Assault on Abbeville

by Jack Badelaire

  At several points during the evening, the two men had heard the sound of large vehicles passing by, and Verhoeven had even reported seeing the bulk of a tank pass by the storefront. He’d told Gorski he thought it was a Hotchkiss H39, a French tank marked with German colors and insignia. The presence of a tank in Abbeville didn’t make Gorski any less anxious, especially since they’d even less hope of defeating a tank than they’d had of taking on the Panhard car. But the real problem was all the other vehicles that’d arrived along with it, signalling a reinforcement from some nearby town. Based on the number of trucks they’d counted passing through, there was at least a reinforced company of German infantry now in Abbeville.

  Of course, it made sense that the Germans were reacting with such force. Back in April, just one squad of British Commandos had joined with the Butcher of Calais and his men, and they’d run roughshod over a garrison company near the town of Merlimont, a mere 50 kilometers away. And although he didn’t reveal it to their new resistance contacts, Gorski knew that men from the same Commando unit had actually rescued the Butcher from his captivity in Calais last month. Intelligence reports indicated that the German garrison there - both Heer forces as well as men from an SS Einsatzkommando - had suffered surprisingly heavy losses. Here in Abbeville, even if the Germans knew that Gorski and his men weren’t a military unit, they wouldn’t be taking any chances in treating this matter lightly.

  With that in mind, the two Revenants moved with great caution. Every few meters, they would pause, take cover in a nearby doorway or alley, and listen for the sound of voices or approaching footsteps, On their journey towards the southern end of town, this practice had saved them from detection twice; on both occasions, they’d avoided encountering German foot patrols. The Germans were operating in sections of five men, four carrying Mauser carbines, the fifth armed with a machine pistol, all of them carrying one or more stick grenades. Even if they’d gotten the drop on one of these five-man patrols, Gorski knew their chances of surviving against such firepower were slim.

  Eventually, Verhoeven motioned Gorski back into a deep-set doorway, and when the two were within centimeters of each other, Verhoeven leaned in to whisper in Gorski’s ear.

  “There’s a roadblock up ahead. A half-squad of men, and I think I saw a machine-gun position. We should turn west now, begin circling around the town.”

  Gorski nodded and tapped Verhoeven on the arm, indicating he should lead the way. The two men crossed the street, then found the nearest alleyway heading west. After listening for any sound that indicated they were detected, they continued on at a slow, deliberate, and most importantly, silent pace.

  It took the better part of an hour for Gorski and Verhoeven to make their way to the eastern bank of the River Somme. A hundred meters to their right, a narrow, arching bridge crossed the river, but even at that distance, the silhouettes of Germans standing guard on both ends of the bridge were visible. The river gleamed in the moonlight, its current impossible to gauge, only the faintest sign of rippling along the banks giving any clue as to how fast the waters were moving. Gorski pointed to the river and made a swimming motion. Verhoeven looked horrified, but after a second look at the guards along the bridge, he nodded. The two men cinched their rucksack straps snugly and slowly, cautiously, slipped into the water, careful to avoid any action that would splash and make noise.

  The river was cold, but not so cold as to be a shock to the body, and while the current was strong, it wasn’t dangerous. The two men allowed the current to take them and focused on small strokes under the water’s surface to drive them across, and after a few minutes, they caught hold of some reeds along the western bank and carefully emerged, soaking wet but undetected, about two hundred meters downstream. They sat for a while, wringing out their socks and pouring water from their shoes, checking their rucksacks to ensure that anything inside that got wet wasn’t permanently damaged.

  Having rested and drip-dried to some degree, the two men continued, angling to the north-west as they moved through the very outskirts of Abbeville. The closer they approached to the rail yard, the more cautious they became, and with good reason, because when they came within sight of the yard, it was apparent the Germans had accepted Paquet’s story of planned - or already performed - sabotage. Although blackout regulations were still in place, the two Revenants heard the small sounds of men moving on patrols - the clink of metal on metal, the scraping of boots on rocks, the occasional voice raised above a whisper.

  Finding a quiet spot behind a hedge some thirty meters from the railyard, the two men watched the Germans’ movements, noting their patterns and the overall level of attention the sentries were paying to their surroundings. Finally, when the rhythm of the sentries was determined, Gorski and Verhoeven slipped through their lines, using every bit of concealment around them to their advantage, stepping carefully over railroad tracks and walking slowly over gravel and rock to avoid making any noise. Although they were not detected, the movements of their still-wet clothing and shoes made enough noise that Gorski swore to himself that there was no way the Germans on the other side of town couldn’t hear them.

  Soon, they were moving among freight cars and enormous flatbeds, searching for a suitable target for their explosives. Gorski didn’t like it, but he felt it important that they didn’t shirk their duty in attempting to sabotage the trains. If they did little more than randomly plant a charge or two and escape, the work would simply appear to be a cover-up for something else, and that would get the Germans thinking. Gorski didn’t want them thinking, he wanted them deadly certain that this was the reason the Revenants were operating in the area. And for this to happen, they needed to make it look like the sabotage was done with due effort.

  And so, they made their way towards the locomotive engines. After some careful scouting, Gorski and Verhoeven counted four in the railyard, all of them located next to the yard’s engine house, and each of them, it appeared, guarded by a pair of German soldiers. After a few minutes of discrete observation, it was clear there was no way to get close enough to the cars to place explosives, and the cars were too close to each other to allow the Revenants the privacy needed to kill any one pair of sentries without being noticed.

  Gorski and Verhoeven lay under a freight car for a long while, using hand signals and body language to make - and subsequently discard - several plans. Verhoeven was adamant they should carry through with the plan, even if it meant not blowing up the engines, while Gorski was insistent on them avoiding any undue risk of detection. If they couldn’t sabotage the engines, he wondered, could they sabotage the rail lines themselves? Perhaps, he argued, they could break into the control tower and blow that up, or destroy any fuel stores at the railyard.

  A faint droning sound made them pause, and as they listened to it grow louder, Gorski eased himself out from under the freight car and stood up in the shadows, turning his head back and forth, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Eventually, he determined it was coming from the north-west, from the direction of England.

  It was a bomber formation, and it was on approach.

  A sudden thought struck him, and Gorski carefully ducked back underneath the freight car and shrugged off his rucksack. Digging around inside while making as little noise as possible, and ignoring Verhoeven’s questioning expression, Gorski finally found what he was looking for - a Verey flare pistol, and a waxed cardboard box of flares. Using hand signals, he conveyed his plan to Verhoeven, who was uncomprehending at first, but as understanding dawned, the Dutchman shrugged off his own rucksack and quickly produced his own flare pistol.

  By now, there was some commotion near the train engines, as the sentries realized there were aircraft approaching, quite possibly belonging to the enemy, and Gorski caught a snippet of conversation on the wind that indicated the sentries didn’t know what to do - stay at their posts and risk being in the middle of a bullseye, or make for their usual air raid stations. After a moment, however, their decision was
made for them, as a Feldwebel approached at a trot and called out, demanding that the squad follow him at the double-quick.

  As the Germans moved off, Gorski and Verhoeven acted quickly. First, two charges were placed against the round cylinder of each engine’s boiler, one at each side and on opposite ends of the boiler. Gorski knew that if the boiler’s structural integrity was compromised, even if it could be patched somehow, there was no guarantee that the boiler wouldn’t catastrophically rupture under operating pressures. The entire boiler mechanism would be written off, scrapped, and replaced, a long and time-consuming process.

  By now, the aircraft were close, and several beams from spotlights near the aerodrome were cutting through the night sky, hunting for their quarry. Gorski heard the rippling, booming sound of flak batteries firing from far to the north, closer to the coast, and tiny pinpoint flashes of light were visible just above the horizon.

  “What if we aren’t the target?” Verhoeven whispered.

  “That’s not important,” Gorski replied. “What matters is what the Germans believe.”

  Moments later, the flak battery near Abbeville began to fire, and the Revenants were close enough to see the tracers arcing up into the sky before exploding in flickering clouds of black smoke. Gorski and Verhoeven listened to the droning of the bombers’ engines, and when they sounded close enough, Gorski nodded to Verhoeven, then cocked the Verey pistol, pointed it up into the air, and pulled the trigger.

  Gorski had worried that their swim in the river might have ruined the flare, but when the Verey pistol’s hammer dropped, there was a thump and the shock of recoil, and a trail of sparks leapt skyward, followed a second later by Verhoeven’s own flare. The two missiles were lost in the dark sky for a moment, and the two men looked away, shielding their eyes, because immediately after the whole of the railyard became bathed in a flickering green glow, as the flares ignited and began to float down, suspended from their little parachutes.

  As fast as they could, the two men reloaded their Verey pistols and fired again, then once more, the third salvo of flares igniting a few seconds before the first pair landed. There were shouts of alarm from the direction of the town, and a hot-headed German with a machine pistol sprayed an entire magazine of bullets in their general direction, hitting nothing but freight cars and the night sky.

  “Time to go,” Gorski muttered, stuffing the still-smoking Verey pistol in his musette bag and slapping Verhoeven on the shoulder.

  High above and to the north, the pitch of the droning engines changed, and suddenly there was the deep, rolling thunder of high explosives detonating kilometers away. The two men looked and saw flashes of light and roiling clouds of smoke rising from the general direction of the aerodrome. There was more shouting from the nearby Germans, and the searching beam of a flashlight swept around crazily, as if carried by a man running flat out.

  “Really time to go,” Verhoeven agreed. The two men began to move west, heading for the edge of the railyard, keeping low and with pistols in hand. More voices were heard behind them and to their flanks, as the patrolling Germans spread out, hoping to catch them in an envelopment. Gorski began to realize they were being outpaced, as they were moving with stealth and silence in mind, while the Germans were sacrificing silence for speed.

  Gorski pulled the one German stick-grenade he had from his musette bag and twisted off the cap at the base of the wooden handle, freeing the pull-cord. He skidded to a halt, yanked hard on the cord to prime the grenade, then threw it as hard as he could to the north. The extra leverage afforded by the grenade’s handle gave the throw enough momentum to carry the grenade over the top of a freight car some twenty meters away. Gorski continued westward, quickly catching up with Verhoeven.

  The grenade detonated and there was a shout, not of pain but alarm, and the sounds from the Germans to the south changed, the men veering north, towards where the grenade had exploded. Careful to remain undetected, Gorski pulled on Verhoeven’s coat, and the two men began angling towards the south-west, directly away from the grenade’s blast. After a minute without any sign of the Germans, the two men reached the edge of the woods, and Gorski turned to give one last look back towards the railyard, still illuminated with green light from the slowly dying flares.

  And that was when the first bombs landed.

  SEVENTEEN

  The blastwave struck Gorski like an immense club swung by a giant, and it knocked him flat on his back. Verhoeven was pushed hard against a tree and spun away, only to be sent sprawling by a second blast. Both men had just enough time to press themselves flat against the earth, hands over their ears and mouths open to try and save their eardrums from the intense shock of each explosion.

  In the span of a minute, at least four planes dropped their bomb loads on the rail yard, and when they finally turned away, their engines droning on as they began their return trip across the Channel, the two Revenants were too stunned to even move. They both lay there as pieces of freight cars, railroad ties, shattered concrete and brick rained down around them. A sheet of steel plate, nearly a centimeter thick, landed not two meters from where Gorski lay, shearing through the trunk of a nearby tree before plowing a furrow in the ground. The steel plate was scorched black and crumpled like a chewing gum wrapper, but it probably weighed over a hundred kilograms, and would have chopped through Gorski’s body like a gigantic meat cleaver if it had hit him.

  Finally, the last bits of wreckage and debris fell down through the foliage above them, the sounds distant and muffled due to the abuse their ears had taken from the bombing. After a minute, the anti-aircraft weapons firing to the north became audible again, and on the other side of the rail yard, there were the cries of Germans, both those wounded and those trying to find the wounded. Gorski saw small fires here and there amongst the wreckage of the yard, probably the burning wood of freight cars set alight. Further east, somewhere near the northern edge of the town, flames licked high into the air as a building burned, probably stuck by an errant bomb. Gorski hoped anyone living that close to the Aerodrome had the good sense to flee south at the first sign of an air raid, but he knew such hopes were probably in vain.

  “Are you wounded?” Verhoeven called out softly.

  Gorski pushed himself up and stood. He was covered with bits of broken branches and blasted dirt or concrete, but running hands over his vitals, he found nothing wrong.

  “I think I’m unhurt. You?” he asked.

  Verhoeven sat up and gingerly touched the wound along the side of his face where the bullet fragment had hit him. Gorski saw the gleam of fresh blood in the moonlight.

  “I’m bleeding again, but that’s it,” Verhoeven said, reaching out and grabbing a tree branch to pull himself upright.

  The two men looked each other over, ensuring neither was ignoring an injury, but after finding nothing, they turned back and watched the fires burn in the railyard for a moment.

  “Do you think the charges detonated?” Verhoeven asked.

  Gorski shook his head. “Unless there was a direct hit, I doubt it. That explosive is very stable. Still, it is possible. We planted eight of them, though. I’d wager the majority are still there.”

  “A nasty surprise for the work parties sent in to put out the fires and clear the damage,” Verhoeven replied. “You know most of them won’t be German.”

  “Yes, I know,” Gorski answered. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. But there’s going to be no doubt in the Germans’ minds that this was the reason we were in Abbeville, to signal the bombers and target the rail yard.”

  Verhoeven toed a broken hunk of twisted metal by his feet. “So you think our mission is still a secret?”

  “Yes, I do,” Gorski replied. “Which means we’ve still got a chance to eliminate Kohl when he arrives.”

  “I wonder if they will delay his arrival because of the bombing,” Verhoeven wondered. “If the runway is too badly damaged, they won’t be able to land the squadron.”

  “Runways a
re easier to repair than you think. A day, maybe two, and he’ll be here. We just need to be patient, and not give the Germans any more reason to think we’re still in the area,” Gorski said.

  “Speaking of which, we need to get out of here and make good use of the darkness while we can,” Verhoeven said, gesturing to the south.

  Gorski nodded and cinched his pack straps, then checked to make sure his pistol was intact and functional before turning away from the burning railyard and following Verhoeven southward.

  The two men made good time, and although they had to cross the Somme again, they managed it without incident, using the same technique of slowly swimming from one bank to the other while letting the current carry them downstream. Although it meant hiking in wet clothes right after they’d mostly dried, the two men knew it was far less risky than attempting to cross one of the bridges. Even if the bridges weren’t being actively guarded, there was enough movement of men and vehicles going to and from the railyard and other parts of the city that they could easily find themselves caught out in the open in the middle of a bridge. With time on their side, it was always better to be cautious and take the longer, more careful route, even if that was more uncomfortable.

  Shortly after crossing the river, Gorski looked at his watch. “Sometime in the next ten or fifteen minutes, any charges that survived should detonate.”

  Twelve minutes later, they heard four explosions over the course of about thirty seconds. Gorski tried not to think about the possibility of civilian casualties, instead reminding himself that the Germans would be even more convinced of Paquet’s story.

  As the sky lightened with the dawn, Gorski and Verhoeven found themselves south of town, about half a kilometer from Paquet’s barn. Although he was somewhat doubtful that the Germans would search it again, Gorski took no chances. Instead, he and Verhoeven found a dip in the land, a portion of an old irrigation ditch or dried up creek bed that’d been overgrown with brambles, and they crawled into the undergrowth, finding enough space inside for the two men to hide. They sipped a little water, shared a bar of chocolate, and took turns sleeping in three-hour shifts.