Tales from the Special Forces Club by Sean Rayment

Author:Sean Rayment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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By April 1945, as the war was drawing to a close, John and S Patrol found themselves approaching the small town of Vigonovo, which is situated directly east of the ancient city of Padua, around half an hour west of Venice.

On 29 April the six jeeps of S Patrol were cruising along a deserted road when the air exploded with the sound of artillery fire.

‘At first we thought we were coming under attack, and then we realised that it was the sound of an artillery battery very close by. It was an absolutely colossal roar. We knew straight away that it must have been German. We pushed on a little bit further until we could see the battery was composed of 88-millimetre guns, which, although we didn’t know it at the time, were firing on British troops just outside Padua. We had managed to approach the battery from the rear, and if they had any guards posted they hadn’t seen us, so the element of surprise was with us.

‘I turned to Bill O’Leary and said, “What do you think we should do?” And Bill replied in his own inimitable way, “It’s not up to me to say. It’s your fucking decision.” He was right, of course. There were two options. I could report the position of the battery and withdraw, or we could attack. So I said something like, “Right, we’re going to drive in all guns blazing.” Everyone did exactly as they were told. They simply said, “OK, skipper!’ For me it wasn’t really that much of a choice. We were soldiers in a war and we had found some enemy, so we attacked.

‘We turned to our right, positioned ourselves so that we were in line abreast and charged in across country with all our machine-guns firing at the full rate. It was a hell of a fire-power – 12 machine-guns, six .30 calibre Brownings and six .50 Brownings. We had very long belts of ammunition so we could just carry on firing.’

‘S Patrol tore across the open countryside firing burst after burst into the German position, creating panic and mayhem.

‘We charged in guns blazing not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into. But the .50 cal can put down a tremendous weight of fire and I think we just took the Germans by surprise. We were firing directly into where they were concentrated, and they must have thought we were at the front of a very large attack because they simply packed up and surrendered. It all happened very quickly. The Germans’ morale had been totally crushed by our surprise attack because they thought they would have been as safe as houses. It was our most spectacular success of the entire war because we managed to capture 300 Germans. I later discovered that a cousin of mine, Charlie Price, was entering Padua at a time when this fire was coming. And he later said that it stopped, and that was probably due to us.’

John handed over the care of the Germans to the partisans, somewhat reluctantly.

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