Killing Rommel (19 page)

21

DERNA IS THE first civilised settlement we enter. It's a good-sized town, on the coastal plain beneath the escarpment, made over into a temporary city by Rommel's occupation and now denuded in the Germans' and Italians' decampment. Our orders have routed us to the eastern shoulder of the Jebel Akhdar, the Big Bump jutting into the Mediterranean from Gazala to El Agheila. Benghazi is on the western side. We're on the northeast.

We have entered no-man's-land. The retreating Germans and Italians have moved out, but Monty and Eighth Army have not yet moved in. Approaching via the Martuba bypass, we can see columns of black smoke from the top of the escarpment where fuel dumps of the aerodrome at El Ftaiah have been set alight by Axis engineers. Dull crumps resound from below on the plain; every article of value that can't be trucked away is being blown up so the advancing British can't make use of it. On the flat at the base of the scarp stand POW cages, their wire and guard towers still intact. Suddenly the whole hillside shudders; we squirt sideways into a shallow lay-by along the switchback descent. Billows of yellow-grey powder ascend from below: demolition crews destroying the road. We give them half an hour to clear out, then work our way down over the blown sand and stone. The east side of town is the native quarter. From here on, roads and tracks will be mined; enemy engineers will be blasting bridges and culverts, rigging demolitions at every crossing that might delay a British column.

Derna appears to be a dirty town swallowed by an even dirtier military depot. Leaflets blow across potholed streets, announcing to the citizenry in German, Italian and Arabic that the administrative authority can no longer guarantee the safety of persons or property. A pretty white schoolhouse dazzles in the sun, stripped of everything but its flag. The playground is a welter of smashed filing cabinets and child-sized desks. Across one wall sprawls a heroic rendering of Mussolini.

VINCEREMO DUCE VINCEREMO

We enter the town proper. Enormous fuel dumps and vehicle parks have been emptied and blown up. The grounds of a hospital have been made over into a tent city; now there's nothing left but rubbish and broken-up Army cots. Every home and shop is shuttered. Native patriarchs camp before the unboarded ones. They've got chairs and beaten-up sofas, in which they lounge in the sun with Mausers and Enfields across their knees, backed by sons and brothers sporting various antique firearms. One old man parks cheerfully under a café umbrella: CINZANO. As quickly as the German engineers lay mines and pull out, the locals trot up and mark the sites—with barrels if they have them, with chairs and sticks and wire if they don't—to protect their children and themselves. When the townspeople realise we're Inglesi, they flag us down, wanting us to blow the mines for them. We're not trained or equipped for such a chore; we tell the locals to sit tight and wait for British engineers. In the Arab kin-groups you see no grown women, just girls under twelve, barefoot in head-scarves. The boys look proud and defiant. Grainger translates a slogan beneath another mural of Il Duce.

CREDERE, OBBEDIRE, COMBATTERE

“Believe, obey, fight.”

In the European quarter, pastel villas can be glimpsed with

CIVILIAN

painted on their courtyard walls. Roadsides out of town are littered with wrecked lorries and gun tractors. We detour to the harbour, reckoning that's where the loot is. There's a handsome hotel with its loggia blown in. Broken-up cabin chairs pave a street; water taps don't work. There's no power. On lawns before cottages lie gashed-open mattresses, trampled lamps, punched-through wicker.

On the main drag beside the
prefettura
stands the shell of a cinema. A Tom Mix western is playing in German. We probe down jacaranda-lined lanes. Punch spots some kind of cloister: a convent, abandoned and unransacked. Maybe the enemy have spared it out of respect for the sisters. We break open the iron gate by backing the tailboard into it and enter, standing by all guns. Punch parks beneath a statue of the Virgin. I send him and our new fitter Jenkins to find us a kitchen with some grub or a garden where we might dig up the odd carrot or potato. Collie takes Oliphant and Miller, our Yorkshire-born medical orderly, to check some buildings at the back. If there's an infirmary we'll grab dressings and medicine. I stay with Grainger and the others on the trucks. We're wary. I watch Miller disappear into a courtyard off a colonnade. “Watch for booby traps!”

He reappears almost at once, waving us forward. With Collie and Oliphant, we poke into the court. At the base of a wall lies a tangle of bodies. The stucco behind them has been stitched by bullets.

“Italians,” says Miller. He checks the corpses while the rest of us cover rooflines and lanes of approach.

“Looters, you reckon?” asks Oliphant.

Collie thinks they're deserters. “More likely blokes who tried to piss off.” The men's boots have been taken, probably by native youths; the corpses are all in stocking feet.

“That's enough,” I say. “Move out.”

The convent's refectory and infirmary have been rifled. Sacks of grain sag, knifed open; wine bottles and china have been smashed; contents of cabinets strewn over the floor, paraffin poured over them. We locate the sacristy; Punch searches through lockers. “What the hell are you looking for?” Jenkins calls.

Punch surfaces with a bottle. “Blood of Christ,” he grins.

Towns are hell on discipline. We've only been here an hour and we're already turning into tourists and pillagers. Time to clear out. I get us started up one of the wadi roads that lead to the good Italian-built bypass. Packs of Arab urchins swarm about our vehicles, begging for cigarettes and chocolate.

Abandoned farms and villas dot the hillsides out of town. The place looks like Italy. On hilltops you see red-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls. Everything is deserted. The farms are fortified compounds, with iron gates and pillboxes with gun embrasures.

Turning up the Martuba track, Collie spies a sedan approaching from the east. I get both our trucks off the road, sited to engage it. The car sees us and brakes in the middle of the road, five hundred yards out. Collie puts the binos on it.

“I'll be damned,” he says.

“What?”

“Journalists.”

Through my new German glasses I see pink faces and war correspondent uniforms.

“What are they doing?”

“Arguing.”

I have Grainger stand and wave a tin hat. Immediately we spot white handkerchiefs. The reporters have had us in their sights too. “Canadian! South African!” they shout as their saloon pulls up on the road alongside us. The vehicle turns out to be an ancient Humber, loaded with newspaper and radio correspondents joy-riding out from Eighth Army at freshly liberated Tobruk.

“Are you buggers daft?” calls Punch. “The Jerries are only five miles up the road!”

The newsmen pile from three of the four doors (only the driver, a local, stays put), shaking our hands and declaring their delight at running into us. Each then makes for a different quadrant of the roadside, where he unbuttons and looses an exuberant stream. It's four in the afternoon and they're all pie-eyed. The Humber is a taxi. One of the correspondents hired it this morning, we are told; his colleagues piled in, determined not to let him beat them to a story. When the gang encountered no enemy, they kept pushing west. Now here there are, sixty miles in front of the forwardmost Allied outpost. I ask if any of them carries a weapon.

“Just this,” says one, hoisting a half-bottle of brandy.

It isn't funny. The safety of these swashbucklers has now become my responsibility. I order them to follow us off the road, where they and we are less likely to get jumped by the Luftwaffe. Except one of our fellows has in the meantime blabbed about the massacre in the convent. The correspondents want to see it. I forbid this. The dean of the outfit turns out to be Don Munro of the CBC. I've heard of him. He is known as an outstanding reporter. “What,” I ask, “are you doing with these mad bandits?”

I can't turn our guests loose unescorted; they'll wind up captured or shot. If I order them back to Tobruk, they'll just wait till our trucks are out of sight, then carry on as they please. We certainly can't keep them with us. From our beards and vehicles they know who we are; if we offer up the first clue about where we're heading, the story will be on the air by tomorrow's tea.

In the end we invite them to supper. They've got a quarter-wheel of Reggiano cheese, liberated from an ice locker, with prosciutto and sweet sausage. “It'll go bad,” Munro says, “if we don't enjoy it.”

I'll give the reporters this: they know how to booze. Even without women, they crank up a spirited binge. I won't let them take over an abandoned farm, as they wish; it's more bad discipline. Instead I make them camp with us in the hills, in a position we can defend, with no fires after nightfall. From them I extract a promise that in return for our protection tonight they'll return to Tobruk tomorrow. When the sun goes down, our guests' bravado wears off. They're happy to huddle beneath our trucks and let us stand watch over them.

The correspondents turn out to be decent fellows. One of them, a South African named Van der Brucke, has a VC from the Great War. He was a cavalryman, his companions tell us. He owns his own newspaper now in Durban and could have happily stayed there, he says, filing stories off the wire.

“But I couldn't do it. The thought of boys like you out here haunted me.” Collie and Punch have gathered; something about the veteran draws them. He was a major, he says. Collie invites him to stay on. “We could use you.”

It's a jest, of course, and the South African knows it. He chokes up anyway. “I'd die happy alongside men like you.” He tells me I'm a good officer but too slack. “You should've lit us up back there on the road.” How did I know, he asks, that he and the others weren't German agents?

Later I share a mug of tea with the Canadian, Munro. He's sober now and a bit chastened. He wants to help. He makes me spread out my map and, shielding an electric torch with the wing of his jacket, walks me over it. “Monty expects no fight at Tripoli,” he says. “The place can be flanked via the Jebel Nefusa; Rommel might make a demonstration, but he'll fall back to here.” Munro taps a spot west of Medenine in Tunisia. “The Mareth Line.”

“Stop a second,” I say. “Let me fetch my sergeant and a couple of others.”

When Collie, Punch, Oliphant and Grainger arrive, Munro continues. He tells us about the Mareth Line. It was built by the French in the last war to keep the Italians out of Tunisia. No one knows exactly how many defensive emplacements it's got, how big its guns are, or how deep its minefields. “But it's serious business. Forty miles end to end, blocking the gap between the sea and the mountains. If Rommel digs in behind that line with 15th and 21st Panzer divisions, 90th Light Division, with the Italian Ariete and Centauro armoured divisions and the Folgore paratroopers—not to mention the reinforcements in armour and aircraft that Hitler is sure to ferry over in such an emergency—a raft of our fellows are going to get their tickets punched trying to push him out.”

Munro can tell from our expressions that this is news to us.

“Look,” he says, “we all know who you fellows are and why you're here. I was having a beer with your boss Guy Prendergast the day he sent Tinker and Popski out after you. No one knows where Wilder and Easonsmith went last month, so I assume they're with you or you with them.”

We're impressed.

“I can see from your faces,” Munro says, “that you don't yet have orders for the Mareth Line. But you will.”

On the map he indicates the rugged country south of the Mareth Line—the Jebel Nefusa—and southwest the Grand Erg Oriental, an unmapped sand sea as vast as the Egyptian. “Monty can't wade into that mess head-on. Some lucky bastards are going to get the job of scouting a way round for him. A left hook. That's Tinker and Popski's job now, is my guess.”

“Or ours soon?”

“All I'm saying is don't start counting the days till you're sipping John Collinses on the terrace at Shepheard's. You lads'll be out here till the show's over.”

Next morning we give Munro our mail to deliver to Eighth Army. I have twenty-seven letters for Rose. Munro promises to phone her in Haifa, if not look her up in person, and assure her that I'm well.

The last thing that happens on our way out of town is we capture an Italian. More accurately, the fellow accosts us where the Derna road joins the Martuba bypass and won't take no till we accept his surrender. He's about forty, obviously an unwilling conscript, barefoot now and terrified, which leads Punch to speculate he's a deserter who somehow escaped a firing squad. By signs the fellow assures us he's an expert Fiat mechanic, but when we hoist the bonnet on Te Aroha IV, his eyes pop as if he's never seen an engine in his life. At noon we halt and signal Cairo for instructions. Get rid of him, they say. They also tell us the attempt on Rommel's life at Benghazi is off, as is our assignment of reporting on enemy traffic on the settlement roads. Instead we are to rendezvous in three days with Nick Wilder and Major Mayne at Bir el Gamra in the Jebel southeast of Benina. We will receive new orders there.

We drop the Italian off three miles from an Arab encampment with a quart bottle of Pellegrino and a forage cap stuffed with cheese and ham. “Bloody hell,” says Collie, watching the fellow recede over our tailboard, “that's the sorriest excuse for a soldier I've ever seen.”

Book Five

Benina

22

WE'RE MOVING, lights out, down the new bitumened road that runs from Benina to the Benghazi–Solluch rail line. It's night and raining. Two thousand yards north, Nick and Major Mayne's trucks and jeeps are advancing to raid the Axis air facility at Benina. My two trucks—with Collie, Grainger, Marks and Jenkins on one; myself, Punch, Oliphant and Miller on the other—are prowling towards an L-junction, where we will set up to cover their withdrawal. Already I can feel the whole show running queer.

Benina is an airfield and repair facility. Round the port of Benghazi are other satellite fields including Regima and two at Berka.

GHQ has determined that the most effective use of our joint patrols' remaining firepower will be not against enemy personnel—i.e., Rommel—but against his aircraft and aircraft workshops. This is the type of job the SAS and LRDG are set up for. So our orders have been changed to raid Benina.

As for our two-truck party, mine and Collie's, we have crossed from Derna in three nights, brazening it out on the good metalled road past Beda Littoria and D'Annunzio, descending the escarpment at Maddalena, then following the El Abiar railway cross-country southwest towards Benghazi on the coast. The second scarp, above the city, drops down within five miles of Benina, which is visible in daylight across a plain that would be planted in season with maize and melons but is now mud, criss-crossed by sloughs and silted-up irrigation ditches.

Rain is heavy and cold. With no roof or windscreen, we're drenched. Temperature has plunged to the forties. The guns are soaked, even under their canvas covers. I'm driving. The steering wheel with its grip ridges is handleable, but the steel pedals of the brake and clutch are both slick beneath my soles.

We're waiting to hear the first explosions. I've got a bad feeling. Rotten luck has plagued this operation since we started. Half a day out of Derna, Te Aroha IV began flooding and stalling; for two nights we've fought shorts in the electrical system, and the patches and bypasses we've rigged are not being helped by this rain. We're on our second and only spare propeller shaft, whose splines are already chattering. The list of ills for Collie's truck is just as long. At the same time our medical orderly, Miller, has come down with a fever of unknown origin. He's keen, but his hearing has been seriously impaired by the malady; he keeps drifting off mentally; twice he has called men by the wrong name, though he knows them as well as brothers by now. Collie has not fully recovered from his burns; he can hold himself together during the day, but at night his body-warmth flees so fast that I can't call on him to stand a watch; all he can do is wrap up in everything he owns and endure till the sun rises. The rest of us are afflicted by all the predictable ailments and inflammations of skin, bowels and stomach that assault men who've been too long away from fresh vegetables, clean sheets and decent medical care.

Nick and Major Mayne's journey has been as ill-starred as ours. Mayne's outfit were jumped by Macchi 202s two days ago, descending the escarpment east of Solluch. The planes shot up three of his four vehicles. Casualties are two dead and two wounded, and though both injured fellows have been patched back to fighting trim, the loss of a pair of good men is devastating in such a small and tightly knit unit.

As for Nick Wilder, a sandstorm separated his patrol from Mayne's the day they set out. Groping blind, one truck has pitched headlong down a forty-foot wadi. Illness and mechanical breakdowns have stripped T1 of another 30-hundredweight and four other men. By the time my Chev and Collie's link with what's left of Nick's and Mayne's outfits at Saunnu oasis, our new rendezvous and fallback point, the combined force is down to nine vehicles, four of which are jeeps, and twenty-two men.

Our outfit is creeping down the dark tarmac now, seeking the L-junction. The road turns left there, according to the map—towards the airfield. Nick's trucks took this route thirty minutes ago. When they've lit the field up, they'll bolt back this same way. Our job is to cover their withdrawal.

But where's the L? It's supposed to be half a mile but we've covered twice that and seen nothing. We pass a sign
COLONIA ESPARZA.
It's on our maps, just past the junction. Have we overshot it?

Suddenly from the west: an explosion. We strain, waiting for the fireball. It never comes. A second blast goes up and, moments later, a third. We're expecting alarms and searchlights. But there's nothing.

“What the hell's going on?”

We keep going. Another mile. There's the road-crossing. I roll through and turn left; Collie's truck follows.

But the junction is a T, not an L. There's no T on the map. Collie and I meet each other's eyes. The night is freezing but we're both sweating. Are we lost?

“Kill the engines,” I say.

We listen. Nothing. Suddenly the whole airfield goes up. Yellow fireballs wallop skywards, followed by massive, ground-shuddering explosions. We can hear machine-gun fire and see green and red tracers zinging in all directions. More minutes pass. Suddenly headlights appear, speeding towards us from the direction of the airfield. Our two trucks have taken up positions flanking the road, partially covered behind sand berms. We're expecting Nick's jeep and trucks to come racing out of the darkness.

Instead we hear the growl of diesels and the whap-whap of steel tracks on the tarmac. Three tanks churn past, an Italian M-13 and two Mark III Panzers. They don't see us. They turn right and rumble off, down the road we came in on. They're the first tanks I've seen since Cairo. I'm astounded at how huge they are and how terrifying. As soon as they pass, Collie and Grainger scurry to me. We can hear more diesels and see more headlights approaching.

“This road,” says Collie, “is starting to lose its charm.”

We reverse farther back from the junction, seeking a spot from which we can cover all approaches but that won't leave us so visible. The trucks haven't gone fifty yards before my rear tyres nearly plunge into a six-foot-deep irrigation ditch. We're in melon and maize fields. I can see no way round the ditch. It's too deep to cross. We probe along its verges, seeking a culvert or crossover, but the muck we're driving through builds up so thickly on our tyres that we have to halt and scrape it off with spades. We can see headlights approaching from east and west. Suddenly a voice in Italian challenges us from the darkness.

Punch cocks the Browning. At once we hear the frantic overturning of mess tins, punctuated by furious Latin profanity.

“Fire!”

Punch lets loose. It's a thousand to one, hitting anything in this ink, but as always the din of the gun vaults us sky-high with adrenalin. When Punch cuts his burst, we can hear footfalls receding into the distance.

“That'll give the Wops some exercise,” says Punch.

We inch back towards the road. On the airfield, more bombs are going off. The buildings are hangars and repair facilities. The explosives will either have been detonated on delay-fuses, so that Nick's and Major Mayne's trucks may be fleeing or long gone by now, or both raiding parties may still be on the field, planting explosives as they go.

Either way, we can't stay here. The Italians we have just stumbled upon may have a radio to call for help; they may signal by Verey flare or even recover their nerve and come back to snipe at us or to lob the wicked little grenades they call “red devils.”

More blasts ascend from Benina. Sirens at last begin sounding; we can see and hear fire trucks and emergency vehicles speeding between buildings, a number of which are now aflame. We have no choice but to pull away from the T-junction, back down the road we came in on. We can't go forward and risk getting cut off any more than we already have been, but we also can't abandon our assignment of covering our comrades' withdrawal.

By now my truck and Collie's have escaped the melon fields and are slogging on our mud-caked tyres back on to the solid shoulder. Suddenly Collie's truck nose-dives to the right and stops. I halt too. I hear cursing. Somehow Collie has run over barbed wire; wreaths of the stuff have coiled round his front axle and right front tyre, which has been punctured in heaven knows how many places. Jenkins bangs through kit boxes, seeking the wire cutters. I hurry over. Collie radiates his usual calm.

“All right, lads, hang on to your water. I'll dismount the twins,” he says, meaning the Vickers K machine guns, “and find a spot on the road to set up.” He pats the side of the truck. “Jenkins and Marks, don't get your knickers in a twist. There's no enemy in sight. Shut up and get the bloody tyre off.”

I ask Collie how long till he can move.

“Ten minutes.”

I help him dismount the Vickers. We're both keenly aware of how tight our spot is. We must set up and man this position, but for how long? We've already witnessed an M-13 tank and the two Mark IIIs passing this post, heading south—in other words, between us and our getaway route. Worse, as we've noted via our adventure in the melon patch, there must be scores of side tracks through and round the cultivation, known to the enemy but not to us—perimeter and airfield access roads, fire and rescue lanes, not to mention the farm tracks that the Arabs use to get their donkey carts in and out of the fields. The infantrymen we bumped into will report our incursion soon, if they haven't already. How long till every track out of here is cut off?

In war, nothing ever works by the timetable you think it will. “I'm going forwards,” I tell Collie. “We've got to know what's up front.” I leave him with the Vickers protecting the road and his truck. Punch, Oliphant, Miller and I press westward towards the airfield.

Rain continues sheeting. I'm rolling in second gear, lights out. Suddenly:

A camel.

“Jesus!”

The beast looms out of nowhere, beam-on and big as a barn. I stand on the brakes. Punch, on his feet at the Browning, goes sailing over my shoulder, across the aero-screens, and lands with a crash on the bonnet. The momentum of the braking truck somehow keeps the surface beneath him. Two more camels appear. It's a string. None even looks up. The truck by now is into a slow-motion 180, all four tyres locked up and sliding on the rain-slick road. Punch is slung sideways on to the sand of the shoulder. Oliphant and Miller in the truckbed are hanging on for dear life. In a spume of spray the truck stops tail-on to the camels, who still haven't reacted in the slightest. Two Arabs materialise, tapping the animals' rumps with their sticks. In moments the caravan has melted back into the night. Miller dashes to Punch. Miraculously he's not hurt and the truck is OK.

Now we're completely frazzled. Punch is cursing my driving, Miller and Oliphant are cursing the camels, we're all cursing the Arabs. In the mêlée of braking, one of our spare wheels and all of our bedding, plus half our water and rations, have spilled over the rails onto the tarmac. As we're scrambling to fling it back aboard, Punch whistles:

“Headlights!”

We can see them coming from the north axis of the T. We heave our gear into the truckbed, but there's no time to get it all.

“Could be Nick.”

“Could be Collie.”

“Could be half the German army.”

It's the last. We buck off the road into the mush beside the cultivation. Before the truck gets a hundred yards, two four-wheeled armoured cars slew up on to the site we've just vacated. They brake, headlights blazing, spotting our debris in the road. We're in the salt-bush, big as life, with no cover except the darkness. I hear orders shouted in German.

In front of me the glass aero-screen disintegrates. Something hot and close passes under my seat. The Germans are firing into the darkness. Punch replies with the Browning. I heave the wheel over and floor the accelerator. We're in mud. The wheels spin. The truck is fleeing at the speed of a tortoise. I'm shouting to Punch to cease fire; the flash of his muzzle is giving our pursuers a target. He shuts down. We slide and slither for what feels like two minutes but is probably only fifteen seconds. The Germans have lost us in the dark; they're simply raking the fields with fire. We hear the chatter of at least one light gun and the heavier banging of a 7.92.

The armoured cars will be splitting up, each taking one direction to head us off. And they'll be radioing for help. We have to get round them and back to the road. But where is it? I'm certain I'm running parallel, but I have no idea how far I've gone. At any moment I'm expecting the truck to plunge into an unseen ditch. I spot a donkey track at right angles. Does it lead to the road? I can feel the rain on my face mixing with the blood where the glass has hit. The rounds that passed underneath the seats have torn up the condenser. Boiling water is spraying over the bonnet on to my right arm and leg. I hit the donkey track and bury the accelerator. With a mad lurch the truck bucks over a runoff channel and on to an unpaved road. Where the hell are we now?

I turn hard right, lights out, and crash broadside into a 44-gallon oil drum, upright in the middle of the road. It's a roadblock. The truck rebounds off this first barricade (which is no doubt filled with sand) and ploughs headlong into another. I'm flung into the steering column. The vehicle stops dead. The wind has been knocked out of me by the collision. I'm aware that we're being fired upon from very close. The bonnet of the truck is levitating in a way that defies physics. I glimpse a guard shed at the side of the road. Yellow tracer rounds are ricocheting off the surface. I've got the accelerator on the floor. The truck crawls. The world has become a silent movie. A searing gale passes beneath me; I feel the floorboard disintegrate. In the left-hand seat, Miller has been flung face-first into the dashboard. “I'm shot!” he cries. I turn towards him. The right side of his shoulder, arm, and ribcage has been ripped open so wide I can see the bone-ends and viscera; he drops hard left, out of the cab, so fast that when I lunge to catch him with my left hand, I grab only his belt. I haul him back. He's unconscious and hangs, dead weight. I jam him into the seat, shouting at him to hold on though I know he can't hear me.