Killing Rommel (25 page)

34

LUCK RUNS OUT two days later. A signal from HQ reports that Tinker and Popski's base camp at a hill called Qaret Ali has been attacked by Luftwaffe fighters and shot up badly. Every vehicle has been destroyed. Tinker and Popski are missing.

Report of this calamity comes from a third patrol, Lieutenant Henry's S2, fresh out from Hon, which has stumbled on the burnt-out site while recce-ing their own sector west of the Matmata Hills. Two other patrols, Lazarus' and Spicer's, are on their way now from Hon to scout other quadrants north of Wilder's Gap. They could be in this area within days, even hours.

Our orders are changed back to topographical reconnaissance. We're despatched north to that sector—the Tebaga Gap and the Gabès–Kebile road—which Tinker and Popski had been assigned to reconnoitre. Under no circumstances are we to venture near Tinker's camp or attempt to pick up his or Popski's men. Axis air and ground patrols will be saturating the area. HQ fears Tinker and Popski are goners; we and the other patrols are to take over their sector and finish the job they started.

I call a sit-down and walk the men over the map for the hundredth time. “Have you noticed,” Collie observes wryly, “how the tone of HQ's signals has changed?”

Indeed it has. We're getting no more “exercise caution” or “proceed with care.” Now it's “A route will be found” and “You will complete your report within twenty-four hours.”

Tinker and Popski are on their own.

So are we.

I spread the maps on the jeep's bonnet. Due north about thirty miles, the plain, which runs north and south where we are now, turns east towards the coast. Along its southern flank lie the hills of the Jebel Melab, on its northern the Jebel Tebaga.

In the middle runs the Tebaga Gap.

That's the one we want.

The Tebaga Gap cuts through to the sea behind the Mareth Line.

“Counting our patrol and Henry's, Lazarus' and Spicer's,” I say, “we've got about twenty vehicles recce-ing the same sector. Eighth Army only needs one of us to succeed and get the word back to Monty.”

I don't need to add that all others are expendable.

My idea is to descend at once to the plain. But when we scout the approach on the freezing morning of 29 January, we find fresh tracks of German patrols criss-crossing everywhere.

We're forced back into the foothills into the most infernal country yet—a sea of granulated-sugar hummocks, each no greater than two truck-lengths across. Even the jeep mires in these. We sand-channel all day, logging barely two miles. Striking a passable trail near sunset, we hold a quick council and decide to take our chances in the dark on the flat. The trucks descend into sandhills, which every man would have called hellish if he weren't coming out of even worse. The hold-up now is dense brush, which catches beneath the vehicles' undercarriages and balls up into axle-binding masses that have to be cleared by hand every hundred yards. I probe ahead in the jeep with Punch and the Bren gun. Past one in the morning we strike a track that seems to lead down on to the plain. No time for grub or a brew; we descend, lights-out, hoping to strike the Tebaga Gap by sunup and find a place to nest.

Now the big-end bearing on the wireless truck packs up; we halt to replace it only to find that our only spare is missing. There's nothing for it but, as Punch says, to tow the bitch. We slog on till four, freezing and famished. Suddenly the track dead-ends. We're in a blind wash, butted into the wall of a wadi. I'm afraid if we stop for a kip we'll never get going again. So we make a virtue of necessity, call this site our rear base and leave the disabled wireless truck with three troopers of the Grenadiers and the Bren gun. I backtrack with the jeep and the other two trucks, Collie commanding one and Punch the other.

Dawn finds us camouflaged in the cut bank of a dry watercourse, overlooking a track that snakes down on to the plain. Jenkins prepares a petrol-tin fire for tea but waits to light it till daybreak permits. Suddenly from the flat below comes machine-gun fire. We can hear it, tinny and distant, and see a bright stream of tracers arcing away from us across the lightening sky.

Collie, Punch and I scamper on foot to the shoulder of a ridge that looks over the plain.

Another burst. Another rainbow.

“Toffee apples,” says Collie, meaning tracer fire deliberately let off to signal the location of the shooters.

“Somebody needs help,” says Punch. “But who? Us or them?”

Collie points north. A mile out on the plain, two squarish lumps can be seen straddling the track from Gabès. I thumb the focus wheel of my binoculars. Into clarity comes an Afrika Korps half-track, on its side in a ditch, apparently having run off the trail in the dark. An eight-wheeled armoured car protects it.

Half a dozen squaddies hunker round a petrol-tin cooker. A bivvy tarpaulin has been rigged from the flank of the 8-wheeler to make a shelter camp. On the car's turret is a black Axis cross and the numeral 288.

We decide to wait the enemy out. Sure enough, within ten minutes engine sound can be heard from the north. An ambulance and a second armoured car appear. The second one is a 4-wheeler. The vehicles halt alongside the disabled half-track; two men and an officer dismount and hurry across. From under the tarp on the 8-wheeler's flank, two soldiers are helped to their feet. I hadn't noticed them before. Both are young and look badly shaken. Their mates help them to the medical vehicle. Meanwhile two scruffy-looking natives have dismounted from the second armoured car; we can see them jabbering to the Germans and pointing up into the hills in our general direction. The officer with the first armoured car comes over from the ambulance. He's tall and slender, nearly as youthful as the two injured troopers, with rimless spectacles and a sober, almost scholarly face. On his left breast pocket he wears an Iron Cross—a decoration for valour.

We watch, forgetting fatigue and hunger, as the two hurt soldiers are settled into the back of the ambulance, which then pulls away north, back towards Gabès and the Tebaga Gap. Now a third vehicle, a repair lorry, rumbles into view from that direction. The second armoured car stays with the first. The fitter's lorry comes up and sets about towing the half-track clear of the ditch. The natives continue palavering. The Iron Cross officer listens patiently. After several minutes he reaches into his trouser pocket, removes several small items and hands them to the two Berbers. Whatever the payoff is, it renders the tribesmen ecstatic. In twenty seconds both have buggered off into the hills. The lorry winches the half-track out of the ditch. Officers hold a brief conference; then the salvage vehicle starts back north, towing the half-track. The two armoured cars crank up, as if to resume their original patrol. By the count of a hundred they've vanished south, round crescent dunes at the base of the hills. By two hundred, our jeep and two trucks are down on the flat, rolling north in the wake of the towing lorry.

“What's the form?” calls Punch into the wind.

I point north. “Follow them.”

35

THERE ARE DECISIONS you make that you know are wrong the minute you make them.

We roll fast for five miles down the good two-tyre track that the ambulance and the salvage lorry have taken before us. My thinking is this: If we can keep close enough behind these two without letting their crews spot us, enemy scout planes coming out of Gabès will think we're all elements of the same party. With luck, brazening it out like this will carry us deep into the Tebaga Gap without arousing suspicion.

Sure enough, at about six miles, a pair of Fieseler Storches buzz overhead, giving us the go-by.

The scheme seems to be working.

I'm straining at our dreadful French maps. The northernmost spur of the Matmata foothills, the Jebel Melab, juts into the plain a mile ahead on our right. I can see clearly its bare stony slopes. Beyond the shoulder of the Jebel lies the prize we've been seeking: the five-mile-broad boulevard of the Tebaga Gap.

If we can get in and get out, we'll be telling our grandchildren about this.

But just as the road starts to turn east, the scout planes come back. A Storch is a slow, light aircraft, usually unarmed. Two of them pass directly overhead, so low we can see the tread on their tyres and the sunglasses on the pilots' noses. I'm in the jeep with Holden. Punch and Collie are close behind when suddenly Collie draws level and points rearwards. Looking back, I see two columns of dust, a mile behind and closing fast.

“The armoured cars!” shouts Collie.

Have we been spotted? Could this be coincidence only?

I turn back to the front. To our immediate right rise the foothills of the Jebel Melab. Left, five miles out, ascends the Jebel Tebaga. In between runs the Tebaga Gap. In the centre of this I see more dust—three, four whirling dervishes—two miles ahead and racing directly at us. From one comes a puff of white smoke. Two seconds later, a spout of rock and earth erupts violently thirty yards behind us.

Another shot; a shell explodes the same distance in front.

I point to the hills on the right. Collie and Punch need no more. Trucks and jeep swerve off the road and run for it.

We're in trouble. The hills are bare—no cover. The Storches bank, right on top of us. Fighters and bombers will be overhead soon. Holden flattens the accelerator. The jeep pounds upslope over a surface like rutted marble topped with two inches of talc. Collie hammers on our right. I can hear Punch behind, loosing a burst at one of the Storches.

The only thing in my head is the mission. One of us has to get away and get back to the wireless truck.

In our favour: our Chevs and jeep are faster and nimbler than the armoured cars on our tail. We've got fuel for hundreds of miles, while all they've got is what's in their tanks. Against us is their armament. In a shoot-out, we have no chance. The airplanes are another problem entirely. The Storches are unarmed, but they can stay overhead all day. Once the Macchis and Messerschmitts show up, our survival time shrinks to minutes if not seconds. But the gravest peril is these dead-end valleys. The hills are a muddle of culs-de-sac and blind spurs. Our maps are worthless. Every turn could be our finish.

We flee all-out into the foothills. Down below, the armoured cars chase us, grinding in bottom gear. Stakes and fences bound the track we're running on. Signboards with death's-head symbols warn

         

VORSICHT!

MINEN

         

We speed past a German encampment: engineers laying out a minefield. The troops think we're their countrymen. They wave. When a Storch drops on to our tail and Punch opens up on it with the Vickers, the mine-layers whoop and cheer, thinking it's a drill.

The planes wing away. This is our chance. I signal to Collie and Punch to step on it. For ten minutes we twist and turn at high speed over a labyrinth of goat trails and herders' tracks. The maze works in our favour. Each junction of valleys makes our pursuers guess which track we've taken. We pass two good roads, both demolished by Axis engineers; marked minefields climb slopes right and left. Every valley entrance holds notice boards:

         

HALT!

VERMINTES GELÄNDE!

         

The enemy have dynamited all culverts and retaining walls. Roads have been undermined from below or blasted from above. Where valleys come together, the Germans have blown whole hillsides to try to block further passage. We get round anyway. On a crest I halt and peer back through the glasses. Some way down below, both armoured cars have stopped. Smoke pours from the 4-wheeler's undercarriage. A blown head or bearing, perhaps? I can see one officer—older, with a dark moustache—urging the other on. The young lieutenant with the Iron Cross.

Here he comes, climbing after us.

The Storches have vanished, replaced by a pair of ME-110s. The fighters scream overhead. They haven't seen us. Punch shouts taunts as the planes bank beyond a crest and vanish. The Messerschmitts, we realise, are too fast to be effective search planes; after one pass it takes them a minute or more to come about and search again. By then we're gone.

We run. For the first time I'm beginning to think we have a chance. If we stay dispersed and use shadows and folds in the earth, we can make ourselves invisible.

We're running down a broad valley with tributary gorges off both sides. Again and again we have to stop to avoid losing one another. Collie's steering box is failing; Punch's clutch smokes so badly, it looks as if it's on fire. But the halts help us. Sitting still, spread out, we're hard to spot from the air. We can hear the Messerschmitts scouring a different valley. They've lost us.

Where is the armoured car? At one point, peeping over a ridge, I get an eyeful of the Tebaga Gap below. It's perfect for Monty and Eighth Army. An armoured division could roll through, a hundred vehicles across. If we can get back to the wireless truck, our signal could save hundreds, even thousands, of lives.

But a dead-end valley steals every minute we've gained. No choice but to go back. Can we get clear? For an instant I allow myself to believe we've beaten the odds. But as we emerge at the mouth of the vale, 7.92 machine-gun fire tears into a limestone outcrop fifty feet in front of us. Holden brakes and throws the jeep into reverse. Collie's and Punch's trucks plunge for cover to the shoulder. Into view three hundred yards below comes the eight-wheeled armoured car. It stops. Its cannon traverses. It fires.

A 75mm shell ploughs into the ten-foot chalk wall that Punch's truck has ducked behind. Every one of our guns is firing. The turret surface of the armoured car lights up from the impact of bullets and rebounding tracers. But the car is buttoned up tight. Its cannon fires again. Another chalk slope is blasted into powder.

We can't sit here. The armoured car will simply close and finish us. But if we flee back up the valley, its machine guns will tear us apart in the open. There's only one chance and we all know it.

We charge. Three hundred yards feels like an eternity under fire. But we're screening ourselves in each other's dust, while the enemy gunners are handicapped by having to peer through narrow gun-slits at moving targets. Our vehicles reach the 8-wheeler and blast past.

We pick an uphill track and bet our lives on it.

The Germans turn after us. A dirt track mounts the slope. Punch is already on it. Collie speeds behind. Holden guns the jeep in their wake. The armoured car lurches into the pursuit like a monstrous metallic lizard. It takes an angle to cut us off.

A Teller anti-tank mine is the size of a London phone book; its case is steel and packed with high explosive. The blast of a Teller, or T-mine, can overturn a thirty-ton Sherman or blow a light Crusader tank in half.

Our jeep is a hundred feet upslope when the armoured car's front left tyre strikes one of these mines. In the patrol commander's seat I am flung shoulder-first into the mount of the Browning. Holden is thrown so far out of the driver's seat that his right boot is torn off his foot, just from friction with the ground. Somehow he hangs on. The jeep heels over on to two wheels, then crashes to earth, facing backwards, and stalls.

In the few seconds it takes to pick ourselves up, the cloud from the explosion is already high in the air and spreading laterally. A hailstorm of grit engulfs the jeep. Uphill, Punch is hooting with joy. Grainger and Jenkins point jubilantly down the slope.

The armoured car lies on its side with its topside wheels still spinning. The mine has ripped its underbelly open like a tin of peas. Flames lick from beneath the vehicle. I see one man stagger clear. Now comes a second blast, shorter and sharper than the first. It's a German S-mine, what the Americans call a Bouncing Betty. When an S-mine is detonated, a steel case containing three hundred and sixty ball bearings is flung into the air to about waist height; then the case explodes. S-mines are used in minefields as anti-personnel devices, planted round the larger anti-tank mines.

One of the armoured car troopers, surviving the initial blast, must have trodden or fallen upon an S-mine. That's the second explosion.

Holden has the jeep re-started. I hear Punch's and Collie's trucks revving. “Go!” I cry. We bolt away up the valley.

When extreme fear is suddenly, unexpectedly relieved, the release can carry one apart from his senses. All I'm thinking is that I want those Germans dead. Behind us, I can hear secondary explosions—ammunition in the armoured car's magazine. I don't look back. To do so might be bad luck. If I turn back, the explosions might stop. I don't want them to. I want them to keep going. I want that bloody car to blow until there's not a scrap of it left bigger than a penny.

Our three vehicles speed away up the valley, round one dog-leg of the rising trail and up another. Suddenly the road runs out. Another dead-end. We brake in a storm of grit, every eye scanning for a route up and out.

Nothing.

Curses from every one.

“Back!” I shout. But first I order all the men to clear and test their guns and seat fresh magazines. Other enemy vehicles may have come up in the past minutes. “Whatever we run into, don't hesitate. Hit them with everything and keep going. We go for the plain and stop for nothing.”

Jeep and trucks are topped out in second gear when we clear the saddle that opens on to the descending slope. Two hundred yards down we see the smoking carcass of the armoured car. No other vehicles have come up. I sign to keep going. We plunge down the track. Holden keeps the jeep in the lead. I'm braced, half-standing in the left-hand seat. One foot is wedged amongst the four-wheel-drive levers; the other is jammed into a corner of the dashboard. I'm peering over the bonnet, looking out for enemy reinforcements, when I see a lone figure stagger into the road ahead.

The young lieutenant with the Iron Cross.

I tug the cocking handle of the Browning. I'm about to hit the trigger when I see the officer wave both arms held together as if to signal “Stop, please!” Some impulse makes me hold. My eyes are flicking to both sides of the road, seeking any sign of treachery. The officer has lost one arm below the elbow. With his remaining hand, he presses a wad of material—a shirt or a cap—against the stump. He hops on one leg; the other, bare beneath charred trousers, looks as black as a fireplace log. On the shoulder of the track lie his crew of three, alive but horribly burnt and disfigured.

I hear my voice cry stop.

Holden stares at me as if I've taken leave of my senses.

“Stop, damn you!”

Holden stands on the brakes. Behind the jeep, I can hear Collie's truck slewing sidewise with its tyres screaming. The German officer stumbles forward, hopping on his good leg. “Help my men, I beg you!” he cries in excellent English.

The jeep slides to a stop. I stand behind the Browning. I don't have to look to know Collie and Punch have got the Vickers and the second Browning all over the enemy. I stare at the men on the ground. All are appallingly burned. One's tunic has been stripped, revealing a chest and belly that look like roasted meat. Another's right arm hangs, turned round backwards. The third's whole left side weeps blood.

Somehow I'm on my feet on the ground. I have taken the Iron Cross officer under one arm, supporting him. I call for the medical kit. My thought is to leave the box for the wounded men and keep moving. But as Grainger brings the pathetically inadequate white case with the red cross on its side, I am seized with such shame as I have never known.

The young officer in my arms has lost the ability to speak. He is in shock and he knows it; he struggles to remain conscious and to continue to aid his men.

“Dressing station?” I shout directly into the officer's ear.

“Down the hill.” I can barely hear him. The young lieutenant's spectacles have been shattered; shards of glass are embedded in the flesh of his cheek and brow. One eye drains a runnel of blood. He lifts his joined arms, struggling to point towards the plain.

By now Collie and Jenkins have leapt down too. The muzzles of their guns droop on their mounts. Both start towards the maimed soldiers, then draw up. “Chap, if we bring these poor bastards in…”

“I know.”

Collie means we'll be taken prisoner. The mission will fail.

“Take the jeep,” I tell him. I'll carry the wounded men in on my vehicle. “You get to the wireless truck.”

Before all else, we must complete our assignment. HQ must learn what we've seen of the Tebaga Gap and of the enemy's dispositions. Nothing can be allowed to compromise that.

But as Grainger and Jenkins kneel beside the wounded Germans, it becomes clear that they can't deal with the situation on their own. Holden steps down from the jeep and comes forward. Collie crosses to Holden's place. He sets one foot inside the jeep and one hand on the wheel. Jenkins and Grainger bend to help the bleeding man who looks in the worst shape of the three.