Chapter 200: Breaking the City (3)
Kirvin waited for the commander to make a decision on whether to set up a support point on the spot or move on. At this time, the adaptability of front-line officers is most tested, but the platoon commander has rich combat experience, and Colwin is very relieved.
"The platoon commander ordered us to move on, and the third squad has already come up." The deputy squad leader held the walkie-talkie and reported on the side. Kirwyn nodded, and the platoon commander made the right decision as he expected.
If you are in a plain area, or a more open village or town, then what you should do at this time is to let the spearheads withdraw, regroup your forces, and then launch several tentative attacks to find out the enemy's defensive position and firepower intensity. However, in such a narrow area at present, the strength of the company and platoon level cannot be used at all, and the infantry squad level is the most suitable combat unit.
"Let's go and eliminate that machine-gun fire point." Colwin made his decision by pointing to the British firepower point a hundred meters away.
By this time, Max's machine gun had already knocked out an entire saddle drum, and the barrel had begun to burn, and just as he was replacing the drum with a new one, the Bren machine gun began to click again, and the bullets hit the surface of the brick steps continuously, raising a cloud of debris and dust.
The British soldiers were clearly not prepared to give up resistance, and they knew that they had been targeted by the Germans, and that if nothing happened, this was likely to be their final burial place.
The Bren machine gun was an excellent weapon, and it performed very well in the French theater. After the Battle of Dunkirk, the Germans captured tens of thousands of Bren machine guns, and the Germans allocated these weapons to the second-line troops.
The British machine gunners skillfully fired several rounds of three bursts at the Germans, and they were able to suppress the activities of the Germans in a short time. But everyone understands that this is only a flash in the pan, and it is impossible to rely on the tragic thirty rounds of Brenna's ammunition to last long.
Squatting in this machine-gun fire point was a British light machine gun crew, a non-commissioned officer with two machine gun shooters. There were also two ammunition men armed with short rifles, the former for firing from the machine guns and the latter for loading empty magazines with loaders on the side. While the machine gun was being replaced, the ammanier began to shoot cover with the Lee Enfield rifle.
At this time, the German machine gun was also reloaded, and began to launch a fierce counterattack, tracer bullets like flying locusts fired into this firing point from the front, and the ammunition man quickly retracted his head and squatted back behind the bunker.
Colwin struggled to throw an M39 smoke grenade in the direction of the British fire, the smoke grenade filled with red phosphorus jumped twice on the ground and rolled back down the ramp before finally getting stuck on the curb before emitting a pungent white smoke. Ten seconds later, the thick smoke covered the entire street. Kolvin and the three riflemen put on the rubber gas masks they had prepared for a long time, and under the leadership of the squad leader, they rushed out of the shelter and quickly crossed the street.
At this time, the British soldiers also noticed that something was wrong, and they opened fire indiscriminately into the smoke. As the smoke faded, the British soldiers were horrified to find that the German soldiers had split into two lines, the machine gun crews were still in their original positions, and several other soldiers had crossed the street under the cover of smoke and were advancing towards themselves along the building across the street.
Although the current position of these German soldiers happened to be in the corner of the machine gun. But the Heavy said that there was nothing he could do about it, because the German machine gun was again suppressing them, and now he couldn't even poke his head out, let alone aim and fire.
The British missed the last chance to evacuate. Their frontal was suppressed by German machine guns, and the sides were exposed to the fire of the German infantry. They could no longer get out of the bunker, and the British could only lean out quickly and shoot blindly in the direction of the Germans, but with each leaning out. They feel themselves getting closer and closer to death.
The German soldiers didn't care about the British bullets, they fired at themselves with their weapons, and then quickly jumped to the next bunker. Sergeant Colwyn directs his men to fire at the British bunker. While carefully observing the situation in front of the queue, he did not dare to rashly launch an infantry assault on the British machine-gun fire point when the enemy situation was still unclear. For, according to his previous experience, in a firepower trap like this, the enemy would never have set up such a lone forward firing point, and the enemy commander would have arranged a covering crossfire at the other end of the street. The Englishmen seemed to be a little weaker than he had thought, and Colwin was convinced that the British should still have a large number of troops waiting in the rear.
Colwyn felt that he was close enough, and he and his men stopped in front of a small Victorian building. Theoretically, the smoke masking time of the smoke grenade is two minutes, but due to the environment, it is difficult to achieve this standard in actual combat, and now only a minute and a half has passed, and the white smoke has begun to dissipate.
The German infantrymen had already passed through the smoke barrier they had set up, and they took off their gas masks, and because they did not have time to retract them, they rolled up the rubber product and hung it on their belts. The riflemen crouched behind the fence of the flower bed at the edge of the house, picked up their rifles and began to shoot at the side of the machine-gun bunker, and the British made a very low-level mistake by not stacking sandbags high enough on the side of the fence.
Colwin turned around and looked behind him, and saw several infantry squads steadily advancing along the ramp, behind them a Tank Four had rolled one of its tracks onto the pavement, the black hole with the muzzle facing in his direction.
Colwyn had almost climbed the first part of the 400-metre steep slope, and was now well above the surrounding area, and he found that the view was very good, and he estimated that he could see directly from here the railroad they had crossed if it were not for the side houses.
From time to time, there were a series of crisp gunshots in the distance, interspersed with a few dull bangs, and there seemed to be a large-scale exchange of fire in a community in the distance, and I don't know how many buildings were set on fire, and Colwin saw several black and straight plumes of smoke.
Kirwyn could roughly tell what part of the sound was coming from. "Looks like we're going to pick things up." Kirwyn said to his rifleman.
By this time, the Germans had completed a series of tests they had planned, and those front-line commanders finally couldn't bear it anymore and began to launch the first all-round attack on the defense of London. The London line of defense would collapse at the touch of a button, which was a situation that none of the marshals of the High Command expected.
Snyder's tank company was under the direct jurisdiction of the General Headquarters of Group E, and if it weren't for Bock's sober-mindedness, he would have almost been taken by Guderian to fill in the Thames, and Bock reminded Guderian that Snyder's No. 4 submersible tank would not have been able to climb up to the Thames' riverbed full of all kinds of rubbish and debris.
Bock intercepted the company and placed him on the southern front of the city of London, believing that the British defense in this direction was relatively strong and that this main armored force was very much needed as a breakthrough force. So, the company of diving tanks and the attached infantry company were thrown into this place.
"It's almost the distance, I'll see how many we have." Curvin crouched by the flowerbed and pulled two M24s from the grenade launcher's grenade pouch. The other two riflemen also drew their grenades from their waists and boots, respectively, and handed them to the corporal.
Colwin placed the four M24 grenades in front of him, unscrewed the galvanized iron caps at the tail one by one, and pulled the fire rope attached to the white porcelain pendant out of the wooden handle. This was a plan that Colwyn had already conceived, because he observed that the bunkers guarded by the British were uncovered.
Colwyn was confident in his bomb-throwing skills, but he was not sure that he would be very accurate, so he threw four bombs in a row at the British bunker, ready to make up for the lack of accuracy with the advantage of numbers. Eventually, two grenades fell on the side of the road, and the other two fell into the barred flower beds, and the German grenades were so powerful that four dull explosions immediately reverberated through the streets.
Ask for a monthly pass, okay...... During this time, there are a lot of brushes on the monthly ticket list, and even the blind can see which ones are real and which ones are spent money to buy tickets, which is really funny, and it also makes people a little discouraged. However, I have a large group of resurrected book friends to support, and those brushes are just rootless trees, and in the end, it depends on the real ability to speak, and the scenery made by crooked ways cannot last long. (To be continued.) )