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Challenge: Stronger Soviet Union at the End of World War II

There Will Always Be An England (part 5)

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Excerpt from a Work In Process novel involving World War II and sending Great Britain to the Stone Age.

Chapter Five (continued)

 

The bombed out Quonset huts got repaired later that day. A dozen more P40s flew in a few hours later.

 Billy noticed that the artillery rumble did seem to be getting louder. The planes flew out about an hour after they landed, loaded with bombs and rockets.

A B24 landed and was immediately surrounded by military police.  Billy thought he recognized one of the men who got out, but the MPs hustled them away before he could be sure.  Lloyd Corrigan?  The B24 fit, but why would Lloyd get taken away by MPs?

 Sergeant Grimm rushed by him, swung to a stop and whispered, "Heads up. The panzers broke through. We'll be moving out as soon as the brass figure out how to tell us without starting a panic." He moved on before Billy could react.  Billy pushed the mystery of the B24 and the MPs to the back of his mind and watched the pattern of the camp.  There was definitely something going on, and the artillery barrages did seem to be getting closer.

 The major in charge of the camp called a meeting about five minutes later. He said that they would be moving back a few miles to avoid artillery fire. He didn't say anything about panzers.

 Trucks roared up to the airbase and the soldiers hastily loaded supplies from the warehouse. Lloyd couldn't see any pattern to what they loaded, and he shook his head at the thought of trying to straighten out the inventory once they got to a more permanent base.

 I'm thinking like a file clerk.

 A couple dozen German planes made a pass at the camp, dumping hasty bomb loads on nearby French farms before being chased off by US fighters.

 The evacuation process went on, with more and more trucks getting loaded up. Jeep loads of pilots and maintenance personnel roared away from the compound, as did trucks full of supplies.

The work crews gradually dwindled, but the warehouse was still piled with far too much food and ammunition, so Lloyd and a dwindling number of others kept working at filling trucks.

 More trucks rumbled in to replace the full ones. By now the rumble of artillery was definitely getting closer. The P40s landed again and Billy helped attach another load of air-to-ground rockets to them. Men were working frantically around the B24.  It finally took off, with an escort of fighters.  Billy looked around and saw another jeep-load of men head out. Panic nagged at the corners of his mind, but he fought it back and concentrated on getting another truck loaded. A captain ran by and stopped by the little group of workers. "We're not going to get everything out.  Grab rifles and ammunition, and then take a couple of jeeps.”

Billy ran to the nearest jeep, fighting down panic. Trucks roared by them apparently from the front. A couple of dozen Sherman tanks roared by in the opposite direction, toward the front, worried looking infantrymen riding on them.

 An artillery round of some kind hit nearby, sending a spray of shrapnel in their direction. Billy hit the ground in back of the jeep and heard metal on metal sounds. The other jeeps were rolling away and there were only a couple more men left in the base.

 Billy glanced at the jeep and didn't see any obvious damage. He managed to get it started and roared out of the base as the other two men jumped in, spewing gravel as he turned onto the main road, and barely missing a speeding truck.

The roar of the artillery was almost continuous now, and rounds fell on the base behind them. One hit something explosive in the warehouse and touched off a series of explosions that sent clouds and debris high in the air.

 Billy felt a mixture of fear and a kind of wild elation as he raced down the road toward the ocean. The thought of the ocean stilled the elation. There isn't anywhere to go--no more than ten or fifteen miles to the Channel and then nothing. He thought about scenes from the evacuation of Dunkirk that he had seen on the newsreels and wondered if something like that was in his future.

 Another batch of armored vehicles rumbled toward them up the road. At first Billy thought they were tanks, but then he saw the open-topped turrets and realized that they were M10 tank destroyers, a tank-like vehicle with light armor but a heavy gun designed specifically to kill tanks.

He had to pull the jeep to the side of the road as the tank destroyers roared past. When he started up again the rest of the jeeps from the airbase were out of sight over the next hill. Another barrage of artillery came in, cratering the road and stripping branches off a nearby tree. The tree leaned and then splintered, blocking the road ahead of them. One branch poked through the jeep's windshield, sending slivers of glass into the lap of the guy beside him.

Billy backed the jeep away from the tree and glanced over at the other seat.  “Are you okay?”

"I'm bleeding," the guy said. "Sliced open my leg, I think."

 Billy finished getting the jeep out from under the tree branch and swung it off the road in a wide circle around the tree. He glanced back at a private who had jumped into the back seat. "See if you can help him with that while I get us out of here."

 He got busy trying to pick his way through the obstacle course of tree branches, crater and shell fragments, and was only vaguely conscious of what was happening in the seat next to him. The private from the back said, "It's gushing. Must have hit an artery."

 "You know what to do?"

"Sort of. Do you have any medic training?"

"No more than you. Keep him alive until we can get him somewhere." He concentrated on getting the jeep back on the road. Another barrage came in, this one a couple of hundred years behind him. A stream of trucks and jeeps were following them, taking the same path he had around the tree and the crater. He glanced back and saw a jeep with the medic insignia.

He loitered a little bit in the lane, earning indignant horn blasts from the truck behind him. It swung into the other lane and roared past, as did the next two behind them. That left them directly in front of the medic jeep. He yelled, "Flag them down some way."

"With which of my three hands?"

 "Whichever one isn't keeping your friend alive."

 "Yeah. That's the third one."

 Billy weaved the jeep from lane to lane, blowing his horn. He didn't know what that would signal to the guys in the jeep behind them, but he couldn't think of anything else to do. He slowed down until the medic jeep pulled alongside them, and then pointed urgently at the wounded leg. The medic jeep finally slowed down, and the driver nodded and pulled to the side of the road. "Got room for two, and from the looks of it we'll need someone to keep pressure on that gusher."

 They quickly loaded the wounded man into the medic jeep and it roared away, leaving Billy alone in his jeep at the side of the road. He waited for a break in the rush of the traffic and then swung in behind a racing truck filled with supply troops rushing away from the front.

The jeep chose that moment to blow a front tire, probably a delayed result of running over a shell fragment.  He fought the wheel and felt the jeep go up onto two wheels.  It slammed back down, jolting him.  He managed to get the jeep to the side of the road.

 Billy sat motionless in the seat for a couple of seconds, feeling abandoned and as alone as he could ever remember feeling. More traffic flowed in both directions. Finally he got out and examined the shredded tire. There was a spare, and he got it out before he noticed that it was flat too. He sighed and climbed back into the jeep. He put it back in gear and plodded down the shoulder, making about ten miles per hour as more mobile traffic flowed past in both directions.

Nobody stopped or offered to help, and the artillery barrages continued to fall around him. By now the remnants of the tire shredded away and he drove on on the rim, metal on gravel. The noise and the jolting numbed him. His hands tingled.  An artillery shell burst not far ahead him on the shoulder, cratering it.  The ground dropped off steeply at the shoulder, leaving him no way to go on. He pulled the jeep to a stop in front of the crater and grabbed the rifle from the seat beside him. The dust from the road and the artillery shells got in his throat and made him cough, something that reminded him that he had forgotten to grab a canteen in his haste to exit the base.

 The realization increased his thirst.  He looked around for a creek or pond. He didn't see anything. Probably a good thing. I would probably end up with dysentery or something.

French civilians were fleeing too now, some of them on foot, others in cars and farm carts. A Studebaker car rushed by, and then slowed down and stopped on the shoulder not far ahead of him. He shambled toward it.

 When he got there he recognized the French woman who had worked at the airbase. She smiled at him, and spoke in nearly flawless English. "I recognized you from the base. Where are you trying to go?"

 The question stopped Billy. "I don't know. Just away from the fighting I guess."

 "But you're a soldier."

 "I'm a supply guy, not an infantryman. I'm not afraid to fight, but they ordered us to pull out. I'm not deserting. I'm just following orders." The words spilled out, seeming false to his ears. “But I lost my unit and I have no idea where they ended up, so where do I go?  Hopefully the brass will get it sorted out.”

 "I understand," the woman said.  “I’m trying to get home.  I don’t know what I’ll do if the Germans come back.”

She drove skillfully in the heavy, mostly military traffic. No one made any effort to stop them. Billy took in the chaos around them. "Somebody needs to take charge. Form up some scratch units and toss them into the gaps."

 The woman didn't say anything. Shells came down within sight of them a couple of times, preceded by a high-pitched whistling sound.

 "Do you know where you're going?" Billy asked.

 "Home. Not far from here. I'll give you food and water and send you back to your unit so you don't get accused of deserting."

 The water part of that sounded good, and the food part didn't sound bad either. The stresses of the loading and drive had kept Billy distracted, but now that he focused on it he realized that it was quite a bit past noon and he was ravenously hungry.

 The woman turned off the main road onto a gravel pathway that wound through little farms and groves. A rumbling, clanking sound came from up the road. A couple of seconds later a tank swung in from a nearby field and onto the gravel. Billy didn't recognized the shape for a second, then it registered. "Panther! German tank! Back up!"

 The woman hit the brakes and backed up as fast as she could in the narrow road. The tank's turret swung toward them. As it lined up, she swung the car onto a rutted track leading into a field. She turned into some brush, scraping paint off the car, but hopefully getting it out of sight of the tank.

 The Panther clanked down the gravel road to the ruts they had gone down, paused and then accelerated past them. Billy exhaled the breath he had been holding and said, "Not worth their time, I guess."

 They sat in the car, peering past the brush. A cannon of some kind roared nearby, followed by a harsh metal on metal clank. Billy jumped. "Way too close!"

 The woman said something in French, probably a curse of some kind from the sound of it.

 Billy said, "More satisfying in your own language I imagine. By the way, I'm Billy Chandler."

"This is hardly the time for introductions."

 "True."

 Several more cannons fired nearby, some of the shots followed by the same metal on metal sound. Billy heard multiple clanking sounds. "More tanks, I think. It sounds like we may be in the middle of a tank battle."

 "What can we do?"

 "What do mice do when lions are fighting? Be as quiet as we can and hope neither side steps on us.”

 Even as he said that, Billy got out of the car and snaked his way through the brush to figure out what was going on. Two Panthers were maneuvering in a now ravaged field, with ten Shermans facing them. The Shermans appeared to be getting the worst of the fight, with three already burning and the others dodging backward from one patch of dubious shelter to another. A Sherman and one of the Panthers traded shots. Both appeared to hit. The Sherman was immediately engulfed in flames, while a spray of metal on the front of the turret was the only impact Billy could see on the Panther.

Three of the Sherman's crew got out, one of them on fire. Billy ached to join the fight, but with only the rifle he had no way of impacting the tank part of it. Another Sherman exploded into flames and then another. From his vantage point, Billy could see US infantrymen trying to maneuver close enough to the Panthers to get in a shot with their bazookas, but German infantry was coming up too.

 One of the bazooka men got in a lucky shot and hit one of the Panther's treads. That stopped the tank, but left it still capable of firing its machine gun and its main armament. Great. Now they're stuck here, within firing range of us.

 Billy could see German infantry prowling through the field, their advance covered by the Panthers. Machine guns and rifles were firing on both sides. A couple of bullets cut through nearby twigs, reminding him that he was neither invisible nor bulletproof. He thought about shooting back but decided not to attract more shots his way with the French woman close behind him.  He ran back to the car and guided the still unnamed French woman to the shelter of a low stone wall just high enough to shelter them as long as they lay flat behind it. Billy risked poking his head up long enough to see that the other Panther was no longer moving either, and that the German advance had apparently stalled in the field below them.

 Billy's military training told him that the area they were in was a key part of the battlefield and that eventually one or both sides would try to occupy it if they weren't already on their way to do that. He looked around for a less prominent position.

The ruins of an old stone farmhouse sat in a little valley not far from them. Based on the state of the ruins, the farmhouse was probably a victim of the German advance of May/June 1940. It had obviously gone several years but not decades without being repaired.  Billy mentally traced a route that should get them to the ruins without exposing them to the fighting.  They made a dash to the relative shelter, apparently undetected by either side.

The house was more damaged on the inside than it had looked on the outside.  The roof was mostly gone, and the floorboards on the main floor were warped and rotted.  They picked their way down stone stairs to a cellar partly filled with stagnate water and huddled near the stone wall in the driest part of the cellar. 

The battle kept going above them as evening came and turned into night.  The woman moved closer to him in the damp darkness and they curled up together.  Finally the woman said, “Brigette.”

"What?”

"My name. Brigette Tenney.”

Posted on Feb 4, 2012.

 

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