Killing Rommel (18 page)

Someone asks what we do about HQ's orders.

“What orders?” says Mayne.

Planning begins. The men know this is lunacy. But Mayne is right. The enemy expect us to run; they'll throw all their pursuit parties on to the tracks along which we're likely to flee. They know we'd be crazy to go the opposite way.

“Crazy,” says Paddy Mayne, “is our business.”

19

THE PATROLS TAKE two more days bringing in the missing (all of whom are recovered unharmed), repairing the trucks and allowing the men time to rest and recuperate. The remaining wounded, including Standage but not Collie, who refuses to be evacuated, will make for Landing Ground 119, about ninety miles northeast of Jarabub oasis and a hundred and twenty south of Halfaya, as soon as vehicles can be made ready to transport them. Sergeant Wannamaker, who is suffering from dysentery and must go back anyway, will lead the party.

Major Mayne orders the camp moved from Bir el Ensor, which as it turns out takes a pasting from ME-110s ten hours after we get away. The patrols move twelve miles east the third night, as far as the trucks can go in their shaky state, and south another fifteen the next.

The scheme has changed. Monty and Eighth Army are breaking through at Alamein more powerfully than anyone had anticipated. Rommel is pulling back fast. The Allies could reach Mersa Matruh in a matter of days; Tobruk could be liberated soon after. New orders despatch us even farther west. Intelligence reports that Rommel's intestinal disorder still plagues him; short of Tripoli, five hundred miles away, only Benghazi possesses proper medical facilities. The Desert Fox will go there, HQ believes. We will too.

Our party has been joined by a third patrol. Second Lieutenant Tinker with T2 has come out from Faiyoum via Kufra, crossing the neck of the sand seas where we did at Garet Chod and swinging east, avoiding Jarabub. One of Tinker's trucks takes our wounded aboard; another tows our most damaged vehicle. In this ragtag column we cover fifty miles to a good safe camp at Gadd el Ahmar, which is far enough south to elude Axis scout planes and far enough west to be within a day's hard drive of LG 119. Tinker is the officer I shared a room with at training camp, though we never met because he was out on patrol. With him are twelve men in three trucks and two jeeps carrying our White Russian friend Popski with two savage-looking Senussi guides and a couple of Warwickshire gunners who look like no serving soldiers I've ever seen. “Who are these fellows?” I ask Nick.

“Never ask Popski his business. I promise this, though: These buggers can slit a throat.”

It was Tinker and Popski, we now learn, who beat Wannamaker and me to the petrol dump at South Cairn. Their headlights were the ones tracking us in the dark. One of Popski's tribesmen shows me the holes our Vickers put in the side of their jeep. I give him a tour of our patched jerry cans. Having shot at each other creates a bond. At once we are the best of mates.

As for Tinker, I'm delighted to make his acquaintance. He's a Kiwi like Nick, twenty-nine years old, a handsome devil with a thick jet-black beard that gives him the gravity of a man ten years older. Tinker, his mates testify, is the best navigator in the LRDG (though he has moved beyond this, becoming a patrol commander) and a crack desert hand. When I ask him why he ran his trucks with their headlights on when they were stalking us, he responds with a grin. “To draw your fire. We had the moon behind us; we could see the glint off your bonnets but couldn't make out who you were. There weren't supposed to be any friendly patrols in that area so we reckoned you were Jerries.”

His intention, Tinker says, once we opened fire, was to immediately douse his lights and scatter, returning fire using our muzzle flashes as aiming points. “But your shooters were too good,” he laughs. “We got off one burst and had to run for it.”

Tinker is another of these chaps, like Mayne and Wilder, who are born warriors. Mayne, the rugby star, is a formidable, even frightening example of this type. Tinker's patrol sergeant, Garven, has told me of a raid last year on the German aerodrome at Berka. Mayne led the SAS team that infiltrated on foot at night to plant incendiary bombs on parked aircraft. Once inside the wire, the raiders realised that each plane was guarded by an armed sentry. Mayne killed seven of them, one by one, with his knife, in the dark, going round the field planting his explosives.

At the same time Mayne, to us his comrades, is the kindest, most generous companion, one who will seek out the fellow in distress and spare no effort to make him feel part of the group. Tales of Mayne's drunken excesses are legendary. Yet he's an accomplished scholar—a Cambridge man from a fine family in Ulster, and a solicitor in the bargain. Mayne possesses an odd delicacy of speech; he will swear like a trooper, but without ever employing the ubiquitous term for fornication, which most soldiers use every tenth word, or any obscene term for a woman or a female anatomical part.

The camp at Gadd el Ahmar is a warren of wadis with plenty of cover and good water from an ancient Roman cistern. A number of Arab parties have collected, having learnt through the desert grapevine of Popski's arrival. The Senussi tribesmen of Libya hate the Italians, who drove them into the desert from their fertile grazing lands along the coast and whose favoured method of executing any Arab suspected of collaborating with the British is to hang him by a hook underneath the jaw. With the fall of darkness we are safe from aircraft; the tribesmen, cronies of Popski, will protect and not betray us.

Tea is brewed, stew boiled in the billy. What's so powerful about the desert is its timelessness. I wriggle a seat in the sand with my shoulders draped in the fleece greatcoat that Jake gave me and my back set comfortably against a tyre. I peer about the camp to the men industriously at their labours, the trucks and jeeps dispersed among the camel thorn, to the Arabs and their flocks, the firelight, the vault of heaven. I am an ordinary Englishman, barely out of my university years. Yet here I sit, in the vastness of the African night, surrounded by companions who could have stepped from Caesar's legions or Alexander's phalanx. So primal are the surroundings that I would not be surprised to see Scipio Africanus emerge from the gloom and take a seat upon a hammered-out petrol tin. Wannamaker is setting a watch against our light-fingered neighbours, as Ptolemy or Hannibal no doubt did twenty-three hundred years ago. Dear comrades have been slain; I myself may meet my end tomorrow. Yet this only adds to the savour of being, ourselves, still alive. The smells about are of scrub acacia and motor oil, sweat and sheep dung and gunblack. The joy of this hour, of being in this place with these men, is so keen it makes my eyes smart. Can I write this to Rose? Would I only cause her distress?

At the same time I realise another thing: I myself am not a warrior. Not like these fellows. I am not a Paddy Mayne, nor a Nick Wilder or a Jake Easonsmith or a Ron Tinker. Of Mayne certainly it can be said that if he could be translated across the centuries, he would fit in with the hardest of the Romans or Macedonians. And the others would not be far behind.

These fellows are different from me. I admire them; I wish I could be like them. They are men of action, warriors and man-killers. I'm not.

This apprehension is, paradoxically, the beginning of my true vocation as an officer. All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more “himself,” by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.

Indeed, I was a flawed officer in the Armoured Division. I lacked empathy; I could not lead men. By war's end, however, I had become quite an able commander, which I define by the following criteria. First, from the point of view of my superiors, I could be counted upon to perform the mission they had assigned me, or, if that was unworkable, to improvise and turn my men's exertions upon a secondary undertaking as good as or better than the first. Second, from the point of view of those serving beneath me, I had become someone they could look to for leadership and direction, who would shield them from meddling from above, and would ask no act of them that he wasn't prepared to perform himself. I provided for my men a framework within which they were freed to use their own qualities of courage, resourcefulness and tenacity.

Tinker comes over and flops down beside me. His orders after resupplying us, he says, are to reconnoitre “the going” south and west of Tripoli. The mission comes from Eighth Army, from Montgomery himself. Our commander-in-chief is thinking ahead to hooking left round Rommel's flank. But Monty must first be certain that the terrain is passable in this season for heavy armour. Tinker's assignment is critical. But as soon as he hears of Mayne's plan to raid Benghazi, he wants in.

Mayne rejects this. He and Tinker have a proper dust-up over it, with Tinker making the case that not only has he been in Benghazi on prior raids, as Mayne has, but also he knows his way round the Hotel d'Italia, the site used in the past for Rommel's
Kampfstaffel,
the Field Marshal's rear Headquarters Group. Tinker can lead us to it, he says. Mayne rules against this. Tinker already has orders. But Mayne gets him to draw a map and to describe in detail how to find the site.

By the second night, Collie has recovered enough from his burns to return to duty. At least that's what he claims. His shoulders are still slathered with sheep grease, which he has got from the Arabs, but, he swears, the burns are not as bad as they look. I don't believe this but I'll not be the one to send him back against his will. Standage is clinging grimly to life. Doc Lawson has sawn off Standy's left leg at the knee and splinted the right. We of the patrol have made our comrade as comfortable as possible in a bed on the back of Sergeant Wannamaker's truck, renamed the “Homeward Bound,” and have all taken turns keeping him company at night.

Dawn three, the patrols mount up. All will travel by separate routes. Nick's T1, combined now with Mayne's SAS teams and the surviving vehicles and men of Jake's R1, will proceed west through the desert via Msus to Solluch, coming up to Benghazi from the south. Tinker will bypass Benghazi entirely, swinging south and west past Agedabia and El Agheila towards Tripoli. Wannamaker will head for LG 119 with the wounded. Collie and I, in our two remaining trucks, will make a loop north and west into the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Hills. Our orders are to follow the highland tracks across the Jebel, sending reports of Axis traffic as we go. We'll rendezvous with T1 in five days at Bir el Qatal in the desert south of Benghazi, a site that everyone knows well but me. Oliphant will navigate us in, with Grainger on the wireless.

0730, time to move out. I'm checking tyre pressures and finishing a smoke when Collie comes up but doesn't speak. “What?” I ask.

It's Standage.

We bury him as our last act before departing.

“So long, mate,” says Punch as we toss shillings on to the canvas shroud. None of us is ashamed to weep. “I was envying Standy,” says Punch. “Getting back to Cairo.” Soldiers are superstitious. We beat it out of there fast.

Our trucks make only forty miles that day over stony going with soft dust beneath, with four punctures and one long stop for a carburettor rebuild. While we are lying up that night, a signal arrives from HQ. The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. It was not even a command vehicle but the former living quarters for General Stumme, who had been killed weeks earlier. The Germans had converted it to a mobile dressing station. When our fellows shot at it, they were firing on sick and wounded men.

Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.

20

FROM GADD EL AHMAR, my truck and Collie's strike northwest towards the Trigh el Abd, hoping to swing round the shoulder of the Jebel and turn west before any withdrawing Afrika Korps columns can make it too hot for us. But the place, as the Yanks might say, is crawling with Krauts. Rain has turned the desert to muck. Columns of Axis transport block every track, mired up to their mud-guards. We're stuck too. We pass three days under scrim nets, with flights of Macchis and ME-110s overhead hourly. It's too risky to rig the Wyndom or make a fire; there's nothing for it but to lie up miserably under the trucks, passing the time reading and caring for our weapons.

Finally on the fourth morning the skies clear; a cold wind descends out of the north. The surface of the desert turns crusty and hard. We find cover and set up the aerial. HQ signals that the enemy are falling back faster than anticipated. A gap is opening between Rommel withdrawing west and Monty pressing in pursuit. We receive new orders: Proceed to Benghazi via the tracks linking the Italian colonial settlements—Luigi di Savoia, Beda Littoria, D'Annunzio—or as close to them as we can prudently travel, and report what we see.

We work west and north all day over sandy but decent going, crossing scores of nameless tracks that pass through notches in the ridges breaking up the intervening pans. The desert is strewn with the wrecks of convoys and the graves of men. We are passing over battlefields from this summer and the winter and spring before. Along tracks with route markers in English as well as German and Italian lie the burnt-out hulks of tankers and supply lorries, ours and the enemy's. In cabs scorched to cinders, we glimpse the remains of drivers and convoy officers, the charred rags of their uniforms still clinging to their bones. For several hours we make time by running along a spur of the Trigh. We pass sites where supply columns came under attack. You can see where the tanks waited, hull-down in ambush, behind ridges a thousand yards to the flank. From there they charged in line abreast, scattering the trucks and armoured cars of the supply column; the victims' burnt and shot-up carcasses lie strewn about for miles.

When soldiers have been killed by high explosive, you find no bodies, just boots. The men have been blown out of them. Cresting north–south ridges, we can see the scooped-out pockets where in retreat the Honeys and Crusaders of the 7th Armoured Division took up positions and made stands, seeking to slow down Rommel's advance. Where anti-tank guns were sited supporting the armour, we see now soldiers' junk, web gear and desert caps, the refuse of campsites. Everything of value has been looted. German salvage crews are brilliant at turning rubbish into armament. What they miss, the Arabs make away with. The flats between ridges are studded with “brew-ups,” tanks incinerated with their crews inside. Only the really bad ones remain; Axis salvage crews have towed off all that can be repaired. Many of the brew-ups are U.S.-made Grants, the tall heavy machines powered by aircraft engines that use high-octane aviation fuel. When these tanks idle in place, a halo of superflammable vapours collects about them, so that an enemy shell needs only a near-miss to make the whole thing blow sky-high. Germans and English mark their men's graves with an inverted rifle topped by a helmet; the Italians use a rifle and topi. The troops strip the bolts to make the rifles unusable, but the Arabs take them just the same; their expert gunsmiths can fabricate any weapon-part.

One would think that such grisly apparitions would sober us, but in fact we are cheerful. “We're still breathing,” observes Punch. Nor are we superior to a little judicious pillaging. Oliphant sounds every petrol tank; it's remarkable how much juice you can recover with a simple siphon. We ransack the kit boxes of armoured cars and ammunition lorries, scrounge through the innards of tanks. I forbid the men to loot corpses, but that doesn't keep them from rifling the pockets of loose tunics and greatcoats. The Germans' give up tobacco, chocolate, tinned sausages. Our own fellows' yield cigarettes, jam, boiled sweets. Italian lorries are the jackpots, producing such delicacies as tinned pears and cherries, cigars, Chianti and Frascati, Pellegrino water, even the odd split of champagne. We tuck away tins of cheese and sardines, packets of Fatimas or Players' or Gallagher's Blues. Plum prizes are Luger pistols, swastika flags and Dienstglas binoculars. Finding a pair, I immediately dump my Taylor-Hobsons. Grainger finds a
Gott Mit Uns
belt buckle, which Marks trumps with a silver cigarette case, a gift to some major from his wife, bearing the sentiment

GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND

“God punish England.”

In dead ground we come upon rucksacks overlooked by previous scavengers. The contents of these wrench the heart—diaries and paybooks, wallets, photos, letters from wives. We collect these articles, the enemy's as well as our own, and preserve them in a suitcase Punch has salvaged from a burnt-out Daimler scout car. We'll turn them in when we make contact with higher echelons; such personal effects may ease a young widow's grief or provide a cherished memento for a son or daughter.

By evening of the fifth day out of Gadd el Ahmar we're drawing near to the coast. Along the Martuba track tramp endless columns of Mussolini's infantry. The Germans have made off with all motor transport, leaving their allies to walk. The Italians have come a hundred miles and have two hundred to go. They march without order; all soldierly bearing has fled. We could put five thousand in the bag, but what would we do with them? We give them a wide berth and keep moving.

A failed big-end bearing immobilises us all the next day. I send Punch and Jenkins, who has replaced Durrance as fitter, to canni-balise wrecks. What we need most are hoses, inner tubes and gaskets. They come back with armloads, plus two radiators and a crankcase plate.

All that day enemy columns rumble past in the distance, withdrawing west. At night we watch the Panzers going into their leaguers and see the Verey lights they shoot off to guide stragglers in. The sea is only ten miles off; we can smell it. We can hear, across thousands of yards, the metallic banging of the enemy's field repair shops. A signal from HQ reports Wannamaker's convoy has reached Landing Ground 119 safely; our wounded have been taken out in Bombay bombers serving as air ambulances. We kill a bottle of cognac to celebrate.

We're starting to see Arabs. Normally as shy as gazelle, the tribesmen materialise now in parties of ten and twenty, on foot and on camels. They smell plunder. Dawn seven out of Gadd el Ahmar, we skirt a freshly vacated German leaguer. Senussi pillagers carpet the site, hoovering up everything. They salute us, grinning. “Inglesi! Inglesi!”

We trade tea and sugar for eggs and boiled kid. The tribesmen are Obeidi from the Jebel south of Derna. They know Popski. When they learn he is out here and that we are his friends, our stock soars. One piratical-looking kipper swaps Punch a brand-new Luger, still in its case, for a wristwatch and a fifty-cig tin of Woodbines. The sheikh is a lanky fellow with a nose like Disraeli and the whitest teeth I have ever seen. By sign and pidgin he communicates to us that these Germans—the ones who've just vacated this camp—are the last of Rommel's formations between here and Cairo. “All flown,” says he, miming birds taking flight.

Sure enough, from the ridge where we stand, we can spot the dust of five columns receding.

The sheikh wants to throw in with us. He likes our trucks; they can carry more loot than camels or donkeys. I decline politely. Where, I ask, will he go now? He points north.

“Towns,” he says. And he grins.