Upfall

Roi, like almost every member of the sayeret, had been wounded in the fight. He was peppered with bullet fragments and shrapnel and his head ached from repeated mortar blasts. Yatom and Mofaz each had bruised or broken ribs from the shots they'd taken into their protective vests—Bolander too, in his own counter-charge during the SS attack on the hillock. Roskovsky was dead, Rafi dying. Ido had taken a bit of shrapnel during his stint in defense of the ridge, but had yet to treat himself or allow the doctors at the aid station to assist him. body armor was also peppered with shrapnel, as was a good portion of his face. Only Ilan, ensconced in his sniper's liar throughout the fight had escaped injury.

The other Jewish defenders of Biali had suffered much worse. It would take a long time for Yatom to fully assess the casualties, but the aid station was collapsing under the strain of dozens of seriously wounded men and women. Yatom knew that there were still bunkers still full of dead or the badly wounded. Yet until the Germans were completely gone, there was little he could do. And while it seemed clear that the Germans were indeed retreating, they were taking their time about it, doing what they could to recover their own casualties and equipment.

It wasn‘t the German way to leave anything behind if they could help it, a trait they shared with the Israelis. Teams of SS corpsman advanced to collect their wounded. Distaining white flags, they practically dared the Jews to shoot. Yatom held his forces back, so long as the corpsmen didn‘t get too close. When a few Germans approached Roskovsky's body Yatom and Roi drove them off, Yatom shooting an MP 40, Roi an MG 34, their 5.56 mm ammunition almost fully exhausted. Later a working German halftrack moved out from the German line to attempt the retrieval of a damaged machine. This was too much for the surviving Jews, who without orders drove it off with massed machinegun fire.

Finally, late in the afternoon, the Israelis listened to what they hoped was the last rumbling of the retreating German vehicles. Yatom doubted that the Germans would pull out completely, without leaving at least a covering force, and so his little army went about its own cleanup and recovery very carefully, and only after sending out a couple of tired and reluctant patrols. To his surprise, the patrols reported that the area seemed to be completely clear. Doubting them, near to sunset, Yatom led a patrol accompanied by Nir and Han. The scouts had indeed been truthful—for whatever reasons, the German battle group was gone.

The Germans‘ complete withdrawal had as much to do with their original orders as the battering they took on the hills near Biali. Neither Stadler nor Kumm had been ordered to occupy the area around the town, or to seize it. Their orders had been to engage and destroy a partisan force in the area. Having done that, after a fashion, Stadler decided to terminate the fight, and withdraw. It wasn't the job of the SS to pull security duty. Globocnik may have ordered one battalion to camp guard duty at Belzec, but Stadler would be damned if his men were going to stand guard over the blasted forest and hills around Biali. His men had managed to repair one Stug III and two of the damaged halftracks sufficiently to drive away, while a recovery vehicle pulled out the Stug III knocked out by Roskovsky‘s EFP. Leaving behind two destroyed assault guns and several halftracks looked bad, but the fighting had been hard, and his men had killed many partisans for the price. Anyway, he didn‘t have the support or reinforcements to do otherwise.

Stadler had no intention of characterizing the battle as anything other than a victory. Anything else would dishonor the memory of Colonel Kumm and endanger his own career. His battalion had suffered, but Stadler convinced himself, had dealt out as much punishment as it had taken. Like Kumm, Stadler had been shocked that the partisans stood and fought, rather than fleeing after some initial skirmishing. That decision, reckoned Stadler almost certainly had led to catastrophic losses among the partisan force, even if a few bunkers held out at the end. He'd taken twenty-three prisoners to boot. And although the worthless police sergeant Mueller could not identify any of them as British commandos, Stadler decided to keep them alive as proof of his victory. Anyway, Mueller might change his mind.

Stadler‘s men had seized many enemy weapons as well, which always was good for display after a partisan operation. Especially telling, he believed, was the capture of a British commando weapon unlike any he'd seen before, and which alone, might justify the price of the battle The machinegun-like rifle was far more impressive than the little Ootzi submachinegun. If the German army copied it, it would make a marvelous assault weapon.