The battalion had suffered nearly 12 percent casualties before they’d even crossed the Channel. RAF Hurricanes had ripped into them, diving out of the sun and slashing through the tight formation of transports and the gliders they were towing.
Their escorts, a squadron of standard 109s, had finally beaten off the defenders, but not before six Junkers had dropped away, trailing smoke and flame. Colonel Albrechtson tried not to imagine what it would be like, dying in such a fashion.
His men all wore the same expression. Thin lipped, gray faced, but resolute. The fucking SS with their pantomime costumes and superior bullshit—they liked to think of themselves as the elite. But Albrechtson knew that the best soldiers in the world were here in these planes with him. The
The hollow bass notes of exploding flak reached him through the corrugated metal skin of the JU-52, but it was distant. The entire coastline of southern Britain was ablaze with gunfire. Thousands of planes dueled in the sky, and hundreds of ships pounded away at each other down below. It was a titanic struggle, but for the moment, it was a contest of machines.
In a few minutes he and his men would contend in blood. Their strength and their will against their offspring of this failed, bankrupt empire. Albrechtson didn’t know if he would survive. But he was certain that Germany herself would triumph.
The drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything but shouts, so there was no point saying any last words to the men. They didn’t need speeches, anyway. All they needed was the jump light. He took a sip of water from his canteen and stroked the wooden stock of his trusty Mauser. It wasn’t as fancy as the new automatic assault rifles issued to the SS, but it had served him well on Crete and in the Ukraine. He was happy to have it along, as an old friend.
He took the last few minutes to inspect his men. They looked magnificent, but he wasn’t so foolish as to imagine that would last. He’d fought the British on Crete. Although that had been a victory, it was a bloodbath, as well. There had been talk that the fuhrer would never allow an airborne assault again, yet here they were. At least a third of these men had jumped into Crete with him, falling amongst the savages of the Maori Battalion and their New Zealand slavers. It had been a slaughter from which normal soldiers would not have recovered.
But his
They would take this island, too.
Harry instructed his makeshift platoon to take up positions in a series of slit trenches that offered fire lanes that converged with Fitzsimons’s fire teams on the hill at the end of the runway. He had no illusions about the kind of fire support he could expect from them, but you have to cut the cloth to suit your budget, as his grandfather used to say.
He heard Sergeant St. Clair’s thick East End accent, booming through the speakers of his helmet. “Target lock, guvnor. Confirmed as eight ME One-oh-nines. Five thousand meters out. Launching.”
“Acknowledged,” said Harry before he muted the channel back to his antiair team.
“Listen up,” he called down the trench line. “Escort fighters are coming in. Eight Messerschmitts. They’re about three miles away now, but I want you to watch what happens. Keep watching in the direction of the village.”
The men—they were all men—studied the tree line behind him.
“Cor blimey, wozzat!” cried one of them.
Eight thin tendrils of white exhaust smoke shot up from the hollow and rocketed away.
“Those are Scorpion ground-to-air missiles,” Harry informed them. “They will destroy every Messerschmitt that’s currently heading toward this airfield, hoping to shoot the crapper out of you.”
He watched as their heads turned to track the flight path of the missiles. A few began pointing in excitement. A cluster of small black dots, the fighters, had become visible to the south. The Scorpions ate up the distance to their targets at a phenomenal rate.
Eight balls of fire filled the sky where the aircraft had been.
Lusty shouts of approval arose from the trenches, and Harry was sure he could hear something similar coming from Fitzsimons’s hill. His demo specialists, Bolt and Akerman, dropped into the shelter beside him, having just finished a rush job of mining the runway.
“Whizzbangs are ready, Captain,” Bolt announced.
“We set a few claymores, too. Had ’em for securing the lay-up point in Norway. They’re about halfway out to the runway.”
Another six contrails whooshed away from the village.
“Is that more fighters, sir?” asked a private with an amazingly shiny hairdo.
“No, Private,” he answered, checking the heads-up display in his goggles. “My sergeant is aiming for some troop transports. You can’t see them yet, but he can. They’ll all be shot down long before they get here.”
There was no cheering this time. Some nodding, a few murmurs of appreciation, but no cheering.
“Are there going to be any left for us to get, Major?” asked the Brylcreem boy.
“Oh, yes,” replied Harry. “I’m afraid so.”
Something had gone wrong.
The pilots were shouting. The aircraft swooped and climbed and dropped down violently, throwing Albrechtson and men around the cabin. One man had already broken his arm, and the colonel himself would have been knocked out had he not been wearing a helmet.
Six loud flak bursts had gone off all around them, and it sounded as if every single shot had scored a hit. There was a terrible sound when a plane took a direct hit—all that metal and fuel and ammunition going up simultaneously. It was a much denser report than the slightly empty boom of a near miss.
He began to feel just how painfully slow the JU-52 was—that was why they stopped using them as bombers in the first place. Fighters and ack-ack guns picked them off too easily.
Every muscle in his body was clenched, urging them on to the drop point just that little bit faster. The rapid
The jump light turned red. The men all held up their hooks for the static line.
“Up!” he called out, checking his helmet strap.
The men arose as one, even the kid who had been puking his guts out.
“Hook up!”
Standing by the open door, Albrechtson felt the tug of the slipstream. The rushing air added a constant roar to the crash of exploding shells as his seventeen surviving men hooked their chutes onto the line. Some tumbled over, cursing, as a volley exploded over the wing, punching the plane down and to the left. Albrechtson saw three lines of tracer converge on another Junkers two hundreds away. The portside engine blew up and sheared off the wing.
“Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.
Each paratrooper patted and pulled at the man in front him, checking for faults that might kill a man before he had a chance to fight.
“Sound off!”
They counted themselves down, halting temporarily at the ninth man, as two windows shattered and somebody screamed.
The puking kid was dead.
The count continued, as the men on either side of Dietz cleared his body from the lineup.
Albrechtson called out that he was clear as the red light turned green.
He grabbed the frame of the exit and thrust himself out. He felt the shock of hitting the airstream at speed and heard the
