The Odin Mission (19 page)

'We've got to take out those MGs,' Tanner said to Sykes. 'They've got
us covered but they're firing blind. Dan!' he called. 'Keep firing bursts, all
right? I need you to cover me and Sykes.'

Lance Corporal Erwood raised his hand in acknowledgement. 'Good,' said
Tanner, then turned to Sykes and pointed into the trees away and behind them.
'On three we're going to head back twenty yards over there where the ground
slopes away, then use that drop in the land to get underneath the line of fire
and work round their flank. OK?'

Sykes nodded.

Tanner took a deep breath. 'One, two,
three!'

Bullets followed them like a swarm of bees, hissing over their heads
and kicking up the snow around them, but although Tanner's body had tensed for
the moment when one or more ripped into him, it appeared luck was with them.
Suddenly the twenty yards had been crossed, the ground was falling away, and
the bullets zapping clear into the wood above him. He stopped, crouched and, to
his relief, saw that Sykes was beside him.

'Bloody hell!' gasped the corporal. 'That was a bit hot, Sarge!'

'Pretty warm,' agreed Tanner. 'Where are the rest of them?' He spotted
Hepworth, Kershaw and Bell. Hepworth was lying flat on the ground, clutching
his helmet to his head; Bell was taking occasional pot-shots then bracing
himself against the rear-side of a thick pine. Kershaw was behind a rock by the
stream, ducking every time a bullet whizzed past him. Then he saw McAllister,
across the stream from Bell. Good, he thought.
That'll do.

He picked up a lump of snow and hurled it at Hepworth, who saw him, and
began to scurry over. Another snowball caught the attention of the other three.
Short bursts of machine-gun fire still spat intermittently above their heads,
while cracks of rifle fire rang out. 'We're going to take out those MGs,' said
Tanner, to the five men now squatting beside him. 'We cross the stream out of
the line of fire, move on sixty yards, then come round the back of them.' The
boys looked tense; Hepworth, especially, was wide-eyed and ashen-faced. 'Come
on, Hep,' he said. 'You know the drill. We work in pairs. Two forward, two
pairs covering. Got enough ammo?'

Hepworth nodded.

Tanner patted his shoulder. 'We'll be fine. Let's go.'

Their bodies crouched low, they made it across the stream and pushed
forward until the sound of firing was coming from behind them to the left. He
hoped the enemy troops would be too busy with the fire coming from in front of
them to have thought of an attack from behind. As he moved up the slope to the
almost level ground above, he was glad to see his guess had been correct.
Signalling to the others to follow, he pulled McAllister by the shoulder, then
signalled for Hepworth to pair off with Sykes, Kershaw with Bell. 'Watch out
for our own fire,' he warned.

He pulled out three grenades from his haversack, clipped them to his
belt and briefly scanned ahead as a stray bullet whipped up the ground a few
yards to his left. They were behind the far left of the German skirmish line.
One of the machine-guns was just forty yards ahead, although hidden by trees,
while the second was sixty yards to the right of the first. He could hear
bursts from a third further away. His intention was to get within twenty yards
of the first two and lob grenades at them. The danger would come if the gunners
saw them first and turned their weapons on them.

'Sod it,' he muttered. Then, to his men: 'Forget the drill. Stan, you
and Hepworth run towards that first MG and hurl a couple of grenades,' he
whispered. 'Mac, you and I'll get the other. Bell, follow Sykes and Hep and
cover them. Kershaw, you cover me and Mac. On three.'

He gripped the first grenade in his hand, counted down visually with
his fingers, took a deep breath, then sprinted through the snow, praying the
bullets would miss them once more. Thirty yards to go. A German rifleman was
standing firing from behind a tree. Twenty-five yards. Three more riflemen and
the second MG team. Twenty yards. Pull the pin from the grenade.
One, two, throw.
Aim good. A
rifleman saw the grenade, looked round in horror, but it was too late. As it
detonated, spraying the machine-gunners with shards of searing iron, they
cried out and rolled. A second detonation came a split second later, just as
Tanner brought his rifle to his shoulder once more, pulled back the bolt and
fired, silencing the startled rifleman. Two more bullets fizzed above his head.
Tanner ducked but, keeping his rifle tight into his chin, shouted,
'Hande hoch! Hande hoch!'

He was only vaguely aware of McAllister standing a few yards from him,
yelling the same instruction. To his amazement, several German troops dropped
their rifles and slowly raised their arms. 'Where's the bloody officer?'
shouted Tanner, then saw him, crouched by a tree, still clutching his pistol.
"
Hande
bloody
hoch,
mate,' Tanner said to him, his rifle pointed at
the enemy officer's heart.

Zellner
dropped his pistol, his face flexing with anger.
'
Waff
en nieder!'
he shouted. '
Befehlen
ist unter alien Umstanden von der Englander zu lei stent'

'Cease firing!' yelled out Tanner. A bullet pinged through the trees to
his right. 'Bloody stop shooting. They've surrendered!' he shouted, as he
stepped forward and picked up Zellner's pistol.

As the guns fell
silent on the mountain above Tretten, the battle continued to rage in the
valley below. The day had been every bit as difficult and depressing as
Brigadier Morgan had suspected. It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening when
he walked out of his makeshift office and stepped outside to smoke his pipe. He
realized he'd not had any air all day, yet outside the house the sharp stench
of cordite and burnt wood was so heavy he could feel it in his throat. He
looked towards the river, but a heavy fog hung over the valley. Through the
smoke, however, the sun was trying to break through; he could see it high in
the sky, a hazy orange orb. Ahead, shrouded in fog, the battle boomed on. The
ground shuddered.

After only a few puffs, he took his pipe from his mouth and tapped it
against the heel of his boot. The brief break for a smoke had not been as
calming as he'd hoped. He walked back inside, where clerks and the remaining
brigade staff were still frantically passing on information and trying
desperately to find answers to unanswerable questions.

In his office he sat at his desk and opened his small leatherbound
diary. One day, he thought, he would write this up, 'How Not to Fight a War:
Lessons from the Norwegian Campaign', and submit it to the War Office. 'The
remnants of the three companies of Leicesters, Foresters and Rangers,' he
scribbled, 'were attacked in the morning along their makeshift positions west
of Oyer and soon fell back. Leicesters' company commander killed, and most of
the officers in that mixed force now reported missing.' Morgan's pencil hovered
over the pale blue paper.
They had been fine men all
, he reflected.
A bloody waste.

'By midday,' he continued, 'the usual array of aircraft appeared,
bombing and strafing their lines.' And flying so low, too. Morgan had clearly
seen the pilot of one Messerschmitt. The man's arrogance - sticking up two
fingers to the soldiers below - had been hard to stomach. The German artillery
had been in on the game too, systematically pasting the village. Most of the
buildings in the small settlement were now destroyed, their timbers devoured by
raging flames. 'By afternoon, a pall of grey smoke hung heavy over the valley.
Spent most of the afternoon fending off desperate pleas for reinforcements and
scratching my head, wondering how the devil I could possibly hold the enemy at
bay until 15th Brigade joins us.'

Colonel Jansen's Dragoons had arrived, as Ruge had promised, and had
been sent forward to bolster the forward positions in the gorge south of the
village. 'Had I had just a few guns,' he scrawled, 'it might have been very
different.' It was, after all, the kind of defensive position any commanding
officer would normally only dream of. But the planes, the shelling and the
enemy's armour were too much. What could a few machine-guns and rifles hope to
achieve? It was like throwing snow at a stone wall. Indeed, Morgan had
wondered, perhaps they should have tried chucking snowballs.

All afternoon he had fretted about a flank attack by German mountain
troops. So, too, it seemed, had Colonel Chisholm, commander of the Yorks
Rangers, who had been deployed on the far left of their lines on the low slopes
above the village. Chisholm had pleaded for more men.

'Damn it, Colonel,' Morgan had told him, on one of the few field
telephones that were working, 'I can't muster more men from thin air.
Everything we have is thrown into the line. If the Germans try to outflank us,
you must simply do your best.'

'And see my battalion destroyed?' Chisholm had fumed.

'Do you think I like leading lambs to the slaughter?' Morgan had asked
him.

'Then, with respect, sir, order the retreat.'

But Morgan had been unable to do that. Not at four in the afternoon,
just as his forward troops were engaging the advancing enemy. His task was to
hold the Germans as long as he could; 15th Brigade was due to start arriving at
Andalsnes that evening so help was on its way but, as Ruge had reminded him at
their meeting in the early hours of the morning, and as he had repeated on the
telephone that day, checking German momentum and slowing their advance was
crucial. They were playing for time - time that would allow 15th Brigade to
arrive and deploy in strength. That meant every passing hour took on enormous
importance. The problem was that soon he would have no brigade left with which
to make any kind of stand, as Colonel Chisholm had painfully reminded him.

'Flank attack materialized shortly after 1800 hours,' he scribbled
again. 'Ordered forward troops to fall back to the village.' In the mayhem of
battle, with field-telephone lines cut and communication between units severely
limited, these instructions had, inevitably, been too laic. Indeed, half his
staff had been sent forward to deliver messages, but had not been seen or heard
of since.
What a mess
, he thought.
What a huge bloody mess.

He closed his diary and went out to the hallway where he found Major
Dornley. 'Latest news?'

Dornley looked grave. 'Enemy mountain troops have overrun the village
from the east.'

'And the men fighting there?'

'Presumably captured. All lines are dead.'

Morgan steadied himself against the doorway and put a hand to his brow.
'God almighty,' he muttered. 'It's 2000 hours, we've got almost no brigade left
and most of my staff are missing.'

Suddenly, above them, there was a loud drone of aircraft. Dornley and
Morgan looked up as the wailing siren of Stuka dive-bombers shrieked overhead.

Both men fell flat on the ground, their hands over their heads. The
whistle of bombs, followed by an ear-splitting explosion. Morgan felt himself
lifted off the ground and pushed down again. With every boom and whoosh of
detonating bombs, the house shuddered, the floor quaked and plaster fell from
the ceiling. Morgan screwed his eyes shut. The percussion of the bombs pressed
on his lungs.

Then the Stukas were gone, but as Morgan staggered to his feet and
dusted himself down, he could hear artillery and small-arms still echoing
through the valley. The sound was drawing closer.
My brigade
,
he thought.
All those people.

They could do no more. 'Dornley,' he said, 'order what survivors we
have to block the roads, get the remaining trucks and vehicles loaded up and
tell everyone to fall back.'

Dornley nodded.

Morgan hurried back into his office to collect his own case, his papers
and few belongings. He could not turn and stand a few miles further up the
valley this time because his brigade, as a fighting force, had ceased to exist.
Rather, they would head for the village of Kvam, where General Ruge hoped they
would meet Major General Paget's freshly arrived 15th Brigade. And it would
take the Germans a while to get there, Morgan hoped, because Kvam was some
distance away. Forty miles, to be precise.

Tanner put an
arm to the nearest tree and rested his head against it. Now that the fight was
over, the adrenalin surge that had kept him going evaporated as quickly as it
had arrived. His legs ached, his hands were shaky, and his stomach was racked
with hunger cramps. A pounding headache drummed in his skull, while his mouth
was as dry as bone. Stiffly leaning down, he picked up some snow and put it
into his mouth, the icy water striking the nerve ends in his teeth.

'Sarge,' said a
voice.

Tanner looked
round. Sykes was standing beside him. 'Three casualties, Sarge. Gibson's dead,
Saxby and Riggs wounded.'