On his mark, the group would use all three doors to gain entrance, weapons ready to cut down anyone in the wrong uniform.
They waited.
‘0303…’
There were now four teams inside the headquarters, waiting for the next deadline which would bring them to the phase where silence was no longer necessary.
Mors and Romaniuk waited with a reinforced group brought up by Skorzeny, ready to go for the Operations room.
The senior NCO, a Hauptfeldwebel who had once landed at Eben Emael, held his group ready outside the Staff Office doors.
On the other side of the building, an Unteroffizier stood with his hand on the door of the Communications room, one eye on his watch, waiting for the seconds to tick away to 0303…
The second hand ticked into the vertical on a number of closely observed wristwatches, stimulating a burst of frantic activity.
All assault groups moved in.
The mess room was empty, save some basic furniture and the occasional discarded plate or mug.
“Scheisse!”
There were five petrified men in the staff office. Three, all in Soviet uniform, were gunned down in silence, the two Poles spared, but kept covered under the muzzles of sub-machine guns.
The radio and communications room yielded four soldiers, their gaunt white faces full of fear as the Unteroffizier’s group charged in.
Apart from noticing their dirty nails and lack of personal hygiene, the NCO immediately spotted that the radios were either not working or not switched on.
Skorzeny’s group crashed through into the ops room, fanning out quickly to allow the maximum men to get in as possible.
A dozen faces looked back at them, faces ravaged by sheer terror.
Every man’s instincts squealed in protest at the scene, and each man saw his own issues… his own reason to distrust what was in front of him, whether it was the thin hands, or the thin faces, the smell of poor hygiene, or the obvious sores.
Whether the man was in a Soviet or Polish uniform was suddenly irrelevant, as they were clearly not what they … what they were supposed to have been.
Skorzeny pointed at Romaniuk.
“You’ve got one minute. Find out what the fuck’s going on here.”
The Polish Major moved forward to engage one of the Polish ‘officers’ in conversation.
They did not understand him.
Meanwhile, Skorzeny had moved back through the doors and met up with his NCOs, after ordering a search of the bodies, living and dead.
As he received their reports, understanding exactly what each meant, the results of his search order became known.
“Nothing?”
“No, Herr Oberst. There are weapons but no ammunition… we cannot find the key for the armoury, but none of these men or their casualties have capable weapons.
Romaniuk emerged, his face bright red with anger.
“They’re all Jews… kitted out with uniforms and told to wait here while an exercise was run tonight. If they did what they were told… played the game properly… then they’d get a decent meal tomorrow.”
Skorzeny nodded.
It was a trap and he had led the Storch Battalion right into it.
“We move back to the drop zone now… at the run… forget the evacuation plan… we go as a group… get the men assembled in the radio room… pass me that…”
He took hold of the SCR-536 radio and spoke rapidly to the relay station at the mid-point between the landing zone and himself.
Tossing it back to the man detailed to carry it, Skorzeny moved off to lead his men out of whatever it was he had led them into.
The woods erupted after they had advanced no more than two hundred metres, the Unteroffizier being the first of the Storch Battalion’s dead as he was riddled with bullets from a DP-28.
All was confusion as flares cast their light through the trees.
Others soon joined him in death, as the ambush poured fire into the group of one hundred and twenty-five men, deadly metal lashing them from both sides and from the rear.
Von Berlepsch, towards the rear of the group, dropped off a security group, including an MG34, to watch for anything coming up from behind. He then organised a group of twenty Fallschirmjager to swing off to the right in an attempt to turn the flank of their ambushers.
They charged forward blindly and almost immediately started taking fire.
A bullet tugged at Von Berlepsch’s jacket and had passed far into the trees behind before he realised it had also journeyed through his flesh. The side of his stomach started to leak blood and he felt himself weaken.
Suddenly the wound became secondary, and his MP-40 rattled as he instinctively shot the moving shadows in front of him.
Both Russians went down and stayed down.
He shouted and gestured to the remaining men of his group.
“Move right! Move right!”
The running group swung right, avoiding any more direct contact.
“Now, left!”
Desultory fire chopped down two of the running paratroopers, but the remainder were quickly falling upon enemy soldiers who had been more intent on killing those to their front than watching their rear.
A Soviet platoon was butchered in short order, although another three men were down.
One, a long-service Corporal, had been slashed in the crotch by a desperate flail with a sharpened spade, and his screams were awful, penetrating the night and overriding most of the weapons fire.
Von Berlepsch organised a carrying party as the trapped elements of ‘Storch’ responded to his Handie-Talkie call to the area he had opened up.
Skorzeny slapped his shoulder in thanks and congratulations, not realising that his Operations officer had taken a bullet.
The First Lieutenant yelped as the vibrations reached his broken rib.
“Can you still fight, Georg?”
A nod was all Skorzeny needed, and all he received.
“Take your men forward to the staging point. Watch out for the Porcupine, Georg. When you find it, make a firing line facing this way. We will fill into it. We have to discourage these bastards from following us. Klar?”
For some minutes now, the MG34 team stationed at the rear had sounded extremely busy.
“How many back there?”
“Six, Herr Oberst.”
Skorzeny gestured at his man.
“Get moving. I’ll make sure your boys pull back.”
Von Berlepsch was away immediately, calling his group to him.
Mors arrived, his face bleeding from a score of cuts.
He held out a smashed radio.
“Fucking bullets hit it and I got peppered. Saved my life.”
The handie-talkie was just so much scrap.
Skorzeny filled Mors in on the plan and directed him to recover the rear-guard, moving them back steadily until set-up on the Porcupine.
The two parted, and Skorzeny took the main body to the east, aware that the firefight behind them had grown in intensity.
Mors found the rear-guard under pressure and unable to disengage. Two men were wounded, one of whom was unable to walk unaided.
The relieving group was waved left and right, and found themselves immediately under fire from the pursuing Soviet infantry.
To their immediate rear, the good citizens of Wielke Niesakszka cowered under their blankets.
Catching the attention of one of his men, Mors used his fingers to get the man to concentrate wider, as it would only be a matter of time before they tried to outflank.
A solid lump fell to ground with a thud and the group around the MG34 hugged the damp earth.
The grenade exploded, sending deadly fragments in all directions.
None of the group near the device was hit.
However, one small piece struck the HauptFeldwebel in the back of the neck, passing inexorably through his spinal cord and coming to rest in the temporal lobe.