Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II

by Jack Badelaire

  “Kill that bastard, Harry!” their Kiwi navigator screamed at him from the front of the truck. Nelson frantically spun the traversing wheel, swinging the muzzle of his cannon about, trying to keep it lined up with the Autoblinda. The armoured car’s turret was rotating as well, each gunner in a race to see who could lay sights on the other first.

  Fortunately, Nelson was the winner. As soon as the Breda’s sights touched the rear of the armoured car, Nelson opened fire, relieved to see the high-explosive cannon shells flying true, slamming into the thin rear armour plating of the Autoblinda. The HE shells detonated across the car’s engine compartment, sending bits of steel spinning through the air, leaving fist-sized holes behind. The armoured car’s hatches slammed open and several crew members stumbled out, gouts of thick black smoke following behind them.

  By now, Nelson’s car was completely past the supply depot, and Herring executed a wide turn to the left, taking them out of harm’s way as the squadron of Crusader tanks bore down on the enemy position, their machine guns blazing away. Nelson watched the approach of British armour with fascination, wondering what it must be like to have control over one of the steel behemoths. Although spread out on a wide front, at least five or six hundred yards across, the tanks were able to lay fire on the Italian’s position; machine gun bullets chewed through piles of crates and riddled barrels filled with petrol. Fires brewed up everywhere as tracer rounds ignited flammable materials, and the Italian infantry found there was nowhere to hide where British machine gun fire couldn’t find them.

  And where mere bullets couldn’t penetrate, the armour-piercing shot of the Crusaders’ two-pounders smashed through with impunity. The lone Italian tank managed two more shots from its 47mm cannon, one of them scoring a direct hit against a Crusader’s track guard. Hunks of steel plate and wrecked track links spun through the air in a puff of dust and sand as the armour-piercing shell smashed home, and the racing tank slewed around, coming to a halt with its shattered track dragging behind. In retaliation, the wounded Crusader fired two shots in rapid succession, and its fire was joined by two other nearby tanks.

  The storm of high-velocity steel rounds tore the M13/40 to pieces. Nelson watched in fascination as the two-pounder AT shells punched through the Italian tank’s armour, smashing holes in the front glacis plate and turret. As the tank began to burn, the top hatch popped open and a lone Italian tanker bailed out, only to be shredded by MG fire from the crippled tank. Nelson felt an uncustomary moment of pity as he watched the man try and escape the smouldering iron coffin of his tank, only to be cut down a moment later. He reminded himself that if the roles were reversed, the Italian would likely do the same thing to the British tankers opposing him. A second later, the Italian tank shuddered repeatedly as its cannon shells began to cook off and explode, thick clouds of oily black smoke and white-hot flame erupting out of the open turret hatch.

  With the death of their only tank, the Italians decided they’d had enough. Men began to throw down their rifles, and a white rag on the end of a rifle barrel poked out of the hatch of the surviving armoured car, waving furiously. Over the next minute, the Crusaders, the armoured cars of the 11th Hussars, and the LRDG trucks slowly closed in around the depot, occasional bursts of submachine gun or MG fire delivered into the ground, herding the Italians as a sheep dog might guide its flock.

  Nelson reloaded his Breda cannon, then climbed down from the bed of the truck, Thompson in hand and ready. The other Commandos were dismounting from their vehicles, weapons trained on the dozen or so Italians still on their feet and huddling in the middle of their camp, arms raised, heads tucked meekly into their shoulders. Only one of the Italians seemed the slightest bit indignant, and to Nelson, the man had the bearing and uniform decorations indicating some kind of officer’s rank. Captain Eldred moved towards the Italian officer, limping slightly from an old wound, a trooper whose name Nelson didn’t know accompanying him. Nelson recalled the trooper spoke Italian to the Bersaglieri they’d captured two weeks ago, and Eldred began talking to the enemy officer, using his man as an interpreter.

  Suddenly there was a great shout of consternation from one of the Crusader tanks, and Nelson turned to see Major Meade jumping down from the tank’s turret, face crimson.

  “Hold it right there, Captain!” Meade shouted at Eldred. “This is my command, and if anyone is going to accept this man’s surrender, it’s bloody well going to be me!”

  Eldred halted in mid-sentence, and turned to Meade, face unreadable. “My utmost apologies, Major,” Eldred replied. “I thought you might be preoccupied by other duties.”

  Meade strode up to Eldred, looking down his nose at the shorter Commando officer. “Other duties, you say? What the hell duties are more important for the commander of this expedition than accepting the formal surrender of a defeated enemy?”

  Eldred blinked twice. “Pardon, Major. I presumed you’d want to take reports from all the elements under your command, coordinate the tending to of our dead and wounded, make sure our perimeter is secure…”

  “I’ll leave that for junior officers such as yourself, Captain.” Meade waved his hand as if to shoo away a bothersome insect. “In the meantime, leave your man with me so I can carry on a civilized conversation with this gentleman.”

  Nelson, watching from a dozen paces away, admired Eldred’s composure. If it’d been him suffering under Meade’s imperious glare, Nelson would have been hard-pressed to hold back from knocking the major’s teeth down his throat. Still, Eldred’s expression and body language was positively murderous as the Commando officer saluted Meade, pivoted smartly, and strode away. As he walked past Nelson, Eldred gave him a glance, and although it only lasted a moment, Nelson knew if he’d been Major bloody Meade, he’d have caught fire from the heat of Eldred’s wrath.

  As Eldred walked away, heading towards where Lieutenant Price and Captain Moody were talking near the armoured cars, Nelson turned and caught the eye of Sergeant McTeague, standing next to his Chevrolet car nearby.

  “Oi, Sergeant,” Nelson said softly, “we got ourselves a whole kettle o’ trouble brewing up.”

  “Aye laddie,” McTeague replied, eyeing Meade as the major waved his arms in the air, cursing in frustration at his translator, “and it’s going to be a bitter brew, that’s for sure.”

  “Just hope we don’t bleedin’ choke to death on it,” Nelson muttered, and strode off, hoping to find a choice bit of loot before any of the other lads got to it.

  Chapter Seven

  One Hundred Fifty Kilometeres South-West of Bardia

  November 16th, 0615 Hours

  Major Kessler re-read the message scrawled across the paper in his hand and looked down from his panzer’s turret at Steiner.

  “Your man, he speaks Italian well? He didn’t misinterpret the message?” Kessler asked.

  Steiner shook his head. “Werner is fluent in Italian, and I speak it almost as well. When I heard the Italian radio operator resend the message, even though it was very faint, I made out the details clearly enough to know Werner wrote them down correctly.”

  “Scheisse,” Kessler muttered. The grizzled officer let out a lengthy sigh and scratched the stubble on his chin. “Hand me your map.”

  Steiner unbuckled his leather map case and pulled out the relevant map, handing it up to Kessler, who unfolded it while gesturing for Steiner to climb up next to him. The two men looked over the features and coordinates on the map for a couple of minutes before Steiner jabbed a finger against a point on the map south of their current position.

  “There. I know the place,” Steiner said. “While we were operating in the deep desert, this was one of the depots near our position, and when we’d receive new shipments of consumables, they’d come from there.”

  “How large was the garrison?” Kessler asked.

  “A full platoon of Italians, plus a few extra men from their supply company. There were always a few armoured cars or tanks passing through and resupplying. Maybe fort
y to fifty men, depending on the day.”

  Kessler’s finger tapped the message paper next to the map. “A platoon and maybe a few armoured cars, against ‘a large enemy attack force of armed trucks, armoured cars, and fast-moving tanks’. I don’t give the Italians much of a chance.”

  Steiner shook his head. “Nor do I. These were garrison troops, not Folgore, Alpini, or Bersaglieri. They’d put up a brave fight to appease the officers, and then fold at the first sign of being hopelessly outgunned. If they weren’t exaggerating in their message, and there was more than a troop of armoured cars or tanks, they’d have no chance.”

  “Are we the nearest friendly unit?” Kessler looked over the map, his finger wandering across the paper, as if in search of reinforcements.

  “There is an aerial reconnaissance station, an airfield located seventy kilometres south of us,” Steiner said, pointing to its location on the map. The point was almost exactly halfway between their position and the Italian depot.

  “Do you think they’d have heard the distress call?” Kessler asked.

  “The station is manned by Germans,” Steiner replied. “If we heard it this far away, there’s no chance they missed it.”

  Kessler nodded. “They’ll have a Storch in the air by now, heading towards the depot. Try and raise the airfield, inform them of our approach. We’re going to push hard and get there as fast as we can.”

  Ten minutes later, the panzers and their support vehicles were on the move again. Steiner’s radio operator had raised the airfield, and as Kessler had predicted, a Storch was already airborne, heading in the direction of the depot. The airfield’s radio operator assured them a report would be radioed back as soon as the reconnaissance flight returned.

  An hour later, Steiner received word of the Storch’s report. A great deal of smoke was seen coming from the depot, and the reconnaissance flight identified at least two plumes from wrecked vehicles, as well as a number of fires from destroyed fuel stocks and other supplies. Of the British, the Storch crew spotted at least a squadron of tanks - sixteen or more - as well as a number of armoured cars, both British and Italian, although the nature of the war in North Africa meant the nationality of a vehicle had little to do with who built it and fielded it in the first place. At the time of observation, all the British vehicles were surrounding the Italian depot, and there were no signs of an ongoing battle. Steiner knew that, given the numbers involved, the fight would have lasted only a few minutes.

  The Storch’s crew also mentioned seeing a number of armed light trucks, of the kind most often associated with the British desert scouts, the Long Range Desert Group. This gave Steiner pause; men driving such vehicles were at least part of the assault force that had engaged his armoured car patrol, knocking out three of his Autoblindas. The British Commandos he’d met under a flag of truce also drove a similar vehicle, and while it had been too dark to know for sure the night the Commandos attacked his outpost, he knew some of the attackers were using armoured cars and light trucks.

  Could the men who’d just taken the Italian depot be part of the same unit his men and the Bersaglieri had faced two weeks ago? It seemed at least plausible. Steiner knew the British Desert Group focused on gathering intelligence, not carrying out raids, and this was the same region of the desert. If they were fighting in support of British “cruiser” tanks, armour fast enough to keep up with the recce vehicles, this could be a British reconnaissance in force along the southern corridor, maybe even the lead elements of a larger, slower, combined-arms force. It could be the exact situation the DAK commanders sent them here to discover. What had seemed like a waste of men and armour now appeared to be a much more dangerous venture.

  Several hours later, after pushing their vehicles as fast as they dared, the armour column reached the airfield. A dozen camouflaged tents of various shapes and sizes surrounded a tall radio tower, all of it guarded by a handful of sangars also covered in camouflaged netting. A short airstrip of clear, flat desert had been bulldozed next to the tents, a tan-coloured Storch reconnaissance plane sitting at one end with a refueling truck doing its job alongside. As Steiner’s car slowed to a stop near the outermost tents, several men in various uniforms approached warily, all of them armed. At their head was a young man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Oberleutnant carrying an MP-40 at the ready.

  Steiner stood up fully in the cupola of his 232 so the officer could see his uniform. “Are you in command here?” he asked the young officer.

  The Oberleutnant gave a salute, which Steiner returned. “Oberleutnant Hasek. I am in command of this airfield.”

  “Not any more, Oberleutnant. I am Hauptmann Steiner, and Major Kessler will be here momentarily.” Steiner gestured behind him, towards the rapidly approaching panzers. “We have reason to believe your installation may be the next target for the British force to the south.”

  “I wasn’t told about this by my superior officers,” Hasek said, a dubious look on his face. “And this is a Luftwaffe command. You have no authority over us.”

  Steiner shook his head. “This war moves too fast to sit around waiting for orders from someone on the coast. We were sent south to catch any British forces hoping to sneak in behind our lines from the deep desert, and it appears we’ve found them. Your airfield is the only target within striking distance of that supply depot. We’re going to make this our base of operations, find the British through aerial reconnaissance, and either attack or observe, depending on their strength and numbers.”

  Hasek looked past Steiner’s armoured car and saw the motley group of approaching panzers. “I flew the reconnaissance mission this morning. The British have a full squadron of their Crusader tanks, as well as armoured cars and a good number of desert scout vehicles, some of them portee-armed. Do you think you can handle them?”

  “I am a Regiment Brandenburg officer,” Steiner said lightly. “I can handle anything.”

  Once the panzer formation set up their leaguer at one end of the airfield, Hasek took Steiner and Kessler on a brief inspection of the installation. The garrison included a squad of ten infantry seconded to Hasek’s command, led by a Feldwebel, stationed there as a security detail. In addition, there were ten other men, all Luftwaffe, whose job it was to handle the airfield’s day-to-day operations. Hasek was the only pilot, for there was only one plane.

  “When it became clear that all the excitement was taking place near the coast,” Hasek explained, “the rest of the aircraft and most of the men were taken north. But it was decided that someone needed to stay down here, in case a flight over the deep desert was necessary.”

  “Not a very exciting posting, is it?” Steiner asked.

  “No,” Hasek replied. “But on the other hand, I’m not being shot at by Spitfires every day.”

  When Steiner inquired about the defences, Hasek showed him the three sangars positioned around the airfield. Two of the positions contained MG-34 machine guns, each mounted on a tall tripod and fitted with an anti-aircraft sight. The third sangar was larger, and contained a 20mm Flak 30 anti-aircraft cannon.

  “Two MGs and a single-barrel autocannon,” Kessler observed. “That’s not a lot of protection against an air attack.”

  Hasek shrugged. “Like I said, we were left here as an afterthought. At least the Flak 30 can chase away those pitiful Tommy armoured cars.”

  “I wouldn’t feel very comfortable with only those weapons and a score of men,” Steiner said, joining in the discussion. “You aren’t so far from the front lines as to be safeguarded from attack.”

  Hasek’s face took on a mischievous countenance. “Ah, but you haven’t seen every card in my hand, gentlemen. Follow me.”

  Hasek walked them over to a particularly large, rectangular tent in one corner of the airfield, near the makeshift “hangar” of camouflage netting the Storch lived within when not in use. The tent was dusty and draped with a large camouflage net, and Steiner’s keen eyes noted there wasn’t the usual path of tracks in the sandy ground coming
in and out of the tent’s entrance.

  Hasek stepped up and unfastened the ties holding the tent closed. Pulling one of the flaps aside, he looked over his shoulder with a grin.

  “Gentlemen, after you.”

  Steiner stepped forward and entered the gloom of the tent. Ahead and slightly above him, there was a large, shadowy object, and he reached up a hand and touched the round, smooth surface of what could only be a large calibre gun barrel. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Steiner began to make out the details of muzzle, recoil mechanism, and the massive expanse of flat armour plate making up the weapon’s gun shield. He knew it could only be one thing.

  “Mein Gott,” he murmured. “You’ve got an eighty-eight.”

  “What?” Kessler said from outside the tent, incredulous. “Let me see.”

  The senior officer threw the tent flaps wide, letting in more light. The weapon was unmistakable: a Flak 36 anti-aircraft gun, capable of hurling an explosive shell high into the air, or a high-velocity anti-tank round downrange with sufficient power to kill any tank in their enemy’s arsenal from thousands of metres away.

  The two men turned and looked at Hasek.

  “How...where did this come from?” Kessler asked.

  Hasek grinned. “I told you, this airfield used to be more heavily manned. We had a battery of four eighty-eights stationed here for air defence. But when the other planes and the rest of the men were shifted north, the big guns were moved as well - all except this one. The half-track used to move it had taken damage a month prior in a strafing run, and chose a poor time for the engine to give up its ghost. There was no spare part to repair it, and no spare vehicles to tow the gun, so they left it here and told me it would eventually be retrieved.”