by Thomas Wood
And, judging by the silence of the MG34, we now outgunned them too.
We stared straight at each other for what felt like hours, as I sensed his finger gradually applying the pressure to the curved steel of the trigger. It was only a matter of seconds away now; I could feel it. I could only hope that if I was the first to take the hit, that I would have enough life left in my body to pull the trigger as I fell.
The Generalfeldmarschall’s shoulder suddenly erupted, a spout of blood shooting up towards the heavens, taking his gold-braided shoulder patch with it. Then, his face seemed to explode in a similar fashion, as a round went straight through the side of his cheek.
He stared at me in utter disbelief, his lower face seemingly disconnected from the rest of his body. The round had gone through one side of his cheek, taken out most of his teeth and tongue, and exited through the other side.
But he still wasn’t dead.
My right arm suddenly seared with pain, and I felt the round from the 1892 thump gently into the padded leather behind me.
I slumped backwards, just in time to watch as his chest burst open, with the accuracy of a surgeon’s knife, before he too, slumped backwards.
His rat-like eyes stared up into the inky blackness above him.
29
“Why does it always seem to be me that’s saving you?” Mike said, as he offered an outstretched hand.
“Because I’m the one who does all the real work,” I replied, spitting out a few broken teeth and more than a little bit of blood.
“You alright?” he asked me, gently wiping his hand over my arm.
“Tickety-boo,” I replied, as he pulled me down beside the car.
The MG34 had sparked up again, which confirmed that these boys had come packed and ready for a fight. Rounds thudded into the other side of the car, one or two of them passing through the sides and hitting the interior quite hard.
“We need to move from here,” I gasped, as I tried to put the thought of the searing pain out of my mind.
“We can’t. We’re pinned down by that machinegun here.”
“Where are the others?”
“Jerry’s managing to keep their heads down, for now. We’ve only managed to kill one of the motorcycle riders.”
I glanced up at him, as he double-checked that his MP40 was all in working order. I had dropped mine somewhere in the car.
“Can you cover me? I need to get back inside the car.”
“No, you don’t. You’ll get peppered in there, Johnny.”
“Well, I can hardly fight them with this, can I?” I lifted up the FN 1910 for him to look at. His look said it all; that’s going to kill no one.
I pulled the German helmet off my head and stripped down to the layers that made me identifiable to everyone else. It would have been just my luck to escape a close call like that, only to be riddled with holes by someone meant to be on my side.
I pushed the safety back up on the FN and tucked it away in my trousers for safekeeping. I had no idea if it would come in handy again later on.
“You all set?”
He nodded.
“Right then, after three. Three!”
I leapt up, not giving Mike a chance to argue against what I was about to do, but force him into doing what I wanted him to do anyway. He darted to look around the front of the car, and I heard him firing off rounds in bursts of three, to keep the weapon closely trained on its target.
I wrenched the driver’s door open, yanking his body out of the way before scrabbling into the back to find my weapon. It was in the footwell, by the body of the Generalfeldmarschall, and within seconds it was mine.
The car suddenly began to rock as I felt the headlights disintegrate under the force of the MG34. Mike must have ducked back behind the vehicle, as it rocked further still as the operator swept the gun backwards and forwards, sparks flying everywhere as rounds connected with the dials.
The sustained fire kept on coming, with the stuffing of the leather chairs flying out over my face, as the beautiful leather upholstery was completely decimated. Even the Generalfeldmarschall took a few extra rounds, just to be sure.
I lay on my back, my face tightly screwed up, clutching the weapon to my chest, as I let the rounds have their way. I was merely waiting for the inevitable round to strike my body. But it didn’t seem to come.
I slid my way through the front of the vehicle, joining Mike back where we had started.
“No chance of using this vehicle to get away then,” he quipped, as he fired another three-round burst around the front of the vehicle. He recoiled dramatically as another host of bullets ripped into the grill, the bits of metal twanging and screaming as they were ripped from their mountings.
He began to laugh erratically, as he changed the magazine on his MP40, tucking the empty one down his trousers for later on. We had been taught never to just throw them away. We might come across a whole crate of nine-millimetre ammunition, which would be completely useless if we didn’t have anything to put them into. We had been trained to become hoarders.
His laugh was a hollow one, the kind that someone gave when they had just received some awful news, or when they knew that they were about to die. I wondered how he was even managing to shoot straight, there was that much water filling up in his eyes. I could tell he was scared, but he was trying his hardest to plug every hole that was leaking it.
“We better move,” he suggested, “Before they realise that they could turn this whole thing into a ruddy great bomb if they wanted to.”
He was right. All it would take would be a few, well-aimed rounds towards the petrol tank, and this whole thing would become a charred ruin of twisted metal and singed bodies. We needed to move, and fast.
“Where to?” I asked, poking my eyes just over the top of the car.
“Not sure,” he replied, as the roar of a motorcycle engine, thundered at the foundations of the earth. “They’re moving the bike!” he began screaming, as the engine was throttled, and the bike began to manoeuvre around.
The machinegun began to open up, as the man in the sidecar started spraying the entire area with lethal rounds. As he turned, his back opened up to us momentarily and, in unison and without any kind of agreement, both Mike and I lifted our weapons up to our shoulders.
Burying the flimsy stock into my shoulder, I breathed calmly, no ounce of hesitation on my finger this time. I waited for the post of the front sight to line up with the man’s body and squeezed.
A nanosecond later, Mike did the same.
We would never know which one of us had been the one responsible for silencing that machinegun, but deep down, we both knew it didn’t matter. But that wouldn’t stop us arguing for the claim later on.
I emptied another few rounds towards the driver of the bike, who slumped over his handlebars, the throttle slipping, as he sent the corpses charging towards the ditch at the side of the road.
I looked towards Mike, relieved. We were now relatively free to run, apart from the odd round of tracer that zipped into the ground ahead of us.
We threw ourselves into the ditch at the side of the road, shortly to be joined by Suzanne and two other men.
“We have lost about five men,” she reported. “But we have only one man left in that car.”
“In that case, we should withdraw. Keep some behind to engage with him while the rest retreat. That German isn’t going to want to keep poking his head out now he’s all on his own.”
“No,” Suzanne argued, defiantly. We already knew that whatever happened, we had already lost this argument. “We kill every last one of them. We don’t want him to be able to report back what happened. It won’t take long.”
Everything had suddenly calmed, with only a few gunshots ringing out as the clean-up began. Then, the bold, lone German let out three rounds from his pistol, making a throaty echoing sound, as if he was firing into a barrel.
A man, who was foolishly sauntering towards the machinegun, crumpled in a heap on t
he floor, before wriggling around clutching at his throat, as if he had swallowed a bee.
A volley of shots rang out in retaliation, none of them really anywhere close to hitting their target but peppering the Mercedes nicely as they did so.
A handful of men cautiously moved towards the car, their variety of weapons raised and ready to shoot anything that moved.
The car was suddenly the scene of a ferocious light show, coupled with echoing reports of weapons as they bounced off the nearby trees. If the man wasn’t dead before, then he certainly was after twenty rounds of ammunition were emptied into his body at close range.
People began to drag themselves out of the holes that they had burrowed into, inspecting the dead and taking anything that would come in useful to them.
“You need attention on your arm,” Suzanne suggested, taking it in her hands and inspecting it carefully.
“It can wait. We need to leave, now.”
As if it had been waiting for my command, a truck suddenly roared from the southern end of the road. It drove with no headlights, only switching them on the second it came to a stop. It was unlike the other vehicles, in that there were no restrictions on its lights, flooding the whole area in an artificial white light.
For a second, we were totally blinded by it. But then, my eyes adjusted, and I could make out the outline of a Blitz truck, the same kind that I had seen back in Tours around a week before. It was open-backed and stuffed with as many troops as it could carry.
“How on earth did they get here so quickly?”
Mike looked at me, a panicked look upon his face. He was right. We had only hit the Generalfeldmarschall’s convoy about two minutes before, and it was a little bit of a coincidence that a fully laden truck should turn up, right on time.
They must have been warned by someone.
We both looked to Suzanne, but she had vanished.
Looking out of the ditch, I just caught her head as it bobbed down into the other ditch on the other side of the road.
It was just as we went to follow her, that the bullets let fly.
There must have been an additional twenty men now, which, seeing as we had lost at least five already, meant that we were now outnumbered. Two to one.
We scurried backwards, like retreating rats, as the rounds began to thwack into the ditch just ahead of us. There was no way we were going to stay in the barrel and let them shoot at us at will.
We ducked behind the front of the car, seeing for ourselves the true amount of damage that the MG34 had inflicted upon the vehicle it had meant to protect.
The front grill was nothing more than a mash of twisted metal, and the rest of the bonnet had not fared much better either. Mike had taken notice of it too.
“I reckon we could do with some of that right now. What do you say, old fruit?”
“Reckon we can make it?”
“We’ll have to give it a go.”
The Germans had no cover up their end of the road, apart from using their own truck, which was parked at such an angle that it blocked almost the entirety of the road.
“At least that means they aren’t expecting any tanks to join us,” I suggested to Mike, as he pointed out the Blitz to me.
He chuckled softly, as he eyed up the bike again, which was facing northwards, and back towards the château.
“I’m worried what they’re going to bring from up there,” he said morosely.
“Agreed. We need to get rid of as many of this lot as we can, then scarper.”
“Let’s go for the bike then, and hope they left some rounds for us.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“There is one condition though, old fruit,” Mike said, a surprising chirpiness to his voice.
“What’s that?”
“I get to drive. I’ve always wanted to drive one of those things.”
“That’s good. Because I’ve always wanted to fire one of those things,” I said, pointing to the MG34.
“Excellent, it seems that we both get our dying wish.”
We both paused, for a moment, as Mike realised his poor word choice had scared the two of us. His face broke out into a deep smile.
“Come on then, let’s show them what we’ve got.”
We gave a slight grimace, and a nod of appreciation for one another, as we waited for the right opportunity.
The volley of rifle fire seemed to happen in groups of five rounds each, so all we had to do was wait for one of the gaps.
Briefly, there was silence. But, as we emerged from behind the car, the two figures, out in the open, suddenly became the interest of every German weapon in France.
30
There was no mistaking Mike’s complete and utter joy that he was about to ride his very first German motorbike. He had been the proud owner of a Vincent Comet, which had seen many a near-miss on the country lanes around RAF North Weald.
That was the problem with young fighter pilots, they came so close to death on a daily basis up in the air, that when they were back on the ground, they thought of themselves as completely invincible. It had led to more than one tragic accident in our short time at Weald. None of which stopped Mike from doing his best to become involved in a high-speed crash.
He seemed to forget completely that we were now under heavy enemy fire, the aim being ever so slightly off, just enough to allow Mike some time to caress the motorcycle and get her purring.
“Cor, would you listen to that!” he exclaimed, as the pulsating feeling rumbled through my backside. It did truly feel wonderful, to be at the mercy of such a powerful machine. It was a feeling that I had missed, one that neither of us had experienced since we had been back in the cockpit of the Hurricanes.
“Never mind that, Mike. We need to get a move on!”
He looked around startled to find that it wasn’t just him and the bike. Their love affair was to be brief and ruined by me.
Within a second or two, he had the thing facing the right way and it was now my turn to snap out of the romantic trance that I was in.
I lifted up the feed cover at the top of the gun, and quickly slid the drum magazine off the left-hand side. Flicking the carry handle over to one side allowed me to peer inside it, and I was automatically comforted by the number of rounds that I had at my disposal.
“We should be all good here, Mike,” I bellowed, over the roar of the gunfire, as I went about replacing the drum and getting the weapon ready.
There was a sudden ping as a round deflected off the front wheel guard, and both Mike and I instinctively ducked down to avoid anything further.
I suddenly had the thought that there wouldn’t be too many more of them that evening. I had used up my fair share of close calls now, and the next one would ping me somewhere vital.
“Bring me into range!” I shouted at Mike, and he dutifully revved the engine and charged towards the enemy, like a valiant knight of the realm.
I felt the air thicken again as we got closer to the truck, before Mike stopped and brought his MP40 off his shoulder and into the aim.
“Go!” I screamed at him, the blood vessels ripping at the back of my throat. “There’s no point in the both of us being killed! Go!”
He looked at me in disbelief, or at least I think he did, as I was already too busy staring down the iron sights of the machinegun, preparing to loose off rounds in every direction.
I focused in on two Germans who were using the front cab of the truck as cover, their feet foolishly visible underneath the open door.
My first few rounds were high, smashing into the window and spraying them with glass, but my following burst was spot on, and I could imagine the pain as the rounds ripped into their flesh, exposing shattered bone and muscle.
They both writhed around for a moment, as I kept my gaze on them, until I was satisfied that they weren’t going to be getting up in a hurry. They were of no real threat to me, so it was my time to move on.
But, as I did so, I became the attention of every man th
at was there, including one who had made his way down the ditch at the side of the road and was now taking potshots at me from a matter of yards away.
He began to fumble around with his rifle, panicking so much that the bolt would not go into its housing that he forgot to take cover as he did so. It was a fatal mistake.
I was sure that I was able to see his heart as he sank back down into the ditch.
I squeezed off another few rounds into the truck, as the heavy wooden stock smashed into my shoulder one time too many. Blood was now gushing through the front of my shirt, the pain reaching an unbearable level.
Just as I felt like giving up, I heard a click.
The truck up ahead of me was now full of holes and shattered glass, the few troops left uninjured were standing well behind the cover of the truck so that I could not get to them.
But I had run out of ammunition. The drum was completely empty. Panicked, I began to look around in the sidecar, my feet sprawling about like a spider’s legs, trying to find another drum, or at least a box with some more ammunition in it.
But there was nothing there other than another empty drum. I was spent.
“Jean!” came a cry from the ditch. “Get over here, now!”
There was a burst of gunfire, and the small, inadequate windshield of the motorcycle shattered, splintering my left cheek in fine glass. I felt the blood begin to fall immediately.
The call came again, this time far more urgent, and with a hint of worry that I was no longer able to hear them.
Ignoring the pain in my arm, that seared as if a branding iron was burning into my flesh, I pushed myself from the sidecar, beginning to run.
Something jumped up from the ground and bit me in the back of the leg, which sent to the floor. The pain was not so bad, at first, and I was able to continue running, before throwing myself face down into the nearest Frenchman that I could find.
He brushed me down, looking into my face like a worried father, before I rolled away from him, to go and find Mike.
“This is hopeless,” I breathed, as Mike gripped my shoulder. “We need to fall back, and quickly.”