Scorched Earth

by Robert Muchamore

  If the Maquis’ arrival had made much of the neighbourhood nervous, the battle and ambush planning brought out a powerful sense of community. As Henderson scoured the streets around the bridge looking for good ambush spots he was greeted warmly and offered food. He also picked up an entourage of teenagers and old men volunteering to fight.

  There was no sign of a German counterattack, and no traffic either. As there were several other bridges in the area, it seemed probable that the Germans had switched to using other routes when they saw the stranded tank and burned-out truck.

  By noon 190 petrol bombs had been made. Henderson had identified four key spots on the approach roads leading to the bridge and placed teams of six at each one. The teams comprised a mixture of local men, Maquis and boys in their early teens. If anything happened, Henderson’s own team would take sniper positions and act as back-up.

  The ambush points were supposed to be concealed, but the heady atmosphere meant that women kept bringing out trays of drinks and kids loitered nearby, tasting the excitement.

  As the afternoon wore on, people began cycling across the bridge to inspect the stricken tank. Several posed for photographs and someone arrived with a pot of white paint and daubed FFI on its side in large letters.

  Henderson was uncomfortable with this. These ‘tourists’ would attract attention and the riverfront location would always be vulnerable to shells aimed from defensive positions across the water.

  Beside cameras and curiosity, some visitors brought the latest underground news sheets. These sheets usually ran different stories reflecting the politics of their editors, but there had been some kind of coordination and Henderson saw three sheets, all with near-identical lead stories below generous headlines.

  MAKE BARRICADES!

  The uprising has begun. German patrols, once proud, now scuttle through Paris like rats, taking shots from all directions!

  Now we must take Paris back. Free your own neighbourhood by building barricades to keep out Nazi scum.

  Take up the cobbles and paving. Sacrifice your furniture and tear up railings.

  Once you have built your barricade, stand bravely behind it to defend your city and your nation.

  This is the order of the FFI and the duty of EVERYONE!

  ‘Where did this FFI suddenly come from?’ Marc asked, as he showed Henderson and Edith yet another version of the barricades story. ‘Who are its leaders?’

  Henderson smiled. ‘I reckon the FFI is anyone who puts on the armband. If there’s any leadership I’ve neither met them, nor heard of them. But it does no harm if it gives the people a sense of unity and sends the Germans after an imaginary organisation.’

  ‘So are we making barricades?’ Edith asked.

  Henderson shrugged. ‘I don’t see much tactical value in them. Loose stones and railings won’t stop anything heavier than a truck. On the other hand, they’ll do no harm as long as they don’t stop the Germans getting to our ambush points.’

  ‘If we had them in the right places they might help filter cars and trucks towards our ambush points,’ Marc reasoned.

  News sheets got passed around, while people in upper-floor apartments could see barricades being erected across the river. As the neighbourhood’s unofficial leader, Henderson found himself besieged by people who wanted to make barricades.

  Partly, it was residual enthusiasm from the battle and the bomb making, but people also worried that they’d be a soft target for the Germans if they had no barricades when other neighbourhoods did.

  Despite his doubts about their effectiveness, Henderson suggested that a 15-metre barricade be constructed across the cobbled street between the wrecked municipal building and the riverbank. This would provide a good shooting point from which to ambush enemy vehicles crossing the bridge.

  Henderson also gave the go-ahead for a smaller barricade at the top of the road they’d been living in, and several other residential streets radiating up from the river. This would force any German traffic to either demolish a barrier or run the gauntlet of their ambush points.

  Within twenty minutes there were three dozen adults and close to a hundred kids at work. It was decided that the stricken tank would form the barricade’s centrepiece and they built out from either side of it.

  People brought out barrows, pickaxes and shovels. Broken cobbles were taken up, then kids worked with hammers and crowbars to loosen more. Elderly men worked in teams, plundering the rubble in front of the wrecked municipal building and dragging the biggest sections into place with ropes.

  It was hot work and the mix of unstable mounds of stone and kids running around led to crushed fingers and other minor injuries. Paul was no fan of manual labour, but he rounded up six metal fire-ash cans and some paint. He put bright yellow stripes on the cans and found two pieces of board, on which he painted black skull icons and Danger Mines! in both French and German.

  By the time Paul’s artwork was dry, the chest-high barricade had a few people finishing off the section closest to the river, while everyone else had moved uphill to start building the smaller barriers. After stripping several lengths of electrical cable out of the municipal building, Paul arranged his brightly-painted ash cans and warning notices in front of the barricade and ran pieces of wire between them so that it all looked like some fiendish explosive trap.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The tide of goodwill that took Henderson’s suburban neighbourhood through morning and afternoon gave way to anxiety as the sun faded. Barricades or not, you could still hear Germans attacking resistance strongholds throughout the city. There had been no sign of army vehicles in Saint Cloud, but their return was surely only a matter of time.

  Henderson’s apartment had become a kind of neighbourhood headquarters. The sofas had been pushed back against the living-room walls and the kitchen table put in the middle of the room with a local map spread over it.

  At 7 p.m. Henderson, his team, plus several Maquis and locals gathered around the radio for BBC France’s daily news broadcast. They all hoped for triumphant news, but the announcer calmly stated that American and French forces had now reached the Seine at Fontainebleau, while resistance fighters faced increasingly heavy German retaliation in central Paris.

  ‘Fontainebleau is south-east of here,’ Luc’s girlfriend Laure said sourly. ‘The Allies are going around Paris.’

  People nodded solemnly in agreement.

  ‘If they get across the Seine they can quickly cut off German supply lines to Paris,’ Jean-Claude added.

  ‘They said nothing about the German reinforcements,’ Luc said, as he slid an arm around Laure’s back.

  ‘If the reinforcements arrive and the city gets cut off, there could be a siege,’ Jean-Claude said.

  Henderson shook his head. ‘Paris is huge. There could be pockets of German resistance, but it would take hundreds of thousands of soldiers to secure the whole city.’

  ‘And we’re almost ten kilometres from the centre,’ Marc added.

  The mood was dark as people filtered out of the apartment. Henderson sent Marc and Sam out to check on one of the ambush points. Three of the six men had gone home as the initial eagerness of the volunteers gave way to anxiety and hunger.

  The other ambush points were similarly depleted, so Henderson reduced their number from four to two, and sent some men home to rest with orders to return in the morning. He also added two of his own people to each team.

  It was 2.30 a.m. and Marc was keeping lookout on a flat roof when he heard a truck coming downhill towards the bridge.

  ‘Showtime,’ Marc shouted, giving PT a nudge. ‘Everyone wake up.’

  There were five men on the team, plus Marc and PT. The most alert was a local lad of about fifteen who whipped a lighter from his pocket and grabbed a petrol bomb. Marc went for his sniper rifle, while PT and a couple of the other men grabbed bombs.

  When the truck drew close they lit the wicks on their bombs, but the driver surprised them by slowing down.

/>   Marc looked at PT. ‘He can’t have seen us, can he?’

  The truck stopped 15 metres from the point bombs would have been dropped on to his canvas awning. Three men managed to pull the burning wicks out of their bombs, but the fifteen-year-old lost his nerve and lobbed his into the road in front of the truck.

  Apparently lost, the truck’s driver was reaching for a map in the door pocket. But he threw the gearstick into reverse the instant he saw the explosion. The flames enabled Marc to see the driver and his trigger finger was faster than the driver’s foot engaging the clutch.

  Marc shot the German through the chest and as his body sprawled sideways the truck began rolling downhill.

  ‘Don’t burn it,’ PT shouted. ‘There might be food, or ammo.’

  As the truck accelerated, Marc took a second shot and blew out a front tyre. This made the vehicle lurch sideways. It scraped noisily along a garden wall and stopped just shy of the dying petrol bomb.

  While Marc shot, PT had clambered over a sloping roof and now lowered himself on to cobbles directly behind the truck. He pulled out a pistol as he opened the truck’s canvas rear flaps and shone a small torch inside.

  He briefly glimpsed racks of blue-green cylinders, before getting distracted by a skinny figure cowering at the back.

  ‘High explosive,’ the man said, in strangely-accented French. ‘Shoot and you kill us both.’

  ‘Come out slowly,’ PT ordered. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

  Marc had jumped off the roof and approached the front of the truck. He was surprised to see that the dead driver wore the insignia of a senior SS officer. Marc opened the passenger side door and grabbed a blazer resting on the seat. The ID inside confirmed the officer’s rank and listed him as part of a Special Demolition Team.

  ‘Don’t kill your pal back there,’ Marc shouted to PT. ‘I don’t know what we’ve got here, but it might be important.’

  PT allowed the skinny man to crawl out of the truck and stand up.

  ‘Not German, Polish!’ he said pleadingly. ‘Polish. Osttruppen!’

  The guy was so underweight that you could see every bone in his face.

  ‘You said high explosive,’ PT said. ‘What are those cylinders?’

  ‘From torpedoes,’ the man explained.

  Marc turned to the fifteen-year-old and told him to run and fetch Henderson from the apartment.

  ‘I know what a torpedo looks like,’ PT said disbelievingly.

  The Pole shook his head. ‘They make torpedoes at Saint Cloud, but the Germans have no more submarines.’

  ‘What do you mean they make torpedoes in Saint Cloud? We’re in Saint Cloud now.’

  One of the locals answered this question. ‘The Germans did make torpedoes in a factory near here, but all the workers got laid off months ago. A friend who worked there said the factory was full of torpedoes, but that there were no U-boats left to use them.’

  The Pole didn’t speak good French but nodded eagerly at the old man’s story. ‘They take torpedoes apart. Then they remove explosive, for demolition of the city.’

  PT peeked back inside the truck and realised that he was looking at the explosives from more than thirty disassembled torpedoes. His jaw dropped as he looked at Marc.

  ‘If we’d dropped petrol bombs on this lot we’d have killed ourselves and blown up half the neighbourhood.’

  But Marc still didn’t completely buy the Pole’s story. ‘So the Germans sent out all this explosive with just one guy and an Osttruppen?’

  The Pole shook his head. ‘We had a puncture. The other trucks wanted to reach the city centre before dark, but we stayed behind and I guess my driver got lost.’

  ‘So how many trucks were in the convoy?’ Marc asked.

  The Pole shrugged. ‘Fifteen. Perhaps twenty.’

  Marc did a calculation in his head. Twenty trucks with thirty large warheads inside made 600 bombs. That amount of explosive dropped from aeroplanes would be nasty, but the destruction would be hundreds of times more effective if the bombs were expertly positioned rather than lobbed out of aeroplanes.

  Henderson came running towards the scene with unlaced boots and his shirt buttons undone. Before the war he’d run the Royal Navy’s Espionage Research Unit, which specialised in spying on rival navies’ technology.

  ‘Two-hundred-kilo torpedo charges,’ Henderson said. ‘The design’s been refined since I last saw one, but they’ll still blow a nice hole in whatever you want them to.’

  Henderson then shocked the skinny prisoner by switching to fluent Polish. ‘How long since the other trucks left the torpedo factory?’

  The man’s face lit up. ‘Are you Polish?’

  ‘Good with languages and accents,’ Henderson said. ‘Now answer my bloody question.’

  ‘We took almost an hour finding a spare tyre after the other trucks left.’

  Henderson nodded, then spoke to Marc in French. ‘Use the telephone in the apartment below ours. Contact the Ghost Circuit on five-four-nine-three. It’s probably too late, but someone may be able to identify the trucks with the other bombs in. And they can get word out, asking all resistance groups to keep an eye out for demolition teams using blue cylinders.’

  As Marc ran up the hill, Henderson looked at the skinny Pole and pointed inside the truck.

  ‘I don’t understand what that thing does,’ he said.

  ‘What thing?’ the Pole asked.

  As the Pole turned, Henderson slipped an arm around his neck and started choking him.

  PT looked shocked. ‘He told us everything we asked.’

  ‘Don’t care,’ Henderson said, once he’d dropped the dead Pole between his unlaced boots. ‘Osttruppen betrayed their own country. They swore an oath to Hitler to save their own skins. I might have done the same thing under desperate circumstances. But once someone’s crossed that line, how can you ever trust them?’

  PT looked furious. ‘The guy was half starved. He was no threat to anyone.’

  ‘Don’t you dare question my decisions in front of strangers,’ Henderson spat. Then he paused, before reverting to a more normal tone. ‘We need to stop worrying about one dead Polish traitor and start thinking about the best way to kill Germans with all the explosives that just landed in our laps.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Tuesday 22 August 1944–Wednesday 23 August 1944

  ‘Take cover,’ Sam yelled, equipment clattering as he ran frantically uphill, tailed by half a dozen armed men and a bunch of kids.

  It was Tuesday, almost noon, and three medium Panzer tanks had rolled on to the far end of the bridge. As the lead tank came off, it slowed to a crawl and turned its turret towards the long barricade less than 15 metres away.

  A few seconds felt like hours as the two tanks behind slowed up.

  ‘Panzer mark four,’ a girl crouched in a doorway beside Sam said.

  He was no tank expert, but you didn’t need to be one to appreciate the difference in destructive power between the broken 20-mm cannon of the tank that formed the centre of their barricade and the huge muzzles on these beasts, designed to pump out 75-mm shells.

  Then, with a rumble of its engine and a blast of sooty exhaust, the lead tank accelerated aggressively across the riverfront. It tore bricks out of a low wall as it pulled on to the street where the truck had been captured the night before.

  The second and third tanks did the same and people began returning to the barricade as their noise faded.

  ‘Those guns were huge!’ a worried-looking boy who’d been on the barricade with his grandfather said. ‘Do you think the German reinforcements have arrived?’

  The grandfather had no way of knowing and shrugged.

  People looked to Sam, expecting some pearl of wisdom because he was part of Henderson’s team, but he could only copy the shrug.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t try and fight ’em,’ Sam said.

  ‘There’s less noise from the city centre now,’ the doom-faced boy said. ‘Maybe t
hey’ve swept up the resistance there, and now they’re moving out here to the suburbs.’

  ‘Or it may be a good sign,’ a woman added. ‘If the Germans are sending tanks out of the city centre, it could mean that the Allies are closing in.’

  ‘The Allies have already gone around Paris,’ another man insisted. ‘So don’t go holding your breath on that theory, flower petal.’

  The woman took the insult personally. ‘I am not your petal, old man. And watch your mouth, or I’ll knock you out.’

  The woman looked tough, but Sam didn’t get a chance to see the argument pan out because Paul was yelling at him.

  ‘Henderson wants us indoors for a meeting.’

  It took a couple of minutes to walk to the apartment building and up to the third floor. Henderson’s whole team was present and the Maquis and other hangers-on had been conspicuously locked out.

  ‘Did you see the guns on those three Panzers?’ Sam asked. ‘I damn nigh shat myself when the lead tank turned his turret!’

  Joel spoke next. ‘If we’d placed some of that torpedo explosive on the bridge, we could have blown them into the water—’

  Henderson interrupted noisily. ‘I need everyone’s attention. I’ve had a bit of a run-around, but in the early hours of this morning I re-established telephone contact with one section of the Ghost Circuit. I’m told that the situation in the city centre is tense, but that resistance groups still control large areas and important buildings, despite the increased German pressure.’

  ‘What about the German reinforcements?’ Paul asked.

  ‘The resistance has seen no sign of German reinforcements arriving by road, and railways coming from the east are now bombed and sabotaged out of action. I’m also told that several vehicles in the convoy of torpedo explosives were attacked and destroyed. The rest of the convoy is being hunted and I understand that the Germans are now finding it difficult to move any non-armoured vehicles through Paris without incurring constant sniper attacks.’

  ‘That almost sounds like we’re winning,’ Sam said cautiously.