by Phil Ward
BOOK TEN IN THE RAIDING FORCES SERIES
THE
SHARP END
PHIL WARD
A RAIDING FORCES SERIES NOVEL
THE SHARP END
Copyright © 2010, 2017 by Phil Ward. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to Lieutenant General Josiah Bunting III, Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, Rhodes Scholar, etc. and he used to write articles for Playboy.
In late 1968, I was in the field on an operation in the Mekong Delta. Upon returning, there were orders to report to the 9th Division Headquarters – Captain Bunting. This could be very good or it could be very bad.
Capt. Bunting turned out to be the Secretary to the Chief of Staff. He conducted an interview that did not seem to go anywhere but covered a lot of ground. Finally, he pulled out a plastic bag and said, “Did you write this?”
Uh-oh, inside was a letter written to the father of one of my men KIA in the Battle of the Plain of Reeds and my signature was on it. I was toast.
Capt. Bunting said, “Your letter was forwarded to the President of the United States. You’re one of us now.” And, that’s how I became a General Staff officer, an assignment I had not one single qualification to perform.
I did not have the privilege of serving with Capt. Bunting for long. He moved on to be the Operations Officer of one of the Mobile Riverine battalions, but during the time I worked for him he set such a shining example of work ethic that I have tried to emulate it the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, I was killed on page 21 of his book the Lionheads.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Randal's Rules for Raiding
Raiding Forces
Maps
1: Ranger Patrol
2: A Few Good Men
3: Auto Gyro
4: Order of the Garter
5: Illusionist
6: Beverly Hills Bank
7: Little Bloody Late
8: New Mist-o-Matic
9: Arab Tents
10: Trains Run on Time
11: Shot Placement
12: Art of War
13: Smith and Jones
14: Black Cat or Lucky Lady
15: Singapore Tea
16: Kill Merlin
17: Solid Gold
18: U.S. 71st Airborne Division
19: Island of Doom
20: Five-Seven-Five
21: Sobering Up Fast
22: Smoke 'Em
23: FUBAR
24: God's Truth Ltd.
25: Donkey Meat
26: Pain
Abbreviations
Acronyms
List of Characters
Raiding Rommel Preview
About the Author
Contact
RANDAL’S RULES FOR RAIDING
RULE 1:The first rule is there ain’t no rules.
RULE 2:Keep it short and simple.
RULE 3:It never hurts to cheat.
RULE 4:Right man, right job.
RULE 5:Plan missions backward (know how to get home).
RULE 6:It’s good to have a Plan B.
RULE 7:Expect the unexpected.
RAIDING FORCES
ONGOING OPERATIONS
OPERATION BATTLEAX. A series of raids on Rommel’s lines of communications in Syria. Middle East Command’s counterattack to retake Tobruk, relieve the Port of Tobruk.
OPERATION BOMBSHELL. Named after pilot Pamala Plum-Martin—resulted in more than one hundred Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica pilots being killed.
OPERATION CRUSADER. Four primary objectives related to Raiding Forces:
1. Raid enemy airfields to keep as many Luftwaffe attack aircraft out of the fight as possible; highest priority is to disable Ju-52 tri-motors.
2. Destroy enemy fuel dumps, installations and supply points.
3. Interdict the secondary tracks that parallel the Via Balbia.
4. Demonstrate in the Tripoli area. Reconnaissance of the beaches where British Forces can conduct an amphibious tank landing. The idea is to tie down as many of Rommel’s troops as possible defending against an amphibious attack that may never come.
OPERATION DYNAMO. Evacuation of Dunkirk.
OPERATION GOLDEN FLEECE. “Pinch” operations to capture Nazi encoding/ decoding equipment. Commander Ian Fleming’s project.
OPERATION LIMELIGHT. Ice blocks are dropped by parachute, leaving empty chutes when ice melts.
OPERATION LOUNGE LIZARD. Remove German and Italian ships from San Pedro Harbor.
OPERATION RED INDIAN. Cover name for OPERATION GOLDEN FLEECE.
OPERATION SOLID GOLD / SUNDANCE. Hunt down and kill Captain Alfred Seebohm, master of signals intelligence, Rommel’s genius radio interceptor and his 621st Radio Intercept Company.
OPERATION TOMCAT. Conduct a parachute raid on an enemy signals station/lighthouse complex, capture or kill the enemy personnel in the target area, collect any equipment or documents of intelligence value, and withdraw by sea.
FROGSPAWN. Drop whatever you’re doing and carry out the orders you are about to receive. Frogspawn overrides any mission except GOLDEN FLEECE / RED INDIAN.
1
RANGER PATROL
Lieutenant Colonel John Randal, DSO, MC, was sitting in his olive-green and pink-colored camouflage gun jeep somewhere in the Libyan Desert. It was pitch-dark, 0220 hours. His navigator, riding in another gun jeep with Sergeant Ned Pompedous, knew exactly where Ranger Patrol was on the map, but all the Raiding Forces commander cared about at the moment was that the patrol’s six gun jeeps were hull down on the perimeter of a vast Axis fuel tank farm awaiting his order to attack.
The British Y-Service had intercepted an Afrika Korps message that indicated the Luftwaffe was suffering a critical shortage of aviation fuel. Actually, that was not entirely true. The intercept was a decrypt from Ultra Secret Bletchley Park in England—but Lt. Col. Randal was not cleared to know that.
Not that it mattered where the intelligence came from. The information was dead accurate. Now Ranger Patrol had new marching orders. “Go after Afrika Korps fuel storage depots.”
OPERATION CRUSADER was raging. Immediately after the British attack went in, taking the Afrika Korps by surprise, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel flew back to Tripoli from his birthday party in Italy, took charge, counterattacked, and all the smartly tailored staff at General Headquarters Middle East (GHQME/GHQ) watched their predictions for a walkover victory turn to dust before their eyes.
Lt. Col. Randal did not know much about that either. For weeks he had been in the field, deep behind enemy lines, engaged in the risky business of ambushing Axis transport racing down the Via Balbia to reinforce Afrika Korps. Traffic had been so heavy that Ranger Patrol had to resort to attacking casas di stradas from standoff range, utilizing its newly acquired 81mm mortar expert. They would roll up at night, emplace the mortar, lay down a barrage on a roadhouse, flee to a preselected laying-up position, then hide and hold up under camouflage netting during daylight.
The tactic worked for laagered enemy convoys as well.
The Raiders called it “shoot and scoot.”
The military situation was fluid. No one on either side was quite sure
exactly where the front lines were. Opposing tank columns were blundering around the desert churning up giant clouds of dust, endeavoring to run into each other and do battle.
The relief of Tobruk had been a seesaw affair only accomplished after heavy losses in men and tanks. The 7th Armored Division, the vaunted Desert Rats, had attempted to destroy the opposing armor but been decimated by the surprisingly hard-fighting Italian Ariete Panzer Division.
That had not been part of the plan.
The question of which side was going to win was in doubt. However, the relief of Tobruk and the initial rough handling of Afrika Korps at the beginning of the battle marked the first time Middle East Command had inflicted a defeat on the Germans—razor-thin though it was.
Field Marshal Rommel took exception with how the outcome was being reported in the press, publicly responding that he was merely executing a tactical withdrawal in order to shorten his lines of communication. The Desert Fox was experiencing resupply problems—no matter what he said. That was why he was shortening his lines of communication.
British armor was acting independently again, exactly the way it had in OPERATION BATTLEAX, which had failed miserably and resulted in Field Marshal Archibald Wavell being relieved of command.
The generals fighting OPERATION CRUSADER (now under Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, who had recently fired the Eighth Army commander in the middle of the battle and taken personal command) had not learned a thing from the BATTLEAX disaster. The British generals thought in terms of tank = horse, and rode to the sound of the guns—but when they arrived, an antitank screen of German 88s shot them to pieces.
The Allied “poor bloody infantry” (PBI) was left on its own, set up in defensive boxes or dug in on one lonely ridgeline or the other.
FM Rommel, realizing that the British infantry had been abandoned, spent a lot of time attempting to locate their defensive boxes in hopes of defeating them in detail. He failed. The fog of war had both sides firmly in its grip.
While the stationary PBI sweated it out, their opposite number—the German infantry—were riding in trucks traveling with Afrika Korps’ panzer columns. FM Rommel integrated his infantry, engineers and tanks into powerful, mobile, combined-arms teams that included a substantial component of field artillery—primarily deadly 88mm guns.
In addition, the Desert Fox’s armored columns could count on “flying artillery” in the form of Luftwaffe Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers being available on call.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) still refused to fly close air support even though they knew the tactic of flying artillery had worked well for the Nazis from the day they invaded France and drove the British Expeditionary Force out of Europe at Dunkirk. The RAF had its own ideas about the appropriate use of air power. None of them included low level air-to-ground bombing or strafing missions against enemy tanks, trucks or infantry.
Ground combat, the Air Marshals held, was a job for the army.
There was nothing Lt. Col. Randal could do to offset wooden-headed mindsets, fossilized tactics, lack of inter-service cooperation or the confusion of the battle. However, airplanes cannot fly without fuel. And that, Raiding Forces could do something about.
While it was easy to criticize the Eighth Army and the RAF, Lt. Col. Randal was aware that his own tactics tonight were nothing to brag about. By necessity, the plan was in keeping with one of Raiding Forces’ Rules for Raiding: Keep it Short and Simple. This was not going to be any long-range fire mission followed by a quick getaway. Ranger Patrol had expended all of its 81mm high explosive (HE) mortar rounds.
They were going to have to do it the hard way—up close and personal.
On his command, Ranger Patrol was about to roll out on line and drive through the enemy fuel tank farm, shooting up every storage container it came across. Then the gun jeeps would disappear into the dark and the vastness of the desert.
Hit and run.
The objective was a petroleum storage complex so huge that it was impossible to defend properly. The Italians, who were responsible for Axis fixed installation security, did not even bother. Why should they? The nearest British ground forces were a thousand miles south, more or less, and the Mediterranean Coast too distant for a Commando raid to pose a threat.
An Italian guard post was positioned at the gate to the facility, but Ranger Patrol had no intention of coming in the front door.
“Keep the speed down. Try not to drive too close to the tanks,” Lt. Col. Randal ordered ex-Lieutenant Billy Jack Jaxx, MC of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), who was at the wheel of the command gun jeep. “We don’t want to be anywhere near one when it blows.”
“Roger that, sir,” ex-Lt. Jaxx said, sounding semi-bored—“Jack Cool.”
“King?”
“Locked and loaded, Chief.”
“All right, then,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “let’s do this . . . move out, Jack.”
Ex-Lt. Jaxx revved the engine three times—the signal for the patrol to advance. Then he let out the clutch, and the command jeep rolled through the gap that had been cut in the single strand of rusted barbed wire that the Italians had strung around the installation’s perimeter.
When Ranger Patrol rolled out, Waldo Treywick’s jeep remained in place while Sergeant Rex Blackburn, formerly the noncommissioned officer-in-charge of the Middle East Command’s Officer Training Course’s 81mm Mortar Committee, ordered three illumination rounds dropped down the tube of his mortar. He was firing without the aid of sights or the bi-pod. Lovat Scout Lionel Fenwick was holding the tube with his bush hat wrapped around the barrel, moving it slightly left or right as the sergeant stood back and gave adjustments by line-of-sight, eyeballing the objective over the top.
Pinpoint accuracy was not necessary.
On Sgt. Blackburn’s command, Lovat Scout Munro Ferguson put three illumination rounds down the tube—one right after the other—as fast as a round cleared the barrel. Three parachute flares cracked open over the objective. They burned stark white, high against the sky, extending over the horizon. An otherworldly glow was cast on the ground below, illuminating a forest of gigantic fuel storage tanks.
Sgt. Blackburn and Scout Fenwick pitched the mortar tube in the back of the gun jeep and jumped aboard. Waldo’s AVG driver peeled out to catch up to the rest of the patrol.
Ranger Patrol was spread out on line—fifty yards’ spacing between vehicles–driving resolutely toward the giant fuel storage tanks. Overhead, the parachute flares swayed back and forth, creating an umbrella of artificial moonlight and weird shadows as they drifted to the ground.
King was the first to engage. As he fired short, crisp bursts at a distant fuel tank, his pair of Vickers K .303 caliber machine guns (MGs) were making TSSSS TSSSS TSSSS sounds because of their high cyclic rate.
Five hundred yards in the distance, King’s tracers arched into one of the jumbo-sized storage tanks. The strikes seemed to be swallowed up. Ranger Patrol’s Vickers Ks were loaded with tracer, armor-piercing and incendiary rounds. First, liquid fire shot out of the bullet holes. A brilliant flash followed, then came a catastrophic explosion that seemed to erupt from the belly of the earth.
The fireball obliterated the mellow light provided by the swaying parachute flares.
All of Ranger Patrol was in action now. Thirty-five Vickers Ks and a pair of 20mm Oerlikon guns operated by “Guns,” the Royal Navy Patrol Service (RNPS) ace, were making a fantastic roar. That many automatic weapons engaging all at once sounded like a monstrous thunderstorm breaking. Fuel tanks were going up, flaming fuel was raining out of the sky, fires were raging—the desert was burning.
As Ranger Patrol rolled closer, Lt. Col. Randal transitioned from his pair of Vickers Ks to his Brixia 45mm shoulder-fired mortar. The weapon was only effective on point-type targets inside 350 yards, and closer was better—it did not have any sights. After launching the first round, Lt. Col. Randal continued to watch his target while his hands automatically reloaded the stubby firearm.
The li
ttle mortar shell plowed into the side of a fuel tank—CRUUUMP-FLASH—BOOOOOM!
KAAAAABOOOOM!
Now Ranger Patrol was in among the burning tanks, weaving around them, each jeep acting independently. The depot was an inferno. Tanks were exploding. Flames leaped high into the night. The burning fuel illuminated more storage containers dotting the desert as far as the eye could see.
Sounds were distorted. Colors seemed more brilliant. Lt. Col. Randal was aware of everything around him, all the while continuing to work the Brixia shoulder-fired mortar as fast as he could reload without thinking about what he was doing. Things seemed to be taking place in slow motion.
Ranger Patrol was a superbly trained, highly motivated, battle hardened team of handpicked men who had served together for a long time. Every patrol member was performing to the highest possible standard, executing with precision.
Each man was dialed in, focused on the task at hand—hammering fuel tanks until they exploded. When a primary target began to blaze or blew up, the Raiders shifted their fire to another target and went back to work firing short bursts of six—except for Guns. He triggered shorter bursts of three rounds each on the 20mms—POCKA, POCKA, POCKA.
Night turned to day. There seemed no end to the Afrika Korps’ installation. It swallowed up the Lilliputian-sized patrol. Fuel tanks were on fire across the desert. Ranger Patrol continued the attack.
More tanks lit off.
Lt. Col. Randal realized he was down to his last few 45mm rounds.
“How’s your ammo, King?”
“Final magazine, Chief.”
“Jack?”
“Couple left, sir,” ex-Lt. Jaxx said. “Lot more of these storage tanks than we counted on.”
Lt. Col. Randal retrieved his Very pistol from the side of his seat where it was hanging by a piece of parachute cord. He fired three green flares into the sky: the signal to withdraw. Ranger Patrol needed to move as far away into the Great Sand Sea as fast as they could travel and hide before daylight.