German guns shell Dover

Shortly before noon on 22 August 1940 the seamen of a British coastal convoy codenamed “Totem”, sailing west through the Strait of Dover, saw columns of water tens of metres high rising around their ships. They were not falling from the sky, for there were no German aircraft over the convoy. The ships were being fired on by heavy guns emplaced on the French coast, on the far side of the strait, several dozen kilometres away. The shelling lasted about an hour and a half, and in the evening the Germans shifted their fire to Dover itself. That same day a British gun on the cliffs above the town replied for the first time. For the people of Kent a war had begun that would last more than four years.

Guns above the strait

After the defeat of France the Germans stood on the narrowest point of the English Channel. Between Calais and Dover there is a little over thirty kilometres – less than the range of the largest guns available to the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine. Coastal artillery was to play an important part in the planned landing. On 10 July the Wehrmacht High Command passed on Hitler’s instruction that every available heavy battery should be emplaced on the Calais–Cap Gris-Nez–Boulogne sector to cover the crossing from the front and the flanks. Directive No. 16 of 16 July repeated this among the conditions for Operation Sea Lion: strong coastal artillery was to dominate the belt of sea off the coast and, together with minefields, close the strait to Royal Navy warships. From 22 July the emplacements were built by the Todt Organisation, the state construction organisation headed by the engineer Fritz Todt.

The army’s railway guns were the first to be ready. On the tracks between Wimereux, Marquise and Calais, on sidings cut into the dunes and the hills of the Boulonnais, several dozen heavy guns were installed, among them 280 mm K5 guns and long-range 210 mm K12s, successors to the “Paris Gun” of the First World War. Because a railway gun could be traversed only together with its entire carriage, turntables were fitted at the ends of the sidings. Such guns were suitable for shelling targets on land, but they performed poorly against fast-moving ships: they traversed slowly, took a long time to load and had unsuitable ammunition.

The heavy naval batteries of the Kriegsmarine, set up from the end of July, were better suited to engaging ships. The first, the “Siegfried” battery near Audinghen, south of Cap Gris-Nez, initially had a single 380 mm naval gun; it later received four and was renamed the “Todt” battery. Next to it stood the “Grosser Kurfürst” battery with four 280 mm guns, and by mid-September the “Friedrich August” battery near Boulogne (three 305 mm guns) and the “Prinz Heinrich” and “Oldenburg” batteries near Calais were also ready. Fire was directed by aerial observers and by German radars on the headlands of Blanc-Nez and Alprech.

The first shells and the Totem convoy

The first shells had crossed the strait ten days earlier. At about eleven in the morning on 12 August the railway guns near Wimereux fired ranging rounds at Dover, Folkestone and Deal. In Dover the shells destroyed several houses and injured their occupants; in Folkestone one house was destroyed and several dozen damaged. This was the same day on which the Luftwaffe struck at British radar stations and airfields on the eve of Eagle Day, so amid the general din of the raids the shelling went almost unnoticed.

On 22 August the Germans opened fire on shipping for the first time. The Totem convoy was just passing Dover when shells began to burst around the ships. According to the British online chronicle Battle of Britain Diary, the German guns fired for about eighty minutes and loosed off 145 rounds; accounts differ as to when the firing began, giving either nine or eleven in the morning. A shell took more than a minute to fly across the strait. The escorting warships laid a smokescreen and the convoy sailed on. No ship was hit. Several shells fell into the outer harbour at Dover. Later that day the convoy was attacked by German aircraft, which were engaged by British fighters. In the evening – for roughly three-quarters of an hour, according to some accounts – the German guns shelled Dover itself. There were injuries and damage, but the sources do not agree on the exact number of casualties that evening.

Winnie and Pooh

The British had nothing to answer with. When the Germans reached the coast in the spring of 1940, there was not a single gun on the English side capable of reaching France. Winston Churchill, who visited the Kent coast, personally demanded that heavy guns be set up on the cliffs around Dover. The first was a 14-inch (356 mm) naval gun, a spare barrel intended for the battleship King George V, then under construction, fitted to a mounting from the aircraft carrier Furious and set up in a field near the village of St Margaret’s at Cliffe, east of Dover. It was manned by a detachment of the Royal Marines Siege Regiment, which had arrived in Dover at the beginning of July. The gun was named “Winnie”, after the Prime Minister’s nickname. According to the Dover Museum it was ready for action on 7 August, but received permission to fire its first round only on 22 August. That day “Winnie” fired across to the French side, aiming at the German batteries. It was the first British shell fired from England at the Continent. According to an account by its crew, it slightly damaged an emplacement and wounded one soldier.

A second gun of the same type, ready later, was named “Pooh”. The pair “Winnie and Pooh” was a play on Winnie-the-Pooh, the bear of A. A. Milne’s stories; every Briton got the joke. Both guns, however, loaded slowly, were inaccurate and were good only for counter-battery fire at the limit of their range. They could not fire effectively at ships. In the years that followed, therefore, Churchill had further batteries built near Dover and manned by the Royal Artillery: a 6-inch (152 mm) battery at Fan Bay, a 9.2-inch (234 mm) battery at South Foreland and two 15-inch (381 mm) guns at Wanstone, named “Clem” (after Clement Attlee) and “Jane”.

Hellfire Corner

The stretch of sea and coast between Dover and Folkestone soon became known as “Hellfire Corner”. The name came from the previous war, when British soldiers had used it for a crossroads near Ypres that the German guns kept under constant fire. Now it fitted Kent. Dover was a target for air raids, fighters battled over the strait, barrage balloons hung in the air, and from August 1940 shells flew over the town as well. The inhabitants took shelter in caves and tunnels cut into the chalk cliffs, where during the frequent alerts they spent long hours.

The German shelling had little bearing on the Battle of Britain, which was fought in the air, but it was linked to it through the invasion plan. The guns above the strait were one of the few parts of Sea Lion that the Germans managed to get ready in time. They forced British convoys to pass through the strait at night or under a smokescreen, and the civilian crews of small merchant ships, as historians of British coastal shipping write, feared them more than aircraft and torpedo boats. At times they refused to sail from Southend, where the convoys were assembled. In those same days the Germans declared a total blockade of the British Isles, and the guns above the strait were its nearest instrument, visible from the shore.

Four years of shelling

The artillery duel across the Strait of Dover went on until the autumn of 1944. Contrary to British fears, the German guns proved of little use against shipping. According to figures cited by the British historian Nick Hewitt, over two years they fired on roughly one convoy in five passing through the strait, loosing off a few dozen shells on average each time, and until the summer of 1944 they did not sink a single ship. Only in June 1944 was the transport Sambut, carrying troops to Normandy, hit and sunk. In 1942 the Germans added the Lindemann battery (PL) near Sangatte, with three 406 mm guns, and the batteries above the strait became part of the Atlantic Wall. In February 1942 the British batteries near Dover fired in vain at the German battleships forcing their way up the Channel in Operation Cerberus.

It was Dover that suffered most from the shelling. According to the town’s records, cited by the museum and by local historians, 2,226 shells fell on the town between 1940 and 1944, and several hundred more on the surrounding area. More than three thousand alerts were sounded, more than ten thousand buildings were damaged, and bombs and shells together killed 216 civilians in Dover. Folkestone and Deal were shelled too, and fragments of the largest shells were found as far away as Chatham, several dozen kilometres inland. On the last day of the shelling, 26 September 1944, five people were killed, among them 63-year-old Patience Ransley, who had taken refuge in a tunnel cut into the cliff. A few days later the batteries near Calais and Cap Gris-Nez were captured by the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division in Operation Undergo. The Mayor of Dover was given a flag captured at a German battery as a memento.

The shelling of 22 August 1940 thus opened an artillery duel that lasted more than four years. Militarily it changed little, but it showed how close to England Hitler now stood: the enemy could now reach her not only from the air and the sea but also from the land on the far side of the strait, and shells falling without warning on the streets of Dover became part of everyday life for the rest of the war in Europe.