by David Black
The Jerry had turned towards the beam with one hand shielding his eyes while with the other he was waving. The light paused only for a moment, then began panning on. The Jerry began to turn back, bringing his arm down from his eyes. He never saw Verney before he ran straight into him like a freight train, Verney’s left hand shooting by his ear and grabbing the back of his neck and pulling, and Verney’s right hand coming up from waist height at sixty degrees exactly, as he’d trained to do. Did the Jerry see the glint of the blade? And even if he did, did he know it for what it was before the steel went up under his jaw and straight into his brainpan, before Verney’s left hand came back to shut off his mouth and kill any residual scream from a body that was already dead before it hit the ground?
Verney could shoot Jerries all day long, plant bombs or throw grenades and see them blown sky high. But killing up close, with your hands still on the breathing, living man’s body and his death grip still on you, as you took his life, it sucked something out of him too. He hated it. He could feel the tears pouring down his own face as he struggled to disentangle himself. But he couldn’t think about that now. He’d think about it later, whether he wanted to or not. He knew that. But then he’d have gin for company. For moments like that, there was always the gin.
He was up and running again; the Ju 88s just fifty yards ahead. The first one was deserted. Not a figure near it.
The brief from the Greek locals had been specific – the Jerries always had at least one guard per aircraft. Because they feared local partisan action more than anything the British might do. And there were at least a hundred and thirty-odd Jerries on the base at any one time. All Luftwaffe ground crew. The aircrew slept in the nearby village. Verney remembered thinking that was a pity; chucking a half dozen grenades in amongst all the sleeping pilots as well would really have fucked up their air defences. Backup was a one hundred and eighty-strong company of Panzer Grenadiers, based on the island’s main town, with a clutch of Hanomags and two armoured cars. The Greeks even had some Box Brownie snaps of them. Verney had identified them immediately as Sd Kfz 232s. Nasty. But they were all a good ten minutes away, long enough for his lads to make a mess and leg it.
So where was the first Ju 88’s armed guard? Sod it! He slowed to a halt by the first aircraft’s undercarriage. Nobody there. Jerry guards bunking off, whatever next! He fished one of the Lewes bombs out his satchel, stripping off the paper and stepped up onto the undercarriage wheel. With a lunging reach, he slapped it up into the wheel well, right against the main wing tank, which should, with a bit of luck, be topped up with fuel and ready to go. Verney’s bombs had replacement minute fuses; he snapped it and dropped down onto the pan again and started racing for the next Ju 88 in the line. Again, no guard. He snapped up another Lewes bomb, stripped it and slung it up into this one’s wheel well. It was only when he jumped down again that he noticed the oversized bundle clustered between Ju 88 number three’s main undercarriage. He froze in the shadow of this one’s main wheel and peered into the space between the other’s. It looked like some sort of cover had been stretched… a blanket? It was then he could hear the muttering, and if he just offset his eyes… was that a faint glow? What on… earth? And then it dawned on him. The Ju 88 guards were playing cards… and maybe some of the nearby Stuka ones too. There was a vague whiff of tobacco smoke in the air. Jesus Christ, if they’d been in any of his units, he’d have had their hides flayed off them.
What to do? He was aware he was hesitating, which broke Rule One in The Olly Verney Guide to Raiding! – keep moving. The other Rule One was concentrate on the target, so he did, and he decided was he was going to bag that bloody Junkers. And the only way to do that was to kill those guards… he had his Browning 9mm in his hand now and was fishing for a grenade… when one of the guards suddenly stood up, pointing away from Verney, back towards the main buildings. The Jerry shouted a challenge. It wasn’t very loud, like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Verney followed the line of his sight… and there was Dickerson and Meikle, dodging in and out the far end of the line of Stukas, just fleeting shadows to the Jerry, but Verney knew all right exactly who they were.
The figures went to ground. And the Jerry raised his rifle. The other Jerries stood up too… five of them. Another challenge from the Jerry with his rifle. Inexplicably, his comrades just stood there. The Jerry was yelling he was going to shoot. Verney heard a breech block. And that was it. Decision made. Verney shot the Jerry with the rifle in the back of the head, and raised the grenade, intending to pull the pin. The other four, all of them Luftwaffe ground crew… engine fitters and airframe riggers, just like their dead pal lying there on the ground with his helmet leaking blood and brains… all of them immediately threw up their hands and started shouting, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’
‘Bloody hell!’ yelled Verney, aloud, out of incredulity and frustration. What did these idiots think he was going to do with four prisoners? Stupid bloody… and then he saw they were all edging apart, and one of them was edging further than the others, towards the dark. ‘Kamerad!’ the Jerry shouted, once more for good measure. Verney stared at him until he realised he was hesitating again. He turned his pistol on the Jerry, and as he did, the one at the other end of their group ducked in behind the tapering rear fuselage and started running, keeping the tailplane between himself and the crazy Englander’s gun. When Verney swivelled to try and get a shot at him, the other three fanned out and tore off into the blackness as well.
‘Thank you, Fritz,’ Verney muttered to himself, relieved not to have had to shoot them all in cold blood. There were things you had to do sometimes, even if sometimes you’d’ve preferred not to. Meanwhile, behind him, all hell was breaking loose. He saw Dickerson and Meikle emerge from behind the line of Stukas, heads up, one of them shouting, ‘What the fuck?!’
‘Use up what’s left and head for the wire!’ yelled Verney and then he turned and started running… towards the searchlight tower and under its sweeping beam. On the tower, spits of light appeared… an MG 42 had opened up and tracer arc-ed, and the rounds, as they hit, bounced and toppled across the hardpan between the last Ju 88 and the line of Stukas. No one was there, Jerry was firing blind. Verney heard a bang, like a grenade going off, but quite a way away. He blanked it – too much to think about right here. And then a flare went up with a whoosh. Verney didn’t look, he just kept running through the dark. And then the whole world was bathed in a sickly, chemical light that turned it into one vast frieze of moving shadow. But Verney was already under the view of the machine gunners in the tower. Two more Lewes bombs, stripped and fused and stuck to the tower’s legs. Thirty-second fuses this time.
And then, BOOOOM!… BOOOOM!
Great billowing mushrooms of flame and oily smoke billowed from the two Junkers in quick succession, so that between them and the parachute flare, the whole airfield seemed fixed in some awful artificial daylight. Both aircraft had collapsed on their sundered wing roots and were now blazing furiously.
*
Boyd, on his feet and running, began yelling, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Alarm! Alarm!’ and started pointing wildly into the dark maw of the airfield. ‘Bunny! Dusty! Start yelling too, you soft bastards!’ he hissed, much lower. Rabbett and Miller, also up and running now, caught the drift and obliged, ‘Achtung! Alarm!’
The Jerry at the guardhouse was suddenly aware of these three dark figures appearing on the road, coming from behind the fuel dump. Who? What? But they were heading towards the gunshot… and shouting warnings… in German. He thought no more about them as he turned and began winding the field telephone for a connection to the Panzer Grenadiers’ barracks in the town.
The three raiders were running towards the two Storch recce kites, and Boyd was fumbling in his satchel for the Lewes bombs with thirty-second fuses. He kept pulling bombs out to check the coloured tape marker, but he couldn’t make out any bloody colour in the dark. Every time he checked, he slowed, so that Rabbett was racing ahead. Rabbett reached the fir
st Storch before Boyd and simply pulled the pin on one of his four grenades, popped it in the cockpit, and ran on to the next.
The Storch was an ungainly excuse for an aircraft to say the least; all struts and wire with a high monoplane wing all propped up and looking like an overgrown balsa kit flung together by some enthusiast in his shed.
Boyd stopped in astonishment, and before he’d remembered to start running again – remember Rule One of The Olly Verney Guide to Raiding! – the grenade went off and was enough to reduce the middle of the Storch instantly to a pile of kindling. Then there was a flash, and its petrol tank went up, scorching Boyd’s eyebrows.
This was the grenade Verney heard as he ran towards the searchlight tower.
An instant later, Boyd could see Rabbett clear as day as he reached the next Storch and repeated the exercise.
Because suddenly, as if from nowhere, a huge parachute flare had appeared almost directly overhead.
The BANG! from Rabbett’s grenade, however, was drowned in a big, one-two yellow flash and blast out in the middle of the field as Verney’s Ju 88s went up.
Everything was total confusion now. And everything began happening at once.
Verney’s team and Boyd’s, from their different angles, could see the avalanche of figures pouring out of the barracks hut, in various stages of dressing, clutching rifles and sub-machine guns, holding helmets on, struggling with their webbing. All the airfield’s lights were now blazing and the searchlights probing wildly around the perimeter. Some of the Jerries were making for the trucks directly ahead of Boyd’s lot, but he urged Rabbett and Miller to keep running towards them. Shots filled the air, and the chatter of machine guns, though it was obvious to the two British teams nobody knew what they were shooting at. Certainly, nobody was shooting at them, not yet.
Another flare went up. And as it did, in a regular BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the line of Stukas started to explode, like a row of fireworks in a closely choreographed display. Seven of them, in quick succession, turned into collapsing bonfires. And as they did, two more cracks! And the central searchlight tower’s beam began to spin wildly through the sky, jabbing up into the haze, as the tower itself, in slow motion, toppled its full length to the ground.
Verney, standing behind the two back struts of the tower, stepped deftly aside as they too, split and splintered, and he stood motionless as the whole structure crumpled onto the ground. The platform that had once been its top, spilled four figures, sprawling onto the rough gravel, each of them landing hard and bouncing. And as they did, Verney was already running towards them with a grenade in one hand, pin already out. He threw it, checked his pace momentarily and shielded his eyes as it went off. When he turned back and started running again, he could see one of the Jerries had taken most of the blast. His disrupted body lay to the side, unrecognisable as a person now. The other three were all conscious and moaning. One got to his knees, and Verney shot him twice. The other two, especially the one with the spectacularly broken legs, just lolled, so he left them alone. It was their MG 42 machine gun he was after and its belts of ammunition. He swept it up; he’d fired a Spandau before – beautiful device! He flipped down the bipod and threw himself to the ground. The enemy was firing everywhere, but not at him. With the second flare guttering away furiously above them, Verney knew he was in plain sight now, but nobody was going to distinguish his prone figure from the other Jerry ones lying around him. He checked the belt, cocked it and then systematically began pumping tracer rounds into the still intact Ju 88. One of its fuel tanks detonated almost immediately.
This had all been planned as a sneak-in-sneak-out-again op. We just cut through the wire, mark the spot, then creep through the shadows to the aircraft, plant our charges and then run back to the holes and away before the balloon goes up. Funny how all these raids always went to shit, one way or another.
But none of the six British commandos tearing across the airfield that night was worrying about that. It was the speed of it all that was consuming them, and that they were feeding off it too. That old Verney dictum again: keep moving. The rush, the sheer excitement, the no time to think.
He was still in his early twenties, but this thrill was Boyd’s drug of choice now, this was what he craved, where he could feel the fitness of his body sing back to him after all those months of training, carrying knapsacks full of bricks for hours and hours in a running crouch round that track, or out over the desert for fifteen miles and back, the endorphins pumping through him. And the action, the unalloyed joy of explosions, destruction, mayhem, power. Everything else in life was just killing time until he could be back here, right here, in this very moment, living. Fear was just something he’d heard about.
Two trucks, now loaded with a scrambling mob of Jerries, suddenly started up and shot out of the motor pool area. A couple of Jerries, hanging out the back of the second one, saw the three commandos running towards them and never for a moment realised who they were. They just assumed the obvious and waved for them to ‘Come on! Come on!’, thinking the three were Luftwaffe, just like them. But the lorry was tearing away too fast. The commandos waved back. But it was the bowser Boyd had his eyes on. He ran straight to the cab and jumped in. Miller came up to the door behind him. Boyd turned the ignition, and the engine started.
‘Slap a couple of Lewes on this, and open the outlet valves,’ he yelled, but his voice was almost drowned by the Stukas blowing up, one by one, on the other side of the row of bell tents.
Miller nodded and did as he was told. When he banged the cab door, Boyd slammed the petrol bowser into gear and drove it across the perimeter road and directly into the row of tents, spewing fuel as he went. He ran over three; from the crunching and clanging coming from beneath the wheels, the tents were obviously workshops, as he’d been hoping. Then he yanked on the handbrake, jumped out and ran before Miller’s Lewes bombs blew the lot into a flaming pyre.
He was back on the other side of the road when a series of flashes dead ahead almost blinded him. The Lewes bombs he’d planted in the heart of the petrol dump were going off now and turning their enclosing stacks of oil drums into even bigger bombs. The noise was tremendous; huge whumphs!… and thundercracks too, like the sound a giant redwood tree might make being snapped like a cocktail stick. And then there was the display, the drums that hadn’t detonated, where the heat and blast only sundered their base plates, going off like huge barrel-rockets, the burning petrol roaring out of their ends, sending them soaring in gigantic fiery parabolas into the night; and the heat, the roiling, rolling waves of furnace heat.
The two troop-laden lorries reached the centre of the field and stopped. Any further and they might have run Verney over. Verney, who was still prone behind his MG 42 Spandau. He was trying to decide whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to start firing at them when there was a huge BANG! and a mushroom of yellow flame billowed out from behind the lorries, then a line of flame, like a theatre curtain opening out, and Verney could make out the tent line behind, each bell of canvas crinkling as it was consumed.
It must have been that bowser he’d seen. Boyd and his lads must be busy.
That was when Verney really was stunned, physically, because of the blast, but also by the sheer biblical conflagration of it as the flames erupted over towards the main gate, as the fuel dump went up.
He turned back to see the lorries begin disgorging strange, jerky, stick-like figures, all silhouette limbs and rifles dancing in the glare of those flames and flares. The figures fanned out across the field as if without a plan and began firing as they went at God knew what. Verney watched a wave of them stumbling directly towards him, all of them, half-blinded – thankfully – by the glare. He shuffled himself round until he had the MG 42 facing the other way, and then he began shooting randomly into the night. As the first of the running Jerries impinged on his peripheral vision, Verney began yelling in his diplomat’s excellent German, ‘Draussen! Tommies! Schnell! Ausschwärmen!’ And the Jerries went scurrying past him
, at the crouch, rifles at their shoulders, firing too.
And look who was creeping up behind the Jerry line? Verney’d know those rumpled, shady, moving heaps anywhere: Dickerson and Meikle.
‘Where’s our hole?’ hissed Verney. He’d long ago lost his sense of direction, thus breaking that other Rule One of The Olly Verney Guide to Raiding: concentrate.
‘Buggered if we know, Olly,’ said Meikle. ‘We’ve both lost the marker points too. None of the terrain makes sense in all this light. We’ve still got the cutters though.’
Over on the other side of the burning tents, Boyd, Rabbett and Miller stood admiring their handiwork but only for a second – remember Rule One: keep moving.
It was obvious their work was done. Everything they’d come to blow up was burning, except two of the Stukas that neither they nor Verney’s team had managed to get at. Too late now, there were too many Jerries running about.
‘Head for the gate,’ hissed Boyd and set off at a run. Rabbett and Miller looked at each other, did he mean for them to just walk out the front door? Well, okay then. Off they jogged after him down the perimeter road. Until Rabbett shouted, ‘Oi!’
Meanwhile, on the other side of all hell, Verney was scanning the tableau before him. He thrust his hand directly towards the mid-point in the one, immaculate black and untroubled stretch of perimeter. ‘Right there. Off we go,’ he said, as if suggesting a stroll down the pub, and his team took off at a jog after him. Dickerson, on the outside, noticed as they went past, two pale, frozen faces following their progress. The Jerry lorry drivers were still in their cabs, and they had both just looked up to see three commandos loping through the shadows less than ten yards away. Their expressions were a sort of pastiche of incredulity and terror. Neither of the two Jerries uttered a sound, nor, it seemed, dared move a muscle; frozen, except for their rigid stares which seemed to follow the three without a blink. Dickerson winked back at them over his shoulder, but he couldn’t tell if they saw, so he just turned and jogged on.
