Killing Rommel (8 page)

I tell Stein how impressed I am with him—and how different he seems from our days at university.

“Not actually. All that's changed is we've switched from men of words to men of action. And a damn relief too!”

Stein tells me that when he first got out to Egypt, he applied for the Long Range Desert Group. “It seemed like what Lawrence would have done.” He means T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, our fellow Oxford man.

I tell Stein of my own failed application to the LRDG. “Did they accept you?”

“Division squashed the deal. Said they couldn't spare artillery officers. The fools! I'd have been damn smart out there among the prophets and the scorpions.” Stein laughs. “I must tell you something, Chap, that I daren't confess to another soul. I'm having the time of my life.” He shakes his head. “It's outrageous to declare such a thing, I know, with dear friends getting blown to pieces and England's own survival hanging by a thread. But, by God, life is brilliant out here, isn't it?”

He asks if I've ever had a premonition of my own death. I tell him I follow the advice of my drill sergeant from Bovington: Stay dumb and don't think.

“Will you take this for me, my friend?” And he slips a folded envelope into my breast pocket.

“What is it?”

“It makes you executor of my estate.”

“Don't joke around, Stein.”

He's serious. He asks if I recall our conversations about the twentieth century and how much he abhors it. “All that is behind us, Chap. We're living in the time before Christ.” He laughs and indicates the desert round our camp. “We're a tribe. We've become that. The Huns too. The poor bastards.”

He hoists the flask. “Do you know,” he says, “I used to feel apart from men of the trades, as my father would call them. Other ranks. No more. Out here I've come to love them. Officers too. Hell's bells, I love even the Jerries, the bloody swine.”

He says if he writes anything in future, it will be damn serious. Life and death. But it'll be funny. The gods themselves laugh, he says. “And not darkly, but with joy.”

Mallory comes up, our leader. “What are you two on about?”

“Nothing you'd understand,” says Stein, passing him the flask.

“Well, break off for a bit, will you?” Mallory indicates the command truck, at which other officers are now collecting, apparently for a late-hour change in orders. “Let's see if we can conjure a way out of this mess for one more day.”

6

21 JUNE, Tobruk falls. With that, Rommel acquires a seaport within three hundred miles of Alexandria—and we lose our last stronghold in Cyrenaica. The gallop is on, back to Cairo.

Two episodes give the flavour of the retreat. The first involves Colonel L. Our commander is painfully aware of his displacement in the men's hearts by Mallory. He feels shame over this and takes to reasserting his authority by spasms. Falling back in the desert between Sidi Aziz and Fort Capuzzo, our troop of “A” squadron is ordered by L. to take up a defensive position at a feature identified on the map as Hill 99. We arrive with our sister troops, eleven tanks in all, and set up hull-down along the ridgeline, facing west. Within minutes shells begin dropping amongst us, first the airburst high explosive that 88s use for ranging; then straight HE, possibly from Mark IV Panzers, though we can't see; then even bigger shells that Pease identifies as 105s from field guns. This fire is coming not from in front, where the enemy are supposed to be, but from behind and left. What the hell is going on?

I drive with my troop sergeant, “Tick” Haskell, and a lieutenant called Marsden, nicknamed “Duke,” commander of the adjacent troop, to the brow of the ridge; we peer over to where our infantry are supposed to be dug in, awaiting the foe. The infantry's dug in all right, but they're firing at
us.
It's the Germans. Either the map is in error or we're on the wrong feature. I raise battalion, report the situation, and request permission to attack the infantry. “Hold your position,” declares Colonel L. “No movement without my orders.”

It takes no imagination to reckon that our neighbours of the Afrika Korps will not sit tight; they'll be in our laps any moment, packing Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons and satchel charges. Worse, Rommel's artillery has got our range. I call in to battalion again, asking clearance to move out. Let us do something: go forward or back. Negative, replies L., appending aspersions on my manhood. Marsden chimes in and gets a dose of the same. One of the Crusaders in his troop takes a direct hit and becomes a flamer; we can see the crew baling out as black smoke pours from the engine compartment. Haskell is pointing to our southern flank. A phalanx of dark shapes can be seen at three thousand yards, rumbling in our direction. I report this, with Haskell adding another ten to the figures, just spotted on a farther ridgeline. Meanwhile nasty airbursts from the 105s are creeping closer. Shrapnel is pinging off our hulls; the sand has acquired a carpet of smoking shards of steel. L. still won't let us move. “Bugger this,” Haskell declares off the air. “I'm not sticking it here till Jerry comes galloping down our cheeseholes.” An instant later an armour-piercing shell, a ricochet, comes pinwheeling past us, three feet off the sand at two hundred miles an hour, screaming like a cat. Its passage sucks the air right out of our lungs.

“‘A' squadron, withdraw in good order,” barks Mallory over the blower. We get the hell out before L. can countermand him.

This is how command passes from a weak officer to a stronger. No rank alters; no papers are filed. Without a word, every man understands.

That night L. and Mallory vanish into L.'s command truck. We can hear raised voices. “It's Bligh and Mr. Christian,” says Marsden, when I relieve him as duty officer at 2200. Stein comes over with tea. When Mallory exits L.'s truck, red-faced, L. appears in the blackout doorway. “Show's over,” he says to Stein sharply. Of me, he demands to know whether I still have idle time to read books. Next night L. delivers a particularly vicious tongue-lashing to a gallant and exhausted troop commander I'll call Q. At the peak of L.'s tirade, the young officer, absent all ill intention, chances to let his hand fall toward his sidearm. “Go ahead!” bellows L. “It's what the lot of you want, isn't it?”

We fall back to the Wire on the Egyptian frontier. We are learning belatedly the lessons our elders of the veteran brigades have acquired before us. We grasp the difference between being “tied in” and “in the air.”

A unit is “tied in” when it has contact with friendly formations right and left. A unit is “in the air” when it is cut off, alone.

A force that is tied in will hold.

A force in the air will run.

The skill to desert warfare, we begin to comprehend, is to put the other fellow in the air while keeping your own side tied in. This is what Rommel is so brilliant at. His armour appears out of nowhere in massed strength; by bold thrust or clever misdirection, he achieves a breach. Into this he pours his Panzers. The penetrated front is now broken into two sections. Both are in the air.

Inevitably we run. This is not bolting as in cowardice; it is redeployment to get tied in again. The last real scrape our troop gets into is in defence of a ridge near Sofafi, east of Halfaya Pass. Aussie infantry holds one extremity of this otherwise featureless drumlin, while three or four troops of British tanks assemble turret-down on the other wing. The enemy have attacked this ridge once in the morning and been repelled, then again at midday; now they are coming at it again. The assault is supported by heavy guns, with 88s and long-barrelled Mark IVs firing from closer range.

Behind these, we knew though we couldn't see, waited a massed formation of faster, more mobile Mark IIIs, with motorised infantry immediately to their rear. At some point the foe would mass this force and hurl it at some vulnerable point on the ridge. Stein had one of his two batteries of 25-pounders several miles to the rear, laying down a strong fire of HE, trying to keep Rommel's 88s at bay. He himself was up front with the other battery. To direct the long-range fire, Stein had OPs, forward observers, zipping from one vantage to another, before the enemy could zero in on them—two in tanks, two others in armoured cars, with Bren infantry carriers and several truck-mounted combat teams to protect them. My troop, which was then two Crusaders and an A-9, was forward too, covering this screen. I had a new corporal, Wicks, in one Crusader, and Pease in the A-9. The third Crusader was mine. We were all low on fuel and ammunition and all exhausted. Two hours remained till dark. All afternoon we had been seeking a lull to pull back and replenish, or a break in the fire when the supply trucks could get up to us.

Suddenly an urgent signal squalled over the headset. One of the Bren carriers had been hit. These are open-top vehicles, notoriously under-armoured, designed for multiple purposes, mostly transport of infantry. This one protected one of Stein's OPs. It was unclear what had happened, but whatever it was, men were badly wounded. Our troop was ordered to pick them up. Wicks in our scout tank took the lead. We could see the Bren carrier, at the foot of a column of dense black smoke. Now Stein's rear batteries started adding smoke shells of their own to protect the carrier. At this moment, the German attack broke. There was a sort of bowl northwest of the ridgeline and into this, from the north, rumbled a mass of dark armour. I could hear Duke Marsden reporting, “…figures five zero Mark IIIs and IVs, I say again five zero.” This mob was rolling straight towards the burning carrier, about four thousand yards away. The tanks did not advance as a whole but by elements; one section would halt and fire while another rolled forward; then the one that had stopped would charge ahead, while its cohort drew up, sighted and loosed its volley. Just as Wicks got to the Bren carrier, he was hit too, an HE round slap on top of his engine compartment. I shouted to him over the wireless. I could hear Wicks calling to his men inside the tank; clearly one or more had been hit; the interior was in chaos. Pease and I were about three hundred yards behind, when I saw another flash of HE and the mass of Wicks' tank dropped belly-down, the way armoured vehicles do when their suspensions collapse.

Stein's post was at the southeast shoulder of the ridgeline; he could see all this happening directly in front of him. (I only learnt this later from Mallory; I was too busy with my own problems at the moment.) Apparently Stein reckoned that this sweep of enemy armour was the main attack; that this spot on the ridge was what the Afrika Korps commanders called the
Schwerpunkt,
the critical point. Stein could see that no British armour, other than my light troop and Marsden's, both of which were about to get vaporised, was in position to respond. The black shapes were at thirty-five hundred yards now. Stein ordered his forward battery up, using whatever cover they could find. A 25-pounder is not a big gun. Its muzzle shield stands little higher than a man's shoulder; three muscular crewmen can easily manhandle it on its wheels. But it shoots fast, fires true and packs a bang. Stein began engaging the Panzers at three thousand yards. I couldn't hear him through my headset; he was on a different net. But Mallory told me later Stein was simultaneously directing the fire of his forward battery, exhorting the fire of his rear battery, and crying the alarm for help from any source who could hear him.

By now my Crusader was within a hundred yards of Wicks. Flames were jetting from the deck of his engine box. I called to him over the wireless to get his crew out at once. From inside the tank he might not be aware of the danger he was in, of the blaze creeping towards his ammunition or of smoke asphyxiating him. “They're dropping stones all over me,” Wicks called back, meaning he was coming under machine-gun fire. I sent Pease after the men in the Bren carrier; I took my own tank to cover Wicks. Now we were hearing a rattle on our roof too. The fire was coming from the left so I ordered the driver to pull in on that side of Wicks, to screen him, at the same time lighting off my own smoke generators. Black soot billowed. I heard a titanic wallop and felt all forward motion cease. We're hit, I thought. But no, we had crashed into Wicks' tank amidst the smoke. I could feel the tank corkscrewing under us as one track found traction and the other hung on something, probably Wicks' tank, whose radio had now packed up as well, so that I could no longer reach him. I thought: This is a damn ridiculous way to cop it.

I popped the hatch and clambered out, but I had forgotten to cut off the smoke candles. They were spewing black petrol-stinking clouds that my lungs sucked in as I shouted for Wicks. Through gaps in the smoke, I could see him helping his gunner out of the forward hatch. Flames from their engine compartment were flaring up behind them. If Wicks' tank blew, we would all be seeing the red light. I scrambled down from my cupola to help him get his crew clear. It didn't seem a particularly dangerous proposition, as both tanks were obscured by Stygian murk, and my own vehicle screened me from the enemy machine gun. My primary emotion was outrage at the Germans, for throughout all prior clashes in the desert campaign, chivalry had dictated that gunners hold fire when men were baling out of tanks. At any event I leapt down, grabbed the kit rail on the left of Wicks' turret, above which his crew's rucksacks and bedding were blazing like Yule logs, to haul myself up and take his gunner. I couldn't understand why those stones continued rattling round us. Then I realised there was a second gun. At least one other machine gun was raking both tanks from the opposite direction. In the end, the gun turned out to be one of ours, whose gunner was severely reprimanded in the aftermath, not so much for shooting at his own men as for shooting at
any
men in that position.

By this point I was halfway up Wicks' flank with ricochets of .30-calibre rounds banging off the hulls of both our tanks, and tracers skipping and popping all round me, Wicks and his gunner. Suddenly the wind changed. In the time it takes to say the words, all smoke blew away, leaving us ape-naked in the gunsights of two machine guns. Shame primarily, coupled with Wicks' gallantry and the shared peril to us all, as well as rage at the enemy for shooting at us under these conditions, prevented me from plunging right back into the hole I had just leapt out of. To cut a long tale short, Pease came up with his A-9, with the survivors of the Bren carrier burrowing frantically into every nook of cover they could find, and somehow we got Wicks' crew clear and into mine and beat it out of there. His tank never blew. In fact we encountered it four days later (its name was “Mad Martha,” stencilled in big white letters), still in action but now being used by the enemy.

At the same time this spectacle was unfolding, Stein, on the ridgeline, was single-handedly holding off the main German assault. What one must understand about the 25-pounder gun is its defencelessness when used in this desperate, exposed fashion. The crew, covered only by the gun shield, has no protection against machine-gun fire or HE, and both were thundering in from the advancing Panzers and the 88s and 105s. The hell of it was that none of this should have been happening at all, if Eighth Army had been properly equipped and possessed of effective tactics. The enemy had guns that could fire armour piercing
and
high explosive. Why didn't we? Why was it up to our fellows to improvise? Why must our gunners make up in valour for deficiencies that should have and could have been remedied months ago? Why did it take someone like Stein to use unarmoured, slow-poking artillery in the place of tanks and
against
tanks? The whole trick was madness. That it worked, which it did, long enough at least for the Aussies and a couple of squadrons of Grants to trundle on-line and convince the enemy to try again later, was the product of luck and gallantry alone, a fine saga for the regimental archives but a bloody travesty in terms of fighting a war. Stein lost six brave men and four guns. Incredibly he himself came off without a scratch. The tally of Panzers taken out by his guns, five, sounds less than spectacular—but his actions and his men's saved the line and held the position. We would have lost scores, if not the whole formation, without him.

In the after-action, Mallory put Stein in for a DSO and four of his men for Military Medals, three posthumously. Wicks and I wound up getting mentioned in despatches. When I went to Mallory and told him the real story, that for my part I probably deserved a dressing-down more than a citation, he laughed and said, “Take it anyway, it'll look good in your obituary.”