Killing Rommel (3 page)

Still, I loved tanks. I loved the Armoured Division. What I hated, what we all abhorred, were the vain and courage-crazy tactics which obsolete doctrine and our own undergunned and under-armoured tanks compelled us to employ. While Rommel's Mark III and Mark IV Panzers advanced in self-covering leap-frogs, backed by crack motorised infantry and screens of lethal 88mm and 50mm anti-tank guns, our Crusaders, Grants and Honeys found themselves again and again on their own, isolated and exposed. Outranged by a thousand yards by the Mark IV's long-barrelled 75s (and nearly as far by the Mark IIIs), our squadrons had no alternative but to dash from one spot of cover to the next, when and if such sites could be discovered, seeking either to flank the foe or to charge at him head-on, usually across open ground, in a desperate attempt to get within gun range before he or his anti-tank screens turned us into flamers or “brew-ups.” The enemy reckoned this of course and exploited it with feigned retreats, flanking manoeuvres and ambushes into which we blundered time and again.

The retreat to the Egyptian frontier in summer 1942 culminated for me in a fiasco on a sandy track alongside the Cairo–Mersa Matruh rail line. My troop of four tanks had been reduced to one Crusader and one American Grant, our squadron having lost, over the preceding twenty-one days, no fewer than nineteen others—Valentines, Honeys, A-10 and A-13 Cruisers, even a pair of captured Italian M-13s. Some had been brought up from the repair shops as replacements, others salvaged intact or refitted in the field, along with their crews, who were cycled through so quickly owing to wounds, death or capture that most barely learnt my name and I theirs before their place was taken by the next round fresh from the pool companies. On the twenty-first day I found myself separated from my squadron (who were a mile or two ahead), bottlenecked on the track west of Fuka in a hundred-mile traffic jam, still that distance short of Alexandria, with a hundred more to Cairo. My wife, Rose, was a Navy telegrapher in Alexandria; she was pregnant with our first child. I was desperate to get her evacuated before Rommel and Panzerarmee Afrika overran Egypt all the way to Suez. Suddenly I spotted a break in the column, with clear sailing ahead, cross-country, at least enough to get round the jam and rejoin my squadron. “Driver, hard right,” I commanded. Off we rumbled, steamrolling a wire barrier, directly on to a Mark IV mine.

No one was hurt, but my right track and front ventilator were blown to scratch. Under favourable conditions, the crew can re-fit a shed track by locking the steering on the unspooled side, railway-tracking spare plates beneath the spooled side, then using the power of the still-shod track to inch forward over this newly cobbled sheath, while the fitters on the ground manhandle the heavy plates into position, replace the blown ones with spares, and re-pin them. That option was out of the question in the middle of a minefield. Meanwhile the mortification grew more excruciating by the moment. Before the unstifled glee of several hundred onlooking officers and other ranks, I baled out with my crew, intending to backtrack on foot out of the minefield, where I would take over my other, still-mobile tank. The humiliation was unalleviated by the spectacle of driver, gunner and wireless operator emerging from our tank, arms laden with tins of apricots, cigarettes and Italian ham, not to mention half a dozen bottles of Boar's Head gin, all looted on the retreat. Our regimental commander, a colonel with whom I had had a run-in several days earlier in the desert, chose that moment to appear on the shoulder of the track and, standing tall within the turret of his Grant, commanded me and my crew to return to our disabled tank and climb back aboard. He indicated a signboard poking up beside what was left of the wire. “I say, Lieutenant, can you read that posting?”

I replied that I could.

“What does it say?”

“It says minefield, sir.”

“Whose minefield?”

“Ours, sir.”

“Then what, upon Christ's twisted Cross, are you doing in it?”

He demanded my name and outfit, though he knew both well, and instructed his adjutant by signal to write me up. I and my crew were to stay put until a squad of sappers could be called to carve us a way out.

But I have got ahead of my story. I must reverse and set down the approach march, so to speak, without which this tale will make no sense, to the reader or to me. If this were a work of fiction and I its editor, I would urge the writer to dramatise such events as hold significance for the narrative's thesis. But I have no patience for such stuff in my own memoir, so the reader will forgive me, I hope, if I simply lay out the essentials overtly, as they were and as they felt to me.

2

I AM A product of the English public school system. I state this neither as a badge of honour nor as a blot of shame, only as a foundation in fact, from which I venture the thesis that this often nasty, brutish and peculiarly British institution, whatever its other shortcomings, must be given credit for producing a type of citizen who came into his own during the war, in the officer corps of all theatres, but specifically, in my own experience, in the Western Desert.

What is it about featureless wastes that appeals so powerfully to the Anglo-Saxon soul? William Kennedy Shaw, who served from its inception as intelligence officer of the Long Range Desert Group, relates the tale of a captured German officer transported from Kufra to Cairo by one of the LRDG's patrols, nearly seven hundred miles in unarmoured Chevrolet trucks across such appalling wilderness that even native Senussi tribesmen rarely dared venture into it. After several days of observing the Long Range Desert Group's Tommies and Kiwis imperturbably at their labours, the prisoner confided to his captors, “We Germans could never pull off this trick as you do, wandering about on your own, miles from nowhere. We lack the individual initiative. We prefer to run in a pack.”

What appeared as unendurable hardship to soldiers of other nationalities produced a species of exhilaration in our lads, raised on a diet of Kipling and institutional porridge. Some time after the war I ran into a school chum, a pilot, Flight Lieutenant S., who had been shot down over Holland in 1940 and had endured the better part of four years in Oflag Luft III, most notorious of the camps for Allied fliers. When I asked him to describe the experience, he replied, “A bit like St. Paul's, only with better breakfasts.”

The English educational system for the privileged classes of that era was made up of two tiers—public school and university. When war came, a third tier was appended, the regimental, so that a young man might be identified as, say, Harrow/Sandhurst/Royal Scots Greys or Ampleforth/Cambridge/Coldstream Guards, which venues of passage cast, or reinforced, the graduate in a sliver of social hierarchy from which no earthly intervention could extract him—Old Rich, New Rich, Newly Ruined, Anciently Impoverished. My own family was Old Rich Freshly Ruined on my father's side and Never Rich at All on my mother's.

At Winchester when I was thirteen there were three heating stoves, two half-sized baths and one WC in a boarding house housing thirty boys. We used chamberpots at night. In winter, water froze in our drinking pitchers. Winchester boys were called “commoners.” We wore neckties in the classroom and caps and gowns on examination days. Twenty cigarettes cost a shilling with a penny back in the packet. We read in Greek Xenophon's
March of the Ten Thousand
and in Latin Livy's
History of Rome,
not to mention all of Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, and the main freight of Marlowe, Coleridge, Hardy, Arnold, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens and Conrad, while participating in all weathers in football, rugby, cricket, rowing, riding and track and field, as well as attending religious services, usually Anglican, not once on Sunday but five times a week.

Many boys saw their parents on holidays only; some not even then. They raised each other like feral beasts, with all the outrages and excesses that such an upbringing implies. For most, it worked. The public schools of that era produced a type of young man who was keen but not academic, athletic but not muscle-bound, gay of heart and confident of mien, a solid chap, the sort who would sooner die than let the side down. Put another way, the system turned out the kind of individual who frequently displayed boredom or feckless complacency during times of prosperity, but shone through in hours of trial. I have often wondered of comrades who fell as heroes during the war whether, in the fatal instant, they weren't privately relieved to do so, dreading a deadly post-war normality more than the bullets and cannon shells of the foe.

W
hen I was twelve, my mother was killed in a motor accident. I am not a subscriber to the theory of traumatic psychopathology. It is humbug in my view to isolate some episode from childhood and extrapolate from it an aberration of character, indelible for the remainder of one's life. That said, some wounds go deep. My father, who had been driving at the time of the accident, suffered far worse than I. He could not overcome his grief and guilt. He withdrew, first from work, then from family, at last by his own hand from life itself. I have three sisters, Edna, Charlotte and Margaret Anne. After the deaths of my mother and father, our two uncles, my father's brothers, in whose care we children were placed, thought it best that we be sent to boarding schools. My sisters were enrolled in St. Catherine's, an Anglican academy in Herefordshire near the town of Hay-on-Wye. I was sent to Winchester.

The night of my father and mother's accident, my sisters and I were driven to the hospital by our neighbours in their 1924 Humber sedan, a car I adored because it had a jump-seat in the back, which folded up from the floor. My sisters disdained this as undignified, which was a joy to me as I got it all to myself. No one had told us yet what had happened or where we were going. We could scent the wind, however, and this cast a pall over the ride. My sisters were weeping already.

At the hospital a nurse instructed us to wait in an area of wooden benches. My sisters obeyed gravely; our neighbours, an elderly couple, sat up with us. At the terminus of the hallway stood two wide, handle-less doors, through which from time to time nurses pushed trolleys. On the far side of these, our mother lay in surgery. The doctors were labouring heroically, we were told, to save her. Our father's injuries were less severe; he was being treated in another wing.

We waited. How long would the operation take? No one could tell us. Hours seemed to pass. Our caretakers would not let me go outside so I excused myself to find the lavatory. I poked down a hallway. A passage opened on to a corridor of patients' rooms, from which a nurse chased me. A dim space led to a kind of anteroom. I entered. In the corner sat a surgical trolley. On it was my mother's body.

The bloody clothes from the accident had been wadded into a ball and dumped on to the trolley shelf below. My mother herself lay beneath a white surgical sheet, which had fallen partly free, exposing her nakedness from waist to neck. She lay on her side, with her right arm dangling grotesquely. Her mouth was agape; she was already going stiff. No one was about. The institutional custodians had just left her there.

A child sees and understands far more than grownups believe. I knew at once that this was death. My mother was gone; this inert object was not she. She was with Jesus or amongst the stars. I didn't believe any of that bollocks, but I repeated it to myself as I imagined I ought. I told myself I should not be angry. The hospital had many patients besides my mother whose needs were urgent. At times, the overtaxed staff had no alternative but to stick a dead person temporarily out of the way so that they could get on to other emergencies. The nurses would return soon, I was certain, and restore my mother to dignity.

But I knew this was rubbish. I hated the authorities for leaving her like this, even for a moment. And I was furious with them for not telling my sisters and me. For how long did the hospital intend to hold us in suspense, believing that our mother might yet survive, when in truth her cold corpse had been dumped and forgotten upon this shameful siding? I crossed to the trolley and repaired my mother's modesty. I worked the rings off her fingers and put them in my pocket. I didn't want the staff stealing them.

My sisters told me later that I reappeared in the corridor in a state such as they had never seen. “Your face was scarlet,” Edna said. “Tears were streaming down your cheeks.” The surgeons, a young man and a senior, had just that moment emerged from the rear doors. “Without a word, you sprinted the length of the hall and hurled yourself upon them, kicking and punching.” In the end, my sisters told me, I had to be given a sedative and carried physically to the car. I have no recollection of that. What does remain, with blazing clarity, is this:

My mother's death was my fault.

I knew this instinctively and with every cell of my body. I had caused her end. How? By being too young and too small to protect her. Had I been driving the car instead of my father, no accident would have happened. Had I been with them, even as a passenger, somehow I would have preserved her. But I wasn't there. Because of my absence, my mother was dead.

A child does not understand with reason. Later at university we studied Freud, Adler and Jung. I could grasp intellectually the preposterousness of this childish belief. But rationality is powerless against emotion.

Not long after that night, my uncles' influence got me into Winchester. Before then I had never been in trouble at school; from that date I was rarely out of it. I got into scrapes daily, with the other boys and with the masters. I hated them all. I despised the school and every sham rite and cruel tradition it prided itself upon. The house I was assigned to was called Kingsgate. Each house had three prefects. These were sixth-formers who received privileges in return for acting as counsellors and maintaining order. Our prefects were Tallicott, Martin and Zachary Stein. Stein was a Jew. Rumour declared him a poet. I knew only that he was tall and rich and spent a lot of time in his room. He had an American Schwinn bicycle with an illustration of a Red Indian on the chainguard, which he rode in all weathers.

I came in with two other boys whose names I forget. We were all thirteen. The older youths at once gave us the treatment. I had no experience of boarding school and was not prepared for this. In addition I was both a “muley” (an orphan) and a “duff” (a hardship case), meaning I inhabited the absolute basement of the pecking order. The other two new boys alternated between rage and despair as each new indignity was heaped upon us. They hated the older boys and burned with murderous fantasies; that, or worshipped them shamelessly. I would do neither. I held in contempt the seniors who inflicted these abuses upon us. They perceived this, of course, and gave it to me twice over.

By then I was having a recurring nightmare. In the dream I found myself beside a lake at twilight. A mist stood on the water. My mother's body lay on a barge, swathed in silk and flowers; her eyes were closed, hands folded across her breast. Yet I was certain she was alive. Suddenly the barge was either pushed or began to move of its own accord, away from shore and into the mist, which I understood to mean oblivion. I had to save her! In a state of desperation I plunged into the lake, hands stretching for the boat to pull it back. A great weight of iron—a garment of some kind—dragged me down. My mother's sleeping form slipped from my grasp. I woke in a state of dread and consternation.

The culmination of the initiation ordeals at Winchester is a rite called the freeze-out. This was a tradition at the school. Upon a bitterly frigid night, we new boys were stripped of mufflers and overcoats and locked out in the storm. We had been told by one of the more kindly sixth-formers that the torture would not last all night. The seniors would observe us in secret; when we had turned blue enough to satisfy the demands of the trial, they would fetch us back indoors. My fellow sufferers clung together, overacting their misery. I despised them. I would not give our tormentors the satisfaction.

I began walking. I was going home.

I made my way to the railway station. The place was deserted. I set off down the tracks. How far I marched, I don't know. At some point I lay down in the snow.

Stein, the prefect, saved me. He told me later he had sensed the freeze-out coming, but had been fooled by the older boys, who had made pillow-dummies of me and the other two and had put them in our beds. Stein didn't realise what had happened till the frozen pair were brought back indoors. How did he find me? From my tracks in the snow and his own imagination. The train station. Home. He was a poet; he could figure it out.

I was lying on my side on the tracks when I heard the tinny bell of Stein's American Schwinn. “Chapman! Where in damnation are you?” I had never heard an upperclassman employ such language. Stein pedalled up. He was frightened; he thought I was dead. He wrapped me in a woollen blanket. Close behind him came the master's assistant in an ancient Peugeot. The assistant pulled up on the road that paralleled the tracks. Stein carried me through the woods to the car.

“You better not pop off, you little sod,” the master's assistant said as he bundled me through the passenger door and up against the machine's feeble heater. Stein wrapped me in the blanket and his own greatcoat, cursing when the assistant botched the clutch and stalled. “Is this little twit going to croak?” the fellow demanded.

Stein produced a silver flask. “He'll be fine,” he said, lifting the whisky to my lips. “He just wants a stiff belt.”