The Invasion of 1950 (2 page)

More shots rang out through the woods as the German infantry crashed into his men, with shouts and screams echoing out as the Germans attempted to dislodge the British from their position. Jackson lifted his own weapon as a German storm-trooper appeared, holding a grenade in one hand, and had the satisfaction of watching as the German fell to the ground, dead. He lifted his whistle to his lips and blew a single long blast, the signal for retreat. The remains of the company fled the battle, in seeming panic, right towards the next holding position. Jackson half-hoped that the Germans would pursue them directly – there was an infantry company dug in a short distance down the road – but they contented themselves with capturing the remains of the position and hunting for the mines.

“We caught them with their pants down,” Sergeant Henry Wilt said, as they reached the second position and stopped, puffing for breath.  It was just in front of a bridge and that presented its own problems; the Germans might try to take the bridge, but at the same time, they would be expecting to meet an ambush there.  It was the logical place to set a trap.  “How many do you think we got?”

Jackson thought about it, replaying the engagement in his head. “At least four tanks,” he said, thoughtfully. They wouldn’t know how many German infantrymen they’d killed for hours yet. “What about our air support?”

“It’s been denied,” Wilt said. He was a short stocky man, every part of him devoted to muscle and determination, and he was old enough to remember serving in France and Egypt as a young soldier. Jackson privately admired him; Wilt’s impressive skills had kept him from making too many embarrassing mistakes during his first tour of duty with the Home Guard. “It’s something to do with a major air offensive…”

His voice cut off as three aircraft flew low overhead, the noise of their passage echoing over the trees and the small village just beyond the bridge. The population had already been evacuated, removing them from the path of the German advance, and the village had been converted into a strong-point The German aircraft attacked without mercy, targeting buildings with their bombs and scattering flammable oil over the village; the Germans had been known to use it in their own counterinsurgency campaigns in Russia to great success. 

“So much for the village,” Wilt said, as the enemy aircraft retreated and the clamour of enemy tanks rose again. Jackson took up his binoculars as the German infantry advanced, heading towards the bridge, covered by their tanks. The antitank guns on the far side of the river opened fire, their shells falling wide of the targets, while the Germans returned fire with their own weapons. “Sir?”

“Destroy the bridge,” Jackson ordered sharply. The Germans had killed half of his company; he couldn’t hope to prevent them from taking the village, but if he could destroy the bridge, it would slow them down enough that the regulars, struggling to establish a defence line, could stop them dead in their tracks. The odds weren’t good; regular armies all around Europe had been trying to stop the Germans, and hadn’t even come close to succeeding. Jackson had been young when the German juggernaut had crashed into Poland, Norway, France, Russia…but even he remembered the dread days when everyone had
known
that a German invasion was imminent. Adolph hadn’t come to Britain, not then…

Wilt barked an order and a signalman pushed down hard on a plunger, just in time. The German infantry had reached the bridge. They would have tried to remove the explosive, but now, as the bridge blazed with white light, they knew that they had failed. Jackson had hoped that they would have tried to find another bridge, but instead, the lead German tank advanced slowly down to the river…and then into the water. Water splashed up all around it as it slowly ground across the river, before it came out of the river, firing it’s machine guns. Jackson shouted a command, calling forward the portable antitank gunners, before the tank’s weapons came right to point at him. He gave himself up to the inevitable and dropped down to the ground.

***

“
Well, that was an interesting exercise,” Colonel Felton-Smith said an hour later. Jackson couldn’t really disagree; the ‘destroyed’ tanks and ‘killed’ men had been impressive, but the Germans – or, rather, the regular army units playing at being the Germans – had defeated the Home Guard and broken through the defence line. “Jackson, so you have any thoughts?”

Jackson, who would have preferred a hot bath and a good meal, closed his eyes to compose his thoughts. “We should have requested more portable antitank weapons,” he said, referring to the PIAT rocket launchers the Home Guard used against enemy tanks. “We moved up the field guns and used them as part of the ambush, but when we retreated, they forced us to abandon the weapons; they may even have used them against us.”

Colonel Felton-Smith shrugged. He was a career military officer, with a neatly trimmed moustache and a perfect uniform; Jackson privately wondered if he had ever actually seen any real combat in his life. The field guns had been equipped with flash-bang shells, rather than any real explosives; after all, the tanks and men advancing against them had been British. There had been some live-fire exercises, but no one sane would permit the soldiers to use real ammunition when they might kill their fellow soldiers. The fistfights were bad enough.

“A good thought,” Colonel Felton-Smith said, finally. “What about the mines?”

Jackson shook his head. “We need to block the roads properly,” he said, cursing the mixture of parsimony and efficiency that prevented the Home Guard from
really
sabotaging the enemy’s line of advance. They could have cut down a few trees and slowed the ‘Germans’ down for as long as it took them to clear the roads again; just think what they could have done with the confusion! He’d seen enough exercises to know that even a tiny delay could, under the right circumstances, mount up into a complete disaster as supply lines got snarled up and enemy commanders became confused. “It’s just not an accurate portrayal of real war.”

He tapped the location of the village on the map. “The aircraft bombed the village and destroyed it,” he continued, speaking with more firmness now. “Sir, that wouldn’t happen in real life; we could have continued to fight through the wreckage and held the Germans for a few hours, if they had been forced to clear the village step by step. We also would have shot back at the aircraft and maybe even forced them to keep their distance.”

Colonel Felton-Smith nodded. “That’s not something that we can reproduce in an exercise,” he said, shortly. “Captain, overall, how did your company perform?”

“They did much better than I think some expected,” Jackson said, pointedly. The regular army tended to look down on the Home Guard; Dad’s Army was one of the nicer nicknames for the service. “They don’t have the discipline of people who have served in the regulars for a few years, but they held the line here until well after I bit the dust.”

“True enough,” Colonel Felton-Smith said. He held out a sheet of paper. “You and your company are being ordered to return to Felixstowe, where I believe most of your men come from, and continue basic drills until this exercise is concluded. Once it ends, I anticipate that there will be more drills, but most of your unit will return to inactive service.”

Jackson nodded once; he had expected no less. The Home Guard, by its very nature, couldn’t be permanently deployed anywhere – particularly not outside the United Kingdom. The conscription program kept most of the young men trained, but the regulars could be deployed anywhere, and often were. If the Germans landed tomorrow – and that was the nightmare, with the
Reich
on the other side of the Channel – the main burden of the early fighting would fall on the Home Guard. They would fight and die to buy the regular army time to mobilise and be deployed.

He threw a neat salute. “Yes, sir,” he said, as he stood to attention. “I’ll see to it at once.”

***

Night was falling as Gregory Davall slipped closer and closer to the barbed wire. Clad in dark clothes, his face blacked out like the Golliwog, he was almost invisible in the gloom. The sentry, whose cigarette light could be seen in the darkness, certainly never saw him. Davall smiled to himself as he crawled closer, keeping his belly firmly on the ground, just before he reached the wire and pulled out a pair of cutters. The sentry didn’t react at all, pacing slightly as he tried to keep himself awake; Davall silently cut a hole through the wire and slipped into the airbase.

Idiot
, he thought coldly, as he continued to crawl towards the aircraft hangers. The RAF had built the airbase to handle some of their long-range bombers. His task was to penetrate it, slip inside the base, and slip out again, all without being seen. The Grey Wolves would be depending on him to recover some information from the airbase, and if he were caught, he would be in very real trouble. On this exercise, he would probably get a clout from the sentry or whoever caught him. On an actual mission he would have been shot out of hand. The Grey Wolves, like every other stay-behind unit, would be considered illegal combatants and, as such, were not protected by the Geneva Convention.

He slipped closer to his destination, avoiding a pair of patrolling guards with ease, and entered the hanger through an unsecured door. The sheer absence of real security made him grind his teeth together with rage. He was meant to be training for penetrating German bases, not exposing holes in British security. It had been seven years since the war had ended, but with the
Reich
across the Channel, anyone with a brain in their head knew that the resumption of hostilities was inevitable, sooner or later. Davall, a skilled toolmaker in a reserve occupation, had been exempted from conscription, but he
had
been recruited into the Grey Wolves. Unfortunately, ten years later, the secret soldiers were still maintaining their preparations. When Hitler came for them, they would be ready.

The interior of the hanger was dimly lit. He closed his eyes to force them to adjust to the change before glancing over at the aircraft, an experimental jet-propelled aircraft that was supposed to be able to fly as far as America. Davall’s son had fallen in love with the RAF and had announced his intention to join as soon as he was old enough, but before then, he had collected dozens of aircraft models, including the ones designed to show off what the RAF could do. Davall had helped James to assemble the aircraft and knew their statistics off by heart; it made him wonder what James would have made of how easy it had been to slip into the base. If Davall had come on a sabotage mission, which he would have to do if the Germans ever came, he could have destroyed the aircraft before anyone could have stopped him.

He scooped up a small set of papers from a desk, slipped them into his pocket, and withdrew the way he’d come. The sentry should have kept an eye on the wire, perhaps even patrolled it to find the gap, but Davall was able to retreat without any problems. It was only when he'd made it out and was walking back towards his operations base that he heard the outraged shouts behind him and pounding feet as guards were aroused to search for the intruder. It was too late, he knew, as he walked away through the forest; if they had wanted to catch him, they would have to improve the security. He’d take the papers to the coordinating officer tomorrow and hand them in, as well as making a report on the exact state of security on the base. If Davall had anything to say about it, heads would roll…

The forest was warm and welcoming, although someone who was unfamiliar with the forest would have found it creepy; Davall found his way to the operations base with ease. Major General Colin Gubbins had hammered security into their heads; the Grey Wolves were the only people who knew where the base actually was in the forest. Even their coordinating officer, who knew all of them by name, didn’t know. He also didn’t know that the Grey Wolves had orders to assassinate him if the Germans landed.

It was the work of a moment to clean himself, to change his dark clothes for something more fitting, and then to start the long walk back to his house. There was no longer any curfew over Suffolk, but he kept off the roads and streets anyway; tonight, the security forces would be out in force, hunting for the spy who’d broken into the airbase. He hoped, as he walked, that when the Germans came, it would be that easy to break into one of their compounds, but he knew, somehow, that it wouldn’t be anything like as easy. The Germans were very good soldiers and they had lots of experience in defeating stay-behind units. He knew his duty…

But, deep inside, he was scared for the future.
platoon

Berlin, Germany

“
Heil Hitler!” The cry burst out from a thousand throats. “
Heil Hitler
!”

Standing on the balcony,
Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler watched as thousands of black-clad soldiers marched past, their faces all perfectly blank and disciplined. The massive parade had been going on for nearly an hour, with overflights by the latest and greatest aircraft of the
Reich
, and Himmler was more than a little tired of it. It was also something that even he, the second-most powerful man in Germany, couldn’t escape; it was Victory Day. The holiday that Adolph Hitler himself had decreed sacred, the day that Moscow had fallen to a combined assault from German forces, the day that marked the triumph of the Greater German
Reich
…Victory Day would be celebrated by Hitler’s people, body and soul. They had placed their faith in the
Fuhrer
and the
Fuhrer
had delivered; Germany was master of Europe, ruler of an empire that stretched as far as the Urals and the Iranian border.