“The cars have moved on, so it’s now or never. Looks like Jerry reinforcements arriving. We need to move,” Lynch told White.
“What about Rhys?” White asked.
Lynch waved to get the sniper’s attention as the Welshman fired another round towards the German infantry. Bowen looked his way, and Lynch indicated Bowen needed to make a break for it, and that they’d lay down cover fire. At first Bowen refused, but when Lynch pointed at the German reinforcements approaching, he saw Bowen nod.
“Alright, make sure you’re full now,” Lynch said.
White nodded and switched magazines. “This is my last one.”
Lynch dug two from his ammunition pouch. “Here, I’m still flush.”
The two men shifted out from behind cover and opened fire on the Germans. Working their triggers carefully, each man nursed short bursts from their weapons, putting down aimed fire anywhere they saw movement. Out of the corner of his eye, Lynch saw Bowen, his rifle slung, staggering away from the foxhole, his spotter draped across his shoulder.
“Bloody hell!” Lynch exclaimed. “The wee bugger will snap his ankles doing that!”
Bullets kicked puffs of dust all around him, but Bowen made it to the edge of the ravine, where a rope anchored into the rock hung down to the bottom. Under fire, Bowen pulled the line up, tied it around Johnson’s waist, and then eased the wounded man over the edge. The face of the ravine wasn’t vertical, just very steep, and handling the rope carefully, Bowen eased his spotter down a few yards at a time.
The Germans apparently saw this, and strangely, the firing towards Bowen slacked off. Reloading, Lynch leaned back out from behind cover with his Thompson at the ready, but he saw no targets.
“Huns must be so impressed, they didn’t have the heart to shoot him!” White declared.
“I think they saw their friends arriving, and didn’t think it was worth the bother to stick their heads up. Let’s make the most of it!” Lynch replied.
The two men moved to the edge of the ravine and grabbed onto their own ropes. Lynch eyed the Boys rifle and cursed. There was no way he was carrying it down now, so he fired a round from his Thompson into the Boys rifle’s receiver, denting the mechanism and rendering the weapon useless. Looking across, Lynch saw Bowen had started making his way down the ravine using his own line, and he turned to White with a grin.
“Alright,” Lynch said, “race you to the bottom!”
From the east came the sharp report of a high-velocity cannon.
And then another.
And another.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Ravine
November 18th, 0615 Hours
Steiner peered into the gloom of the ravine as his eight-wheeled armoured car followed its smaller cousin into the shadows. High above, a slash of early-morning sky provided little illumination, and there was no sign of the sunrise ahead to the east, with all the twists and turns between them and the ravine’s end. Ahead of the light armoured car, the three crewmen of the disabled car scouted ahead on foot, each man carrying an MP-40 at the ready, one man lighting the way with an electric torch.
Five minutes ago he’d gotten a transmission from Mueller. Just as the Feldwebel was about to take his panzer into the ravine, he’d radioed Steiner to report seeing vehicles approaching from the east. Not armour, but what appeared to be transport trucks. Steiner thought it was strange, but then it occurred to him that Hasek might have sent the transports in anticipation of more prisoners, and perhaps to pass along any information he might have gleaned from the prisoners they’d already captured.
He’d lost contact with Mueller moments ago, no doubt because down within the confines of the ravine, radio transmissions were all but impossible. Steiner knew Mueller would move forward into the ravine slowly and shell anything suspicious, driving the Commandos west and right into Steiner and his armoured cars. The 20mm autocannons and coaxial machine guns of both cars were loaded and ready. Steiner even had a machine pistol, passed up from inside the car, sitting on the edge of his hatch in case he needed it.
One of the men scouting twenty metres ahead of the first scout car shouted an alarm and fired a long burst into the ravine. The report, magnified and reflected from the stone all around them, rolled around like thunder for a moment before dying away. A moment later, the deep-throated reply of a light machine gun rattled back at them, and several slugs bounced off the hull of Steiner’s armoured car, ricocheting in from an unseen assailant. Steiner ducked down, but kept his head above the lip of the hatch. The ravine was no place to limit one’s field of view to a few small vision blocks.
Steiner turned to Werner. “Load AP into the cannon, and fire a few bursts from the MG. See if we can’t send a few ricochets their way.”
As Werner carried out his orders, Steiner keyed his radio. “Car Two, can you see anything?”
“Nothing so far. The scouts say they spotted a couple of Tommies on foot.”
“Push forward then. Load your cannon with armour-piercing. It’ll stay intact if it ricochets around corners.”
The two armoured cars moved forward at a slow walking pace, taking the twists and turns in the ravine as widely as possible to give the gunners the best angles. The scouts caught glimpses of the British several more times and exchanged fire with them, but as best as Steiner could tell, they caused no casualties. More than once, the only reply from the British was a hand grenade tossed around an outcropping of rock, and by the time the debris settled and the scouts peeked out from around whatever cover had been nearby, the British had retreated.
“I don’t like this,” Werner muttered, eyes glued to his weapon sight.
Steiner said nothing, but he knew something was amiss. Were they trying to find a good place to make a last stand? Steiner hoped not, because not only would it be a senseless act, he’d no doubt lose more men before it was over. Furthermore, the British had to know by now the panzer was moving in from the east, squeezing them from the other side of the ravine.
Hoping for a report, Steiner tried to get Mueller on the radio again, but there was no response. He realized he hadn’t heard the distant krump of an exploding howitzer shell for several minutes now. There was no way the panzer would have run out of high explosive shells so quickly; Mueller was an experienced commander, and wouldn’t make that mistake. He hoped instead the Feldwebel was in contact with their reinforcements, perhaps trying to get them organized in support of the battle plan.
Glancing behind him, Steiner didn’t see any daylight. He had lost track of how far into the ravine they’d progressed. Five hundred metres? A kilometre? It couldn’t have been two. The rock walls of the ravine climbed up almost vertically around him, the monotonous stone playing tricks with his senses. Steiner found it oddly claustrophobic, and wondered what it would take to knock one of the ravine walls in and bury them all. What if the British had concealed a demolition charge, and were waiting for the two cars to get within range? Would he rather die in an explosion that shattered his vehicle and dismembered his body, or would he prefer a rockslide that crushed the car like a tin can under tons of falling rock, reducing him to a grotesque paste? Steiner had once seen the body of a French infantryman that’d been run over by a column of panzers during the drive for Calais. Smashed into the rut caused by the panzers’ treads, the corpse had been almost comical, a deflated caricature of a human being, like something out of an American cartoon.
A rapid series of explosions right around the next bend fifty metres ahead snapped Steiner out of his daydreaming. A cloud of dust and pulverized rock drifted out from around the bend, and a lone figure, limping and bloody, stumbled into view. It was one of his Brandenburgers, and the man dropped to his knees before falling on his face, limp in death.
Steiner keyed his radio mic. “Car Two, advance and engage!”
The driver of the SdKfz 222 gunned the engine, and the four-wheeled armoured car pulled ahead, the car’s gunner firing several short bursts into the cloud of dust still h
anging in the air, obscuring the turn. A sudden thought turned Steiner’s blood cold.
“Wait!” he shouted into the mic. “Don’t take the turn!”
There was the whip-crack sound of a high-velocity cannon firing, and the unmistakable clang of an armour-piercing round punching through steel plate. Steiner saw a large chunk of the lead car’s right-front tyre leap into the air, torn from the wheel. Frantic, Steiner saw the car’s gunner firing the machine gun like mad, and it took Steiner only a second to realize the problem: the anti-tank gun was firing at point-blank range in front of the car, and the turret-mounted weapons couldn’t depress far enough to engage.
Even as Steiner reached for his machine pistol, a part of his mind couldn’t help admiring the Commandos’ cunning. They’d wiped out the scouts and obscured the bend in the ravine just long enough to bring up a gun, and they’d positioned it so close that at the moment they had a shot, they were safe from return fire. An audacious move, one that certainly put Steiner and his men on their back heel.
The driver of the lead car attempted to back away from the bend and gain some distance, but the wrecked tyre caused the car to lurch and wobble, making progress slow. The sound of a second shot from the gun reverberated off the ravine walls, and the machine-gun fire from the 222 immediately stopped. There was a third report, and then a fourth, and the car stopped moving and began to burn. Steiner stood immobile in his turret hatch, staring at the destroyed car only fifty metres ahead of him. He watched as an arm, sheathed in flames, frantically tried lifting the anti-grenade screen covering the car’s open turret, but to no avail. After a few horrifying seconds, the arm dropped, still in flames, and hung over the rear of the turret.
Steiner swallowed. “Back us out of here, now!” he said, his voice hoarse. “Werner, lay down covering fire. Use the autocannon.”
The car’s rear-facing driver began to move the car back, and Werner began firing short bursts of four or five rounds at a time, the solid, armour-piercing shells smacking against the rocks and careening around the bend. Steiner rewarded himself with a brief sigh of relief. There was no way the British would risk coming after them with that gun, even if they could get it past the burning wreck taking up most of the room at the head of that bend.
A fist-sized rock glanced off the top of the turret right in front of Steiner. Thinking his wild fears of being buried alive were about to come to pass, he looked up in alarm, half-expecting to see a mass of boulders rushing down the ravine wall.
Instead, he saw a dozen British soldiers in a mix of uniforms, all pointing weapons at him. One of them, the large, thuggish-looking Commando he’d interrogated the day before, stood right at the edge, wearing a menacing grin while holding a machine pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. As Steiner watched, the Commando pulled the grenade’s pin with his teeth and spat it into the ravine, then held the grenade as if ready to lob it right into Steiner’s open hatch. Several of the other men around him also held grenades at the ready.
“”Ello, Fritz.” the Commando said. “Fancy a game of catch?”
Steiner ordered the driver to halt the car, and then kept his hands well away from both the machine pistol and the handle of the turret hatch.
The Commando nodded to someone out of sight. Almost immediately, a pair of arms thrust Huber to the edge of the ravine, their grip on his webbing the only thing keeping the Feldwebel from tumbling to his death.
“I am sorry, Hauptmann,” Huber said. “They attacked with trucks mounting machine guns. They were on top of us before we could react.”
“How many men are alive?” Steiner asked.
“Myself and three others,” Huber replied.
“And Mueller?”
Huber shook his head. “They used our own Pak 36s. Mueller died when his tank burned.”
Steiner closed his eyes for a moment. Four men left in Huber’s squad, plus the three other men in the armoured car. I can save eight of us, at least, he thought.
There was a tug on his pants leg, and Steiner glanced down at Werner. The gunner had a machine pistol in his hands.
“Give us the order, Hauptmann.” Werner said, his voice steady.
Steiner looked back up. From around the front of the burning car up ahead, a trio of Commandos wheeled forward their anti-tank gun, setting it up so its muzzle was pointed right as his turret. Steiner immediately recognized it as a captured Panzerbüchse 41 squeeze bore, probably one of the very guns he’d brought with him to the Bersaglieri outpost several months ago. Steiner found himself chuckling softly at the notion of being defeated by his own weapons.
“Hauptmann, are you okay?” Werner asked.
Steiner gave his Gefreiter a smile. “Put down the gun, Werner. We’re done fighting, at least for now.”
Standing up straight in the turret hatch, Steiner raised his hands and looked up at the men who’d beaten him.
“Alright, chaps. You’ve got me.”
The Commando with the grenade smiled broadly, then glanced at the armed bomb in his hand.
“Oi, lads! Any of you lot ‘ave a grenade pin? I threw mine away.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mersa Matruh Airfield, Egypt
December 1St, 1930 Hours
Lynch stepped out of the hangar serving as their barracks for the last twenty-four hours and made his way to the plane waiting on the runway. The hangar was the same one used by their unit over a month ago, when they’d arrived in North Africa under cover of darkness. Now, they were departing under the same conditions, about to embark on a two-day journey back to Scotland.
Behind him, others of his squad emerged single file. Their original twelve-man squad was now reduced to nine. Johnson had survived his wounds, but they were serious enough to warrant shipping him out the day they’d arrived back in Mersa Matruh over a week ago. Stillwell, who’d been shot in the leg during the assault on the Bersaglieri outpost, had been shipped out almost three weeks ago. Brooks, killed instantly by a round from an anti-tank gun, had been buried out in the desert.
Still, Lynch counted his squad lucky. Sergeant Peabody’s squad had lost eight men killed or wounded in the last few days, and Donovan’s squad had suffered so many casualties from the operation in October that those few who remained had taken the place of casualties in Peabody’s squad, with the wounded men from both squads sent back to Mersa Matruh and eventually off to Blighty along with Stillwell.
Handing his Thompson to McTeague, already aboard the plane, Lynch climbed in and settled into a seat next to Nelson. The Englishman had become insufferably cocky since the events of the eighteenth, particularly with regards to having brewed up not one, but two of the large Panzer IVs.
Nelson turned to Lynch. “Well, if it ain’t ol’ pissy britches!”
Lynch punched Nelson in the shoulder. “I didn’t piss me britches, you spotty arse.”
“So says you! I bet a pint of the best porter you had a weak trickle running down your leg when we landed,” Nelson shot back.
“I’ll give you a trickle, old son!” Lynch snapped his fist down into Nelson’s groin, eliciting a howl of pain and a flurry of blows on Lynch’s shoulder, arm, and thigh.
“If you two keep acting like a couple of prats every time we climb into a bloody airplane,” McTeague growled from the other end of the passenger compartment, “I’ll start pushin’ ye out without parachutes!”
“These lads causing trouble as usual, Sergeant?” Price asked as he climbed aboard.
“Nothin’ I can’t knock out of ‘em, sir,” McTeague replied.
Price found a seat, propping his Beretta machine pistol between his knees. “Well lads, I have news that may be of interest to you. Some of it’s good, some bad.”
“Let’s have the good news first, sir,” Lynch said.
“The rumors are true,” Price replied. “We’ve managed to break the siege at Tobruk, and although the battle is far from over, it sounds like we’re trading equal blows with Rommel’s lads. HQ is confident that, g
iven time, Crusader will be a success.”
“Sounds brilliant to me,” Lynch said. “What’s the bad news?”
Price gave them a broad smile. “After all this hot sun and gritty sand, you’ll be happy to know the weather back home is much cooler than when we left in October. In fact, it’s downright brisk. The weather report I received today said it’s snowing rather heavily back home.”
McTeague let out a diabolical chuckle. “Sounds like the perfect weather for a good long march, Lieutenant. Just what the lads need to be proper soldiers again.”
The plane’s engines roared as the pilot prepared for takeoff, drowning out the curses and groans coming from inside the passenger compartment.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mersa Matruh Airfield
December 2nd, 2300 Hours
Karl Steiner finished buttoning up the British battledress, and tightened the chin strap of his newly-acquired helmet. Satisfied it was secure, he looked down at his uniform and made sure no bloodstains were visible. To his left, Werner dragged the last of the sentries’ bodies out of sight, covering them up with a nearby tarpaulin.
Steiner opened the bolt of the Lee-Enfield rifle in his hands, making sure there was a round in the chamber. Behind him stood Fromm, his last Brandenburger, who was also dressed in the uniform of a dead British soldier. Fromm tied a simple, loose knot around Huber’s hands, and made sure the other three men of the Feldwebel’s squad, along with his armoured car’s driver, were similarly bound. When their preparations were completed, Fromm gave Steiner a nod.
Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II Page 16
