At least we won this one… Trumbull thought in silence, smiling grimly at two more kills he could add to a tally that already made him an ace several times over. Few and far between these days, but at least we one this one…! But his heart knew how pyrrhic a victory it had been…
On the road below, a column of camouflaged armoured vehicles ‘at the halt’ watched nervously as Trumbull’s second kill howled past low overhead, its props slashing through the treetops on the opposite side of the lane as it carried on regardless. From his position half out of the commander’s hatch, Sergeant Jimmy Davids let loose at the crashing bomber as it passed over him with a long burst from the Lewis gun mounted above his hatch, the act probably useless but making him feel better all the same. The twenty-year old machine gun the crew had ‘scrounged up’ from somewhere or other was fussy, prone to jams, and in Davids’ opinion a royal pain in the arse to keep in anything close to reliable condition, but he wasn’t complaining: reports of what Luftwaffe air superiority had done to his colleagues in the BEF on the other side of the Channel were damning indeed, and anything that could be done to improve a tank’s anti-aircraft capability — even if only marginally — was well worth it in the opinion of he and his crew, for morale value if nothing else.
“That’s ’im fooked,” Lance-Corporal Angus Connolly observed with evil glee from his position forward. Although the man’s disembodied voice had come through over the intercom from somewhere below the line of the tank’s turret, Davids knew the foul-minded, oft-drunk Scotsman (with a mastery of the bleeding obvious) would be watching from the vantage point of his open driver’s hatch in the middle of the Matilda’s thick glacis plate.
“That’s one load of Jerry buggers they can send home in boxes,” Davids agreed in his lilting, Welsh accent with little sympathy for their enemies’ plight.
“Goin’ ’ome in fuckin’ matchboxes by the sound of it!” Corporal Gerald Gawler, the tank’s gunner and resident, bad-tempered Yorkshireman chimed in from somewhere below Davids in the turret as the Junkers hit the treeline across the field and finally exploded. Neither he nor Hodges, the cockney loader, could see anything from their stations within the turret, but the sound of the explosion was loud enough to give a good idea of what had happened.
“…Squareheaded bastards!” The gunner added as a venomous afterthought, as if there was anyone left in the world who’d ever been within earshot of the man who didn’t already know how much Gerald Gawler hated Germans. With most people in Britain, hatred of Germans was an accepted norm in the present climate…with the gunner of Grosvenor, Squadron A, 7th Royal Tank Regiment, 1st Army Tank Brigade, British Home Forces it was a passion of pathological proportions. That salient fact made the irony of his first name’s colloquial form even greater, and the rest of the unit took great glee in addressing him only as ‘Jerry’ as a result. If there was anyone in the entire squadron — save for perhaps the CO and 2IC — who hadn’t been sworn at profusely by Jerry Gawler on a regular basis because of it, Davids wasn’t aware of their existence.
Davids, the tank’s commander, shuddered a little at the sight of that fiery wreckage that’d once been a state-of-the-art fighting machine. It was far enough away to be a spectacle of interest rather than something directly dangerous but it was a sobering sight nonetheless. Had those 88’s gone looking for game other than the RAF fighters they’d obviously found and (to Davids’ mind) unnecessarily annoyed, there might well have been Luftwaffe bombs crashing down on their armoured column rather than crashing Luftwaffe bombers.
The sergeant had no illusions as to how well his Matilda might withstand a direct hit from one of those lethal ‘eggs’…the answer of course being ‘not at all’… Grosvenor was heavily armoured for its era, and experience in France had shown that Matilda II infantry tanks could stand up to enemy panzers quite well, but air attack was something else entirely. There was little enough room in that cramped turret with three men in it jammed in behind the breeches of the 2-pounder main gun and coaxial Vickers machine gun, and what space there was they were forced to share with volumes of ammunition, radio equipment and other bits and pieces that filled up every available nook and cranny. The stocky, young Welsh sergeant didn’t even want to think about how they’d all fair if they caught a direct bomb hit or the vehicle caught fire. His hatch was barely big enough to let him through in a hurry and there’d be little time in an emergency to get the rest of the crew out.
That was one of the reasons the convoy had stopped upon detection of the approaching aircraft, the line of eight Matilda tanks halting its leisurely progress along the lane the moment they’d identified a danger of attack. Although still apprehensive, feelings of fear and tension had subsided somewhat upon realisation the RAF seemed to have the matter in hand and that an air battle was already in progress. Normally the whole unit would’ve been transported by rail, but with the state of the railways in southern England, that would’ve taken far too long and would’ve been far more dangerous. Trains were a juicy target for enemy aircraft and were a lot harder to camouflage or hide than tanks under their own power.
With the encirclement and subsequent surrender of the BEF at Dunkirk a month before, Squadron A (Gallant, Griffin, Goodfellow, Grosvenor, Growler, Gunfighter, Gracious and Giant) were now no less than half of the entire strength of what was left of 7RTR. Indeed, that newly-reformed unit and its even less-experienced sister, Squadron B, were the only heavy tank units in the whole of the British Isles, although 1st Armoured Division could also field something like thirty-odd Cruiser tanks of various marks to supplement their heavier colleagues. What was left of the Hussar and Dragoon regiments probably had as many of the obsolescent Mark-VI light tanks, but in truth 7RTR was the only real opposition to German armour that Home Forces possessed, and it wasn’t just Davids who knew it.
The Hussar and Dragoon regiments could be discounted outright for any use other than scouting, and the way things were developing in modern armoured warfare, not even all that much use at that. Like the Matilda Mark-I his tank had replaced, most British light tanks were only armed with heavy machine guns that’d been shown in France to be worse than useless against modern opposition. The armour on the British Mark-VI light tank was at best only 13mm thick, and even the 30mm cannon of the enemy’s P-1 panzers could easily penetrate at ranges far greater than that at which the Mark-IV could inflict damage in return — if at all — with its .50-calibre Vickers machine gun.
The medium Cruiser tanks were a little better as a fighting proposition, if still not really up to scratch. Although better armoured than the older Mark-VI, they were still quite vulnerable to the standard issue Wehrmacht tank and anti-tank guns. They did however at least have the same armament as the Matilda II — the ubiquitous Royal Ordnance 2-pounder gun. While the weapon lacked the ability to fire anything but solid, armour-piercing shot, it was quite accurate and had at least proven its capability in penetrating the armour of German tanks at closer ranges while in France. Although vastly superior numbers and the constant threat of encirclement had forced withdrawal after withdrawal back to the Channel, there’d been one or two encounters with the oncoming panzers — most notably at Arras — where the Matildas and Cruisers had given good account of themselves. This was particularly the case with the Matilda, whose frontal armour had proven impervious to the 30mm shells of Wehrmacht’s P-1 light tanks. Even the 75mm cannon fitted to the heavier P-2 and P-3 tanks had found the Matilda difficult to penetrate at longer ranges (although not impossible) and it was thus that the real weight of the mobile side of the land defence of the UK now rested mostly with 7RTR.