“Throwing arms in good fettle?”
They grinned and said “Yessir.”
“Come on, then. As soon as Jerry shows up close enough, we’ll engage with rifle fire. When enough of them are in Tommy gun and grenade range, we’ll let ‘em have it, then withdraw. They’ll follow and walk into enfilading rifle and Bren fire, and we’ll call the mortar platoon down on them.”
Sergeant Duff, who had come with the two privates, went back to give orders to his corporals. The platoon took post and Taggart wished his nerves would steady down. He had a bad feeling that, now they were within a few miles of Dunkirk and unavoidable embarkation for England, some misfortune would befall and deliver him into enemy hands. He thought of George Dempster and others who were snugly in hospital already in Sussex or Kent, and envied them.
Staring at the road from the east, at trees and farm buildings, his vision became distorted again and he saw two of each object. He shut his eyes for a longer time and rubbed them. When he looked again, all was in order. But his breath was laboured and he could feel his heart hammering against his ribs.
I could do with a stiff Scotch or a belt of cognac... no, I couldn’t... what the hell sort of funk am I that I need a drink before I can fight?
The five of them were in a long attic which had two dormer windows front and back. He looked right and left to check the others’ mood. He and Udall were at one back window with the quiet, stocky Boys gunner, O’Connor. The two riflemen were at the other. All four of his companions were intent on watching the road, the copses and woods, the fields, hedgerows and ditches for a tank, armoured car or field-grey infantry, on foot or brought to contact by lorry.
They trusted him. He despised himself for his fears and for succumbing to the physical burden of the past days to the extent of having trouble with his eyes. He looked at his hands: they were firm; dirt- and oil-engrained, but firm on the submachine-gun.
He was putting a lot of confidence in O’Connor and his Boys anti-tank gun. It was a weapon that had to be treated cautiously. The recoil could give a man a bruise on the shoulder that lasted a week. The jolt from its kick could jerk a man’s neck as though it were a whiplash and leave it sore and aching for days. But its .55 inch steel cored bullet could penetrate armour at 300 yards and do appalling damage when it ricocheted around inside a tank. When fired it made a tremendous bang. This nearly always startled novices into releasing their grip, with the result that the second round gave them a terrible kick and a whiplash jerk.
O’Connor was regarded as a distinguished executant with this formidable instrument of destruction and took modest pride in his reputation. In civilian life he had been a librarian and Taggart found his subdued, scholarly manner incongruous with the deadliness of his aim and the manifest delight he took in inspecting the results of a shot whenever the chance occurred. He would peer through the turret of a halted tank and gloat over the mess of blood and mangled flesh and bone smeared over the armour plating.
Taggart had given each man a segment of the landscape to survey. It was O’Connor who spotted the first movement.
“Dust rising from the lane at two-o’clock, five hundred yards, sir: just near the junction with the main road.”
“Got it.”
Taggart adjusted his binoculars.
“Tanks. Two of them.”
Or am I seeing double again? He had a quick moment of self-distrust.
“Yes, sir.”
Udall said “Dust moving this way along the main road, sir. Half past twelve, six... seven ‘undred yards.”
“Yes, I see it. Lorry. Two... three lorries.”
Taggart held the tanks and lorries alternately in view.
“All right, they’re doing as expected. The tanks are going to come down on either side of the road, along the edges of the fields and through the trees. The infantry are getting out and preparing to follow them.”
He tested himself again for the steadiness of his nerves and resolution, the steadiness of his hands. All under control.
Nobody had seen or heard the dive-bombers.
Six of them appeared at six or seven thousand feet, before the throb of their engines reached the house.
One of the tanks had crossed the road, the other had crashed through a hedge to advance on the opposite side of the road. They were within 400 yards of the house when they stopped in a copse.
The Stukas were almost overhead, the noise of their engines loud; and threatening. Five flew over the house.
The sixth dipped into an almost vertical dive. It was impossible to guess its point of aim.
Taggart shouted “Downstairs, everyone.”
Immediately under the roof tiles, they were in the worst kind of danger. He hoped there was no sound of panic in his order. He clumped down the stairs behind his men.
The siren on one of the Stuka’s undercarriage legs began to scream as it dived.
The earth trembled under the impact and explosion of a 50 kilogram bomb. The bomb landed close enough to the house to shatter all the windows and slam all the open doors. There was the scraping of tiles falling from the roof.
Four more bomb bursts followed as 50 Kg bombs exploded beyond the house.
They had reached the ground floor by the time the first bomb went off. Taggart rushed to a glass door at the back of the house, all its panes gone. He could see the tanks coming for them.
“Come on... we can’t get a decent shot from here now.”
He ran across the back lawn to a fence along which stood yew trees and poplars at intervals of a few yards. He gestured to O’Connor to take cover behind one, and to the rest to spread themselves along the others.
“Wait until they’re within two hundred yards, O’Connor.”
“Sir.”
Taggart looked for the infantry and saw them in open order 50 yards behind the tanks.
The din of Stukas diving and their bombs bursting was loud and hideous, and Taggart pictured the damage they must be wreaking in the hamlet; and among his comrades.
O’Connor fired. His first bullet ripped away the tread of the further tank. His second slammed through the armour at the front of it. The tank started to burn.
Two more shots from the Boys, but the nearer tank had swerved, presenting a side, which had thicker armour than the front. It was still moving forward, zig-zagging. O’Connor fired the last round in his magazine and began to reload. His fifth bullet had hit a tank track and the nearer tank, 150 yards away, had stopped.
Taggart was taken by an intensity of emotion that he had never known before. He thought, for a fleeting moment: This is what it must be like to run amok... to go berserk. He was overpowered by hatred for the enemy. He hated the disgrace of having to quit the battlefield; but there was no alternative to reaching the coast as fast as possible and scuttling back to England. And here were these bloody bastards of filthy Nazis, filthy bloody Huns, trying to prevent him and the others who had survived their foul invasion from reaching safety; to fight another day. Not bloody likely.
He rose from crouching behind a tree.
“Come on. O’Connor, stay and put a bullet inside that tank... there’s an armoured car coming down the road... knock it out. Come on, Fillery... Robinson... we’ll get closer to the bastards.”
The Boys sent another bullet at the crippled tank. No one had escaped from the burning one.
The sound of an aero engine overhead. Bullets from a Stuka’s front gun. Taggart turned his head. Thep.’ 87 was only a few hundred feet up, in a shallow dive. He saw its bullets hit O’Connor and their impact throw him clear of the sheltering tree. He lay motionless.
Taggart resumed his run towards the roadside.
“Get down... cover me.”
Fillery and Robinson fell prone. Udall doubled at Taggart’s side.
“Go back... no, drop there, and help cover me.”
“But...”
“Do it.”
Scowling and grumbling, Udall dropped behind a bush.
R
ifle bullets hummed past Taggart from his three men. He reached the ditch beside the road and began firing his Tommy gun. Three or four Germans fell. The armoured car had run off the road and lay on its side, wrecked by O’Connor’s expert aim.
Taggart threw two grenades, then, in a moment of stark appreciation of his rashness, began to pelt back to rejoin the others, crouching and swerving with enemy bullets following him and hitting the ground around his feet.
He did not stop when he passed Udall, but yelled to him to follow. He did not stop at the other two, but called to them as well. Then he pulled himself together and halted, turned and saw them rise.
He ran to them and hurled his last two grenades at the nearest enemy. Fillery, standing and fully exposed, threw one before a bullet took him in the heart. Robinson began to run back, following Udall and Taggart. As they crashed into the garden behind the house where they had hidden, the three of them paused and each threw two more grenades. Then there was a burst from a Schmeisser and Robinson was riddled from head to waist.
Taggart and Udall ran full tilt around the house and into Sergeant Duff.
“Just coming to look for you, sir...”
“Get back... get back... don’t stop...”
The Brens opened up. The mortar platoon, called on, Taggart guessed, by Sergeant Duff, was in action. Mortar bombs crumped among the enemy infantry.
Ten minutes later the company had fallen back to rejoin the rest of the battalion.
* * *
The 72 hours that Taggart spent on the beach at Dunkirk waiting to be embarked were the worst moments in his life. It was not on account of the misery of defeat, the dive-bombing and strafing, the hunger and thirst, the spectacle of ships and boats being sunk, either before they could take men off or heavily laden with stupefied and battle-weary troops and their officers, who drowned. His remorse and guilt arose from the knowledge of his loss of self-control, the recklessness with which he had led O’Connor, Fillery and Robinson to their deaths; the terror that had engulfed him for those few seconds when he was running for his life, forgetting everything, including his men, in his desperate effort to escape the retribution provoked and deserved by his impulsiveness.
Major Eugster had said “The Colonel is putting you up for an M.C., Rodney.”
Taggart remembered reading how men who turned tail in the American Civil War had been branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron that left a mark to proclaim their cowardice for the rest of their lives. Involuntarily he put his hand to touch his own cheek.
Even if his weakness had lasted only a few short moments, he was no better than Dempster; or any of the others who had envied him his apparently unassailable bravery.
And, he meditated, even if he were not truly a coward, he had acted like a bloody fool, a maniac, leading men who trusted him implicitly to a death that no other officer in the battalion would have brought them.
Six
When Taggart went ashore at Dover late on the morning of 1st June, he expected to find a nation reeling under the demoralising effect of defeat, of its Army having been driven out of France, and the loss of immense quantities of arms, ammunition, tanks, vehicles and other military equipment in the process; as well as of thousands of men from death, wounds or capture.
He felt hangdog and personally disgraced. The fact that he had been put up for a decoration gave him no pleasure; it seemed an ironical, even cynical, recognition of having done his duty and achieved nothing by it. He was prepared for the civilian population to treat the returning British Expeditionary Force with contempt, resentment, scorn.
Instead there was a welcome as warm as though they had returned triumphant. That gratified him but added to his sense of shame, because it seemed to him an undeserved kindness. There was more than mere kindness, there was pride; which astonished him; and, above all, a cheerful and undaunted spirit of determination not to allow the reversal of fortune to affect the nation’s confidence in ultimate victory.
“Now we know how we stand,” people said. “We’re on our own, and we know we can rely on ourselves.”
It was, as well as an expression of firmness of character and courage, a typical reflection of the sturdy British attitude of patronising disdain for foreigners.
In fact, the French Army was still fighting and went on fighting after the last troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk on 4th June. It was not until 18 days later that an armistice was signed between France and Germany. It was also a fact that tens of thousands of French officers and troops had chosen to come to England to fight on. And there were already thousands of volunteers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark.
The battalion was reassembling at a barracks in Surrey and all but a small nucleus were given a few days’ leave. Taggart walked up the path to the door of his parents’ home in Wimbledon jaded and shabby. His father was out visiting patients, his 17-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister were at boarding school. His mother, the elderly cook and the middle-aged housemaid were at windows, watching for him. His mother came running down the path to meet him halfway with an embrace.
“Tea will be ready in a few minutes, darling. Cook’s baked a Dundee cake for you, and your father promised to be home by four as well. I telephoned Tim’s housemaster and Valerie’s housemistress to let them know you’d come back safely. You’re much too thin, we shall have to feed you up.”
He laughed. “You won’t have to persuade me, Mother.”
“Now, out of those grubby clothes and off they go to the cleaners and into the washtub. Would you like anything before you have your bath?”
“A whisky and soda would go down rather well, Mother.”
“My goodness! At half-past three in the afternoon? I don’t know what your father would say to that. But I know what I’m going to say: I’ll join you! Now let’s hurry up and have that drink and you have your bath and change. I know we’ve only got you home for a very short time. You’ll have to get back to the coast, of course, to stop this invasion that Hitler’s ranting about; silly little man. Your father has his twelve-bore ready, and I wanted him to buy me one; but he said I ought to join the Red Cross, so that’s what I’ve done. Goodness, just look at all that mud and sand caked on your uniform...”
This acceptance of disaster as though it were triumph made it hard for Taggart to credit that only a few hours earlier he had been among a throng of men terrified for their lives under bombing, artillery bombardment and sniping.
* * *
Four days’ leave and Taggart rejoined his unit on 5th June. The last man had been rescued from Dunkirk in the small hours of the previous day.
The Colonel called his officers together.
“For your information only, we have already begun to hit back. On the night of second-third, three officers were landed between Etaples and Boulogne, by the Navy, and destroyed two hundred thousand tons of petrol and oil. Coming back, they had to row thirteen miles to make their R.V. with the naval trawler; and they picked up a British soldier who had missed the evacuation, while they were about it!”
Taggart, visiting Dempster in hospital, passed on the information.
“Sounds like the sort of mad thing you’d enjoy, Rodney; and be damned good at.”
“I’d certainly rather do something of that sort than wait around on this side of the Channel for Jerry to make the first move. I wonder if they’ll use the Independent Companies for raids on the French coast, now?”
These had been formed, around a small nucleus of Regulars, by volunteers from the Territorial Army who had not been sent to France on the outbreak of war. They had done well in Norway during the brief campaign there in April and May: fulfilling their purpose, guerrilla-type warfare.
“They formed ten Independent Companies, didn’t they?”
“That’s right: twenty officers and two hundred and seventy troops in each. I don’t know what casualties they had in Norway.”
The notion that had entered Taggart’s mind excited him. He
would have been all the more stirred had he known that, on the day following that first audacious foray by three Army officers and a small naval vessel, Churchill had sent a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff: “If it is so easy for the Germans to invade us, why should it not be possible for us to do the same to them?”
While Taggart was spending his days and a large part of the night preparing defences along the Sussex coast, training new drafts of recruits to the battalion, standing guard for an enemy seaborne assault, the thought of a specially trained and chosen force of volunteers to devote their time to raiding German-occupied France, Belgium and Holland was often in his mind.
It was in the forefront of the minds of Winston Churchill also and of Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke, Military Assistant to The Chief of The General Staff, General Sir John Dill.
The Prime Minister’s conception of such a force was typically romantic: he referred, in his memoranda to the C.I.G.S., to the proposed raiders as “Leopards” and “Storm Troops”.
Colonel Clarke’s were less fanciful. South African by birth, he recalled the Boer commandos which had so successfully harried a numerically superior British force during the Boer War. The commando troops had been successful because they were mounted and thus mobile; and they carried their frugal supplies with them and therefore did not depend on a supply column. To make swift raids across the Channel a modern British force would travel by sea: again, mobility would be the essence of its usefulness.
Churchill, Colonel Clarke and General Dill together spawned and fostered the decision to form a commando-type force. Where, however, could they find the best men for it?
Churchill did not allow much time. He wanted the first raid to be mounted within two or three weeks. His instructions to this effect to General Dill were immediately passed on to Colonel Clarke. Meanwhile, War Office had drawn up a specification for the qualities a Commando officer or ranker must have.
The first requirement was that the Commandos must accept the doctrine that no type of operation could be regarded as “unusual”. In order to carry out every task demanded of them, they must, at short notice, be able to swim, ride a bicycle or motorcycle, drive a car or lorry of any kind, ride a horse or camel (!), travel by land, sea or air and adapt themselves to every sort of terrain. They also had to be already fully trained soldiers, to have perfect health, be immune from air or seasickness, and possessed of self-reliance and intelligence.
The Steel Fist Page 8