Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Page 2
“I would be delighted, sir.”
In the sergeant’s professional military opinion, the Rangers officer had pulled off a neat piece of soldiering. In a little over an hour, the lieutenant had managed to take a mixed lot of leaderless, dispirited troops and transform them into volunteers for a hazardous mission. Sergeant Mikkalis had never seen it done any better.
“Alright, listen up,” Lieutenant Randal ordered the men of Swamp Fox Force, moments before they departed the assembly area. “Keep in mind, a panzer division is not the solid phalanx of armor it appears to be when you see it drawn on a situation map. Lightly armed reconnaissance troops of motorcycle scouts, sometimes accompanied by armored cars, travel out in front of the main force. Behind them come light tanks, followed by heavier tanks with mechanized panzergrenadiers interspersed throughout the column to provide rapid infantry support.
“We’re going to force the tank units to stop and deploy the panzergrenadiers as often as possible. Dismounting a tank to check out a threat or deploying the accompanying mechanized infantry to conduct a road sweep takes up time and fatigues the troops—especially if they take casualties while doing it. And, we’re going to make sure they do.
“I want you to shoot down the motorcyclists and dismounted infantry from as long a range as possible. Use the Boys rifles to engage the armored cars and thin-skinned vehicles. Don’t bother shooting them at the panzers. No matter what they told you in training, the .55-caliber antitank rounds will only bounce off. However, the Boys are sure death to any command car, troop transport, or truck at up to a mile.”
The German Mark III tanks posed a serious challenge. Swamp Fox Force did not have any weapons able to knock one out at standoff range.
“We can’t kill a tank, but you snipers are going to go after the tank commanders. If the Germans are ever stupid enough to carry fuel cans strapped to the outside of the tanks, you Boys gunners can go for those.
“To get stationary targets, we’re going to bury steel helmets in the road, make them look like antitank mines. The tankers won’t be able to ignore ‘em. When the column stops to investigate, you snipers take out the tank commanders standing in the turrets. The rest of you men, engage the troops on the ground with the automatic rifles and machine guns. We fire ‘em up, break contact, pull out, and start all over again.
“Any questions?” Lieutenant Randal wrapped up his briefing. “All right then; let’s go do it.”
~ * ~
Two hours after receiving the designation “Swamp Fox Force,” a forty-six-man gypsy caravan bristling with assorted weapons and trucks of British, French, and Belgian manufacture pulled out of the sand dunes and headed west, embarking on a vicious little private war where no quarter would be asked or given.
Swamp Fox Force moved directly into the attack, struck unannounced, hit as hard as it could, then disengaged quickly and departed the area at a high rate of speed to a preplanned fallback position. At the designated rally point, Lieutenant John Randal’s men gathered around while he briefed them for their next mission over a 1:50,000 contour map and sketched out a new scheme of maneuver in the dirt with a borrowed bayonet.
Lieutenant Randal had a natural aptitude for tactics, a gift recognized in his first year of ROTC and later improved on at the U.S. Cavalry School. In the Philippines, while serving in the 26th Calvary Regiment, he had been carefully tutored by two long-service master sergeants who, appreciating his talent, had expended the time and effort to put the final polish on those tactical skills teaching him how to “out-guerilla” the elusive Huk bandits. Now he simply married up his cavalry training with those guerrilla tactics. The combination was deadly.
The trick, Lieutenant Randal knew, was to find a way to pit his troop’s strengths against the enemy’s weakness. Swamp Fox Force’s strengths were surprise, speed, and violence of action. The Germans’ weakness was their predictability.
The Tenth Panzer Division was essentially road bound. The Calais area was laced with canals and soft marshy ground that channeled the approach to the city. The terrain and the fact that the Germans were driving on Calais as straight as an arrow made it easy for Lieutenant Randal to anticipate their moves. He assigned a sniper or Boys antitank rifle team to contest every crossing where the sunken roads intersected the channels. Had the Swamp Fox Force had any demolitions to blow the small bridges spanning the canals, they could have halted the German column or at least seriously slowed it down. As it was, Swamp Fox Force was little more than a speed bump to the mighty Tenth Panzers.
At night the Germans laagered, making inviting targets. Lieutenant Randal organized teams of his men, one of which he led personally, to infiltrate the laagers and attack the tanks with improvised Molotov cocktail firebombs.
“Takes a brave bloke to crawl into an enemy position in the dark and strike a match, sir,” one Rifleman remarked upon hearing the orders.
“Anyone else want to say something stupid?” Sergeant Mikkalis growled.
Lieutenant Randal knew that the Tenth Panzer Division’s only real vulnerability was its tail. The Germans had an armored tip of tanks on their columns, immediately followed up by a stream of hundreds of thin-skinned vehicles, mostly trucks, transporting all the fuel, fitters, and supplies necessary to maintain a tank force in the attack. Following behind the trucks, the next echelon of transport, to Swamp Fox Force’s surprise, turned out to be horse drawn, even in a modern panzer division. Horses were soft targets.
“A tank outfit is like a spear,” Lieutenant Randal explained as he drew a diagram of a long lance in the dirt with another borrowed bayonet. “All the steel is up here, on the point.
“What we’re going to do is leave one element here under Sergeant Mikkalis to harass the spearhead while the rest of us swing wide behind it and do our best to shoot the wooden shaft clean off.”
Immediately upon conclusion of the briefing, Lieutenant Randal, with half of his men, set out on a long-range deep-penetration raid to attack the fifteen-mile-long supply train traveling along behind the Tenth Panzers. Mounted on the Norton model 16H motorcycles Swamp Fox Force had appropriated in Calais, they cut around far to the rear of the armored tip of the column, arriving unannounced and unexpected in the division’s soft, unprotected caravan.
The motorcycle raiders shot up whatever they happened across: bivouac areas, mess tents, truck convoys, POL stations, canteens, horse-drawn wagons, artillery caissons, motor parks, water distribution points, latrines—anything of military value. The Swamp Fox Force’s targets of choice were the five-ton fuel tankers that blew up with a satisfying orange mushroom fireball when strafed with tracers. The guerrilla fighters would appear out of nowhere, strike fiercely with guns blazing, and then tear away on their Nortons, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.
Lieutenant Randal’s private little war was to hit and run, cavalry style—irregular warfare at its very best. His troops kept banging away at the enemy lines of communication long into the night and throughout the next day. The rear-area raids were devastatingly successful.
Although the Swamp Fox Force attacks were not much more than a minor annoyance to the Nazis, the raiders had nevertheless destroyed a few tanks, more than a few trucks, a fair number of horses, and enough troops to have the Germans glancing over their shoulders. The victorious storm troopers of the panzer divisions had been looking forward to wrapping up the campaign, going home, pinning on their medals to impress the Fräuleins, and enjoying the perks lavished on combat veterans by a grateful Third Reich. Not one of them wanted to get killed at the very end of the most brilliant blitzkrieg in modern history.
The Tenth Panzer Division began to proceed with uncharacteristic caution. Understandably, the division had already begun to lose some steam, even without the harassment dished out by Swamp Fox Force. The German vehicles were at the point where they needed to take a pause to conduct a major refit. Two hundred fifty miles is about as far as an armored force can advance before hitting a maintenance wall.
/>
The German High Command’s reaction to Swamp Fox Force was swift. The order came down: “Speed up the advance. Shoot anyone who impedes progress. Do not take prisoners.”
ME-109 fighters flying at treetop level attacked first, firing their machine guns indiscriminately into the columns of civilian bumper-to-bumper traffic clogging the few avenues leading into Calais. The wrecked civilian vehicles blocked the roads.
Next, gull-winged Junkers-87 (JU-87) Stukas, circling above like rabid bats, dive-bombed the massive traffic jams created at those choke points. Then JU-88s, operating in the role of high-level saturation bombers, zeroed in on the tall pillars of smoke caused by the dive-bombing, cruised over, and toggled their heavy bomb loads indiscriminately into the trapped masses of helpless civilians.
On the ground, elements of the Tenth Panzer Division rolled up as soon as the bombing stopped and machine-gunned anything not wearing a swastika. A wholesale massacre was taking place. Men, women, children, horses, cows, goats, pigs, chickens, dogs, and cats littered the roads. The civilians were dying in the tens of thousands. The western approach to Calais became a highway of death.
At night the Luftwaffe dropped parachute flares over the roads to allow the strafing, bombing, and machine-gunning to continue the slaughter without letup. Survivors of the onslaught lay screaming, hideously mutilated with appalling injuries. In the hot sun they suffered terribly and died badly. Terrified men, hysterical women, and traumatized children milled around in dazed confusion.
In the midst of this butchery, the remnants of the battle-tested Swamp Fox Force assembled in a small, isolated copse of elm trees. They had been fighting all day.
Lieutenant John Randal rapidly issued new orders. Concerned that the men might have started to become overconfident after their recent successes, he casually mentioned, “One of the Huks we captured bragged, ‘It’s hard to kill a mosquito with a sledgehammer.”‘
“Bloody cheeky,” growled Royal Marine Corporal Mickey Duggan as he crammed fresh ammo into a Bren magazine. “But as we’ve been demonstrating the bandit ‘ad a point. What did you ‘ave to say, sir?”
“Not if you hit him with it.”
The German Army swung a giant sledgehammer, and although they did not hit the mosquito, they smashed everything else.
~ * ~
Pressure can crush a stone or turn it into a diamond. Swamp Fox Force was down to fewer than twenty effectives. They were dangerous men.
On the morning of 29 May 1940, the word came through to try to escape if they could after completing one last task; it was to be every man for himself. The officer commanding 30 Brigade, Brigadier Claude Nicholson, was preparing to surrender the garrison to put an end to the slaughter. Calais was done for.
Incredibly, the lightly armed 30 Brigade, with help from a hard-fighting Swamp Fox Force, had held up the First and Tenth Panzer Divisions for four priceless days. Because of their sacrifice, the evacuation of Dunkirk was assured. The Riflemen fought like cornered lions. Virtually every man had been killed, was wounded, or would soon be captured.
Lieutenant John Randal received orders to blow a humpbacked bridge over the last major canal west of Calais before escaping. A sapper sergeant arrived in a truck loaded with the first explosives they had seen. It took three hours for the sergeant in the Royal Engineers to place the guncotton demolition charges.
At that point, Swamp Fox Force attempted to halt the flow of refugees streaming over the bridge. They could not make them stop. First, shots were fired into the air, and then the few remaining Swamp Fox Force fired at the refugees’ feet, even wounding a few. Nothing worked. On they came: a press of old men and elderly women, mothers with small babies, families fleeing together, French and Belgian soldiers in uniform who had thrown their weapons away, and military-aged men of indeterminate origin with short haircuts in civilian clothes. The crush of desperate people stampeded, forcing their way over to safety, even though there was no safety to be had. No boats were waiting for them, and none were coming.
Stukas arrived and began strafing the fleeing column. German Mark III tanks advanced on the bridge, indiscriminately firing their cupola-mounted coaxial machine guns into the packed crowd, chopping people down. Pandemonium broke out.
The beleaguered sapper sergeant appealed to the Swamp Fox Force commander. “What am I to do, sir? I was bloody well never trained for anything like this!”
“Blow it.”
“I bloody wired it. You bloody want it blown, you bloody do it, sir!”
Lieutenant Randal twisted the charging handle immediately. The bridge erupted in black smoke as the string of charges popped in rapid succession, dropping the structure, still jam-packed with screaming people, into the canal with an impressive splash. Even for the battle-hardened veterans it was a horrific sight.
Rounding up his surviving troops, Lieutenant Randal headed for the coast. When they reached the beach at dusk, they turned and drove straight toward Calais. An oily cloud of smoke obscured the city. Every building seemed to be burning. A lazy string of JU-87 Stukas curled in, releasing their ordnance, one bomb after the other, rolling into their attack run with their dive sirens wailing. Artillery rounds were falling sporadically and panzers were randomly firing their main guns into the town. Every German soldier with access to a mortar was stonking rounds downrange as fast as he could drop them down the tube. Calais was coming apart at the seams.
Just outside of town, as night began to fall, the Swamp Fox remnant abandoned what was left of their vehicles and patrolled on foot to the dock in a tactical file formation, with Lieutenant Randal pulling point. Dangling from his neck was a pair of Zeiss binoculars he had taken off a dead Nazi colonel. A Luger R08 and a Walther P-38 were crisscrossed on their black leather belts across his chest, and an MP-38 machine pistol on a strap was hanging, muzzle down, from his right shoulder. The Browning P-35 that Sergeant Mike “March or Die” Mikkalis had given him was on its lanyard, stuck into his belt. German stick grenades were tucked into every pocket.
The Swamp Fox Force commander was unrecognizable as the young Ring’s Royal Rifle Corps replacement lieutenant who had strolled off the Canterbury, swagger stick in hand, only four days earlier. It would not have been possible to guess his age within ten years.
The night was pitch dark as the men approached the dock. No ships were visible in the harbor, and the dock was being swept sporadically by searching machine-gun fire. The odd artillery or mortar round plopped into the bay. As they made their stealthy approach march, Lieutenant Randal ordered his men to tear down a wooden fence.
“I want every man to carry the largest plank he can.”
In the dark they reached the west side of the dock, moved down under it, and waded their way out to the very end, where they found about forty men from assorted 30 Brigade units hiding. Corporal Mickey Duggan, the last surviving Royal Marine in Swamp Fox Force, shone his flashlight to seaward and began to signal.
To everyone’s great surprise, a response came back right away. The Royal Marine and the unknown light blinked back and forth for a time. “Sir, I am in contact with the armed yacht Gulzar,” Corporal Duggan said. “She is willing to come in to try and pick us up, but the skipper says he is not going to come to a stop. He wants us to climb up on top of the dock and jump aboard as he sails past the end of the pier.”
“Signal ‘can do.’”
Each man dropped the plank he was carrying, and with some of the other men who elected to come with them, climbed up the wet, slimy, barnacle-encrusted wooden pilings, struggled up onto the dock, and lay prone, hoping to avoid the intermittent bursts from the German machine guns. They did not have long to wait.
HMY Gulzar’s skipper was a master mariner. True to his word, he brought the yacht in close, slow and steady, braving the automatic weapons, the artillery, the mortars, and the unknown. Forty-seven men made the leap. They were the last evaders from 30 Brigade to make it out of Calais.
Lieutenant John Randal slept the whole way
back to Dover.
~ * ~
SMALL-SCALE RAIDING
~ * ~
1
COMMANDOS
LIEUTENANT JOHN RANDAL DISEMBARKED AT DOVER TO FIND A mob scene of returning soldiers from Dunkirk at the dock that was almost as chaotic as he had found in Calais the first day he landed—the only difference was, nothing was actually blowing up.
While he had been in France, the famous American radio war correspondent for CBS, William Shirer, had reported live from London that, in his opinion, the Germans would storm the British Isles within three weeks. U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy cabled his boss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that he concurred with the CBS time estimate and was highly skeptical of Great Britain’s chances of survival. Invasion fear was gripping the nation. The British were being bombed, blacked-out, and rationed. Times were ominous: All the news was bad, and even the most optimistic description of the military situation was bleak.
Since no one was expecting him, Lieutenant Randal released the survivors of Swamp Fox Force back to their units and flagged down a Tilly with staff markings. “Take me to the station,” he told the corporal behind the wheel. “I can grab a train from there.”