The Sand Panthers (5 page)

It was fortunate for Wotan that he did so. For just before they breasted the rise, von Dodenburg had time to spot what lay waiting for them below and cry urgently, ‘
Halt!
’ Matz hit the brakes in a flash and they jarred to a bone-shaking stop.

‘
Christ on a crutch
,’ Schulze gasped, all breath knocked out of him. ‘
The buck-teethed Tommies!
’

Von Dodenhurg lowered his glasses and announced grimly, ‘It looks as if they’re going to settle in there for the night, Schulze.’

The big NCO nodded his agreement. ‘You’re right, sir. Look at ’em down there with those baggy long drawers of theirs, boiling up more of that tea-shit that they always swig by the litre. They’re settling in, as if they’re gonna be there forever!’

Von Dodenhurg took one last long look at the British positions: a circle of armoured cars and light tanks, with men squatting round blue-flickering petrol fires, while the officers gathered round the radio truck for some sort of conference. He made his decision. ‘We’ll have to attack, Schulze. Come on, let’s get back to the tank and get on with it.

Bodies bent low, the two men scurried back to the command tank, which was now dug in in the hull-down position in the centre of the others. The commanders, poised alertly on their turrets, looked at him anxiously and von Dodenburg placed his hand on top of his khaki cap, fingers outstretched in the infantry signal for them to rally on him (he had ordered complete radio silence one hour before). A moment later they had dropped from their turrets and came doubling over to where the CO stood.

‘All right, we are going to attack. For two reasons. One, we can’t waste any more time here. Two. Now that they’ve stopped their own motors, they’re bound to hear us, even if we did attempt to sneak our way round them.’ He paused and glanced around at the dust-covered faces. Their weariness seemed to have vanished almost instantly and their red-rimmed eyes gleamed with sudden excitement. Young and as inexperienced as they were, they were obviously eager for battle. Von Dodenburg noted the point gratefully. ‘Now most of you are new to battle,’ he continued, ‘and I don’t want you taking any foolish risks. So this is the way we’re going to do it. I shall take my tank up to the top of the ridge and show myself. My guess is that the Tommies will assume there is only a lone tank facing them and although that tank outguns those 37mm popguns their vehicles are armed with, they’ll have a crack at me with their light tanks. Once they start their motors, you start up. Meier, you’ll command the left wing. Seitz, the right.’

The two 18-year second-lieutenants snapped to attention.

‘Once I open up with my 75, you will come in from the flanks in a wide swoop and envelop them like this.’ He drew in his arms as if he were hugging a girl in a passionate embrace. ‘You Sergeant Doerr.’

‘Sir,’ the one-eyed veteran NCO in charge of the panzer grenadiers barked.

‘As soon as the two flanks go in, I shall advance down the slope and you’ll follow with your halftracks.’

‘
Jawohl, Hauptsturm
,’ Doerr snapped. ‘My boys’ll tickle up those Tommies’ asses for you, sir.’

‘I don’t want their asses just tickled,’ von Dodenburg answered with unusual severity. ‘Understand this – all of you. I want all those unfortunate Tommies killed. Not one of them must escape. All right, be off with you – and the best of luck.’

‘Best of luck to you, too, sir,’ they replied breathlessly and doubled back to their tanks.

Wotan was going to battle again!

*  *  *

‘All right, Matz. Start up –
now
!’ The 300 HP engines burst into life with a tremendous roar. Matz thrust home the gear and the tank rattled to the brow of the hill. Down below the Tommies had spun round to discover the cause of the sudden row. If what was going to happen next had not been so tragic, von Dodenburg could have burst out laughing at the comic look of surprise on their gawping British faces.

It seemed to take them an age to react to the appearance of an enemy tank in their midst. Then suddenly a white-haired man dropped the canteen from which he was drinking, and started to pelt for the radio truck with surprising speed for such an elderly man. ‘Stop him, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg rapped.

Schulze crouched behind the 75mm, pressed the trigger of one of the machine-guns almost automatically. A burst of tracer zipped flatly across the desert. The elderly officer faltered, flung up his hands dramatically, and flopped to the ground. The burst of machine-gun fire finally roused the British. They scattered in sudden alarm. Drivers tumbled into their tanks. Gunners flung themselves behind their weapons. Officers and NCOs barked hasty orders. In an instant, all was confusion and movement.

‘Ten o’clock – radio truck – HE!’ von Dodenburg barked.

Schulze swung the 75 round. He had already loaded the high explosive shell. The circle of the sight flew along the line of tanks and trucks. It settled on the radio truck, whose driver was frantically attempting to start it. Schulze centred the calibrated lines on the rear of the truck in which the radio equipment was housed. He hesitated for a fraction of a second and then pulled the firing lever.

The big 75 erupted. A spurt of purple flame shot from its muzzle. The turret was filled with the stink of burnt explosive, and the steaming empty shell-case came clattering out of the breech into the waiting collector bag.

Just as the first of the British light tanks started to climb towards them, the radio truck disappeared in a vicious flame and began to burn furiously. No one got out.

The leading Tommy tank was handicapped because it had to shoot uphill and the rays of the setting sun were in the eyes of the gunner and driver. Von Dodenburg ignored the first 37mm shell which flung up a fountain of sand and stones a dozen metres away which showered down on them like heavy rain on the turret. He had to lure the Tommies to an attack on the lone intruder before he threw in his two wings. ‘Hold fast!’ he ordered above the racket and grabbed the shaking side of the turret as the Matilda fired again and the Mark IV swayed with the impact of the near-miss like a ship at sea.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ the ‘Prof’ quavered, ‘these things can be dangerous’.

‘Quite,’ von Dodenburg agreed and ducked instinctively as a 37mm shell struck the turret a resounding hollow blow and went whizzing off, unable to penetrate the thick armour.

He nudged Schulze’s broad, sweat-soaked back. ‘All right, Schulze, let him have it now,’ he commanded. ‘They’ve bought it.’

Schulze swung the great sinister hooded gun round. From von Dodenburg’s position on the turret it seemed at least ten metres long. He grunted and pulled the firing lever. The white blob of the AP shell hit the British tank squarely in the engine. For a moment nothing happened. The tank still continued its laborious crawl up the steep hill.
Whoosh!
The Matilda’s petrol tank exploded. In an instant it was a blazing inferno. With a thick asthmatic crump, its ammunition racks exploded, piercing the black oily smoke with a stab of violent scarlet flame.

A man staggered out of the lower escape hatch. His face was pitch-black and both his clothes and hair were alight. He stumbled a few metres, his legs getting progressively heavier; then he fell and in a frenzy of agony rolled back and forth on the hard sand in a desperate attempt to put out the flames. His flailing, tormented arms and legs moved more slowly. With a convulsive heave, he lay still.

Von Dodenburg made his decision. The whole of the British tank force, followed by the armoured cars, was now advancing up the hill to where the stricken Matilda blazed away fiercely. ‘Matz,’ he cried through the throat mike, ‘advance! ...Schulze!’

‘Sir?’

‘Fire at will!’

As Matz thrust home his gears and began to rumble towards the attacking force, von Dodenburg heard the roar of the concealed tanks and halftracks starting up their engines. The trap had been well and truly sprung!

*  *  *

It was a massacre. The Tommies realized too late that they had walked into a trap. The armoured cars tried to break away, relying on their superior speed to escape, but they could not evade the two young second-lieutenants’ gunners. One by one, the 76s knocked them out. Soon a couple of square kilometres of desert were littered with the burning armoured cars.

Von Dodenburg, followed by the panzer grenadiers’ halftracks, charged straight into the mass of British tanks. Schulze firing from right to left, smashed Matilda after Matilda to a flaming standstill, while Sergeant Doerr’s young grenadiers mercilessly mowed down those of the crews who managed to escape.

Here and there individual Tommies tried to stop the German advance, standing in the path of the metal monsters and attempting to hold them off with rifles and revolvers. But within seconds they disappeared screaming under the churning tank tracks to fall behind – mutilated chunks of flesh in the bloody sand.

Eventually von Dodenburg had had enough of the slaughter. ‘Stop firing!’ he cried thickly, sickened by the bloodshed, but knowing that there was more – and worse – to come.

He turned and repressing the wave of nausea that threatened to overcome him at the sight of his blood-red tracks, through which protruded a severed naked arm, the fingers outstretched as if pleading with God for mercy. He signalled to Doerr to do what had to be done.

Wearily he closed his eyes and slumped against the hot metal of the turret. He tried to ignore the whimpering pleas for mercy, and cries of fear of the Tommies, which always ended in the sharp crack of Doerr’s revolver; but he failed lamentably. Every time the revolver cracked, he twitched convulsively.

Next to him, the ‘Prof’ whispered over and over again, ‘
Oh my blessed Saviour…oh my blessed Saviour!
’

One hour later they moved on, leaving behind them the silent heaps of dead and the still burning tanks, outlined a sombre black against the blood-red ball of the setting sun.

Major von Dodenburg, his face pale and buried deep in the collar of his greatcoat in the sudden night chill, did not look back.
He couldn’t
!

On the afternoon of the second day, Wotan entered the Sand Sea. At first the going was good, apart from a couple of bad patches of soft sand. But towards evening they ran into a series of dunes which swept to the darkening horizon. Most were razor-backed and it demanded a great deal of skill on the part of the driver to traverse them.

Matz soon showed that he had an excellent eye for terrain and just what an experienced driver he was. He had the special technique at his finger-tips. He would position the tank at the base of the dune and charge at the mountain of sand at full speed. Just before the tank was about to lurch alarmingly over the top of the dune, perhaps to face a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres on the other side, he would jam on the brakes, swing the steering round violently and rattle down the other side at a frightening, hair-raising angle.

Some of the other drivers, especially those in the halftracks which did not have equivalent traction, were not so successful in their attempts to surmount the dunes. Regularly a cursing driver would get bogged down helplessly in the sand. Then the rest of the crew would have to get out and begin the back-breaking task of freeing the tracks and digging holes beneath them so that the metal sand channels could be placed underneath to allow the trapped vehicle more traction.

That afternoon they hardly made twenty-five kilometres, and by nightfall von Dodenburg had had enough. He called a halt and told the crews to prepare their evening meal. The men formed the defensive laager for the night and dropped onto the sand, exhausted, grateful for the start of the night breeze after the murderous heat of that day.

Von Dodenburg supervised the activities of his own crew and while the ‘Prof’ and Schulze set about preparing the evening meal, he decided to ‘take the spade for a walk’.

With the spade over his shoulder and a wad of newspaper in the other, he slogged up the nearest dune and down the other side. There out of sight of the camp, he emptied his bowels and was just about to begin using the spade when he caught the glint of glass a long way away.

For a moment he thought his eyes were playing him tricks after the strain and glare of the long day. But then he saw it again. He dropped his spade and fumbled for his own binoculars. But he was an instant too late. At that moment the sun slipped beneath the horizon and the desert was plunged into darkness. The gleam had vanished.

Thoughtfully, von Dodenburg walked back to the busy little camp. Someone had been watching him out there. The question was –
who
?

*  *  *

In spite of his exhaustion, von Dodenburg awoke at two and could not get to sleep again. He was due to relieve ‘Prof’ at three for his hour of guard-duty anyway, so he lay there, hands propped underneath his head, staring at the cold silver infinity of the stars and listening to the singing of the sand. For a while he lay there – planning the next day and glancing at the dial of his wrist-watch.

Then, by instinct, he unzipped his sleeping bag. Shuddering a little in the night cold, he pulled on his desert boots, flung his black leather jacket around his shoulders and clambered on to the turret in which the ‘Prof’ was keeping watch.

‘You’re early, Major,’ the ‘Prof’ whispered, obviously not wishing to disturb the men snoring heartily all round.

‘Couldn’t sleep any more, Prof,’ von Dodenburg answered.

For a few minutes the two officers stood there in silence, staring up at the stars which seemed low enough to touch. Then von Dodenburg broke the silence. ‘Prof, I’d like to ask you a question. Does anyone live out here in this miserable wilderness?’ Swiftly von Dodenburg explained what he thought he had seen the night before, almost doubting his testimony as he did so.

Reichert seemed to take a long time before he answered. ‘It is a long story, Major,’ he said finally. ‘You know that there is a theory that the Sahara is constantly expanding outwards. Once, it is thought, this was probably the bread basket of the Ancient World, an exceedingly fertile place, though it is hard to believe now, is it not?