Then they settled down to wait.
The burning staff car acted like an obvious beacon in the woods, and it was only a few minutes before Dawson saw the two German soldiers approaching, one on either side of the forestry track, keeping hidden in the undergrowth as much as they could. One of them was armed with a rifle, probably a Mauser, while the other was cradling a machine gun in his arms.
Dawson waited until they were about 50 yards from the ruined staff car, and about 100 yards from where he was hiding, then focused the sights of his Lee-Enfield on the German holding the machine gun, altered the sight picture slightly so that the bullet would not hit the weapon, and squeezed the trigger.
The Lee-Enfield kicked back against his shoulder, but even before the German soldier had fallen backwards, he was already moving the muzzle of the rifle and working the bolt to chamber another round. The next shot followed about a second after the first, and before the other German soldier had even had time to react.
For a few seconds, Dawson did nothing, just looked along the forestry track, making sure that both had been kill shots and that it was safe to move out into the open. Then he stood up and walked cautiously towards the spots where the two men had fallen. Both were very obviously dead, which was no surprise at that range with a Lee-Enfield rifle, and both their weapons were undamaged. As he had guessed, one of the Germans was carrying a Mauser, and the other a weapon he recognized as an MG 34 – a Maschinengewehr 34 – a general-purpose machine gun fitted with a 50-round drum magazine.
As Michaels and Rochester walked cautiously down the lane towards him, he put the weapons to one side and collected all the spare ammunition the soldiers had been carrying.
‘They might have been sitting ducks, sir,’ he said to Rochester, ‘but they were heavily armed sitting ducks.’
‘I’ll give you that,’ Rochester said. ‘So what do we do now? We can’t walk to Saint-Nazaire.’
Dawson handed the Mauser to Rochester and the Lee-Enfield to Michaels, then took the MG 34 for himself.
‘I’ll keep this, sir, if you don’t mind. It’s the heaviest, and I’m probably more used to firing this kind of thing than either of you are.’
‘So we need to get a ride,’ Michaels said, ‘and there isn’t a great deal of passing traffic here in the forest. I presume our best bet is whatever truck the Germans arrived in?’
‘I reckon so, sir, yes. That road we were on was probably the main route through this forest, so somewhere along there is where I would have set up my camp if I’d been in charge of a patrol. So what we need to do is retrace our steps, and then work our way south.’
The three men spread out, Dawson in the vanguard with the machine gun, and the two officers some distance behind him, none of them talking, and all paying the closest possible attention to their surroundings, using both their eyes and their ears to try to spot the Germans they knew had to be there somewhere, before the Germans could spot them.
They’d walked about a quarter of a mile south from the entrance to the track Dawson had steered the staff car down, keeping inside the treeline and hopefully out of sight, when he suddenly heard a metallic clacking sound from somewhere ahead.
Instantly, Dawson raised his hand to stop the two officers advancing any further, and then angled sideways, moving deeper into the forest.
About 50 yards ahead of him, in a small clearing cut out of the forest, perhaps as part of a logging operation, he saw the bulky outline of a vehicle, shadowy figures moving around it and speaking in guttural tones that confirmed to him their nationality. The most important thing was to ascertain the strength of the enemy, so for several minutes Dawson remained in cover and just tried counting the figures that he saw. Because of the intervening undergrowth, he could not be absolutely sure, but he thought there were no more than six of them, which meant that they were outnumbered about two to one. On the other hand, they had the element of surprise on their side.
Satisfied that he had done what he could, Dawson crept slowly and carefully back to where Michaels and Rochester were waiting.
‘I count six of them,’ Dawson whispered behind the thick patch of undergrowth where they had assembled. He guessed that Rochester would probably balk at simply machine-gunning the Germans from cover, which would be the easiest and most obvious option. And, in truth, he didn’t really have the stomach for that himself. With the two-man patrol, the situation had been different.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Michaels asked.
‘We surround them,’ Dawson said simply. ‘As far as I can see, they’re not expecting any trouble. They’re an advance patrol sitting in the middle of a French forest with not even a village within miles. The most dangerous thing they probably expect to encounter out here is a wild boar, and probably not even that. They haven’t got sentries posted and I didn’t see any of them carrying weapons.’
‘But what about the machine-gun fire, and the rifle shots?’ Michaels said. ‘They must have heard them.’
Dawson nodded.
‘I agree, sir, but we don’t know what those two soldiers were doing. They might have been sent out to bag a deer or something for the pot.’
‘With a machine-gun?’ Rochester asked.
‘Ah,’ Dawson replied. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose a couple of rifles would have made better sense.’
‘So we still surround them?’ Michaels asked.
‘It’s either that or I mow them down with the MG,’ Dawson replied. ‘I haven’t got any other ideas.’
‘OK. Let’s do this.
They separated so that each man would approach the German encampment from a different direction.
Dawson stopped about 20 yards away, took up a position behind a tree and again stared around the tree trunk and through the undergrowth at the scene in front of him.
He now counted five men, not six, which gave him pause. Had one man slipped away to watch the perimeter? Was he himself now in some German’s sights?
But there seemed no sign of concern or even awareness among the men he was looking at. They were wandering about, doing mundane tasks about the makeshift camp, and after a couple of minutes Dawson relaxed.
And then he instantly unrelaxed when he felt the unmistakable cold steel of a rifle muzzle pressing firmly against his back.
Chapter 32
28 May 1940
France
There are a lot of misconceptions about close combat, particularly when it comes to reactions, and especially to reaction time.
A fundamental truth is that anyone who sticks a gun in your back is as good as dead, as long as you can react faster than your attacker can pull the trigger. And you always can. A competent attacker will never get within killing distance. He will stand out of reach and control the situation from that distance.
Dawson felt the rifle muzzle against the back of his battledress and reacted the way he had been taught. He whirled around to his left, his left forearm knocking the rifle away from his body, and simultaneously swung the heavy MG 34 machine-gun backwards at head height.
The German soldier pulled the trigger of his Mauser, but the rifle’s barrel was no longer pointing at Dawson and the bullet ploughed harmlessly into the ground a few feet away. A split second later, the heavy butt of the machine gun crashed into the side of his head and he tumbled sideways, instantly knocked unconscious. Or worse.
Dawson shifted his grip on the weapon, fired a short burst into the air and ran straight into the camp. At the same instant Michaels and Rochester stepped out of the undergrowth on opposite sides of the clearing, their rifles levelled and ready to fire.
None of the German soldiers was carrying a weapon, apart from a couple with Mauser bayonets on their belts, and the shock on their faces told the story. Without a word being spoken, the five men raised their hands high above their heads.
Dawson moved a few paces until he could see all of them, and then gestured to Rochester to move in and remove the bayonets.
‘Leave your ri
fle, sir,’ he instructed, and Rochester lowered the Mauser to the ground before stepping into the camp. The last thing Dawson wanted was one of the German soldiers making a grab for the captain’s rifle.
Under Dawson’s watchful eyes, Rochester removed the two Mauser bayonets from the helpless soldiers, then continued to the half-track patrol vehicle parked to one side of the clearing, against which a line of Mauser K98 rifles were leaning. He picked up all of them and placed them, and the bayonets, in the rear section of the half-track.
With the soldiers all disarmed, Dawson used gestures to make them sit down on the ground beside their camp kitchen. Leaving Michaels covering them with his Lee-Enfield, he then walked back into the wood to recover the Mauser his erstwhile attacker had been carrying. He checked the man’s throat for a pulse and found one. Weak, granted, but he would probably live. Not that Dawson frankly cared one way or the other.
Then he climbed into the back of the half-track, levelled the MG 34 on the side of the vehicle and watched as Michaels made his circuitous way over to him.
‘Neatly done, Dawson. I’ll take the machine gun if you can get this thing started.’
‘Right, sir.’
The half-track was a Sonderkraftfahrzeug – a special motorized vehicle – designated the Sd.Kfz. 10, one of the commonest tracked vehicles used by the German military. There were two seats in the driving compartment of the vehicle, a more or less conventional steering wheel that turned the front wheels, and seats for up to eight soldiers in the back, above the tracks.
With both Michaels and Rochester now covering the disarmed German soldiers with the Mauser and the MG 34, Dawson got the engine started, worked out by trial and error how the gearbox functioned, and turned the half-track around within the clearing. A couple of minutes later, they were back on the road through the forest and putting distance between themselves and the German soldiers.
‘A bit bouncy back there, Dawson,’ Rochester commented, leaning forward to look down at Dawson sitting in the driving seat.
‘Sorry, sir. It’s this bloody gearbox. It seems to be a kind of automatic, with about seven forward gears. You move the gear lever, then press the clutch pedal down to make the change. It’s not that easy.’
‘Never mind. Just keep us heading in the right direction. How much fuel is there?’
Dawson scanned the gauges in front of him, searching for inspiration. One looked hopeful. It was labelled Kraftstoffanzeige, which was no help at all, but it had the look of a fuel gauge.
‘It might be this one, sir,’ he said. ‘If it is, we’ve got about half a tank.’
‘Let’s hope that’s enough. Keep the speed down, because that should give us a better range.’
They cleared the forest near Bourneville, found the road they needed, and started driving west. Luckily, the Sonderkraftfahrzeug was painted in camouflage colours, and was bare of German flags or insignia, or at least insignia that were big enough to be seen from a distance, because they definitely didn’t want to attract hostile but friendly fire.
About half an hour later, Michaels told Dawson to stop the half-track near the top of a low hill that offered an uninterrupted view to the north-east, the direction from which they had come.
The three men climbed out of the German half-track car and for a minute or so they just looked in silence at what they had achieved, though for all of them the word ‘achievement’ did not really equate with the level of destruction that they had directly caused.
Every tank farm and oil refinery along the north bank of the river, a total distance of about 60 miles, was ablaze, creating an almost unbroken line of fire that accurately delineated the path of the Seine. The flames from millions of gallons of petroleum products were reaching several hundred feet into the air and above that was an impenetrably black pall of smoke, itself several hundred feet thick. Occasionally, there would be a sudden silent explosion – silent because they were too far away to hear the sound – as the fuel inside a tank at one of the sites reached such a high temperature that it detonated. It was an awe-inspiring sight, by any standards, and Dawson suddenly shivered.
‘I know it’s late afternoon, but is it just me,’ he asked, ‘or has it suddenly turned really cold?’
Michaels shook his head.
‘It’s not just you,’ he said, and pointed at the dense black cloud hanging motionless over the river. ‘It’s us, and what we did. That smoke is so thick that it’s cutting out the heat from the sun’s rays. And that’s also why it’s so dark at the moment.’
The total distance by road to Nantes was about 200 miles, and although they were well ahead of the German advance, it was still a long and slow drive, in the main because of the huge numbers of refugees who were walking on both sides of the road, all trying desperately to escape. At the sight of the German half-track many of them would back away, then apparently recognize the British uniforms and run forward, trying to hang onto parts of the bodywork and begging for a ride to freedom and safety or just for food and water. But, heartbreaking as the sight of these desperate men women and children was, there was nothing the three men could offer them. There was some space in the vehicle, but how could they choose which half a dozen or so refugees to help? If they’d offered space to anyone, that could easily have sparked a stampede to get on the half-track. And they had no food and only a minimal amount of water. All they could do was harden their hearts, ignore the constant blandishments and try to drive on as quickly as they could.
And as the afternoon shaded into evening, they found they faced a silent and insidious enemy that was just as potentially deadly as the Germans: exhaustion. They were all aching with tiredness, and after Dawson had almost driven the half-track off the road when his eyes closed and his head slumped forward, they decided they would have to take it in turns behind the wheel.
But even that proved difficult, and eventually they each drove for only about fifteen or twenty minutes before handing over to one of the others; the hypnotic effect of the headlights on the straight road in front was almost as good as a sleeping tablet.
They finally reached the British HQ at Nantes a little before midnight. While Rochester and Dawson stayed in the half-track and thankfully closed their eyes, Michaels found the duty officer and told him who they were and what they had been doing, and then used the telephone inside the building to contact the military operations section at the War Office in London to confirm that they had completed their tasking: all the oil reserves along the River Seine had been fired and were unusable to the Germans.
There was no accommodation available for them at the headquarters building, and Michaels was told to report to a rest camp at Savenay, roughly 20 miles further along the road that led to Saint-Nazaire.
In their exhausted state, that was almost the last straw, and with Dawson once again behind the wheel as he claimed to be very slightly refreshed after sleeping for a few minutes while Michaels had been in the British HQ, they made their way slowly along this final part of their journey.
At the rest camp, the sight of the German half-track caused some consternation, but Michaels refused to explain why they were in it.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Ask me about it tomorrow, when I’m awake.’
They showed their identification to the guards on the gate, were given the number of a vacant hut and stopped right outside it. Michaels led the way inside, picked a bed and lay down on it, Rochester and Dawson following moments later.
Within three minutes, the only audible sound in the hut was gentle snoring from three separate sources.
Chapter 33
30 May 1940
France
Dawson had believed, and certainly hoped, that with the firing of the tank farms and refineries along the Seine their job in France was over, but it turned out that there was one more task they would have to do before they left.
The rest camp was located in open countryside near the small town of Savenay, and had so far been untouched by the horrors of
war: there had not even been a single German air raid anywhere in the vicinity since the start of hostilities. And it offered facilities that seemed like a taste of paradise to the three men. They could take a bath with hot water, something that none of them had enjoyed for what seemed like weeks; they could sleep without listening out for the sound of an air raid siren or some other unpleasant interruption; and they could enjoy hot food, sitting at a table and eating off china plates using knives and forks rather than scooping some unidentifiable stew out of a mess tin with a spoon.
But their near-idyllic existence lasted only a very short time, and it ended over breakfast on the morning of the second day after their arrival when an orderly approached Michaels with a sealed envelope, saluted him and then scurried away.
‘Perhaps it’s our movement order, telling us which ship to embark on for the journey back to Dover or Portsmouth or somewhere,’ Rochester suggested hopefully.
Michaels used a clean knife to slice open the seal, pulled out a couple of sheets of paper and quickly read them.
‘It’s a bit more than a movement order,’ he said, which surprised none of them. ‘It seems that we’ve been given one more job to complete before we leave this country. You’d better come over here, Dawson, because this will affect you as well.’
The atmosphere in the rest camp was relaxed, but there were still certain standards to be observed, one of which applied at mealtimes, so Dawson had been told to sit at one table while the two officers occupied another one. He had also only spent the first night in the hut they’d been directed to when they’d arrived at the camp, because again officers and enlisted men did not normally share the same sleeping accommodation.
Dawson stood up, walked across the small dining room and stood next to the table where Michaels and Rochester were sitting.
‘Take a seat, man,’ Michaels instructed, and Dawson took a chair from an adjacent table and sat down next to him.
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