Operation Traction

By Daniel James

Thirty years after James Hamilton was forcibly migrated to New Zealand as an orphan child, an unexpected inheritance draws him back to Cornwall, where he stumbles on a long-dormant WWII secret concealed in the shared memory of the small fishing village he once considered home.
Mystery deepens when James begins clearing out the cottage he has inherited and uncovers a bundle of letters that imply the owner of the cottage, a retired lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, participated in a clandestine operation that has remained suppressed in the core of the village and has direct links to James’s true identity.
Determined to get to the truth of his past, James digs into the background and context of the letters he’s found and it’s more disturbing than he ever imagined. His attempts to unravel the past reveal a shadowy world of British Intelligence, the French Maquis and Nazi sympathisers within Allied ranks.
Against the backdrop of WWII exploits spanning North Africa and France, Operation Traction is a story of divided loyalties and extreme courage. A story of love, of deceit and of sacrifice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528983310

Daniel James

Daniel James is the Bernardo Mendel Chair in Latin American History at Indiana University, and the author of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976 and Do�a Mar�a's Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political Identity, and co-editor of The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and before taking up the Mendel Chair at Indiana University, he taught at Yale University and Duke University.

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About the Author

Daniel James was born in Cornwall, raised on the Channel Island of Guernsey and relocated to New Zealand as a teenager. He has spent a large portion of his adult life globe-trotting.

Now semi-retired, Daniel can permit his lifelong interest in history and his vivid imagination, inspired by the cultures and places he has encountered, to run wild.

Daniel lives in New Zealand on the rural fringes of Auckland City with his wife in a home surrounded by native bush.

Operation Traction is his debut novel.

Dedication

To Jo, my travelling companion, for her eternal encouragement and patience.

Copyright Information ©

Daniel James 2020

The right of Daniel James to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, 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.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528983303 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528983310 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2020

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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20230214

Prologue

Krakow, Poland. 22 January, 1940.

There was a loud commotion in the courtyard—dogs barking, men shouting. Heavy jackbooted footsteps thundered on the cobbles and then on the stairs. A furious hammering on doors. The sound of people whimpering. Cries of terror.

Then it was their turn.

The urgent hammering on their door.

The chilling demand for them to come out.

Hadassah, her sisters, brother and mother were herded out into the apartment block’s inner courtyard, shoved roughly at the end of rifle butts.

Hadassah’s grandparents, who lived in an apartment two floors beneath them, were already there, cowed on their knees, surrounded by soldiers in field-grey uniforms pointing rifles at them. Her grandfather’s face was smeared with blood.

While their neighbours concealed themselves behind their curtains, locked their doors, and slunk into the dark recesses of their apartments, Hadassah, her siblings and her mother were forced to their knees alongside her grandparents. Two soldiers seized her grandfather and hauled him across the courtyard, his heels bouncing across the cobbles. Again, he was forced to his knees, his arms bent painfully behind his back and his forehead thrust to the ground. The Nazi officer, dressed in an impeccably-tailored black uniform, wearing a cap with a death’s head insignia, withdrew his revolver with a malicious expression and pointed it at the old man’s head.

A German soldier with a broad Slavic face interpreted the Nazi officer’s demand of Hadassah and her brother Ishmael. He said in Polish, ‘Agree, or your grandfather will be shot.’

Hadassah’s grandfather called out in Yiddish not to agree, his life was unimportant, he was old, and these beasts should be stood up to. He was not afraid to die.

The Nazi officer placed the barrel of his Luger pistol against grandfather’s neck and pulled the trigger.

The girls screamed. Hadassah’s grandmother and mother became hysterical. Her brother began to tremble uncontrollably. Hadassah shouted, ‘No.’ No, she would not serve the Gestapo.

As Hadassah’s grandfather’s blood ran between the cobblestones, the Nazi officer ordered two of his grim-faced soldiers to drag grandmother over to him. He placed his pistol behind her ear, and again the broad-faced soldier repeated his demands.

Hadassah’s grandmother closed her eyes. ‘Let me go with Isaac,’ she wept in Yiddish. ‘Let me die with Isaac.’

Hadassah again shouted, ‘No.’

The Nazi officer’s pistol barked. Grandmother’s head exploded, showering the huddled family in tissue and blood.

The horror.

The bestial savagery of what they were being subjected to overwhelmed them.

They cried, screaming in revulsion and fear.

They begged for mercy.

Again, the Nazi officer made his demand. This time, Hadassah’s mother was snatched by her hair and dragged to the officer’s black-booted feet. Her mother trembled and wept. Splattered with her own mother’s blood, she was at the point of madness.

‘No. No, no,’ the children begged.

The Nazi’s Luger, still smoking from the bullets already fired, barked again.

Hadassah’s will was broken. She was saying yes. ‘Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do what you ask.’

At the sound of his sister’s acquiescence, fifteen-year-old Ishmael, who was transitioning into manhood, flung himself at the officer. He wrapped his arms around the man’s legs and dragged him to the ground. Though hell-bent on revenging his mother, Ishmael’s gesture was futile, an uncontrolled fit of rage.

A rifle butt slammed into Ishmael’s kidney; he rolled away screaming in agony.

The Nazi officer scrambled to his feet, his face contorted in anger. Viciously, he swung a boot into Ishmael’s ribs. Again and again, he kicked him. In the head. In the face. Kicking out teeth. The sound of Ishmael’s bones breaking echoed around the courtyard. The Nazi’s face gleamed with sweat. He breathed heavily; his chest heaved with the effort.

Hadassah clung to her sisters. She pleaded, ‘No more. No more. I will do as you ask.’

Hadassah and her sisters were bundled into the back of a mottled grey van and driven away. They were led to cells in the basement of Krakow’s Wawel Castle, Poland’s symbol of national pride, just three kilometres from Hadassah’s home in the Jewish quarter. The ancient fortress Hadassah had visited as a child and gazed upon with pride and delight was now the headquarters of the Nazi Governor-General, Hans Frank.

The castle had been a place of beauty, of peace and calm, where her family had walked beneath its towering walls along the banks of the Vistula. Now, it was feared. Nazi flags flew from its parapets.

Hadassah was separated from her sisters and incarcerated in cell number 14, a small, grim room secured by a heavy wooden door, with just a chink of daylight coming from a tiny barred window at the top of one wall. As she looked around the cell, she noticed that the stone walls were covered with graffiti. Former prisoners had scratched or written inscriptions that conveyed a wide range of contrasting moods: defiance, despair, hope, anger.

For six weeks Hadassah remained in that filthy cell. Until one morning she was dragged out, screaming, and thrown into the back of an enclosed truck with small iron-barred windows. Her wrists were manacled and chained.

‘Where am I going? Where are you taking me? Where are my sisters?’ she screamed. Her tormentors ignored her. Fear engulfed her.

The truck’s doors clanged shut behind her, and, with a lurch, the truck began to move, rapidly picking up speed, bouncing over the rough cobbled roads, causing the cold steel manacles to bite into her wrists.

Hadassah cried out in agony and anguish.

***

Brittany, France. 30 December, 1943.

Illuminated by a feeble moon, Squadron Leader George Martel expertly flew his matte black Lysander in at treetop level.

It was a pickup sortie. A Moon Squadron mission. Straight in and straight out. No more than three minutes on the ground; he had done it dozens of times before.

George was piloting solo tonight, so he had to contend with reading the map balanced on his lap while looking out for the pinpricks of light from three hand-held torches that would guide him down. He dropped the fixed-wing monoplane in a tight low circuit.

There they were.

Three tiny beacons of light, quickly followed by the identifying code letter, flashed at him in Morse. George turned into the wind. The ground rushed up; his wheels bumped the thick frost-covered earth once, then settled in a perfect three-point landing. The thickly grassed field, barely three-hundred metres long, was firm, providing George with ideal landing conditions. Within moments he was taxiing to a halt. The single propeller at the front of the bulging cowling cover continued to spin. Three figures appeared from the darkened copes of trees on the edge of the field and trotted towards him. George pushed open the Perspex panel on the side of his cockpit bubble to greet them. The night was still. Soft velvety darkness shrouded the crouching figures as they moved silently through the long frost-encrusted grass towards him. An occasional breeze wafted through his open canopy, cooling the sweat on his face.

‘Bonne soirée,’ called out a stocky, barrel-chested French Resistance patriot as he hoisted himself up on one of the Lysander’s wheel spats and grabbed hold of a wing strut for balance.

‘We have two passengers for you tonight. May I introduce Mademoiselle Mia Dubois.’

George knew the name was false. They always were. Aliases imparted by the handlers back in England to protect the true identities of their agents on the ground.

Looking down from his open cockpit, George pushed his flying goggles to the top of his leather flying helmet and smiled broadly through his thick handlebar moustache.

‘Salut, mademoiselle. Enchante,’ he called softly to his passenger. She was lingering furtively at the foot of the small access ladder fitted to his aircraft’s fuselage.

‘Board as quickly as you can, please. Don’t want to linger too long, what.’

The woman, dressed in men’s clothing, raised a hand in greeting.

‘Bonsoir,’ she replied as she began climbing the narrow ladder.

‘Good evening, old chap,’ called out a muffled, plummy British voice.

The man, tall and lean, was wearing a crumpled, mud-spattered civilian pin-striped suit and fedora. The man hoisted himself up onto the Lysander’s wheel spat beside the burly Resistance fighter.

‘I must say I’m looking forward to getting home,’ the man chirped brightly.

‘Good to see you again, Colonel,’ replied George leaning out of his open cockpit. ‘None the worse for wear, I see.’

‘All tickity-boo, old chap. Never better.’

Colonel Mark Pierce-Brawley followed the diminutive British agent up the fixed access ladder to the rear cockpit and squeezed into the cramped space beside her as they awkwardly harnessed themselves into the seats behind George.

‘Au revoir. Bonne chance,’ called out the Frenchman and he jumped to the ground.

George signalled thumbs up, slid the canopy closed and trundled the Lysander back down the small field, ran about two-hundred metres, pulled back on the stick, and was airborne. He ascended at a steep angle, set the propeller to coarse, throttled back the Bristol Mercury engine, gave a slight waggle of the wings to bid farewell, and was gone. He had been on the ground for just three minutes and a handful of seconds. It had been a textbook sortie.

George was pleased.

Chapter 1

Cornwall, England. 3 April, 1989.

James stood totally still. His back to the sea, he stared at the cottage as though in a trance. Whole minutes passed. It was surreal. Back again, after thirty-six years. He really should not have driven all the way from Heathrow immediately after the long-haul flight from New Zealand, but he would not rest until he got here. He was shattered. Exhaustion dragged at his body. He had been nearly thirty hours without any decent sleep. His back ached. His eyes were red-rimmed and raw, and his head felt as though it was disconnected from his neck, floating free like a helium balloon on a string.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said aloud. ‘Un-bloody-believable.’

Built from stone blocks hewn from pale-grey granite, the two-story cottage rose up in front of James like a monolith from the seashore rocks. Its foundation and the outcrop of bedrock it was built upon merged seamlessly, as though the cottage had grown from the very core of the craggy rocks, squeezing its way to the surface like a mushroom.

The heavily-panelled front door, squat beneath a solid stone lintel, was barely five metres from the high tide mark. Spitting distance, was how Uncle Nat had described it.

The weak afternoon sun felt good on James’s back. The offshore breeze gently tugged at his neatly-cropped hair. He stood stock-still, closing his eyes and savouring the moment. The fresh scents and sounds brought a surge of nostalgia, unexpectedly powerful and intoxicating. It was as though the aroma of seaweed, the tang of heavily salt-laden air and the gentle wash of the sea lapping on the slender shoulder of the pebble-studded beach were welcoming him back.

A lifetime ago, thought James, running a hand over his unshaven face.

‘I really am back. Incredible,’ he said, oblivious to the fact he was speaking aloud to himself again.

The lawyer’s letter had come as a bolt out of the blue. James could not believe it when he read it. A cottage bequeathed to him by Nathaniel Ezekiel Moore, Commander, DSC, RNR retired. He had long ago put the memory of Uncle Nat and his boyhood days out of his mind.

The cottage stood apart from the others in the village, commanding an unfettered view of the harbour entrance and the long narrow stone pier, with its modest white and red striped lighthouse at the end, and the English Channel beyond.

They say that on a fine day you can see the Isles of Scilly, and, at night, the light on St. Martin’s Head. It was not true of course, just real estate hyperbole. All James could ever recall seeing was a mauve smudge on the horizon. But then, he had not taken much notice of the view. As a boy, he had been more intent on catching crabs and digging for flatworms in the wet sand. It was here James had spent his summers, free from the restrictions of the children’s home.

On the narrow crescent of sand in front of the stone cottage, he had been a carefree lad armed with a wooden sword and a shrimp net. Now he was a grown man, father to two girls. Now he was a husband to Theresa, or Tee, as everyone fondly referred to her, his wife of fourteen years. He had a career too, as a physics professor at Auckland University in New Zealand’s City of Sails. It was a good life, a solid life.

James flexed his broad shoulders, attempting to stretch out the stiffness from the flight and long drive down to Cornwall. At 1.8 metres tall, James was what Tee referred to affectionately as burly. He was still strong. Strong enough to regularly make the yacht club’s sailing team as a grinder operating the manual winches. The long sun-drenched days spent sailing Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf had tanned his skin a deep brown, offsetting warm hazel eyes that could appear to shift in colour from deep brown to a golden coffee.

The tiny fishing village to which James had returned was a jumble of granite cottages, each one unmistakably the home of a Cornish fisherman. Traffic-free lanes quietly wend their way down the hillside and through the village to the small, protected harbour. What Uncle Nat had wanted was a place on shore to store his gear and mend his nets. The cottage had been perfect. Nat could reach his trawler by means of granite steps, scalloped by centuries of use, that stretched like a gangway from his cottage to the sea.

A narrow pathway was all that stood between the cottage and the foreshore, which was held in place by an ancient stone wall. The metre-thick wall was all that protected the cottage from the pounding sea, which, when whipped into a frenzy by the Atlantic gales, would be tempestuously tossed over the sea wall, sluicing the cottage in a deluge of spuming salt water.

When the moon was in its perigee, the king spring tide had been known to flood over the sea wall and creep its way right up to the cottage’s scullery floor. According to village folklore and Uncle Nat’s hair-raising bedtime stories, pirates and smugglers had used the cottage centuries ago to secrete away treasure and contraband. Such stories had filled James’s boyhood head each night as he fell asleep in the little attic room with its dormer window overlooking the tiny harbour.

This peaceful fishing cove, this mellow harbour, had felt like paradise to James.

A lifetime ago.

James repeated the thought to himself, thrusting his hand into the pocket of his well-worn jeans and digging out the key.

The fusty old lawyer in the village had gratuitously gushed and fussed when he handed James the key. ‘So nice to meet you, Mr Hamilton. Welcome. I’ve been looking forward to this moment for such a long while.’

Blah, blah, bloody blah, thought James, ungraciously. It was embarrassing. Irritating.

James knew he had been unnecessarily abrupt and rude; the old man was only trying to be welcoming.

James had been nine years old when the stern-faced adults, scary grown-ups with harsh voices, had arrived at the children’s home and bundled them all off to the Southampton docks. James retained cloudy images of the six-week voyage to Australia, and then on to New Zealand, through the patina of his childhood memory. Snippets. Vague, shadowy recollections, like the vestiges of a dream. Fear and loneliness and insecurity abounded—unexplained experiences processed through a veil of childish comprehension. Fragmented. Vivid, without resolution. He had learned to suppress the feelings of displacement, of not truly belonging.

James had never spoken to his wife Tee about any of this. About the sense of loss, of betrayal. About the anguish he had felt because Uncle Nat had sent him away. But when the lawyer’s letter arrived, he had poured out his heart and his memories and his lifelong suppressed emotions. He had wept like a child, while Tee wrapped her arms around him. He had been one of the lucky ones, he supposed. Thousands of children had been forcibly migrated from Britain in the post-war years. Most of the children he had travelled with had disembarked in Australia. By some twist of fate, he was among a small group sent on to New Zealand. He had been fostered by a childless middle-aged couple. Eventually, they had adopted him and cared for him. They had been good to him. Both were dead now. She from cancer and he a year later from heart failure.

The question burning in James’s head was why?

Why had Uncle Nat, whom James had not heard from in thirty-six years, left him his charmingly picturesque cottage in Cornwall?

‘Why?’ he had asked the old lawyer, who shuffled in his leather desk chair and pushed his reading glasses to the top of his bald head like a pair of swimming goggles.

‘Commander Moore,’ the portly lawyer replied slowly, as if James were a four-year-old, ‘appointed me the sole executor of his affairs and estate. There were many complex and difficult elements to his last will and testament. Some essentials required time to elapse before I was in a position to contact you and transfer ownership of Commander Moore’s cottage and chattels. And, of course, it wasn’t easy to locate you. Your surname has changed since you left England as a child. It took several years to trace what had become of you through the Child Migration Scheme and the Children’s Overseas Reception Board records. Eventually, we were able to retrieve a document from the office of Child Migration in Canberra and discovered that the ship you travelled on had sailed on to New Zealand. From there, your whereabouts became lost to us until we were able to uncover adoption records that disclosed the change of your surname to Hamilton.’

‘I see,’ James had responded tetchily.

He really did not want to have the memories of being transported 12,000 miles across the globe to the far reaches of the antipodes and into the unknown dragged to the forefront of his mind. He had mastered the ability to bury those memories, to lock them away in the shadows of his heart, and that was where he wanted them to remain.

‘Why did he leave the cottage to me?’

‘Please, Mr Hamilton, I don’t wish to seem unnecessarily secretive, but I must follow Commander Moore’s instructions scrupulously. I am sure you understand. I am unable to answer that question for you.’

‘We have maintained the property,’ continued the lawyer hurriedly, ‘according to the instructions in Commander Moore’s last will and testament. You will find the cottage is clean. I had a woman go in and clean the place from top to bottom in readiness for your arrival. There are clean bed linens and towels. Some basic supplies, coffee, tea, milk, bread, that sort of thing, in the kitchen. Everything contained within the cottage is yours. Commander Moore was adamant that all the contents of the cottage and its chattels be left to you. And of course, as explained in our correspondence, all associated costs incurred by you will be reimbursed in full.’

James looked sulkily at the man’s business card. Aleksy Horowitz, senior partner, barrister.

What sort of name is that? thought James.

Foreign.

Not a good Cornish name, that’s for sure.

He would have to apologise for being rude and ungrateful of course. Make amends and blame the jet lag.

Bugger, not a very auspicious start, he reprimanded himself.

James pulled the stout iron key from the pocket of his jeans and thumbed its outdated form, appreciating the tactile sensation of its shape before stepping across the narrow pathway and up the few steps to the low stone wall that acted as a barrier to uninvited guests. The last time James had been here, Uncle Nat’s eclectic collection of lifebuoys had hung along the whitewashed cottage wall. Crab pots had been neatly stacked in the tiny front yard, and nets and long lines had been carefully draped over the steep rock embankment behind the cottage. But not now. The cottage was empty and tired. Yellow lichen etched its way across the granite exterior like a spreading skin disease. The navy-blue paint on the squat oak-panelled door and colonial window frames was cracked and flaking.

In his mind’s eye, James could still see Uncle Nat sitting on the wooden bench beneath the bay-window smoking his pipe, staring wistfully out to sea and absent-mindedly scratching Nipper’s ear. James and Nipper, Uncle Nat’s raggedy black Labrador, had been inseparable companions throughout those childhood summers long ago.

The key slipped into the heavy brass lock in the centre of the door, tumbling the ancient mechanism open as James turned the key in the salt-encrusted keyhole. James pushed the door open slowly, ducked his head beneath the low lintel, and stepped tentatively inside. He paused on the threshold to peer into the gloom and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. He sniffed at the interior like a bloodhound and was rewarded with the scent of brass polish and pipe tobacco.

‘Drum,’ James said aloud, naming the brand of pipe tobacco

Reviews for Operation Traction

[Adelaide Dupont · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Looked this book up because it mentioned the Office of Child Migration. Takes you through three countries - Poland; New Zealand; England and France - Hadassah is such a powerful character and I like James too.