Ammo Dump Debacle
by tallsunshine12
For Whumptober 2024, #24 "Collapsed building"
Chapter 1
Even after the recent bombing left the city in more of a ruin than ever, the squad of German sharpshooters clung on, zealously guarding the ammo cache. Hauptmann Hans Dietrich himself had just arrived with a backup team of four more men to join the six already in the ruin.
His ten men had immediately fallen to to bolster their perimeter defenses, manning the walls and setting up an artillery piece to deal with another aerial attack. As long as the Germans stored ammo there, another Allied attack would come. And keep coming until it was destroyed.
In the doorway of the HQ building, vaguely hearing the radio chatter in the dim recesses behind him, the tall slim officer took a drag of his cigarette, then crushed the last of it under his German jackboot. Beyond him was the square, once a noisy place of barter for sheep and goats and striped tent cloth, but now busy with trucks, soldiers, motorbikes, some with sidecars, some without, slithering through the piles of rubble left by the Lancasters in the previous day's bomb raid.
Directly in front of him sat his Kubelwagen, the four-door vehicle—with its spare tire strapped on its hood—in which he led his armored columns on the great Saharan desert beyond. Meanwhile, as he mused thus and gave orders to his men as needed, his arch-nemeses, Sgts. Troy and Moffitt, climbed a nearby dune to glass the town. Hitch, Troy's driver, and Tully, Moffitt's, remained with the jeeps in the dry wadi and serviced them with water and fuel.
With their water supplies all but gone, the Rat Patrol—four commandos thoroughly braced in the art of desert warfare—had to quickly assess the damage of last night's Allied airstrike on the ruin, a ruin so old its name was forgotten, and now operating as a German ammo cache.
"Arab lore has it that the Romans built it," said Sgt. Jack Moffitt, Troy's second in command while they spied on the town below, lying flat on the top of the dune, each with a pair of binoculars. The sun was hot on their backs. "In fact, soldiers of the Empire had tramped through this part of Libya on conquest."
"Seems a shame to destroy it then," was Troy's brooding reply, focusing on the activity in the central square around the HQ building.
"Quite," Moffitt agreed.
To look at it now, with its adobe brick and flat roofs, empty wells and waterless fountains baking in the heat of a thousand, thousand desert suns, was to agree. It had to date back to the time of the Caesars.
"The airstrike didn't finish it off," Troy observed. "It's time to call in another."
Sam Troy was not a man to waste words, precise and brief nearly to a fault. Jack Moffitt, though, a college professor and more of a romantic, who lived by words and loved them, understood they weren't always necessary in the din of war.
Slipping back down the dune into the dry streambed, Troy called to Hitch, "Hitch, ring up the base," or Tal Yata, some fifty miles away. "Send another airstrike. You know the coordinates to the ruin."
"Will do, Sarge," said the conscientious young man. He never questioned an order, especially Troy's … well, almost never. Relaying the message in code, Hitch stayed on the radio as briefly as possible in case the Germans were 'listening' in on their frequency.
"Aren't we going to get a piece of the action, Sarge?" Tully asked, looking over at Troy from beside his jeep, now fully serviced and ready to hightail it out of there.
"Only if the planes don't get here."
Leaning back on a rock with his right foot flat against its smooth face, Moffitt spoke up. "Several of the men were carrying big crates into the square, no doubt preparing for company. Maybe tanks."
"I saw that, too," said Troy. He took off his Aussie slouch hat and wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. "It's hot enough to fry an egg," he observed, turning to Hitch as he broke contact with Tal Yata.
"The planes won't be coming tonight, Sarge. There's a dust storm heading our way. We're on our own, it seems."
"Damn!" Troy said without preamble, making Tully jump. Turning, the young Kentuckian patted his wrapped bazooka in the rear of the jeep, in case it had been shocked, too. "We'll slip in then and set some charges," Troy continued. "Two-minute fuses."
Calculating in his head, Moffitt said, "For two minutes, we'll need about 60 centimeters of fuse, or 24 inches to you Americans."
Troy laughed. "That's better. I still don't know what a centimeter is."
"It's bigger than a 'grit,' Sarge, in a bowl of grits," said Tully, whose mother had had eight mouths to feed, including his, on little or nothing. He was well-acquainted with grits.
Ignoring Tully's chucklehead, but witty explanation of a centimeter, Troy said, "Moffitt and I will go in just after dark with the C-2." He seemed to have finalized his plan. Then—
"Now wait, Sarge," said Hitch. "I've had demolitions training—"
"And so have we, lad," Moffitt finished for him. Measuring it with his eye, he was already cutting his detonator cord with a sharp penknife. When finished, he dangled the three cords for all to see. "Not one's bigger than the other."
With the approval of all hands for that dexterous display, he and Troy then molded the clay-like C-2 into three balls and stuck a fuse in each.
"Where'll we be set up, Sarge?" Tully asked.
"Take the rifles, split up, climb up on a roof. Tully, carry the bazooka, too," said Troy. "I don't doubt you'll get a chance to use it." Tully beamed.
Waiting for dark, and going in ahead of the two privates, Troy and Moffitt crept to a hole in the wall to the west of town. Breached by last night's high explosive bombs, the wall could no longer protect the ruin. Slipping through, keeping their eyes peeled for any movement, the two moved towards the central square and the HQ of Dietrich and his men.
Webley revolver in hand, Moffitt left Troy at a corner of one of the buildings and crept up to the HQ. He crouched down under a window in its plastered wall to listen to the planning talk inside. His German came in handy again. He discovered some key information.
A tank company of the 7th Panzer Regiment was indeed on its way to resupply with ammo and weapons. ETA was late morning or early afternoon the next day. After loading up, it would return to where the 'action' was.
Moffitt rejoined Troy and both moved off, locating an alley in which to wait for the activity in and around the ammo dump to die down, its crates being hauled out and set up in the square to await the tanks. Giving it an hour, like ghosts on a spree in the graveyard, scanning every corner for enemy snipers, they returned to the ammo stores. Moffitt located a crawl space where they could get in without the guards' noticing.
"Good," he said of his find. "We won't have to garrote or knife anyone tonight to get in."
Troy's teeth shone, the way they always did when he smiled at Moffitt's dry wit. Rapidly scanning the area for a guard on his rounds, he said, "C'mon, you first." Moffitt crawled through, then Troy darted in after him.
Tully and Hitch entered town a few minutes later, each going to an outside staircase and climbing to the roof, then crouching down behind the short parapets. Here they had good vantage points to do the most destruction in the quickest amount of time. If any Germans ran toward the building where Troy and Moffitt were, the jeep drivers would shoot first and ask questions later.
Once inside the cavernous room of the depot, an ancient meeting hall of sorts, Troy looked around at the crates and boxes and whistled. "There's enough here for a two weeks' offensive," he whispered over to Moffitt.
A bit winded from having to fold his six foot two frame into a foot-wide cube in order to crawl in, Moffitt nodded. He moved off to set his first charge. Troy did likewise. They only had three, for the exploding ammo would do the rest to obliterate half this side of town. An epic conflagration.
Lighting the fuses, they crawled back out, darting away to the hole in the wall and out onto the desert to the wadi where the jeeps were. Tully and Hitch would stay in town to complete their own 'tasks,' then they would join them for a quick getaway.
A distant jackal bayed at the wind as Tully sighted his bazooka on the HQ building. A couple of roofs down, Hitch wiped his sweaty palm against his pants and switched the safety off his tommy gun. He had a slight case of nerves, for, otherwise, on a cool night like this, he shouldn't have been sweating.
The buildings under them quaked at the first boom!, then again and again as the crates of ammo began to go off in concert with the charges. Deadly mud-brick missiles flew out as the ammo dump collapsed. Tully's 'stovepipe' accomplished the same thing with the HQ building, though not on as grand a scale.
As the men poured out like ants from a collapsing anthill, Hitch mowed them down one by one with his Thompson. Shocked and in fear of this gut-twisting turn of events, Dietrich's men, though quite brave men in their own way, fell behind whatever cover they could, including the old fountain in the square, its base already pockmarked from the bombing last night. Their eyes scanned the rooftops, but the dark hid the snipers.
"Einer hat eine furchtbare Bazooka," the men said among themselves. One has a terrible bazooka.
Tully took careful aim again, sighting one particular vehicle still sitting in the square. Dietrich's Kubelwagen. He fired. The rocket spiraled its way towards it and annihilated it in one go. Nothing but smoking, twisted metal remained. Even the palm tree emblem of the Afrika Korps, painted on its side, was defaced. Tully sat back on his heels and grinned.
Then, as Hitch was doing, he picked up his tommy gun and began to 'spray and pray.' Fleeing the courtyard, the Germans had to leave fallen comrades behind, though they fought to drag the wounded away even under 'withering' fire. Dietrich had upped the town's defenses, but he must have been napping not to figure the Rat Patrol wouldn't be far behind the bomb attack with their own brand of menace.