Killing Rommel (10 page)

Book Two

The Long Range Desert Group

8

THE LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP was, as I said, one of the “special forces” units to which I had applied unsuccessfully during the previous winter in Palestine. I had long since given up hope of hearing back from them and certainly never expected to receive orders to report. The news electrified me.

Here at last was a unit that was small and personal, where a single individual might make a difference. The LRDG operated on its own, behind enemy lines, hundreds of miles beyond centralised command. Risk was high, but so was the chance to strike a blow. If I'm honest, though, there was something far deeper to my desire to serve with this group of men. It had to do with the desert, the inner desert. I wanted to go there. I wanted to break clear of the crowded, corrupted coastal strip and get south five hundred, a thousand miles into the raw interior.

Did this have to do with Stein's death? I couldn't have answered. I knew only that I needed to place myself past where others had been, beyond where I had been myself. I needed to be tested. The war had little to do with it. I didn't hate the Germans. I bore no burning desire to inflict injury or death. But I wanted to strike. I wanted to deal a blow.

How disappointed was I, four days later when my orders at last arrived, to discover that Eighth Army was not sending me to join the LRDG but only to be temporarily attached? I would “serve in a technical capacity.”

TASK: To accompany a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group for the purpose of assessing “the going,” in a quadrant to be specified, for its suitability of passage for a force of all arms.

In other words, I would help find routes through the inner desert that could be driven over by tanks, guns and heavy equipment.

That was good enough.

That would do.

I
report to LRDG headquarters at Faiyoum oasis on 7 September, ten days short of my twenty-second birthday. I have been PTD'ed, as I said, for the duration of one desert patrol.

Faiyoum is a made-over resort sited along a string of salt lakes an hour's ride south of Cairo. The place is enormous. Elements of 4th and 7th Royal Tanks are here training on the new American Shermans, as are formations of 2nd County of London Yeomanry and the Staffordshire Yeomanry, my father and uncles' old outfit. Rommel is expected to attack El Alamein at any moment. Queues of transporters line the broiling tarmac, waiting to carry tanks back to the fight. My own reconfigured formation is already in defensive positions at Alam Halfa.

It's 1330 when I locate the Orderly Room. The thermometer reads 110. Major Jake Easonsmith, to whom I am to report, greets me cordially and hands me over to Sergeant Malcolm McCool, a New Zealander, who signs me in and walks me across to my quarters, a bungalow in what had been the bathing area of the disused resort. I'll share two rooms with a second lieutenant named Tinker, who is absent on patrol. McCool asks if I've had lunch; when I say no, he takes me over to the common mess (officers and other ranks dine together in the LRDG), a Nissen hut with mirages of heat radiating off its roof and portable floor fans blowing at both ends. I am to report back to Easonsmith's office at 1630, McCool says. “You'll get your books then.”

“Books?”

“Lots to learn, sir.” And he grins and leaves me to it.

The mess is empty when I enter except for six fellows sitting together at a table beneath the curving corrugated roof. I have never seen men so brown and fit. They are SAS commandos. They keep their weapons within hand's reach—two Thompson submachine guns, three Brens, and a heavy machine gun, which turns out to be a German Spandau. Only one is an officer. I recognise him. He is Paddy Mayne, the legendary Irish rugby wing-forward, who was my idol when I was at school. Mayne is in his late twenties but looks older, six foot three and as powerful as Ajax. I'd be less nervous meeting the King. But he and his men welcome me warmly. They have been told to expect an officer of the Armoured Division. We are to train together for an unspecified but brief length of time, then set off on some sort of “beat-up,” which I take to mean a raid. I try to act as if this is not news to me. “Do you have any idea where we'll be going?”

“Somewhere fun,” says a sergeant.

It's dark by the time I get in to see Major Easonsmith. He is matter-of-fact but welcoming. I hand him my orders, which he scans in seconds, then tosses aside. I start to ask about my assignment.

“You needn't worry about that,” says he. “And please, call me Jake.”

Jake explains my duties in the vaguest terms. For now, they will be simply to train and get up to speed on LRDG protocol. “You'll have to absorb six weeks' material in less than two. I hope that suits you.” Before I can answer he indicates a stack of a dozen books on a table at the rear of the room. “Read these. Learn everything that's in them. You must not fail, because no one else will get a look at them.”

He taps my orders dossier and congratulates me on my evaluation.

“Sir?”

“Your colonel's appraisal of your performance as an officer. According to him, you can walk on water.”

So: my parting gift from L.

I have been selected for this assignment as well, Easonsmith tells me, because my service record indicates that I speak German. I explain that at the peak of my powers, several university terms in the past, the best I could do was struggle through the front page of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“It'll come back,” Jake assures me. He gives me a peaked Wehrmacht cap. “In case you need it.”

He stands. “Oh, by the way, the books can't leave this office. You'll have to study them here after the day's training.” He raps me warmly on the shoulder and strides for the door. “It goes without saying: you may speak a word of this to no one.”

Dearest Rose,

Well, I'm here. Can't tell you where, but it's picturesque as hell and about the same temperature. The unit is unlike any I've served with. Officers wear no insignia and are called by their Christian names. When there's manual labour to be done, everyone mucks in. I like it.

Throughout the first days of training, the battle that would come to be called Alamein I rages along the coast. Rommel is hurling everything he's got against Montgomery's dug-in tanks and artillery. Each night while my new mates are glued to the BBC for news of this clash, I'm in Jake's office reading. The books are about Rommel. Jake has numbered them in order of priority. First is the Field Marshal's best-seller,
Infantrie Greift An
(“Infantry in the Attack”), a serious, almost scholarly account of his exploits as a lieutenant during the Great War. I am astonished at the number of actions Rommel has participated in under fire, well over a hundred, and at the extent of his audacity and fearlessness. In the Carpathian campaign he and a handful of troopers ford an icy river under shellfire, taking almost a thousand prisoners. Rommel breaks through defensive lines, captures fortified peaks, single-handedly turns battles. It's all true and written not with ego or grandiosity but in the spirit only of a teacher seeking to share his experience with the next generation of infantry officers. On the cover of the book is an illustration of Germany's highest decoration for valour, the Pour le Mérite, of which Rommel is his country's youngest recipient. In addition to this book, I read Most Secret wireless intercepts of communications between Rommel and Kesselring, his immediate superior, and between him and Hitler. I study the operations report of a British commando raid, mounted last year on Rommel's rear headquarters at Beda Littoria. The raiders burst at night into what they thought was the general's living quarters, machine-gunning rooms on the first floor before being shot up themselves and driven out by defending troops. In the end, intelligence on the house proved faulty; the site was not Rommel's quarters and he himself had been nowhere near it for a fortnight. I study articles and war college lectures by and about Rommel, as well as tracts on tank tactics by General Heinz Guderian, his boss during the blitzkrieg of France, and essays on the employment of armour by our own countrymen J.F.C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart. I read
Mein Kampf.

Still no word on our mission, its date or objective.

All day I drill with the SAS commandos. We train among sand hills near the Pyramids. Our instructors are Willets and Enders, Kiwi NCOs with more than forty LRDG patrols between them. They school us in explosives and demolitions. We learn about fuses, primers, “sticky bombs” (a mixture of plastic explosive, motor oil and incendiary thermite, used to blow up parked aircraft), “time pencils” (a type of detonator, the size of a test tube, which is activated by snapping its glass shell in two, thus releasing an acid that then eats through a copper electrical wire), igniters and “daisy chains” (for multiple, simultaneous or sequential explosions). This stuff is old hat to the SAS but brand-new to me. Together we learn desert driving skills; techniques of extrication from sand; formations for travel; defence against aircraft; vehicle maintenance and repair; land navigation using the sun compass and the theodolite. Two hours each day are spent in weapons training, with particular stress on keeping the guns free of sand and grit. Each truck in an LRDG patrol has at least two machine guns—.50-calibre aircraft Brownings and twin .303 Vickers Ks. One truck in each patrol is a weapons vehicle, packing a 20mm Italian Breda gun that can blow down the wall of a house. We study first aid, wireless and code. Physical conditioning is restricted to the predawn hours, because of the heat and because the SAS men are already as fit as greyhounds.

For the driving work we're overseen by Corporal Hank Lincoln, another New Zealander, who has become something of a celebrity for his twenty-nine-day walking escape from a POW cage at Agedabia, his account of which has been published to considerable acclaim. He's a cheery sort, who calls everyone Bub or Topper, and is enormously knowledgeable in gunnery and navigation as well as in driving. He teaches us sand-motoring technique: how to mount and descend hummocks and razorback dunes; how to properly inflate tyres; how to recognise salt marshes and quicksand. He schools us down to the actual grains of sand which, we learn, are coarser at the crests of minor dunes but finer at the peaks of big ones. What this means is you have to drive differently up the great three-hundred-foot Sand Sea combers. In these the individual grains have settled over centuries into a geometric configuration whose surface is as fragile as the skin on a pot of rice pudding. One assaults these giant dunes head-on, Lincoln tutors us, bringing all the speed one can carry. We're rolling at forty with the gearbox howling, topped out in second, when the front tyres strike the “apron” and the nose of the truck tilts upwards. “Steady throttle!” Lincoln roars. Punch too hard and the spin of the wheels ruptures the membrane of surface tension; you plunge through and sink to your axles. Too slow and you belly-out. You can't change gear or you lose traction. Meanwhile the glaring, featureless face of the dune masks all sensation of motion; your engine's screaming but you feel as if you're sitting still. Suddenly: the crest. “Hard ninety!” cries Lincoln, meaning turn left or right, deliberately bogging down on top of the razorback. If you let the front tyres nose over by so much as eighteen inches, the truck will plunge and flip.

Dearest Rose,

Still in the dark about our mission. We train and eat, train and sleep. The men's conversations are composed entirely of speculation. “Where are we going? When? With what orders?”

The clashes at Alamein continue. What none of our fellows can work out is what the brass hats have in mind for an outfit as tiny as ours. What can our few trucks and machine guns accomplish when every Allied tank and gun is already engaged in the battle that will decide the fate of Egypt, the Persian and Arabian oilfields, and perhaps the war itself?

Days pass. Though the mission's objective remains unspecified, its composition begins to become more clear. Two additional units have arrived. First is LRDG's “T1” patrol of five trucks and sixteen men, freshly returned from a raid on the Axis airfield at Barce. T1 is commanded by Captain Nick Wilder, a New Zealander. Wilder himself is straight out of hospital, having been shot through both legs during the raid, in addition to suffering a concussion from ramming his truck into two Italian L3 tanks which had blocked his patrol's single lane of escape. The raid destroyed twenty German aircraft on the ground and blew up a number of warehouses and repair shops; Wilder has been awarded a DSO for his actions under fire. He gimps about with a cane now but is getting nimbler every day.

The second addition is Major Vladimir Peniakoff, called Popski after the cartoon character. Popski's outfit consists of an indeterminate number of Arabs, Commonwealth officers and NCOs of obscure provenance, and a white dog named Bella. The formation is referred to in official documentation as PPA, Popski's Private Army. Popski himself is a Belgian national of White Russian extraction, a businessman in Egypt before the war who, I am told, speaks innumerable Arab dialects and loves England more than Milton, Shakespeare and Churchill combined. He's about fifty, podgy as a doughnut, with a dome as innocent of hair as an ostrich egg. Three demolition-toting Senussi tribesmen accompany him at all times (one is reputed to be a sheikh), speaking to him alone and refusing to sleep indoors.