0815. ME-110s overhead. Two with one spotter. We’re lying up under camo nets in a notch of an escarpment. The MEs haven’t spotted us yet. Their technique is to target one notch at a time and blast it top to bottom with cannon fire.
0900. MEs wing off, out of ammo. Spotter has found us, though, stays with us, just out of MG range.
1145. Well, that was a hot hour and a half. MEs back, re-armed, wicked twin-engined monsters spitting fire from cannons and machine guns in the aircraft noses. Our lie-up is so far down the scarp, the planes can’t have a real go or they’ll crash into the cliff. It’s a close thing, though, and we’re pretty rattled.
By noon the Messerschmitts have flown off for the second time, returning to base to rearm and refuel. But now armoured cars have found us, probably the same pursuit force that beat up the rally point. No choice but to run. The worst of it is these steady attacks leave us no interval to set up the Wyndom and signal HQ. Other friendly patrols may be within hailing distance. Tinker and Popski certainly. Nick says he’s had signals informing him that at least two others, Lazarus’ S1 and Spicer’s Y1, may be within sixty miles, not to mention Major Mayne and the SAS, from or about whom we’ve heard nothing since Benina. Compounding the frustration: We don’t know how far west the main British advance has pushed. That’s where we want to go. Safety may be as close as a hundred miles, which we can reach, or as far as three hundred, which we can’t.
Clearly our pursuers know this. They come at us from the east, cutting off all escape in that direction. Do they know we’re the outfit that went after Rommel? Have they been sent after us specifically? “There’s an Iron Cross waiting,” Nick says, “for any Hun lieutenant who brings in our scalps.”
My watch reads 1230 as our four trucks lurch from their hiding holes and churn north along the base of the escarpment. Pursuing us are at least two armoured cars, a 4-wheeler and an eight, which we’ve glimpsed bulldozing through the brush, and one or more half-tracks carrying infantry. Our Chevs and even the Lancia could outrun the gang if they were in good repair, but with burnt clutches, patched sumps and punctured radiators, the pursuit bangs and jounces like a Keystone Kops farce. Top speed never gets above ten miles an hour over salt-bush-thick sand and shingle, whose surface is cut every hundred feet by ditches and runnels, some capacious enough to swallow a jeep, others only a foot deep and two across. These are the worst. Into them the front axles plunge with an impact that beats the frame as if on an anvil and sends men and kit flying. Rain continues; visibility is down to fifty feet. We can’t see the Germans and they can’t see us. The armoured cars’ cannons are useless in this gloom, so they simply rake the unseen ground ahead of them with bursts from their 7.92s. We can see tracers rebounding off the scree and hear the bullet-strikes above us on the scarp. With dread, we’re counting the minutes till the 110s come back. “Maybe the buggers’ll stop for lunch,” Punch shouts across at me as the Lancia bucks over the obstacle-course landscape with every bolt and rivet crying. The chase bumps along, devoid of excitement or even urgency. It just feels stupid. A futile, moronic way to die. About an hour along, our trucks gain enough of a lead for Nick to signal halt and set us up in an ambush position behind the shoulder of a ridge. At fifteen hundred yards, Collie’s Vickers and two of Nick’s Brownings get good bursts on to the 4-wheeler, which we catch in the open with both hatches up and its commander’s and driver’s heads high. Through the Dienstglas binos I can see the tracers spraying the armoured car like a garden hose; the German veers, plunges into a shallow wadi and stops with a bang. “Got him!” cries Punch.
“Stay on him,” Nick shouts, “till you knock him out.” For the first time I feel real rage towards the foe. I’m tired of being chased by these bastards. Guns from both our trucks pour fire on to the armoured car. But in a few seconds both hatches button up. The German grinds away laterally, using the wash as cover. Coming our way.
“Slowed him anyway,” says Collie.
We run for another hour, taking intermittent fire from the 4-wheeler (the eight appears to have fallen behind) and from two half-tracks, which we glimpse at intervals among the scrub, until a cracking Old Testament cloudburst saves us.
By dark we’re fifteen miles farther on. The storm passes; the heavens clear. The night turns hard cold. We’ve been running all day north and west, 180 degrees from the direction we want. Night finds us making a hasty camp in a wadi at the base of the escarpment, fifty miles farther from safety than we were at dawn, with less than sixty miles of fuel remaining.
Worse, when Nick’s operator sets up the aerial, the atmospherics are so bad he can’t raise a peep. Collie, Punch and I scout out a high spot where we hope the next flood won’t reach; we slip Miller’s body under, digging as silently as if with teaspoons, and set up a cairn with a cross of brushwood. We stand bare-headed over the Yorkshireman. We’ve got one beer, which at first we think to bury with him, then change our minds and share it out amongst ourselves. “He’d have given us hell,” says Punch, “if we’d wasted a good pint.”
Back in camp a rising mist has turned the night black and cold. “I’m getting bloody tired of this,” I tell Nick as our patrols carve out a lie-up and try to get a brew on. It’s clear to everyone that we can’t keep on like this. “What now?” I ask.
Nick squints up the thirty-storey face ascending above us. “I don’t know what’s on top of this bastard,” he says. “But we either get up this scarp tonight or the Jerries’ll finish us in the morning.”
24
THE ESCARPMENT LOOMS over our heads three hundred feet—not much compared with the mighty coastal cliffs at Sollum and Halfaya, but still damned daunting in the dark with four trucks at the breaking point and men pressed beyond exhaustion. Worse is the cold and wet. The face of the escarpment is like all others in the Jebel—limestone and marine conglomerate, sediment of some ancient sea. Wadis and ravines furrow the cliff, which steps back from base to summit, so that from the bottom you can’t see the top. This is good; it means the slope should provide inlets and traverses that our vehicles can take advantage of.
Nick sends Punch and me in the Lancia north along the base of the scarp, seeking a way up. “Don’t dawdle,” he says. Half a mile out, Punch spots a natural ascent. I scramble ahead on foot with a spade and a torch; Punch churns at my heels in creeper gear. The Lancia bucks uphill by leaps and lurches. The scream of the winding engine seems as if it must carry for miles. The trail starts as a camel track, narrows to a goat path, then a trace, then nothing. It ends. Back down we go, with me at the wheel in reverse and Punch guiding by shouts. Already the brakes are overheating. I do the last forty feet free-wheeling, bouncing back on to the plain with Punch diving clear amid a storm of profanity.
We try three more tracks till we have to stop to spare the clutch a hundred feet from the top. “This has to be the one,” declares Punch. We don’t have the strength to try another. As we start down, red streaks flash across the cliffline; we hear thuds overhead; stones and shingle begin tumbling from above. My first thought is it’s wild goats, even wolves.
“That’s a bloody gun,” says Punch.
We can see tracers now and the pinpoints of muzzle flashes, far out on the plain below. The enemy haven’t halted with nightfall; they’ve been trailing us, probably by our engine noise.
Back in camp, every man is on his feet with the trucks revved and ready. In the minutes it has taken Punch and me to get back, the enemy have found our lie-up and opened fire with a 20mm and two more MGs. At least three vehicles are out there in the dark, one of them an armoured car. “How far,” Nick says, “to this trail of yours?”
Of course we can’t find it. I have marked the site by a limestone notch. Now this landmark refuses to show itself. Tracers, ball and incendiary continue streaking overhead and thumping into the cliff face. Nick calls us together. His idea is to duck our pursuers by bolting back the way we came. But it’s too risky, he says, for all four trucks to try. “Who’s game for the scarp?”
r /> I look to Collie.
“Hell with it,” he says. Meaning aye.
It violates protocol to split a patrol with only one wireless, but if we stick here together we’re done for and there’s no chance of four trucks getting up this cliff under fire. Whoever gets away first sends help for the others. “Luck,” says Nick again. Again we touch hands all round.
Nick’s trucks fake a runaway north, firing as they go, then cut their guns and beat it south into the dark.
Punch and I find a track that looks like our road and start up. The next five hours are surely the longest of my life, and that of every man in Collie’s truck and the Lancia. As soon as we forsake the shelter of the cliff base, the Germans can hear our engines. As the moon ascends they can see us too.
The 20mm they’re shelling us with is a Pak anti-aircraft gun, as big as a Breda. It fires cannon shells, not bullets. We start up the cliff with the Lancia in the lead, Punch driving. Oliphant and I scratch ahead on foot; Collie protects the space between the trucks. The trail takes us sixty feet up with no problems, then cuts back to another driveable slope. We can hear the growl of diesels approaching; our pursuers are bringing their guns up slap to the base of the scarp. By now every man we’ve got except the drivers is out in front with spades and mattocks. Dense brush chokes the route; we hack it away, road-building as we go. Fortune spares us momentarily when a twist in the track puts a shoulder of the slope between us and the 20mm. We’re in dead ground. But now we hear the enemy troopers fanning out below, seeking an angle on us from the flank. They’ve loaded their belts tracer/ball/incendiary; we can see and hear the rounds, in crisp professional bursts, painting the cliff above us. A hundred and fifty feet up, a driveable chimney opens before us, but to get to it, the trucks have to negotiate a sharp zig-zag ascent across a shelf no wider than the trucks themselves and with a 150-foot drop. Punch tries it in the Lancia with me outboard, hanging over the fall. As the Lancia’s tyres dig, they tear the ledge away beneath. I can see the shingle spilling below my heel and hear the flat stones banging and clashing as they avalanche down the face. “No good! We’ll have to go up this next bit in reverse.”
It takes an hour for the trucks to get round the corner. We can hear German troopers below us, scrambling up the slope on foot. A burst or two from our guns and they think better of that notion. I post Oliphant and Grainger with the Vickers on a shelf where they can give our pursuers a welcome if they keep trying. Up we labour with the trucks. At one point, when the track has half sheared away, we find ourselves with a sand-channel spread across thin air and two men on spades bracing each extremity. The trucks inch into the dead end, then reverse up the slope above. We do this four times, climbing the next sixty feet. Each time we destroy the trail behind us so the enemy can’t get vehicles up after us. By now the Germans have set up camp two hundred yards out on the flat and are pasting the hillside with everything they’ve got. We can hear them clearly. “Come down, friends!” a voice calls in crisp upperclass English. “We have hot broth for you!”
We’ve reached a shelf notched back from the face, safe for the moment.
“Who are you bloody buggers?” shouts Punch.
“Two Eight Eight Combat Team. Show sense, men, don’t throw your lives away!”
Another hour carries us within thirty feet of the summit. Here the trail falls away completely. A twenty-foot chasm gapes. No way round. Do we blow the trucks, continue our flight on foot? Dawn is four hours off; the summit will be plastered by planes at first light. There’s only one hope: fill the void with brush, then bridge it with sand-channels.
“There’s another way,” says Jenkins. “Show the white flag.”
Curses greet this. But Jenkins, who is no coward, is past caring. “They won’t kill us. So we’re in a camp? Who cares?”
“That’s enough,” I say.
I can see Jenkins is about to make an argument for his case, which in truth is not without merit. In tank clashes throughout the desert campaign, Allied and Axis crews have routinely put their hands in the air when their machines were knocked out and they were cut off from aid. Little if any shame has attached to this. Generals on both sides have hoisted the white hanky; tales are legion of soldiers giving themselves up at one hour, only to have their captors surrender to them in the next when the tide of battle turns.
Tonight is different, though. The idea of giving in, embraced even for a moment, will sap our will and break us before morning. “We’ll have no more of that,” I tell Jenkins.
Whether it is something in my voice or eye, I can’t say. At once, however, Jenkins backs off. He apologises.
“Forget it,” I say. “Get back to work.”
All hands plunge into the chore of hacking brush and tying it into fascines. I have trained in this technique at Bovington. It’s how tanks cross ditches. We bundle tamarisk and acacia into dense kindling-like rolls, then bind the mass with chains and ropes. The job takes hours. Throughout, my mind works. How, after Jenkins’ lapse, can I restore the men’s trust in him and his belief in himself?
At last the fascines have been wedged into place, sand-channels lashed across the top. The crews stare at their handiwork. A man would have to be mad to drive across this rickety span.
“Jenkins,” I say, “show us the way.”
Jenkins understands. So does everyone. This is not to punish but to redeem.
He mounts the running-board and slips behind the wheel. “Tally-ho!”
And across the gap he zips, as slick as a fox over a fence. The Lancia scurries to solid ground, halts to dig in, then hauls Collie’s truck across with the tow chain. In a gang we bowl the fascines back down the slope so our pursuers can’t use them to follow us once we’re gone. On the summit, Collie and Punch pound Jenkins’ back in congratulation. Oliphant and Grainger climb up from their rear guard post. We can hear the enemy below, still wooing us to surrender.
Collie stands at the brink with the Vickers. “Who wants a go?” He means shoot down.
No takers.
The men are too tired and too relieved to find themselves still alive and uncaptured.
25
WE HAVE HOPED that the summit will prove easy going, but from the first fifty yards the trucks find themselves entangled in dense acacia and tamarisk. Both plants are tough and pulpy, impossible to hack through without keen axes, so that the men have no choice but to open what slender breaches they can with spades and their own shoulders, then bowl through by the push of the trucks. Progress is heartbreakingly slow, made even more frustrating because the man-high brush keeps us from seeing more than a few yards ahead. Again and again the trucks plunge into unseen creases. Even a shallow trench, a 2-footer, produces a frame-walloping crash that hammers our already battered tie-rods, steering boxes, axles, sumps and undercarriages. Blunder into one of these pits sideways and the whole truck careens, necessitating a mad rush by all hands to save her from upending. To compound our ills, both Collie’s truck and my Lancia now begin torturing us with minor breakdowns. Collie’s engine overheats; we spend twenty minutes checking radiator, belts and hoses before discovering the stuck-closed thermostat. We pull it out and chuck it entirely. Next, the water pump fails on my Lancia; it has to be patched together, at the cost of half an hour.
The race is against daylight, not only to outstrip the Macchis and Messerschmitts that our friends in 288 will surely have called down on us for first light, but also to put miles between ourselves and the German armoured cars and motorised infantry working round the escarpment (which we know they will be doing because in their place we surely would) to beat us to the other side. They can’t come over the summit unless they find another way up, so thoroughly have we wrecked our ascent behind us—and if they do somehow, they’ll be thrashing through the same brush that’s frustrating our progress. Suddenly, more bad luck. After a mile or two of terrific labour, we hear the strangling sound of Collie’s engine sucking dry. We’ve burned miles of fuel, just mounting the scarp. I call a po
w-wow. “All right. Who’s got what?”
In the desert every vehicle holds out its secret cache of juice. Punch and I have a full jerry can tucked behind the spare wheel. Collie coughs up another. Oliphant contributes two litres, stashed amongst his POL tins. We pool this reserve and press on.
Every man is exhausted. Nobody speaks. Yet our spirits remain strong. I discover a new capacity in myself. Without a word I can sense my comrades’ state of mind. I feel the group’s breaking point, individually and collectively, and my own as well. Have I at last become a commander? The elements of time, terrain and weather—I seem to know, almost without thought, whether they will be working for or against us. I can gauge how long machines can carry on before they fail, or men before they crack. And I can sense their reserves, and my own, beyond that point. I can even, I realise with gratification, perceive the wider field—the theatre, the campaign, the war itself. As our patrol hacks its way across the summit plain, I grasp, despite the real and immediate peril to ourselves, that the greater enemy is on the run. Rommel himself and all of Panzerarmee Afrika are withdrawing before Montgomery’s advance. This will do us of T3 patrol no good, of course, if we are killed or captured.