Chapter 256
“Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them, Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell, Rode the six hundred.”
-Charge of the Light Brigade
The German Light Flak battery consisted of four Quad 2cm Flak 38 situated on both ends of a bridge over a narrow but deep valley near the southern edge of the Austrian Alps, itself defended by two Squads of German Infantry that were commanded by a freshly promoted and very edgy Oberleutnant of the Heer who was already known throughout the battery for never being seen without a cigarette between his lips except when the Captain arrived to inspect everything. The Bridge was only 50 metres long, so one could easily shout to the other end and be heard perfectly fine, but even so the Lieutenant had insisted on a Field Telephone line being laid the first thing after they had arrived. Some of the mostly Bavarian Luftwaffe Flak troopers grumbled that they were under the command of a young Wipper-snapper Heer Officer from Hamburg, but that had settled down when their daily routine, consisting of scanning the sky for enemy low-flying
Jabos in the day and having two poor souls patrol back and forth on the bridge at night. All the men, their commander included had served in France and Italy before and were more than happy to know that their duty station was within the Reich and thus didn't have to deal with the constant threat of Partisan attack.
The Lieutenant was on the field Telephone with the Company when the connection suddenly died. That was nothing special in warzone, from less than reliable telephones to drunken Russian lorry drivers everything severed the connections all the time. Still, the Lieutenant was annoyed, but most likely that was because he was down to his last packet of cigarettes.
“Lieutenant, Aircraft engines coming in from the west, and a lot of them!” yelled one of the troopers as he stuck his head through the door of the small hut that was the Lieutenants Quarters. He grabbed his helmet from the back of the chair where it had been hanging and a G-41[1] from the weapons rack. He checked the magazine and then ran outside, putting his helmet on as he went. Much to his satisfaction his men at both ends of the Bridge were already at the guns and had their quad barrels trained skywards. By now the sound of aircraft engines was overwhelming, but the Lieutenant could already hear more than see that they were far too high to be anything but Strategic Bombers, 'viermots' in fact. Usually the sound stopped after a while, but this time it remained and only got louder and louder. The Lieutenant was already going back towards the hut to report this in when he saw a a dark shape descending on the flat area near the west side of the bridge. At first he thought it was a damaged plane simply crashing, but them, just as Artillery fire was beginning to sound in the west he knew what it was and even while he tried to regain control of his wits the first came in for landing and several more appeared.
“GLIDERS!” he yelled, but the nearest gun was already coming around and just as the first glider touched down, a torrent of high-explosive rounds laced with tracer smashed into the glider and tore it to shreds.
The next two gliders landed farther away and just out of range and while the Lieutenant scrambled back towards the trench near the closest gun position he could see dark figures emerging in the light of the fire of the first glider that had erupted from the tracer rounds. He raised his rifle but realized that shooting now would be a waste of ammunition as by now the gun that had downed the first glider was covering the..It had to be the British..the British Paratroopers even though it was still too dark to see what they were doing with any sort of detail. Around him his men prepared for the attack and had also set up one of the Machine Guns, so he left them to it safe in the knowledge that the Sergeant was competent. He zig-zagged back to his hut and only then remembered that the Telephone wasn't working which was probably no coincidence after all. He tried again in vain but then heard gunfire and explosions breaking out outside so he slammed the phone down, cursed loudly and took a handful of the loading strips from the box under the weapons rack.
Outside he could see that his men had beaten off a British attack but at a great cost to both of them. The gun that had killed the first glider had been partially knocked off it's mounting and the gunshield had been penetrated by a PIAT, the crew lying around it in a bad state of mutilation. Of the men in the trench at least two were dead, leaving him with twelve counting the three walking wounded that he could see and not counthing the eight men of the guncrews and sentries on the other side of the bridge that guarded the detonator for the explosives. He leapt into the nearest trench and looked over towards the British. By now it was almost totally light and what he could see through his binoculars 200 yards away didn't improve his mood. Beyond the two Light Machine Guns that he could see were two mortars, one already set up to fire. A bit more forward, near where the Infantry had taken cover he could see the British Para helmets and red berets sticking up from behind the cover that the men had made for themselves. Great. Paras. If the British Paras were anything like their German counterparts, and by reputation they were, then they would be Light Infantry, but Light Infantry that would fight like demons to achieve the objective. With that he thought of the explosives and the bridge for the first time and wondered if it might be prudent to abandon the single operational gun on this side, retreat to the other and simply blow the bridge behind them. He was interrupted in his musings when the firing picked up again. He raised his rifle, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. He never knew if he had hit anything with that first wild round, but he kept shooting at the British that tried to rush his position three times over the next ten minutes, failing each time. Again the cost was high, at least six more dead Paras lay in the field and two more of his own men were dead. Way back in the field inbetween the gliders he could see what had to be an Officer rallying his men, and unlike the Germans most of the British were unwounded.
“Time for a tactical retreat.” he muttered and then yelled to be heard over the racket: “Sergeant Hausser!” “He's dead, Sir!” came a voice back. “Well, whoever is the still around,” the Lieutenant adapted, “we will fall back to the other side now.”
The Lieutenant was the last across, and luckily for him the British let them go except for a few stray rounds and some mortar shells that destroyed the Lieutenant's hut.
Six miles away Colonel Anthony C. 'Nuts' McAuliffe was feeling tempted to curse the gods of war, but then again he had councelled against a glider assault on the Bridge. Lieutenant Winters[2] had just reported that it had been blown up after the Germans had offered unexpectedly fierce resistance, not to mention that E-Company had lost several gliders to light ackack that had somehow been missed on the photographs and the surprisingly eager defenders and of course the loss of ten percent of his men and all but one of his PIATs. Whichever idiot had decided that putting most of them into the first glider would most certainly have a meeting with the Colonel very soon. Overall the picture was very very mixed. The 101st Parachute Regiment had achieved it's objectives, but at a cost that ran far higher than expected and overall the drop and airlanding of the two Regiments into the Gailtal and to various bridges and had gone well and now the two Regiments were dug in very, very deep around a small hamlet and the main objective, two steel bridges, brand new and supporting the great Highway system the Germans had been building, and in a case of the Germans learning from the Soviets it had been decided to build a Munich-to-Rome road over the Mountain passes, with the road on both sides thus far reaching towards the edges of the Austrian Alps, and which wouldn't be finished until several years after the war. For the moment the daring Allied assault had netted them a crossing over the river that could take Tanks and the only non-natural chokepoint on the road towards the cities of Finkenstein and Klagenfurt. All the Paras had to do now was keeping the landing zone for supplies and reinforcements open for the next several days until the Army crossed the border less than ten miles away south of Arnoldstein and linked up with them. McAuliffe didn't know, but it was expected that the 1st Irish Infantry Division would most likely be the one to make the link and also that General Browning and Major General Gale had protested very loudly with Euro-HQ in Rome that the plan depended on the Irish making good progress through rough terrain against an enemy who was battlehardened.
What the Colonel did know was that two Hamilcar Gliders on each side of the river had delivered a mountain Gun apiece and that these guns had done a lot beating back the two half-hearted German counter-attacks. The units that had attacked them from the north , south and east had come from any number of units of the
756. Infanterie-Division, so it was a good bet to think that the scratch 'Able Force' had landed somewhere between the main line of resistance and the forward supply units, which would make the job of the 1st Irish easier, and if he was not mistaken McAuliffe could already hear Irish Artillery in the distance. His headquarters was nothing more than a dugout with some camouflage netting draped overhead with nothing more than a singular 40mm Bofors as a direct defence, so he hoped that Major General O'Doherty and his men were at least somewhat on time.
Private Francois Lahey, 1st County Tipperary Infantry Regiment, 1st Irish Infantry Brigade, 1st 'Thunderbolt' Division guarding the crossing into Germany
The Irish troops crossed the border into Germany right on the dot at 5:11 AM on 5th August and proceeded along the Raccolana valley and the route of the modern Italian A24 Motorway while down south the rest of the Allied Army made their own crossings. This time tactical and Strategic surprise had not been achieved, but this didn't damp the confidence of the Allied Generals. The Irish crossing profited from the confusion created by the parachute drops, but their lack of experience still told as they struggled to come to grips with the veteran German troops that had been fighting the Allies almost without pause since 1939.
The Germans on the other hand were still recovering from the chaos that the Paras had sown but even so they put up a stiff resistance against the Irish advance, in fact the 1st CTIR was stopped cold by a company-sized German holding attack and this created a massive traffic jam, but after two hours and lot's of cursing Major General O'Doherty sorted out his units, pulverized the Germans with Artillery and then resumed the advance if somewhat slower and with less confidence than before.
Later that day Private Lahey was staring down the Ironsights of his rifle and the road towards where the Germans had created a barricade out of some rocks and wood. He saw a helmet, took aim for a second, held his breath and pulled the trigger. Without bothering to check if he had hit he dropped down behind the cover of the ditch and worked the action. Beside him the section Bren Gunner opened up more to keep the enemy's head down. Lahey knew that they would advance again very soon, since the Brits had somehow thought that shoving men out of perfectly good airplanes was a good idea and now needed the Irish Army to rescue them.
The road they were advancing along was littered with the dead and the remnants of at least a dozen other barricades like this one and he had been relieved of a lot of the .303 ammunition he carried with him and two of the rifle grenades strapped to his belt. He and the rest of the Division still feared that at any moment the Germans or the Soviets would unmask the mountain guns on the peaks alongside the road and begin a merciless shelling of the one road the Irish advanced along. That hadn't happened yet and so they continued to battle their way through the German defences where the enemy had the edge. They had inner lines and three men and a machine gun could potentially hold up the advance for hours. As he thought of this Lahey heard a growl and the clinking of metal tracks behind them, and as he turned around a Comet camouflaged with branches but with the blue stallion emblem of the 1st Battalion, The Blue Hussars visible came up with them, the massive 17 pounder gun already pointed down the road. Lahey and the others barely had time to turn away and cover their heads before a massive flame erupted from the muzzle, the gun boomed and a fraction of a second late a high explosive round exploded against the front of the German barricade, sending splinters in every direction and pulverizing the German light Machine gun.
His ears ringing Lahey rose to his feet and looked over to the smoking ruins of the German position.
“Goddamn bloody Donkey Wallopers!” he yelled to hear himself over the ringing. A head appeared in the driver's hatch with a sorry look on his face turned up and someone with a Dublin accent asked: “Can I give you lads a ride?” which was met with acceptance. Even though for them the road only lead downwards for now and they could see that at least right now no more blockades existed, it was still some distance to the bridge, and after almost deafening him, this was the last thing they could do. Blue Hussars... just because they escorted the President of the Republic they got all pretentious.
Half an our later the Comet came to a stuttering halt when five figures with the maroon beret and Para helmets came out of the undergrowth. The man obviously in charge wore the shoulder tabs of a Lieutenant on his Denison smock.
“Winters, 101st” was said in the way of an introduction. “Laheya, 1st County Tipperary Infantry.”
[Notes: And thus we jump into the abyss...]
[1] Basically the OTL G-43. The Germans got a few examples of the SVT Series and someone decided to fix the first G-41 Prototypes before they went into production.
[2] The very same. A nod and salute to the man himself and the men he commanded.