten meters deep.

When the 380mm main gun shells of the Richelieu struck the armored corps' assembly area, it was a localized tectonic movement.

A Panzer III tank parked on the mudflats was tossed into the air like a toy by the shockwave of a 380mm shell explosion, landing twisted into a burning lump of scrap metal.

A 152mm naval gun shell hit a piling of ammunition less than 50 meters from Guderian's command post.

The massive chain of explosions generated an unparalleled shockwave, directly ripping Guderian's windproof command tent, along with the mahogany map table, high-powered radio, and several staff officers who couldn't escape in time, dozens of meters into the air like rags, before turning to dust in the flames.

Mud, shrapnel, burning human remains, shattered pieces of wood from river barges, and road wheels from a Panzer IV tank flew through the air. The entire beach looked as if it had been put into a giant meat grinder and churned up wildly.

"General, run!" the adjutant roared.

This time, Guderian did not refuse. He began to run wildly on the beach, heading as far away from the coastline as possible.

The once-arrogant armored warfare genius Heinz Guderian, the general who brought despair to the Polish cavalry and brought collapse to the French Army High Command, was now experiencing the most humiliating moment of his military career, even more so than when he was chased by B1 tanks on the banks of the Aar River.

Because he got up too quickly when the air raid siren sounded, he didn't have time to put on his crisp, gray military uniform covered in medals, nor his always-shiny knee-high riding boots.

The creator of this blitzkrieg was wearing only a blue and white striped cotton onesie and a pair of soft-soled slippers.

Amidst the deafening roar of battleship main guns and the scorching bullets flying everywhere with a piercing whistle, Guderian, under the desperate cover of two loyal guards, trudged along the soft sand.

Sand filled his slippers, and his striped pajamas looked utterly forlorn in the sea breeze.

"Whoosh!!!"

A 380mm shell from the battleship Richelieu exploded on a sand dune more than 100 meters away from them.

The ground shook violently as if an 8-magnitude earthquake had struck, and the terrifying blast wave from the nearly one-ton warhead's explosion knocked the three men off their feet. The admiral tumbled and crawled into a huge crater, still smoldering from the recent bombing by the destroyer.

He took a deep bite of mud, his mouth filled with the salty taste of sea sand and the bitterness of gunpowder.

"Hermann Göring! You damned, lying, fat pig! What happened to the absolute air superiority you promised the Führer?!"

Ignoring the sand in Ye Chu's mouth, Guderian lay prone on the muddy, cratered beach, watching the landing barges being blown apart and scattered like target practice by naval guns. Enraged beyond reason, he pounded his fists furiously on the scorched sand: "Rayder! You idiot, only fit to play with toy boats in the bathtub! Where are your warships?! Where are your U-boats?! Are the most elite armored troops of the Greater German Empire meant to be dumped like garbage on this exposed beach, naked and exposed to the main guns of British and French battleships?!"

His roar was completely drowned out by the continuous explosions.

Under the relentless barrage of thermite bombs from bombers and the relentless, all-encompassing onslaught of heavy naval guns, the first wave of landing vehicles in "Operation Sea Lion," which Little Mustache had placed high hopes on to conquer Great Britain and even to carry the myth of the Third Reich's transoceanic expansion, was completely reduced to a stretch of burning wood and sunken scrap metal extending for over ten kilometers in just one hour.

Guderian knew that even if the Führer pulled out a gun and pointed it at his head, he would never allow even a single tank to drive onto this ship of death with no hope of survival.

August 26, 1940. Berlin, Germany, Reich Chancellery.

The man with the small mustache stood before the enormous desk made from a single piece of mahogany, his face as pale as a piece of cheap parchment. He clutched tightly in his hand a top-secret urgent battle report sent from the front lines in Calais, along with several high-resolution photographs taken by reconnaissance planes at dawn, still clearly showing towering flames and seas of wreckage.

The scene in the photo is shocking.

The "steel bridges that will soon be laid across the strait," which he once boasted about to the world in his congressional speeches and to his ally Mussolini, are now nothing but a pile of black charcoal floating on the sea.

Guderian, the empire's proudest armored warfare weapon, had his command post razed to the ground. The entire 19th Panzer Corps suffered an unprecedented and devastating blow in terms of equipment and morale.

More importantly, aside from the loss of military equipment, what Little Mustache found most intolerable was this open, blatant, and transatlantic attack and humiliation, which meant that his Sea Lion program was a joke.

Last night, the British didn't bomb the arsenals hidden deep in Germany, nor the airfields of immense tactical value. Instead, with a spectacular and brutal inferno, coupled with the battleships' heavy bombardment, they burned away their inviolable authority as conquerors of Europe in front of the entire world.

This was even more humiliating to him than the last time when dozens of bombers dropped hundreds of bombs on several blocks of Berlin.

His strategy needs to change.

"The Butchers—Arthur Sterling, that profit-driven capitalist, and Winston Churchill, that alcohol-crazed, savage butcher!"

A sickly flush rose on the bearded man's pale face, and his lips trembled violently with extreme anger.

He paced hysterically behind his large desk, his military boots making a dull thud on the carpet.

Suddenly, like a wild beast out of control, he swung his arm and violently swept the extremely expensive, huge globe on the table, which symbolized global hegemony, to the ground.

The globe crashed onto the marble floor with a hollow cracking sound, splitting in two along the Prime Meridian.

He turned around abruptly and glared fiercely at Air Force Commander-in-Chief Herman Göring, who was standing to the side trembling and barely daring to breathe, and Field Marshal William Keitel, Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command.

"This is the result you promised me?! Mr. Meyer?!"

The bearded man strode up to Göring, his finger almost poking the Imperial Marshal's terrified, sweat-drenched, thick nose. Spit landed on Göring's face, but the latter didn't dare wipe it away: "Two weeks ago you confidently assured me that your Condor Legion had reduced the Royal Air Force to near death! If they really were just barely alive, how could they have dropped three hundred tons of incendiary bombs over our armored forces?! How dare they brazenly sail their warships to Calais and bombard my most prized tank units with their battleship main guns?!"

"Your Excellency—please calm down, it was an extremely despicable nighttime raid—" Göring pulled out a handkerchief, frantically wiping the cold sweat from his forehead and neck, trying to explain incoherently, "Our nighttime air defense network is still under construction, our night fighter squadrons are still testing their radar equipment—"

"I don't want to hear your disgusting excuses! I only want results!"

The bearded man interrupted him rudely, his eyes burning with an irrational, mad rage driven entirely by his thwarted pride.

Arthur, far across the strait, had his plan, that calculated psychological spear, perfectly strike at the dictator's most vulnerable spot.

Arthur was certain that Little Mustache would never swallow this insulting rebuke.

"Since the British don't want to fight a fair war according to military rules, and since they like to use incendiary bombs to burn our ships and destroy the honor of the Empire, then we will respond to them with the same means, ten times the fire!"

The bearded man strode to the huge European military map on the wall. His slightly trembling hand bypassed the dense network of British front-line airfields marked with red crosses in Kent and Sussex, and without hesitation, slammed it heavily onto the heart of Great Britain.

"Stop bombing those dilapidated runways overgrown with weeds! Stop arguing with those metal radar stations! It's pointless, it can't wash away the humiliation the Empire suffered last night!"

The man with the small mustache turned his head, stared intently at Göring, and issued the decisive order that would forever alter the course of World War II: "From today onward, the Luftwaffe changes all its strategic objectives! Drop all its bomber wings, all its bombs, and all its incendiary bombs on London!"

"I want to see London burn! I want to see their docks, their Houses of Parliament, their financial district reduced to ashes! I want to wipe their capital off the world map to atone for the destruction of Calais! The bomber force shall not stop until London is leveled!"

London, August 26.

As night fell, the piercing sound of air raid sirens echoed throughout the vast city. Beams of searchlight swayed wildly through the clouds as civilians, driven by police, poured into the deep subway stations in terror.

Standing before the observation window of the sturdy, thirty-meter-deep underground defensive bunker at Dover White Cliffs, Arthur changed into a meticulously tailored dark gray three-piece suit.

He held a glass of single malt whisky from the Scottish Highlands in his hand, gazing coldly across the Channel.

Although separated by thirty miles of sea, the embers left by last night's fire in Calais still faintly glowed in the darkness.

A senior intelligence officer strode up to him and handed him a coded telegram from the German High Command that had just been intercepted and decrypted by the Bletchley Park decryption team.

Arthur took the telegram and quickly scanned its contents in the dim light.

Everything was exactly as he had predicted.

The German 2nd and 3rd Air Fleets have received the latest instructions from Berlin: completely abandon the suppression tactics against the 11th Group's front-line airfields, concentrate all attack sequences, and target a large area of ​​London.

Arthur's face showed no joy of victory, nor the excitement of an ordinary person who had escaped from a desperate situation.

His eyes remained as deep and cold as a stagnant pool.

He was fully aware of the heavy price behind this brief telegram.

The price will be that tens of thousands of ordinary Londoners will have to spend the next few months, or even half a year, in hellish, long nights in dark, burning ruins and the fear of death.

London’s buildings will be destroyed, and the Thames will be stained with blood.

But he knew even better that the homeland air defense network in the Axbridge underground bunker, which was on the verge of complete collapse due to the repeated bombing of the runway and the depletion of elite pilots, was finally, on the brink of death, turned the wheel of fate around with hundreds of tons of incendiary bombs and the main guns of the Free French Navy's battleships.

The Royal Air Force airfield is saved.

Those surviving Spitfires and Hurricanes could finally rest safely on the runway to refuel, and the pilots could finally close their eyes and get a good night's sleep in their dormitories, free from the sound of bombing.

At this moment, the scales of war tipped in an extremely cruel manner.

Arthur slowly raised his whiskey glass, offering a very gentlemanly and gentle toast to the turbulent English Channel, as if also to the tyrannical dictator across the channel who was in a fit of impotent rage.

"Strategic replacement complete."

He downed the spicy, amber-colored liquid in his glass in one gulp.

Besides the ordinary people, he himself, his arsenal, and the hundreds of thousands of workers at Sterling Heavy Industries also stood on this land that was about to turn into purgatory.

He turned around and slammed the empty glass down on the table with a cold, resounding clang.

"The bricks and citizens of London bought us the most expensive time of the war. Notify all arsenals that have moved underground to cancel all leave and run the assembly line gears at full speed."

Arthur strode toward the bunker's communications room, his eyes filled with a chilling killing intent: "Since the Germans are going to waste their bombs on our rooftops, then we'll use this time to produce three times the number of Spitfires and Hurricanes. I'm going to use a massive number of fighter jets to wear these Germans down over London."

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