Chapter 415: Bayonet

“I’m not asking for anything for myself, but I feel that every German and British soldier that night deserved a medal. If you had seen the battle between us that night, you would know how beautiful peace truly is.” — Wilhelm Donner, veteran of the 1st German Paratrooper Division.

A new round of attacks had begun. It wasn’t just the German paratroopers who wanted revenge; so too did the British infantry, who had the advantage of numbers. After a lengthy artillery preparation, the British once again summoned their courage and charged into battle, facing the most dangerous opponent of the century with their stubbornness and bravery.

Anyone who wasn’t an idiot knew to learn from their failures. And the threat of death makes one learn faster and better. Sometimes, veterans would feel a deep sense of bitterness, because their best tricks, techniques, and even their experience would be learned and absorbed by their opponents, bit by bit, eventually becoming the very means to kill them.

This time, the British fought with incredible intelligence. They spread out their formations, closing in on the German positions stealthily, bit by bit. They didn’t rush to scream and charge but crawled forward, slowly narrowing the distance between them.

The lower-ranking British commanders, having learned their lesson, began to pay attention to the German machine-gun nests on the flanks. They used their own heavy machine guns to lay down suppressive fire, blasting the carefully camouflaged positions with clouds of white dust. This tactic proved quite effective. The German machine guns were forced to abandon their more efficient flanking fire and grudgingly fall back to their own defensive line, bracing for the fierce British assault.

As the minutes ticked by, the British finally closed to a distance where their numerical superiority could be brought to bear. The real attack began. With their light machine guns opening up, the British infantry leaped up and charged. At almost the same moment, the German soldiers’ rifles and guns of all sizes began to roar. Bullets flew back and forth, and the flames from exploding flares lit up the nearby sky.

Rat-tat! Rat-tat! In the hands of a veteran, Borol’s assault rifle was a personal divine weapon, especially at a range of about 200 meters. Although the weapon’s recoil was not insignificant, its accuracy was excellent, and its controlled bursts at that distance were extremely efficient.

Every time Borol gently squeezed the trigger, two bullets would fire. The muzzle climb of the MP-44 during a burst was just enough to lift the rounds slightly, typically hitting the opponent’s chest and inflicting a terrifyingly lethal one-shot kill.

His muzzle constantly sought new targets in the light of the flares, hitting one British soldier after another. Bullets from the British soldiers kicked up dust around Borol, but he paid them no mind, simply aiming and firing.

Before the light from the flare faded, Donner, who was firing his G43 beside Borol, saw two German paratroopers in a nearby foxhole get hit by British bullets. They cried out and fell backward in a spray of blood. Compared to the previous attack, the British were clearly achieving some success. They were starting to inflict casualties on the German paratroopers, truly challenging their defensive system.

Anyone familiar with combat knows that this is not the time to retreat. To retreat now is to hand your life over to the enemy; it’s practically suicide. The veterans all knew that if they were to retreat, it would have to be after repelling this British attack.

So, even as some British soldiers reached the first line of foxholes that formed the core of the German defense, the Germans showed no intention of retreating. They threw grenades to drive the British out of their positions and used even more intense fire to pin the British soldiers down.

It seemed the British soldiers opposite them had also been given orders to fight to the death, so the troops, who should have broken long ago, showed no sign of falling back. At midnight, the battle entered its most brutal phase. Both sides fought desperately in the interlocking positions with hand grenades, and in some places, soldiers were already engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

“Fix bayonets!” Borol shouted the order to Donner beside him. He then threw his last hand grenade. A few British soldiers in the distance were thrown to the ground by the blast wave, their screams piercing the quiet night.

A third flare shot into the sky. Borol raised his weapon and aimed at a British soldier who was throwing a grenade. As the shot rang out, the man’s arm was blown in two. The grenade, along with the man’s hand and half his forearm, fell back into a British-occupied foxhole. The subsequent explosion sent the five or six British soldiers inside to hell.

Before he could even turn around, a British soldier screamed and leaped into the foxhole occupied by Borol and Donner. Donner, startled, quickly met the charge of the British soldier, who also had a bayonet fixed, with his own. The opponent’s skill with a bayonet was clearly lacking, but Donner, the new paratrooper, was no expert either. The two of them stared at the gleaming steel tips on each other’s rifles, neither daring to take a step forward.

Rat-tat! Borol had no time for gentlemanly conduct. He immediately shot and killed the British soldier who might have been hoping for a fair duel. Without a second glance at Donner’s strange expression, he turned and continued firing in another direction.

As he fired, he shouted, “Don’t just stand there, cover my flank! Next time you freeze, I’ll kill you first!”

“Yes, sir!” Donner raised his rifle, swallowing hard as he looked down at the still-twitching corpse at his feet.

When another British soldier tried to charge them, Donner instinctively shot him through the chest. Suddenly, he felt he was no longer afraid, no longer hesitant. He had become a stone-cold killing machine. And the feeling was actually not bad. Pulling the trigger, and then continuing to breathe—that feeling was not bad at all.

Borol ejected his empty magazine, slammed his last one into the rifle, and bent down to pick up a dropped Lee-Enfield. He propped it on the edge of the foxhole and continued to fire. He had lost count of how many men he had killed that night; all he knew was one after another, after another.

The new recruit covering him, Wilhelm Donner, also had no idea how many he had killed. Around their foxhole alone lay the bodies of no fewer than five British soldiers.

The second British soldier to charge into their foxhole was killed by Donner with his bayonet. The blood that spurted from the bayonet’s fuller splattered across both his and Borol’s faces. By this time, Borol had fired all his own ammunition. He used the British rifle to hold the front of their position until a bullet tore through his arm.

The sky had still not brightened, dawn had not yet come. The Germans still held their positions, and the British had still not achieved their objective. Much had gone as expected, but what was different was that no one had anticipated the losses would be so enormous.

When the British finally retreated, Borol lay in his foxhole with only enough strength left to breathe. Donner sat there, clutching his rifle, the blood on his face having dried and been splattered again, dried and splattered again, layer upon layer.

When the 1st platoon leader found Borol with a few of his men, he finally learned just how devastating the losses to his company had been. There was not a single living soul left in the entire 2nd platoon. The 1st and 3rd platoons combined had only 30 men left, nearly all of them wounded.

When they had boarded the plane, his paratrooper company had numbered 123 soldiers. Now, including himself, only 32 remained. So many faces he knew, and so many names he couldn’t remember, so many young men, had become dust in the wind on this seemingly endless night. No one would remember these poor souls who had left their homes to give their lives for the Führer. In the future, even if they were recorded in the annals of history, they would be nothing more than an unremarkable casualty statistic.

“Retreat,” was all Borol said before he passed out. The battered German paratroopers, in silence, supported each other as they left the positions they had held for most of the night.

They stumbled away, slowly and numbly, back towards the place they had started from at dusk. On either side of them was the second defensive line of the German paratrooper force. On that line was another paratrooper company, another insurmountable mountain, a true Great Wall of blood.

It wasn’t until 2:15 AM that the British finally caught a glimpse of their objective, the town of Bite. Only after suffering over 900 casualties did they realize that what stood in their way was not the estimated German battalion, but a single, understrength German paratrooper company. Only then did the British understand what kind of force they were fighting. Only then did they truly realize how far they were from the coast.

The land that the German soldiers had captured inch by inch with their blood could only be retaken by paying an even higher price in blood. This was the logic of the German paratroopers, the logic of the German military, the logic of their Führer, Akado Rudolph.

In a battle for survival, no one would back down. The two sides continued to fight for every inch of ground. The German-controlled area was pushed back a full circle by the British counter-attack, but the British still could not see that beautiful coastline.

Dawn finally came, and the morning sun brought countless hopes and new life to the world. The German bomber formations appeared on the distant horizon, right on schedule. In the port of Rotterdam, the second wave of the landing force, accompanied by aircraft carriers, slowly sailed out of the harbor. A new round of battle was about to begin.