On the other hand, Rommel could be here. This could be it. To stumble on to such luck and do nothing…
The “A” set sits under a steel shell behind the driver’s seat in my patrol commander’s truck. Oliphant has already dug out the headset and chest mike. He switches the radio on. I take the gear and kneel beside the set, balancing myself between a spare wheel and a stack of ammunition cases. I lift the backing plate on the radio and reach my hand in to feel the vacuum tubes; when they’re warm, the set will be ready. I pull the phones over my peaked cap. What I’m about to do is potentially the most momentous act of my life.
Forget codes and protocol. I’m going up in the clear.
“Hello Jake, Chap calling. Objective in sight. I say again: I’m looking at what we came for. Off to you.”
The headset fills with static. Nothing. I realise I have not thought beyond the sending of this signal. I have no clue what to do next except continue to report. I repeat:
“Hello, Jake and Nick, Chap calling. Objective in sight. Out.”
No answer. I’m half-relieved. How many more times can I transmit before some German intercept truck picks us up? I’m just depressing the mike button when Punch raps me hard. Ahead on the sand road, a Fiat 3-tonner is ploughing straight at us, with more trucks behind.
“Smile and wave.”
The Italians pass, singing. Ammo vehicles. Two more roll by in a storm of alkali. My headphones come alive:
“Hello, Chap, Jake answering. I see you. Shut up and get in a hole. I say again: Shut down and find a hole. Off to you.”
The last Fiat buffets past, swamping our cab in dust. I pull the headset off and turn to Punch and Oliphant. “Jake’s here.”
They react as electrified as I.
“Keep going.” I sign to Grainger on the wireless truck to follow.
I’m expecting the whole camp to erupt into action. Surely our signals have been overheard; in seconds we will come under fire. But nothing happens. We continue rumbling across the flat. Oliphant scribbles
JAKE
on a pad and holds it up for Grainger, Marks and Durrance in the wireless truck. They sign back that they understand. My skull is revving. Have I done the right thing? Where’s Jake? What’s the form? The track our trucks are on leads past some kind of mobile repair shop. A safe spot. No infantry. Punch sees it and puts us on a beeline.
We buck past a pair of parked transporters. Their drivers smoke in the shade beside the first cab. I swing my glasses back towards the scarp. Tank crews are packing up. Men clamber up over the kit rails of their vehicles; plumes of diesel smoke belch from exhausts.
Has my signal been intercepted? Is this the cause of the pack-up? It can’t be. No massed formation can react that fast. What should we do? If Jake is here, Nick must be too, and Mayne’s SAS. Have they signalled the RAF? Will Mayne and Jake attack on their own?
All round us, enemy outfits are loading up, engines cranking. The transporter drivers peer in our direction. Not suspiciously; more like they’re confused by the mobilisation and want to check with us, their comrades, to see if we know what’s going on. One of them starts towards us on foot. I turn to Oliphant on the Vickers guns.
“I see him,” he says.
The German keeps coming. Sixty yards out.
“Punch, get us rolling.” I sign to Grainger to do the same. At my shoulder, Oliphant pulls both cocking levers. The enemy driver keeps approaching.
“Chap,” says Oliphant, “let me take him now.”
“No.”
The wireless truck fires up. Punch stalls. “Grainger, get moving!” The driver sees our No. 2 start up; he lengthens stride to head it off. Punch wrestles with the choke. I can smell the carb flood. The German is within fifty feet now. He stops.
“He’s on to us,” says Oliphant.
The driver squints hard in our direction.
Suddenly he turns and bolts. I see the back of his shirt and the soles of his boots. At that moment, the earth erupts.
A blizzard of destruction rolls directly over the man. For an instant I think it’s Oliphant on the Vickers. Then the shock wave hits. Shadows streak above us; a blast like a bomb nearly bowls me out of the truck.
Two RAF fighter planes boom overhead at two hundred miles an hour, strafing everything in their path. Cannon fire rips the sand. Two stripes fifty feet wide roar forward at impossible speed.
“Jesus Christ!” cries Punch.
The Hurricanes thunder away. The concussion of their engines deafens us. We have not even heard them coming.
Out on the sand the transporter driver, who has been knocked prone, scrambles to his feet and sprints for all he’s worth. Somehow the cannon fire has missed him. As I turn to check on myself and my men, two more Hurricanes drop out of nowhere and scream down the axis of the valley, machine-gunning the enemy tanks and trucks at the base of the ridge. Where the planes’ fire strikes, the earth explodes in a storm of rock and dust. The fighters blast over the scarp at the height of a clothes line.
Punch is cursing our stalled engine. The second pair of Hurricanes has boomed overhead so fast the eye can’t catch up with them. In the killing zone, German trucks and transports are shredding like toys in a gale. The ground still shakes beneath us.
Impulse makes me look at my wristwatch. To this day I can see that face, a Wittnauer Elysian with squarish numerals and radium arms that I bought on the Rue Fouad el Awal in Cairo after bartering my grandfather’s Breitling for fuel on the retreat to El Alamein. In an instant I understand everything.
“This is it!”
The attack. It’s happening now. This is why Jake has ordered us to find a hole and get in it.
The planes scream over the scarp and roar skyward into a steep, banking climb. It takes moments before our skulls stop ringing, so overwhelmed are we by the suddenness of the aircraft’s appearance and by the impact of their speed and power. In moments the second pair of Hurricanes have climbed a thousand feet and are banking into the turn that will bring them back again over the target. We can see the trails of their exhaust hanging in the air. On the summit of the scarp a surprisingly small number of enemy vehicles are blazing. Men are racing in all directions.
We’re moving too. Punch has got our truck started. I’m peering through glasses at the Mammoth. Nothing has touched it. It hasn’t moved. I can see armed men rallying to it and others, without weapons, exiting its side and rear doors. They do so in neither panic nor urgency but looking a bit befuddled, as if they thought something had happened but weren’t sure exactly what it was.
“Go for the target!”
We’re picking up speed now, straight down the axis of the valley. I have climbed back into the truckbed and am wrestling the tarpaulin off the Browning. Oliphant is already blazing away with the Vickers. The twin barrels fire so fast, nine hundred and fifty rounds per minute, that they burn through a ninety-six-round drum in seconds, howling with a piercing, blood-freezing squeal. The Mammoth perches a thousand yards away and a hundred feet up the scarp. We’re crossing directly in front of it. Dead ahead of us squats the repair bay. Fitters are streaming out into daylight. Some dash towards slit trenches, others congregate nonchalantly as if they’re about to ask their comrades for a smoke. As we accelerate to go round the repair tent, a 10-tonner pulls out broadside, inadvertently blocking our route. Oliphant swivels the Vickers. The truck lights up with hits. I have never seen a motor vehicle get out of the way so fast.
We’re past the repair shops now. I can feel Punch engage third gear. The truck bucks like a wild beast. We still haven’t seen Jake, Nick or Major Mayne. The Germans have seen us though. Along both sides of the track, enemy troopers dash to positions. Oliphant shreds one fellow before a wall of sandbags. I’m shouting to him to put his fire on the Mammoth. I look behind. A truck chases us. I’m swinging the Browning round to engage it, when I realise it’s Collie.
He’s standing on the bed of Guns, hanging on to the mount of the 20mm Breda gun and pointing in fr
ustration at the summit of the scarp. The heavy Breda faces rearward and can’t be rotated forward past 90 degrees. Standage is braced beside Collie, draped in belts of ammunition. Midge is driving; Hornsby mans the fore-mounted Browning. I can’t see the jeep with Conyngham and Holden anywhere. Collie’s truck speeds ahead, apparently seeking some spot where it can pull up with its rear end facing the summit and cut loose for at least a few moments. We barrel past two Afrika Korps infantrymen carrying spades, no doubt returning from heeding nature’s call. They gape like tourists. Oliphant holds his fire, though they’re sitting ducks.
Collie’s truck turns off the track, angling towards the scarp. We veer with him. Adrenalin floods through me. I look in Oliphant’s eyes and see the same. He’s changing drums; both barrels of his Vickers pour smoke as if they were on fire. We bounce off the main trace at forty miles an hour.
On the summit of the scarp, two storms of dust are racing towards the Mammoth. Tracer fire streaks from both. This can only be Jake and Nick or Mayne’s SAS. It’s too far to see and impossible to use field glasses at this jarring, molar-rattling clip, but the vehicles, whoever they are, are racing along the crest of the scarp, throwing up great plumes of dust and chalk. Down on the flat, our column of three produces its own cyclone. Impossible as it sounds, no one has fired at us. We’re moving so fast we’re outrunning the alarm.
Something makes me look up. What I see stops my heart. Two Hurricanes are diving straight at us. I can see their propellers like giant windmills and the flashes of the cannons on the leading edges of their wings. They’re firing at us. The dust we’re raising must have drawn the pilots’ eyes. This realisation happens in a fraction of a second. Then the rounds strike. I have never heard anything, including solid shot from Mark IV Panzers, to match the violence of those cannon shells as they hit and explode in front, on both sides and behind us. The sound is like the end of the world. The Hurricanes roar overhead so low that their wingtips seem to scrape the sand.
“We’re your own blokes!” Punch is howling at them, appending a raft of obscenities. Oliphant shouts something I can’t hear and points at the planes as they bank away and begin to climb. I understand. He means they’ll be coming back.
On the crest of the scarp, though we will only learn this later, the same sort of chaos has played out. The dust we saw was indeed Jake and Nick and Major Mayne. The two other Hurricane pilots must have seen it too. Have they mistaken it for the red signal smoke, meant to mark the target? Or are these pilots as adrenalinaddled as we are and blasting away at the first thing that moves?
I can’t see Grainger’s truck anymore. Collie races ahead. Every gun in the camp, it seems, is firing at the planes. Suddenly we’re among an infantry encampment. Enemy soldiers are diving out of our path. Punch flattens a tent kitchen. Our right mud-guard blasts through the flue and tank of a camp stove; the blazing fuel explodes in all directions, painting us as we speed past. We’re on fire. I’m on the truckbed, wrestling the Browning as flaming liquid lacquers a stack of wooden ammunition cases and coats two boxes of Mills bombs. The hair on my arms incinerates; my beard catches. I grab a tarpaulin and beat myself like a madman, then plunge on top of the ammo boxes, trying to smother the blaze. Now the tarp itself catches fire. Oliphant’s focus is on finding the Mammoth, whose camouflage netting is a lot more effective from this low angle; he has no idea that our truck is about to go up like a Roman candle. We’re directly below the scarp now, four hundred yards out.
“Where is that bastard?” Oliphant curses in frustration.
Now the Mark IIIs at the base of the ridge spot us. Flashes blaze from their 7.92s. As I beat at the flames on the ammunition cases, splinters of wood tear into my right cheek and ear—slivers from the truck’s flank being shredded by machine-gun fire. If I had stayed standing, I’d have been cut in half.
Oliphant continues cursing. Blown grit has fouled one of his drum magazines; he can’t get it seated on the gun. He still doesn’t know the truck’s on fire. By now I’ve hurled the burning tarp over-board. I can’t get the ammo cases doused so I’m heaving them out, on fire. A wooden case of .303 ball ammunition weighs over fifty pounds. I’m flinging them out as if they were crumpets. Meanwhile the truck is weaving so violently that I fear Punch has been hit at the wheel. I dive over the forewall into the cab. Punch has the accelerator to the floor. “I’m fine!” he shouts.
Now the planes come back.
One pair takes the scarp, the other the flat. I see Collie’s truck, a hundred yards ahead and angling diagonally away from the summit, so its rear-facing Breda gun can get off at least a few rounds where they’ll do some damage. Collie fires the gun, Standage feeds the oversize belt; Midge and Hornsby are up front. The Hurricanes dive on us and on them.
In slow motion I see a double stitching of cannon fire rip the sand in front of Collie. The right-hand stitch rolls over the long axis of his truck. The vehicle is a rolling bomb, packed with explosives. I see the rear half disintegrate. Midge at the wheel is attempting a hard right to evade the cannon fire. As the truck’s hind end explodes, the frame and forechassis cartwheel into a series of high, bounding flips. I see the undercarriage ten feet in the air, then the engine, somersaulting over. The Breda gun drops dead-weight, seven hundred pounds, on to Standage. The Hurricanes pass with a shock wave that nearly floors us.
Later, Nick will tell of the parallel bedlam taking place on the summit. Before the first strafing run, one of the SAS jeeps has succeeded in getting close enough to the Mammoth to mark it with red smoke as planned. But somehow the Hurricanes don’t see this. Their first pass misses everything. At the same time the Mammoth’s defenders, reckoning the purpose of the smoke, cleverly snatch up smoke grenades of their own and begin marking every vehicle and position within two hundred yards.
The Mammoth, like all staff command centres, is protected by its own combat team; these troops have now taken up defensive positions and are plastering our fellows’ vehicles with machine-gun fire. Neither Jake nor Nick sees what happens to the first SAS teams in the assault, but it can be nothing but death or capture. Now come the Hurricanes on their second pass. By this time the trucks and jeeps of Jake, Nick and Major Mayne have been located by the enemy and are being engaged in an all-out firefight. The Hurricanes’ third pass attacks this. Nick tells us later that he is firing his Thompson into a lane of Axis staff vehicles, sited shrewdly away from the Mammoth and pointing in the opposite direction, when he hears the planes dropping on to him. In an instant the bonnet of his truck vaporises, along with both front tyres, radiator and half the engine. Motor oil scalds his face, blinding him. The Chev nose-dives into the sand. Nick is certain that his number is up. But the truck simply stops, settles upright, and he and his driver and gunner dismount, “like stepping out of a taxi in Grosvenor Square.” The Hurricanes have shot up everything on the summit except the Mammoth. “I can see the bloody thing,” says Nick later, “fat as Aunt Fanny’s arse and not a scratch on it.” One of Mayne’s jeeps picks up Nick and his men. In the end they flee down the reverse slope of the scarp, chased by the machine guns and cannons of enemy armoured cars.
Down on the flat, Punch has got our truck flat-out, racing for the wreck of Collie’s. We can see Collie, charred black but on his feet, along with Standage, whose left leg hangs limp. Collie supports him. We can’t find Midge or Hornsby. As our truck barrels towards Collie and Standage, another vehicle appears on our right—an Afrika Korps van, racing towards the wreck at top speed. I shout to Oliphant to take the German out. The camp is pandemonium, with men and trucks criss-crossing madly and smoke and dust everywhere. Oliphant swings the Vickers. Then I see: the enemy van is an ambulance! The Germans obviously think the shot-up truck is one of theirs. Why wouldn’t they, when it’s just been strafed by two British Hurricanes? Oliphant sees the red cross and holds fire. Only one thought animates us—to get to our comrades first and haul them out of there.
Punch ploughs to a stop alongside Collie and Standage. Oliphant an
d I dash to them on foot. The ambulance men are racing up as well—two young stretcher bearers, barely more than boys, and an officer in shorts and peaked cap who looks as if he might be a doctor. Now we spot Midge and Hornsby. Midge’s jaw has been shot away; his shorts and shirt have been burned to scratch; he is naked, his chest, arms and legs charred black. He rises from the spot where he had been flung. His eyes look clear. Hornsby lies face-down in the sand. Midge is trying to speak. Blood rises in bubbles from where his mouth used to be. I feel as if I’m in hell. The magnitude of the horror is more than one’s senses can bear. At the same time a part of me remains lucid. That part remembers the Hurricanes. In moments they will be back to rake the earth with another fusillade. Oliphant and I get to Midge just as the doctor scampers up. He takes our comrade under one arm. “Hilf dem Anderen!” he shouts. Help the other one!
More soldiers are racing up from other units. They still don’t realise we’re the enemy. Collie gets Standage aboard our truck. Punch hauls him up. Oliphant and I drop beside Hornsby. When we turn him over, he looks OK. Maybe the crash has just knocked him cold. Then we see the pool forming at the base of his skull. The stretcher bearers have got Midge now. I’m thinking, How can we get him away? The ambulance driver has backed round to take our men aboard. A medic hauls the rear doors wide; we can see the hangers for litters inside. The doctor comes up before me. I see his face change. For a moment he freezes. Then, in perfect English:
“Save yourselves!” He indicates Hornsby. “Leave your wounded with me!”
I glance to Oliphant, then to Punch and Collie.
“Both will die if you move them,” says the medical officer.
I wish I could say that I got the man’s name or at least shook his hand. But I couldn’t make myself say or do anything, only glance in agony at Midge and Hornsby, then bolt like hell for the truck.