Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces Page 7

  Meanwhile, seven of Antoine’s FTP companies, together with two of Hubert’s AS companies, were laying siege to what was to prove the hardest nut to crack, the garrison at Egletons.

  Unhappily, this “joint” arrangement was working no better than previous FTP-AS acts of “cooperation.” As ever, the Communists intended to go their own independent way.

  This situation grew more complicated a day or so later, when Patrick’s regional intelligence officer, who called himself Coriolan, passed on disturbing news: Informants within Antoine’s FTP units had warned Coriolan that on the previous night Antoine had pressed the attack against Egletons, and had done it without informing Hubert of this operation, or bothering to coordinate his attack with the AS companies taking part in the encirclement.

  Worse, the poorly trained FTP troops screwed it up. Instead of catching the Germans off guard, their attack was so inept that the Germans had managed to retreat in good order back into a fortified and practically impregnable refuge in the École Professionelle, a three-story stone-and-concrete complex on a ridge at the edge of town. Because they were in radio contact with their regional headquarters and defended by heavy machine guns and a 37mm antitank gun, they were as comfy as rats in a sewer. Before long, an armored column would come to relieve them. And air support wasn’t far away.

  The choice was clear. The Jedburghs had to go to Egletons (where they would join Hubert, who was already there), do what they could to salvage the situation, and prepare to ambush the German relief column. Since collaborators and spies were everywhere, the three of them (and a ten-man AS escort) had to hike over backcountry Maquis trails—maybe twenty-five kilometers point to point, but closer to fifty on the ground. It took them a day.

  That evening they linked up with Hubert, who had set up his PC on the ground floor of a stonc house with a walled garden, perhaps 500 meters from the northwest corner of the École Professionelle. His two companies had taken positions in neighboring houses and along a sunken road, while the FTP troops were in pockets ringed around the other three corners of the school compound.

  After Hubert’s briefing and a quick look around, Dominique and Singlaub tried to link up with the FTP and conduct the kind of reconnaissance needed for a realistic attack plan, but quickly decided to put that off until daylight after they were warned off by FTP sentries, whose hostility was palpable.

  The next morning, the Communists’ suspicion and hostility was little diminished, but nevertheless, the two Jedburgh officers managed to talk their way into the FTP area.

  Once again Singlaub was struck by the indiscipline of the FTP troops, who were firing Bren guns sporadically at the stone facade of the school, to no real effect except to send stone chips flying. Uncoordinated fire is like an unfocused lens—a waste.

  When Dominique and Singlaub asked for directions to the FTP commander, sullen Communists pointed out a bullet-pocked house near the school. the way there was dicey, since much of the street was in view of the school, and there was so much glass and rubble underfoot it was impossible for the two Jedburghs not to make noise and call attention to themselves. This was made worse by the FTP soldiers they passed en route, all of whom seemed bent to point them out and challenge their presence.

  Bent low, they raced down the street, then passed through a garden and burst through the back door of the house closest to the school. While Dominique stayed behind to guard his rear, Singlaub climbed up to the slate-roofed attic to see what he could learn. A small, square window opened onto the school, two hundred meters away. He opened it and stealthily raised his face to look outside.

  Some of his OSS training in England came in handy just then—how to make quick, accurate recons. It was like a meditation technique: The idea was to clear your mind of conscious thought, focus your gaze like a camera, and let what passed before you register as though your mind were photographic film. Singlaub panned his eyes across the school courtyard across the road and the school walls and windows, noting the timber barricades, overturned concrete slabs, and heavy furniture blocking the windows. Shadowy figures moving in the shrubbery probably indicated a machine-gun crew.

  At that moment, angry shouts came from below. And he could hear Dominique cursing. Meanwhile, off to the side he could see FTP soldiers down in the street stupidly pointing fingers in the direction of his own attic window, effectively spotting him for the German gunners. In OSS school, they’d had to go through what were called “bungler exercises,” in which the trainees would be subjected to unexpected, frustrating, and often stupid annoyances to see how they would react. This was different. It was the real thing. The German gunners quickly got the point and started spraying the window from at least two machine guns, but not before Singlaub had scrambled down the stairs and out the back door. By then, the machine guns had opened up on the front windows. Dominique was waiting for him, his face white with fury—not so much at the Germans as at their own supposed friends.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Singlaub said to him, “in case the Krauts have got a mortar over there.”

  There came then a loud crack and a deep-throated metallic clang, as the 37mm antitank gun blew a hole through the slate roof under which Singlaub had just been hiding. Slate fragments showered down as he and Dominique scuttled away.

  A little later that morning, they were set to meet Antoine (they had so far never set eyes on him), for a tactical conference in a stone barn on the other side of the sunken road. But the Communist leader was proving to be elusive (“He’s been called away on urgent operational matters,” it was explained), and his chief of staff showed up in his stead.

  By then it was clear to the Jeds that taking the school with the weapons they had—Bren guns, Sten guns, rifles, pistols, and hand grenades—was not going to happen. Their alternatives: a long siege (a bad idea, in view of the Germans’ ability to send help to their Egletons garrison from their headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand), or a quick, perfectly coordinated attack, supported by mortars and bazookas.

  Antoine’s intention, relayed by his chief of staff, was to continue the siege indefinitely. “There are SS inside! We will pin them down.” In other words, Antoine was happy to engage in a silly operation in order to reap the political benefit derived from making a few of the hated SS troops moderately miserable.

  And so Antoine ordered the siege to continue.

  Meanwhile, word had come that Captain Wauthier had received an airdrop the night before. Now the strength of his SAS unit had grown to thirty men, and he had mortars and British Piats (which were like bazookas). With this added firepower, Dominique and Singlaub reasoned that it ought to be possible to break the siege at Egletons in a few hours ... and rake in the Germans heavy machine guns and antitank guns, which were badly needed.

  A runner was dispatched to Wauthier with the request.

  And then, at 0900, the Nazis in the Egletons garrison got their help, in the form of three Luftwaffe Heinkel-111 medium bombers. The Heinhels swooped down low for bomb runs, one after the other, while Hubert’s Maquis and the Jeds dived for cover.

  The first plane dropped a stick of 100-kilo bombs that blasted the row of houses facing the school. The concussion shook everything nearby, and the red-flickering tailgun swept up afterward.

  When the second I Ieinkel lined up on FTP positions, several brave—or recklessly foolish—Communists raced into the center of the road and fired rifles and Sten guns at the plane, braving machine-gun fire from both the school and the Heinkel’s nose gunner. Two bombs dropped out of the plane into somebody’s garden. They exploded moments later.

  A time delay! Singlaub realized. So the low-flying bombers could escape the blast. If properly coordinated, he quickly reasoned, Bren guns, which fired the same .303 round as a Spitfire fighter, might throw off the bombardicrs’ aim and take the pressure off the Maquis front-line positions.

  Dominique grabbed four Bren gunners from the FTP units, while Singlaub rounded up four from Hubert and set them up in the sunken road. Singla
ub gave instructions and Dominique translated. The Heinkels were now making single bomb passes that took them directly overhead. As a bomber approached, he and Dominique would estimate its speed and altitude and hold up fingers to indicate how many plane-length leads the gunners should allow when they fired—one finger equaled one lead, two fingers equaled two, and so on. A clenched fist meant no lead.

  A Heinkel was now coming in below 200 feet, lined up directly above the sunken road. The Bren gunners crouched at the ready. Singlaub could clearly see the pilots in their leather helmets. He took a breath and stepped out, with one finger raised. “Fire!”

  But then the pilot saw them, and at the last minute banked right. So the rounds that hit only raked his left wingtip.

  Better luck next time, Singlaub hoped.

  The next Heinkel drove in from Dominique’s direction, and Dominique was standing there, clearly visible, his fist beating against the sky. “No lead!” Singlaub yelled. The Brens coughed and rattled as one, with accurate, coordinated fire, hosing the green-painted bomber with a Spitfire’s firepower at point-blank range. Shards of glass scattered from the nose, holes appeared in the belly and right engine nacelle, and you could see oil streaming along the base of the wing.

  The pilot banked hard left, aborting the bomb run, and limped away on one engine. His right engine was out and throwing clouds of smoke. He slowly lost altitude as he staggered north over the Correze valley. Singlaub later learned that the Heinkel had crashed and burned a few kilometers away.

  The Maquis screamed and howled, wild with the ecstasy of the kill. And Singlaub was no less thrilled. “My heart thudded in my throat and temples,” he recalled later. “My breath was ragged. I was caught up in the rage of battle.”

  At 1300 Captain Wauthier and his SAS platoon sprinted into town under a rain of bullets. The Heinkels had been replaced by three Focke-Wulf 190 fighter-bombers, which were strafing anything that moved, and punctuating that with fragmentation bombs. The superbly trained SAS troops seemed indifferent to all this, and looked very glamorous in their red berets.

  Soon SAS NCOs had taken charge and were preparing mortar positions. The plan was to lay down a mortar barrage on the school courtyard. It was hoped this would drive the German troops indoors and allow the Maquis to push their Bren gun positions forward and dig them in. Singlaub decided to act as forward observer and direct the mortar fire.

  In the meantime, Dominique would try to track down the elusive Antoine and do what he could to convince him to allow his forces to join the attack, or at least to lend troops for ambushes north of town.

  Singlaub returned to his early-morning observation position in the attic of the house near the school. This time, FTP troops he passed on the way included Bren gunners who’d fought the Heinkels with him that morning; they greeted him with welcoming smiles. He was no longer persona non grata among the Communists.

  He made his way carefully up the stairs of the now-much-damaged house. The roughly planked attic floor was littered with slate fragments and splintered wood from the 37mm shell. Entrance and exit holes in the steeply raked roof indicated the shell’s path. He crouched low, slithered across the floor, and took up a position he hoped would be invisible.

  Moments later, the first SAS mortar round arced into the courtyard, driving German soldiers out of shallow foxholes in a hedgerow into the cover of the school. Singlaub shouted down to a young FTP sergeant, who was acting as his relay, “Correct fire twenty meters right, and then forward.” The next round dropped on a timber barricade near the school’s administration wing. Another covey of enemy troops raced into the school. Singlaub was beginning to feel good. Now they were getting even for the heavy air attacks they’d faced that morning. A few rounds later, the mortar rounds had nicely bracketed all of the German outside positions, and it was time to drop a few rounds onto the school itself. Since several machine gunners had set up positions in the school attic, Singlaub directed fire onto the roof (like the local houses, slate-and-timber), with the aim of driving the Germans down to lower floors. For this job, Wauthier added phosphorus to the high-explosive rounds. Soon, fires were burning merrily in the attic.

  Things were going so well that Singlaub forgot where he was—and that the Germans would be looking hard for the forward observer—or that he was silhouetted against the 37mm exit hole as he crouched beside the circular entrance hole. His carelessness did not go unnoticed. In a flash, steel-jacketed machine gun rounds were clattering against the slate, spraying the entrance hole, and madly ricocheting about the attic.

  He was hit.

  The next thing he knew, he was sprawled on his back. “My skull [was] ringing like a gong,” he said. “It was as if someone had thrown a bucketful of rocks in my face. I felt the blood, warm and salty, on my right check, then saw thick, dark drops raining on the floor. My hand went to my ear and came away sticky red. There was blood all over my para-smock now. The pain began after the initial shock, hot and persistent. 1 got control of my breathing and took stock. My head moved all right on my neck, and there was no spurting arterial blood. So I must have been superficially gouged by slate and bullet fragments.”

  The side of his face wasn’t pretty, but he was not seriously hurt. What came upon him then was a tightly focused rage.

  When the machine gun turned its attention to the house’s lower floors, Singlaub took one last glance at the school, and there he noticed for the first time the barrel of the 37mm gun swiveling beneath camouflage netting in the hedgerow seventy meters away. The crew was wearing camouflage gear and had leaves threaded onto their helmets, but from his angle, they were clearly exposed.

  This was too good a chance to pass up.

  Almost without thinking, he dashed down the stairs and out into the back garden. When they saw the bloodied side of his head, the FTP soldiers rushed forward to give Singlaub aid, but in fact the injury looked far worse than it was. And besides, at that moment he was practically unstoppable. Without offering more than a mumbled explanation in his uncertain French, he grabbed their Bren gun and a spare thirty-round magazine, and without looking back, made his way to the edge of the garden, then raced thirty meters down the street to the cover of a bomb-blasted plane tree, which, at sixty meters from the hedgerow, was in easy range of the gun’s position.

  By the time he reached the tree, most of the bleeding had stopped—not that that mattered much in his current frame of mind. He worked his way quickly around the trunk, leveled the Bren, and sighted on the hedgerow and the Germans. Four long bursts, and the magazine was empty. In went the fresh one. The soldiers around the gun jerked into activity, intending to turn the gun toward this mad attacker, but they were toppling over satisfyingly before they could reach it. A German soldier trained his rifle toward the plane tree but then was flung backward, his arms flying.

  The second magazine exhausted, Singlaub raced back to the shelter of the garden. As he ran, he was aware of someone shooting at him, but he wasn’t hit.

  Back in the garden, he gave up his Bren gun to the awed, wide-eyed FTP troops. He’d been possessed by a god; they weren’t used to that. One of them took a cloth, dipped it in a bucket, and reverently washed his wound. Then the young American lieutenant sat down with his back against the fieldstone wall, lifted his face to the sun and billowing afternoon clouds, and let his pounding heart grow quiet.

  The attack was going well: Most of the Germans in the courtyard had been driven back into the school buildings. Wauthier’s SAS Bren teams had moved forward along the school’s left flanks to a commanding position over the courtyard, and though Dominique had had no success locating Antoine, his company commanders had agreed to work under Wauthier. That night, Wauthier radioed a request to London for an air strike the next afternoon. The plan was to again pin down any Germans in foxholes with mortars and Piats, or better, to drive them again back into the school. Then, just before the air strike was scheduled, the French would pull back a couple of streets, and British Mosquito bombers would dive
-bomb the school.

  The catch: Maquis operations were not exactly top Allied priority just then. Hubert had yet to receive his promised arms drop, for instance. And besides, there were more pressing preoccupations, such as the invasion of southern France earlier that morning by Allied armies under General Alexander Patch. All the Maquis units in south and central France were expected to support the invasion, which meant all of them were requesting more of everything.

  During the night, the Germans in the school tried to push back into positions in the courtyard. And by morning the Focke-Wulfs came back, with a full array of strafing, fragmentation bombs, incendiaries, and high-explosives.

  That afternoon, the time approached for the planned Mosquito attack. Mortar shells again ripped into the courtyard. SAS troops moved close in and fired their Piats. It all went swimmingly. The Germans pulled back into the school. But no Mosquitoes. The only planes in the air were Focke-Wulfs and Heinkels. There was nothing to do but keep down and wait.

  DURING the night, Coriolan brought heartening news: First, the Maquis had breached the defenses of the German garrison in Ussel, and the garrison had then surrendered. Second, the more powerful garrisons at Tulle and Brive, besieged by Patrick’s forces and Hubert’s remaining companies, had agreed to surrender—but with a condition. They’d been promised that an American officer would accept their surrender.

  That meant Singlaub, who set out in a gazogene farm truck to take care of that chore. At Tulle and Brive, Singlaub produced an ornate document, which he had signed, promising the German commanders full protection of Supreme Allied Headquarters, and the German companies laid down their arms. It was a good haul—rifles, machine guns, cases of grenades, and a 75mm field gun. The weapons from Tulle went directly to Hubert’s men, and were most welcome.