The Iron Stallions (23 page)

As the light began to fade and the desert turned silvery, there was a cold wind blowing from the sea to chafe the gritty dust against the skin. A few of the older hands were quiet and thoughtful, thinking of friends who already lay in the desert, beneath crooked crosses jammed into old petrol tins full of sand or sticking out of piles of snake-infested rocks.

Sitting beside his tank, Josh felt the urge to write home. All round him other men were setting their thoughts on paper, penning letters to girls who meant nothing to them and never would, simply because they felt they couldn’t go into battle without letting someone know their emotions.

The sky darkened and the desert grew quieter. Despite its hugeness, there were always sounds about them – an unseen lorry’s gears grinding in the distance, the faint growl of a moving tank, the stutter of a machine gun or the thud of a far-off anti-tank weapon. Waiting in the white moonlight, Josh began to wonder if the Germans wouldn’t be suspicious but, even as he wondered, a battery of six-pounders began slowly to bang away.

An endless stream of lorries was moving past, the dust on the faces of the men inside making them seem like ghosts. As the moon rose higher, all movement stopped and to Josh it seemed as if the whole desert was holding its breath. Above them he could hear the sound of aircraft seeking out the enemy’s positions but over mile upon mile the silence was the silence of a church.

The seconds ticked on. He looked at his watch again and had just lifted his head when he saw the whole sky turn red and the noise of the guns hit him in a solid thump that shook the desert and cut the sky in half. The whole front ahead of him began to sparkle, the horizon convulsed in an unsteady glare. Through the confusion of sound he heard a machine gun and the clear-cut bark of a German 88, but whole squadrons of aircraft were passing overhead now, drowning conversation with their throbbing, and Josh found his heart thumping.

A glare of acid-white light on the horizon marked the end of a German position, then there was a pause as the artillery moved on to different targets and the infantry began to move forward.

The tank crews stood talking quietly as they waited, caught by the excitement of the moment. Reeves was silent and Josh wondered what he was thinking. He hadn’t mentioned his premonition of death again but he knew he hadn’t forgotten it. For an extrovert, gregarious man, he was quiet and subdued these days.

Ormonde was comparing conditions with the conditions he’d found when he’d first arrived in 1940. Aubrey was listening with a grave face, his thoughts obviously far away over the horizon.

Tracer shells from a Bofors gun lifted in the distance and the beams of a searchlight shone into the sky as a beacon to indicate the way. Somewhere in the darkness a voice called out instructions to the guns.

As the battery crashed out, officers and men ducked at the concussion, then Josh heard the screech of whistles and saw a line of steel-helmeted figures moving up, their rifles at the high port, the moon touching their bayonets.

The tank crews scrambled to their seats, wriggling into the warm interiors, operators bent over their radios, gunners crouched below their commanders’ feet. Starters whined and the engines roared into life, the flicker of exhausts throwing the next tank in line into silhouette.

‘Okay, Tyas,’ Josh said quietly into the microphone. ‘Off we go!’

Enormous volumes of dust enveloped the desert and the night thickened as the tanks growled forward.

The task of the men in the south was to press with sufficient determination to force the Germans to keep two whole armoured divisions away from the main fight, but not to incur casualties that would cripple them for any future operations. The prospects of easy success were not high. Many of the vehicles were in poor condition still, with radios and even guns unserviceable, while opposite them the defences were strong and deep, the enemy of high quality, and the country ahead rough and broken or covered with soft impeding sand.

Moving up in the dusty moonlight, Josh watched the first trickles of prisoners moving to the rear, some of them stunned and dazed-looking after the colossal barrage. Among them was an Italian officer wearing his braided cap and a jacket over red silk pyjamas. Guns were trumpeting all round them, and ahead blue lights showed where sappers worked to clear a path and mark it with tapes. Somewhere just in front two machine guns were firing through the murk, the tracers flicking just over Josh’s head. Then there was an explosion on his right, and as the air cleared, he saw an armoured car lying on its side, licked by flames, its crew staggering about, holding their ringing heads.

They began to refuel, while the gunners removed the muzzle covers from the guns and fed the belts of ammunition into the Besas and Brownings. Leduc came down the line in his tank, his head out of the turret and giving instructions as they marshalled themselves into order.

‘They’re about six miles ahead,’ he shouted across. ‘We move at 2 a.m.’

Ahead of them there were gun flashes as far as the eye could see. It was bitterly cold and Josh shivered. Like everybody else, he was quietly praying they’d be through the minefield and out in the open before daylight.

As the radio crackled with orders, he glanced about him and gave the signal.

‘Caro One, Two, Three and Four. Advance.’

Creeping forward in line ahead at the prescribed speed of three miles an hour, they followed the masked lamps nose-to-tail, four groups each led by its reconnaissance troop in scout cars and followed by batteries of artillery, the new self-propelled guns’ motor infantry and anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Clouds of white dust obscured everything and, as the vehicles ahead became obscured, the movement became a nightmare for the choked and blinded drivers.

As they got into position, reports came back that the resistance was stiffening. The infantry had made good progress, however, though they had failed to capture all their objectives, and tanks had been pushed up to help.

Josh began to watch the sky. It was growing dangerously late and he was well aware that if they didn’t get through before first light they’d have little chance against the 88s. Time was running out and, standing on the brink of the new day, the pyramid-like mound of Mount Himeimat was still in enemy hands to plague them.

The radio crackled. ‘Caro Leader. Can you move forward at all?’

‘Not far. But I’ll try.’

Reaching the old front line, they began to pass through the gaps in the minefield and emerge into No Man’s Land where the bursting shells and the rattling of machine guns answered the guns. As the leading tanks reached the captured enemy outposts, gaps had already been cleared by the Engineers, but at the next stretch of mines they were obliged to halt because the infantry ahead were still trying to fight their way forward. As dawn approached, they were still barely halfway to their objectives, still closed up and hemmed in by minefields.

Leduc’s voice came over the radio, ordering them to deploy and, moving gingerly, they opened out. As the sky lightened they could see the ground rising gently ahead to a ridge. The landscape was already scarred with the wreckage of the night’s fighting. Engineers still laboured in the minefield gaps, signallers repaired telephone lines, ambulances growled up and down, while salvage parties dragged back damaged vehicles. As a sudden squall of fire from the German artillery set light to a group of vehicles and thickened the dust storm, every kind of unit imaginable began to open out in the patches of favourable ground, while the guns, swinging off the routes, blasted away with no regard for anyone, their gun barrels alongside command posts and vehicles until the shattered occupants bolted for somewhere safer and quieter.

As B Squadron appeared alongside, Dodgin’s head appeared from the turret of the leading tank.

‘Bloody crowded battle,’ he shouted.

Hull-down on a slope, British tanks were exchanging shots with the Germans and shells cracked viciously over the rocky ground. The sand began to drift over the bodies of friend and enemy, while the wounded, tormented by the sun, tried feebly to fight off the flies. The sky drummed under the sound of allied aircraft, and radios were filled with the chatter of British, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian and Polish voices.

Up ahead, the smoke cleared a little but it was impossible to see where the enemy gun line was. Then a squadron of Bostons swept out of the sky and the long barrels of the 88s swung skywards to engage them. Immediately the tanks and guns began to bang away at them.

‘That’s a new one,’ Josh said. ‘Ground support for the air. It’s usually the other way round.’

Under the full view of the enemy on Himeimat, they clung to their congested bridgehead through the dropping fire. Shells raked the new-cut lanes through the mines and later in the day, thirty German tanks bore down on their northern flank but made no attempt to come too close and remained at a distance, hull-down, watching and waiting.

As darkness fell, Leduc held a conference in the lee of a tank, with the shells dropping uncomfortably close. Wrapped in greatcoats, against the bitter night, they kept ducking under the showers of stones and sand as he gave his instructions. As the barrage roared out again, they began to crawl forward between the green lights that marked the route. German aircraft dropped parachute flares in an attempt to find out what was happening, and a moment later shells began to fall on heavily-loaded vehicles so that the desert was like a crackling forest fire that lit up the earth for miles around. The gap ahead was clearly illuminated but everything in it was silhouetted for the enemy guns. As the tanks moved past, headquarters trucks and petrol lorries were burning fiercely, the charred bodies of their drivers still upright in their seats. In the middle of the holocaust stretcher- bearers moved bent double and a doctor and a padre walked past, upright and indifferent, looking for wounded.

On the right, tanks seemed to be going up in sheets of flame as if someone were lighting candles on a birthday cake and a little later a jeep came back with a wounded colonel in it, his eyes full of tears because he had lost half his men and many of his friends.

‘This bloody battle,’ Reeves said slowly, ‘demonstrates once again that what dominates a battlefield is the mine and the anti-tank gun. Until we get rid of the bastards, we can’t ever do what we’re supposed to do.’

That evening, in accordance with the policy of avoiding serious losses, they were withdrawn and for several days, they remained silent. The southern feint had served its purpose, keeping two armoured divisions tied up, and now news filtered down to them that the New Zealanders and the Highlanders were making progress, though the tanks were getting their usual hammering from the 88s. A German attempt at a counter-attack had ended in complete failure, however, when the RAF had spotted the gathering panzers.

‘All the same,’ Reeves said quietly, ‘it looks to me as if this famous bloody advance’s come to a dead stop, new general or no new general.’

What Reeves said seemed to be correct. Mechanised cavalry seemed as helpless against anti-tank guns as the old horsed cavalry had been against machine guns. The Eighth Army had lost more tanks than the Germans, and more officers and men, and it seemed very much as if they were losing their grip on the battle again.

As the crimson globe of the sun began to climb out of the British lines, they wondered what the new day would bring. Yet another German counter-attack in the north had been stopped and the desert by this time was a charnel house reeking with the stench of the dead. Machine-gun fire scalded the air and vision was still limited to a few yards except when the sun managed to break through to throw strange shapes and huge shadows on the drifting clouds of dust. By now the army had been struggling to break out for ten days and they were growing concerned about the shortage of petrol.

‘It’s by no means a battlefield in which the soldier’s dream o’ victory’s written in the sky,’ Dodgin observed.

The following day, however, Leduc appeared in a hurry. ‘Ninth Armoured’s taken a hammering,’ he said. ‘They were given orders to break out at all costs and their regiments now look like a couple of squadrons. But Monty’s still confident. 1st Armoured are to continue the pressure towards Tel el Aqqaqir, widening the funnel the New Zealanders have made to launch us through. We’re to move to Tel el Eisa to come under the command of 10th Corps. You’d better get cracking.’

As they moved up, the dust-fog was so thick tank commanders had to shine torches rearwards for the following tanks to keep in touch. As the sun rose, it lit the horizon like an enormous gunflash but it failed to disperse the mist and the drifting smoke and dust. It was just possible to see the slim white minaret of the mosque at Sidi Abd el Rahman but beyond the smoke and the wreckage it was impossible to make out what was happening. From the radio reports it seemed that the German tanks were counter-attacking again and it was even possible to see the squat black shapes coming in serried lines from the north-west and west. As the battle within a battle died, news began to arrive of enormous German and Italian tank losses.

Throughout the following hours they waited impatiently.

‘This day don’t appear any more auspicious than any o’ the others,’ Dodgin remarked.

By this time, tempers were fraying. The physical and nervous strain was beginning to tell and bleary-eyed men were snatching meals wherever and whenever they could. Josh couldn’t remember the last time he had slept properly.

‘There’s only one consolation,’ Aubrey observed. ‘It’s beginning to look as if we can’t
lose
the battle, which at least makes a change.’

Josh said nothing, wondering how long the strain could be kept up. 1st Armoured could make no headway, the South Africans had come to grief in the minefields, and 8th Armoured had been stopped by the 88s. By this time the tank men were beginning to wonder where their replacements were coming from. And, even though they knew that up ahead German tanks were going up in flames and men were reeling from the furnace of the battle, they could see no end to the dog-fight. Nobody was moving. Rations were unappetising. Water was short. And the flies were worse than ever, as if the blood that was being spilt had brought them from every corner of Africa.