Take or Destroy! (2 page)

Beyond the town, on the black ribbon of road that ran east and west along the coast, a group of bored Italians were cooking an evening meal of soup, pasta and beans among the broken walls. As the camels approached, one of them stood up stiffly, holding a rifle. The camels came to a shuffling halt, the dust they had stirred up drifting past the little encampment on the breeze. There was a brief exchange in a mixture of tongues, and then the Italian waved them on.

‘Aiee!’ The leading driver jabbed with a pointed stick at his animal’s testicles and the little caravan, stinking of uncured hides and dates, headed out of town towards Akka Dub, the next village along the coast in the direction of Fuka and the fig plantations of Daba. The Italians didn’t bother to look up. The evening movement of camels between Qaba and Akka Dub was normal enough. The Bedouin had been spectators of the North African struggle ever since the first forward pushes in 1940, looking on disinterestedly as fortunes swayed back and forth between El Agheila and El Alamein, even sharing the waterholes with lorry-borne young men of the long-range groups of both sides. Sometimes they lost a village hit by bombs or a camel killed by a mine. Sometimes they murdered a lost soldier or profited by a rifle stolen from a corpse, a can of petrol from a wrecked car, or a few tins of food from an abandoned lorry. But, profit or loss, it was always wise to be wary of the Messerschmitts and Hurricanes that prowled the sky during daylight hours, and they took care to remain within easy reach of shelter when the sun rose, and only move their caravans during the first hours after dusk. It had been going on so long now that neither side took much notice of them; the Italians, who had ages since grown sick of the war, least of all.

The caravan moved slowly eastwards, the camels like ungainly ships on a rough sea, their riders muffled to the eyes against the grit stirred up by the breeze. Occasionally a single rider turned north to where his family huddled with his few animals among the hills in a flat black tent smelling of sheep dung. Slowly the convoy became strung out, the leader a good half-mile from the last straggling beast, a dark brown animal with a hide covered with sores. Its rider crouched on its back, his head down, the grimiest of the whole string of grimy riders, the only portion of his face that could be seen the grey eyes glinting under his headdress and a large hooked nose poking through the wrapping of rags that surrounded his face.

Gradually the distance between the main group and the last rider increased until he had dropped far behind. Then, as night fell and the sky overhead became thronged with glowing stars, he sat up straighter on his limping animal and turned, not north but south, into the desert. Down there rolled the Great Sand Sea, known to the Arabs as ‘the Devil’s country’, almost impassable to anything but a camel, but interspersed with great areas of rocky outcrop, stony wastes and loose sand where vehicles could move.

After an hour’s riding, the camel halted and the rider stared about him. In front, the land rose a little, and on the horizon against the lighter hue of the night sky, he saw a square angular shape which didn’t fit into the landscape. The camel snorted and, as it moved forward again, a stone rattled under its great flat feet. From the direction of the square silhouette came the click of a rifle bolt being shoved home.

A light flashed briefly and figures appeared against the skyline. A few muffled words were exchanged and the rider of the camel slipped from the beast’s back. At the other side of the ridge, white blurs of faces turned, figures moved in the shadows and engines were started. The muffled shape in the grimy galabiya climbed into a lorry and someone offered him a cigarette. As he drew in a deep grateful puff and the smoke floated away on the night air, he gestured towards the east.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘And pile the coal on, please. I’ve got news that’ll make their hair stand on end at HQ.’

The decision was therefore made to mount a special operation to disrupt these important supplies, together with large amounts of spare parts for the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps panzer divisions which were also known to be in Qaba.

Brigadier Loftus, of Eighth Army Intelligence, was a big man with far too much flesh on his bones, and he was sweating profusely because his tent was stuffy in the morning sunshine. He was a dedicated man, and it never occurred to him to take an hour off for a breather, because he had already given his complete allegiance to the new commander of the Eighth Army and was prepared to work every hour that God sent to make him successful.

The new man hadn’t been long in North Africa -- barely long enough to get his knees brown, in fact -- and to the sunburnt desert veterans, he hadn’t any particularly remarkable physical attributes with his fair hair, sharp enquiring nose and pale blue eyes. Pale though they were, however, those piercing eyes seemed to Loftus to miss nothing and there was a steely quality behind them that indicated an unexpected depth of character. It was said the general was lacking in warmth, but he was incisive, firm of purpose and, as quite a number of indifferent officers had already found out, not over-willing to make allowances for the fallibility of others. He mightn’t look very much like the sort of man who would win the hearts of his soldiers, but he did seem to be the very man who might do something about the Afrika Korps and especially about Rommel.

Rommel had caught the imagination of every man in North Africa, and his soldiers -- Erwin’s Army, they were called -- with their palm tree insignia, sun-bleached hair and bright blue eyes, had built up a legend of invincibility that was hard to break down. Because their general was good and an honourable man, too, his Afrika Korps was good also and its soldiers were clean fighters. Well equipped with excellent weapons, they envied the British nothing except their cigarettes, and it was little wonder the Eighth Army admired them.

They still stood, however, for German
Schrecklichkeit -
that toxic frightfulness of the Nazis - and since they had to be beaten, it was Loftus’s opinion that another legend was needed to combat the one Rommel had built up. And oddly enough, the long-nosed general, who’d come out from England only as a second choice, had already started one of his own, different but strangely similar in its austerity and ruthlessness. His attitude was quite clearly not to dance to the German tune, but to play one of his own -- only better -- and first. In the desert, the wolves of Europe were suddenly facing bigger and craftier wolves.

Brigadier Loftus had a whole series of situation reports to prepare, and despite the heat he still went on with them because every minute was important if the Germans were to be defeated. The three arms of their
Drang nach Osten
had all by the grace of God come to a stop at last - the Russian one at Stalingrad and Moscow, the Balkan one at Crete, and the North African one at Alamein, only a few short miles from Alexandria - but it was still necessary to guarantee the Mediterranean and somehow re-establish a footing in Europe, and the only way to do that was by the conquest of Libya and the driving out of North Africa of every last vestige of the German--Italian occupation.

Since the new commander of the Eighth Army seemed to have some pretty solid ideas on the subject, and vast new supplies of tanks and 25-pounder guns, to Brigadier Loftus it seemed that the extra effort might well be worthwhile, so when the starched and laundered young staff captain appeared in his doorway, he looked up with a frown at the interruption.

‘Chap called Hockold to see you, sir,’ the captain said.

The man in the scruffy galabiya appeared, his skin still dark with the stain on it. His face was lean and, without the ragged headdress, his straight fair hair fell over his eyes like the broken wing of a yellow bird.

‘Hello, George,’ Loftus said. ‘Made it, I see. Brought some good news?’

‘Depends which way you look at it, sir.’ Hockold moved to Loftus’s table, and a mug of tea appeared. ‘I’ve just come from Qaba.’

Loftus studied him carefully over his spectacles. ‘What’s special about Qaba?’ he asked.

‘That’s where Rommel’s got his petrol.’

Loftus gestured. ‘Rommel hasn’t got any petrol. He’s supposed to need thirty thousand tons and, before he can move again, another thirty-five. He’s supposed to be in Berlin, in fact, begging on his bended knees for it.

‘I think it’s different now. There are three petrol ships in Qaba. They came in forty-eight hours ago.’

Loftus’s eyebrows rose. ‘The RAF reported nothing,’ he said.

‘They rigged up camouflage. They had it up within a matter of hours.’

‘How much petrol is there?’

‘I worked it out at thirty thousand tons - at least.’

Loftus whistled. ‘That would make a hell of a difference to how he fights.’

‘Are we expecting an attack?’

‘We’re not.
He
is. The new commander’s all set to go. Chap called Montgomery. Know him?’

‘Instructor at Camberley when I was there.’

‘Well, I hope he puts the wind up ‘em. For my money he’s all right. He says he’s going to knock Rommel for six clean out of Africa.’

Hockold gave a little smile. ‘It might be harder than he thinks now,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s also a ship loaded with ammunition, a refuelling post in the town where there are two sheds of spare parts, and a dump a mile inland from the harbour. Fortunately for us, their administrative services are unstable and they have no lighters, tugs or lorries.’

Loftus sighed. ‘We’d better let ‘em know at AHQ,’ he said. ‘They’ll get an RAF bang laid on, I suppose.’

‘Not this time. There’s a prisoner of war cage right alongside the harbour.’

Loftus stared at Hockold for a long moment. ‘Got any ideas?’

‘I was thinking of a raid.’

‘Not a hope. Monty’s dead against sideshows. The navy set one up against Benghazi and Tobruk in September. It was a dead loss.’

‘There’s no minefield,’ Hockold persisted. ‘And I’ve got a chart.’ He placed an envelope on the desk. ‘A few other things too : Numbers. Positions of the ships. Gun emplacements. Three old French 47s and heavy machine guns, but not much else. Flak guns are all inland.’

Loftus paused; then he smiled and pushed his papers away. ‘You make out a good case,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps we should let the bigwigs decide.’

As it happened, even as Hockold prepared to head for Eighth Army headquarters to lay his ideas before the new general in command, the signals that Colonel Hochstatter had made about the arrival of the four supply ships to General Stumme, holding the fort for Rommel at Afrika Korps headquarters, were just starting to bear fruit. Qaba, which was normally used only when Mersa Matruh and Bardia were full, had increased enormously in importance since the British retreat in June. Now the lines of communication went all the way back to Tripoli, and as it suddenly occurred to someone that they were incredibly vulnerable, a message was directed to Hochstatter that the four ships were to be unloaded at once.

Captain Hrabak, the supply officer, permitted himself a cynical smile. ‘What with?’ he asked. ‘We’re short of lorries.’

‘Lighters then,’ Hochstatter suggested. ‘Across to the concrete below the POW compound.’ He turned to the signals officer. ‘Ask for lighters, Tarnow.’

‘Where from?’ Tarnow demanded. He was popularly supposed to be a member of the
Feldsicherheitspolizei
or the
Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Waffen S.S.
and was surly, arrogant and indifferent in manner, which gave the stories a substance of truth and made them all wary of him.

Hochstatter drew a deep breath. ‘Try the navy at Mersa Matruh,’ he said. ‘And we can hire all the Arabs we want.’

‘They work too slowly. It’s not their war.’ Hrabak gestured angrily. ‘We need
transport.
The panzers took all ours at the end of August. It never came back. If they want what we’ve got, we’ve got to have lorries.’

Hochstatter frowned. What Hrabak said was only too true. A few lorries had been commandeered, together with everything the wretched Italians possessed, but it was obviously not going to be enough by a long way. Unknown to Hochstatter, however, his signals to army headquarters had been duly noted, and General Stumme was well aware there was a considerable amount of worry in the forward areas caused by a shortage of petrol. He also knew that a British Commando brigade had been sent to the Middle East the previous year and, though it was known to have been badly cut up in Crete, he had no knowledge of whether its losses had been made good and he was very concerned in case it attempted something against his supplies.

‘Tell Colonel Hochstatter that the defences of Qaba must be strengthened,’ he directed. ‘At once. And keep me informed about what’s being done because we don’t really know yet what the Eighth Army’s up to.’

The Eighth Army was up to a lot of things, chief of which were the new general’s preparations to knock the Afrika Korps out of Africa, for which the plans, code-named Lightfoot, had been pushed ahead at tremendous speed.

Army headquarters was a group of caravans at Burg el Arab, twenty miles from Alexandria, set on the coast where the staff could walk straight from their work into the sea. Despite the rumours that he allowed no smoking and no drinking, the new commander was not a killjoy.

‘He’ll laugh if it’s funny,’ Loftus said as his jeep jolted along. ‘And he doesn’t give a damn about saluting. They say that Freyberg suggested that, since the New Zealanders didn’t go in for it much, he should try waving at them. To everybody’s surprise he did, and they waved back.’

His belly jerked as he laughed. ‘The chaps who’ve flogged up and down the same bit of desert till they’re sick of it love him,’ he went on. ‘Though he’s a bit difficult with generals. He says they know a lot about fighting but not much about war, and the machine’s running properly now for the first time since Wavell left.’

As the dusty jeep drew to a stop, the new general was standing at a table under a strip of camouflage netting which threw a speckled shadow over the map he was studying. As the brakes squealed, several of the officers round him turned to look at it and, though the army commander didn’t even bother to lift his head, what he said was sharp enough to bring their attention hurriedly back to the map again.