Nelson nodded. “We deal with these two bastards, then make our way along the backside of the tents, near the outer perimeter. Kill any sentries we think we can take quiet-like, hiding otherwise. Once we get close to where the other lads are kept, we hit their guards like a bloody hammer and get guns in the hands of as many men as we can. Then, we fight hard and make for those bloody panzers. If we get a few of our tankers inside one, Jerry will piss his britches.”
At that, the two Commandos slipped close to the tent flaps, and using his knife, Herring cut the ties securing them together. With infinite care, he parted the flaps, revealing the two guards standing only a pace from the opening on either side. Both Germans were wearing their soft caps, but were otherwise fully armed and equipped.
Before the guards took notice of the disturbance behind them, the two Commandos struck. Nelson came up behind his target and wrapped his forearm around the guard’s throat. Before the man could react, Nelson hammered his fist into the guard’s kidney, the brass knuckles magnifying the force of the blow. The guard’s back arched and he gurgled, unable to scream with Nelson’s arm clamped around his throat like a vice. Nelson punched again and again, until his victim’s legs went out from underneath him. With a savage jerk, Nelson twisted the guard’s neck until there was a hideous crunching noise, and the guard’s body spasmed and flopped for a moment before shuddering and going still. Nelson dragged the corpse back inside the tent, and as he did so, he saw Herring tear his knife free of the other guard’s neck, an arc of spurting blood gleaming in the moonlight. As the second guard sagged to the ground, Herring dragged him inside the tent by his webbing.
The two men said nothing as they stripped the guards’ bodies of anything useful. Nelson’s victim carried an MP-40 and a pair of three-magazine ammunition pouches, as well as a fighting knife, an electric torch, and a stick grenade. Herring’s victim had a Kar98K rifle, pouches for stripper clip-fed ammunition, and a bayonet. Herring eyed Nelson’s machine pistol enviously, but Nelson shook his head.
“Not a bloody chance, mate. Now, let’s get moving.”
The two men finished buckling on the German webbing, and they both pulled on the service caps each man had worn in order to better disguise their silhouettes in the dark. Then, they slipped out of the tent and snuck around behind it, careful to avoid the ropes and stakes holding the tent up. Scanning the area around them, Nelson gave the signal to advance, and they began to move behind the various tents and other structures that made up the airfield installation. As they passed the Storch observation plane and its refueling lorry Nelson sighed, wishing he had an explosive more sophisticated than a single hand grenade.
Once beyond the Storch, they approached the wireless tent and its wooden antenna tower. Ahead of them, both Commandos saw the glow of a cigarette indicating the presence of a sentry standing in the lee of the tent, enjoying a late-night smoke. Herring looked to Nelson, who nodded and reached for Herring’s rifle. Unburdened of his long gun, Herring dropped to the ground, and over the next couple of minutes, slithered like a snake towards his quarry.
The only sign of Herring’s attack was the cigarette’s glowing tip as it flew from the sentry’s mouth and arced through the air, bouncing on the ground in a brief shower of sparks. Nelson counted to ten before moving forward in a crouch, until he saw the dark outline of Herring kneeling over the dead sentry. Herring slung the sentry’s rifle and ammunition pouches, tucking a stick grenade into his belt, before taking the other rifle from Nelson. For a moment, the moonlight crossed Herring’s features, and Nelson saw the man was smiling, the expression one wears after hearing a good joke. Herring saw Nelson looking at him and his smile grew even wider.
“Like putting a baby down for his nap,” Herring whispered. “Didn’t even know what happened until it was all over.”
“You’re a nutter, that’s what you are,” Nelson replied. “C’mon now, let’s move.”
The two men continued on, slipping around and behind several more tents. Now and then a sentry was seen at a distance, but they didn’t encounter another in their way. Nelson sensed this was a disappointment to Herring, who tensed with excitement every time a sentry appeared, looking to Nelson as would a hunting dog, begging to be let off the leash.
Eventually they approached a more open area, where the moonlight illuminated still forms lying on the ground, surrounded by a crude rope fence and guarded by a trio of sentries. Nelson gestured to two guards who were nearest them and pointed to his chest, then pointed to Herring and the last guard, in turn. Herring nodded, then brought up his rifle. Nelson unfolded the wire stock of the MP-40 and tucked it into his shoulder, settling the weapon’s sights on the right-most sentry. To preserve his night vision as much as possible, Nelson closed his off-hand eye.
“Now,” he whispered.
With a soft squeeze of the trigger, Nelson fired three rounds from the MP-40, the 9mm slugs stitching the guard from belly to shoulder. The guard dropped, and before he hit the ground, Nelson was firing on his second target. A longer four-round burst spun the man around and sent him tumbling into the sand, tangled in his rifle sling. Herring’s shot, a moment after Nelson’s, caught the third guard high in the chest and kicked him right off his feet.
The two Commandos broke into a low sprint and covered the short distance to the prisoners’ pen. Men were cursing and sitting up or crouching, bewildered faces staring around wide-eyed, looking for a threat. Nelson scooped up a rifle from the closest corpse and tossed it to a tank crewman, who managed to catch it before taking the rifle’s bolt in his face.
“What the blazes?” the man cried out.
“Jailbreak, lads!” Nelson answered. “Grab their weapons and make for those bloody panzers!”
With that, Nelson spun around and pulled the stick grenade from his belt. Twisting away the cap, he tugged on the arming loop and threw the grenade as hard as he could towards the wireless tent. The grenade sailed through the air and tumbled into the tent, detonating with a loud crack and a flash of high explosive. A scream came from inside the tent, slowly trailing off into a whimper.
All around him, the tankers were coming to their senses. Three other men were armed in short order from the bodies around them and the spare rifle Herring carried, and not a moment too soon, as the first Germans arrived and began firing. Immediately, one of the tank crewmen went down, a rifle bullet blowing away part of the man’s face, before Nelson turned and cut down the German responsible with a burst of slugs.
“Move it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to take their armour!”
The men surged forward, only to drop and cower in the sand as a hail of machine pistol slugs whipped through the air all around them. Nelson, Herring, and a couple of the tankers returned fire, but the speed with which the Germans were responding made headway impossible.
“It’s the crewmen!” Lieutenant Chalmers shouted at Nelson. “They bivouacked with their panzers!”
As if on cue, the growl of an engine coming to life reached them from the far side of the airfield.
Nelson turned to Chalmers. “The cannons on those tanks, do they fire high explosive?”
Chalmers nodded. “The big one, the Panzer IV, has a howitzer, and the others can all fire HE, but they don’t need to, and they won’t in such close quarters. They’ll just use the machine guns, and that’ll be enough, because we don’t have anything that can stop them.”
Nelson pointed back towards the tents. “Sir, get your men in amongst the tents and clear out any Germans left there. The panzers won’t fire on the tents for fear of hitting their own. Herring will stick with you, he’s a right terror when Jerries are around.”
Chalmers nodded. “What about you?”
“I’m going to get me hands on a bigger gun,” Nelson said, ducking as a burst of machine gun fire snapped overhead. “And, to use it, I need your best gunner.”
Chalmers looked around for a moment, then grabbed a man by the arm and swung him around. “Miller, you’re going with
the corporal. Do whatever he tells you.”
Miller nodded, looking a bit at sea, but he saluted nonetheless. “Yes, sir!”
Nelson turned to leave, but Chalmers caught his sleeve. “Corporal, exactly where are you going?”
“I’m going to commandeer that ruddy great big cannon of theirs,” Nelson shouted. “The eighty-eight.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Airfield
November 18th, 0215 Hours
Nelson snapped on the electric torch, and the beam illuminated the inside of the tent. Towering above them, the gun shield of the eighty-eight showed signs of recent battle damage; dents and pits in the steel marked where machine gun slugs had bounced off, and there was a fist-sized hole in the upper right-hand corner where a tank’s armour-piercing shell had struck.
“Bloody hell,” Miller whispered. “Now, this is a cannon! It’s a sodding monster!”
“Can you operate it?” Nelson asked.
Miller stepped around the gun shield and Nelson followed, the torch lighting their way. Several opened ammunition crates were scattered around the gun, and a dozen or so spent shell casings littered the ground between the rear of the gun carriage and the back end of a large German half-track. Miller walked up to the weapon’s controls, his gaze tracking over the wheels and levers, the gears and pistons that made up the great cannon. He ran his hands over the breech, as if tracing the weapon’s method of operation in his mind.
“Aye, I can handle this. Semi-automatic sliding breech block, mechanisms for traverse, elevation, and firing. I’ll need you to load it and trip the firing lever, and it’d be nice to have a third man to feed you the shells, but two men can do this in a pinch.”
Nelson nodded. “Alright, let’s get at it.”
“We’re going to need more visibility,” Miller said. “I’ve got to see the targets better, and we need a wider field of view.”
“What we need is a Very pistol,” Nelson muttered. He dug around in the back of the half-track parked behind the eighty-eight. There were unopened crates of shells, as well as entrenching tools, lengths of chain, cleaning instruments for the gun, and other miscellanea. Finally, he found a small metal case that looked about the right size. Opening it, Nelson found a flare gun and a number of flare cartridges.
“Bloody brilliant,” he muttered.
“I need my field of view!” Miller repeated.
“Right.” Nelson moved back to the front of the gun and drew out the fighting knife he’d taken from the sentry. Working fast, he cut away the tent flaps and the side of the tent in the direction of where the German armour had been leaguered.
“Good,” Miller said. “Now I can traverse the gun so it’s aiming down the runway.”
“The runway?” Nelson asked.
“If it was us, we’d move up the runway in column, bringing our turret MGs to bear on targets as we passed. Nice clear path, don’t have to worry about obstacles or running over one of our mates stepping out from behind a tent.”
Nelson nodded and stepped away from the gun as Miller rapidly spun the traversing wheel, the massive gun barrel slowly turning to the left until it was pointed down the entire length of the airfield. Off in the distance, they heard the sounds of engines roaring and the squealing of tank treads, the chatter of machine guns and the crack of rifles. In the dim moonlight, the looming shapes of panzers were just visible turning onto the far end of the runway.
“We need those Very lights,” Miller said.
“Once we fire, they’ll be gunning for us,” Nelson warned. “How fast can you kill four tanks?”
“With this?” Miller asked. “As fast as you can load fresh rounds and pull the lever. Now, grab a shell and load.”
Nelson reached into a half-emptied crate and pulled out a heavy armour-piercing shell. With Miller’s direction, he slammed it home into the open breech, noticing how the breech locked closed once the shell was inserted.
“Now, send up the flare,” Miller said.
Nelson snapped a fat cartridge into the flare pistol, then stepped to the edge of the tent. Aiming the pistol into the air, he pulled the trigger, and with a pop, the flare fizzled up into the sky for several seconds, before bursting into bright light several hundred yards in the air.
“Get behind the gun shield and fire!” Miller shouted.
Nelson jumped back and ducked behind the shield, then grabbed the firing lever and gave it a hard tug. The blast from the gun was enormous, like being struck by a sodden pillow in the face, and Nelson jumped as the gun recoiled back violently next to him. The breech snapped open at the end of its journey and kicked the spent shell free in a puff of burnt propellant smoke before the recoil mechanism returned it to its firing position.
“Missed! Loader, reload!” Miller ordered.
Nelson grabbed another shell and slammed it home in the still-smoking breech. Miller fiddled with the guns aiming mechanisms for a moment.
“Now, fire!”
This time, Nelson leaned far to the left and peered out around the edge at the oncoming panzers as he fired the gun. The first tank, one of the smaller Panzer IIIs, was perhaps two hundred yards away when the eighty-eight’s shell struck. The armour-piercing round impacted at the top of the tank’s gun mantlet, just to the left of the gun. There was a huge flash of sparks and white-hot metal fragments spinning through the air, and Nelson saw the top of the turret ripped open, flames licking upwards. A moment later, white-hot fire gouted from the turret and a string of secondary explosions began to detonate inside the hull, as the panzer’s ammunition began to cook off.
“Stop gawking and keep loading, you big lummox!” Miller shouted.
Nelson snapped out of his momentary daze and grabbed another round, reloading the eighty-eight, and Miller gave the order to fire the instant the weapon was loaded. After yanking on the firing lever, Nelson reached over and took the last shell from the ammunition crate, then loaded the cannon again.
“That was the last round!” he hollered.
Miller gave the order and Nelson fired the cannon again, then peered around the gun shield and saw a second tank burning. The panzer had tried to manoeuvre around the first tank, and Miller had delivered a flanking shot, punching a glowing hole right through the middle of the second Panzer III’s chassis.
“Open another crate!” Miller ordered. “Hurry, blast it!”
Nelson stumbled over smoking spent brass casings trying to find an ammunition crate marked Panzergranaten, but every time he illuminated one with the torch’s beam, he was disappointed.
“I think we’re out of AP!” he shouted.
“Grab anything! We’ll be dead meat in seconds if that Panzer IV finds us!”
Nelson jabbed the end of his knife under the lid of a crate and pried it free. Clipping the lit torch to his webbing, he pulled out a shell and stepped around the debris, thrusting the fresh round into the breech. Miller worked the traversing wheel, shifting the cannon slightly.
“Need another flare!” Miller said. “Can’t bloody see anything through all the smoke.”
Nelson stepped around the gun and reloaded the flare pistol, firing another flare high into the air over the runway. The instant the flare popped, Nelson spotted the two remaining panzers - both of them were swinging wide around the runway, well out of the eighty-eight’s line of fire, and bringing their turret guns to bear.
“Panzers, two o’clock!” he yelled.
Miller frantically spun the traversing wheel, and the gun slowly came about, but it was too late. Both tanks opened fire with their machine guns, and a fusillade of slugs ripped through the tent, glancing off the cannon’s gun shield, tearing through the thin metal body of the German half-track, and smashing through the empty ammunition crates. Nelson shuddered to think what would happen if a tracer penetrated a live round in one of the full crates. He probably wouldn’t even know what happened before the blast turned him to bloody hash.
There was a crack and sparks flew from the rear of the half-trac
k, followed instantly by the report of a tank’s main gun. Bits of red-hot metal ignited the back wall of the tent, which began to smoulder.
“Fire, you big oaf! Fire!” Miller hollered, and Nelson stepped away from the breech block and tripped the eighty-eight’s firing lever. The shell smashed into the circling Panzer III, tearing through its engine compartment. Nelson saw several figures bail out of the tank as it caught fire.
“Load, load!” Miller cried out, traversing to bring the gun to bear on the large Panzer IV, moving at speed to come around their flank. The barrel of the eighty-eight hit the other side of the tent fabric and caught it, obscuring Miller’s view.
“Christ, I can’t bloody see!” Miller shouted.
There was a heavy report, and a shell cut through the tent and out the other side faster than the blink of an eye. A moment later, there was an explosion a hundred yards to their rear.
“The tent - cut the tent!” Miller demanded.
Nelson grabbed the next shell and all but threw it into the breech, before scrambling over the rear of the gun carriage and attacking the tent fabric with his knife, cutting it away with great hacking sweeps of the blade. Three hundred yards away, the Panzer IV opened fire with its co-axial machine gun, the tracers zipping all around Nelson, several glancing off the eighty-eight’s gun barrel and the shield next to him. A ricochet plucked at his sleeve, another smacked into one of the magazine pouches at his hip.
At last, the tent cloth was sliced away, and Nelson stumbled around Miller and over the gun carriage, pulling the firing lever as soon as his fingers found it. The shot arced out and plowed up a great furrow of earth behind and well beyond the panzer, whose commander had shrewdly ordered the driver to increase speed as soon as he saw the eighty-eight had a clear line of sight.
Nelson turned and picked up another shell, but before he could load the gun, there was a terrible blast. The explosion picked him up and slammed him against the tailgate of the half-track. Ears ringing, he groaned and struggled to his hands and knees, squinting through the smoke and dust swirling through what remained of the tent. He saw Miller lying across the rear gun carriage, moving feebly, and there was a great rent torn in the gun shield. Nelson crawled to Miller, and saw the gunner’s right leg was gone below the knee. Several other shrapnel wounds along his right side were slowly oozing blood.
Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II Page 14