“What happened here?”
“The Jerries put up a scrap at every wadi.”
The road runs west along the coast. I can see a blown bridge; tapes mark a lane through a minefield. A column of lorries low-gears up a freshly bulldozed sand ramp, where the bridge used to be, and back on to the highway. Thirty yards from me, on the desert side, lies a German Pak 38 anti-tank gun with “288” stencilled on the gun shield. The weapon sprawls on its side amidst acres of other junk, with its breech blasted and six white rings painted round its muzzle. Each ring represents an Allied tank or truck knocked out.
“Where are we?”
“Nofilia.”
“Is that all?” It has taken me three days to go forty miles.
The orderly looks into my eyes. He gives me another shot.
When I wake again, Sergeant Kehoe kneels beside me. Nick Wilder’s chief NCO. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he says.
I’m so glad to see him. “Where is everybody?”
31
Zella is the LRDG’s new forward base. It’s a ragged oasis two hundred miles into the desert. I ride in on Sergeant Kehoe’s jeep. Kehoe has been sent to Nofilia not for me, but to pick up Jake Easonsmith, who was supposed to fly in from Cairo on a mission to the Americans, who have now landed in Algeria under Eisenhower and Patton, but instead flew directly to Marada and caught a truck the rest of the way.
The camp at Zella is three marquee tents and an under-construction Nissen hut serving as a motor repair shed, the lot ringed by slit trenches and sheltered by a berm topped with stunted date palms. There’s water from a good well and even a ten-by-ten-foot pool for bathing, called Little Cleopatra. Trucks in various stages of refitting poke their noses under camouflage netting that pops and bucks in a hard, sandy gale. We pull in just at suppertime. Two sixty-foot wireless masts tower over the camp but there’s no radio shack, just a pair of wireless trucks parked side by side behind a canvas windbreak, with desks on the sand and map boards taped to the trucks’ flanks, under more camouflage nets, with a Cummins generator thumping away like a torpedo boat. I note Colonel Prendergast’s WACO biplane with its wings tied down against the wind. “Come on,” says Kehoe. “Let’s belly up to the trough.”
The mess is a single table under one wing of a marquee, beneath a flysheet snapping in the gale. Grub is sandwiches in wax paper, held down by stones. Each is, as the saying goes, “more sand than wich.” I don’t care. I have come back to life. Jake is here, with his shoulder wrapped, directing the show.
“Chapman,” says he, “do you know I have orders to place you under arrest?”
But he grips my hand with warm emotion, which I return. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Never better.”
The last time I saw Jake he had a broken collarbone—at Bir el Ensor, Sore Thumb, in the aftermath of the Rommel raid.
I ask after Collie, Punch, Oliphant and Grainger. “Have you got a job for me, sir?”
Jake sends me to the medical tent instead. I’m given a bunk in the third of three shelters, alongside Lieutenant Ken Lazarus, whom I’ve never met and who is away on a patrol. I sleep for three days. Throughout this interval, trucks keep coming and going; patrols are mounted and sent out while others limp in, returning. A corporal named Hartley looks after me. He is best mates with one of the wireless operators. All signals are designated Most Secret, but in a unit so small everyone knows everything. Hartley tells me that my old outfit is keen to retrieve me, now that my assignment with LRDG is over. Tank officers are in urgent demand for Monty’s next westward push. At the same time, Hartley reports, XXX Corps has sent Jake a despatch announcing the arrival at Zella of two RAC lieutenants, to accompany patrols with an eye to evaluating the going between here and Tripoli. In other words, my original job! When I’m fit enough to get out of bed, I put this to Jake straight out.
“Jake, how can XXX Corps demand my return, when they’re sending you two other tank officers on the identical assignment I’m here for already?”
“How do you know what XXX Corps wants?”
I clam up.
“Hell’s bells, is there one bloody thing that stays secret round here?!”
The next day Collie, Punch and Oliphant arrive from Jalo; we have a grand reunion. When they hear I’m being sent back to the Armoured Division, they demand to speak to Jake. I forbid this.
Then on Christmas Day, my seventh at Zella, an updated operations sheet is posted on the board in the company office. Below “Wilder T1” and “Tinker T2,” I see
Chapman T3
I make straight for Jake to thank him, but he’s already gone, off to Algeria, having flown out at dawn. Bill Kennedy Shaw, now in command, shows me the signal Jake has sent to XXX Corps regarding my status:
Operation still in progress. Will restore officer immediately upon completion.
Now LRDG’s advance HQ moves forward from Zella to Hon. Another group of oases. We go with it. Patrols are being sent out from both sites. The first wave are to reconnoitre the going west of Sirte, Wadi Zem Zem and Misurata, scouting a left hook round Tripoli. The second will probe farther west, into Tunisia, seeking a way round Gabès and the Mareth Line.
The following, copied from the Operations Sheet, comes from my notes dated 26 December 42. I can’t remember why I took it all down, unless perhaps I sensed something historic in the offing. It names the patrol commanders and their patrols.
Wilder
T1
Tinker
T2
Chapman
T3
McLauchlan
R1
Talbot
R2
Lazarus
S1
Henry
S2
Spicer
Y1
Hunter
Y2
Bruce
G
Birdwood
Indian 2
Rand
Indian 3
Nangle
Indian 4
I am given three trucks and six new men, all elite infantry of the 6th Battalion Grenadier Guards, fresh from a training course at Faiyoum under our old schoolmasters Willets and Enders. The remainder will be our old crew: Collie, Punch, Grainger and Jenkins but not Oliphant, who has come down with an eye infection and been evacuated to Cairo.
Hon, to which we move on Boxing Day, is the plushest HQ yet, a colony of miniature oases that have been headquarters for the Auto-Saharan Company, the Italian counterpart of the LRDG. Hon has a barracks, a hospital and airfield, even a tennis court. Where is everyone?
Popski, I hear, has just arrived at Zella, preparing to join S1 patrol under Lieutenant Lazarus, my tentmate, to reconnoitre the Jebel Nefusa south of Tripoli. Lieutenant Hunter with Y2 is there too, readying to depart immediately after New Year to recce the same left hook. Nick Wilder will set off from Zella as well, but bound for Tunisia. His T1 patrol will be the first to scout the Mareth Line. Tinker with T2 is still conducting a road watch east of Tripoli.
Eighth Army have sat down for Christmas just west of Nofilia. Monty is short of petrol; his engineers are repairing the port of Benghazi and building all-weather airfields as fast as they can. Rommel, we are told, with 21st Panzer Division and 90th Light Division is preparing defensive positions at Beurat and Wadi Zem Zem. 15th Panzer Division remains forward.
Dearest Rose,
This may be the last letter I can post for a while, though of course I shall write every day and keep the lot till the next drop. I forgot to tell you, I still have Stein’s manuscript! I left it behind at Jalo and believed it gone forever. At Christmas, however, it found its way back to me, courtesy of Sgt Collier, who discovered it with other items of my kit.
The men see 1943 in with an all-night boozer. After my bout with jaundice, I can’t touch the stuff because of my liver. I don’t mind. The weather has broken, as has my fever. I’m well except for desert sores on my legs and arms and a still-queasy stomach. I’m grateful these are the only things
wrong with me. Days are windy now, nights ungodly cold.
As patrols are launched and others scurry about in preparation, everyone gets into everyone else’s business. Officers grill officers for the latest griff; other ranks interrogate their own. We all want to know what’s out there and how bad it’s likely to be.
The first clue comes from Tinker, whose patrol limps in from Geddahiah a few days after Christmas. T2 has been shot up by planes and armoured cars, losing six men missing and two trucks. On nearly the same day in almost the same spot, Captain Tony Browne’s patrol runs on to Teller mines and loses one officer killed and Browne himself gravely injured. He is replaced by Lieutenant Paddy McLauchlan who, a few days later, is ambushed near Wadi Tamet by German armoured cars; McLauchlan loses one truck and four men captured. A few days later, Hunter’s Y2 will be plastered by ME-110s and armoured cars and have to turn back before it reaches its area of operation. “Things are getting dicey out there,” says Kennedy Shaw, who relays the observation from Tinker’s report that he, Tinker, noted the numeral 288 on both 8-wheelers chasing him.
I’ve never seen an officers’ mess more competitive than that of the Long Range Desert Group. On the one hand, patrol commanders readily hazard their lives to aid their brother officers, but at the same time they can’t stand to think of a comrade getting one-up on them. Each officer believes his patrol the best and he himself the only man for the job.
My old bunkmate Tinker is the fiercest competitor of all. Nick Wilder’s early start for the Mareth Line has put him into a blue-balled sweat. Tinker is barely back in the barn before he commences lobbying to be sent out again. He gets his wish on 16 January when he and T2 depart Hon, escorting two 3-tonners carrying fuel and a mob of Popski’s Arabs and demolition men (but not Popski himself, who is already at large somewhere round Wadi Zem Zem), with orders to deliver these bandits to their master, who will rendezvous with Tinker at a location of which Tinker will be advised by signal. Then Tinker and Popski will make for the Mareth Line together.
As for my own group, we’re ready to roll by 3 January, with the addition of a new Willys jeep and Trooper Holden, Collie’s original driver. But orders keep changing for another fortnight. I’m grateful for the delay; it’s precious hours to regain weight and strength.
The Mareth Line mission has become everything to me. I spend hours each day poring over the nearly-worthless French and Italian maps that are the only ones we have for Tunisia and conferring with the other patrol commanders and NCOs who are putting together their packages at the same time. Kennedy Shaw and his two keen corporals are feverishly draughting their own maps, based on daily signals from those few patrols—mainly Nick Wilder’s and David Stirling’s of the SAS—that are out there recce-ing the area right now.
In a nutshell, our next wave of patrols will be operating three to four hundred miles behind the present front east of Tripoli. We’ll proceed west across all Tripolitania, crossing into Tunisia south of the Jebel Nefusa, the great crescent-shaped ring of highlands whose northernmost range, narrowing in towards the sea south of Gabès, is called the Ksours de Mons, the Matmata Hills.
Our job is to find a way through those hills.
East of them lies the coastal plain, bottle-stoppered south of Gabès by the Mareth Line. West of the hills spreads a second plain, deserted and undefended according to our French maps, that could lead round the entire defensive front.
This second plain is the one Monty wants to know about.
He wants to know whether a thousand tanks and guns can get there. Are there routes through the hills? Has Rommel fortified the passes? How good is the going on the other side? Are the Germans there and, if so, in what strength?
Kennedy Shaw has sliced this pie into sections, each one half the size of Ireland. Our patrols will take a section apiece and explore it. Each will prepare a “going map” of its assigned territory.
“This is it,” says Kennedy Shaw. “This is the Big Show.”
32
MY PATROL DEPARTS Hon on 16 January 1943.
The going is fast and firm on the short hop to the well at Socna (where our three trucks and one jeep, accompanied by one 3-tonner carrying fuel, top up with water as instructed) and excellent along the Italian-built track to the escarpment at Sciueref, which site we skirt when informed by signal that German motorised activity has been reported in the vicinity. Thence via the Mizda road—a good one, with a fast, firm crushed-rock surface—to Oswald’s Dump, a petrol cache established by earlier patrols. We have exact map coordinates but, when we get there, we can’t find the damn thing. I’m furious, recalling the diesel debacle at the Sand Sea, but Asquith, our new navigator, suspects a transposed numeral on the operation instructions and he’s right. The dump appears, three miles from where it’s supposed to be. We fill up mid-afternoon, leaving our empties, and press on till the last hour of winter light. We have been ordered to a rendezvous at latitude 29 degrees 30 minutes off the Mizda–Brach road. I’m anxious about Asquith but he reels us in on the dot.
The site is a complex of wadis beneath a rugged north–south escarpment. Tinker’s T2 is already there. By morning, three other patrols have arrived—R2 under Sergeant Waetford (whose two officers, Lieutenants Talbot and Kinsman, have been captured by the enemy at Sciueref four days earlier), Y1 under Lieutenant Spicer and Y2 under Captain Hunter. The place looks like a Chevrolet truck convention. Popski is on his way, a signal says, ferried by Lazarus’ S1, which has just got jumped by an Axis patrol at the north end of Wadi Zem Zem about fifty miles away and has had to turn back, reporting two captured, three missing, five trucks lost. Next morning, 20 January, Colonel Prendergast flies in in his WACO to issue instructions to the whole parliament.
Prendergast is commanding officer of the LRDG. Eighth Army, he informs us, is attacking Beurat this very morning, expecting to be in Tripoli in days. Monty is desperate for intelligence on the Mareth Line.
Then Prendergast drops his bombshell: Nick Wilder, he says, has found a pass through the Matmata Hills.
I’m standing next to Tinker when Tinker hears this. I have never seen the colour drain more swiftly from a man’s cheek. All round, patrol commanders proffer a chorus of “Here, here!” and “Bloody brilliant!” Tinker is heartbroken. When Prendergast recites map coordinates for Nick’s discovery and instructs the group to inscribe the position on their maps as “Wilder’s Gap,” Tinker’s morale hits a new low.
Popski is laughing.
“Cheer up, you bastard. We’re all on the same side!”
Tinker is inconsolable. What galls him most, I can tell, is that the name Wilder’s Gap will be on maps of North Africa forever. I observe aloud that it’s not very sporting to begrudge a teammate his success, particularly a triumph earned fair and square.
“Screw sporting,” says Tinker.
Popski grins. “War is hell.”
He asks Tinker how old he is.
“Twenty-nine.”
“And you, Chapman?”
“Twenty-two.”
Popski rubs his fifty-year-old dome and laughs even harder.
Tinker’s spirits revive with the next word from Prendergast. It seems that Nick Wilder’s patrol has penetrated the Matmata Hills only a short distance before mechanical problems have made it turn back.
“Nick has made a start, nothing more,” declares our commanding officer. “No one knows what kind of country lies on the far side of those hills, or if it’s go or no-go for tanks and guns. No one knows where Rommel is, or what fortifications and troops he’s thrown into that position.”
In other words, there’s still plenty of glory to be won.
Wilder’s Gap is some seventy to a hundred miles south of the final passage that will take Monty round Rommel and the Mareth Line. “Even when the route through the Matmata Hills has been thoroughly explored and mapped, there remains a hell of a long march on the far side, unscouted and unknown. The reconnaissance of that passage is a critical undertaking, upon which depend the live
s of thousands of men and the outcome of the entire North African campaign. Here are your orders. Carry them out.”
Prendergast is good. I have only seen him in person once before, but I’m impressed now by his unprepossessing but powerfully focused style. He pilots the WACO himself, alone. Within five minutes he has turned the aircraft up into the wind and taken off back to Hon.
Orders are distributed. Lazarus’, Spicer’s and Waetford’s patrols will return to base to refit and prepare to move out again as soon as possible. Tinker’s patrol, with Popski, and mine will proceed at once to Wilder’s Gap and through it, to recce the going on the far side, to Gabès and round the Mareth Line.
Before we start, Tinker, Popski and I take the afternoon establishing a dump of the fuel we’ve escorted from Hon. We bury three hundred and seventy-five jerry cans and camouflage the site. Tinker hates the fact that another patrol is getting the start alongside his, even though my sector is different from his so there’s no direct competition.
As for me, Collie, Punch and Grainger, we at last have the orders we’ve been waiting for:
TASK. To obtain fullest topographical information in the area bounded as follows:
N. COAST–MATMATA–KEBILE ROAD
E. TRIPOLI PLAIN
W. CHOTT DJERID
S. LAT. 32°30´
The information is required from the point of view of the advance of a force of all arms on a wide front. It should include the following:
(a) GOING
(b) WADI CROSSINGS
(c) COVER
(d) WATER SUPPLIES—WELLS
(e) LANDING GROUNDS
Tinker’s orders are identical, but send him to an area farther west and north. Both patrols set out next morning, travelling together. No place is where it’s supposed to be on our French and Italian maps, but nobody cares, so inspiriting is the flush of taking up a crucial job with comrades we love and trust.