How I Won the War (22 page)

“You’re not trying to tell me,” I said, “that Montgomery fought the Battle of Alamein off the wrong maps.”

He drew up his shoulders in tipsy dignity.

“My brother, Conrad, sent them to him. There was
buggerall
on half of them, but flat sand and one contour. Just the Kidney Feature to break the forty-mile monotony and a bit of a dip down by the Qattara Depression. So they marked up their start lines and their axes and their bounds and fought their chinagraph battle quite happily on the sheets that
Conrad
gave them. While the troops were fighting on the sands of El Alamein, Eighth Army Headquarters were conducting their paper battle a thousand miles to the south on a bare bit of lower Libyan desert two hundred miles northwest of Khartoum.”

“But yet,” I said swiftly, “we still won the battle.”

“My brother, Conrad, won the battle. If he’d sent them up the right maps to work off they’d probably have lost it. Got to finding out where the troops really were and interfering with them. They appreciated it too, you know, because they gave my brother, Conrad, a medal. They gave him the M.B.E. for meritorious issue of maps in Cairo. And you don’t get medals for nowt, do you?”

“No,” I said, “of course you don’t.”

“You get medals, old cock, for pulling the general’s
chestnuts
out of the fire. Medals are issued
pro
rata
to the magnitude of the blunder made by the higher command. You can’t fight against impossible odds unless some bloody brass hat is incompetent enough to land you up against impossible odds. You can’t conduct an heroic last-man, last-round
defence
unless some red-tabbed genius has bungled his battle and left you on your tod…. The bigger the boob, the more the medals. The number of gongs given after an action increases in direct proportion to the number of casualties. In lauding the decorated living, we overlook the wasted dead. Our attention focused on the gallantry of the survivors we forget the top-level botchery that caused the casualties…. Ten thousand killed today, sir! Strike up the band! Lob out the V.C.’s! And make me a Field Marshal!”

He tipped up the bottle and poured the last of the gin into his glass.

“Medals …” he said, lurching in his chair. “Do you know the one thing you got to have to get medals?”

“Courage?”

“Wrong again. You’re wrong every time, Mr. Musketeer. There’s plenty of courage about. Plenty of blokes too stupid to take cover. Plenty of blokes got no imagination, too dull to know the danger, too dumb to run away. Plenty of blokes, half-crazy, half-animal, best they can think to do is to lower the horns and charge…. Just being brave don’t get no medals. There’s a thousand heroes every day but no laurels go to the unsung … you get no garlands if nobody hears what you’ve done. And the biggest medals don’t go to the biggest heroes … they go to the ones with the best reports…. It’s the reports, cocky, that win the medals, the citations that capture the gongs…. Brave man—good citation—big medal!”

He banged his chest like Tarzan and knocked himself off the chair. “Bravest man in the world—poor citation—no medal! That’s the way of it, boy. If you want to get medals, you want a literate C.O. And a lousy general to make the boobs…. You want a colonel like I had, boy, lead writer for a national daily, every word a masterpiece, every syllable
hitting them in the heart…. The Hemingway of the war diary…. The Dostoeyevsky of the dispatch….”

I got my hands under his shoulders and lugged him to his feet.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s nearly one o’clock. You’d better get to bed.”

“Where’s my bottle?” he grumbled. “Who stole my
bottle
?”

He lit a cigarette lighter and swung it like a torch.

“Ah! There it is.”

“Put that light out,” I said. “There might be ships watching us.”

“What ships?”

“Enemy ships.”

He held the bottle to his eye like a telescope.

“I see no ships,” he said. “Stand the sea at ease.” He swung back his jerkin as he turned wobbling towards the companionway. It was then that I saw he had a V.C., two D.S.O.’s and three rows of variegated ribbon.

It really was a most disturbing experience, and I would have made a special security report to O.C. Ship had I not been fully extended for the rest of the voyage in that
interminable
naval game of lugging the rifles and kitbags out of whichever hold they happened to be in and dropping them momentarily in another.

W
HEN TWELVE PLATOON JOINED
the Allied Forces in Western Europe the forward troops were closing up on the Rhine. I was most gratified to find that we were in time to take part in the greatest opposed river-crossing of the War because, in spite of all the rivers we met in Italy, we were never lucky enough to cross any of them before the enemy had pulled out. An opposed river crossing is one of the most interesting maneuvers a military commander can be called upon to undertake and I was sorry, in so river-racked a land as Italy, not to have sampled its complexities.

Progress from Rimini to Bologna had been something of an aquatic Grand National. Water jumps appeared at regular intervals—Conca, Marrechia, Savio, Ronco, Montone, and the rest—and only the tooth-stumps of blown bridges
remained
to help us over. It wasn’t due to lack of trying that Twelve Platoon never crossed a river till someone had built a bridge. It was just an infernal sequence of bad luck.

We were all set for watermanship on the Marrechia and they sent us up six inflatable rubber boats. It was depressing to find on pumping them up that each had suffered a
two-inch
slit
en
route.

“Must have been a chisel or something sticking out in the truck the engineers brought them in,” said Corporal Dooley. “Terrible careless with their tools they are. We’ll not be getting over in these, sir. A great disappointment it is, too, with the men all raring to go.”

“Don’t give up,” I said. “We can still make the assault. Get the puncture outfit from the fifteen-hundredweight and we’ll mend the holes.”

It took most of the night to get the little patches built up along the slits. When we finally had the boats airtight again, Corporal Hink, overly eager for the fray, treadled the pump with such astonishing vigour that it shot out from under his boot like a football and disappeared into the muddy torrent of the Marrechia. By fixing a piece of gas tubing over the valve and lining up the platoon for relay balloon blowing, I managed to rouse the flaccid black rubber to the wrinkled inflation of a Zulu grandmother’s bosom. But though the chaps gallantly puffed themselves blue-faced and thyroid-
eye-balled
, we never got a boat to a state of buoyancy. And by the time Major Arkdust had sent us up a new pump the Boche had withdrawn and the engineers could build in peace.

When we were faced by the flooded reaches of the Ronco they sent us up canvas assault boats which collapsed flat for transport and opened up on an ingenious wooden framework. We taped the launching routes over the mud flats, rehearsed the landing, and hid the boats in the bushes. At Z minus 15 we erected the craft—to find that they collapsed immediately under our hands. The main struts at bow and stern were cut completely through and there was no way of changing the spineless bag of canvas into a navigable craft.

“It looks like sabotage,” I said. “These are saw marks. Perhaps a German swam across during the night.”

Sergeant Transom looked expertly at the severed pieces of wood.

“These ain’t saw marks, sir. They’ve been gnawed through. It’ll be the water rats that done it.”

“But do water rats eat wood?”

“Round here they do, sir. All the time. The giant Italian wood-eating water rat. That’s what done in those assault boats, sir, and a real danger to other river crossing parties they might well be. We were lucky ours were hungry ones and chewed right through. If they’d had full stomachs and stopped halfway through, the frame could have collapsed out there in the middle and drowned the lot of us.”

I deemed it in the best general interest to write a report for Major Arkdust there and then on the dangers of the giant Italian wood-eating water rat, accompanied by sketches of a suggested metal assault boat framework which would be resistant to rodent teeth. By the time I had finished and the pioneer corporal had come up to repair the struts, the
Germans
had once again gone away and we were able to cross the Ronco in daylight and dry-shod.

Our advance halted by the Montone, they sent forward wagon loads of kapok-bridging—buoyant lozenges about five feet by two which could be laid like floatable railway sleepers to support a duckboard track. Sappers stood waist-deep all one night knitting a floating bridge of the right length. It lay anchored by day among the reed forest against our bank. We set off to tow it across the following night and as it snaked clear of the bullrushes and into the current it broke at every joint and the individual portions of kapok went zipping down the river like big, black dominoes.

“All the lashings have broken away,” I said.

“It’s them blasted Italian water rats again,” said Sergeant Transom.

“But I thought they ate wood?”

“That was down on the Ronco. Up here on the Montone they eat rope as well.”

The sapper sergeant got very excited as his bridge
disappeared
piecemeal downstream and threatened to sue somebody about it. He dived in and collected up pieces of rat-cut rope and was waving them excitedly in my face when
Corporal
Globe unfortunately slipped on the mudbank and hit him across the back of the head with the thick end of his antitank
rifle. We had to send him back unconscious to the F.D.S., and I took the opportunity to send with the driver to Major Arkdust an addendum to my earlier Water Rat Report
explaining
the rope appetite of the Montone mutation.

Brought up short by the Lamone they pushed up to us an ingenious engineer with a rocket, cable, and pulley wheels. It was the plan to shoot over a line in shipwreck fashion and, if no enemy ill feeling arose, to dispatch a swimming patrol to secure it. Our end would then be fixed to a higher purchase and we would each in turn roll gently across in a breeches buoy.

“When,” asked Corporal Hink, after I had explained the technique to my order group, “are they sending up the roundabouts and coconut shies? Where do they reckon we are? Butlin’s flipping Holiday Camp?”

That afternoon the rocketeer mounted his giant firework on its special tripods and made abstruse calculations to set the elevation and line of fire. It was unfortunate that all my N.C.O.’s were still non-swimmers and I had, therefore, to lead the swimming patrol myself. Sergeant Transom was giving me a final coating of used engine oil, just before midnight, when the engineer went through the countdown and fired his rocket. It fizzed quietly on the trestle for a few moments … gave a sudden whoosh of smoke … grew to a driving roar as one leg of the front tripod pulled away … the whole device fell sideways and the rocket blasted off at right angles to the river … turned back over our heads for two hundred yards, hit the front window of the Company Headquarters farmhouse … crashed straight through and out the back, threading the needle with the cable as it went.

It happened, unfortunately, that Major Arkdust was
sleeping
directly under the path of the cable and, as it streaked like an aerial snake across his ceiling he got the idea that Twelve Platoon was deliberately attempting his assassination by rocket fire. This misconception was reinforced as the whizzbang came finally to rest and an Italian flag, which had somehow got caught in the end of the cable, fell to the floor and draped his camp bed like a catafalque. He appeared rapidly at my launching site and although I did my best to
explain to him the true course of events, it was difficult to do justice to Twelve Platoon’s defence standing to attention on a mud flat, stark naked, and plastered from head to foot with used engine oil.

After such a series of riverside misfortunes, the prospect of the assault on the Rhine filled me with elation. The Division had landed at Marseilles and
en
route
northwards to join 21st Army Group stayed at the beginning of March with
American
First Army. Twelve Platoon was encamped on the banks of the Echler, a tributary of the Rhine, twenty miles up from its junction with the great river. We were allocated four American rubber boats for river-crossing exercises.
Compared
with the overgrown inner tubes we had in Italy, they were inflatable palaces. They blew themselves up from gas bottles, had built-in spray sheets and were covered in little pockets containing chocolate, chewing gum, signal flares, bandages, and best wishes to our brave boys over there from the management and staff of the Rochford (N.Y.) Rubber Goods Company.

“Get a band up front there playing Water Music,” said Corporal Globe, “and a couple of Wogs with ostrich feather fans, and Antony could take Cleopatra twice round the pier in that gondola.”

I devised an embarkation drill specially suited to our latex luxury liners and spent a day practising it on a sandbank. Knowing that battles are won in the hearts of the soldiers I took my usual steps to ensure that everyone under my
command
was firmly in the picture.

“We will shortly be embarking, men,” I said, after
breaking
ranks to relax the tension, “on the decisive battle of the whole war—the Assault on the Rhine. The Musketeers will, as ever, be in the forefront of the battle. I am determined, as I know you all are, to obtain pride of place in the assault for Twelve Platoon. It is my intention when the Musketeers attack the Rhine that Twelve Platoon shall be their
spear-head
. But we will not win this place of honour merely because I happen to be the senior platoon commander in the Regiment. We will win it only on merit … only if we can show Colonel Plaster that we are the outstanding exponents of watermanship under his command. And we can achieve
that reputation only by hard work and intensive training. From now until we are called to battle, I propose to practice watermanship each day and to hold an embarkation and landing exercise on the Echler each night. Then, when the trumpets sound the last Great Call to Arms, Twelve Platoon will be first into the water, first across the Rhine and first on the road to Berlin!”

“And last,” said Private Drogue, jocularly concealing his enthusiasm, “on the bleeding leave roster.”

“How wide, sir,” asked Corporal Dooley, “did you say the Rhine is likely to be?”

“Rather more than a quarter of a mile wide.”

“Khee-rist!” said Private Spool.

“Then it’ll be slow running?” asked Corporal Hink.

“I’m afraid not. The river is heavily swollen by the winter rains.” I never believed in softening the facts to my men. “There will be a strong current and we will need all the watermanship at our command.”

“Blimey!” said Private Clapper.

“And which bank is the higher,” asked Corporal Globe, “theirs or ours?”

“Theirs. They hold the commanding slopes and we must pay particular attention in our training to the use of cover after landing.”

“Cut my throat!” said Private Gripweed.

“What will the going be like?” asked Sergeant Transom. “Better than Italy?”

“No. It may well be worse. Much of the east bank is
precipitous
. At the likely crossing places there may well be mud flats to negotiate.”

“Quarter of a mile across,” said Private Drogue. “Jerry up on top, pouring of bleeding rain, and up to your crutch in mud…. Rah, rah, rah! chaps. Tally-ho! and good
hunting
!”

“That’s the spirit,” I said. “Obstacles are made to be overcome. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Now we’ll just go through the details of tonight’s exercise …”

At midnight we were down on the sandbank with our boats. The sections crouched back under cover of the
bracken
as Sergeant Transom and I crawled forward with the
guide tapes. The river swung in a curve before us, swollen with winter rain, racing fast with white water breaking against the far bank.

“Right!” I commanded quietly. “Inflating parties forward.”

Out of the darkness came the boat-carriers and unrolled their parcels along the tapes. Compressed air hissed softly and the rubber creaked as the craft grew like monster slugs and slipped silently into the water.

“Secure boats!”

A stake was driven into the sand and the painters from all four boats were tied to it. The ropes stretched out taut and straining as the current pulled greedily at the airy craft.

“Prepare to embark!”

The sections came crawling forward from the undergrowth and crouched in correct boat-mounting order on the
cross-tape
before the stake, N.C.O.’s in front, paddle men at their stations.

“Embark! Follow me!”

I ran forward through the shallows, leapt into my
command
craft and took my place at the prow. As I turned to watch my troops embarking the boat suddenly shot out into mid-stream…. The line had come away from the stake before anyone could join me … I was alone on board and gaining speed every second as the current sucked me away into fast water….

“Halt!” I cried. “Exercise Seaboots temporarily suspended….”

I sensed the shadow of an overhanging tree coming up behind me … my feathery skiff swirled into a rapid, leapt for a moment bodily out of the water…. Leaves and twigs brushed past my face … my feet tangled, I lost my balance … a branch thumped me blindingly on the back of the head and I fell face down and out cold in the indiarubber scuppers.

When I came round the first flicker of dawn was touching the darkness. The water slapped and gurgled under my ear, and as I pulled myself up I felt a lump like a bony goitre on the overhang of my skull. My craft was skimming along on a vast expanse of roaring water. I could see no banks on either side and thought at first that I had been swept out to sea. Huge tangled shapes appeared above me in the sky, and I
realized I was passing under the skeleton of a blown bridge. The light grew steadily stronger and I picked up the shape of cliffs away in the distance both to the port and starboard … I was on the Rhine and my pneumatic cockleshell was
speeding
on the flood at a whipping ten knots.