Marosy saw one of the half-tracks giving a dense stream of tracers. It had to be a quad-twenty vehicle; probably the biggest threat. He lined up and squeezed the firing trigger. The aircraft lurched as the 75mm in its nose fired. Through the muzzle flash he saw his first round had landed short. His second was a little to the left but the third turn the half-track into a red and orange fireball. Then, he saw something else, streaks of gray smoke leaving the ground and heading for him. Spirals.
“Disperse! Get those vehicles separated. Gunners open fire when you have the target.” Colonel Asbach yelled the orders out. They had little time to prepare for the attack that had suddenly developed. They’d seen the Grizzlies of course, and heard their engines. For a while it seemed that the Ami jabos had missed them and would head off south. Then, the aircraft had turned slightly towards them, before diving away to the west. Everybody in the column knew that they had been spotted. That meant the column would soon be fighting for its life.
At the rear of the column the six self-propelled 150mm howitzers were frantically backing up, trying to get clear of the rest of the column. Their trucks were doing likewise and doing a better job of it. The English-built AECs were renowned for their ability to cope with bad conditions. When they worked at all. The British truck workers had a habit of building subtle defects into their vehicles; an axle over-tempered perhaps so it fractured under stress, or a towing bar whose mounting welds would fail when an extra load was put on it. More importantly, they weren’t overloaded. The self-propelled guns were. Like most German self-propelled artillery, the guns used captured enemy tank chassis. In this case, some British cruiser tank captured back in 1942. The Covenanter or something similar. It didn’t matter, what did was that the chassis was overloaded and clumsy. Still, the battery was better than towed guns.
The two anti-aircraft half tracks attached to the artillery battery had already swerved to a halt. The crews on the quadruple 20mm guns elevated their weapons and scanned for the approaching jabos. Ahead of them, the half-track belonging to the anti tank squad of one of the mechanized infantry platoons had also stopped. Strange figures were emerging from it, looking like running tents with a stove pipe sticking out. The stove pipes were the Panzerschreck rocket launchers, the running tents were the men who were going to be firing them. To his astonishment, Sergeant Heim saw Captain Lang jump from his kubelwagen and run over to that half-track. What, he wondered, was Captain Still up to now? And would any of the unit survive it?
“Sergeant! A cape, a Panzerschreck launcher and a Fliegerschreck rocket. Now!” Lang’s voice was urgent, there was little time. In the back of the vehicle, the anti-tank unit Sergeant looked doubtful. Captain Still’s reputation had spread beyond the artillery unit. Lang’s hand dropped to his pistol. “Now, Sergeant.”
That did it. The Sergeant passed out the equipment demanded. Lang hurriedly checked the cape. The white side was out. It was shaped like a cone, with two tubes for his arms. He slipped into it, then took the Fliegerschreck rocket and checked the fuse. It was the standard Panzerschreck rocket but fitted with a powerful booster and had a time fuse on the end. Lang dialed it down to minimum, then slipped it into the rocket launcher. The Grizzlies had already come over the ridge and were heading for the unit when Lang got into position. He knelt exactly the way the user manual for the Fliegerschreck said, and aimed the clumsy launcher at the lead of the two aircraft.
Two aircraft, that was odd, the Ami jabos usually flew in fours. Perhaps the A-4 bombardment of their bases had hurt them worse than anybody had expected. Lang hoped so, his contacts on the General Staff had whispered that the navy part of this operation was truly a disaster. The Amis had to lose somewhere didn’t they? And they had no equivalent to the A-4 rocket, the weapon that gave the German artillery the ability to strike deep into the heart of an enemy rear area. Whatever the reason, there were only two jabos and that gave the mechanized column a fighting chance.
Lang was already starting to sweat inside the clumsy protective cape. The first Panzerschreck launchers years before had required the users to wear protective capes but their back-blast was nothing compared with that of the Fliegerschreck rocket. The booster needed to give the rocket the speed and range necessary to engage an aircraft would immerse the operator in a ball of fire when the rocket ignited. Without the tent-like cape, survival was not an option.
Through the glass panel in the front of the cape, Lang saw the first Fliegerschreck rockets go out. First, the long streak of the booster, then the wild spiral as the Panzerschreck rocket detached for the final spurt. There was something odd about firing things in stages; it didn’t work very well at all. Lang had heard that the Peenemunde group’s efforts to build two-stage versions of the A-4 had been failures for that reason. They were still trying, still working towards a rocket that could cross the Atlantic and strike at American cities, but the problems were proving intractable. Quietly, one of Lang’s General Staff friends had told him it wasn’t likely that the multi-stage rockets would be anywhere near usable this decade. Looking at the wild gyrations of the Fliegerschrecks, Lang could see why.
The lead Grizzly, Lang’s target, was already firing. Its first two shells had missed, but the third had hit a half-track down the road. Tracers from the 20mm guns were already surrounding it but they seemed to be brushed off by white monster that was coming for him. Lang took a brief breath and settled down, still tracking the target in his sights. It was so tempting to fire, but Lang resisted it. He waited for the optimum moment. Then, he squeezed the trigger and felt the furnace-like heat seep through the protective cape as the rocket soared away.
He watched it fly, needle straight, for the Grizzly. Then the second stage separated. It didn’t even have a chance to start spiraling before the time fuse ignited. The rocket exploded almost directly under the starboard engine of the Grizzly. Lang watched the whole nacelle erupt into flames; a brown and red streak stained the sky behind the stricken aircraft as it reared up. Lang saw the propeller detach. It spiralled away and broke up, lashing the fuselage with its fragments. Then, the pilot got the aircraft under control and curved away, still surrounded by the firefly tracers from the 20mm guns. The second Grizzly broke off the attack instantly, moving to cover it’s stricken team-mate. That’s what the Ami jabos did; they covered each other. Normally, there would have been two more aircraft to carry on with the attack on the unit but not this time. The two Grizzlies disappeared; the one trailing smoke quickly losing altitude.
Land peeled off the cape. The residual heat from the rocket blast stung his hands but he ignored it. There were cheers coming up from the vehicle crews, cheers that lifted Lang’s heart. He saw Sergeant Heim running over to help him with the cape and the clumsy launcher.