77. Guard Against Garde
Forward Elements, II/3. Leib-Panzerregiment
South of Loxhill, United Kingdom
1800 6 April 1942
"Jesus, what a fucking dog's breakfast," Kleist muttered. "You think they ran some sort of sale before we got here? 'Buy a plough, get a PIAT?'" The anti-tank weapon had proven to be the uncontested king of British weapons, accounting for more German tanks than actual British armor had. They had lost three on the march here, and they had learned the hard way not to stop and try to figure out where the sniper was. It had cost them a half hour and a second tank the first time someone fired on them; after that, they had just ploughed on the second time it happened, using the coaxial guns to spray the hedges. The divisional pioneer battalion had scrambled to keep its mobile bridges in play as the convoy moved through, because it seemed that every drainage ditch, every canal, and every natural water feature had been widened until there was no easy way for a Panzer IV to cross. That it had taken only three hours more than General von Mackensen had estimated was a minor miracle.
The tensest moment had, ironically, had nothing to do with PIATs or bridges, but with the sudden appearance of low-flying twin-engine aircraft. No one in the German army had much faith that Fat Hermann's toys had really swept the skies clean, no matter what General Grauert in Berlin might have claimed, no matter what the morning briefings might say, and when two planes came roaring in low from the north, they had been absolutely certain that what they were facing were a pair of the Mosquitoes they had heard about in the pre-invasion briefs. They had splayed out in a herringbone formation across the road, two files staggered along the verges, and trained the cupola machine guns skyward as best they could, only to see the Balkenkreuz on the tail as the planes roared by, wings waggling at the armored column below them. It had arced to the southeast, probably to land at the field at Dunsfold, leaving behind a column of shaking fists and profanities.
They were near the limits of their mental tethers as the column arrived near Loxhill. Kleist called a halt and lager in a large field just off the intersection of the Godalming and Dunsfold Common roads. He surveyed the hills to their north in quiet unease. "Could be anything hidden up there, Hans," Kleist said, lowering his glasses. Johann Volkmann nodded silently, not bothering to reply, doing a quick calculation to determine distance. "Twelve hundred meters to the peak, you figure?"
Kleist nodded. "If it's a meter. Map shows it at one-fifty, us a little below one hundred in elevation. That hill
is this area. A Pole could see that!" He swished from his canteen, then spat. "I'm not taking tracks up there, trees are too thick. And they've heard us. There's no way on Earth they could not have. The grenadiers still happy?" Johann grunted, knowing what was coming. "They're not going to stay that way," he finally replied. Kleist grinned. "Good man. Oh, and you're my grenadier company commander 'til further notice. I can give you a platoon of 'fours to put some teeth in 'em." Johann blinked, then stared straight at Kleist. "Sir. Are you... you know I'm not a leg."
Kleist looked steadily back at him. "I know that, you know that, but the grenadiers don't know that, and what I've got in mind needs a steady man, Hans. I can't give this job to just anybody. Besides... you think I'm going to be sleeping tonight?"
Kleist's plan was alarmingly simple. The armor would remain with engines running in the field, and would make noise as if camping, complete with fires against the chill. Crews were already dismounting to gather firewood. Exempted were Johann Volkmann and the remnants of III. Abteilung. They rested, sharpened knives, and oiled their MP38s. Every canteen was either full or empty, as was every belly according to taste. They removed or strapped down everything that could chink or jingle, they hastily blackened every exposed piece of metal, and they turned to rub the dark clay soil into their cheeks, already hollow. In the space of three hours they were transformed into ghosts. At 2100, he reported back to Kleist. "Jesus, Hans, I almost didn't see you! You've got a bright career in the minstrel show if this war doesn't work out." He grinned at Johann in appreciation of his own joke. Johann, daredevil though he might be in a tank, merely grinned sickly. The surviving platoon leaders, and the armored platoon he had been given, squatted beside him.
Kleist laid out a map and drew a flashlight - a certain taboo, but part of the ruse. "Here we are, here's Haydon's Ball, over there, and here's your objective, call it Hill 155. From here, I want you to cross the road... that main one, the two-lane over there, then make your way along the fencelines north to the base of the hill. It is
imperative that you not get caught. I know you're grenadiers, but tonight you're Jägers. The map shows a road leading up to a house at the base of the hill... probably some country squire's estate. Take the house - QUIETLY! - and use it as an observation post. See what you can see in the woods on the hill, and then... I leave it to your discretion whether you can force the hill, but if you think there's even a remote chance, take it. Once you're secure, send up a flare and I'm going to race into the valley between Hill 155 and Haydon's Ball. With any luck, we can wrong-foot them and be in Hascombe up here by morning. You're on your own until I see the flare or you report back except for the armored platoon, which I'll release to the intersection, and you crewers, watch the hedges for PIATs. Any questions?"
Johann frowned. "What about the village?" The British had proven remarkably resistant to occupation; it was almost certain some old man with a shotgun was creeping out as they spoke. Kleist considered for a moment, then replied, "It's only four or five houses, I think we can make it through if we don't meet any resistance." He gazed longingly in the direction of Loxhill before adding, "Besides, if it weren't for General von Lettow-Vorbeck, we'd probably be sleeping there tonight. Anything else?"
There were no further questions, and the grenadiers moved out, subdued and apprehensive. They deviated from the original plan, crossing the main road and creeping through the fields to a low rise with a farmhouse on top of it. Their goal was not to be spotted in the attempt, and as far as human occupants went, they were successful. However, there was a deep, hoarse barking as soon as they broke into the thick woodland atop the knoll. They stopped, waiting for some sort of investigation - and the dog kept barking. The farmer did come out eventually, calling out to his watchdog to hush, grumbling about the war. It had no effect on the dog, and eventually Johann waved them forward again. An alarm that constantly went off, after all, was as useless as an alarm that never went off.
The tanks, meanwhile, turned toward Loxhill and crept forward at idle, hoping that their movement would be unobserved in the general noise of the battalion below. In the lead vehicle, a smooth-cheeked twenty-year-old peered in frustration through the seventy-five's sights. "Can't see a damn thing out there." He sipped from his canteen and the tank commander above him grunted. "Can't see anything up top either, Woll. So shut up and listen for that radio. The Biker knows what he's doing."
Usually, he left unsaid.
In the field, the grenadiers crept forward, gray uniforms blending well into the bare field in the moonlight. They stayed low as they moved along the fenceline. The "house" that they had been sent forward to investigate turned out to be nothing more than a game warden's hut, currently unoccupied, incapable of accommodating all of the grenadiers. With two hundred and fifty men under his command, he probably commanded the largest "company" in the Heer, and cramming all of them into the hut would have been sheer folly. Thus, they spread out through the woods opposite the cottage, taking up positions and watching the darkness. Johann took his field glasses out, beside Hauptfeldwebel Eberle - the man who had waded back out to the halftrack - and gazed up at the hill. "Can you see anything up there?" Johann muttered out of the corner of his mouth. "Nothing," Eberle breathed in reply. "Wait - there. About halfway up. There's a shape there, too many straight lines to be natural." He pointed, and Johann followed his finger, frowning.
"Yes. I see it." They scanned along the hill at roughly that level, seeing a handful of these positions sticking out. They were fairly recently constructed, he guessed, and what he saw at one of them made his breath stick. A turret clearly traversed. "Shit."
As if on cue, the sky opened up. A moment after Johann had spoken, a half-dozen mortar rounds exploded in the battalion lager. It was virtually certain that any crews in their tanks were safe. The halftracks, and crews in the open, were not so certain, but there was nothing he could do for them but keep his eyes rigidly fixed on the hill and ignore the explosions drifting across the twelve hundred meters between him and Kleist's position. "We're going in," he announced. Eberle looked at him like he was insane, and he gestured at the hill. "Only way to take pressure off the battalion is to wake them up on the hill there. They won't be expecting it, at least," he added lamely, then turned his attention to the ground. How to approach...?
The hut was at the base of a very broad-throated draw. Because of foliage, and because of the shape of the ground, the draw was almost completely shaded at all times; movement up to the ridgeline was therefore potentially possible without detection. The problem was that this approach led to fortifications on both sides of the broad defile, and if they were spotted, there was no way to avoid a massacre. Johann's jaw set finally and he nodded to himself. If it had to be done... to get the rest of the battalion out from under the mortars, frankly, he would do anything. Where there were mortars, heavier guns would soon follow. "Eberle. Tell the platoon leaders... platoons in wedge, I want your best in the middle. We're going up that defile. We have to clear at least the road side of the ridge, send up our flare, and then hold tight, got it?" Eberle, far more experienced than Volkmann, nodded once, sharply, and slid away to begin briefing the platoon leaders. Any success they had on this assault would be Eberle's, he thought to himself.
The grenadiers began to creep forward, inching slowly across the last meters between the hut and the woodline before beginning the ascent up the hill. They fanned out in a broad arc, covering a hundred and fifty meters of frontage, with the MG40s spaced out among the squads. No tripods had accompanied them; the tripods were simply too cumbersome for an infiltration. Instead, squad gunners would fire either from the march or from the bipod. Save for the gunners, everyone else carried either a G40 or an MP38. Johann had scrounged an MP38 after Romney Marsh, on the off-chance that he might be forced to fight dismounted. He had never really expected to use it, let alone lead men into combat with it.
Moving into the woodline was one of the more difficult maneuvers they could attempt. The trees were bare, the ground covered in leaves, and a number of trees had fallen, either intentionally or naturally, making movement difficult. Johann felt his chest constricting with every step, doing his best to emulate the grenadiers as they covered ground. He knew intellectually that the mortaring and deliberate distraction by the battalion below should cover their approach, but instinctively, he felt he was alone out here, very far from home.
They had advanced only fifty meters when he heard the unmistakable
crack of a boot on a twig. It had not been him, but that was no consolation as he heard the hillside erupt in an alarm, English phrases shouted above him. The Germans threw themselves flat as the British began to sweep the draw with machine guns. A set of parachute flares went up, illuminating everything in stark whites and shadows. Johann looked around, momentarily paralyzed into indecision, trying to spot the British defenses. They did an adequate job of highlighting their own positions with tracer fire, leaving little to the imagination. "EBERLE!" he yelled, waving frantically. "WORK TO THE WEST!" He pointed, and Eberle nodded grimly, low-crawling forward. There was little that Johann could do from his current position, and the company was largely fighting itself - the machine-guns had gone into action against the British positions, the grenadiers were crawling forward or hunkering down, depending on when and where.
Down at the crossroads, the five tanks saw the parachute flares go up and the tracers light off. "That's our cue," Feldwebel Dreier grunted, cuffing Woll's shoulder. "High explosive. Fire as they bear," he ordered idly, field glasses up. "Bunker. About halfway up the hill, bearing about three-twenty, range about eleven hundred." Woll seemed to vanish into his own world, dreamily murmuring, "I see it." He pulled the trigger, and the entire turret jumped backward slightly with the recoil. On the ridge, there was an explosion, and a number of trees fell, but in the tank, the breechblock came back, the spent casing flew out, and the loader heaved another round into place, slamming the block shut and dogging it down. "Ready!" The entire operation had taken five seconds, and already Woll was re-sighting, trying to reacquire the bunker.
On the ridge, Johann scrabbled forward under the hail of wood chips. The tankers down there were good. He had left them no orders, and they had engaged with surprising discrimination. The octagonal pillbox on the hillside fell silent momentarily, and Eberle used that pause to close in a series of mad rushes, men following him as if clinging to dear life. He visibly hesitated, then chose the side approach, less exposed to the tankers below as they released another round, shaking the ground and blowing a chunk out of the concrete emplacement. When men began to spill from the bunker, Eberle was there to greet them, MP38 firing from the shoulder. The first stage of clearing the hill was complete. Johann feared the cost given how long they were trapped under British fire.
As the parachute flares settled, a growling movement on his right drew his attention. "Shift left! Shift left!" he shrieked, knowing what it had to be. Men scrambled to follow his orders, moving onto the parts of the hill that they already controlled and flowing upwards. He himself crawled upward, sheltering in a fall of logs. A sharp
boom followed; he had been on the outside enough times to know what a seventy-five sounded like. He had just never been on the receiving end. He clung to the ground, fingers digging in and heart pounding against the cold, gravelly soil. His eyes were corkscrewed tightly shut, and he realized that he was whimpering. This was not how a Lichterfelde man and a General Staffer behaved.
With a deliberate effort of will, he forced himself up from the ground, looking around. He did not
feel anything... something to marvel at later, he supposed. Above him on the hill, he saw four boxy, ungainly tanks moving - like a Panzer III's idiot manchild son, he thought despite himself, large, square, and bulky, with obvious lines of rivets or perhaps bolts. His time at Meppen had taught him that was a mistake on the part of the British, but this momentary analysis got him nowhere. He looked around for the radioman, and discovered that the man would be of no use whatsoever: a neat hole in his chest blossomed into an exit wound out the back of the transmitter. He had been shot from very close, and probably never even knew he had been wounded. There was no way to tell the tankers down below.
There was also no need: They had been watching the ridgeline, and Dreier tapped Woll's shoulder again. "Ridgeline. Looks like armor. Armor-piercing, three-twenty-five, range thirteen hundred." A grunt was the only response, then a moment later, the gun roared again. Dreier marveled at the shot: thirteen hundred meters in the dark against a moving target, and the British tank
still stopped moving and spilled out smoke. Woll just
didn't miss. "Total kill, Bobby," he called out, clapping the gunner on the shoulder. Woll grunted again, a man in tune with his machine to the exclusion of all else. The next round slotted home and the gun muzzle quivered, seeking a new target. Among the platoon of armor, Woll's was the only first-round hit on the armor on the hill. The British pulled back off the exposed ridgeline as they watched, incapable of finding a shot that Woll felt comfortable with.
On the hill, the Germans crawled upward into the fire. The British armor had pulled back past the crest, and therefore could not depress to bear on them, but Volkmann knew they were there. His men slipped onto the heavily defended western approach and began the work of clearing the British back yard-by-yard, pillbox by pillbox. At five in the morning, they gazed down into the valley, and Johann, exhausted, pulled out the parachute flare. The sun had not yet risen, but he knew it could not be far off. He scrambled back out into the draw, where desultory fire from the other end of the hill told him the British were not completely beaten, to the hull of the wrecked tank. He knew the hull was exposed, but it was also the best position with the clearest view of the sky, the only suitable place for sending a flare up. On its side, he saw a badge, the star of the Order of the Garter. He filed it away for intelligence purposes, and raised his arm high to fire off the flare.
The flare shot upwards, and a rifle cracked in the night. Johann Volkmann slumped back against the wrecked Churchill, gazing down at his chest in shock. A red stain was spreading across his blouse, near the bottom of his ribcage. A yell reached him from the German side of the ridge -
"SANI! THE BIKER'S HIT!" He sat up, breath coming quick and shallow, anything more too painful, and fought down the urge to cough. Each breath produced bubbles in the blood around the wound. So - lung puncture. Probably went out the other side. How very interesting. When the medic reached him, he could see by the man's face that it was bad. He looked up at him, gasping, whispering out, "Tell Kleist. Coldstreamers." The medic silenced him, quickly working to put a sealant layer against both wounds and bind dressings over them. Johann watched in detachment until he finally slumped back, exhausted. The medic, alarmed, quickly checked his pulse - thready, but still alive.
In the valley below, Kleist's battalion roared out of lager, pounding between Hill 155 and the Ball, a classic cavalry ride. The grenadiers held their position on the hill, waiting for Volkmann's orders in the dawn. With the dawn came the word: He was hit, and in no condition to lead them. The division's medical staff was at the airfield at Dunshold, and so it was there that they rushed him, along with a handful of the most severely wounded. By noon on the seventh, it was obvious that the dressings would do whatever could be done, and he was on an Annie bound for France.
Behind him, Kleist's battalion secured the division's first path through the ridgeline that formed the southern natural obstacle of the GHQ Line. The Germans ran headlong into a defensive line at Hascombe, finding the Guards Armored Division dug in, and the Guards fought their way backwards across the Wey. The German losses were slight, but the loss of time was significant. Leese had made a cold calculation, driving every farmer, herdsman, and cottager back to the north to allow a battlefield clear of all civilian combatants. It was in contradiction to standing orders to keep the roads clear of refugees, but it was also the only way to spare them the bloodletting that was coming.
Mackensen and Leese clashed at Farncombe, on the Wey. Leese was behind a seventeen-meter flooded trench, fighting with Britain's newest and best tanks, the Churchill and the Leyland-built Cromwell I, sometimes ironically called the Cavalier. Neither was as mobile as the Panzer IV, but behind the canal, in defilade, and dug-in, they did not need it. Leese blew all of the bridges on the Wey, and deliberately destroyed the locks at each passage, leaving the Germans no convenient way to cross, and Mackensen's division, already exhausted by the landing and fighting in Kent, found itself stymied for the first time in its long history. To Eberhard von Mackensen and the younger Ewald von Kleist, this was unacceptable. They had fought across the heavily wooded hills of Hampshire, and to be stopped by a simple canal and a handful of tanks was unacceptable.
Kleist, who had rapidly developed a reputation for being a spearhead battalion leader, found the solution. The Germans simply pushed rubble into the river at Milford until it was shallow enough for their armor to ford. In the face of determined opposition, the divisional pioneers took heartbreaking casualties doing so - Mackensen is said to have remarked that another 'victory' like this would get him cashiered - but they managed. Once they were across the river, and on Leese's western flank, there was no easy stopping them. The Guards Armored Division bounded backward in good order toward Bristol, with the hope of making an oblique march into London. By then, though, the Garde du Corps was in Newbury and Bock was in Milton Keynes.
London was alone.
The last one was one of the best updates I've read whole year, congratulations! Now, lets just hope the Brits, Canucks, French and Poles on that island pull their shit together, so that desperate struggle of this sort continues as long as possible!
