Killing Rommel (11 page)

As for our SAS contingent, they, it seems, are all champion boozers and rugby players. One night in the mess their commander, Major Mayne, takes up a post empty-handed in the centre of the hall and challenges any four men to tackle him and take him down. Ten strapping blokes take turns for half an hour. Mayne remains upright, grinning the while.

Without question the leader of the outfit is Jake Easonsmith. I have met no officer like him. He commands by example alone, or more accurately by a kind of focus and gravity that elevates each act he performs and inspires all beneath him to emulation. One would sooner cut off one's hand than disappoint Jake, though no one I have questioned can state exactly why. In the special forces, I'm beginning to understand, an officer rarely issues orders. The men are ahead of him. Whatever the task, they set about it before their superiors can command them and have it half done before the officer even knows they've plunged in. Discipline is not externally imposed, as in the Armoured Division. Here it's self-discipline.

“A good desert hand,” declares Jake, instructing the SAS men and me on a training patrol, “needs a bit of the ascetic. He must enjoy deprivation and thrive on hardship.”

Jake is a rangy chap in his early thirties with a mane of dense unruly brush that seems permanently nested with dust and sand. He's not a military type; he was a wine merchant in Bristol in civilian life. I have heard Bach's cantatas coming from his room. He rules with the lightest of touches, appearing during training at ghost hours and staying only moments, yet every man including Mayne and Popski jumps to please him. The solitary personal exchange I have shared with him, one evening on a practice patrol, concerned the subject of the imagination. I had muttered something about the desert being a place where a man's mind could wander.

“It'd better not, Chapman. The desert demands one's focus at every moment.”

Jake has assigned me to prepare a document on Rommel and on the defensive dispositions employed by the Afrika Korps in the field. At the same time, other papers are being prepared by other officers. On the morning of their distribution, Jake shuts down the LRDG sector of the base. Corporal Arnem-Butler of the orderly office passes the word: all officers and senior NCOs of patrols R1, T1 and T3 including navigators and medical personnel will assemble for a briefing at 1300 hours. “Is this it?” I ask the corporal.

He just grins and says nothing.

9

THE BRIEFING TAKES place in the Motor Repair Shop of the Heavy Section, that branch of the LRDG whose role is to supply petrol, ammunition and rations to the fighting patrols. The shop is the only space that has windproof walls (to keep dust out of the newly machined engines) and is big enough and cool enough for comfort. It is called “the barn.” Three officers preside: Major Easonsmith, commanding the operation as a whole; Captain Bill Kennedy Shaw, LRDG Intelligence Officer; and Major Mayne, commanding the SAS.

Present are all LRDG patrol officers and their senior NCOs: Captain Wilder commanding T1 patrol, Lieutenant Warren commanding T3 (Jake himself will take R1). T2, under Second Lieutenant Tinker, is absent on another operation. Major Peniakoff—Popski—takes a seat on a bench alongside his second-in-command, Lieutenant Yunnie. I find a place on the side. At the front are the patrols' medical officer, Captain Dick Lawson, and the RAF adjunct, Flight-Lieutenant Higge-Evert, who will accompany Wilder's patrol as adviser and air liaison. Near Major Mayne sit his three NCO mainstays, Reg Seekings, Johnny Cooper and Mike Sadler, the navigator, along with Mayne's single fellow officer, Captain Alexander “Sandy” Scratchley. The feel of the briefing is extremely casual. There are no chairs, so the fellows perch on test stands or benches or simply camp on the floor with their knees up and their arms round their bare legs. The uniform is shorts and shirts, with chaplies, the box-toed sandals that the men favour over boots because they're cooler in the heat and because scorpions and spiders can't hide inside them.

A sergeant named Collier closes the big sliding shop doors. At the front, Kennedy Shaw pins a blow-up photo to a presentation stand. The photo is of Rommel.

I glance round to see whether any of the officers appear surprised. If they are, they don't show it. Sergeant Collier comes back and takes the seat beside me on a wooden crate of .303 ball ammunition.

“The Desert Fox,” says Kennedy Shaw, indicating the photo. “For nearly two years every man in this room has burned to get a crack at him. Well,” he says, “soon you shall.”

Briefly Kennedy Shaw goes over Rommel's early career—his spectacular success as an infantry officer in the Great War, his winning of the Pour le Mérite, the triumph of his book
Infantry in the Attack.
Kennedy Shaw is trying to give us a sense of the man. “Rommel's physical courage is beyond question. The hallmark of his fighting style is audacity and aggressiveness.”

In the invasion of France in 1940, Rommel commands the crack 7th Panzer Division. This formation spearheads the blitzkrieg breakthrough of the Ardennes, the blow that breaks France's back. Rommel's reward is command of DAK, the Deutsches Afrika Korps, and all German troops and armour in Tunisia and Libya.

Now elevated to lieutenant-general, Rommel lands at Tripoli in February 1941. In his first campaign, before half his men and tanks have arrived from Europe, he chases Western Desert Force out of Cyrenaica, driving our armoured divisions back nearly a thousand miles to the Egyptian frontier. The British press in effect knight him by bestowing the title “Desert Fox.” Churchill himself declares:

We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.

“No one has to tell this to the British soldier,” says Kennedy Shaw. So powerful is Rommel's hold over our Tommies' imagination that General Auchinleck, C-in-C of Eighth Army, felt it necessary last spring to issue the following directive:

There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman and it is highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers….We must refer to “the Germans” or “the Axis powers”…and not always keep harping on Rommel. Please impress upon all commanders that, from a psychological point of view, this is a matter of the highest importance.

“What makes the Rommel myth even thornier to contend with,” Kennedy Shaw continues, “is the fact that he fits neither the stereotype of the rapacious Hun nor that of the brutish, doctrinaire Nazi. He is not a member of the party and never has been. His code of soldierly honour was shaped by the era of Prussian arms before the rise of National Socialism. He is, we are told, a warrior from a bygone era, an old-fashioned knight for whom the virtues of chivalry and respect for the foe are indivisible from the passion for victory. In other words,” says Kennedy Shaw, “you can't even hate the bastard!”

Rommel's men worship him, Kennedy Shaw declares. He is unique, essential, indispensable. No German general can replace him. This is the strength of the Rommel phenomenon, and its weakness.

“Eliminate this one man,” says Kennedy Shaw, “and you drive a stake through the Axis' heart in North Africa.”

He indicates the photo of the Desert Fox.

“That, my friends, is where you come in.”

Kennedy Shaw turns the briefing over to Major Easonsmith. Jake thanks him and comes forward, with a sly look towards his audience. “Do I have your attention, gentlemen?”

For the first time, laughter breaks up the concentration.

“I know what you're thinking,” says Jake. “The job can't be done. And we're just the fellows to do it.”

More laughter. A coffee flask is passed round. Cigarettes are lit. Next to me, Sergeant Collier tamps his Sherlock Holmes pipe and re-fires it.

Jake begins, describing Rommel's style of command. Rommel leads from the front. “He's got guts, give him that. He doesn't manage the battle by telephone.” As Jake speaks, he distributes a number of Afrika Korps propaganda photos depicting Rommel in various front-line environments—in staff cars, on Mark IV Panzers and so forth. Rommel's aggressive instincts, Jake says, have made him thrust himself again and again into the thick of the fight.

“In other words, gentlemen, the single most important enemy personage, upon whom the outcome of the entire North African war depends, will not be sitting safely hundreds of miles behind the lines, where we have no hope of getting at him, but will in all probability be placing himself deliberately out in front, in broad daylight, protected by nothing stouter than an open command car. All we have to do is find him.”

The men are given photos of the vehicles that comprise Rommel's mobile headquarters, his
Gefechtsstaffel,
whose identifying characteristics we are to study and commit to memory. A field marshal's command post, Jake reminds the men, will stand out amidst acres of other vehicles by virtue of its concentration of wireless aerials, the steady traffic of couriers funnelling to it, and the beefed-up security round about. These factors, too, will enlarge our chances of success.

This produces the briefing's second laugh. A sergeant pipes up: “What are we supposed to do, sir, go swanning about the desert hoping to run into the bastard?”

“Sigint has learnt,” Jake responds (meaning Signals Intelligence, our radio intercept fellows), “that each night when circumstances prevent Rommel from returning to his proper HQ in the rear, his wireless operator sends a single coded signal at a specific hour, different each night, informing his headquarters staff of their commander-in-chief's whereabouts.”

Our spies, Jakes says, have acquired this schedule. He indicates the words “Desert Fox” on the chalkboard.

“What this means is that the DF can be DF'ed.” Meaning located by radio Directional Finding. “By no means does this warrant that Rommel will stay put. Where he sets down at 1900 may not be where he remains at 1930. That's where you fellows come in. Major Mayne, will you take over?”

Paddy Mayne steps forward. To those of his era, no introduction would be necessary, but for later readers let me say only that Mayne had been a rugby star before the war on a par with the great champions of any age; he is a Cambridge man and a solicitor; by war's end he will become Britain's most highly decorated soldier and, with the exception only of his commanding officer in the SAS, David Stirling, the most celebrated British commando of the North African war.

“What does this mean, sir?” A voice addresses the major. “That we pinhole Rommel and go in with all guns blazing?”

Mayne smiles. “I wish it did, lads. But it looks as if the RAF will be getting all the glory.”

The first groan ascends.

Our ground party's assignment, Mayne explains, is to penetrate the enemy's defences, getting close enough to the target either to fix its bearings or, if possible, to mark Rommel's location with red smoke. Fighter planes of the Royal Air Force will take care of the kill. Our role is to clean up anything left over, then get the hell out.

At this, the briefing breaks into muttered indignation. For my part, though by war's end I will have participated in a number of such assemblies, during which outlandish assignments are imparted with absolutely straight faces, and during which I invariably feel my blood run cold, I cannot fail to be astonished at the keen and cheerful fervour with which this near suicidal mission is embraced.

“Rotten luck,” says Mayne. “The air force boys have beaten us this time. Still, our turn should be damn brisk sport. Don't give up hope, lads. I've seen these aviation types come up empty more than once. If they kick it, we'll get our shot.”

The briefing breaks up in high spirits. The men, who all know each other from their units and from prior operations, move off into their various groups to work out the details of their individual assignments. I find myself alone, picturing in my mind the vast expanse of the Western Desert and the tens of thousands of soldiers, tanks and guns of the Afrika Korps. Is it just me, or is this operation as preposterous as it sounds?

I turn to the Kiwi sergeant, Collier, who has been perched on an ammunition crate beside me throughout the briefing. He looks the athletic sort, who on civvy street has probably been a rugby player or mountaineer, as so many NZedders are.

“What do you make of this show, Sergeant?”

The New Zealander turns to me with a grin. “Sounds like a dodgy do to me, sir.”

10

THAT AFTERNOON comes the load-out.

Orders are issued at 1400. All passes are cancelled and all mail and phone privileges cut off. Instructions to the patrol commanders are to outfit their vehicles with fuel, oil, water, rations and ammunition for thirty days.

T3 patrol—the one I'll ride with—has at the last instant lost its commander, Lieutenant Warren, to an emergency appendectomy. Sergeant Collier is placed in command. The eleven other men are all New Zealanders, except Miller, the medical orderly, who's a Yorkshireman from Bradford. We have five SAS troopers who will travel with us.

The trucks are loaded in a yard that's off-limits to all but LRDG personnel. The men are given the afternoon and night to pack the vehicles; I keep close but out of the troopers' way.

In honour of the New Zealand composition of T3 patrol, the trucks all bear Maori names. I will ride in Te Aroha IV. Patrol commanders' vehicles are American Willys jeeps, reserved for the LRDG from the rare and highly prized few that Eighth Army has managed to lay hands on, so that these officers can scout ahead over rough going. The other vehicles are all full-size 30-hundred-weight trucks. The crew of Te Aroha IV, or “Four” as she is called, are me, Trooper L. G. Oliphant as driver, Corporal Jack Standage as one gunner and Trooper “Punch” Danger (pronounced DAN-gurr, with a hard “g”) as the other. We'll have one SAS man, Sergeant Pokorny, as a passenger; he'll handle his own weapon, a Bren gun. Sergeant Wannamaker commands Te Rangi V, the wireless vehicle, with Trooper Frank Grainger as his operator, gunner Marks and fitter Durrance. Corporal Conyngham runs the weapons truck, Tirau VI, with gunners Midge and Hornsby and the medical orderly, Miller. They'll carry two SAS commandos each. The LRDG men are all New Zealanders, as I said, and all, except two privates, Holden and Davies, older than I by at least seven years. In civilian life they are farm appraisers, stockmen, fitters and joiners. They have families and own farms. Oliphant's family's is ten thousand acres.

The load-out takes place under the eaves of the motor shop. Supplies are laid out on tarpaulins alongside. Wilder and Easonsmith oversee the labours. Every requisitioned item seems to be on hand, with the exception of T3's petrol, which has been delayed coming from the quartermaster. T1 and R1 have theirs. I watch Easonsmith's and Wilder's patrols finish up and tarp over (the covers are not for rain but sand and dust), then roll the trucks into their parking slots, ready for tomorrow. Our fuel, T3's, still hasn't shown up. It's dark now. At last our lorry arrives, a White 10-tonner, stacked to the gunwales with petrol tins. Our fellows offload the boxes labelled

SHELL

MT

BENZINE

This White and a Mack NR9 will accompany the patrols for the first 250 miles, acting as rolling petrol dumps.

A 30-hundredweight truck is supposed to take a load no greater than a ton and a half. Added leaf springs can beef that up to 3,300 pounds, though Collier tells me that at a pinch he's packed on as much as two tons. You load a truck with petrol tins first. T1 and R1 patrols' fuel comes in tight, leakproof jerry cans, captured from the Germans and valued almost as highly as U.S. jeeps—forty-five per truck. Eight jerry cans apiece go to Wilder's and Easonsmith's jeeps and to the three others set aside for Major Mayne, for his infiltration teams and for Popski. But the Q has ballsed-up T3 patrol's fuel ration; instead of jerry cans we get “flimsies,” the notorious four-gallon containers made of metal so thin you can practically puncture it with a fingernail. Flimsies come two to a case, packed in cardboard. Of seventy-six that Collier's crew take down from the Mack, twenty-one are leaking at the seams; eleven have drained half to nil. “A lot of work with the funnel,” says our sergeant. He and I conspire. The shortage is made up by a bit of pillaging, in the form of three forty-four-gallon drums, which Punch and Grainger under my direction spirit out from the shop stores and which all three of us roll up ramps in the dark into the trailers. The solution is so satisfactory that we help ourselves to two more drums, leaving the piles of leaking flimsies for the quartermaster. We stow the drums aft of the cab; counting the topped-up twenty-gallon fuel tank, each truck is now loaded with about a hundred and eighty gallons, or a little over half a ton.

The remaining two thousand pounds is water, rations and cooking gear, POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants), ammunition, bedding and kit, sand-channels and mats, wireless, batteries, and guns and men themselves. In addition, for this operation only, each patrol commander's truck will carry a short-range “A” radio, like the kind used in tanks. The “A” set uses voice, not code, and will be employed to communicate among patrol commanders and with the jeeps of the SAS infiltration teams. The fitter's truck carries spare axles and radiators, extra clutch plates, steering rods and assemblies, and all manner of hoses, belts and fittings. Twenty-six tins of petrol are stowed inboard directly behind each cab in four rows of six each across with the remainders on top. Directly aft of this stands the mount for the Browning. Pipe stanchions at the four corners of the truckbed provide supplementary mounts. Ammunition boxes form a floor for the gunner to stand on, with a wall of tins rising directly behind the petrol. In the gaps go sleeping tarps, coats, caps, web gear and each man's personal bedding, rucksack and bale-out kit. Rations and cooking gear (and the ceramic jugs of rum marked “SRD,” which stands for “Supply Reserve Depot” but which all hands translate as “Seldom Reaches Destination”) are secured just inside the tailboard, so that the cook, or whoever is acting in such capacity, can drop the plank and get at the “conner” fast when men are hungry. Drinking water is carried in tins identical to those used for petrol, with their caps soldered shut to prevent leakage, and marked with a big white X. “This,” declares Sergeant Wannamaker, “is so that officers can tell which tin to drink out of.”

A Mills bomb is what the Yanks call a hand grenade. Oliphant and Holden pack these for all four of T3's vehicles. The elements go in separate boxes—explosives in one, fuses and detonators in another. The boxes are wood, which Oliphant explains is handy, as we can break them up to make fires for a brew-up of tea.

By ten at night the trucks are loaded. A last-minute change in orders pulls Popski and his Arabs from the operation; rumour says they will kick off with Tinker, when he returns with T2 patrol, on a different mission. Wrapped and tarped, the vehicles glisten like Christmas packages. I have only helped a little but I feel proud and satisfied. A quick feed, a smoke with Collier and Oliphant, and I'm off for the bunk.

I can't sleep. Midnight comes and goes. I'm thinking about my shaving kit. Why have I packed a razor? There'll be no water to shave with. Hairbrush? Pistol? Saved weight would add a pint of petrol. Books. Those I
will
need. I lay out half a dozen, including
Paradise Lost, The Sun Also Rises,
and Stein's manuscript, which I carry for luck. At 0245 I'm up and pacing. I shave one last time, dress and start on foot for the motor yard.

The vehicle park is blacked out, not even electric torches permitted. Desert nights are bright, though; the trucks cast shadows, even in starlight. Four new vehicles have arrived since I went for dinner—German Kübelwagen jeeps with camouflage paint and Afrika Korps markings. No one has told me about these; they must be for the SAS infiltration teams. I walk round the trucks. You can smell the gunblack on the Brownings and the Vickerses, even under their canvas covers. The vehicles stink of petrol and rubber, motor oil and grease. The metal gets cold in the night; condensation beads on the trucks' mud-guards and trickles down their frames. Along their flanks ride the perforated steel sand-channels. Beside these are mounted the sectioned masts for the Wyndom aerials; spades and axes; extra leaf springs. Clearance between tyres and mud-guards had been over eighteen inches when we started; now, with the load, it's under six. No doors on these trucks, just canvas dust flaps, and no roofs or windscreens except open-car-style “aeros,” covered in canvas so their glass doesn't flash in the sun. Seats and steering wheels are swathed in blankets to keep off the wet tonight and the sun tomorrow. The trucks have no ignition keys; you just step on the starter. I'm finishing a walk-round of Te Aroha IV when a lanky form materialises from the corner of the shop.

It's Easonsmith. For an instant I consider ducking from sight; he's such a daunting presence to me. He spots me, though, and comes forward. “Can't sleep, eh, Chapman?”

“No, sir.”

“Neither can I. Never can, the night before a push-off.”

We exchange good-mornings and chat informally for several moments. He asks about my notes and orders. Do I have everything I need? Do I understand what will be required of me?

I assure him I do.

“Yes,” says Easonsmith, “I always lied too.”

Jake regards me thoughtfully. He wears a Hebron fleece greatcoat; I'm shivering in a new Tropel.

“I'm glad we've run into each other, Chapman. I have something to say to you.”

I brace for the lecture about Special Operations being different from the regular army, which I have heard already half a dozen times from Kennedy Shaw, Willets and Enders and the other instructors. But that's not what Jake has in mind.

“You're in a bit of a ticklish spot here, Chapman—an officer in a patrol whose commander is an NCO. I mean Sergeant Collier. It's unfortunate, Lieutenant Warren being taken ill so suddenly, but there you have it. Collie, I assure you, is top-shelf, an old desert hand. You understand that I can't place you, a seconded officer with no inner-desert experience, in command of a specialised unit whose men have served together under this particular leader for over a year. As you know, we have an RAF officer in Captain Wilder's patrol; I've handled his placement the same as yours.”

I assure Jake that I understand.

“That being said, you are by no means a mere passenger.” He draws on his pipe, which he holds upside-down for blackout protocol, and nods towards the desert. “The one thing you can count on in operations like these is that something will go wrong. When it does, a second balls-up invariably follows. Before you know it, all your cherished plans have unravelled down to the ground.”

I respond yessir.

“You think I haven't been watching you, Chapman, but I have. I've been waiting for you to find your place. Sink or swim.”

I tell him I'm swimming as hard as I can.

“Try swimming less hard.”

Footfalls sound from the far side of the vehicle park—Major Mayne and Mike Sadler, the SAS navigator, come to give a once-over to their vehicles. Jake greets them across the space with a half-salute, then turns back to me.

“Hell could break loose on this operation, Chapman. Be ready when you're needed.”

I acknowledge, with my bones rattling inside my light coat.

“Here,” says Jake, “you're freezing.”

He strips off his greatcoat and wraps it round my shoulders. “Don't worry,” he says. “I've got another.”

Now I'm thoroughly confused. Am I in favour or on the mat?

Easonsmith beats the bowl of his pipe against the heel of his boot, then grinds out the embers in the dust. He straightens, ready to move off.

“Don't mind this little lecture, Chapman. Keyed up, that's all. Chattering as much for my own benefit as for yours.”

He raps me once on the shoulder, then nods towards the paperback in my pocket.

“What're you reading there?”

“You mean this book, sir?”

Jake smiles. “You
do
read, don't you Chapman?”

With sinking heart, I confess to ploughing through Bertie Nevins'
The Chrome Castle.
Detective pulp. Absolute drivel.

“Excellent!” declares my commander. “For a moment I was afraid you might say Livy or Lucretius.”