Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Read online

  Captain Randal gave the men a final briefing and conducted an inspection. He ordered each trooper to jump up and down, checking for metal-on-metal contact: loose ammunition in a pocket, an untapped, slack rifle sling, or anything that might rattle. He checked each man’s bolt-action .303 Mark III SMLE rifle to make sure that the magazine was loaded but there was not a round in the chamber; he didn’t want an unintentional discharge to give away the show. He also looked for the signs of panic that they all should have been feeling but, never having actually been shot at before, were not.

  His inspection completed, Captain Randal addressed the Commandos as a group, talking calmly and quietly. The troops gave him their undivided attention; they had heard a few things about the business at Calais. He told them they looked ready; he spoke of spirit, pride, dangerous enterprise, and a few other things. By the time he was finished, the men were so fired up, they were just about ready to start hacking each other with their old sword-type bayonets.

  Then he led them aboard the racy, forty-foot civilian craft His Majesty’s Yacht Arrow, commanded by Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Midshipman Randy Seaborn, on which they would set sail for enemy shore. Because their hobnail boots would scar the deck, the men were banned from wearing them on board and instead wore rubber-soled athletic shoes and knee-high leggings. The Leopard Commandos were less than thrilled to be invading France in “bleedin’ ballet slippers” as one Blues corporal was heard to complain indelicately.

  Eighteen-year-old Midshipman Seaborn, the nephew of the widow at whose London townhouse the planning sessions had occurred, was just as green as the raiders when it came to battle, but he did have the dual advantages of coming from a seafaring family and commanding a yacht that he had a lot of experience with—because she had belonged to his parents before being called up for emergency war duty.

  Royal Navy officers have three career paths to choose from: engineering, gunnery, and navigation. Midshipman Seaborn had chosen to specialize in navigation for the simple reason that it was a prerequisite for command. It was an intuitive choice because, as the midshipman explained to Captain Randal, the Admiralty, in its infinite wisdom, on occasion allowed reservists to command their own boats in the rare event when they were both mobilized. In this case, it was anticipated to be only a temporary tour of duty until the young skipper’s orders conferring his regular navy commission came through. The paperwork was already in the pipeline.

  “Randy may be a trifle young,” Lieutenant Stone confided, “but he is as game as they come.” Captain Randal knew he was going to need to be. The mission that night called for him to navigate across forty-odd miles of German E-boat-infested waters, land his passengers on a tiny pinpoint of a target, stand off a hostile shore while they carried out their clandestine mission, then recover the raiders and transport them safely home—all before the sun came up.

  A stiff wind blew out of the northeast, which caused the sea to rise. The night was dark, with thick patches of high cumulus clouds obscuring what little starlight there was, complicating navigation. No one really blamed Midshipman Seaborn when he got lost.

  Hours later and miles off course, the Leopards stumbled ashore through light surf, slightly seasick but ready for action. Leaving two men behind to secure the beach, the rest fanned out into a loose column formation with their weapons at the ready. They advanced cautiously on a road they thought—hoped—ran parallel to the beach, obscured by some sand dunes four hundred yards to their front. Their mission, hastily modified just before they hit the beach, was to cut the road and interdict enemy traffic—if any. They never reached it.

  To Captain Randal’s astonishment, almost immediately after wading ashore his team happened upon an open-topped Mercedes Benz-type Stuttgart German Army staff car parked hull-down among the sand dunes. Pulsating music from the car’s radio, tuned to a station in Algiers, filled the night with the hypnotic beat of a primeval African drum song.

  Floating on the sand like silent phantoms in their army-issue athletic shoes, the Commandos closed in and surrounded the staff car’s unwary occupants. In disbelief, the men with the black-streaked faces observed Panzer General Ernest von Rittenhauser—one of Germany’s finest, holder of the Blue Max and a recent recipient of the Knight’s Cross—touch a champagne-filled silver chalice to the ruby-red lips of his companion for the evening, a plump, strawberry blonde French girl who appeared not to have very many clothes on.

  The Commandos fell on the two of them like a pack of Churchill’s proverbial leopards. Sometimes, Captain Randal knew, it was better to be lucky than good. The odds against anything as miraculous happening again in this war were at least a million to one. They sent the French girl packing and, with their captive in tow, set a course for England.

  ~ * ~

  Alerted by a radio signal from HMY Arrow, the press was carefully stage-managed to be on hand for their arrival. Allowed unfettered access to photograph the return of the raiders to their hearts’ content, the reporters were nevertheless strictly forbidden to interview the participants for reasons of operational security. The Official Secrets Act was cited.

  As Captain John Randal and Lieutenant Terry Stone knew, the actual reason interviews were off-limits was because MO-9—meaning Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke—wanted to create the impression that the operation was a carefully orchestrated snatch mission conducted in response to precise intelligence, specifically targeting Panzer General Ernest von Rittenhauser. The big lie was that the mission had been brilliantly planned and executed with split-second timing and uncanny precision. The last thing MO-9 wanted was for one of the participants to spill the beans: that they had been lost and it had all been a big, happy accident. Naturally, there was no mention of the French girl.

  A news release that was a wonder of hyperbole and bald-faced lie—all carefully couched in clipped British public school understatement—was quickly drawn up by Captain David Niven and distributed to the press corps. The news release was remarkable only in that the reporters actually believed it.

  Captain Niven had clearly mastered the art of stage-managing public relations during his time in Hollywood, a fact that was duly noted and that resulted in his being whisked off soon after to a super-secret signals organization known as “Phantom.” There, it was hoped, he could put his talents to good work, fooling the Germans instead of the local citizenry.

  The British public went wild with joy over the capture of the enemy general. Captain Randal and Lieutenant Stone were both immediately decorated with the Military Cross. Midshipman Randy Seaborn was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Royal Navy’s equivalent to the Military Cross. Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks received the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Great Britain’s second-highest valor decoration for an enlisted soldier. Each of the NCOs on the operation was granted the Military Medal. Every Commando trooper received a mention in dispatches that was denoted by an oak leaf cluster worn on his campaign medal.

  Not a single shot had been fired in anger. It sure beat playing polo.

  After such an enterprising start, the future of the Small-Scale Raiding Company, as Lieutenant Colonel Clarke dubbed them, was never in doubt. Prime Minister Churchill fired off a dispatch reportedly dictated through a blue cloud of cigar smoke while soaking happily like a plump, pink porpoise in his bath at Checkers. “This intrepid enterprise demonstrates the kind of bold thinking, brilliant planning, and rapid execution we have needed all along! Press on, Commandos!”

  Midshipman Seaborn suggested to Captain Randal that they use his wealthy aunt’s vast, isolated estate south of London as their base of operations because it was located on one of the narrowest parts of the English Channel. The Small-Scale Raiding Company repaired there, straightaway. Toward nightfall, all the Commandos would have to do was walk down to the private boat dock, climb aboard HMY Arrow, and go raiding. Only, as it turned out, it was not quite that simple.

  ~ * ~

  4

  RAIDING DOCTRINE

  “what WE NE
ED,” CAPTAIN JOHN RANDAL, MC, INFORMED HIS TWO officers one day soon after their arrival at Seaborn House, “is a copy of the army’s and the navy’s raiding doctrine. There is no sense trying to reinvent the wheel.”

  “The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, is the place to look,” Lieutenant Terry Stone, MC, offered. “I am one of its most distinguished graduates, you know. They say I hold the standing record for demerits in a single term.”

  “The Admiralty will have something,” Midshipman Randy Seaborn, DSC, added. “My father works there. He can locate the material for us.”

  They both struck out. Neither the army nor the navy had publications on the subject. Captain Randal even went to the American Embassy in London to pay a call on the officer in command of the Marine guard detachment stationed there. He asked to borrow USMC tactical manuals on small-scale amphibious raiding operations—but came away empty-handed. The USMC’s idea of amphibious operations was to establish a beachhead lodgment on a hostile shore—by force if necessary—and stay there until relieved or the enemy was dead. The U.S. Marines were not in the raiding business.

  “Look on the bright side, old stick. No matter what we do, no one will ever be able to accuse us of violating official doctrine,” Lieutenant Stone pointed out, “because there isn’t any.”

  Captain Randal and the Small-Scale Raiding Company were forced to work up their own tactics. And they had to do it amid the frantic activity of the local military authorities, who were preparing a defense against the much-feared, highly anticipated German assault on England. Invasion paranoia along the English coastline was at fever pitch.

  Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks made his presence felt from the start. The first thing he did was to announce: “In the Grenadier Guards, if you’re on time for a formation, you are already five minutes late. That policy is in effect as of right now.”

  The second thing he did was to restructure the rank nomenclature. The Life Guards Regiment and the Blues had some strange ranks, he pointed out to Captain Randal. For example, for some obscure reason, sergeant majors were called corporal majors, and Sergeant Major Hicks was having none of it. His logic was that they would eventually be recruiting men from other line regiments, and there was no sense confusing them when they did. Sergeants went back to being called sergeants and corporals became corporals. Interestingly, Captain Randal noticed, the cavalrymen made no objection.

  The third thing Sergeant Major Hicks did was to suggest that the Small-Scale Raiding Company establish an eleven-day operational cycle followed by a forty-eight-hour pass plus one day of travel and administrative downtime tacked on the end.

  “Work hard, play hard, sir,” he said.

  Captain Randal agreed.

  This turned out to be an excellent policy, except for the men’s custom of requisitioning any handy means of transportation they happened across to get them back to Seaborn House on time when their pass was about to expire. The local constable routinely rang up Captain Randal to make arrangements for the borrowed vehicles to be picked up, knowing they could be found scattered along the driveway in front of Seaborn House. No serious attempt was made to stop the practice, however, on the grounds that it showed initiative on the part of the troops.

  The Small-Scale Raiding Company began rehearsing landing exercises from HMY Arrow. Midshipman Randy Seaborn observed that on their initial raid they simply sailed up to the first beach they came to, eased the Arrow in, and waded ashore, being extraordinarily lucky in making landfall at a place that allowed them to pull in so close to the shallow beach that they did not even get wet above the knees. Not to mention their extreme good fortune in finding a carousing German general in flagrante delicto.

  “It is not always going to work out like that, sir,” the young naval officer said. As the men would shortly learn, this was the mother of all understatements.

  They practiced rowing ashore in whalers, dories, cutters, and canoes before finally settling on Goadey dinghies as the craft best suited for their purposes. Nevertheless, the Commandos quickly discovered to their chagrin that they could not row ashore or back to the Arrow every time they tried.

  The problem lay in the fact that the Small-Scale Raiding Company was composed of cavalrymen, not sailors or Marines. Transitioning from the hurricane deck of a polo pony to a seat in a tiny eggshell of a rowboat proved easier said than done. The flimsy little dinghies sometimes went round and round, and sometimes they tipped over. In fact, it was a challenge to offload from the Arrow into one of them while carrying arms and equipment without capsizing.

  But even if they did manage to get themselves into the Goatleys without upending them, Captain Randal and his men were learning that it took a skilled boat handler to row through even light breakers. The men were all nearly drowned—or thought they would be—time after time after time.

  Days turned into weeks. The Small-Scale Raiding Company trained and then trained some more, running endless exercises. After a while the troops hit a plateau in their level of skill. Unless the Commandos planned to spend all their time perfecting their boat-handling techniques—something they could not afford and did not want to do—they were never going to be better than talented amateurs.

  They faced two formidable obstacles, however. The first was the English Channel, a notoriously unpredictable body of water. Even at the best of times it is choppy, and weather conditions tend to change minute by minute, making long-range planning a virtual impossibility.

  The second was the Germans themselves, who were working fast and furiously to fortify the occupied French coastline just as the British were to build anti-invasion obstacles along theirs. Just as Midshipman Seaborn had said, the Small-Scale Raiding Company would not be able to count on being able to land on the first beach they came to. The Commandos were going to have to learn how to land in rough, out-of-the-way places where the heavily armed gentlemen of the Third Reich did not expect anyone to come calling. That kind of seamanship, as it was becoming uncomfortably clear, was a job for highly trained professionals.

  It was cold, wet, frustrating, miserable work, not helped in the least by the fact that their proficiency level had peaked and was not improving.

  In the evenings, all hands repaired to the tavern in the Blind Eye Inn, located on the tiny bay near Seaborn House, to strategize over fish and chips while drowning thoughts of their day’s failures in drink.

  The pub was always crowded with hard-partying fighter pilots from the two squadrons that were operating off a small grass airstrip located a few miles north of Seaborn House. One of the squadrons flew the glamorous Spitfires and the other the workhorse Hurricanes. The highest-scoring aces seemed to fly Hurricanes, but that did not keep the Spitfire pilots from asserting their natural superiority at every opportunity.

  Fighter pilots had become the idols of the nation, accorded instant celebrity status and lasting immortality as the “Valiant Few.” It was universally accepted that the RAF constituted the thin blue line: all that stood between King and Empire and the brutal Nazi onslaught. The fighter pilots drank like fish.

  New pilots kept turning up at the Blind Eye practically every night, while many of the old familiar ones were conspicuous no-shows. So many of the fighter pilots were wearing the Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon on their uniforms, with its slanted blue and white lines, that the barroom seemed to tilt to the left.

  The Small-Scale Raiding Company generally confined itself to a small corner of the pub, while the hard-drinking pilots swirled around them. The fighter pilots were a close-knit fraternity and seldom bothered to come over and introduce themselves. This may have been due in some measure to the lurid newspaper stories that appeared from time to time, claiming Commando units were filled to the brim with convicts recruited straight from prison. It was widely reported that the other ranks in the British Army were required to have a violent criminal record or be certified psychopaths in order to get in.

  While nothing could have been further from the truth, the stories did seem to h
ave a chilling effect on strangers and generally discouraged outsiders from striking up unnecessary conversations. This was fine with Captain Randal and his men.

  There was one notable exception: Squadron Leader Paddy Wilcox, DSO, MC, DFC, a much-decorated, rotund, middle-aged Canadian World War I ace fighter pilot and former bush pilot. He flew the local air-sea rescue flying boat tasked with swooping in and picking up pilots and aircrew who got shot down in the Channel. The veteran pilot always wore a black patch over one eye when he was not flying.

  “I say, old stick, but weren’t you wearing that patch on your right eye last night?” Lieutenant Stone inquired of the squadron leader one evening when he strolled over to the Small-Scale Raiding Company table to introduce himself.

  “Strengthens the eye muscles,” he explained. “I rotate it. You lads are those pinprick boys,” he went on. “You’re the desperadoes who kidnapped a Nazi general! I’ve been watching you practice in your boats.”

  This announcement was met with stony silence from the Small-Scale Raiding Company/Leopard/Commando/Desperado/Kidnappers. At the end of a long, hard, frustrating day of cold, soaking-wet training, the men were not predisposed to welcome intrusion by any outsider, particularly some over-the-hill pilot dripping in medals. Besides, what they were doing was classified, even if they were not actually doing very much at the moment.