Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘Can you hold them away for ten more minutes, though?’ Max asked.

Koch turned towards the guard hut and barricade and the small crescent wall of sandbags. It was hardly a great defensive position, and in any case, the airfield wasn’t contained. The Americans could easily by-pass the official entrance and enter the strip from any direction via the woods that surrounded it.

‘All we can do is fire enough shots to make them keep their heads low, slow them down a little, that’s all. I don’t suppose any of them want to be heroes today.’

Koch looked around at the collection of planes. The B-17 was parked up beside the grass strip; beside it was the fuel truck, a large container vehicle full of aviation fuel. Nearby, parked in an irregular cluster around a hastily assembled collection of fifty-gallon drums, were the Me-109s. The fighter pilots were sloshing a lot of the fuel onto the grass in their haste to transfer it to their planes.

‘It’ll take one well-placed shot to take the lot of you out if you’re not careful,’ Koch said.

Max looked around. The young man wasn’t wrong. But there was little they could do about that apart from fill up as quickly as possible and get away. ‘Well, if you can keep them off our backs for a few more minutes, I’d be very grateful.’

Koch grinned and nodded. ‘We’ll do that.’ He turned on his heels and jogged across the short grass in the direction of the hangar.

Max looked at Schroder and his men refilling their planes. He’d sent both Stef and Hans across to help them out. Both of them were working hard holding a fifty-gallon drum at an angle to pour the fuel out into the more portable five-gallon drums. The pilots were struggling backwards and forwards between their planes, emptying the fuel into the wing tanks and returning to Stef and Hans to collect another load. They were all soaked in fuel and the air above the central stash of fuel drums danced with gasoline vapours.

It might not even need a bullet, one spark is all it would take.. and they’re all history.

Koch’s men or even Schroder’s should have been supplied with funnels and pumps; it would have made the task a lot quicker and a lot safer. The sooner they were up and away, the better. Max checked the gauge. It showed just 3050 gallons… 550 to go.

Koch entered the hangar and looked around for Scholn. He saw the stocky man on the far side of the hangar overseeing the prisoners now all gathered in there and lying face down on the ground. If it weren’t for the movements amongst them one could be forgiven for thinking that these poor men had all been mercilessly gunned down.

‘Scholn… over here!’

He jogged over towards Koch. ‘Yes, sir?’

Koch looked around the hangar; there were six of his men watching over approximately sixty prisoners. Some of these guards could be freed up to help the Luftwaffe pilots with their fuel.

‘Is the door to this hangar the only way in or out?’

Scholn looked around. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right, well, pick one of your men to remain with the prisoners and send the others over to help those pilots. The quicker they get under way, the better for everyone.’

Scholn looked back at the prisoners lying face down on the ground, hands behind their heads. One man to guard all of them? Under other circumstances he would have considered that as taking a bit of a chance, but looking at them now, none of them were combat soldiers. He couldn’t foresee any of them attempting an escape. He nodded and turned to carry out Koch’s orders as the first of a series of bursts of small-arms fire could be heard coming from the direction of the guard hut.

Here they come.

Koch headed at the double out of the hangar towards the front entrance. Buller and a dozen of his men were dug in there, the sandbag bunker proving the only sensible place to set up a defensive enclave.

Seconds later he slid to the ground behind the sandbags, and worked his way over to Buller.

‘All right?’

‘Hello, sir. Looks like the jeep had some friends with it,’ he replied, squinting through a gap between the bags. He made way for Koch to peer through.

Fifty yards beyond the flimsy barricade on a dirt track that led from Nantes to this airfield were four trucks and several more jeeps. As he watched, US soldiers spilled out of the backs of the trucks and spread out to use the cover of poplars that lined both sides of the dirt track.

‘I’d say that’s a full company they’ve sent to deal with us,’ said Koch to Buller.

‘There must be a base nearby… it’s only been half an hour since we took this strip.’

‘Well, I guess we’ve been a little unlucky. Listen, we’ve only got to hold ’em here for a few minutes, okay? Nobody needs to do anything stupid. Just keep them busy for a while with some covering fire. It’ll probably take them a while to organise something anyway.’

Buller nodded and spread the word amongst the men sheltering behind the sandbags and inside the hut to lay down some suppressing volley fire on the dirt track. The rattle of gunfire increased as the sporadic bursts intensified. Koch watched with satisfaction as the American soldiers, still piling out of the trucks, went to ground. He was right; it was going to be a while before they were fully deployed and ready to retake the airfield.

They won’t realise how time-critical this little skirmish was.

We’ll do this yet.

The soldiers who had taken cover behind the poplars began moving. Koch watched them as they ducked under some hedges that lined the track and jogged across into an open field beyond. They stopped and dropped several times as Buller’s men sprayed a little fire in their direction.

‘They’re trying to flank us,’ he shouted above the clatter of their gunfire. ‘Those Yanks are pretty good, not your average bunch of GIs,’ he said to Buller. Buller nodded; these men were almost as good as the Russian convict brigade they’d faced outside of Murmansk. He’d wager a packet of cigarettes that these soldiers had already seen some action.

We spoke too soon.

‘They’re working their way around to the sides. They’ll get to the planes unchallenged unless we pull back. I want you to direct most of your fire on those men moving across the fields to the left there, and those men moving off the track to the right.’ Koch pointed towards a copse of trees to the right of the track. The copse extended around to the top end of the airstrip, where it grew a little thicker and became a narrow stretch of wood. The planes and the fuel truck parked there at the bottom of the landing strip were only fifty, perhaps sixty, yards away from this treeline.

That wasn’t so good.

‘Slow down those ones heading for the trees on the right. If they get to the trees, then keep them ducking with a few shots into the woods. You’ve got to slow them down.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m going to take some of your men and establish a tighter defensive ring nearer the planes.’ Buller nodded and Koch clapped him on the back. ‘Hold your position as long as possible and then fall back towards me.’

A few dozen yards away from the gathered planes was a stack of supply crates; tinned food, probably destined to be relief for the recently liberated citizens of northern Germany. A typically American gesture, he thought. They bomb the fuck out of us, then shower the poor bastards left alive with food parcels.

The crates were small enough to be manhandled. It would take only a few moments to pull them out across the ground around the planes to create some reasonable defensive positions.

Koch pointed towards the cluster of planes and the fuel truck to one side of the strip.

‘That’s where we’ll hold them back.’

Buller turned to look. ‘That’s open ground — ’