Chapter 19
12 September 1939
They reached Tommy Blake just minutes later. The soldier was lying with his back against a tree trunk, the front of his uniform sodden with blood. Both hands clutched his stomach, and his lips were drawn back in a silent snarl of agony. Beside him lay his Lee-Enfield, the fore-end smashed, the trigger missing and the guard bent badly out of shape.
‘Oh, Jesus, Tommy,’ Dawson muttered, looking down at the badly injured man.
‘Took a few in the fucking gut, mate,’ Blake murmured. ‘Lost a finger as well.’
He lifted his right hand slightly to show Dawson the bloodied stump where his forefinger had been blown off by the round that had carried away the rifle’s trigger.
‘Luckier than Jock, though. He bought it on the track.’
Dawson reached out and gently lifted Blake’s left hand away from the wound on his torso, but there was little to see – just a sodden red patch on his battledress – and even less he could do. And all three of them knew it.
‘Your medical pack?’ Dawson asked.
Blake shook his head, and blood ran from his mouth as he coughed. ‘In the truck, mate. Wouldn’t help if you had it. I’m fucked. Save yourselves. Get the hell away from here.’
Dawson crouched down beside the man he’d known only for a couple of days.
‘Anything we can –’ he started, then realized the futility of what he had intended to say.
‘Just go,’ Blake muttered. ‘No – wait.’
‘What, mate?’ Watson said.
‘You got any of them bouncing mines?’
Dawson nodded. ‘Yeah. Half a dozen. Why.’
Blake summoned a semblance of a grin from somewhere. ‘Leave me a couple. When those Jerry bastards come for me, I’ll take them with me.’
Watson shook his head. ‘We can’t just leave you here, Tommy. Not like this.’
‘You can’t do nothing for me, Dave,’ Blake muttered, coughing up another spray of blood. ‘Just give me the mines and bugger off.’
Dawson stood up and nodded. He took two of the mines out of the bag and placed them beside the dying man.
‘One either side of me,’ Blake instructed.
Dawson repositioned one of the mines as he’d been asked. Both were base-down, with the trigger assemblies pointing upwards. ‘You sure about this, Tommy?’ he asked.
Blake nodded. ‘Give me the rifle,’ he said, and Dawson passed him the useless weapon. With his left hand, Blake laid the Lee-Enfield across his thighs, the two ends of the broken rifle resting on the triggers of the mines.
‘Now arm them,’ Blake said.
Carefully, Dawson extracted the bolts they’d inserted to make the mines safe, then stood up.
‘Reckon I can just push down on this when the time comes,’ Blake said, looking down at the improvised booby-trap. ‘Good luck, Eddie, and you, Dave. Now go.’
Dawson nodded and turned away, not trusting himself to speak.
Watson hesitated for a moment, then bent forward and squeezed Tommy Blake’s shoulder. ‘You really will be going out with a bang, mate,’ he said, tears in his eyes.
‘Fuck off, Dave,’ Blake said, summoning another smile.
Moments later, Dawson and Watson were nowhere in sight.
* * *
‘Which way? Watson asked. ‘Back to the clearing?’
They’d moved deep into the forest, staying well away from level ground to avoid any mines, and had put as much distance as they could between themselves and Tommy Blake, just in case the German troops found him quickly.
‘No fucking way,’ Dawson said. ‘That’ll be crawling with Jerries by now.’
‘So where do we go?’
‘Right now, mate, I don’t know.’
There was a sudden massive double-explosion from somewhere in the forest behind them, the two blasts separated by the briefest fraction of a second.
‘That was Tommy, I guess,’ Watson muttered, turning back to look in that direction. ‘Hell of a thing to say, but he’s better off dead.’
‘With those wounds, you’re right. He’d have died anyway. This way he might have taken a few of those Jerry bastards with him.’
For a few moments the two men stood there in silence, the appalling reality of their situation numbing their thoughts. They were alone, unarmed apart from the bayonets they’d used for lifting the mines, on German territory and probably virtually surrounded by enemy troops.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Dawson said, his voice low and bitter. ‘That French bastard St Véran must have been ordered to collect his troops and withdraw, and he never said a word to Tommy Blake – just abandoned the four of us here in the forest, knowing the Jerries were on their way. If I get out of this alive, I’m going to track that fucker down and blow his bloody brains out.’
‘You might find yourself in a queue, Eddie,’ Watson said, his tone just as angry.
‘Ready?’ Dawson asked, his voice little more than a whisper.
‘As ready as I’m ever likely to be,’ Watson replied.
He and Dawson were each carrying one of the mines in their left hands, and their Lee-Enfield bayonets in their right. Over his shoulder Dawson had a haversack they’d brought from the Morris lorry, with the other two mines inside it.
‘I really hope we don’t have to try lobbing these at the Jerries,’ Watson muttered.
‘So do I, mate, so do I. Right, we’re well away from the clearing now, so I think we should try and angle back towards the track through the forest and follow that. That’ll make sure we don’t end up going round in circles in this bloody wood.’
‘Yeah, that makes sense.’
‘OK, let’s go.’
Dawson checked all around them, but saw and heard nothing that caused him any alarm. The two men moved cautiously through the undergrowth and took their first few silent steps down the hillside towards where they thought the track was.
They covered a couple of hundred yards down the slope, and Dawson felt his heart thudding in his chest with every step that he took. He kept on expecting a German soldier to appear in front of him every second, Schmeisser machine-pistol, rifle or pistol levelled at him, and knew that his life would end the moment that happened. Despite his suggestion to Watson about using the bouncing mine as a kind of improvised grenade, he had no illusions about how effective a weapon it was likely to be.
They moved slowly, their attention concentrated on the view ahead and to both sides of them, Dawson leading and Watson bringing up the rear. They were paying less attention to the wood behind them, because they guessed that most of the German troops would be closer to the track than deep in the forest.
That cosy assumption was violently shattered within another couple of minutes. They’d just crossed through a large open space in the forest when a sudden burst of machine-gun fire erupted – and it came from right behind them. Bullets whined past the two sappers, screaming through the undergrowth in front of them and to their right.
Dawson instinctively ducked to his left, behind a tree, and glanced back the way they’d come. About seventy yards behind them, a single grey-clad figure was standing right at the edge of the clearing. He was holding a Schmeisser machine-pistol and was just snapping a fresh magazine into place.
Instinctively, the two sappers dived into cover, burrowing deep into the bushes and shrubs that surrounded them.
But hiding wasn’t going to be enough. The German soldier had missed with his first burst of fire, because although the maximum range of the MP 40 was about 200 yards, it was rarely accurate even in trained hands at much over fifty. If he guessed his quarry wasn’t armed – and he might even have seen that neither man was carrying a rifle – he’d be able to walk right up to them and shoot them at point-blank range.
And there was no doubt about his intentions. His weapon reloaded, he was now walking around the edge of the clearing towards the spot where they’d gone to ground. He was pointing his machine-pistol in front o
f him, his finger resting on the trigger, and Dawson had no doubt that he’d open fire the moment he saw any sign of movement.
‘Shit,’ Dawson muttered, looking around for inspiration and finding nothing. Their only chance was to use one of the mines.
Dawson slipped the haversack off his shoulder and placed it on the ground. He lifted up the mine he was still carrying, grasped the head of the bolt with his left hand, wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the nut he’d screwed onto it and span it off. Then he extracted the bolt itself. The mine was now live, and quite a gentle pressure on the trigger assembly would start the ignition sequence.
He looked up. The German soldier was now only about thirty yards away, still moving cautiously towards their hiding place.
Dawson knew he had just the one chance, a single opportunity to get this right. If his plan failed, both he and Watson would be dead in a matter of seconds.
‘Wish me luck,’ he muttered, took a deep breath and rammed the trigger of the mine straight down onto the ground.
Nothing happened, but Dawson knew that inside the weapon some kind of a delayed-action fuse had been triggered, and he had three or four seconds – at the most – before the weapon exploded. Immediately, he changed his grip slightly and then threw the mine, as hard as he could, towards the approaching soldier.
‘Down, Dave!’ he hissed, and dropped flat himself, waiting for the explosions.
From his hiding place, he had a fairly clear view of both the clearing and the approaching soldier. He watched as his improvised grenade sailed out of the undergrowth towards his target.
The German obviously saw the missile almost as soon as Dawson threw it, and swung his machine-pistol round to aim at it. But then he appeared almost to relax slightly as he realized that the canister wasn’t the grenade he’d been expecting. He aimed his Schmeisser towards the edge of the clearing from which the object had appeared, and where the two men had to be hiding, and Dawson could almost swear he could see the man’s finger taking up the pressure on the machine-pistol’s trigger.
Then the mine hit, base first, perhaps thirty feet in front of the approaching German soldier. It started to bounce upwards, its momentum carrying it forward, then there was a sudden bang as the first charge detonated. When the explosive fired, the mine was about a foot off the ground and perhaps thirty degrees off the vertical, pointing away from where the two sappers had taken refuge. Without the weight of soil above it to restrict its flight, the mine shot about a further ten feet upwards and over towards the far side of the clearing. Then the main charge fired. There was a colossal bang, and suddenly the air was filled with red-hot flying ball bearings.
Dawson and Watson, lying flat on the ground with their hands over their ears, heard a cacophony of thuds and cracks and whistles as the tiny, lethal, missiles ripped through the trees over their heads, but the main axis of the blast was well above them.
The German standing out in the open wasn’t so lucky. The first explosion had caught him by surprise, and he’d just watched uncomprehendingly as the small black cylinder had suddenly jumped into the air about thirty feet in front of him. When the main charge detonated a split-second later, his unprotected body was virtually shredded by the impact of dozens of steel balls travelling at enormous velocity. He was dead even before he hit the ground.
‘Shit,’ Watson said, a kind of awe in his voice as he stood up and looked out at the clearing. ‘I’ll never doubt you again, Eddie.’
‘We were lucky that time,’ Dawson replied shortly, ‘but we aren’t out of the wood yet. Come on.’
He handed the bag holding the mines to Watson, then dashed out into the clearing, over to where the body of the German soldier lay sprawled on his back. His injuries were horrendous, his stomach and torso ripped open, his face torn to pieces, blood and splatters of tissue spread all around his corpse and across the track. Dawson did his best to avert his eyes, knowing that his actions had caused the death of this anonymous soldier, but also knowing that if he hadn’t done what he did, he and Watson would themselves now be dead.
He reached down and grabbed the Schmeisser machine-pistol. The leather strap for the weapon was around the dead man’s shoulders, and Dawson had to roll the body over slightly to free it. Then he undid the belt buckle which secured the soldier’s brown leather ammunition belt – fitted with two sets of three long green canvas and brown leather ammunition pouches, each holding a Schmeisser MP 40 magazine – and dragged it off the body. One section of the belt, and three of the magazines, were covered in blood, and there were a few cuts and scratches on it caused by the shrapnel that had ended the German soldier’s life.
Dawson glanced all round the clearing. At that moment he saw no other enemy soldiers, but then he heard shouts from the far side and looked up to see two figures wearing grey uniforms appear and start running towards him. It looked as if both men were carrying rifles.
But now Dawson himself had a gun. He roughly aimed the machine-pistol and fired a long burst at the approaching figures, though at that range – probably about seventy yards – he had no hope of hitting either of them. All he wanted to do was make them keep their distance, while he and Watson made their escape.
The two German soldiers stopped, but they didn’t retreat, which was what Dawson had hoped they’d do. Instead, they both dropped to one knee and aimed their rifles towards him. Despite the machine-pistol, Dawson knew that at that range he was hopelessly out-gunned.
The standard German army rifle was the Mauser Karabiner 98k, a 7.92-millimetre rifle that was accurate at over 500 yards with iron sights, and at nearly 900 yards if a telescopic sight was fitted. At less than 100, the type of sight was irrelevant – at that range anybody who’d ever fired a rifle would be able to hit a man-sized target with every single round. Dawson knew he had to move, and quickly.
He ducked down, then rolled sideways towards the edge of the clearing, keeping as low as he possibly could, just as the two German soldiers fired their weapons, almost simultaneously. He heard the bullets whining over his head, then the echoing crack of the two shots. The Mauser was a bolt-action weapon, so Dawson knew he had a bare second or so before either of the soldiers would be ready to fire again. He jumped to his feet and ran for the shelter of the undergrowth.
‘Dave,’ he shouted, ‘let’s get out of here. And bring those mines – we might need another one before this is over.’
The two sappers headed away from the clearing, deeper into the forest. Another couple of shots cracked out, but Dawson guessed the Germans had to be firing blind and neither bullet came anywhere near them.
After about 100 yards they stopped and took up positions behind a pair of substantial trees. Dawson checked the MP 40. There was a bullet in the breech, and after a couple of seconds he found the release and dropped the magazine onto the ground. He dragged another one out of the soldier’s belt and snapped it into place. If that magazine was fully charged, he knew from their briefings at Catterick a few weeks earlier, it had a total capacity of thirty-two rounds.
Ignoring the blood, which was now sticky to the touch, he quickly shrugged on the ammunition belt and secured the buckle. He picked up the discarded magazine and slipped it into one of the empty pouches. It felt as if there were still four full magazines, so ammunition wouldn’t be a problem for a while.
The two men stared into the forest around them, looking for any sign of the two German soldiers.
‘They won’t follow us in here, mate,’ Watson said, his voice little more than a whisper, ‘not with you carrying a machine-gun.’
‘I bloody hope not,’ Dawson replied, equally quietly.
Watson nodded and lifted the bag holding the mines. ‘You think we still need to lug these around?’
Dawson nodded. ‘If it wasn’t for those, we’d both be dead by now. We might find another use for one or two of them.’
‘I still think we were bloody lucky the way that mine exploded.’
‘We were, mate, but right
then we were fresh out of fucking options. I hoped that when it landed it would bounce away from us when the first charge fired, and if it did, that would mean that the main explosion would blow the shrapnel over our heads. And pretty much whichever way the mine fell or bounced, that soldier wasn’t going to survive the blast.’
‘If you say so,’ Watson nodded. ‘And thank Christ that Jerry opened fire too soon. If he’d got much closer, he’d have killed us for sure.’
Chapter 20
12 September 1939
The two sappers stayed hidden in the forest for about fifteen minutes, watching and listening for any sign of the two German soldiers they’d seen in the clearing, but could detect no sign of them. Watson wasn’t too surprised.
‘It’s one thing to shoot at a bloke with a rifle over open ground,’ he said, ‘but it’s a bloody sight different when he’s hiding in a wood and you know he’s got a machine-gun. Buggered if I’d want to go in after somebody like that. And when they see what’s left of that Jerry, they’ll probably think we’ve got some new and really fucking powerful grenades as well.’
Dawson nodded. ‘And they only saw me, so they’re probably not going to want to risk their lives to chase down a single man.’
But they knew they had to move. If possible, they had to get hold of more weapons, but they certainly needed to find a way to cross the border and get back to their own lines. And the longer they waited, the more enemy troops were likely to be in the area as the Germans brought up reinforcements.
Dawson stepped out cautiously from his hiding place and looked around. Everything appeared peaceful, and nothing seemed out of place.
‘The border’s that way,’ he said, pointing, ‘so we’ll head in the opposite direction. Let’s go. Keep it slow and steady.’
* * *
Taking care to make as little noise as possible, the two men separated slightly and started moving through the forest, staying on slopes that couldn’t have been mined. Dawson was in the lead, the MP 40 held ready, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. Watson followed him, the bag of mines slung over his shoulder. Both men checked all around them, looking for anything suspicious, anything that could indicate the presence of enemy soldiers.
To Do or Die Page 11