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Praetorium Honoris

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Ambush

(Source)
Soldat Jean-Yves Cahun had at first counted himself lucky to have slipped out of the German encirclement of Dunkirk. He had assumed that the Royal Navy would only be taking off British soldiers from the beaches. He had been wrong, French troops had been evacuated as well. But the vast majority of them had been returned to France within hours. They had escaped captivity at Dunkirk, but faced a renewed German onslaught.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire as the Yanks might say, Jean-Yves thought. Though the French expression "aller de mal en pis¹" was far more accurate and succinct.

Two days ago, after escaping from Dunkirk, Jean-Yves had made contact with a group of soldiers that he initially thought were French. Their sergeant spoke French, but with an odd accent, well, odd to Jean-Yves. For all he knew the man could have been from a section of France he didn't know, speaking a dialect he had never heard. But when two of the other men had laughed at the look on his face and began talking in a language unfamiliar to him, he was completely confused. Until the sergeant noticed his confusion.

"Ah, you think we are French, yes? We are Polish and we too are lost."

Jean-Yves looked even more puzzled until the sergeant explained, "We are with Sikorski, 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade. We were on a training course when the Germans entered Belgium. We've been trying to rejoin our unit which was outside Reims the last we knew."

"You're a long way from home Sergent, Reims is a good 150 kilometers from here." Jean-Yves pointed out.

"Warszawa further still." the sergeant said in a voice filled with despair.

Before Jean-Yves could reply, the sergeant continued, "We were driven out of our homeland by the Niemcy, now it appears that France is falling as well. We had thought to go to Dunkirk and leave with the English, but were too late." Pausing, the sergeant looked at the rifle Jean-Yves held.

"Do you know how to use that?"

Jean-Yves simply nodded, he felt no need to explain himself to these men. Though he did note that the Poles were all carrying the MAS-36, the same rifle as his own. Which eased his concerns about obtaining ammunition. The MAS-36 was intended to replace the older rifles still in use but issue wasn't all that widespread.

"I've killed Boches with this rifle, how are you lads fixed for ammunition?"

"We have plenty, we have yet to encounter any of the Niemcy. How much do you need?"

"Twenty rounds, if you can spare them."

"Where are you headed Soldat? Are you planning on killing more of these Boches, as you call them?"

Jean-Yves grinned, then said, "You boys feel like going hunting?"

The Poles all nodded.


Jürgen was dozing in the passenger seat of the LKW², his squad had been selected to provide the escort for a supply convoy moving up to the front. He had no problems with that, it certainly beat walking.

Officially the 2nd and 3rd Squads had been combined, the platoon was at half strength for now. Bernd Osterfeld had 1st Squad, Jürgen the 2nd, the other platoons in the company were also short of men. Replacements were promised but were not yet forthcoming.

Oberschütze Leon Schwarz, Wittman's old assistant, had recruited a couple of men from another company during a pickup football³ match. Leutnant Acker, upon seeing the records of the men Schwarz brought in, stated, "No wonder 3rd Company was glad to be rid of these two." For in truth, neither Schütze Christian Möller nor Schütze Martin Busch would ever be mistaken for choir boys.

"Don't worry Herr Leutnant, these lads are from my village, they're good lads, I'll keep them in line." Schwarz had assured his lieutenant. While skeptical Acker decided, "Why not? We need the bodies." So von Lüttwitz's squad had an extra man.

Now the squad looked like this:
  • Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier Jürgen von Lüttwitz, Squad Leader
  • Obergefreiter Sepp Wittman, Assistant Squad Leader
  • Oberschütze Leon Schwarz
  • Schütze Bodo Hermann
  • Schütze Michael Offenbach
  • Schütze Karl Wachsmuth
  • Schütze Hans Warstadt
  • Schütze Walter Schnabel
  • Schütze Christian Möller
  • Schütze Martin Busch
  • Schütze Helmut Schneider
Jürgen was looking over his roster at the moment that a rifle round pierced the LKW's windscreen and blew glass into the driver's face. That man, Oberfahrer⁴ Manfred Weiss, though partially blinded, kept his composure long enough to stop the LKW off to the side of the road. The drivers behind followed suit, not knowing what was going on but trusting their lead driver. When they too came under fire, the men from 2nd Squad reacted quickly.

Jürgen pulled Weiss out the passenger side door and was pleased to hear his squad MG 34 open fire from two trucks back. Schwartz and Möller were manning that weapon and had brought it into action quickly. Weiss was moaning and trying to rub his eyes.

"Stop that or you'll blind yourself." reaching down for the man's canteen, he told Weiss to lean to one side and just run water over his eyes. "Don't rub them!" Jürgen again barked as he moved up the ditch to ascertain where the fire was coming from.

It ended almost as quickly as it started when the enemy ceased fire and moved off.

Wittmann came up to Jürgen's position and said, "Delaying action, looks like the boys expecting this shipment are shit out of luck for now. Two of the LKW's took some damage, the drivers say they need their maintenance guys to fix them. I sent Warstadt back to report to company."

"By himself?" Jürgen thought it imprudent but then realized that they needed the bodies here, in case the enemy hit them again.

Before Wittmann could respond, Jürgen said, "Good decision Sepp, we need as many bodies here as possible. Anyone hit besides my driver?"

"No, not a scratch. Just two f**ked up LKWs."


"I don't think you hit anyone." Sergent Bartosz Podbielski laughed, "But that lead driver will need new underwear I'm sure!"

Jean-Yves shook his head. "That shot should have hit the driver dead on, it surprised me that he seemed alive. Now answer me this, why did we withdraw?"

One of the Poles, Damian Krempa, looked at the Frenchman and said, "You saw how many there were, a couple of squads at least, if you count the drivers. We are but six men." He nodded at the other Poles and said something to them. For Privates Klaudiusz Mierzejewski, 
Mariusz Perzan, and Juliusz Dziadosz didn't speak French. Mierzejewski spoke Russian in addition to Polish and Perzan was fluent in German. Only young Dziadosz had no other tongue but the one his mother spoke.

"He's right Cahun, we delayed them for a bit. We'll move down the road a few kilometers. If we don't find a French or Polish unit to join up with, then we'll become highwaymen, attacking Niemcy convoys wherever we find them. Does that suit you?" Podbielski asked.

"I suppose, mon Sergent."

"Perhaps we can find you a scope for that M-36 as well. That wasn't a bad shot really, I made the range to be 200 meters or so." Krempa said.

"Closer to 250, I didn't account for the wind ..."

"Don't worry chłopaczek⁵, you did better than I expected. We'll make you a myśliwy yet!"

Jean-Yves looked puzzled for a moment, "Mish-she-vlay?"

The Poles all laughed, Krempa looked at Jean-Yves and said, "A chasseur, a jäger, what the Tommies call a hunter. I think you'd do well as a huntsman in the Carpathians back home. Maybe someday ..."

"After we drive the Boches out of France." Jean-Yves hissed.

"Or maybe kill them all," Podbielski suggested, "that's my preferred solution."

The men got up and moved off as night fell. The sergeant wanted to put as much distance as possible from where they'd ambushed the supply column. The Germans were a thorough race, they'd be looking for their attackers at first light.




¹ Go from bad to worse.
² Lastkraftwagen, the German word for a truck. Typically pronounced letter by letter, in German it would sound like "ell-kah-vay."
³ Fußball, or soccer if you prefer.
⁴ Senior driver.
⁵ Boy or lad. (Polish)

34 comments:

  1. Well the game is afoot for these leave-behinds. Amazing the number of photos out there on the InterNets.

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    1. Those photos help me get the story off the ground, that's for sure. I go look and see something interesting, then I try and build a story around it. Usually works.

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  2. Sarge, I had no-idea that the French were lifted off at Dunkirk - or returned! (Apologies, it is TB. Apparently there is something wonky with Blogger at the moment and I cannot comment as myself).

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    1. Yes, they were. Surprised me too. As to the new Blogger commenting "feature," it wasn't broke, so Google "fixed" it. Incompetent buggers aren't they, notice that you can't preview and edit a comment anymore? But they managed to put this useless corporate boilerplate crap in, didn't they? This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Google continues to suck, they used to be so good at what they did.

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    2. I'd though all the French who left at Dunkirk ended up forming the Free French army, then again I though that France was finished after Dunkirk. More to learn!

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    3. The British weren't completely gone from the Continent after Dunkirk and France did fight on, but only for a couple of weeks.

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  3. Oddly Sarge, it does not seem to be across every site, just some Blogger sites. SIGH. This may drive even me to do something about it...

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    1. Sarge, I seem to have "found" the fix - apparently one has to unblock "third party cookies". On the bright side, this seems to ahve worked. On the less bright side, this is annoying.

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    2. Unblocking 3rd Party cookies is a bad idea (allows you to be tracked across the web). Had no effect here, so I went back to my earlier settings.

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    3. Thanks Sarge. Good to know and I will continue to sort through (reset mine as well).

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  4. Crusty Old TV Tech here. Another good section of a chapter of the story.

    One of the Polish names lept out at me, Podbielski. There is a Berlin U-Bahn station named for a street, Podbielskiallee, on the line to Oskar-Helene-Heim. That was the stop for the Berlin BX. I remember it well. Spent a month at Tempelhof in 1984.

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    1. The street was named for Prussian Minister of State Victor von Podbielski (1844–1916), son of General Eugen Anton Theophil von Podbielski. Prussians and Poles shared a number of family names.

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  5. Hey Old AFSarge;

    I had known that a whole lot of Frenchmen were lifted off at Dunkirk, but I didn't know that most were returned to France. I learned something new. I had read that they were incorporated into the "Free French". I knew that the France fought on for a little longer after England withdrew at Dunkirk but it was a forgone conclusion. The French Army fought but most of their officers, especially their senior officers were mentally beaten before the war began and they couldn't handle the speed of the German advance.

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    1. Defeatism was rampant in the French high command, many were also delusional. A really good film to watch to get a flavor of those times is De Gaulle. Though he is looked down upon by many English speakers, he was actually a good man who had French interests at heart. Trying to hold on to the French "Empire" - Algeria and Indochina - were his biggest mistakes. But again, it was what the French wanted. He was devoted to his special needs daughter throughout her life. The film shows that well. I highly recommend it.

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  6. My issue with DeGaulle was his "all-me/nobody else can do anything" approach. I understand it, but don't like it. Gimme LeClerc anytime.
    Boat Guy

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    1. De Gaulle and LeClerc were operating at different levels of responsibility. De Gaulle kept France relevant. I never got that "all-me/nobody else can do anything" vibe from De Gaulle. A lot of the negativity attached to that name is probably due to his relations with both Eisenhower and Churchill. Not to mention the post-war, particularly NATO, activities which soured many in the West on the man. Was he difficult to work with? Yes. No doubt, but so was Churchill. Just my 2 cents on the man, I admired him.

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    2. If you look more into the intra-French military arrangements you will likely find that DeGaulle ruthlessly squashed any possible "competition, insisting that only he was legitimately the "Free French". Again I understand the impulse but it was counterproductive
      Boat Guy

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    3. I get that, but would you have had any confidence in a fellow French general? Say what you will about De Gaulle, he was a fighter. (And yes, he did have an elevated opinion of himself.)

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    4. Yeah I guess one could say he had an "elevated opinion of himself"...dude would make fighter pilots and SEALs seem self-effacing.
      Boat Guy

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  7. Good Story, Sarge, but then they always are. On the other hand, This new policy SUCKS. Blogger, IMHO, has always sucked, but they've now take sucking to a near infinite level, They're Olympic Gold Medal winners of all Suckage events.
    Have you given any thought to moving the blog elsewhere? Or does Blogger own the data?
    My browser of choice, Brave, doesn't work for any kind of commenting. I can read posts, but that's it. I haven't looked very far, but Blogger seems to be the only platform Brave doesn't work on. But it doesn't allow trackers (aka cookies) of any kind, so an expected outcome. I'm commenting via Firefox.
    Did I mention how badly Blogger Sucks?

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    1. Yes, the way they do things amazes me. It's like they're trying to suck.

      As for changing platforms, not going to happen. We own our posts, not Google, but porting them to another platform would be non-trivial. There are many browsers, as they involve software, they all kinda suck in my eyes. In my experience "software development" and "mindless tinkering" are damned near synonyms. For a fella who's spent most of his professional career working with computers it's an odd viewpoint. But my experiences tend to make me distrust software, it will screw you when you least expect it.

      All blogging platforms have issues, I'm used to Google's. Pluses and minuses, I've used more than one platform, this one is, at the end of the day, free. So you get what you pay for.

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    2. Juvat, I am typing this using the private window function of Brave. After entering my Blogger log in, it seems to be working.

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  8. There were about 100,000 French military personnel in England after Dunkirk (evacuated along with the British troops that managd to get away). BUT and this is a very big but, once Petain signed a peace agreement with the Germans, tha vast majority elected to return to France and support the Vichy government. They were NOT simply identified as French and returned within hours of arriving on English soil. They were still being repatriated as late as December 1940 and into 1941.

    The book "Englands last war against France" subtitled "Fighting Vichy 1940 - 1942, by Colin Smith details this in great detail as well as the subsequent fighting against the British and their support (via Petain) of Germany (Syria, Madagascar, Mers el Kabir etc.).

    Another one that is worth searchin out and reading is Operation Fish by Alfred Draper which details the French hoarding of their gold (and the French "economic miracle" post war - they essentially did not pay for it) and their refusal to hand over the gold that they held for others, notably the Poles despite the Polish Government in exile begging them to release it to the British to pay for their expenses. The French turned over the Polish gold to the Soviets post war.

    Je n'aime pas les Francais.

    Phil B

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    1. Many French POWs were put to work in Germany as laborers, they were held hostage to ensure Vichy "behaved." They didn't return to France and start collaborating with the Germans, as you imply. Yes, the Vichyites were nasty bastards, but they did NOT truly represent France.

      Frankly I'm tired of all the Francophobia in this country.

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    2. Please read the book and you will see that the French that were in England demanded to return to France. If they did not want to actively fight alongside the British, then had they offered to do things like guard prisoners, police various overseas territories or worked in transportation, then that would have freed up the equivalent number of British troops.

      Phil B

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    3. Of course they wanted to return to France. I'm telling a story of the men and women at the lower levels of the fight. Not the politicians and the generals, all too many of whom were not very nice people. Regardless of what country they served. This is a novel, not a history book.

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  9. Nice to see some Poles in action... preparing next ewok report, should be raedy today

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    1. Got it, I figured you'd want to see some Poles in action!

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