Read Not Flag or Fail for Free Online Page A

into its holster and was looking a lot calmer than he had in the heat of the action.
    “Well done chaps you did very well, I’m proud of you.” He paused, took a cigarette out of his cigarette case and lit it. The smell of the smoke wafted over towards us, most of us followed the Lieutenants’ example and lit up our own.
    “Are we ok to put a brew on sir?” said Harry. “By all means Henshaw, I think we deserve one, do an extra mug eh? Better stay alert though, I don’t think Jerry will let us get away with what we’ve just done for very long.”
    He was right too. The water was still on the boil when someone nearby shouted Stuka’s, and once again we all dived for the dug outs. This time our crew were accompanied by the Lieutenant. The bombs dropped all around us, earth cascading down on top of the roof of our shelter, the percussion waves from the explosions blowing the tarpaulin in towards us.
    “Cosy little place you’ve got here.” said Lieutenant Davies, in an effort to make light of our situation.
    “Yeh, I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut for you.” said Fishy.
    The planes had got here, so soon that we figured out that they must have been called in by the tanks before they had started their withdrawal. That meant that they would try coming on again, hoping we had been put out of action. This time though, no one had been either killed or injured and only one gun had been damaged so we had got off very lightly.
    We were on the guns and ready, when the first of Jerry’s tanks came down the roads towards us.
    This time though, they found our range and although we were once again the overall winners, they did score some hits, resulting in the loss of two more blokes and several more injured.
    This pattern carried on throughout the day into early evening, then as the Stuka’s left at dusk; it started to go quiet again. By now we had moved out our dead and wounded back towards the coast. The battery was down to seven serviceable guns and about forty blokes. This reduced number was not all down to injury, some of the blokes had been moved out due to the damaged guns and equipment. It was felt they would be more useful elsewhere.
    I stood three of the blokes down to get a break, while myself and Fishy stayed by the gun. We watched down the road for any sign of the tanks returning but it looked as if Jerry had decided to take a break too. Eventually Jack came over carrying two mugs of tea which he handed to us, we sat down on the carriage and the fags came out. I looked at Jack and Fishy; their faces were black with soot and sweat. I figured I must look pretty similar, there was no doubt we were just about done in.
    “We can’t last much longer Bomb. There are only seven of us now. If them Stuka’s come back there’ll be nothing left of us by morning” said Fishy, once again stating the obvious.
    “They won’t come back now” said Ronny, as he and Harry came over to join us “they won’t fly in the dark.”
    “Just for once I hope you’re right Ronny” said Fishy throwing away the slops from his mug and going over to get another cup.
    Ronny was right as it turned out, we spent a quiet night, sleeping in shifts of two men, for three hours at a time so we had all had some rest by the time we stood by the gun at 06.00 waiting to see what Jerry had in store for us today.
    The morning passed quietly with most of the activity around the command tent, this included several trips up and down the road by Mickey Most on the BSA.
    Around noon Captain Roberts left the command tent and stood for a long time looking down the road, he must have decided it was safe, and leaving a Lieutenant and a Sergeant to watch the road, he called us all together.
    “Ok chaps, this is the situation. Jerry has us more or less cut off now and ‘the powers that be’, think we’ve done about all we can, so we’ve been ordered to pull back to the coast. Unfortunately there are some of Jerry’s advanced units already behind