Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume II Page 4

  Contrary to the opinion of the average soldier, the role of a sniper in war was less about killing the enemy, and more about infiltration and intelligence gathering. Trained in stealth, stalking techniques, and how to observe and acquire information about the enemy, those skills were often more useful to a sniper’s commanding officer than the ability to shoot a man dead at extreme distances. To Bowen, the measure of a good officer was how intelligently they made use of Bowen’s talents, recognizing and employing the full range of his abilities, and not just the mating of trigger and finger.

  The previous evening, five miles from where Bowen now lay, Major Meade had pointed out the location of their first target - an Italian supply depot. Intended to support German and Italian reconnaissance units, it had been spotted by the RAF and marked for destruction with a bombing run. However, once their operation entered the planning stages, the supply depot was picked for another purpose. A recce flight had photographed the depot, and in the photos, a long-range radio transceiver antenna was visible. Knowing the Italians were able to make radio contact with someone further up the Axis chain of command, their choice as the first of Meade’s targets became assured.

  Three hours ago, with little more than a compass bearing and their training in night manoeuvres, Bowen, his spotter Johnson, and four other Commandos had set out into the desert, tasked with finding the supply depot and reporting back on its defences. They’d begun their trek an estimated three miles from the depot, and by Bowen’s current reckoning, that distance was accurate to within a quarter-mile.

  “Sunrise?” Bowen whispered, not taking his eye from the rifle’s scope.

  He felt Johnson shift slightly next to him. Both men were prone, with a ragged-looking desert bush between them and the depot. While it would provide no cover against enemy fire, it helped break up their outline if anyone was scanning the area with field glasses.

  “Fifteen,” Johnson whispered.

  Even this far away from the enemy, the two men made as little noise as possible. Both trained together constantly, and by now they were at a point where their communication was largely reduced to slight gestures or single words, all intended to reduce their chances of being spotted.

  “It’s time,” Bowen said. Johnson shifted, rolling onto his side and pulling an electric torch from his satchel. Johnson pointed the torch directly behind them.

  “Estimate five-zero Italians,” Bowen said, “no Germans visible. Two MGs, possible mortar, wire, two armoured cars, one light tank. No A-T visible. RT confirmed.”

  Johnson slowly repeated the words as he flashed the torch in the direction of the pale dawn horizon. Half a mile to the east, one of the four men they’d departed with lay alone in the sand, watching for Johnson’s coded signal and repeating it with another torch. The process was repeated until the message reached the main body of the Meadeforce, at which point the message was acknowledged with the single flash of a torch back to the west, repeated up the chain until Johnson spotted it with his field glasses.

  “Received,” he said to Bowen. “How long d’you think?”

  “With Major Meade in command, they’ll be along momentarily,” Bowen replied. “He’s straining at the lead like a terrier on the scent of a rat.”

  A moment later, there was a low rumble from the east, a sound not unlike the roll of distant thunder. The rumbling grew louder, and even miles away, the faint squeal of high-speed machinery was audible. Peering through the scope, Bowen saw the first gleam of morning sunshine reflecting off of the depot’s radio transmission tower. As the seconds passed, the sun’s rays slid lower, like a burning fuse, and within a minute the sunlight touched the turret of the Italian tank.

  At almost the same instant, the Italian garrison began to notice the sound of approaching motor vehicles. Men turned to the east, squinting into the morning sun as it began to climb up over the horizon. Bowen felt Johnson shift as the spotter looked behind them.

  “Bloody perfect,” Johnson said. “You can’t see a thing with the sun in your eyes.”

  Bowen continued to watch through the scope as the Italians began to mobilize. Cups of coffee were poured down throats, men tossed aside what remained of their breakfasts and ran towards their defensive positions. A tank crewman climbed up onto the track guard of the M13/40, heading for the turret.

  “Time to earn the King’s shilling,” he said to Johnson.

  Although his target was at the extreme end of the Lee-Enfield’s practical, effective range, Bowen was one of the best marksmen in 3 Commando, his rifle hand-picked from dozens of other specimens for the serendipitous mating of barrel, stock, trigger, and other components that gave it superior accuracy. Bowen’s finger slowly squeezed the trigger until it broke, the crack of the rifle’s report and the recoil against his shoulder something of a surprise, as it always was with a proper killing trigger pull. Though only a few inches above the sandy ground, the rifle’s muzzle blast raised little dust - a canvas drop-cloth had been laid out in front of Bowen’s shooting position, preventing the high-pressure gasses from kicking up a cloud of sand, which would not only obscure his view, but give away his position.

  Bowen’s aim was impeccable. Just as the tank crewman reached the top of his turret, the .303 calibre bullet arrived and caught him low in the back. The tanker threw his hands out and staggered for a moment, before toppling face-first over the turret and sliding out of sight.

  “Scratch one Eyetie,” Johnson murmured, as he watched through his field glasses. “New target, left twenty yards, leftmost armoured car, right side.”

  Bowen shifted and immediately saw a man beginning to climb into the side hatch of an Autoblinda.

  “On target,” Bowen replied.

  Resisting the urge to rush the shot, Bowen spent an extra half-second to steady his aim, and was rewarded when the Italian’s left leg buckled, the bullet smashing into the man’s thigh with more force than a sledgehammer’s blow. The Italian crumpled to the ground next to the armoured car, clutching his shattered leg.

  “Right, he’s out of it. New target, shift left ten yards, MG emplacement,” Johnson said.

  The sangar emerged from the left side of the scope’s field of view, but the shade of the camouflage netting made identification difficult.

  “No target,” he said to Johnson.

  “I saw the blighter duck in there, give it your best.”

  Bowen took an educated guess and fired a round over the dark shape of the machine gun. A moment later, the MG’s barrel jerked to the side, much as if a body had suddenly slumped against the weapon.

  “That’s a hit,” Johnson confirmed.

  By now, the Italians were fully aware of the unseen marksman picking them off one by one. The second machine gun began to fire, sweeping wide arcs of tracer-lit fire through the air. But the Italians couldn’t see where the shots were coming from, had no idea of direction or range, and the few rounds that strayed anywhere near the two Commandos sailed well overhead.

  “New target, second MG emplacement, shift forty yards right.”

  For the next few minutes, as the sounds of the approaching Meadeforce grew louder behind them, Bowen and Johnson worked together as sniper and spotter, engaging target after target as fast as Johnson could find them and Bowen could work the bolt of his Lee-Enfield. The volume of fire coming their way was increasing dramatically, perhaps because the Italians had figured out they were using the rising sun to conceal themselves, but the enemy’s shooting was random and unfocused, sprayed out into the dawn in the vain hope of spoiling his aim. Bowen, however, wasn’t overly concerned with machine gun fire, especially panic fire like he was seeing now, most of the shots impacting dozens or hundreds of yards short, or so far above them he’d still be safe standing straight up.

  It was as his father, a sniper in the last war, had said to Bowen while teaching the young boy how to shoot. A hair’s width or a mile, makes no difference at all if you miss ‘em. The first time Bowen had come under fire, during the battle for Fr
ance last year, his father’s words had been in his thoughts, and Bowen had taken comfort in them. Instead of freezing up at the sound of bullets snapping past his head, the young man had treated it as a problem to solve, one of geometry and angles, distance and drop, the science of ballistics comforting him in its precision. As long as you made sure you were not somewhere along a bullet’s trajectory, the bullet could not harm you. Stay out of firing arcs, use cover, present as small a target as possible, and the odds would tip in your favor to the point where you were in control of your fate, not the man at the other end of the gun.

  On the other hand, mortars, artillery, and bombs - now, those scared Bowen. There was no science to their slaughter, no way to precisely measure how they killed. While you could determine where a bomb or shell would land to some degree of accuracy, the explosion and fragmentation killed seemingly at random. Bowen had seen men killed by a tiny fragment of shrapnel from a blast fifty feet away, while a mortar bomb landing ten feet away did no more than muss another man’s uniform. Luck was the only thing that saved a man from the crushing blast waves and the razored edges of shell fragments, and Bowen did not trust luck. It was a fickle thing, a will-o’-the-wisp, the forlorn hope of brave fools who charged into enemy fire with fixed bayonets. That was everything a sniper was not, and so Bowen trusted only in his training, his spotter, his rifle, and the best pair of eyes God ever gave to a Welshman.

  Bowen felt Johnson shift next to him as the spotter glanced behind them.

  “Here come the rest of the lads, and not a moment too soon. Air’s getting a bit thick.”

  The suppressive fire from the Italians was indeed getting heavier, and although neither man had been hit, a few branches from the bush they were hiding behind had been knocked away by near misses. Now, Bowen heard the growl of Chevrolet truck engines and the squealing clatter of armour louder than ever, racing across the desert and approaching from behind them.

  Pausing to feed another stripper clip of five rounds into his rifle, Bowen rolled onto his side and glanced back over his shoulder. Spread out over a distance of at least a quarter-mile, the ten LRDG trucks and the half-dozen armoured cars were coming towards them at top speed. A half mile behind this first wave, the sixteen Crusaders of Meade’s sabre squadron were cutting across the desert in a broad V formation. An alarming thought suddenly came to mind.

  “Let’s hope they’re awake at the wheel,” he said to Johnson. “I don’t fancy tyre treads up my backside!”

  “Should I flash my torch at them?” Johnson asked.

  Bowen shook his head. “They’re too trigger-happy. Probably take it for muzzle flash and riddle us full of bullets. I’ll keep an eye on the Italians, you give our lads a wave if they get too close.”

  Rolling back into position and getting back on the rifle, Bowen saw through his scope that the Italians, despite the casualties and confusion he’d caused, were preparing to meet the vehicles they now saw bearing down on them. The turrets of the armoured cars and the lone tank began to move, and Bowen saw a flash of smoke and flame from the tank’s muzzle a moment before he heard the boom of the gun. The sound of tearing cloth cut through the air over their heads, and Bowen heard several replies from the Crusaders’ two-pound guns. One of the shells missed entirely, impacting hundreds of yards past the depot, while another smashed to kindling a stack of crates near the Italian tank. The third shell impacted on the sangar in front of the tank, sending fragments of stone flying for yards in all directions. Through his scope, Bowen saw an Italian running past the tank cut down by a stone fragment, the missile striking the unfortunate man in the head and dropping him as if he was shot through the skull by Bowen’s rifle.

  The Italian tank fired its cannon again, and this time, Bowen heard the shot smash home behind him a moment later with a great metallic clang.

  “Bloody hell!” Johnson exclaimed. “That bunch of poor buggers are done for!”

  Bowen risked taking his eyes off the glass for a moment and glanced over his shoulder. To his horror, he saw an LRDG truck in the process of catastrophically coming apart - men, weapons, supplies, and vehicle parts tumbling across the desert at forty miles an hour.

  “The shot took them right in the bonnet. Blew out the back end like nothing was even in the way,” Johnson muttered, eyes wide and unblinking.

  Bowen shook his head and hoped none of the men from his squad were on board that truck. Pity for the others, of course, but it was always easier when you barely knew their names.

  The trucks began to race by their position, tracers spitting from their machine guns as they came within effective range of the Italians, who answered the challenge with machine gun and autocannon fire. Bowen saw a pair of 20mm cannon shells blow holes in the side of a Chevrolet truck big enough for him to stick his head in, but he didn’t see any of the truck’s occupants slump or tumble off, so he figured they weren’t wounded, at least not badly. The same couldn’t be said for a Commando manning a Vickers gun in the back of another truck; the man was caught in the path of an Italian machine gun’s tracers and flung off the back of his vehicle, tumbling across the sand like a rag doll. Bowen couldn’t tell at that distance who the man was, and hoped it wasn’t his friend Tommy Lynch, who held a similar position on one of the trucks.

  “So long, tossers!” shouted a man from the back of the truck passing closest to their position. Bowen saw it was Harry Nelson, hanging onto the 20mm Breda autocannon portee-mounted to the truck bed. Nelson waved and shot them a rude two-fingered gesture as the truck sped past, the cloud of dust kicked up by its passage causing Bowen and Johnson to choke and cough.

  “Nelson, you bloody maniac!” Johnson hollered back.

  Bowen sighed and began to stand up. “C’mon, on your feet. No one’s shooting at us anymore, and I don’t fancy getting squashed by those tanks when they get here in a moment.”

  Johnson got to his knees and began packing their kit. Ahead of them, machine guns and cannons hammered out lead as engines roared. The ginger-haired spotter grimaced and spat out a dust-coloured wad of phlegm.

  “Harry’s the bloody tosser,” Johnson muttered.

  Bowen shrugged and checked his rifle, making sure a live round was chambered. The two men began to walk towards the Italian depot as the first Crusader tanks thundered past them.

  “He can shag sheep for all I care,” Bowen replied. “As long as he keeps that damn cannon of his pointed in the right direction.”

  Chapter Six

  Outside The Italian Supply Depot

  November 16th, 0600 Hours

  Harry Nelson was a man of simple pleasures. Chasing skirts, draining pints and drams, putting the boots to Jerry whenever he could - these were the things that brought a smile to his face. But more than a fine pair of big round Bristols, or a foaming pint of stout, or some poor German with a bullet in his belly, Nelson found pure, almost divine joy in blowing Eyeties all to bits and gobs with the great big bloody autocannon of theirs he’d pinched from the Bersaglieri fortress two weeks ago.

  Nelson spun the traversing wheel of the 20mm Breda 35 autocannon, swinging the weapon’s barrel around and pointing it at the two o’clock position as he prepared to blast the Italian depot. He slapped the clip of twelve high-explosive cannon shells one more time, making sure they were properly seated, and he yanked on the cannon’s charging handle, chambering a shell. The muzzle of the Breda bounced and jerked as the Chevrolet truck it was mounted onto raced across the desert at over thirty miles an hour.

  “Keep ‘er steady, you berk!” Nelson shouted at Trooper Herring, who immediately took one hand from the wheel to offer up a two-fingered retort without bothering to look behind him.

  “Bloody wanker!” Nelson groused under his breath. Within seconds, the truck was passing along the left-hand edge of the supply depot, and the closest machine gun emplacement entered Nelson’s sights.

  With a maniacal grin on his face, Nelson opened fire. The muzzle blast was terrific, the ball of fire leaping from the wea
pon almost a yard in diameter. Like an enormous steam-hammer, the cannon thumped back against its mounting over and over, its motion rocking the truck on its suspension. The first couple of shells were too early, either glancing off the angled stone front of the sangar or missing altogether, but with a few deft corrections using the aiming wheels, Nelson got the gun on target, and kept the weapon traversing as the truck passed by the emplacement.

  The results were spectacular. The rest of the cannon’s twelve-round clip sent pulverized stone flying through the air, along with shredded chunks of meat and bone, only identifiable as the remains of human beings because of the bits of uniform cloth and personal kit mingled with the once-living debris. Within seconds, the well-constructed defensive position, as well as the machine gun and its crew within, were utterly destroyed.

  Nelson looked upon the damage he’d done with satisfaction. He felt no particular enmity towards the Italians; they weren’t as bad as the Germans, especially the fiendish SS they’d dealt with in Calais. But on the other hand, Nelson didn’t have any sympathy for the men he’d just killed, either. They and the rest of their countrymen had bought into Mussolini's schemes, his desire to revive a new Italian empire as grand as their ancestors’. When Nelson had heard Mussolini boasted of his army’s “eight million bayonets”, Nelson had laughed out loud, picturing the poor Eyetie infantry marching into the teeth of emplaced machine gun fire, mortar bombs exploding, tank treads grinding men into ragged meat.

  Bayonets or no, Nelson had to admit the Italians could be brave soldiers. As he sped past the left flank of the supply depot, men knelt and fired at him, rifles and machine pistols filling the air with lead. He heard the snap-crack of bullets going past his head, and the body of the Chevrolet rang with the impact of high-velocity metal. Nelson unfastened the clip of expended cannon shells from the side of the Breda and fitted a fresh load, just as a piece of the truck body the size of a dinner platter disintegrated a few feet away. One of the Autoblinda armoured cars was tracking them with its own Breda autocannon, and Nelson felt the buffet of air as a cannon shell passed by him.