Killing Rommel (6 page)

Stein was at the front somewhere. He was an OP, a forward observation officer, with 4RHA, the Fourth Royal Horse Artillery. His batteries of 25-pounders were on the move constantly (a letter from him straggled in once a month) as part of various “Jock columns”—mobile formations of armour, infantry and artillery that ranged the desert, striking when and where they could.

As for our regiment, we were transported via Kabrit to Abbassia Barracks, the Royal Armoured Corps base outside Cairo. At last we had tanks: reconditioned American Stuarts, called Honeys; upgunned A-13 and A-15 Crusaders; and new heavy American Grants. Even then we didn't see action. We continued to train and to man defensive positions.

Our post was called a “box.” This was a wired and mined-in stronghold in the desert south of Mersa Matruh. Tied in with other boxes, most still under construction, ours formed part of a defensive line protecting a deep band of minefields and anti-tank ditches, the lanes between which were covered by artillery, with infantry companies and anti-tank batteries at selected strategic points, and mobile armoured columns arrayed in reserve. My command was a troop of four A-15 Crusaders, the “recce” or reconnaissance unit of a squadron of three troops, which itself was part of our regiment of four squadrons. We spent our days in dust-churning exercises, exactly as in Palestine, racing from one sector of the box to another, rehearsing our role as mobile reserve. This was preferable to what the infantry was doing, enduring hordes of stinging flies and digging slit trenches in the parched and stony earth.

The only action was the occasional “demonstration” or “reconnaissance in force.” A vacant zone of over two hundred miles still existed between our rear defensive line and the actual front at Gazala. Into this void our squadrons probed and patrolled.

The experience, though of no tactical significance, proved invaluable for us untested crews. We ventured past Sidi Barrani and Buq Buq and round the escarpment at Halfaya, darting as far west as Sidi Omar and Gabr Saleh. The Germans were there too—in reconnaissance units of armoured cars and fast light tanks, many of them our own Honeys and Crusaders captured last autumn over this same ground. We found ourselves at times behind the enemy and, at other times, they behind us. We loosed the odd pot-shot and even got into a few fox chases. And we learnt crucial knacks—where to look to find loot in abandoned vehicles (Bavarian chocolate, bottles of Liebfraumilch, Macedonian cigarettes); how to brew up tea under field conditions using a petrol stove or a hot engine block; and the proper technique for wolfing down a meal of bully burgoo (beaf and biscuits mashed together) without losing half to the omnipresent swarms of flies that appeared from nowhere the instant a tin was opened. But the most powerful impressions acquired during these forays were, first, the monumental scale of mobilisation of both Axis and Allies, the vast numbers of vehicles that were being brought up by rail and transporter and under their own power; and, second, the colossal magnitude of the destruction of last summer and autumn, particularly south of Fort Capuzzo and along the Trigh el Abd highway, where mile upon mile was strewn with hulks and derelicts and the graves of the luckless men who didn't get away.

On 26 May, Rommel attacked the Gazala Line. Finally our regiment was called up. My squadron had been temporarily pulled back to the Mobile Repair Shops at Fuka to have new tracks fitted. The rest of the formation was moving forward from Mersa Matruh. In other words, we were split up.

The Gazala Line was a series of defensive boxes about two hundred miles forward of Mersa Matruh and three hundred from Alexandria. The line ran from the coast south, through a box called Knightsbridge and several others to Bir Hacheim, its southern pivot. This position was crucial because Rommel would inevitably try to run a “right hook” round it. If he succeeded, the whole line would collapse. Bir Hacheim was manned by Free French and Foreign Legionnaires. They would hold to the last man, we were told, to restore in the world's eyes the honour of France.

Back at Fuka, my squadron was moving heaven and earth to get rolling. We still didn't have our tracks. When they came, they had the wrong pins. Each night the BBC reported more furious clashes along the Gazala Line. Rommel's Panzers had broken through; our fellows had pushed them back; the Afrika Korps was trapped within vast minefields; no, they were breaking out. Hour by hour, I and my squadron-mates grew more agitated. We had been training for weeks in the art of loading tanks onto special trucks called transporters. Now, with our tracks finally fitted, only half of these “low-loaders” showed up, the remainder having been assigned in some administrative balls-up to other regiments. The result was that our squadron of sixteen tanks set out for Gazala first on railway cars, then under their own power. It took us three days to reach Sollum, the first twenty-four hours travelling cross-country. By the time we rejoined the coast road, troops and squadrons had become hopelessly separated from one another and from higher command. My troop of four tanks fell to three and then two, as first one suspension failed, then an engine blew. No matter; we picked up two strays and pressed on.

The tactical unit of a British armoured regiment is the squadron. A squadron at full strength is three troops of four tanks each and a fourth headquarters troop of four or five tanks. The squadron leader is usually a captain. A lieutenant commands each troop, taking one tank as his own, with the other two or three commanded by a troop-sergeant and one or two corporals. Above the squadron is the battalion (sometimes called a regiment, this being the British army), which is three squadrons and a headquarters group, fifty-two tanks in all. Attached to each regiment are an “A” and a “B” echelon. These are the supply units, the lorries and trucks that shuttle between the rear depots and the fighting front, bringing up fuel and ammunition, oil, rations and water.

By the time my troop reached Sollum, a town on the coastal plain at the base of the escarpment that rises to the inland plateau, we had lost contact with battalion, brigade and division. Wireless contact was hopeless with the short range of our sets and the massive overload of the nets and their changing frequencies and protocols. The road at Sollum ascends in a six-hundred-foot serpentine to the raised desert above; here luck got two of our tanks rides on transporters, while the other pair were forced to grind uphill in creeper gear, making about a mile per gallon. In the crush I spotted a familiar command pennant and scrambled on foot to the Grant belonging to Major Mike Mallory, our 2/IC (second-in-command), who retained his fitter's truck, two HQ tanks and nothing else. “Hell, Chapman, you're the first familiar face I've seen in forty-eight hours!” Mallory crayoned my map, indicating Sidi Rezegh and Bir el Gubi in the desert ahead as objectives, marking positions with yellow for enemy and red for friendly.

“Of course that was yesterday,” he said. “The colours may have switched round by today.”

From the frontier wire a few miles ahead, Mallory said, we were still eighty miles out of the fight, which was raging round Bir Hacheim, the French-defended southern anchor of the Gazala Line. The Fighting French and the Legionnaires were putting up a heroic defence, but Rommel had sent his 21st and 15th Panzer Divisions, along with the Italian Ariete (“Battering Ram”) armoured division, in a wide, sweeping move to the south. If this succeeded, the French would have no choice but to withdraw. That was all Mallory knew, except that our orders were to find Rommel's Panzers and stop them, if it meant sacrificing every tank we had.

Two days later my troop, following a line of markers, at last stumbled into a formation we recognised. The regiment lay in a dispersed formation, spread over miles, just east of El Adem in the flat, stony desert south of Tobruk. Tanks, armoured cars, infantry lorries and “B” vehicles straggled in continually from the rear, altering the shape of the disposition as they came up and worked themselves in, so that it took most of a day to locate my post, refuel and carve out a few hours to replenish oil and fluids, tighten tracks and snatch a spot of grub and sleep. My troop-sergeant, Hammond, had badly smashed both hands when a hatch crashed on to them; he was evacuated to the rear, his place taken by a corporal named Pease from 5th Royal Tanks whom we had picked up en route along with his A-13 and who was the closest thing to an old sweat we could muster. Squadron leader was Captain Patrick McCaughey, whom I had known at Magdalen. The first dawn our battalion was called to aid 150th Infantry Brigade and 1st Army Tank Brigade, who were under ferocious attack by the Afrika Korps' 90th Light Division in what the Germans called a
Hexenkessel,
a witches' cauldron, of minefields near the Knightsbridge box north of Bir Hacheim. By the time we got there, Rommel's right hook had outflanked the French.

Bir Hacheim fell.

The 15th and 21st Panzer divisions were racing round our flank.

From that hour, the retreat started. It didn't end till Rommel was beating at the gates of Alexandria.

In the cinema, it's always the enemy tanks that advance first. In real armoured warfare, the form was the opposite. First came the enemy scout infantry on sidecar motorcycles. After the bikes you saw armoured cars, the four-and eight-wheeled SdKfz-222s and 234s that served as screens and recce units for the armour and as assault elements against foot troops and soft-skinned transport. Behind these came the motorised infantry, on trucks and in armoured half-tracks. The Afrika Korps' infantry's role was to take on our unarmoured gun crews and transport—anti-tank guns, artillery, echelon vehicles—and to protect their own A/T, the low-slung Pak 38s and the high-profile, long-barrelled 88s. The latter were enormous, with barrels as long as entire tanks; they sat high, ten feet off the desert floor, and were manned by crews of seven. Once you heard the sound of an 88, you never forgot it. The gun had been designed originally as an anti-aircraft weapon. It fired an extremely high-velocity, flat-trajectory shot that could penetrate 150mm of armour at two thousand yards. The thickest steel we had, on heavy Matilda infantry tanks, wasn't even 100mm. An 88 could knock out a Crusader with one shot at a mile and a half. The killing range of the guns on our Honey and Crusader tanks was closer to five hundred yards. The 88s and Paks advanced and dug in, using ridges and folds in the ground for cover. Only then did you see the Panzers.

We new troops had been prepared for this; we had been trained to appreciate such tactics and to recognise them in action. But it took the real thing to make you a believer. Two days after El Adem, in rolling featureless country west of Bir el Gubi, my recce troop of four tanks was out in front of the battalion, mounting the reverse slope of a ridge, to peep over the brow, when our leftmost Crusader—Pease's A-13—spotted two German Mark IIIs withdrawing at speed directly in front of us. A tank's most vulnerable part is its rear end; we couldn't pass up such a target. Up and over we went, hounds after the fox. Before we had dropped a hundred feet down the slope, two of our four tanks had been hit and stopped in their tracks, the crews of both baling out madly (a third, my own, though holed, remained driveable), while tungsten-steel armour-piercing rounds slammed into the stationary hulls. We never even saw the 88s. As we reversed flat-out, leaving one Crusader and a Honey smoking on the sand and my Crusader hobbling for the repair shop, I could see the German commander in the turret of his Mark III, giving us a wave.

For the next five days our troops and squadrons waged what historians would later call the battles of El Adem and Knightsbridge but what to us felt like a succession of isolated and maddeningly inconclusive skirmishes. We are ordered by brigade to take up a position in anticipation of being immediately attacked. We scurry to the trig point and set up. No enemy appear. For hours we squat, broiling in the sun, hull-down along a ridgeline with our sister squadrons on either flank and HQ and “B” vehicles echeloned back for miles to the rear. Suddenly headphones blare with a report of German columns advancing round our flank. We decamp in a mad scramble, only to dash again into vacant waste.

A typical action, Day Four, reconstructed from my diary:

The skipper's voice crackles over the wireless. “Hello, all stations JUMA, JUMA calling. Friends [meaning our forward screen of armoured cars] report enemy tanks, figures four zero, approaching from southwest, at range figures three zero zero zero. Orders: Three [meaning Troop Three, i.e., us], take a look but do not engage until all units come on line. Others conform to my movements. We will advance and hold for orders. Off.”

Forward goes my troop of four, reconstituted from the repair shops. It's noon and the heat haze reduces visibility to a thousand yards. We rattle over one ridgeline, spread out at a three-hundred-yard interval, one tank in the point, two on the wings. Trailing us by five hundred yards, McCaughey brings up the other troops of our squadron; he's in the centre rear. Through my earphones I hear him deploying his other tanks and reporting to regiment on what the armoured cars are seeing up front. We don't know this then, but the enemy are tuned in too. The Germans have Signal Intercept trucks, manned by operators who speak English better than we do and whose detection skills are so keen that they can recognise the voices of our individual commanders down to squadron and even troop level. Already they're reporting our movements and formation numbers to the column of Panzers advancing behind them. Now comes report from battalion that the enemy have stopped.

“JUMA Three, JUMA calling. Keep going. Report what you see. Off to you.”

That's us. In my bucking, heaving turret, pressing the small of my back into the rim of the hatch with one knee braced against the rack that holds my Mills bombs, my spare glasses and the four books I'm reading, and the other wedged against the side of the breech guard of our 2-pounder gun, I wave Corporal Pease in the point tank forward. We're advancing at about five miles an hour. My binoculars are riveted to my eye sockets. The ride is like a small boat at sea. Petrol and machine oil reek. The surface of the turret is so hot from the sun that it burns my elbows through my shirt. Inside the tank, the temperature is well into triple figures.