"It's not about winning in FFA, it's revenge."
-Mark4
|
| Leaders 03: Curtainfall | | | Author: | | | IP: | cache-dhXXXX | | Date: | 06/07/03 02:06 | | Game Type: | Other | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 8, Min: 8
Lifetime Rating for SupeRc0pKr: 8.2353 |  |
Leaders: 03
With the Utah and Omaha beachheads united at Carentan, thanks in part to the 29th Division's seizure of the Isigny-Maisy highway, US V and VII Corps could begin their next respective missions. For V Corps, that meant pushing towards St. Lo, the key to break-out in Normandy. For the next five weeks, the already battle-worn troops of the 29th Infantry Division and several others would advance through the hedgerows against twelve German divisions, two of which were armored, the others of which were well-supported by Fallschirmjager, paratroopers equal to the Allied Airborne troops in skill and tenacity.
St. Lo would constitute a desperate, brutal fight against a determined enemy with some organization. The nearly point-blank range combat in the hedgerow, the brutal ambushes and surprise assaults, the constant machine gun fire and snipers, this was the 29th Division's Normandy. This was their introduction to combat. They had learned a few lessons thus far, but there were far more to under go, and all of them would be as costly and painful as before.
[No Last Words]
19 June; D+13
Lifeless, gray rain poured down across Normandy, pattering limply against broken glass and shattered brick. Two companies of 1st Battalion had pushed into a small village, battered by Allied and German artillery. Flower pots and black soil lay scattered on the streets, and windows grinned with toothy, uneven glass daggers, perhaps concealing a sniper or machine gun in the shadowed rooms behind.
"First Sergeant," Burkeley called at a whisper, carbine still resting on the rubble beside a collapsed wall, the limp branches and leaves of a hedgerow draped like curtains against it.
Wescott crept forward, passing other A Company soldiers, pressed against the wall and hunched low. They watched him while he examined Burkeley's point of attention. A three-story apartment, great gaps blown in its walls, stood - barely - just ten or twenty meters away from A Company's position behind the wall. There were several windows that had a clear line-of-sight down the street, and Wescott knew that there would be Germans behind them, weapons at-the-ready. But this was the only fast way into town, and speed was what 1st Battalion Commander had called for.
After a few last checks on the windows, Wescott turned to the A Company troops. "Listen up. Chances are there's going to be some krauts in the building just ahead of us. It's going to be point-blank, but if we fire on the move and move fast, it shouldn't be a problem. Move to either side of it, split up into two groups, and grenade them out. After that, we push hard straight through town. Tanks'll drive hard once we've made the penetration, and we'll follow right behind."
Wescott turned back and secured the Thompson against his shoulder, ready to shoot the moment he spotted anything. "All right, let's go."
Wescott jumped through the gap, splashing in a puddle on the otherside, and sprinted hard to the right, Thompson pointed high. Behind him, Burkeley led 2nd platoon through the gap, the twenty men behind him stumbling through muddy water and dead rubble.
Fire from the top windows cracked down as A Company troops hopped over the shattered stones littering the gap in the wall, and Wescott saw four distinct flashes from the windows, all carbines. A moment later, there was the tear-paper rip of a Schmeisser, lighter than the rapid metallic thud of machine gun fire, but still quite menacing, and incoming fire fluttered past Wescott, sweeping behind him and sending the private behind him to his knees. He slid into a puddle and then dropped face-first into it.
The Schmeisser rounds came from the open lobby of the three-story building, and BAR men from the wall shot into the dark recesses. Movement shuddered from inside as chips of wood and dust sprayed from the impact of automatic fire, and Wescott and another stopped and pointed their sights against the movement, Thompsons roaring.
Dust popped off the sills of the top four windows as M1 rifle fire pelted the defenders inside. Wescott saw Burkeley leading 2nd platoon around to the left side of the building, and Captain Wayne rushing across the right, boots stomping heavily into the puddles on the street. As the remainder of A Company filed onto either side of the building, the fire from the top story slackened. Inside, the Germans were rushing down the stairs, to exit through the back where Burkeley and his men had taken up position at the intersection behind.
Six men splashed into the street, firing into the doorway they were fleeing from, and second platoon opened fire, hitting three of the Germans as they pulled into the next multi-story structure fifty meters away. Their gloved hands reached towards the falling rain, limply clutching at the clouds.
"We've got them on the run!" Wayne shouted, and Wescott could barely hear his voice through the pattering rain. "Push 'em through!"
2nd platoon covered A Company's rush across the street, primarily headed by 1st platoon, but Wescott was the only one to catch the sniper's wink as a sergeant fell, a gurgle ripping from his throat, along with his trachea.
"Sniper, sniper!" Wescott alerted, and a few of the 1st platoon troops halted in their tracks, some looking at Wescott, the others at the buildings, searching.
"Keep moving, close-in and get to cover!" Wescott waved them up, and watched as Wayne turned about, grabbed the sergeant in charge of 1st platoon, and pulled him forward, into the rain-drenched street running into town.
It sounded like suicide, advancing against a sniper, but it was a lesson that the Rangers had learned more than once in their combat experience; even when enemy fire was extremely heavy, it would slacken and disappear altogether once men would maneuver against them, to close the distance between themselves and the fire.
Wayne led the platoon into the building that the Germans had occupied, and flashes of automatic fire lit-up the windows from inside, accompanied by screams and wails, as thought it were some chamber of horrors. Meanwhile, the sniper's rifle cracked again, and the last soldier in the platoon went down; he'd taken cover outside the building, but apparently it wasn't very good.
"First Sergeant, get some covering fire on that sniper!" Wayne shouted through the rain from across the street.
Wescott brought his BAR men up. "Three blocks down, second-story room, window on the left, go."
Heavy thuds pounded against the sheet of gray falling from the sky, the automatic rifles plastering another apartment building down the road. The sniper's rifle flashed once, barely noticeable as the impacts of the BAR rounds piffed rapidly around the window, and another 1st platoon soldier fell, momentarily clutching at his gut, the exit wound the size of a fist.
One block ahead, soldiers from B Company were crossing a four-way intersection, advancing to the next building, a bakery. As the platoon reached the center of the street, there was another metallic tear-paper rip, this one heavier than a Schmeisser, and much more rapid - an MG-42, firing from the structure adjacent to the bakery, and the lead B Company soldiers disintegrated, dropped to the street one after the other, their blood converging into a single stream in the water.
No last words, not a sound. Just a violent jerk, then a slow fall, the splash inconspicuous as the MG-42 continued to pound more fire into the platoon.
Leutnant Geissler's 3. kompanie had the Americans halted, for a while atleast. His forward sentries, the loose line of rifle men out on the edge of the village, had come back and reported the main points of assault. The main line of resistance, closer to the center of the town, was then able to re-organize and re-position in order to meet the American advance with whatever advantages they could produce.
Geissler could hear his words from a few days ago, or was it a week? "The Americans have linked their beach heads. It is now imperative for us to hold our line, to keep Saint Lo out of their hands. If they command the crossroads there, we will be finished in Normandy."
"And perhaps, my leutnant, that would not be so bad. For us to be finished with Normandy."
Geissler had stared at the sergeant, the emotions in him tearing down what little was left of his faith into fluttering pages. "Perhaps. But the Russians are pressing in from the east. Our homes will be destroyed, our families will be killed, our entire way of life will be assimilated into Bolshevism. Once we are through here, once our Normandy has been finished, we will be finished as well. Because we've been struggling for four years for everything that we value in our lives, and in those four years the war has taken away all of it. We haven't been fighting for our loved ones and our homes in Normandy. They're already ghosts. Just like us. The ghost army of Normandy, fighting the ghost war."
As reports from the two companies filtered through to the battalion commander, armor of the 29th Division's supporting tank battalion entered the Norman village, machine guns chattering, sending tracers shooting through the rainfall. The remainder of A Company filed loosely behind the three Shermans which now motored onto the main road running through town, headed towards the lead 1st and 2nd platoon sections holding their positions just short of the road that the German sniper and machine gun team had well-covered. Wescott scrambled away from his cover and into the street, to hop onto the back of the lead tank to shout at the tank commander - "Sniper three blocks ahead, bring the goddamn house down."
"HE," the tank commander told his crew, "Sniper on the second floor."
A routine checklist of firing procedure - like medics treating the wounded.
Geissler and a half-strength platoon crouched against the half-collapsed wall of an office building, rifles and submachine guns ready to fire at a moment's notice. Through the rubble they had taken position in they could see American armor roaring down the main road. Concrete and stone scattered across the street as machine gun fire tore into every building in their path. Geissler kept his platoon quiet, and told them to hold.
The main guns of the tanks suddenly coughed, the force of the deep boom pounding into the bones of Geissler's company. Two black blobs screamed through the street, their powerful movement kicking up the dust and pebbles resting on the concrete below them, and the building two blocks down, where Geissler last saw one of his snipers, was enveloped in smoke and falling stone. The private within the building had been slammed against the wall behind him, with heavy shrapnel wounds to his face and head, and he suddenly felt weightless. As he hit the floor below him, he felt himself lurch as the concrete crumbled away, the smoke and falling debris still pelting him, and then he crashed down to the street below, onto the jagged edges of the rubble that had once been a wall.
"Sniper's clear!"
"Move up!"
Wescott let Burkeley take the platoon out from cover, moving down the street with weapons shouldered. The Shermans were not far behind, and they motored single-file onto the street, machine guns firing high into the second and third stories of the French town. Burkeley halted the men just short of the edge of the block, where the score of B Company bodies lie bleeding in the street. Their blood had pooled into a single puddle, having been shot even after they fell in order to ensure that they would not be able to recover. The German machine gun had not fired on Burkeley's platoon, but he knew that German fire-discipline was extremely good - they were willing to take artillery and stay silent, as long as it meant they could gun down the advancing Americans once they were out in the middle of the open.
The Shermans were notified of the machine gun presence ahead, by a huddling Wescott mounted on the lead Sherman's turret, squinting against the rain.
"Kraut MG up ahead, bring the roof down on them."
"You got it." The tank commander, who was no older - probably younger - than Wescott, replaced his headset and slammed the hatch down.
Wescott dis-mounted the tank, bent low with his arm covering the front of his helmet, and Wayne shouted at him again, knowing that no one would hear. The rain and the rumble of the tanks and the chatter of machine guns a block away took his voice away, as if he weren't even speaking.
"Panzerschreck! Panzerschreck!"
There was a white stream of smoke from the rubble underneath a collapsed window that impacted the lead Sherman, driving into the turret, followed by a flash of burning smoke and shattered metal. Wescott fell into the water, deafened, the heat of the burning tank behind him wrapping around him. It continued to motor forward, as though driven by a ghost crew.
"Panzerschreck!" Wayne had begun to sprint towards Burkeley's platoon. "Panzerschreck!"
The men behind Wescott had taken cover behind the second Sherman, and were firing into the building, which was not more than thirty meters away behind them. A few Germans had hidden in cover, allowing 2nd platoon and their supporting armor to roll past them. They were eighteen-year olds with disposable anti-tank weapons, panzerfausts.
"Anti-tank teams," Wescott tried to alert Burkeley ahead, but the wind had been knocked out of him. And as he rose, he was thrown to the street again as the second Sherman slewed to a halt, its track un-wrapping from the chassis, the American squad behind it downed from the concussion, one of them with shrapnel wounds to the face.
The machine gun ahead of Burkeley took the opportunity to fire into the Americans scattering across the street, hitting the soldiers as they rushed back to deal with the AT teams or around to the other side of the street to use the destroyed Shermans as cover against further AT fire. They fell with wet thuds, as the life streamed out of their bodies in red rivulets.
"Return fire!" Burkeley waved his arm at the window across the street, where the MG-42 continued to flash in rapid sequence. The machine gun swept over to his position, the crew recognizing Burkeley's movements as those of a unit leader, and he flattened himself against the face of the building behind him. Wet chips of stone splintered away from Burkeley's cover, but through it he could see a few men opposite him firing through windows with their rifles, frantically aiming for quick kills.
Behind rapidly deteoriating walls of aged stone, the German machine gun crew now fired blindly, somewhat suppressed by the heavy small-arms fire pelting against them.
"We need support or we must fall back!" a replacement corporal was shouting to his comrades. The crew knew this, they had picked up all the principles of combat in Russia, but they had also learned that there was no principle to combat - only move or be maneuvered against, shoot or be shot against. There was no support, but they had orders to hold.
Geissler took his platoon into an open courtyard, a block away from the American flank. Only two of the enemy tanks had been disabled, but if the Americans were left un-pressured, they would be able to break completely through Geissler's main line-of-resistance. And, he supposed, dealing with fire from one tank would be easier than dealing with fire from three.
"Squads deploy here!" Geissler pointed out two main positions - the second-floor windows of a church, and the partly-destroyed wall a few meters away.
Among the burning Shermans, Wescott and a handful of others fired point-blank into the ruins just in front of them, where the remaining tank had slammed a 75mm shell in the front-door. However, grenades were still popping out of the rubble, and a submachine gun farther back continued to patter into the last Sherman. Wayne, half-slipping in the rain, sprinted just behind the last Sherman and threw himself against the wall next to the gaping, smoking hole of the shell's entry. A moment later, his grenade blew out the remaining glass in a partly-shattered window, and the submachine gun had been silenced.
Two soldiers behind the immobilized Sherman staggered forward against the rumbling machine, the blood from their wounds spiralling away on the street as the rain pounded against them, and only then did Wescott see and hear the incoming fire ripping past from behind.
"Christ," and he had slipped as he splashed across the street, the rifle fire still buzzing past him.
Burkeley heard the MG-42 cease-fire, and he risked a glance; steam rose profusely from the window - the barrel was over-heating. Before he could order a move, the third Sherman "brewed up," burst into flame, as a panzerfaust round from above crashed down into the turret, killing and burning the crew almost instantaneously.
Wayne saw Burkeley hesitate for a moment, their eyes meeting in a tense instant as tracers began to stream in from the courtyard, and then Burkeley turned to take his men against the machine gun. That is what Wayne would have told him to do had they been in shouting distance. A rifle round ricocheted off the burning Sherman, and Wayne's attention was brought to the half-dozen men scrambling for cover. He ordered two men to deal with the remaining AT crew in the building, and then deployed the others at the street corner, to hold for now. 1st platoon stood ready behind him.
"Deploy the machine guns!"
Burkeley's 2nd platoon, perhaps fifteen men available at the moment, sprinted towards the bakery, stomping clumsily over the fallen bodies of the B Company platoon section. The German machine gun position did not give any preventive fire, but two snipers a block down did. One of the fifteen twisted sharply as his feet shot under him, a lazy arc of blood swirling from the exit wound behind his heart into the darkened pool behind him.
The whine of a plummeting artillery shell shrieked down into the street a hundred meters ahead of them, and the concrete blasted upwards against the gray of the clouds. Not long after, a second round dropped sixty meters behind 2nd platoon, and the rush against the machine gun broke apart into a desperate scatter for cover. They were ranging shots, meant to zero-in onto specific positions, and the Germans were very, very adept at gunnery. A third round burst in the center of the intersection, and the 2nd platoon soldiers there cart-wheeled up and down, helmets and weapons tumbling away in the smoke of falling bits of concrete.
Soon, Burkeley's platoon had been divided into three clusters; one group had fallen back to their original position, and two others had made it into the buildings on the German side of the intersection, one in the bakery and the other in the building across from it. Shells dropped in increasingly rapid frequency, six bursts, as the Germans loosed a complete salvo, and then the machine gun was firing again, stabbing into the bakery through the thin walls separating the buildings. Even with the Americans firing just thirty meters away, the machine gun position was too well-protected to be suppressed; the linked ammunition belt trembled through the weapon's feed, sending a continuous stream of fire into the next building.
Brown saw the men ahead of him melt away one-by-one as the MG-42 roared, the holes in the wall multiplying at a frighteningly rapid pace, and even the soldiers cowering behind wooden furniture convulsed as automatic fire ripped into them, the splinters of wood falling down along with the rain leaking through the roof. Ice picks pierced into Brown, replaced immediately by searing pain and heat, but the pain wasn't what he expected, because he was too shocked by the sudden realization that he was the only one moving in the room. Everyone else was silent, and the silence became apparent, too, because the machine gun had spent its ammunition. Brown staggered forward against one soldier, and shook him with a quivering hand, as though to shake a parting word from him.
His mouth did not move, his face remained dead.
Burkeley saw a soldier, his rank un-identifiable because they were tattered and coated in blood, stumble uneasily from the building, and he was sure the Germans saw as well, but no one shot, no one fired. No one waved or encouraged the wounded soldier to come forward, to get to cover, because he was drenched in blood, his torso and arms shredded by five distinct machine gun rounds. He dropped lifelessly after a few steps, in absolute silence.
Wayne took a squad of 1st platoon into the nearest building to start maneuvering against the Germans. The remainder of the section had wandered into the street, firing down into the plaza, where MG-42 fire now cascaded forth as heavily as the rain did. They were hunched over, shooting through tightly open eyes, and within the span of a few seconds, three of them had fallen, bodies jerking unnaturally several times, as a machine gun tracked the ten troops in the street. The section froze, suddenly aware of the heavy fire directed at them, and Wayne, shouting from a window, ordered the soldiers to cover.
"Get the fuck out of the street!" Wayne rarely cursed. "Get the fuck out of the street!"
They were replacement troops, even the sergeant in charge.
Wescott skidded behind one of the Brownings now spraying down the block, and crossed the street, bringing the seven bewildered troops to the cover of a burned-out parlor, the shrapnel from one of the Sherman's shells still steaming. The replacements dove and rolled into the rubble in the parlor, helmets bobbing, and they pressed themselves against the dead stone. Wescott told the men to calm down and stay ready, and watched the street ahead of him.
Across the street, Wayne and his squad leap-frogged forward, timing their shooting and their sprints exactly, so that no one would be caught in the open in an alley or on the sidewalk with silence at their backs and a sheet of iron to their front. Stone melted away on the other side of their cover, the automatic fire ripping apart the material as though it were cloth. None of the squad showed any signs of fear; they had been in the mess since D-Day, this was nothing they hadn't seen before. Wayne, especially, lunged ahead mechanically, rifle pointed low, eyes on the muzzle flashes flickering ahead of him.
Geissler did not fire his weapon. He rarely did. Even when he locked eyes with one of the Americans closing on the courtyard, he did not raise the slickened steel in his hands. Geissler kept a gloved hand on the private next to him, telling him to hold, hold, telling everyone to hold their ground. Their machine guns were steaming, the metal within them creaking, and the crews had paused for a moment, to switch barrels. The Americans were a stone's throw away.
The sergeant in charge of the squad had his back against the wall when Wayne passed his men, who were emptying their magazines out against the Germans now thirty meters away. The next door led into an enclosed courtyard, the walls surrounding it partly destroyed and the church within standing as though it were un-touched.
"The Germans aren't pulling back, sir," the sergeant's monotone was hard to hear in the thundering brrrrrp.
"Then we'll kill them," Wayne replied, and then he had sprung out the door, rifle firing two blind shots, then zero-ing on the Germans in the church. He saw one slump to the side, very slowly, strange in contrast to the frantic flashes of yellow-white around him, and the other jerked away from the window, to take up another firing position. The Germans were suddenly rising from their positions, weapons coughing evermore violently as Wayne closed the distance between them, and then everyone was suddenly shouting, unintelligibly, the fear and tension becoming so unbearable they had to relieve it some how, but even the act of relieving it only produced more, as German and American, officer and soldier, man and man tore into each other in utter abandon.
Wescott and the squad behind him ceased fire as Wayne broke into the courtyard, and began to sprint ahead, to join the rest of the platoon in the assault. The Brownings behind them were moving, re-positioning themselves to a better-protected site, and so around them it was relatively silent - only the interspersed cracks of rifle fire ahead, and the rain pounding down on them, and a lone machine gun firing somewhere down the block. Wescott heard shouting, then, as he saw Wayne's men bear down on the Germans - a grenade exploded, the black of it drenching the 1st platoon soldiers, but they were too close now, the detonation having been behind them, and German grenades were too small to be of much use, anyway. Wayne's rifle flashed several times into the heart of one gray-clad form, a Schmeisser swept over two of 1st platoon, bayonets were drawn desperately. Machine gun crews rose from their useless weapons, only to be shoved down and then bludgeoned to bloody flesh with rifle butts. The sergeant in charge of the squad took a round in the chest and staggered to the side, but his own rifle remained at his shoulder, then cracked as the German from the church window sagged. The sergeant lie still against the stone a moment later as two of his men rushed past him, into a pair of flapping overcoats, their submachine guns stuttering, the blood of the Germans stuttering in reply, and then the Americans were bleeding as well, the three Germans of a rifle squad over-taking them and shooting them in the legs, then bashing their bodies with their weapons. A dozen rifle rounds later, those Germans were crawling away or clutching at their wounds, the three Americans behind them reloading their Garands to blast them with another barrage.
And the struggle in the courtyard was over. The sporadic rifle fire remained, but it wasn't the desperate defense of a few Germans in the church windows; now it was an American private, his face dotted with blood, shooting into the motionless bodies of the Germans lying against the walls, wiping the blood that fell from his own head into his eyes with a bloody sleeve.
Wayne stood at the other edge of the courtyard, rifle held loosely in his hands near his hip, and watched the wounded German officer push himself against the courtyard wall behind him, breathing raggedly. He didn't look up at the American captain, only at the thirty-four bodies strewn across the courtyard and hanging from the windows. Seventeen of those were the men of his strongest platoon - the men who had survived the battle since D-Day morning. Everything was lost.
Geissler didn't speak when he did look up at Wayne. None of the others would have spoken, either. They had nothing to say. Ghosts didn't have words. They had been butchering each other, and now Geissler saw a man before him, rifle slick with red, face grim and full of some dark emotion. But he knew that the American had nothing to say, as well. Seventeen German men, seventeen American men, what could be said after thirty-four men died like this? Geissler looked the American in the eyes, and he waited for the gunshot. His Normandy was finished.
Just the rifle thump and then the rain. No last words.
|
|
|
|
|
Home
Forum
Starcraft Tournaments
