The sound of firing had died away almost completely, just a few sporadic rifle-shots occasionally audible at some distance, out to the west. They had no idea if they’d witnessed a full German counter-attack, or if the enemy troops they’d seen were part of a smaller unit, sent into the Warndt Forest to probe the strength of the invading French forces.
But whatever the truth of the matter, both the sappers knew they were now marooned inside German territory, probably with enemy troops all around them. Dawson hoped that, by moving away from the forest, they might manage to meet up with one of the French advance units. And all they had with which to fight their way through the German troops and back to their own lines across the border was a captured Schmeisser machine-pistol, about 150 rounds of nine-millimetre ammunition, three rusting mines covered in earth and a couple of bayonets – not good odds, by any standard.
Dawson led the way, moving slowly and cautiously, taking only three or four paces before stopping for a few moments to look and listen again, Watson mirroring his actions a few steps behind.
But they’d only walked about 400 yards when Dawson suddenly spotted the flash of a grey uniform in the trees, this time in front of them, maybe fifty yards away. He froze instantly and raised his right hand to stop Watson moving any further. Then he sank slowly to his knees, back into cover, and gestured to his fellow sapper to do the same. Was it a single soldier, or a member of a patrol searching for them? Until they knew that, he daren’t open fire or even move.
Almost directly in front of Dawson was a large shrub of some sort – the undergrowth in the forest was fairly thick – and he knew he’d remain invisible to the German soldier as long as he stayed behind it. But he needed to see the opposition – he had to see what they were up against – so he eased silently to one side and looked through the lowest branches.
Standing among the trees, and almost hidden behind the trunk of one of them, he could just make out a grey-clad figure, a Mauser rifle held in both hands at port. The soldier looked alert and prepared for trouble – he would have heard the sound of machine-gun fire and the explosion of the mine just a few minutes earlier. At that moment he wasn’t moving, just looking around him, and Dawson guessed there would be at least one other soldier with him.
‘I see one man,’ Dawson whispered to Watson, ‘but there’s got to be another one somewhere nearby.’
Watson nodded but didn’t respond: he just pointed over to his right, away from the man they’d already seen.
Dawson looked in that direction. Another German soldier was moving slowly towards them, his heading turning from side to side as he made his way cautiously through the forest, his Schmeisser held at the ready. Once again the two sappers were outgunned. And this time they were virtually surrounded, with one enemy soldier on each side of their position.
‘Stay down,’ Dawson whispered, checking his machine-pistol once more. There was no chance that the German soldiers would fail to spot them, because they were already so close. So he knew that, no matter what they did, they were going to be involved in a fire-fight. Their only chance was to take down one of the enemy first, and use the advantage of the element of surprise.
The German carrying the Schmeisser was the most dangerous – the machine-pistol would prove to be a lethal weapon at close quarters – so Dawson knew that man had to be his target.
He eased back, lay flat on his chest and started to crawl away from the bush where Watson still lay hidden, holding the Schmeisser in both hands, keeping it clear of the ground. He’d practised the technique often enough in training, at Catterick and elsewhere, but that had always involved a Lee-Enfield rifle, a slightly easier weapon to handle doing that manoeuvre than the MP 40 with its long magazine sticking out at right angles from under the receiver. But he managed to move perhaps fifteen feet without, as far as he could see, either German seeing him. That brought him a lot closer to his target, the soldier armed with the machine-pistol.
Then he simply lay still, making use of what cover there was. He looked back, towards the second soldier, who had now started moving again, his rifle still held loosely in his hands. He checked the other man, now only about twenty yards away and still walking slowly towards him.
Dawson had never been a sportsman, had never even held a firearm of any sort before he joined the Territorial Army, but even he was familiar with the concept of never shooting a sitting bird. But in his present circumstances, the ideas of fair play and sportsmanship were as alien to him as they were irrelevant. It was quite simply a matter of kill or be killed.
He waited until the German soldier was no more than ten yards away from him, then eased the Schmeisser into the firing position, but turned through ninety degrees so that the magazine was almost flat on the ground. He daren’t stand up, or even kneel, to hold the machine-pistol upright, because that would immediately give away his position. He just hoped it would be reasonably accurate when he fired.
The German was continuing to scan his surroundings, and, as Dawson took up the pressure on the trigger, the man suddenly seemed to notice something. The soldier swung his Schmeisser around, the muzzle tracking towards Dawson’s hiding place, and he opened his mouth to shout something.
Dawson fired. He squeezed the trigger and released it almost immediately, holding it for under a second. The machine-pistol jumped in his hands as the nine-millimetre bullets poured out of its barrel. The MP 40 fires only 500 rounds a minute, but Dawson guessed that brief burst had probably been about half a dozen rounds.
The German soldier’s tunic suddenly bloomed red as three or four bullets smashed into his torso, knocking him backwards. As he fell, his muscles went into spasm and his finger briefly pulled the trigger of his own weapon, sending a long burst of fire crashing into the trees around him.
Instantly, Dawson swung round, looking for the second enemy soldier. For a moment, he didn’t see him, then caught sight of a flicker of grey as the man ducked into cover behind a tree some thirty yards away, lifting his rifle to the aim as he did so.
Dawson checked that Watson was still crouched down and well below his line of fire, then aimed the MP 40 and pulled the trigger, already starting to move. He had no hope of hitting the man, but the burst of machine-gun fire should ruin his aim. And once he’d fired his Mauser, the German would effectively be disarmed until he could work the bolt and reload the weapon. That was the best Dawson could hope for.
The crack of the rifle was a single loud bang, easily audible over the yammer of the machine-pistol. The bullet ploughed into the trunk of a tree no more than two feet from Dawson, who was sprinting to the left, trying to get into a position where he could see and shoot the German before he could reload.
As Dawson ran, he could see the enemy soldier already working the bolt of his Mauser, and fired another short burst at him. But all the bullets from the machine-pistol appeared to miss their target, and the man quickly brought the rifle back up to the aim, moving slightly behind the tree trunk again to protect himself.
Dawson saw the muzzle swinging towards him and dived forward, rolling into cover as the second rifle shot rang out. The bullet missed him, but only by inches, and immediately Dawson was back on his feet and running.
He swung the Schmeisser towards his target again, and pulled the trigger. The bullets smashed into the tree trunk beside the German, but, before Dawson could alter his aim to the left, the machine-pistol fell silent as the last bullet was fired.
Dawson pressed the magazine release and scrabbled to pull another one out of one of the belt pouches, but he knew he was in a losing race. The German only had to work the bolt of his Mauser to chamber another round, and then there was no way he could miss – the two men were a bare twenty yards apart.
He pulled out a full magazine, slammed it into the Schmeisser and reached for the cocking handle. But even as he did so, the German aimed the Mauser straight at him.
Then another burst of firing echoed through the trees, and the German soldier toppled forwards, the r
ifle falling from his lifeless hands. Fifteen yards behind him, Dawson glimpsed Watson, standing with his legs apart, another Schmeisser MP 40 held firmly in his hands.
‘Thank Christ for that, Dave,’ Dawson said. ‘I reckon he was about half a second from blowing me away.’
He trotted forward to the fallen soldier and checked for a pulse, but the man was clearly dead. Swiftly, he and Watson stripped him of his rifle and ammunition belt, then ran over to the other German and grabbed his weapon and ammunition.
As they did so, Watson looked at the uniforms the dead men were wearing. He was by no means an expert on German army uniforms, but it looked to him as if both were regular Wehrmacht troops, the grey-green colour of the material quite distinctive, with the Nazi ‘flying eagle’ badge on the right side of the chest.
He pointed at the lapels of the man who’d been carrying the Schmeisser. On each was a black oblong with two white squared dots in it. ‘I think that’s a sergeant’s rank badge,’ he said, ‘and that explains why he was carrying the machine-pistol instead of a rifle.’
One of their briefings at Catterick had emphasized that the Schmeisser was believed to be in short supply in the Wehrmacht, and the weapon was normally only issued to section or patrol leaders.
‘Now that’s better,’ Dawson said, looking at their haul. ‘One rifle, twenty rounds of ammunition, and two machine-pistols with about six full magazines. Now we really have got teeth, Dave.’
‘Does that mean we can dump these bloody mines?’ Watson asked.
‘Not yet. They might still be useful. Now let’s get the hell out of this area before any other Jerries decide to come out here to investigate all the shooting.’
Chapter 21
12 September 1939
‘The border’s over to the west,’ Watson pointed out, ‘and we’re still heading east.’
‘I know, but I really don’t think trying to go that way is a good idea. The area will be full of fucking Jerries, and we’d find it bloody difficult to sneak through their lines, and then we’d have to face a whole mob of French soldiers with itchy trigger fingers and watching out for anybody heading towards them. I think it’ll be a lot safer if we try to cross the border somewhere else.’
‘Where?’ Watson asked. ‘And do you have any idea where we are right now, bearing in mind we haven’t got a map or even a bloody compass?’
Dawson looked around him. They’d already moved – jogging as quickly as they could over the uneven ground – perhaps half a mile away from the killing ground, where they’d left the bullet-riddled bodies of the two German soldiers. They’d finally stopped for a breather, and were sitting down high on a slope, their backs to another large fallen tree. They were deep inside the forest and had been working their way through the thick undergrowth that grew on the steeper slopes of the heavily wooded valleys, where they hoped no mines would have been planted.
‘We’re in Germany,’ Dawson said.
‘I did know that,’ Watson remarked.
‘I remember the map that Lieutenant Charnforth showed us, or the rough lie of the land here, anyway.’ Dawson reached into one of the pockets on his battledress tunic and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and the stub of a pencil. Smoothing out the paper on his knee, he drew a rapid sketch, beginning with line running diagonally from the top left-hand corner of the page. Then he looped the line up in a curve to point upwards, then across to the right, then down again before extending it to the right. The finished shape was a gently curving line that ran from the top left of the page towards the bottom right corner, with a kind of n-shaped bulge in it.
Above the n-shape, Dawson drew an oval that he labelled with the letters ‘SB’. Above and to the left of that, he drew a smaller circle which he annotated ‘SL’. Finally, almost opposite the ‘SB’ oval, but to the left of the diagonal line and fairly close to it, he marked a dot and labelled it ‘CLC’.
‘Right,’ he said, turning the sheet of paper so that Watson could see it clearly. ‘The ‘SB’ stands for Saarbrücken, the ‘SL’ for Saarlouis, and the ‘CLC’ for Creutzwald-la-Croix, which is on the French side of the frontier, close to where we were camped. That line’ – he pointed – ‘is the Franco-German border, obviously. Now, we crossed it just to the east of Creutzwald-la-Croix, about here. So right now we’re somewhere in this area, between the border itself and Saarbrücken.’
‘So the closest part of the border, apart from just over to the west, is either to the south or, if you and this sort of map are right, due east of here? So we’re going to keep heading east? Or turn south?’
‘Yes and no,’ Dawson replied. ‘You’re right about where the closest border is, but I’m not happy about those two choices. If we head south, we’re entering a kind of pocket of German territory, with a fortified border on three sides of us, and I’d lay money that it’s going to be full of Jerry troops looking for trouble. And if we go east, we could miss the border altogether and just end up deeper inside Germany. We also need to think about pursuit. We’ve left three dead German soldiers behind us, and from what I’ve heard about the Jerries, they’re not going to take that lying down. I think that, once they’ve sorted out the French and re-established their border defences, they’ll send out a couple of patrols to hunt us down.’
‘Full of fucking good news, you are. I hadn’t thought about that. So what do you reckon we should do?’
‘If I was the NCO in charge of a Jerry patrol, I think I’d expect us to try to get across the border as quickly as possible, which means he’d probably think we’d start heading south or south-east.’
‘So we’ll go north?’ Watson suggested.
‘Almost right. If we go north, we’ll end up near Saarlouis, and that would be a really bad idea. I think our best bet is to follow the border up to the north-west, keeping to the west of that corridor of built-up areas that runs from Saarbrücken to Saarlouis. That way, we’ll stay away from the more populated areas and hope to cross the border somewhere up here.’
Dawson pointed at the line he’d drawn on the paper up to the north-west of the circle labelled ‘SL’. ‘As far as I remember from the map the lieutenant had, there are only small villages and hamlets in this area, between the border and that corridor of towns running along the River Saar, so we should be able to sneak through there unnoticed.’
‘We’ll use the sun to navigate by?’
‘Unless we can find a compass somewhere, yes.’
Watson nodded. ‘So let’s hope the weather stays fine. What about crossing the border itself?’
Dawson shrugged. ‘We’ll pick the best place when we get up there and find out what the defences are like.’
‘OK,’ Watson said. ‘You talk sense, as usual, Eddie. Let’s get moving.’
The two men stood up, hitched their weapons over their shoulders and prepared to move off. ‘There’s something else we need to think about,’ Dawson said, as they started walking. ‘Unless we’re really lucky, we’re going to be out here on the wrong side of the border for at least a day or two. We’ve got no rations, not even any water bottles, and we’re going to need to find some food – or at the very least something to drink – if we’re going to make it.’
They were well away from the obvious tracks through the woods, most of which ran along the lower, more level, sections at the bottoms of the valleys that characterized the area, but still they proceeded with caution, ever watchful that a sniper might be scanning the woods through the telescopic sight of his rifle, or a German patrol lying in wait for them somewhere. But for the first hour, as their route slowly took them further to the north, towards the edge of the Warndt Forest, they saw nobody at all.
‘You reckon we’re clear of the Jerries now?’ Watson asked, as they crested a ridge and started the descent on the other side. A basic rule of hill-walking is that you should never surrender height – climbing uphill is exhausting, so once height has been gained, walkers should do everything possible to remain as high as they can. Dawson and Wat
son were both well aware of the principle and were doing their best to adhere to it, so although they were having to both climb and descend, they were trying to keep their descents to a minimum, walking across the frequent slopes rather than down them.
‘For the moment, I think we are. They won’t know which way we went after we left those two dead soldiers, and the further we walk, the wider the search area will become. Why?’
‘Because I’m pretty much knackered, that’s why.’ Watson pointed over to the west. ‘The sun’s going down, and I think we need to find somewhere to hole up for the night. This country’s too bloody rough to try walking over it in the dark. If one of us twists an ankle or breaks a leg out here, we’re both buggered.’
Dawson nodded. What Watson had said was compellingly obvious and, in any case, he was really tired himself. It had been, by any standards, an extremely full day. They’d gone from the dangerous, but ultimately routine, clearance of a minefield to what amounted to a full-scale battle with the German army. They’d each shot and killed a man, and Dawson had blown another one to pieces with his improvised grenade. They were now deep inside enemy territory, where they were liable to be shot on sight by any German soldiers they met and, most probably, they were also on the run from at least a couple of enemy patrols who would be looking for them somewhere in the forest behind them.
‘Yeah, Dave. That’s a good idea. Let’s start looking for somewhere right now.’
About fifteen minutes later, the two sappers found a spot that looked as if it would do. It was close to the top of another ridge, where a couple of trees had fallen over, their collapsed trunks forming a giant X-shape. The area between the exposed roots and the point where the trunks crossed offered a concealed hollow that could easily accommodate both men.
To Do or Die Page 12