Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Read online

  Meanwhile, instead of flying a combat air patrol high overhead, the RAF’s Avro Ansons buzzed in low and tight and continued to zoom around just above the raiding force, doing everything but beaming a bright light on the little flotilla and announcing over a loud hailer, “Here we come.” The pilots clearly had never provided air cover for an amphibious landing force before and had no clue how to go about it. Ordered to protect the Commando raiding party, they were determined that nothing was going to happen to those men—not on their watch.

  “Now, this is what I call close air support,” Lieutenant Stone remarked, tapping a Player’s cigarette on his sterling silver cigarette case as one of the twin-engine aircraft blasted so low overhead, he could almost touch its belly. The Commandos ducked instinctively every time one of the planes thundered over.

  If Commander Milner-Gibson’s face, like that of the raiders, had not been blackened before the mission with charcoal from a burnt cork taken from a champagne bottle and roasted on the point of a bayonet, it would have been purple right now. “Ruddy RAF is giving away the show,” he seethed. He was the maddest sailor Lieutenant Randal had seen in his entire life—and that included his time in the Army-Navy Club in Manila.

  Lieutenant Stone leaned over and muttered, “I reckon our commander was something on the order of as furious as old M-G the day the first armored car arrived at the 2nd Life Guards to replace our beloved black horses.”

  The U-turn at Boulogne put the operation well behind schedule, but at long last the air-sea rescue launch carrying the command party slid onto the beach. Sand dunes were visible to the front. Major Tod and his men were up over the side and away in a flash into German-occupied France.

  Lieutenant Colonel Clarke was under strict orders not to go ashore— a pretty difficult directive to follow considering that the boat he was in was beached as planned. He and his two lieutenants paced anxiously back and forth on the sand at the water’s edge, awaiting developments. There was total silence all up and down the coast. No one was sure where they had landed. The second boat of their party had become separated and failed to land with them. Time dragged by. Originally, the plan allowed for three hours ashore, but the delay caused by the U-turn had cut that down to less than two.

  Suddenly, a lookout called, “Aircraft, nine o’clock.” In the dark they were unable to identify it, but the shadow of the aircraft’s silhouette could be seen offshore, skimming low over the line of breakers behind them. Luckily, the Luftwaffe aircrew—if it was a German plane—did not seem to notice the Commandos. For all they could tell, it could have been part of their own air cover looking for something else to buzz.

  Lieutenant Randal swung his Zeiss binoculars out to sea and thought he spotted the missing RAF crash boat. When he pointed it out, Commander Milner-Gibson barked, “Bloody E-boat, you fool!”

  It was the worst imaginable scenario: a shallow-draft, extraordinarily fast, heavily armed enemy warship, capable of chewing the Commandos’ unarmed air-sea rescue launch into matchsticks, showing up at the exact time and place when they were at their most vulnerable. But once again the main party’s luck held. Like the aircraft, the German torpedo boat did not see them and disappeared into the night. Things were tense on the beach after that.

  From the south came the crackle of automatic weapons fire and the thump, thump of hand grenades. The night glowed with Very lights arching into the sky all down the coastline.

  “Those are Thompsons,” Lieutenant Randal explained. “One of our raiding parties.”

  Unidentified aircraft thundered overhead.

  “The show’s started!” Commander Milner-Gibson shouted. Lieutenant Randal could hardly hold the commander’s enthusiasm against him, but it was rather an awful lapse of noise discipline.

  Major Tod reappeared out of the dark, carrying his Thompson submachine gun at the high port. He conferred anxiously with Lieutenant Colonel Clarke and Commander Milner-Gibson.

  “With the heightened air activity of unknown origin and the possibility of an E-boat being somewhere out in the Channel behind us, now seems as good a time as any to call it a night and make for home,” the colonel said.

  “Heavily armed men heading this way,” Lieutenant Randal announced in a loud whisper, interrupting the leaders’ conference. “Bad guys!”

  A Wehrmacht bicycle patrol, moving along the water’s edge, had somehow penetrated the security perimeter set up in a half-moon around the air-sea rescue boat. Major Tod jumped to his feet with visions of the Victoria Cross dancing in his head and leveled his Thompson at the patrol. Unfortunately, his finger hit the magazine release instead of the safety, and the heavy, twenty-round magazine clattered against the shale of the beach, alerting the Germans.

  The Nazis immediately opened fire and, being trained men, did not disengage their magazines until they ran empty. The first short burst from the German patrol leader’s 9-mm MP-3 8 machine pistol knocked Lieutenant Colonel Clarke over the bow and back into the boat. Then, in the confusion of the moment, the Germans broke contact and fled, getting clean away.

  Things happened very fast after that.

  The rest of the landing party returned to the crash boat on the double, and re-embarkation began immediately. The German E-Boat came roaring back but blazed past at speed and kept on going, headed south. The angry sound of high-performance engines screamed overhead. Enemy? Friendly? Who could say? Commander Milner-Gibson made ready to put to sea.

  Lieutenant Randal pounced on Lieutenant Colonel Clarke, who was bleeding profusely from the head. In the dark and the confusion of the night it was not easy to establish the extent of his injuries. Black-faced men were clambering over the side and into the boat with their weapons clanging. Somebody was taking a head count. The boat began to slide back out into the Channel.

  “What’s happening, John?” the colonel groaned.

  “We’re getting the hell out of Dodge, sir. Now, will you hold still while I try to figure out where to put the tourniquet?”

  “But I’m bleeding from the head!”

  “That’s a problem, sir.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Clarke started laughing manically. “Who will ever believe this story? I create, name, recruit, plan, and get killed on the first amphibious Commando raid in modern history.”

  “You’re not dead yet, sir. There’s a pressure point directly behind and slightly under your jaw. Now, if you’ll just press down hard and keep steady pressure on it, I think we can get the bleeding stopped. As far as I can tell, you’re only nicked. I can’t find any other entry or exit wounds, but they nearly shot your ear off.”

  “You make quite sure you back me up on the fact that I was in the boat at the time I was hit.”

  “No problem, sir. If anybody asks, I was sitting next to you when it happened, one hundred yards offshore.”

  The crash boat eventually linked up with the boat that had become separated from it. As the morning dawned golden, a flight of Hawker Hurricanes appeared in order to provide air cover and stayed with them the whole way back to Dover.

  The Commandos sailed into a hero’s homecoming. Ships at the quayside sounded their Klaxons, blew their sirens, and sprayed streams of water from their firefighting equipage. Sailors manned the rails and cheered Churchill’s Leopards ashore, where they were met by the popping flashbulbs of the hurriedly assembled local press corps.

  Not all the members of the raiding party fared so well on their return, they learned later. Due to the intense secrecy of the mission, when part of the flotilla sailed back into Folkestone, no one was expecting it. The exuberant fighting men had taken their young skipper’s recommendation—“Splice the main brace, boys!”—at face value. They broke open the emergency containers of “medicinal” intended to revive shot-down pilots plucked from the icy waters of the Channel, and medicated themselves forthwith. The harbor authorities took one look at the boatload of dirty, armed drunks and arrested them on the spot, thinking they might be deserters. It took some doing before the misunderst
anding was sorted out, though it was never clear what the men were supposed to be deserting from.

  ~ * ~

  While they were waiting at the hospital for Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke to receive medical attention, Lieutenant John Randal gave Lieutenant Terry Stone his opinion of the operation. It was not kind.

  The colonel was sitting on a stretcher—in a fair degree of pain, covered in dried blood, clutching a bandage to his ear—listening to the exchange. “Do you have a better idea, Lieutenant Randal?” he snapped, finally.

  “Sir, the Apaches, never numbering more than a thousand men total, raiding out of Mexico into the Arizona Territory, had over one-third of the entire strength of the U.S. Army chasing them for something like ten years. The Apaches seldom operated in groups of more than twenty-five or thirty warriors. Most war parties consisted of fewer than ten adult male Indians, the bulk being teenage boys.”

  “Your point is, Lieutenant?”

  “What I think would be more effective, sir, is a small, lightly armed, self-contained raiding outfit of not more than one boatload of handpicked men. They could strike from the sea like lightning, be gone in an instant, show up unannounced somewhere else, then do it all over again, night after night. That’s the way raiding ought to be done, sir. Guerrilla war, and plenty of it.”

  “What is your opinion, Lieutenant Stone?” Lieutenant Colonel Clarke asked.

  “I should like to be a part of something like that, sir! Sea cavalry— only we ride fast boats instead of horses.”

  “In that case, gentlemen, I shall arrange for orders to be cut for you two to get started no later than tomorrow. Acting Captain Randal, you are in command, with Lieutenant Stone as your deputy commander as soon as I can release him from MO-9. Make something happen, gentlemen, and do it with celerity.”

  The colonel stifled a groan through gritted teeth. He gave Lieutenant Randal a thoughtful look. “Maybe you want to rethink recruiting from the independent companies,” he said. “No. 11 did seem a trifle amateurish tonight. I would dearly love to know how that German patrol managed to infiltrate undetected through our perimeter.”

  “Lesson learned, sir,” Lieutenant Randal said. “Just because a military unit thinks it’s an elite force does not make it so.”

  The next morning the London Times screamed, British raiders land on enemy coast! The people of Great Britain were euphoric.

  Prime Minister Winston Churchill proved a trifle more fickle, as Lieutenant Colonel Clarke reported privately to Lieutenants Randal and Stone. According to the colonel’s sources, the PM had penned across the bottom of his copy of the report—admittedly, a sanitized version designed to show in the best light possible an operation some described as “brilliant” and others “bold and daring”—the words, “Unworthy of the British Empire to send over a few cutthroats.”

  “Not the kindest assessment we might have wished for the very first Commando operation,” the colonel ruefully remarked.

  “It’s a good thing he doesn’t know what really happened,” Lieutenant Randal said.

  “John, is what you told me actually true, the bit about one thousand Apaches tying down a third of the entire U.S. Army for ten years?”

  “That’s what they taught us at the Cavalry School, sir.”

  “Hmm. Maybe instead of Commandos I should have named them Apaches.”

  ~ * ~

  3

  PINPRICK

  THE NEXT MORNING, ACTING CAPTAIN JOHN RANDAL, CAPTAIN David Niven, and Lieutenant Terry Stone held a hasty council of war at MO-9. They decided that Captain Niven would make arrangements for a boat of some type to transport the new, small-scale raiding unit Captain Randal had been authorized to raise. Captain Niven would also help with the selection of a target for their first raid on the French coast because, in his capacity as liaison officer, he had access to a variety of intelligence sources.

  “Sounds perfectly mad to me, chaps,” the movie star pointed out cheerfully. “You two are simply going to get yourselves killed. That said, if I were to take a reduction to lieutenant, how would you feel about me signing on?”

  “Talk to Colonel Clarke,” Captain Randal said.

  “Blast! Already turned me down, actually.”

  “I would have thought the colonel would be more than delighted to see you rubbed out, old stick,” Lieutenant Stone said. “That would give him a clear run at the ravishing Lady Jane.”

  “No such luck for him,” Captain Niven said with a smile. “That is one match I intend to win.”

  Lieutenant Stone undertook to recruit the first draft of volunteers. The youngest scion of one of the great noble families of England, he was also its storied black sheep. His father, Captain Randal learned, was an earl who possessed what Englishmen admire the most in one another: mind-numbing wealth, conviviality, liberality, a sense of Empire, and blue-ribbon foxhounds. All that having been said, if Lieutenant Terry Stone had any limitations as a professional cavalry officer, he did not admit to them.

  Volunteers had to come from somewhere, so Lieutenant Stone went to the Household Cavalry Brigade straight away. He came back in short order with the polo squads from the Life Guards and Horse Guards Regiments. Though the recruitment made him persona non grata with the colonels of both regiments for pirating their most prized sporting teams, it was an inspired choice, as Captain Randal soon learned.

  The cavalrymen were extraordinarily fit, keen sportsmen, and extremely competitive in an aggressive, dangerous, hard-charging game. They were trained to think for themselves on the dead run and accustomed to acting on their own initiative while working together toward a common object as members of a highly disciplined team. Most of the polo players were also slightly older and more mature than the average soldier. It would be hard to imagine better raiding stock.

  Captain Niven appeared one day with a tall, bayonet-slim Grenadier Guards sergeant major in tow. “Captain Randal, this is Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks. The colonel has asked him to come down and have a look at your operation.”

  Major Hicks’s Grenadier Guards were a no-nonsense outfit. They took the business of being the First Regiment of Foot seriously. Discipline, iron will, and a readiness to unhesitatingly carry out any order were their stock-in-trade. Tradition in the Grenadier Guards dictated that if a trooper was on time to a formation, he was considered five minutes late.

  The Life Guards and the “Blues,” as the Horse Guards Regiment was nearly always called, were good-natured rivals of longstanding, but to most people the only discernable difference was that one regiment wore a red coat and the other a blue one when on parade. The Foot Guards, on the other hand, held both regiments in slight contempt and referred to them generally as “Piccadilly Cowboys.”

  “They don’t mean it as a compliment, really,” Lieutenant Stone remarked, eying the sergeant major with a certain amount of trepidation.

  It was not clear what Sergeant Major Hicks’s role was intended to be, but it was a sure bet his presence was going to cast a wet saddle blanket on the high jinks of a bunch of polo-playing Piccadilly Cowboys recently turned Leopard Commandos with a license to play merry hell on the French coast.

  In fact, Captain Randal suspected that was exactly what the chief of MO-9 had in mind when he sent the sergeant major down to them. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke was a conventional officer with an unconventional bent. History showed that a background like that often produced the best type of special forces operator. The commander of MO-9 was proving to be a hands-off leader able to delegate command and control and still find a way to place his mark squarely on the Commando units he organized—a formidable talent.

  ~ * ~

  Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks took in every detail of raid planning, but he did not have much to say. A target was selected and ten men were picked for the first raid. They brandished their antique Webley Mark V .45 5 revolvers and an exotic variety of bayonets—some almost as long as swords—and draped themselves with bandoleers of ammunition like Mexican bandi
tos. Each man carried a .303 Short Model Lee-Enfield rifle.

  Captain John Randal loaned Major Hicks his liberated 9-mm Walther P-38 and kept the 9-mm Browning P-35 his Swamp Fox Force topkick had given him. He wished he still had the MP-38 machine pistol he had captured outside Calais. Unfortunately, the military port authorities at Dover had confiscated it the moment he had stepped ashore.

  All things considered, they were about the most poorly armed group of modern-day raiders ever imagined; some of the Huk guerrillas Captain Randal had operated against in the Philippine jungles had carried more individual firepower. The Commandos were definitely going to have to rely on the element of surprise because they couldn’t do battle with the Germans on anything like even terms. Bolt-action rifles against automatic weapons at night was not a fair fight.

  The horsemen and the lone Grenadier Guardsman took turns painting wicked-looking camouflage stripes on their faces with theatrical makeup supplied by a stage actress girlfriend of Lieutenant Stone.