The Australian gunners were experienced. They’d fought fighters before and knew how to go about driving them off. They held their fire until the lead fighter was in close. Then they filled the sky around it with bullets.
Looking over his shoulder, Alleyne guessed that at least 16 machine guns were firing on the leader. He was almost masked from sight by the hail of tracer fire. The Italian fighter burst into flames and continued its dive downwards to plunge into the sea.
Behind him, the Italian number two was also lost in the glare of the massed tracers. Its path was marked by a black stream of smoke. It first turned orange as it mixed with fire, then ended in an explosion of ruptured fuel tanks.
The third fighter saw what had happened to the two leaders. He skidded away as the machine guns tracked in on it. Alleyne guessed it had been hit. His gunners stopped firing when it veered away. Ammunition on the Sunderlands was too precious to waste on aircraft that had already broken off their attacks.
That left four fighters circling the formation of flying boats. The Italian fighter pilots didn’t lack courage, but they had the sense to realize they were up against something much more capable than the aircraft they were accustomed to facing. Two split away and came at Alleyne’s Sunderland from head-on. That was a bad mistake.
Alleyne swung his nose slightly and opened fire with the four fixed
nose guns, reinforced by the twin guns in his upper and nose turrets. Tracer fire envelopd the attacking fighters. They sheered away. One developed a thin stream of whitish gray smoke from its engine. It was last seen heading away, losing altitude.
Three fighters left.
The fate of their flight-mates left the remaining fighter pilots wary.
They tried a few more tentative probes. Fierce return fire drove them off each time. Eventually, they turned away and headed for home. Italian fighters were very short-ranged, Alleyne had read in the intelligence briefings, and they lacked combat endurance.
“Any damage to report?”
There were a few holes from long-range .50-caliber machine gun fire, but the flying boats were essentially undamaged. Critically, the fighters had never even got close to the big G-class boats in the center of the formation. Beside him, Freeman was nodding contentedly. “Nicely done, Squadron Leader. I wonder if they’ll come back with their friends?”
“I think that’s very probable, Sir.”
His rifle had its bolt carefully wrapped in cloth to stop it rattling. All his other equipment was either wedged in place or carefully padded to avoid giving warning to the troops waiting in the defensive position ahead of them. Before setting out, he and his men had jumped up and down to make sure than there wouldn’t be the slightest sound to betray the assault. It had looked strange, but there was good sense behind it. Noise was the enemy as much as the ‘troops’ in the dugout.
Corporal Mongkut Chandrapa na Ayuthya felt the thin white tape laid out by the reconnaissance squads in no-man’s land. He was leading his section forward to its bounce-off point some hundred meters short of the enemy defenses. He had the picture in his mind: the zig-zag trenches, machine guns carefully positioned to cover the wire with an impenetrable hail of fire. Their instructors had been quite clear about what would happen if there was a deliberate assault on the position in daylight. The machine guns would slowly swing backwards and forwards, spraying the barbed wire entanglements while the troops struggled to get through. If the machine gunners did their job, the men would die on the wire. Some of the instructors had told stories of a great battle in far-away France, at a place called the Somme. A place where 60,000 men had fallen in a single day because the wire had held and the machine gunners had been skilled at their work. Mongkut couldn’t even begin to conceive of that many men dying in a single day. It was almost his entire Army being wiped out.
The instructors had explained that night attacks were one way the devastating effects of barbed wire and machine guns could be offset. They had also explained that coordinating and mounting a night attack was one of the most difficult and complicated operations an Army could undertake. Faced with the alternatives of heavy casualties in assaulting fixed positions or learning the skills needed to fight at night, the Army elected to take the latter route. That was why Mongkut was following the white tapes in the middle of the night.
His hand felt the knots in the tape. His section reached their assembly point. His men spread out beside him, crawling close to the ground in case observers from the enemy should see them. Any second now, the assault would start. The seconds stretched into minutes. Mongkut felt the coldness of the night bite into his bones. Even in a tropical climate, the night air could have a chill to it. Especially for men lying motionless on the ground.
After what seemed to be hours, the horizon behind him lit up. A roar marked the guns firing. Mongkut recognized the howl overhead as outbound artillery fire. Shells crashed into the positions in front of him. It was real artillery fire. Live shells filled the air with fragments. That was the signal for the assault. He pushed hard with his feet, jumping up as he shouted out his first order since the move to the front.
“Follow me!”
All along the line, Thai infantry rose to their feet. They sprinted towards positions hit by the sudden blast of artillery fire. They swept over the trench, bayoneting sandbags representing French soldiers manning the defensive line. They shot others that were “hiding” in the bottom of the trench.
Mongkut saw a gaping black hole in front of him. He guessed it was the entry point to a dugout. Almost by instinct, he tossed a thunderflash inside. The interior light up.
His section was spreading out, ready to beat off a counterattack from the defenders; Mongkut had the firm belief that, if sandbags actually came to life and attacked him, it would be time to retire. There was another shout of “follow me!” Mongkut saw his officer ordering them forward. It was time to attack the second line of defenses.
Two hours later, the battalion assembled while the instructors evaluated its performance in the night attack. After general comments and praise for an attack carried out well, the officers and NCOs were taken to one side for individual briefings. Praise in public, punish in private, thought Mongkut. His lieutenant and one of the foreign instructors sat down at a table with him.
“You and your men did well, Corporal. You were quick on your feet and you followed the shells in closely. You overwhelmed the trench in fine style and were quick to set up your defense. You grenaded the dugout without delay. But, you should have followed that up; you can’t be sure that the grenade got everybody down there.” The foreigner produced a picture of a dugout with a deep, narrow pit in the bottom. “This is called a grenade trap. If the men inside are quick, one of them might have kicked your grenade into this and saved everybody. Also, you didn’t clear the trenches on either side of you. That could have cost your entire section their lives.”
“There didn’t seem time to do everything, Sir.” Mongkut saw his Lieutenant look surprised. It wasn’t expected for a junior to speak up like that. Respect for position and rank was deeply ingrained. Yet the foreigner actually seemed to approve.
“It’s hard, isn’t it? You have to secure your section of the trench, grenade the dugouts, clear the sections to either side of you and make sure you are linked up with the rest of your unit. Yet, you also have to be ready to receive a counterattack and get ready to follow up your own advance with an assault on the enemy second line. Everything at once.