Taking a couple of deep breaths, Lynch reassured himself by touching the revolver on his hip and the two grenades clipped to his webbing. Satisfied, he laid under the lorry, German blood pattering across his body, and waited for the armoured car to get close. Long moments passed, and then the wheels appeared next to him, grinding the remains of the partisans into the roadbed. Rolling out from under the lorry, Lynch grabbed a handhold and pulled himself up onto the armoured car, feet scraping at the wheel well for purchase. He climbed onto the hull, clinging like a bug to the angled armour plate, then he dragged himself towards the driver’s vision slit.
Someone on board must have noticed the car’s unwanted passenger, because the turret began to swing around towards the front of the car. Drawing his revolver, Lynch jammed the muzzle against the driver’s vision slit and fired three times, moving the muzzle around each time to try and spread the shots inside the compartment. He could hear, for a brief moment, the ping and whine of slugs as they ricocheted inside the armoured hull.
The effect was immediate. The car accelerated for a brief second, jerking to the right and slamming its fender into the side of a lorry. The armoured car pushed the lorry a few feet, then ground to a halt, its engine stalled. The turret continued to swivel in his direction and Lynch wasted no time, jumping up onto the turret and rolling over it onto the other side of the hull.
“Corporal Lynch, be a good fellow and give me a hand, would you?”
Lynch looked down and saw Price standing on the fender, one hand clutching his Lanchester, the other raised up, beckoning for help. Grinning, Lynch reached down and grabbed the lieutenant’s hand, hoisting him up onto the hull. Price drew his revolver, handed it to Lynch, and tugged back the bolt of his submachine gun.
A pistol in each hand, Lynch stuck the muzzles into the two nearest vision slits, while Price found a third. For several long seconds, the two men emptied their weapons into the armoured car, the reverberating noise inside surely deafening anyone who managed to live through the hurricane of copper-jacketed lead scything through the crew compartment. The chassis of the armoured car gave a sharp wobble, and Lynch looked up to see McTeague, the huge Scot soaked in blood from a dozen flesh wounds, clambering onto the front of the armoured car. He was carrying the twenty-five pound Bren gun as easily as Lynch would carry his Thompson.
“Try tae kill me with that wee popgun, would ye? It’ll take more than that tae put this Highlander in the bloody ground!”
McTeague jammed the muzzle of his Bren against a vision slit and pulled the trigger, his lips pulled back in a bloody rictus as he braced himself against the car to control the Bren’s ferocious recoil. If Lynch thought the pistol and submachine gun bullets had made a racket careening around inside the armoured car, that was no more than rattling pebbles in a tin can compared to the cacophony produced by the Bren’s fusillade. Lynch could feel the hull under him vibrate from the staccato hammering of the ricocheting bullets, and when the Bren’s magazine ran dry, the silence from inside the car was rather ominous.
The three men waited, standing on the hull and breathing heavily. Lynch used the moment of inactivity to reload both his and Price’s revolvers, handing the lieutenant back his sidearm. From out of the treeline men hesitantly stepped forward, both Commandos and partisans, weapons at the ready. Bowen, Souliere, Harris, Hall, and Johnson stepped out, but Lewis and his two partisan assistants were nowhere to be seen. Bouchard and the remaining partisan from the assault team crawled out from under a lorry further down the column, covered in blood and fluids just like Lynch. Resembling primitive hunters emerging from their caves to inspect the carcass of a dead mammoth, the survivors slowly clustered around the silent vehicle.
With a despondent squeal of metal, one of the side hatches unlocked, the armour-plated door slowly creaking open. A half-dozen gun muzzles trained on the opening, and the three Commandos on the car jumped down to investigate. Slowly, feebly, a figure in an officer’s uniform, captain’s insignia torn but still recognizable, dragged himself out of the opening and onto the roadway. The man had been struck by at least half a dozen bullets, but he still had the strength to lever himself into a sitting position, leaning back against one of the car’s eight massive wheels. The man’s hand fumbled at his pistol holster, and although gun barrels tracked his movements, the man drew his sidearm only to hold it out, butt-first, in a gesture of surrender.
Price stepped forward, gave the German officer a brief salute, and took the man’s bloody pistol. Turning to Hall, Price gestured to the German. “See what you can do for the poor sod, would -”
The crack of a pistol cut him off, and everyone jumped. Everyone but Marie, who had worked her way to the front of the crowd, and now stood with Lynch’s pistol smoking in her hand. The partisan looked down with grim satisfaction at Krieger, who was slumped on the ground with a bullet hole through his forehead.
Price turned to face the woman, aghast and open-mouthed. “Bloody Christ! The man had just surrendered, and you outright murdered him!”
Before she could reply, Bouchard stepped between the two and gave Price a cold, unflinching stare. “He may have surrendered to the British, but he needed to pay for his crimes against France. He was a murderer, a rapist, and a war criminal. Now he is a corpse, and justice has been served.”
Price stood there for a long moment, silent, eyes wide and unable to find any words. His gaze swept over the bloody, grim-faced partisans around them, saw several hands tighten on weapon stocks. Their surviving numbers were still easily twice that of the remaining Commandos. Finally, he let out a long sigh, shoulders slumped. “I do not approve of your continued mistreatment of prisoners, sir. But this is not my land and I am not your commanding officer.”
Bouchard gave Price a small nod and adjusted his glasses. “Oui. See that you remember that, Monsieur Price, and we shall be the best of friends.”
The little Frenchman turned and began to walk away, shouting orders to his remaining partisans. Still disgusted, Price turned to Lynch, who stood there, staring down at the dead German captain. Looking at the bloody pistol in his hand, Price grimaced and offered it to Lynch as a man might hand another a rotted fruit.
“You were first onto the car, corporal. You’re welcome to this.”
Numbly, Lynch nodded and took the pistol. As Price moved away, Marie walked up to Lynch and offered him his Colt, just as he had offered it to her only an hour ago.
“Merci, monsieur, for the use of your pistolet,” she said.
Lynch looked at the pistol in her hands with a sour expression on his face. Before, he used to consider it his good luck charm. Now, he thought of it as a murder weapon. He shook his head.
“No, miss. You keep it. It appears to have served you well. May it bring you luck in the future, as it brought me luck in the past.”
Marie nodded. “Au revoir et bonne chance, monsieur Lynch.”
Unable to look the woman in the eye any longer, Lynch turned away from Marie until she walked back to the rest of the partisans. Looking down at the German officer’s pistol in his hands, Lynch considered throwing it away, but instead, he tucked it into the thigh pocket of his fatigues. After a few seconds of hesitation, he bent down and unbuttoned the German’s ammunition pouch, pulling two magazines free and tucking them in his jacket.
“We’re all running low on ammunition, no idea how long we’ll be here,” he mumbled, as if justifying the looting to himself.
A few feet away, Price looked away from Lynch and turned to McTeague. “Sergeant, gather the men. We need to get clear of this massacre and arrange transport home. I think we’re done here.”
“Aye, Lieutenant, that we are.”
Epilogue
South of Merlimont
April 16th, 1941
Germans in camouflaged battle fatigues stepped gingerly over the stripped corpses of their dead countrymen. Many of them carried a variety of different machine pistols, while several carried scoped Mausers. All carried grenades, knives, a
nd a full load of ammunition. All the men had the look of tough, battle-hardened men who had seen years of combat.
They also all bore the double-lightning bolt insignia of the Schutzstaffel on their uniforms.
Each of the five troop transports on the road sat on charred wheel rims, little more than smoking skeletons of blackened metal. The armoured car along the side of the road had been blown apart. A demolition charge had been planted inside, and the hull had shattered and peeled back like the petals of a rotting flower, but not before the cannon and machine gun, as well as anything else of value, had been stripped from the hull.
Another armoured car, similar in design but immaculate in appearance, rolled to a stop at the tail end of the column. A side hatch slammed open, and a figure in black emerged, donning his brimmed officer’s cap and brushing dirt from a sharply-pressed trouser leg. The man wore the insignia of an SS Standartenführer and an Iron Cross hung at the collar of his uniform jacket. His only weapon was a long-barreled Mauser C96 in a black leather holster. The butt of the pistol was just visible; black ironwood inlaid with polished bone said to come from the femur of the first man ever killed by that pistol. The man was tall, lean, and grizzled, with iron-grey hair and only a scarred, empty socket where his left eye should be, a souvenir from a British sniper in the Great War. The man had been a Hauptmann in 1918, but returned to military service as a Sturmbannführer of the Waffen-SS and was quickly promoted after his exemplary service in Poland, Belgium, and France.
The service for which Standartenführer Johann Faust had been so well-rewarded was the hunting and killing of partisans. After the sole remaining garrison officer from Merlimont had contacted his regimental headquarters to report the disaster, explicit orders had been given to leave the road ambush exactly as it had been found, even the dead soldiers. The order had not been well received, but when Faust’s imminent arrival was announced, any recalcitrance on the part of the surviving Merlimont garrison quickly disappeared.
Faust stepped among the German bodies, past the shreds of flesh and blood that remained of Frenchmen butchered by cannon fire, and approached the sprawled corpse of Hans Krieger. An SS Hauptsturmführer walking with Faust gestured to Krieger’s empty holster.
“They stripped him of his pistol.”
“No doubt the prize possession of some filth-grubbing peasant,” Faust replied.
“Over fifty dead here, and as many again between the farm and the town. If we shoot the required number of civilians, they’ll be no one left in Merlimont.”
Faust shook his head. “Nein. There will be no shootings.”
His adjutant gave Faust a sharp look. “But our standing orders in dealing with reprisals for partisan attacks - “
Faust raised his hand, cutting the man off. “This was not the work of petulant Frenchmen. Partisans might have assisted, but there is the spoor of Englishmen all about this place. British ammunition, spent magazines and charging clips, even bandage wrappers. This was the work of British Commandos. Killing civilians will just waste ammunition, and give rise to more enraged Frenchmen.”
The Hauptsturmführer frowned. “So what is our purpose here? We hunt partisans.”
Faust smiled. “Ja, we will hunt. You see, I know who led these French; it was the schoolteacher, the Butcher of Calais. He is the reason the British were brought here, and when we find him, that mistake will earn him a very slow death.”
Faust’s adjutant flashed him a wolfish grin. “Jawohl, Standartenführer.”
Author’s Note
If you’re reading this, you probably have a creaking pile of military history books, a collection of World War Two movies, maybe even a model Sherman tank or P-51 Mustang kicking around in an old shoebox somewhere. You’re the sort of person I wrote this for; the person who’s always been fascinated by the world’s greatest armed conflict - or at least some aspect of it - and anything related to it piques your interest.
There have been a number of pulpy action-adventure fiction series written about WW2, but as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a series written specifically about the British Commandos. Formed right after the Dunkirk evacuation and containing a large number of BEF veterans, these Commando units were employed mainly as company or battalion-sized raiding forces, much like the US Army Rangers, who were formed in the image of the Commandos.
As far as I am aware, by April of 1941 no official Commando action of such a small size as depicted here had taken place. But later in the war, some of those men would get recruited into the SOE (Special Operations Executive, the British counterpart to the American OSS) and fight alongside partisans all over the world. So, although the story told here is apocryphal, its heart is in the right place.
The main reason I wanted to focus on a small group of fighting men was to give my main characters a chance to shine during their baptism by fire. Tommy Lynch, the fighting Irishman, might be our story’s main character, but there is also Bowen, the thoughtful and deadly Welsh sniper, McTeague, the indomitable Scotsman, and Price, the dapper but steadfastly patriotic Englishman. I wanted a core cast of characters who represented all of Britain, not just England, and if these men come off as a bit caricatured, well, I hope it elicits a chuckle rather than a groan.
As for the French, I pray the Francophiles don’t berate me too badly. Bouchard might be duplicitous, scheming, and brutal, but that is often the true nature of those waging “total war”. However, he is balanced by the selfless Chenot and the aged but steadfast Souliere. We will see more of these men, and other partisans will step forward to take the place of those who fall.
Last but not least, we have the Germans, whose burden here as the villains is unfortunate but necessary. Krieger, Bieber, and Faust are obviously detestable scum; they are not the noble, highly professional soldiers of the Wehrmacht who fought not for fascism, but for their families and for their honor. Instead, they are the sorts of evildoers that make you cheer when they finally get their comeuppance. That is not to say you’ll never find a sympathetic German over the course of this series, but they will no doubt be the exception to the rule.
So, the first of our missions is complete. Lynch, Bowen, McTeague and Price will be back again, slipping across the English Channel to wreak havoc on the Nazis once more. It’s only 1941, after all; there are another four years to go before the war is over, and a lot of ground left to cover...
Part 2
Operation Bedlam
Operation Bedlam
Kindle Edition
© Copyright 2019 (as revised) Jack Badelaire
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.
Chapter 1
Twenty Kilometres South Of Calais, France
July 8th, 1941, 2100 Hours
René Chenot stepped out of the forest’s evening gloom and into the center of the partisan encampment. They had found a shallow dip in the forest floor, a dozen paces wide, perhaps an old, dried-up pond. The ground was mostly clear except for a carpet of leaves and moss, but the forest itself was dense enough to hide them from sight as little as two dozen meters away.
A dozen men and women were seated around a fire pit in the middle of the encampment. The pit contained a bed of glowing coals, heating a cast-iron pot filled with a fragrant, bubbling soup. There was no other source of light in the camp other than the coals, their red-orange light reflecting off the polished bottom of the pot. Two soft points of light hung in the air nearby, as two men smoked carefully-rationed cigarettes.
Chenot set his German machine pistol down, leaning it against a nearby log, and he rummaged in his pack for a moment, pulling free a battered tin bowl and spoon. Stepping over to the cooking pot, Chenot ladled a healthy portion into his bowl, breathing in the steam rising from its content
s. He returned to his pack and weapon and sat down.
“Careful, it’s hot.”
René looked across the fire pit and smiled at Marie Coupé. “Don’t worry, I won’t burn my tongue. I’m very cautious.”
Marie smiled back. “René, your tongue is anything but cautious.”
André Bouchard, leader of the partisan band, shook his head as he dipped a hunk of stale bread into his bowl of soup. “The two of you, for decency’s sake, just go take a walk in the woods and find a comfortable spot already. Give the rest of us some peace from your nauseating banter.”
The young couple laughed, eyeing each other from across the campsite. In fact, the two of them had been considering just such a liaison later that evening, once the rest of the camp went to sleep. René had an extra pack of German cigarettes he’d hoarded from their latest ambush, hoping to use them to bribe whoever was on sentry duty tonight.
Jean-Marc, at forty-six the oldest of the partisans, waggled his finger at Bouchard. “In these trying times, André, you cannot chastise two young people for falling in love. Even in the midst of the most terrible ruins, a few beautiful flowers can bloom.”
Chenot almost choked on a spoonful of soup at Jean-Marc’s comment. “Monsieur, please. I am trying to eat.”
“What is wrong with it?” Marie asked, mock outrage in her voice. “I thought his words were very touching.”
Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume I Page 14
