‘Another five, ten minutes.’
The young captain gestured at the Me-109s parked in a cluster nearby, each pilot awkwardly attempting to fill their wing tanks from five-gallon fuel drums. ‘And them?’ he said, pointing towards the fighter planes.
‘They’ll leave as soon as we’re off the ground.’
Koch nodded. ‘If that jeep was on its own, we’ll have a while before word spreads, but I’ve got a feeling that we’ll be due some company very soon.’
‘Can you hold them away for ten more minutes, though?’ Max asked.
Koch turned towards the guard hut and barricade and the small crescent wall of sandbags. It was hardly a great defensive position, and in any case, the airfield wasn’t contained. The Americans could easily by-pass the official entrance and enter the strip from any direction via the woods that surrounded it.
‘All we can do is fire enough shots to make them keep their heads low, slow them down a little, that’s all. I don’t suppose any of them want to be heroes today.’
Koch looked around at the collection of planes. The B-17 was parked up beside the grass strip; beside it was the fuel truck, a large container vehicle full of aviation fuel. Nearby, parked in an irregular cluster around a hastily assembled collection of fifty-gallon drums, were the Me-109s. The fighter pilots were sloshing a lot of the fuel onto the grass in their haste to transfer it to their planes.
‘It’ll take one well-placed shot to take the lot of you out if you’re not careful,’ Koch said.
Max looked around. The young man wasn’t wrong. But there was little they could do about that apart from fill up as quickly as possible and get away. ‘Well, if you can keep them off our backs for a few more minutes, I’d be very grateful.’
Koch grinned and nodded. ‘We’ll do that.’ He turned on his heels and jogged across the short grass in the direction of the hangar.
Max looked at Schröder and his men refilling their planes. He’d sent both Stef and Hans across to help them out. Both of them were working hard holding a fifty-gallon drum at an angle to pour the fuel out into the more portable five-gallon drums. The pilots were struggling backwards and forwards between their planes, emptying the fuel into the wing tanks and returning to Stef and Hans to collect another load. They were all soaked in fuel and the air above the central stash of fuel drums danced with gasoline vapours.
It might not even need a bullet, one spark is all it would take . . . and they’re all history.
Koch’s men or even Schröder’s should have been supplied with funnels and pumps; it would have made the task a lot quicker and a lot safer. The sooner they were up and away, the better. Max checked the gauge. It showed just 3050 gallons . . . 550 to go.
Koch entered the hangar and looked around for Schöln. He saw the stocky man on the far side of the hangar overseeing the prisoners now all gathered in there and lying face down on the ground. If it weren’t for the movements amongst them one could be forgiven for thinking that these poor men had all been mercilessly gunned down.
‘Schöln . . . over here!’
He jogged over towards Koch. ‘Yes, sir?’
Koch looked around the hangar; there were six of his men watching over approximately sixty prisoners. Some of these guards could be freed up to help the Luftwaffe pilots with their fuel.
‘Is the door to this hangar the only way in or out?’
Schöln looked around. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, well, pick one of your men to remain with the prisoners and send the others over to help those pilots. The quicker they get under way, the better for everyone.’
Schöln looked back at the prisoners lying face down on the ground, hands behind their heads. One man to guard all of them? Under other circumstances he would have considered that as taking a bit of a chance, but looking at them now, none of them were combat soldiers. He couldn’t foresee any of them attempting an escape. He nodded and turned to carry out Koch’s orders as the first of a series of bursts of small-arms fire could be heard coming from the direction of the guard hut.
Here they come.
Koch headed at the double out of the hangar towards the front entrance. Büller and a dozen of his men were dug in there, the sandbag bunker proving the only sensible place to set up a defensive enclave.
Seconds later he slid to the ground behind the sandbags, and worked his way over to Büller.
‘All right?’
‘Hello, sir. Looks like the jeep had some friends with it,’ he replied, squinting through a gap between the bags. He made way for Koch to peer through.
Fifty yards beyond the flimsy barricade on a dirt track that led from Nantes to this airfield were four trucks and several more jeeps. As he watched, US soldiers spilled out of the backs of the trucks and spread out to use the cover of poplars that lined both sides of the dirt track.
‘I’d say that’s a full company they’ve sent to deal with us,’ said Koch to Büller.
‘There must be a base nearby . . . it’s only been half an hour since we took this strip.’
‘Well, I guess we’ve been a little unlucky. Listen, we’ve only got to hold ’em here for a few minutes, okay? Nobody needs to do anything stupid. Just keep them busy for a while with some covering fire. It’ll probably take them a while to organise something anyway.’
Büller nodded and spread the word amongst the men sheltering behind the sandbags and inside the hut to lay down some suppressing volley fire on the dirt track. The rattle of gunfire increased as the sporadic bursts intensified. Koch watched with satisfaction as the American soldiers, still piling out of the trucks, went to ground. He was right; it was going to be a while before they were fully deployed and ready to retake the airfield.
They won’t realise how time-critical this little skirmish was.
We’ll do this yet.
The soldiers who had taken cover behind the poplars began moving. Koch watched them as they ducked under some hedges that lined the track and jogged across into an open field beyond. They stopped and dropped several times as Büller’s men sprayed a little fire in their direction.
‘They’re trying to flank us,’ he shouted above the clatter of their gunfire. ‘Those Yanks are pretty good, not your average bunch of GIs,’ he said to Büller. Büller nodded; these men were almost as good as the Russian convict brigade they’d faced outside of Murmansk. He’d wager a packet of cigarettes that these soldiers had already seen some action.
We spoke too soon.
‘They’re working their way around to the sides. They’ll get to the planes unchallenged unless we pull back. I want you to direct most of your fire on those men moving across the fields to the left there, and those men moving off the track to the right.’ Koch pointed towards a copse of trees to the right of the track. The copse extended around to the top end of the airstrip, where it grew a little thicker and became a narrow stretch of wood. The planes and the fuel truck parked there at the bottom of the landing strip were only fifty, perhaps sixty, yards away from this treeline.
That wasn’t so good.
‘Slow down those ones heading for the trees on the right. If they get to the trees, then keep them ducking with a few shots into the woods. You’ve got to slow them down.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m going to take some of your men and establish a tighter defensive ring nearer the planes.’ Büller nodded and Koch clapped him on the back. ‘Hold your position as long as possible and then fall back towards me.’
A few dozen yards away from the gathered planes was a stack of supply crates; tinned food, probably destined to be relief for the recently liberated citizens of northern Germany. A typically American gesture, he thought. They bomb the fuck out of us, then shower the poor bastards left alive with food parcels.
The crates were small enough to be manhandled. It would take only a few moments to pull them out across the ground around the planes to create some reasonable defensive positions.
Koch pointed towards the cluster of pla
nes and the fuel truck to one side of the strip.
‘That’s where we’ll hold them back.’
Büller turned to look. ‘That’s open ground -’
‘Don’t worry . . . it won’t be.’
Koch was up and quickly tapped five of Büller’s squad on the shoulder. They followed him as he ran towards the planes, ducking low as they went.
Max checked the gauge again, it showed only 3270 gallons had been pumped so far. The speed at which it was pumping the fuel was slowing down. The pressure had dropped; the fuel truck must be approaching empty.
Shit.
The sound of gunfire had returned a couple of minutes ago, and now seemed to have intensified. ‘What’s going on? Can you see anything?’ he shouted up to Pieter.
Pieter looked towards the entrance, where a thin haze of blue smoke above the sandbags was developing. He spotted half a dozen of their men running towards them. ‘Ah, fuck it, they’re running away already!’
Max stood up straight. Running away? So much for ‘as good as the Fallschirmjäger’.
He walked around the end of the fuel truck to see Koch and some of his men approaching them. They veered to the right and headed towards a tarpaulin-covered stack of crates. As soon as they were there they pulled savagely at the boxes and began dragging them across the grass.
‘Okay,’ said Pieter. ‘Maybe they’re not running away.’
Max watched as Koch slung his MP-40 over one shoulder and struggled with two of the crates, one under each arm, across the ground to a position thirty feet in front of the fuel truck. He threw them unceremoniously to the ground and raced back for some more.
‘They’re setting up some cover, I think,’ he shouted up at Pieter.
He heard the sound of liquid bubbling in the fuel pipe, and then he noticed from the gauge that the pressure from the fuel pump had plummeted. Either the pump was damaged or the fuel pipe had sprung a leak. He worked his way back to the rear of the truck and found a geyser of fuel spraying from a gash in the pipe. Most of the fuel was spurting out of the hole; only a fraction of it was getting to the B-17. Already a large pool of gasoline was spreading across the rain-moistened turf; the thick fumes floating above it dangerously concentrated.
Dammit.
Max shut off the pump and closed the valve. One spark and the fuel truck, still half full, and their plane would be a smouldering tangle of metal. They needed another 250 gallons to fill the wing tanks. He looked towards the large fifty-gallon drums, there were only four, and they’d need five. Even if there were that many, it was too much fuel to pour manually five gallons at a time.
He called up to Pieter. ‘The fuel pipe’s severed.’
Pieter ducked inside the cockpit for a moment and then returned. ‘Our tank is nearly full, more than three-quarters . . . won’t that be enough?’
It could be.
It was a virtually impossible calculation to make. On a full supply of 3900 gallons, they knew the B-17 could achieve a one-way range of about 4500 miles. New York was 4666 miles away. If they flew low, less than say 5000 feet, and at a low cruising speed, maybe 200 miles per hour, they could perhaps squeeze an extra couple of hundred miles out. But if they could just lose some weight . . .
‘Pieter! Go and remove anything you can, we need to lighten the plane,’ Max shouted.
‘Like what?’
‘Throw out one of the waist-guns, the oxygen cylinders, anything we can afford to lose.’
‘We can’t throw out the oxygen.’
‘We’ll do the rest of this journey under 5000 feet. Now do it! Hurry!’
Pieter’s head ducked back inside.
Chapter 44
Mission Time: 6 Hours, 9 Minutes Elapsed
8.14 a.m., an airfield outside Nantes
Büller emptied the clip of his MP-40 and ducked back down just as the sandbag above him shuddered under the impact of half a dozen bullets. ‘Jesus Christ!’ The sand from the shredded bag above him cascaded down onto his head and shoulders. He wiped it irritably from his face and spat out grit from his mouth. ‘Fucking sand.’
‘Büller, we’ve got to pull back now!’
‘Shut up, we’ll run for it when I say so.’
He turned back to see how Koch was doing. They had managed to pull out some of the crates and stack them in twos and threes a few dozen yards in front of the fuel truck, but it was clear they needed some more time to place a few more positions either side in order to build a semi-circle of positions to cover their flanks.
‘Another few minutes, boys,’ he shouted above the din.
The Americans in front had crept forward, moving from tree to tree. They were now only between twenty or thirty yards away. He’d attempted to keep a mental total of the number of casualties they had inflicted on the Americans. So far he’d seen three, possibly four kills, and maybe another six wounded, it was hard to judge. Two of his men were dead, both instant kills, both head shots, another had been hit in the shoulder, and although it didn’t look fatal, the lad could do little more than lie behind the sandbags and hand ammo clips to the other three of his men as they called out for them.
They had done a good enough job slowing them down here at the front, but it was clear the soldiers that had fanned out across the fields either side of the dirt track would soon be emerging from the trees and bushes surrounding the airfield and entering the fray from all angles. The only thing that could sensibly be done in that event would be to pull back and take cover amongst the motley assortment of huts and tents around the canteen. From there they could take pot shots at the Americans as they made their way across the open field towards the planes. If nothing else, that would force them to the ground again. It would slow them down once more.
Büller decided that was the best they could do for now. Their ammo was running low and the increased silences between their volley fire were proving dangerously encouraging to the Americans. They were close enough now to risk a dash across the open ground. Perhaps they’d lose a man in the process, but they’d be able to vault over the sandbags and shoot Büller and his men like dogs in a pit.
He leaned across to the young lad with the shoulder wound. ‘Right, we’re leaving, Erich. You stay put and make sure you keep your hands away from any guns when they get to you, okay?’
The young lad nodded.
Büller tapped the other three men, and pointed towards the canteen. ‘I’ll give you covering fire, head for the canteen, we’ll pick ’em off from there.’ The three men nodded.
‘Right, off you go,’ he said quickly, before lifting his MP-40 up above his head and firing indiscriminately over the sandbags. The three men, keeping their heads low, sprinted away from him, as a fusillade of return fire thudded into the sandbags above Büller. He heard some of the Americans shouting above the noise of their weapons, and, a moment later, just as Büller was preparing to fire another clipful over the top, they directed their fire at the three fleeing men. Büller felt the displaced air as the bullets whistled over him and a dozen divots of wet soil flicked into the air either side of the fleeing men. One of them, Werner, fell forward, punched hard by a hit in the small of his back, he flopped down with a muted grunt, face buried in the mud, and writhed from side to side for a few moments before another bullet thudded into his prone body to settle the matter. The other two men weaved erratically until they reached the loose arrangement of tents, pursued by raking lines of flying soil.
‘Fuck this,’ Büller muttered. He readied himself to fire off the clip in his gun, his last clip. Once he’d emptied it he would run after the other two, and hope that he wasn’t as unlucky as Werner, now lying motionless on the muddy ground amidst a growing pool of blood.
He winked at Erich. ‘Remember, let ’em see your hands clearly. I’ll see you later after we’re done here.’ He propped his gun over the top and emptied the clip before leaping to his feet and running for the canteen as a barrage of bullets peppered the ground behind him.
Schröder was strugg
ling. Like the others, he’d been ferrying five-gallon drums to and from his Me-109 for the last twenty minutes. His spent arms and legs felt like useless lengths of rubber, and his breathing was laboured and ragged from the physical exertion. Gasoline fumes hovered above the small, muddy patch of ground in the midst of the gathered planes, shimmering and undulating like a heat haze. The pilots were all drenched in gasoline, spilled from the drums as they chaotically scrambled to refuel as quickly as possible. The five soldiers who had been drafted in to assist them had no sooner started to help them carry the fuel drums than they were called away by Koch to assist pulling crates out from under a tarpaulin nearby to form a makeshift enclave of cover around the fuel truck and the bomber.
He had no idea how full his tanks were, he’d lost count of the number of five-gallon drums he’d emptied into the wing tanks, and it would take too much valuable time to climb up into the cockpit and take a reading of the fuel gauge. He decided it would be best to just keep filling up until Max and his boys were making ready to go. That thought in his mind, he looked towards the bomber. He could see no sign of Max beside the fuel truck, but then he caught sight of movement beneath the belly of the bomber. Max was underneath the plane working on something.
Fine time to be doing repairs.
‘Max!’ he shouted across to him as he returned to the central stash of fuel with his empty five-gallon drum. Max couldn’t hear him above the increasing din of the skirmish over by the entrance to the airfield.
‘What the hell is Max up to?’ he shouted to the two young men holding the fifty-gallon drum for their fellow fighter pilots. They both turned towards the bomber and spotted him working busily with a wrench on the belly turret.
‘No fucking idea,’ said Hans.
Stef saw one of the waist-guns topple out of the plane and land heavily on the ground below. A box of ammunition followed it out a moment later.