“If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Sarah said. Her father looked suitably pained.
The canned chicken tasted as good as it looked. Sarah went to bed happy. The RAF didn’t come over Münster. She didn’t wake up puking. It was a fine day.
CHAPTER 6
Alistair Walsh eyed the new piece of military hardware with a veteran’s suspicion. “What in God’s name is that?” he asked.
“Somefin’ from the Yanks.” Jack Scholes brandished what looked more like a stovepipe than anything else Walsh could think of offhand. It was made of cheap sheet metal and painted the dark green the Americans called olive drab-they painted the trucks they sent across the Atlantic the same color. Scholes went on, “They call it a bazooka. Suppose to beat the PIAT all ’ollow.”
“Huh,” Walsh said thoughtfully. That would be good-that would be wonderful, in fact-if it turned out to be true. The PIAT (short for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) was the Tommy’s personal antitank weapon. A powerful spring sent a shaped-charge bomb flying at enemy armor.
You could kill a tank with a PIAT. You could if you were brave and lucky and very close to the damn thing, at any rate. Otherwise, your chances of killing yourself were much better. People had done the job with it. But you could also rupture yourself cocking the miserable beast-that was a powerful spring. And the PIAT was almost impossible to cock lying down. You looked like a monkey humping a football when you tried. It was easiest (not easy, never easy, but easier) standing up. Of course, standing up gave Fritz a clear shot at you most of the time.
No wonder the PIAT wasn’t popular.
“What do you shoot through this bloody thing?” Walsh inquired. “Spit wads?”
“Gordo’s comin’ up wiv a sack o’ the bombs,” Scholes answered.
“Why am I not surprised?” Walsh said. Gordon McAllister was a hulking Scotsman. He wasn’t long on brains, but by God he was strong. People called him the Donkey, but not where he could hear them-not more than once, anyhow. When he spoke, which was seldom, he had a thick burr. It was hard to believe his accent, Walsh’s buzzing Welsh consonants and odd vowels (at least to an Englishman’s ears), and Scholes’ glottal Cockney all belonged to the same language.
McAllister came up a couple of minutes later, with a large canvas sack, also olive drab, slung over his shoulder. It clanked when he set it down. Scholes reached inside and displayed the round that went through a bazooka. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.”
Walsh whistled softly. A PIAT bomb looked like the makeshift it was. This thing … “Like something out of a Flash Gordon movie, isn’t it? Except for the paint job, I mean.” Like seemingly everything else that had anything to do with the American military, the round was painted olive drab.
“You’re a smart one, you are. It does at that, don’t it?” Scholes sent him an admiring glance. He went on, “You load it into the tube ’ere. There’s a battery, like, connected to the trigger, an’ it fires orf the rocket motor.” He chuckled. “They say you don’t want to be be’ind it when it goes-not ’arf you don’t.”
“I daresay. If there’s a rocket in that thing, it’ll fry your bacon for fair,” Walsh said. “How far will it shoot?”
“Couple ’underd yards for tanks, they tol’ us,” Scholes replied. “Farther’n that for ’ousebreakin’.”
“Right.” Walsh nodded. You could hit a house or a bunker out past three hundred yards with a PIAT, and you’d hurt it when you did. A tank? You might nail one at a hundred yards. Twenty-five or thirty made your odds better-if you didn’t buy your plot trying to sneak in so close.
“I want to go ’untin’, I do,” Scholes said. “Bag me a Tiger. Bleedin’ shyme I can’t take the ’ide ’ome an’ ’ang it on me wall.”
“Mind the claws,” Gordon McAllister rumbled. Like a lot of what he did say, that seemed very much to the point.
“Will it get through a Tiger’s armor?” Walsh asked with interest. A PIAT wouldn’t pierce the monster German tank from the front. Neither would anything else in the English or French armory. Too many brave tank crews and antitank gunners had found that out the hard way.
“It’s supposed to.” Jack Scholes didn’t sound entirely convinced, either. Walsh couldn’t blame him. No one who’d seen a Tiger in action had an easy time believing anything could stop it.
“So you and Gordo are trained up on this beast, are you?” the staff sergeant asked.
McAllister’s long-jawed head bobbed up and down. “It’s dead easy,” Scholes said. “Gordo shoves the round in till it clicks, like. ’E stands so I don’t singe ’is whiskers when I shoot. I fire it off. Then I duck, on account of the Fritzes’ll shoot at where I was.”
“Think so, do you?” Walsh’s tone was dry. If that thing with fins was a rocket, it would leave the tube trailing fire. Yes, something like that might draw a German’s interest. But something that let a foot soldier take out a tank from a couple of hundred yards away would draw any Tommy’s interest, and never mind the chances he took using it.
Walsh wondered whether the Germans already knew about the new tank-buster from America. Maybe some other English or French units had used them. Or maybe some of the Belgians had blabbed. This part of Belgium was full of French-speaking Walloons. Some of them liked the Nazis even if they did speak French, dammit.
Two mornings later, they were ordered forward for a reconnaissance in force against the German positions. Scholes carried the bazooka. McAllister lugged the sack of rounds. Walsh wondered what would happen if a rifle bullet hit one of those rockets. He didn’t wonder long. They’d bury Gordo in the proverbial jam tin, that was what.
An MG-42 started buzzing away ahead of them. The Tommies hit the dirt. That horrible thing spat out so many bullets, one of them was bound to punch your ticket if you stayed on your feet. Walsh peered through bushes. There it was, muzzle flashes winking malevolently. Sure as hell, it sat in a concrete emplacement, safe against anything but a direct hit from an artillery shell. Or … a bazooka round?
“See the bugger, Jack?” Walsh called, not lifting his head far from the dirt. “Can you hit it from where you’re at?”
“I’ll give it a go,” Scholes answered. Then he said something Walsh couldn’t make out, probably to Gordo.
There was a roaring whoosh! and, yes, a blast of fire. The forward end of the tube had a screen of wire mesh sticking out around it to keep the rocket motor from roasting the man who launched it. A moment later, the round slammed into the machine-gun nest. There was another blast then, a bigger one. The MG-42 abruptly fell silent.
“Cor!” Scholes said. “Bastard really works, don’t it?”
“It’ll give Fritz something to think about, all right,” Walsh agreed.
What the Germans thought soon became plain enough. They thought they needed to eliminate anybody who carried something that could smash up a hardened machine-gun position. In their jackboots, Walsh would have thought the same thing. They didn’t seem to have any more machine guns close by, but they raked the ground with fire from rifles and Schmeissers.
Then another machine gun did speak up: one mounted in the turret of a Panzer IV. A moment later, the tank’s bow gun started shooting, too. This time, Walsh didn’t shout for Scholes. If the kid from the East End of London couldn’t figure out what needed doing … he had to be hurt or dead. In which case, Gordon McAllister would take hold of the bazooka … unless he was hurt or dead, too.
Before Walsh could worry about what he’d do in that case, the bazooka belched fire and went whoosh! again. The rocket flew from it and slammed into the Panzer IV’s turret. A fraction of a second later, the German tank brewed up as spectacularly as any Walsh had ever seen. He would have shot the tankmen in their black coveralls had any of them made it out through a hatch, but none did.