More blasts ascend from Benina. Sirens at last begin sounding; we can see and hear fire trucks and emergency vehicles speeding between buildings, a number of which are now aflame. We have no choice but to pull away from the T-junction, back down the road we came in on. We can’t go forward and risk getting cut off any more than we already have been, but we also can’t abandon our assignment of covering our comrades’ withdrawal.
By now my truck and Collie’s have escaped the melon fields and are slogging on our mud-caked tyres back on to the solid shoulder. Suddenly Collie’s truck nose-dives to the right and stops. I halt too. I hear cursing. Somehow Collie has run over barbed wire; wreaths of the stuff have coiled round his front axle and right front tyre, which has been punctured in heaven knows how many places. Jenkins bangs through kit boxes, seeking the wire cutters. I hurry over. Collie radiates his usual calm.
“All right, lads, hang on to your water. I’ll dismount the twins,” he says, meaning the Vickers K machine guns, “and find a spot on the road to set up.” He pats the side of the truck. “Jenkins and Marks, don’t get your knickers in a twist. There’s no enemy in sight. Shut up and get the bloody tyre off.”
I ask Collie how long till he can move.
“Ten minutes.”
I help him dismount the Vickers. We’re both keenly aware of how tight our spot is. We must set up and man this position, but for how long? We’ve already witnessed an M-13 tank and the two Mark IIIs passing this post, heading south—in other words, between us and our getaway route. Worse, as we’ve noted via our adventure in the melon patch, there must be scores of side tracks through and round the cultivation, known to the enemy but not to us—perimeter and airfield access roads, fire and rescue lanes, not to mention the farm tracks that the Arabs use to get their donkey carts in and out of the fields. The infantrymen we bumped into will report our incursion soon, if they haven’t already. How long till every track out of here is cut off?
In war, nothing ever works by the timetable you think it will. “I’m going forwards,” I tell Collie. “We’ve got to know what’s up front.” I leave him with the Vickers protecting the road and his truck. Punch, Oliphant, Miller and I press westward towards the airfield.
Rain continues sheeting. I’m rolling in second gear, lights out. Suddenly:
A camel.
“Jesus!”
The beast looms out of nowhere, beam-on and big as a barn. I stand on the brakes. Punch, on his feet at the Browning, goes sailing over my shoulder, across the aero-screens, and lands with a crash on the bonnet. The momentum of the braking truck somehow keeps the surface beneath him. Two more camels appear. It’s a string. None even looks up. The truck by now is into a slow-motion 180, all four tyres locked up and sliding on the rain-slick road. Punch is slung sideways on to the sand of the shoulder. Oliphant and Miller in the truckbed are hanging on for dear life. In a spume of spray the truck stops tail-on to the camels, who still haven’t reacted in the slightest. Two Arabs materialise, tapping the animals’ rumps with their sticks. In moments the caravan has melted back into the night. Miller dashes to Punch. Miraculously he’s not hurt and the truck is OK.
Now we’re completely frazzled. Punch is cursing my driving, Miller and Oliphant are cursing the camels, we’re all cursing the Arabs. In the mêlée of braking, one of our spare wheels and all of our bedding, plus half our water and rations, have spilled over the rails onto the tarmac. As we’re scrambling to fling it back aboard, Punch whistles:
“Headlights!”
We can see them coming from the north axis of the T. We heave our gear into the truckbed, but there’s no time to get it all.
“Could be Nick.”
“Could be Collie.”
“Could be half the German army.”
It’s the last. We buck off the road into the mush beside the cultivation. Before the truck gets a hundred yards, two four-wheeled armoured cars slew up on to the site we’ve just vacated. They brake, headlights blazing, spotting our debris in the road. We’re in the salt-bush, big as life, with no cover except the darkness. I hear orders shouted in German.
In front of me the glass aero-screen disintegrates. Something hot and close passes under my seat. The Germans are firing into the darkness. Punch replies with the Browning. I heave the wheel over and floor the accelerator. We’re in mud. The wheels spin. The truck is fleeing at the speed of a tortoise. I’m shouting to Punch to cease fire; the flash of his muzzle is giving our pursuers a target. He shuts down. We slide and slither for what feels like two minutes but is probably only fifteen seconds. The Germans have lost us in the dark; they’re simply raking the fields with fire. We hear the chatter of at least one light gun and the heavier banging of a 7.92.
The armoured cars will be splitting up, each taking one direction to head us off. And they’ll be radioing for help. We have to get round them and back to the road. But where is it? I’m certain I’m running parallel, but I have no idea how far I’ve gone. At any moment I’m expecting the truck to plunge into an unseen ditch. I spot a donkey track at right angles. Does it lead to the road? I can feel the rain on my face mixing with the blood where the glass has hit. The rounds that passed underneath the seats have torn up the condenser. Boiling water is spraying over the bonnet on to my right arm and leg. I hit the donkey track and bury the accelerator. With a mad lurch the truck bucks over a runoff channel and on to an unpaved road. Where the hell are we now?
I turn hard right, lights out, and crash broadside into a 44-gallon oil drum, upright in the middle of the road. It’s a roadblock. The truck rebounds off this first barricade (which is no doubt filled with sand) and ploughs headlong into another. I’m flung into the steering column. The vehicle stops dead. The wind has been knocked out of me by the collision. I’m aware that we’re being fired upon from very close. The bonnet of the truck is levitating in a way that defies physics. I glimpse a guard shed at the side of the road. Yellow tracer rounds are ricocheting off the surface. I’ve got the accelerator on the floor. The truck crawls. The world has become a silent movie. A searing gale passes beneath me; I feel the floorboard disintegrate. In the left-hand seat, Miller has been flung face-first into the dashboard. “I’m shot!” he cries. I turn towards him. The right side of his shoulder, arm, and ribcage has been ripped open so wide I can see the bone-ends and viscera; he drops hard left, out of the cab, so fast that when I lunge to catch him with my left hand, I grab only his belt. I haul him back. He’s unconscious and hangs, dead weight. I jam him into the seat, shouting at him to hold on though I know he can’t hear me.
I’m sensing rather than seeing a second vehicle approaching from the north. The machine skids up and stops, broadside across the road.
It’s Collie.
I never see who is firing on us or what happens to them. I hear the ungodly shriek of Collie’s Vickers Ks and the bang-bang of what must be Marks on the Browning. I’m still hanging on to Miller with my left hand.
Punch and Oliphant appear; they grab Miller. I turn back to the guard shed. Whoever was firing from there has vanished. This is cold comfort, as the racket and fireworks will bring every Axis trooper in the neighbourhood. I smell petrol and see flames behind me on the truckbed. Punch hauls Miller aboard Collie’s truck. So much for covering Nick’s withdrawal. There’s only one option now and that’s to get the hell out.
Miraculously my truck is still functioning. Punch and Oliphant climb on. They’re kicking flaming petrol tins over the tailboard. I get the engine started; we follow Collie back to the main road.
Trouble, soldiers say, never comes in ones. Now: more headlights. Two fresh sets, speeding towards us from the south. Where are the armoured cars? We never find out. What’s clear is there’s no way round the approaching lights. They block our escape.
Collie’s truck and mine brake in the middle of the road. Steam is pouring from beneath my shot-to-ribbons bonnet; smoke billows from under the cab; I’ve lost first but second and third seem to work. Jenkins is shouting that his
Browning is tits-up. My truck is clearly on its last legs. Should I ditch it? I’m debating piling all eight of us aboard Collie’s. But where can we run?
Our only chance is our guns.
The enemy headlights continue closing. They’re a thousand yards out but already their high-beams are flickering across the tarmac where we squat.
We wrestle both trucks off the road. “Not far!” I’m shouting. If we bog down, we’re sitting ducks. There’s no cover. We slog at right angles away from the road, far enough to get clear of the approaching headlights but not so far that we can’t dash back on to the road after they pass.
If they pass.
We halt, side by side, tails-on to the road. Every man dismounts and piles brush for cover.
Here come the headlights. We can hear the enemy engines now. Collie climbs back on the Vickers twins; Jenkins assists with the drums. Punch is on one Browning on my truck, Oliphant on the other. Marks seats a magazine in his Thompson. “Hold fire till my order,” I say.
We can see the enemy clearly now.
Two trucks.
Fiat 3-tonners, the kind used to carry infantry.
The vehicles approach at twenty miles per hour, one a hundred feet behind the other. I can see a driver and an officer in the lead truck. Windscreen wipers beat. The officer still hasn’t seen us. He’s standing on the running board, hanging on to the outboard mirror strut. I see him point ahead.
The lead truck slows.
The second follows suit.
The officer sees us. He swings off the step on to the tarmac, gesturing to both trucks to stop. They do. The officer is very young and wears a Bersaglieri cap. He is pointing to us and shouting something in Italian.
What happens next takes no more than twenty seconds.
The Fiats are stake-beds with brown canvas covers keeping the rain off the soldiers in the back. The men ride shoulder-to-shoulder on wooden benches, one bench along each rail, facing inward. To dismount from the vehicles, the soldiers must stand and file to the back, drop the tailboard and leap down to the road. As they begin doing this, I shout “Fire!”
Collie opens up with the Vickers Ks. Punch and Oliphant join in on the Brownings, Marks on his tommy gun. I’m firing my own Thompson, which I have grabbed in a hurry from its cradle on the cab wall.
The Italians spill from the rear of the trucks, one and two at a time, like children leaping down from a school bus. The officer stands in the road. He has only a pistol. He is firing at us as Collie’s Vickers puts a burst dead-centre into his chest. A Vickers K has twin barrels. Its rate of fire is nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute. The gun is designed to be mounted on fighter aircraft. Its intended targets are other airplanes, not unarmoured human flesh. What it does to the young Italian officer I will not describe, except to say that what had been solid in one instant is liquid the next.
The Brownings in Punch and Oliphant’s hands are .303 machine guns designed for use against infantry. Their rate of fire is eight hundred rounds per minute. In the Great War, tripod-mounted Brownings routinely mowed down companies of foot troops at ranges beyond five hundred yards. We, this night, are firing at no more than seventy-five feet. That is like saying point-blank.
Within seconds the first 3-tonner has disintegrated. The Vickers shreds its cab; the tyres rip and blow; the chassis crashes dead-weight on to the rims. Petrol spilling from the riddled tanks is ignited by our tracers; the Fiat goes up in a whoosh of orange flame. The second truck is reversing as fast as it can, back down the road. I am firing at it with my Thompson. I see the windscreen shatter. The vehicle lurches out of control, turns side-on and stops. Now the men tumble forth. Half the troopers in the first truck and a portion from the second have leapt to the road. Our machine guns cut them down, then elevate and traverse to take the others still in the trucks. In moments I have run through a fifty-round drum magazine. Punch’s and Oliphant’s belt-fed guns keep blazing. We are so close to the Italians that I can see the moustaches on their upper lips and the wedding rings on their fingers.
The volume of fire from the Vickers and the Brownings is so prodigious that it creates its own wind. The tarpaulins on the trucks blow and howl, then burst into flame. The Italians spill from the trucks in animal terror. Few have their weapons; none tries to turn and fire. Instead they dive for cover, seeking to burrow under the trucks or to use the frames and wheels as shelter. Our tracers and ball rounds pour into them. I can hear Punch’s Browning banging, inches from my ear. Smoke seethes from its barrel. Our guns do not strip the foe of life with surgical strokes. They take them in a holocaust. The spectacle is not like the cinema, in which after a massacre the earth lies littered with forms clearly recognisable as human beings, possessed of heads and arms and legs. When we are done, the enemy are offal. I thank heaven that I glimpse this horror only by the light of the burning trucks and the tracers, and only for the instant I let myself look. One purpose is paramount in my mind. We must kill or incapacitate every man on the trucks. To permit even one to survive, in the darkness from which he can snipe or loose a machine-gun burst at my men, is unthinkable. These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my companions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.
I let it go on till it seems nothing can remain alive. “Cease fire!”
I dash on foot to the shoulder of the road, peering north to a third, new set of headlights speeding towards us. I am shouting to Collie to get ready to run; we’ll blow up my truck and take everybody aboard his. Suddenly the oncoming lights stop. A yellow Verey flare shoots skywards, followed by a red.
“It’s Nick!”
In thirty seconds Wilder’s patrol has reached us. They have two trucks of their own and an Italian Lancia. Without an order, Punch and Oliphant begin slinging our kit aboard. They pile the Brownings over the rails, then the ammo boxes, water tins and jerry cans of petrol. Grainger sluices our own truckbed and tosses a match. Nick stares at the carnage along the roadside. “Jesus,” he says, “what a mess.”
I climb aboard the Lancia with the din of the massacre still booming in my ears. My last glimpse, as our trucks pull out, is of Punch dashing back to the now-blazing Te Aroha IV to grab our bedding and the jug of rum from its nest behind the tailboard.
23
WE REACH THE rally point at Saunnu to find it shot up and sodden under a downpour. The Benina raid has overturned the hornets’ nest. German and Italian patrols cover all escape routes south and east; scout planes scour the flats and every patch of cover. Nick Wilder commands now and I’m glad of it.
For two days and nights we run. Rain makes the trucks hard to see from the air, but the desert surface is mush and our tyres leave great livid scars. From these the enemy reckons our direction of flight; they send Macchis and ME-110s ahead. That’s how they find the rally point.
Miller is dead. We’ve been unable to do anything for him; he has lost too much blood. Our lie-up the first night is tucked into the bank of a wide, stony wadi. We have learnt to site camps beneath gentle slopes, so we can get clear in a hurry if we have to. The post-adrenalin letdown has enervated us badly. We brew up by the heat of the engine block and knock back more rum than we ought. We wrap Miller’s body in his greatcoat and belt it into a sand-channel which we lay flat on the truckbed of the Lancia. Miller had been chess champion of his Yorkshire outfit, the Green Howards; we tuck his miniature board and pieces under his shirt. We have not had a moment even to empty his pockets for his wife and children.
Nick calls for my damage report, which I can give in ten seconds: medical orderly dead, wireless vehicle destroyed. On the surviving truck: Browning disabled; cracked sump, two bent tie-rods, petrol for a hundred miles. Men either beat up, shot up, sick or all three. Nick’s T1 is in the same shape, except their wireless is still functioning. Like us, they have no working
navigation.
We reach the burnt-out RV at nightfall of the second day. Nick studies the site through binoculars, then orders us to pull back five miles to the secondary rendezvous designated before the patrols set out for Benina. Wrecks are sobering sights. Even in the fading light we can make out the hulks of our comrades’ vehicles—Doc Lawson’s, the fitters’, Nick’s second wireless truck—belly-down on bare rims with their tyres incinerated under them. The exposed engines are charred black, rubber vaporised, seats melted down to springs and frames. We can see the tracks where the Afrika Korps armoured cars came in, pasted our fellows, then rolled out. Sandbanks have been torn by the treads of half-tracks, the kind the Germans use to ferry motorised infantry. Farther back we can see the lanes carved by the wide desert tyres of the 3-tonners on which they carry ammo, rations and petrol. “They’re not out here on a picnic,” says Nick.
This time they mean to find us.
After dark, he takes two men and creeps in to inspect the RV. Returning, he reports three graves, one enemy and two of ours—Daventry and Porter, both New Zealanders, neither of whom I know.
“They buried them cleanly, give the Huns that.” Nick has taken the men’s ID discs, which the Germans have left on mounds rimmed with stones. He’ll bring them home if he can. The enemy have marked two of our burnt-up trucks with paint:
288 MENTON
“Just to let us know who nailed us,” says Nick. “It’s their unit, whatever the hell the name means.”
Exhausted as both patrols are, we can’t linger. We’d be safer splitting up—one group might reach safety and send aid to the other—but with only one wireless we have to stick together. Should we bury Miller here, beside the others? There’s no time. We divide the remaining petrol and grub among the four vehicles, sharing rum and cigs, tea and chocolate, in case one or two get shot up or mired. “Luck,” says Nick. We’re off.
All night we search for a way across the mudflats. Here at the southern end of the Jebel, the wadis all drain to the desert, forming the intermittent lakes called balats. The lakes are three feet deep in places, inches in others. Their bottoms are like mucilage. The patrols feel their way in the dark upon the high ground of natural causeways and grope along archipelagos elevated a few inches above the slough. Again and again one truck gets bogged down, leaving the others to tow it clear. Clutches scorch and shudder. The labour proves an ordeal, as tyres become gummed with heavy, water-freighted mud, which can only be cleared by back-breaking spadework. The toil is exhausting; in the end we can’t get clear of the balats. Dawn finds all four trucks slogging dejectedly back the way they came, west towards the foothills, while double lookouts scan the sky for the planes we know are coming.