Certain there weren’t any closer enemies, he leaned over and whispered to Brune.
“The Tommies ambushed the relief column.”
The big man grunted. “The idiot Heer weren’t guarding their approach properly.”
“Those large explosions, they sounded like demolition charges. I would not be surprised if they sacrificed themselves to take out our armour,” Kurzmann speculated.
Brune shook his head. “The Tommies don’t think like that. That is something the Ivans would do. Tommies always think they are too clever to need that kind of sacrifice in order to win.”
Kurzmann smiled in the dark. “Perhaps we can teach them that they are wrong.”
In the enemy’s command element, men were moving, gathering weapons and equipment. Other men came from the east, from the direction of the road, moving urgently and without stealth. A quick conversation took place, and it appeared the men came to some agreement, for others ran back towards the road, while the others assisted in gathering supplies.
“They are falling back, towards the sea,” Brune noted.
Kurzmann nodded. “It won’t be long now.”
A few minutes later, more Kommandos came from the direction of the road, carrying weapons and caring little about stealth. It was obvious now that the entirety of the British force was moving towards the coastline, so Kurzmann and Brune carefully extricated themselves from their position, and while maintaining a modicum of silence and stealth, they shadowed the British in their retreat, staying to the north of the closest Kommandos by at least fifty metres.
From behind them came the thump of a mortar, and a few seconds later, a flare bloomed high overhead. The two SS men froze, looking towards the British, who turned and looked, shouting in alarm.
“Haas is beginning the assault,” Kurzmann whispered.
Brune nudged him and tipped his head to the north. “We’re too close. I don’t want to die because some idiot sweeps too wide with his machine gun.”
Careful to keep within cover, the two men moved in a northwesterly direction, opening up the distance between themselves and the British. The first sounds of machine gun fire and the crack of Mauser rifles came from the east, and Kurzmann saw tracers whipping through the trees and underbrush, occasionally careening wildly into the air or spinning away as the bullets struck a rock or clipped the trunk of a tree. He was glad to see none of the fire was coming towards them, but it didn’t take much for a wild burst of gunfire to swing their way and make a mockery of their plans.
Minutes passed, and more flares went up over the front of the British position. Kurzmann heard at least two mortars firing - one that seemed to be putting flares in the air every few minutes, while another lobbed high explosive into the woods to the south of their position. This was answered by a lighter mortar from the British side, which fired off a half-dozen bombs in quick succession before falling silent.
At this point, it was clear that the Kommandos were in full retreat. Kurzmann watched as small sections of four or five men would take cover and lay down a withering fire, using their Bren guns, machine pistols, and rapid-fire from their Lee-Enfield rifles. Kurzmann had always been impressed by the British soldier’s ability to fire their rifles with such speed and accuracy, and to watch it from a place of relative safety allowed him the time to make some insightful observations.
“Did you ever see Ivans fire their rifles that fast?” he asked Brune.
“Ivans barely knew what end of the rifle to hold onto,” the bigger man replied. “Tommies might be bastards too clever for their own damn good, but they know how to shoot.”
The two men continued to fall back with the British, who were, Kurzmann admitted, offering up an intense resistance against the approaching Germans. Although their movements were exposed by the flare shells, it was clear the Kommandos knew how to use cover and concealment to their advantage, and their firepower was, man for man, greater and more mobile. And, while he had seen a couple of Tommies hit by German fire, he was certain that the British were inflicting far more damage than they were receiving. It did not help, he was sure, that the German troops facing off against them were, at best, simply following orders, and at worst, actively avoiding exposing themselves to the murderous fire poured out of the pockets of British resistance. He imagined the German squad leaders were having a devil of a time driving their men closer and closer to the muzzles of British guns.
“What are we doing here?” Brune finally asked.
“What do you mean?” Kurzmann replied. “If we expose ourselves now, any advantage we have disappears.”
“We don’t need any goddamn advantage,” Brune shot back. “Look at them - they have lost. If we sit here, we are letting them kill more of us. You should be shooting them in the head right now. Instead, you are letting this go on longer.”
Kurzmann said nothing for a moment. He admitted to himself that, despite his hatred for what the Tommies had done the night before back at the chateau, he admired their audacity then, and he admired their tenacity now even more. He had seen troops in Poland, France, and Russia all capitulate when the odds were against them, and many of those captured souls were either dead, or wishing they had fought to the death.
But admiration or no, the British were his enemy. And furthermore, they had gone through his room, through his personal things, and taken his medals, and the medals of all the dead men. Kurzmann did not care about the pieces of tin - he didn’t even care that they were awarded to him - but he cared that the British took them away, that someone out there in the dark was carrying a piece of his personal property as a trophy, and never faced him in combat to prove themselves worthy of claiming it.
“Yes, you are right, of course,” Kurzmann finally said. “Let us move further behind their lines. We need to find some good cover, if we’re going to strike at them from the flank. Cover both from the British and our own men, for either side seeing our muzzle flashes will take us for the enemy.”
Brune grunted, then hefted the MP-28 in his hands, almost caressing the weapon’s wooden stock. “About goddamn time you found your balls.”
The two men began to crawl through the darkness.
Chapter 25
March 29Th, 0030 Hours
Lynch wiped the blood out of his eyes and reloaded his Thompson with the last magazine in his pouch. To his left, Frost pressed five cartridges from a charger into the receiver of his SMLE and snapped the bolt home, not bothering to top off the magazine, because there was no time. To Lynch’s right, Higgins lay on his belly, trying to change the barrel of his Bren gun with hands burned and blistered from the last barrel change.
Lynch thought to help Higgins with the barrel, but there just wasn’t any time. He raised his Thompson and looked for a target, then paused to wipe away blood again. The wound wasn’t clotting, and Lynch knew that wasn’t good, but his brains hadn’t leaked out of his skull yet, so it wasn’t that bad, either. He brought up the Thompson again and squinted from the glaring white light of a mortar flare, another from the Germans’ seemingly endless supply. He waited, then saw movement thirty yards away, a hunched figure moving up from a bush. Lynch concentrated and fired three aimed shots, difficult from an open-bolt weapon like the Thompson, but he had fired the submachine gun tens of thousands of times, and knew just where the sights would settle after every shot. The third round spun the German around and they dropped out of sight behind cover. Lynch didn’t know if he’d killed the man, or merely clipped him, but for the moment it was one less enemy to worry about.
Seventeen rounds left. Movement at his eleven o’clock turned into a half-squad of Germans fifty yards away, pressing home the attack. They were advancing in a crouch, bayonets fixed to their rifles, and at their lead a non-com with a machine pistol shouted encouragement and fired short bursts from the hip as he moved. Lynch steadied his Thompson, blinked away more blood, and fired off half of his remaining magazine, resulting in one of the men tumbling to the ground, arms flailing. The remaining fo
ur Germans went prone and fired on Lynch’s position, bullets snapping past his head. One round punched clean through the six-inch thick tree trunk next to him, and Lynch felt splinters prick his face and neck.
To his right, Higgins’ Bren began firing, tracers flashing through the air all around the cluster of prone Germans. The enemy fired back, this time at Higgins, but before Lynch was able to fire again, the whistle of a mortar round caught his attention. Lynch pressed his body flat to the ground as the high-explosive round detonated ten yards to his left, the blast accompanied by a cry of pain as another of his comrades was torn up by shrapnel.
There was simply no more time, and they were running out of land as well. The woods ended a dozen yards behind Lynch, opening up to shallow scrub that quickly gave way to rocks and sand, and then the open water, not thirty yards away from where he now lay. The men, those still able to hold a weapon and fight, formed a semi-circular defensive position some fifty yards across, and with every minute that passed, their ammunition count ran lower, their bodies took more wounds, and the Germans manoeuvred into better positions from which to slowly, inexorably squeeze them until they all died on the beach or drowned in the sea.
Two hundred yards out, and off to Lynch’s right, there came the slow, methodical stuttering of one of the Germans’ heavy machine guns. They used them sparingly, but to great effect, slicing back and forth with almost metronomic precision a couple of feet above the ground, slaughtering anything in their arc. The Germans would only fire a belt at a time, two hundred and fifty rounds, but they used the MGs to cover men pushing forward, because none of the Commandos dared to keep their heads up while that fire hose of lead tore through trees and brush and any flesh in the way, until the bullets plunged into the ocean far beyond the foam of the surf.
Lynch raised his head up just enough to see, and he cursed as a tracer round snapped by, accompanied by several more bullets he couldn’t see, only hear, not even a foot over his head. Men to his front shouted in German, and as the flare overhead began to gutter out, Lynch saw more of the enemy advancing, crouched and relentless. For much of the battle the Germans’ reluctance was obvious, the men cautious and unwilling to push home whenever they had an advantage. But now, with their enemy cornered and bleeding, the Germans knew they had won, knew they just needed to be strong and brave and advance, to make the British waste what little ammunition they still possessed, and they would be rewarded as heroes of the Fatherland, driving the hated Tommies back into the ocean. No miracle at Dunkirk this time, Englander!
A hand tapped his foot, and Lynch squirmed around to look behind him. It was Bowen, and Lynch smiled, because for the last hour, he’d had no idea whether his old friend was alive or dead.
“We’ve got a coded flash!” Bowen shouted over the drumming of the German machine gun. “They’re on the way in!”
“How far out are they?” Lynch shouted back.
“Matter of minutes, at the most,” Bowen replied. “They must see we’re under fire.”
Two men had been at the water’s edge for the last two hours, one using a red-lensed torch to flash the coded signal, another with a pair of field glasses, scanning the night-shrouded waters behind them for a response. While their normal pickup window was almost an hour away, the hope had been that the Germans’ mortar flares, visible for many miles if one was out in the Channel, would draw the attention of their approaching rescuers.
“What’s the order?” Lynch asked.
Bowen pointed behind him. “Fall back to the tree line, and hold the Germans from there.”
“It’s going to be bloody close, so it is!” Lynch pointed to the east. “Bloody Jerries aren’t but fifty yards away in parts.”
Bowen nodded, then handed Lynch two magazines for his Thompson. “Some of the last we’ve got.”
Lynch took the opportunity to swap out the nearly-empty magazine on his weapon for a fresh one, careful to tuck the partial magazine back into his pouch with the new spare. Then, with a shouted order to the men around him, the Commandos began to retreat yet again, squirming backwards a couple of yards at a time before raising up and firing off a round or two in order to keep the Germans’ heads down.
As the ground began to slope down at the edge of the woods, Lynch looked out across the water, and saw the unmistakable blink of red lensed torches, coming from the bows of a half-dozen inflatable boats half a mile away. A wave of relief swept over him then, and Lynch found himself holding back a sob, his hand brushing away tears along with the sticky blood that still ran from a wound along his brow he didn’t even feel at the time it was inflicted.
As soon as he and Bowen appeared, a shadow moved towards them, eventually recognizable as Stambridge. “Eldred has asked for volunteers. Someone has to hold the beach while the boats are loading. The Russians board first, then our wounded. After that, we’ve got enough room for maybe half the men still on their feet.”
“Bloody hell,” Lynch cursed and looked at Bowen, who glanced towards the sea with worry.
“I’m staying,” Stambridge told him. “But I need at least a squad to man the line and keep the Germans back long enough for the boats to get out there and return. I think the big motor boats will come in close to the beach, even if that’s dangerous, so the turnaround should be quick, but once Jerry knows what’s happening, he’ll swarm us with everything he’s got.”
“And you want us to stay,” Lynch replied, his face grim.
Another mortar round whistled through the air, this time landing in the sand at the water’s edge. A plume of sand and saltwater sprayed everyone within twenty yards, but thankfully, no one cried out in pain. Bullets continued to snap overhead.
“You might be junior to the other sergeants,” Stambridge answered, “but aside from McTeague, you’ve seen the most combat. I won’t order you to stay, but you and some of the senior men, like Corporal Bowen here, might make the difference.”
“I’ll stay,” Bowen said without hesitation.
“Where’s Charlie?” Lynch asked his friend, referring to Bowen’s spotter by his first name.
Bowen nodded towards the beach, where Lance-Corporal Hall tended to the wounded. “Mortar knocked him flat, hit his head. Bad concussion, can’t bloody see straight. Not much good to me, spotter who can’t see well enough to find me Germans to shoot.”
“There’s not much time,” Stambridge cut in, pointing out beyond the surf. The incoming rafts were visible now, the water foaming around them as they cut through the water.
“Ah, bugger this for a game of soldiers,” Lynch cursed, then nodded. “If it gets the wounded lads off the beach, then I’ll bloody stay and fight, so I will. But I’ll need more ammunition. We all will.”
“We’ll collect whatever’s left from the men boarding the boats,” Stambridge told him. “I’ll let the captain know your decision. Inform your men.”
A minute later, the six inflatables slowed into the waist-deep surf, and the Commandos began to usher the Russians aboard the boats, helping them struggle through the cold ocean water. At the treeline, Lynch lay prone behind a fallen tree, his Thompson at the ready. There was only the ammunition Bowen had given him for it, but he had a Lee-Enfield next to him as well, his ammunition pouches stuffed with five-round charging clips of .303 calibre bullets. A small haversack of grenades lay at his side, its strap across his neck and shoulder. On the other side, near the rifle, Lynch had one of their remaining satchel charges, fistfuls of shore pebbles stuffed inside among the blocks of demolition explosive. He was ready.
Although they were few in number, the men holding the beach were well-armed. Higgins peered down the sights of his Bren, while Nelson and Frost lay behind French M29s, the only other MGs with sufficient ammunition remaining. Each man fired a short burst every few seconds, conserving their ammunition and the barrels of their weapons. McTeague remained behind, as Lynch knew he would, the red-haired Scotsman serving as Higgins’ loader. Oliver White was there as well, the left sleeve of his battledress d
ark with blood, his dark brows drawn together with tension as he loaded for Nelson, while Stilwell loaded for Frost. Le Chasseur also remained, his Mauser slung over his back, an MP-40 in his hands. Near the edge of the line, and away from the long muzzle flashes of the Bren guns, Bowen lay prone and peered through the scope of his rifle, while Herring served in Johnson’s place as spotter. Behind them all, Stambridge crouched, his own German machine pistol long since exhausted, a rifle in his hands instead. The lieutenant was keeping an eye on the line of men before him, ready to give orders or fill in if there was a casualty.
The Germans could tell the volume of fire coming from the British positions was greatly reduced, and they were clearly being ordered to press home the attack. As another flare arced into the air, its flickering white light illuminating the ground, the big, methodical MG-08s opened fire again, sweeping back and forth across the British lines. There was the sound of a single rifle shot from Bowen’s position, and suddenly one of the MGs went silent. Lynch saw out of the corner of his eye Higgins shifting his fire, then emptying an entire 30-round magazine with several long bursts into the MG’s location. No more fire came from the weapon, either out of fear of being targeted, or because the weapon was damaged in some way.
Lynch dearly wished that they’d still had ammunition for their remaining functional MG-34, but the weapon’s high rate of fire had meant that it had burned through all the ammunition they’d brought for the two captured MGs during the first half of the engagement, the weapon proving especially good at stopping German advances cold. Lynch guessed that those soldiers who survived a barrage from that weapon stayed in place, knowing how deadly their own weapons were and not wanting to face them. Oh, for a pair of functioning Jerry MGs and a score of belts to feed them, Lynch thought to himself, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II Page 45
