Chapter 411: Hell

They all knew the Germans were coming. Just a few hours ago, German paratroopers had dropped into the areas behind them. They knew that hundreds, even thousands, of German soldiers had begun their attack, destroying roads, seizing bridges, and perhaps even slaughtering their wives and children. But as British soldiers tasked with defending the coastline, there was nothing they could do.

German bombers flew over the beach like a swarm of locusts, dropping thousands of incendiary bombs and high explosives. The surface positions were seven or eight-tenths destroyed; even some of the key bunkers had been blasted into piles of rubble.

The British defenders were undermanned, truly and utterly undermanned. They had only about 500 men to defend this stretch of beach, and the recent bombing had already killed nearly 50 of them. Reinforcements were more than ten kilometers away and were likely already blocked by German paratroopers. All they could rely on were some 50-year-old defensive positions, including the two old gun batteries that had just been collapsed by Stukas.

In the gentle sea breeze, the British soldiers holding machine guns, stocks pressed to their shoulders, suddenly stared with wide eyes. On the horizon, one after another, German vessels began to appear—of all different sizes, a chaotic mess.

Along the shoreline, German soldiers leaped one by one into the frigid sea, letting the biting February water pour into their boots and sting their thighs. Many of the smaller boats didn’t even have engines; they were “lifeboats” rowed by manpower. Once they hit the sand, no one paid them any more attention. All the soldiers were desperately scrambling for cover.

Rat-tat! Rat-tat! The British machine guns began to fire. A hail of bullets swept towards the German soldiers on the beachhead. In an instant, dozens of German soldiers were cut down. Many more hit the freezing seawater at the sound of the gunfire.

Bullets slammed into the wooden hulls of the boats, sending splinters flying everywhere. German soldiers who hadn’t yet had time to jump into the water were easily pierced by the bullets, collapsing on top of their comrades.

The soldiers screamed as they continued to charge forward, trying to get past the dense barbed wire and concrete obstacles. But the first engineer who tried to cut the wire was riddled like a sieve, the second had his arm blown off, and after that, no one was willing to make another attempt.

The German soldiers advanced slowly through the storm of steel. Even the veterans of the Polish and French campaigns had never encountered such a bloody and brutal counter-attack. Tongues of fire erupted from the British defensive positions, and the beach became a river of blood. It was like a scene from hell, striking fear into the hearts of the follow-up German landing forces climbing ashore.

A medic was desperately trying to save a wounded man, attempting to use a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. But before he could even apply pressure to the wound, a bullet tore through his own head.

Steel helmets were easily penetrated. Bodies piled on top of bodies. On the beach, German casualties numbered in the hundreds and thousands. Even on a beachhead that the British hadn’t heavily fortified, advancing a single step was an impossible luxury.

As if God felt the Germans had not yet suffered enough, the British artillery joined the slaughter. Explosions erupted one after another on the sand, and the German casualties grew even heavier. The blasts flung mangled body parts into the air, drowning out the cries and curses of the German soldiers.

It wasn’t even difficult. Looking out from the British bunkers, they saw swarms of German soldiers, half-submerged in the seawater, moving slowly and packed densely together. There was no need to aim. As long as they kept firing, they could send these reckless German landing troops to hell.

Rat-tat! Tat-tat-tat! The machine guns in the hands of the British soldiers, who held an absolute advantage, seemed to never stop. These poorly trained British garrison troops discovered that war was no different from a game. They just kept slaughtering their opponents, who couldn’t even manage a proper return fire.

“Haha! Damn Germans! Die!” a British machine gunner behind a parapet laughed maniacally as he kept pulling the trigger, sending bullets into the exposed German soldiers on the beach.

The oppressive feeling from the long months of bombing seemed to find a full release at this moment. The bullets of revenge could finally tear into the chests of German soldiers, their blood staining the entire beach red. Watching the German soldiers struggle and scream on the sand, the British defenders felt a strange sense of pleasure.

After sacrificing hundreds of soldiers, after being massacred by the British on the beachhead for more than ten minutes, the German soldiers seemed to remember that they had not come here to die.

Ten kilometers out to sea, the Italian battleship Roma finally opened fire, its main guns erupting in a blinding flash. The shells, moving so fast they shrieked through the air, struck a British machine-gun position on the beachhead in a mere instant.

The massive shockwave threw sand and dirt high into the air. The meter-thick reinforced concrete fortification crumbled and collapsed like a sandcastle. Only then did the British feel the true pressure. Following the battleship’s main guns, all of Germany’s cannons, large and small, finally found their voice, and the beach was instantly engulfed in a sea of fire.

The artillery support restored the Germans’ confidence. They began to cut through the barbed wire with pliers and clear obstacles with Bangalore torpedoes and Panzerfausts. Soon, with the deafening roar of a demolition charge, a path was blown through the barbed wire, and several nearby British trenches and foxholes were cleared out.

The German soldiers who had been complaining about the cold seawater just moments before were now clenching their teeth in silence. Only minutes ago had they truly witnessed a truly terrible environment and a truly bloody battlefield. They grabbed their weapons, hunched over, and charged through the barbed wire and over the corpses, storming the British trenches at top speed.

The British soldiers in the trenches, of course, were not waiting to die. They continued to aim and fire, desperately fighting back. But at this point, the German rate of fire was far superior to their British opponents’. The sounds of G43s and MP-44s rose and fell. The moment a breach was opened in the British trench line, it was quickly overrun.

“Attack! They’re finished!” a company commander with an MP-44 assault rifle shouted, urging his men forward. “Throw grenades into every bunker! We take no prisoners!”

Yes, no prisoners. This was a war that could not be called righteous or evil. Here, people bled in rivers and fell in their millions, indulging in the pleasure of slaughter, repaying their vengeful opponents with even bloodier vengeance.

This was an out-and-out massacre. At first, it was the defenders of the beach slaughtering those trying to land. Later, it became those who had gained a foothold on the coast, frantically slaughtering those who had been defending it. When they pulled the trigger, there was only indifference and a sense of justification; there was no room in their minds for mercy or sympathy. At this moment, civilization’s only contribution was more efficient weapons of killing; morality and honor became worthless.

British soldiers who raised their hands to surrender were shot through the head by German soldiers, their anger over their fallen comrades needing an outlet. Before storming a trench, grenade after grenade was thrown into the bunkers as if they were free.

A German soldier kicked open the rear door of a machine-gun bunker. Grenadiers, already prepared, tossed two or three grenades inside at once. The blast wave erupted from the bunker’s firing slit, the deafening explosion accompanied by the screams of the British soldiers inside.

More German troops poured onto the beachhead. They were greeted not by the cheers of their comrades or the joy of victory, but by blood-red seawater and severed limbs. Piles of unrecognizable bodies, a straight line of corpses pushed up by the waves, a trail of bodies stretching to the barbed wire, and more bodies by the trenches… corpses, corpses, corpses, everywhere there were corpses.

The suffocating, vomit-inducing smell of blood and the oppressive atmosphere hung in the air. In just over ten minutes, on a stretch of beach less than a hundred meters wide, the German landing force had lost over 2,000 of its most elite, battle-hardened soldiers.

A soldier whose arm had been shot off was searching for the missing part on the sand. A few medics were trying to stop the bleeding of a wounded man who had lost his legs. Nearby, engineers were setting up the pontoon pier to unload the supplies that would soon arrive.

Further away, a few of the only available landing craft were unloading Panzer III tanks, and engineers were helping them navigate the soft, muddy sand. There was no applause, no laughter, only a few army chaplains in white surplices, holding crucifixes and continuously making the holy sign of the cross over the soulless bodies. This was the entire ceremony to welcome the follow-on forces.

“My God,” a German soldier, rifle in hand, muttered to himself as he stumbled over a corpse upon reaching the beach. “What on earth did they go through?”

An older soldier followed behind him, his boots sinking into the pinkish seawater as he trudged forward. “Kid, this is just the beginning,” he said quietly. “There’s still a long war to fight.”

British artillery shells still fell aimlessly on the beach, occasionally forcing the German troops to dive for cover. On the British defensive line not far away, the firefight continued without a moment’s pause. The British knew as well as anyone that if they let the Germans establish a firm foothold on the beach, then Britain would have all but lost everything.