Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II Read online

  This notion, more than anything else, tightened Lynch’s guts with anxiety. He’d faced long odds several times over the past year, always outnumbered and outgunned. But he’d been led by good men - officers and sergeants baptized in the cauldron of war who emerged to lead men with their wisdom and experience. If Meade and his men hadn’t faced off against the Germans before, how could Lynch trust their instincts, their courage? He’d seen men break and run like terrified children during the battle for France, seen officers standing about wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, lacking the slightest notion of what to do. Many of those men never made it to the shores of Dunkirk and back to ol’ Blighty. Those few who had, were often quietly and respectfully moved into commands that’d keep them out of trouble, and not put any more lives at risk.

  Determined to learn the truth, Lynch waited until the afternoon of the next day, when Meadeforce reached the Libyan border. While the LRDG men cut through the yards-deep barrier of barbed wire, Lynch sought out Lieutenant Price, who was sipping from his canteen, feet propped up against the side of his Chevrolet. Upon seeing Lynch approaching, Price raised his canteen and offered it to Lynch.

  “Cold sweet tea, Corporal?” Price asked.

  Lynch offered a quick salute that Price casually returned. “No, thank you, sir. Kind of you to offer, Lieutenant.”

  Price eyed Lynch with amused suspicion. “Why so formal, Tommy?”

  “Hoping I might have a word, sir. In private, like.” Lynch glanced at the Desert Group navigator in Price’s truck.

  Price raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Grabbing his Beretta machine pistol from its nook beside his seat, the Commando officer jumped out of the truck and motioned for Lynch to follow him. The pair wandered a few yards away, and after a brief look around, Price slung his weapon and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Well, what is it, Tommy?” he asked.

  “It’s Major Meade, sir,” Lynch began. “The lads and I, we’re a little uncertain of the major’s, ah, bona fides with regards to leading this mission. No offense intended, of course.”

  Price’s eyes narrowed as he looked Lynch in the eye, but the Irishman betrayed no inkling of his true unease. After a moment, Price’s expression softened.

  “Come now, Tommy!” Price exclaimed with a smile. “As you are quite aware, High Command would never assign an officer to lead a mission without that officer possessing all the experience, faculties, and qualities of character making them the perfect candidate for the job. So you see, Major Meade being assigned to lead this mission is all the reassurance you need as to whether he’s qualified or not, because if he wasn’t qualified, he’d never have been picked to lead us in the first place!”

  Price paused and looked at Lynch with a straight face for all of three seconds, before both men couldn’t help it any longer, and they broke into a fit of subdued laughter. Price gave Lynch a friendly pat on the arm.

  “My apologies, Corporal, for having a little fun at your expense.”

  “No worries at all now, Lieutenant,” Lynch replied. “That was a right jolly laugh, so it was!”

  After a moment the two men regained their composure. Price glanced around again, and seeing there wasn’t anyone within earshot, his face grew serious.

  “We learned of Major Meade’s arrival three days ago. Each of us - Eldred, Clarke, Moody, and myself - tried to reach officers we knew using the RT, to see if anyone could tell us about Meade.”

  Lynch nodded. He didn’t know much about Clarke or Moody’s career, but Eldred had been in the Army for many years, and Price’s family had connections surprisingly high up the chain of command.

  “It seems,” Price continued, “Major John Meade has never fired a shot in anger. He graduated from Sandhurst four years before me, and went on to teach armour manoeuvres at Bovington. He’s spent the last year petitioning to go into the field, and apparently knows someone with enough weight of metal upon their chest to have finally made it happen.”

  Lynch’s eyes went wide. “You mean...we’re going against Jerry and his panzers led by a bloody schoolmaster? This is a mug’s game, so it is!”

  Price’s expression hardened. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Corporal. But it’s too late to do anything about it, and spreading word of Meade’s less than inspiring pedigree will only hurt morale and reduce our chances of making our way out of this alive. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Lynch replied, all the while thinking of who he should tell first.

  Price could see the wheels turning behind Lynch’s eyes. With a sigh, he shook his head.

  “As I can already tell you’ve no intention of keeping this to yourself, at least be prudent. Keep this amongst the Calais men only,” Price said.

  Lynch nodded. “Aye, Lieutenant.”

  “I mean it, Corporal,” Price added, an edge to his voice.

  Lynch gave Price a salute. “Sir, I understand, so I do. Calais men only. We’ll not let you down now, so we won’t.”

  Price returned the salute, then turned and walked back to his truck. Lynch began the walk back to his own vehicle, his mind going over how he’d discuss this with the others.

  The “Calais men”, were the Commandos who’d made it out of Calais in July, when Price’s squad was sent back over the Channel to find and bring to England several members of a partisan band who’d caused significant trouble to the occupying Germans since the fall of France. The mission had gone sour when Price, Lynch, and a trooper named Pritchard were captured by an SS officer named Johann Faust, who led an elite unit of Einsatzkommandos, SS fanatics trained to hunt partisans and wipe them out. The rest of the squad had escaped capture, but Sergeant McTeague had led the men, guided by the partisans, back into the city on a rescue mission. Pritchard had been executed by Faust, but Lynch and Price had escaped, only to link up with the rest of the squad just as they’d reached Faust’s headquarters, deep inside the city.

  What followed had been a nightmare journey, the squad fighting a running night battle through the streets of Calais, pursued by Faust’s SS as well as the city’s regular infantry garrison. Eventually, the Commandos had sought shelter in a half-destroyed church, where they fought a desperate last stand, convinced they were all going to die, before one of the partisans - a young teenage boy - had found a way out of the church’s catacombs and into the sewers.

  Of the twelve Commandos, only eight survived the Calais mission - Price, Lynch, McTeague, Nelson, Bowen, Johnson, Hall, and White. Ever since, the survivors had begun referring to themselves as the “Calais men”, and there was a bond between them that transcended differences in role and rank. The Calais men trusted each other more than the other Commandos in Eldred’s command, including those replacements assigned to them, such as Higgins and Herring. Above all else, the Calais men knew that if they stuck together and trusted one another, they could see their way through the hardest fights and the most dangerous missions.

  But even the strongest bonds of trust and brotherhood, Lynch knew, were no match for the cold, cruel fortunes of war.

  Chapter Four

  Ten Kilometres South Of Bardia

  November 15th, 1300 Hours

  “This mission is utter shit.”

  Steiner looked up at Major Kessler, 15th Panzer Division, as the senior officer spit a wad of brown phlegm over the side of his Panzerkampfwagen III.

  “I’m sure the DAK generals wouldn’t be sending us south if they didn’t think our mission was important,” Steiner said, picking his words carefully.

  Kessler gave the younger officer a contemptuous look. “Don’t be an ass. We are being sent on a fool’s errand. If that peacock Rommel and the others were serious about protecting our southern flank, they would be sending more than this rolling graveyard.”

  Looking around at their formation, Steiner couldn’t help but agree. Aside from a half-dozen Opel Blitzes providing fuel and resupply for the panzers, Kessler’s command was made up of vehicles and crews left behind for repairs or recupera
tion while their units were deployed around Bardia and Tobruk. The armour was a motley collection of seven Panzer IIIs, two Panzer IVs, a lone Panzer II, and even more unusual, a pair of British cruiser tanks, captured and repainted in Afrika Korps colours. One was a relatively new-looking Crusader, the other an older A13, probably captured by the Italians before their allies even arrived in North Africa. All of the vehicles showed signs of combat damage and the hasty repairs made to get them back into the fight. Kessler’s comment about a rolling graveyard was probably true - more than a few of these tanks were no doubt the death beds, so to speak, of some of their crews.

  The men aboard them now had been a little more fortunate. All the panzer men with Kessler were wounded who’d convalesced in Bardia, and would normally be returning to their units. But now they were thrown together, men crewing panzers who’d never met before a few days ago. Although Steiner was no expert on armour, he knew that, as with a veteran infantry squad, a panzer crew trained tirelessly for months so that they could function together with their vehicle as a single entity, trusting each other and acting instantly as directed by the vehicle’s commander. Even if these men were good, dependable soldiers, they wouldn’t have formed the bonds necessary to make them truly effective.

  If they encountered a veteran British armoured unit, this decision would see good men killed.

  Steiner looked back up at Kessler. The major was somewhere in his late 40s - old for his rank, which was troubling - with craggy features and hair turned mostly grey. Kessler’s face showed several shiny, bright pink scars that were still healing, and although Steiner didn’t ask, he assumed Kessler must’ve had his last panzer shot out from under him. It was common for veteran crewmen to go through several panzers over the course of a campaign. If they weren’t immediately killed by the shot that disabled their panzer, the crew - if they were lucky and well-practiced - could bail out before they burned to death in their vehicle.

  “Well, orders are orders,” Steiner said in a neutral tone of voice. “I spent months out in that deep desert, and while it wasn’t all bad, I can’t say I’m particularly eager to go back there.”

  Kessler looked at Steiner and grunted. “Nonsense. I can see the desire in you. Like a hunting hound, straining at the master’s lead, waiting to chase after its prey. You young men are all alike. You think this war will be different. You think our successes in Poland and France mean you are all immortals. But you’ll die just the same.”

  “That is...rather morbid,” Steiner replied. “So, you served in the last war?”

  Kessler nodded. “From ‘16 to ‘18. Gas in my lungs, shrapnel in my back, and a bullet through my thigh. But I lived. I was a crewman in one of the original Sturmpanzerwagens, those enormous A7Vs, near the end of the war. It took eighteen men to crew one. Utterly ridiculous. I could probably knock out every one of them with just one of these.” Kessler patted the top of his panzer’s turret for emphasis.

  “I can’t imagine what that must have been like,” Steiner said. “So many men crammed into a giant steel box. Like a little U-boat rolling across the battlefield.”

  Kessler laughed. “They weren’t anything like a U-boat, trust me. They had no grace to them at all. Got stuck nearly every time you took it off-road, and couldn’t cross a muddy trench without burying its nose in the far side. Can you imagine that? How could we have built such a contraption to win that awful war, and it wasn’t even able to cross a damn trench? At least the Tommies fared better with their designs in that regard, although not by much.”

  “Ever fight against British armour in the last war?” Steiner asked.

  “Yes, several times,” Kessler said. “But oddly, the only shots I ever fired in anger were aboard a captured Mark IV. The Tommies built so many more of those damn things than we did, most of our armoured units fielded Beutepanzerwagens, armour looted from battlefields where they’d been bogged down or disabled, then abandoned by their crews.”

  Steiner pointed over towards the two captured British cruisers. “Some things never change, I suppose?”

  Kessler nodded. “They’re not as good as our Panzer IIIs, but I’ll take them over nothing at all. No sense in letting a fighting machine go to waste.”

  “Speaking of waste,” Steiner glanced at his watch, “I am a little concerned about the hour.”

  The armoured force was currently parked right outside a supply depot, one positioned in such a way as to support units from Bardia moving to the outer rings of the city’s defence, as well as units falling back in need of resupply. Steiner had arrived three hours ago with his temporary command, a trio of armoured cars. He’d been assigned a heavy, eight-wheeled SdKfz 232 and a pair of the lighter, four-wheeled 222s. Steiner had spread his six men evenly among the three cars, rounding out the remaining crew with the vehicles’ original drivers. His men were currently sprawled in the shade next to their cars, trying with varying degrees of success to get what rest they could before climbing back into the furnace-hot crew compartments of their vehicles.

  When Steiner had arrived, he’d found Kessler’s panzer squadron waiting for him. After topping off fuel tanks and water rations before departing, Kessler had informed him they were waiting “for reinforcements”. But now, that wait had stretched out into the afternoon, and Steiner worried they’d lose the day sitting here doing nothing.

  “Don’t be too hasty to rush into a hail of British cannon fire,” Kessler replied to Steiner’s comment. “Besides, here they come now.”

  Steiner turned and saw a quartet of Krupp-Protze cargo trucks approaching. He was about to make a snide remark about what he thought of Kessler’s reinforcements, when he saw that each truck was towing a Pak 36 anti-tank gun. While they were one of the smaller anti-tank guns in the German arsenal, they were still deadly against the light British cruisers. In the hands of a well-trained crew, the Pak 36 could achieve a good rate of fire, and without all the jostling and lurching of a panzer on the move, the static anti-tank gun could achieve a high degree of accuracy, trading the safety of movement for a very small target profile.

  “Alright, Major,” Steiner said, “these are worth the wait. How did you manage this? I wasn’t informed of any anti-tank unit being assigned to travel with us.”

  Kessler gave him a triumphant smile. “I might be old for my rank, Hauptmann, but in all those years, I’ve acquired a few friends. These are good crews, crack shots, and the Krupp-Protzes are carrying full ammunition loads for their guns.”

  “What we’ll lack in armour, we’ll make up in firepower,” Steiner replied.

  “Indeed. Mount up, Hauptmann. We’ll be departing shortly.”

  Steiner saluted Kessler and walked to his armoured car. Opening the side hatch, he squeezed himself inside the body of the SdKfz 232 armoured car. Nodding to his men, Steiner made his way into the turret and poked his head and shoulders above the rim of the commander’s hatch. Over his head, the large “bedframe” radio antenna was draped with a light-coloured canvas sun shade, a field modification Steiner knew he’d appreciate over the next few days.

  Gefreiter Werner, one of Steiner’s remaining Brandenburgers, looked up at him from inside the belly of the car.

  “The other men...they are concerned,” Werner said in a low voice.

  Steiner made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “I think Major Kessler is more cunning than he might seem at first glance. I had my concerns as well, but I do not think he is incompetent. I believe he is an old war hound who prefers the thrill of the hunt to the warmth and safety of the hearthfire.”

  “Das ist gut, but this mission…” Werner continued.

  “You did not join this regiment expecting an easy war, did you?” Steiner asked. “We will do as we are told, but rest assured, I intend to grow old and die in bed, with a Fraulein’s plump bosom for my pillow.”

  “Right now, I’d settle for a bottle of Korn and a good night’s sleep,” Werner replied.

  Steiner chuckled. “Now, now, such fantasies! Let’s be r
ealistic!”

  A moment later, Kessler gave the order to move out, and Steiner ordered his three armoured cars to spread out far beyond the front of the formation, to serve as the eyes and ears of Kessler’s force.

  Damn him, Steiner thought, it does feel good to be hunting again.

  Chapter Five

  Thirty Miles West of The Egypt-Libya Border

  November 16th, 0530 Hours

  Corporal Rhys Bowen shifted his Lee-Enfield sniper rifle three degrees to the left, and the Axis supply depot slid into view. The thread-thin webs of barbed wire were just barely visible in the predawn light, but there was no missing the large brown tents, the stockpiled fuel cans and ammunition crates, the sangars draped in camouflage netting as much to shield their occupants from the sun as to make the gun emplacements harder to target from the air. Several boxy Fiat cargo lorries were parked inside the depot’s perimeter, as well as a pair of Autoblinda armoured cars and a lone M13/40 tank. The three armoured fighting vehicles were parked nose-first into their own sangars, the piled rocks and sand providing them with passable hull-down positions. Given the size of the depot and the number of tents and fighting positions, Bowen estimated the enemy’s strength at somewhere near a reinforced platoon.

  Around the depot, there were signs of early morning activity. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a cooking fire, and Bowen made out men walking around, pulling on coats to fight off the early-morning desert chill. Although their movements seemed casual and unhurried, Bowen saw the Italians were carrying their rifles and machine pistols wherever they went, and more than once, he spotted a man Bowen took to be an officer or NCO stop near the wire and scan the eastern horizon with a pair of field glasses. So, they are wary, but don’t feel an attack is imminent, Bowen thought to himself.