Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

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 130 °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 The Heinkels had been replaced by three Focke-Wulf 190 fighter-bombers, which were strafing anything that moved, and punctuating that with fragmentation bombs.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