The Hammada el Hamra, across which both patrols now speed with joy, is firm red desert without a scrap of vegetation. Punch floors the accelerator, making as many miles as he can. I feel reborn watching him at the wheel of a new 30-hundredweight Chev, christened Te Aroha V, and Collie in his own refitted truck, with Grainger on the wireless and Jenkins on the Vickers as well as serving as “Doc.” Asquith, the navigator replacing Oliphant, seems a sound fellow, as is the jeep driver Holden with whom I ride, and the new lads from the Grenadiers are crack chaps with their tails in the air. Weather is cold but clear. The desert, after a bout of storms, dazzles beneath a mother-of-pearl sky.
On 23 January we rendezvous with Nick Wilder in a wadi forty miles south of Foum Tatahouine. Nick and his patrol are limping home in triumph; they’ve been instructed by signal from Prendergast to RV with us and Tinker and Popski to impart all intelligence that might be of use.
Wilder’s men look worn to the nub. But they’re happy. They know what they’ve done and how important it is. Popski grins, watching Tinker shake Nick’s hand in congratulation. “You’re on the map!” says Tinker, showing Nick his own board with
WILDER’S GAP
hand-printed in chinagraph pencil at point YK.5991.
Nick is gracious but all business. He takes two hours helping us copy his sketch-maps and alerting us to the perils that we’ll run into on the far side of the Matmata Hills, particularly Axis scout planes.
“The Huns have got birds up everywhere. Rommel knows we’re here and he knows what a threat we represent. And watch out for the natives. Jerry’s put a price on our heads; every tribesman for a hundred miles will be hunting us like a stray camel.”
Tinker breaks out the brandy. We toast in tin cups. “I won’t lie to you, Nick,” Tinker says. “I’d have given my left testicle to be the one to find that pass through the hills. But if it had to be anyone other than me, I’m glad it’s you.”
Half an hour later I’m standing beside Tinker, watching Wilder and T1 patrol pull out for their last leg back to Hon.
“By heaven,” says Tinker, “there goes a soldier. After Jake, the best there is.”
33
THE GORGEOUS FLAT of the Hammada el Hamra, over which we’ve been happily motoring since Hon, runs out a few miles east of the Tunisian border, where the country rises into a rampart of dunes and sand hummocks. Tinker’s navigator finds a break, through which our conjoined patrols slither, crossing the frontier, which is marked by stumpy white pillars, at mid-morning.
There’s a good ballasted road, Foum Tatahouine-Nalut, running north–south, but the crossing is so exposed to ground and air that we decide to lie up in a wadi a quarter of a mile east and watch for a safe opening to dash over. Sure enough, just as Tinker’s second-in-command, Sergeant Garven, is about to probe forward in a jeep, a German patrol of two eight-wheeled armoured cars rumbles into view from the north. The cars are trailed by a pair of Opel 3-tonners, both towing 20mm guns, and preceded by a Flitzer scout car. As we watch, the outfit stops, apparently spotting tracks crossing the road. The armoured cars are SdKfz 234s, as big as tanks but with cork-filled tyres instead of caterpillar tracks, and packing turret-mounted 75mm cannons—twice the size of the 2-pounders in British Crusaders and American Honeys—as well as 7.92 machine guns. Through glasses Collie and I can see an officer sending men to check both sides of the road. “You don’t see the number 288, do you?” asks Collie, making my blood run cold. The Germans search briefly, then mount up and move on. Tinker has us hold up till the noon haze, then dash across the road at points several miles apart.
While we’re waiting, a signal arrives from HQ: Tripoli has fallen. 23 January, the 11th Hussars enter the city; Rommel has escaped west.
“What’s that mean for us?” Holden asks Sergeant Garven.
“It means Tunis is next, lads.” He points north up the Foum Tatahouine road. “All eyes are on us.”
By two we’ve found Wilder’s Gap. Nick has warned that the route is no quick sprint through the hills. The passage zigs and zags for almost thirty miles, at first following the floor of several broad, firm wadis, then tracking a disused motor trail through rugged hill and hummock country. The route is a beauty, with frontage five miles broad in places. Winter grass is thick and green, the kind that, according to Punch, is chock-full of nutrients. “A man could carve out a fine sheep farm here,” he says, and indeed we come upon a number of local herdsmen, boys and old men mostly, grazing their stock. Twice Henschels fly over, but cover is good and the planes don’t see us. We continue west all afternoon, deploying round bad spots, following Nick’s sketches and our own instincts. The place, according to our French maps, is called the Dahar. About ten miles in, an escarpment appears, just where Nick said it would. We locate the track his trucks used to descend. He has marked it with a stone cairn. The patrols halt at the brink. Time to split up. Each will recce the scarp in a different direction, seeking an easier route down, then carry on independently to his assigned search area.
When patrols part in the desert, ceremony is minimal. This time it’s different, because we’ll be operating in dangerous proximity to each other. Tinker instructs both patrols to be sure they know their recognition signals; he reviews rally points, ciphers and wireless frequencies. Supplies are redistributed so that every truck has its share of fuel, oil, water and ammunition. Popski instructs all hands to be wary of the natives; these are not Senussi Arabs, as in Libya, who are friendly to England, but Berbers, whose lands and homes have been despoiled by the French. “To them, the Jerries are God’s finest blokes.”
When it’s my turn, I stress to the men the importance of delivering clear, readable topo maps. “The left hook we’re scouting is not just a jog out and a jog in. If the maps are right, the track’ll be a hundred miles long. Over that, traffic has to be able to move six, eight, ten columns across. And that’s not light ton-and-a-half trucks like ours, but thirty-ton Shermans on fifteen-ton transporters, twenty-ton fuel and water wagons and heavy guns. An entire armoured division will be using the route we scout. That means vehicle columns ten or fifteen miles long, beating the hell out of whatever track we lay out for them. Make sure it’s firm, make sure it’s broad.”
Sergeant Garven asks whether the divisions will have road-building equipment.
“Probably,” I say, “but don’t count on it. Pick routes that can be negotiated ‘as is’—and make sure they’ll hold up even in a downpour.”
Enough daylight remains for the patrols to get out of each other’s range. “See you, Chap.” “Luck, Tink.” That’s it. I shake Popski’s hand and we’re gone.
24/1/43 Party separates from T2, proceeds N. through foothills, camping the night at WADI EL AREDJ at YE.1633. Going is rough but passable for all M.T. Enemy observation post at hill EL OUTID, dominating wadi and approaches.
25/1/43 All day through torturous going, sandy hummocks, to Arab village of KSAR EL HALLOUF, which OC Party recces on foot after dark. Vehicle park is discovered w/ca 20 German and Italian armoured cars and scout cars. Many natives about. Not friendly.
Tinker and Popski are recce-ing the plain to the west; our sector is the hills. Our immediate object is to find a pass north of Wilder’s Gap. Nothing. My topo sketches record dead end after dead end.
“This country makes me nervous,” says Punch. He means the hills. “You can’t run away in ’em.”
Grainger agrees. “We’ve drawn the rump straw.”
We have expected these uplands to be vacant. No such luck. Our aim of establishing a base camp where we can stash the stores and the wireless truck is frustrated by heavy enemy patrolling activity, including aircraft, and a surprising density of native population, which we take great pains to avoid. This is impossible, however, as every knoll and mound is the province of Berber lads and old men tending their flocks. As we pass one toothless gent in a well-ventilated jerd, he clicks his heels and snaps off a Heil Hitler salute. We return the favour, halt and donate a couple of cigs. “
Your friends,” he communicates cheerfully by sign, “are blowing up the valley.”
For a handful of loose tea, the old fellow agrees to guide us, leaving his grandson to mind the goats. We travel by tracks across a crown called Tel Gomel, the Camel’s House, arriving at the village of Matmata in an area of grassy dales from beyond whose shoulder we hear a sequence of muffled blasts. “Road building,” says Collie. “That, or fortifications.”
This could be critical. Combined with the Axis outpost at El Outid, it means the enemy are aware of their vulnerability west of the Matmata Hills and are taking steps to shore up the sector. According to our intelligence, the village of Matmata is the inland anchor of the Mareth Line, though from where we are, we see no fortifications. This area is the very sector Monty will aim to outflank. If Rommel is indeed siting gun emplacements and pillboxes, it means the Line is being extended.
Our patrol starts forward during the noon haze, only to have the steering box on the wireless truck cash out. In the halt for repairs, I take the jeep with Jenkins and a Bren gun and work up through overgrown stream-beds, then stash the vehicle and continue on foot to the rim of a low spur. Through glasses I make out two Afrika Korps bulldozers, apparently excavating a pit on the reverse flank of the crest overlooking the valley. The blasting continues out of sight on the far side. Jenkins and I can see only a fraction of the valley, which dog-legs round a corner before climbing towards the summit of the plateau. It’s apparent, however, that Jerry has got his work boots on. We scoot back to the jeep and down the watercourse to the waiting trucks, which Collie has got under camouflage netting in the interim, to find Punch and Holden in the process of binding our guide’s wrists behind his back and tying him to Punch’s tailboard. Apparently the old man has worked out that we’re not Germans.
“What’s the form with this gaffer?” Punch asks. As chance would have it, Punch has decided to take advantage of the lie-up to clean his revolver. When he produces the weapon, our captive begins to weep. “No, mate,” says Punch, “you’ve got it all wrong.” He seeks to soothe the fellow’s fears by producing a cigarette and lighting it for him. Now the old gent is certain his hour has come. It takes Punch ten minutes to allay his terror; by the time he’s done, our guest has become a rabid Anglophile. He informs us that a dozen other Inglesi (which turns out to be the SAS party under David Stirling) are camped a few miles southwest at Bir Soltane. Our countrymen have vacated the site for the moment, the old man says, off scouting the hills like us.
“Blast these buggers!” says Punch. “Does anything happen here that they don’t know?”
We hold the old fellow overnight, signalling HQ to report enemy fortifications under construction, and the locals’ knowledge of the SAS camp. By return signal we are instructed to discontinue all mapping activity, concentrating instead on recce-ing the fortifications.
In the morning we make a big show of heading east, then drop our guide off; when he’s out of sight we double back west.
Planes buzz overhead all day; it’s impossible to move. We net up and lie low. “It’s the lad,” says Collie, meaning the old man’s grandson. “He made straight for the Jerries, bank on it, soon as Granddad didn’t show for supper.”
27/1/43 Earth-moving equipt moving along road TOUJANE–MATMATA .6 b/dozers on transporters, plus graders and flatbeds carrying concrete caissons. Two trains of donkeys at VR.8991, ca 20 each, possibly carrying mines. MATMATA–KEBILE road is being reballasted and bitumened between VR.8993 and VR.8995.
That noon, Collie in the wireless truck runs into a party of SAS led by Mike Sadler, the navigator, returning to Bir Soltane from scouting the Jebel Tebaga, a range of hills to the north. Collie warns Sadler that locals know about his camp (which intelligence we have relayed yesterday to HQ, as I said, and which Sadler in turn has acquired by signal from HQ last night). That’s why he’s going back, to pack up and clear out.
“We saw a Mammoth,” Sadler tells Collie, meaning an oversized caravan of the same model as Rommel’s own armoured command vehicle. “Big as life, at El M’dou on the Matmata road. No Rommel, though, more’s the pity.”
That night a signal from HQ directs us to get out of the area as well. Tinker and Popski have reported heavy enemy patrolling. We are to move north to reconnoitre the Gabès–Kebile road. This is the key sector of the whole region, the obvious route by which any flanking move by Eighth Army will have to proceed in order to strike the coast behind the Mareth Line. The last thing Sadler leaves with us is the text of a signal received by David Stirling’s party, just this morning, from Eighth Army at Tripoli:
OKH [German High Command] sends followingre inforcements from Europe by sea to Rommel: 10th Panzer Division, 334th Infantry Division, Hermann Goering Panzer Division, Barenthin Regiment, Koch Storm Para Regiment, Panzer Detachment 501, plus Italian Superaga Div and German Manteuffel Div already in place. Total: 14divs. 100,000 men, 76,000 of them Germans.
“Damn,” says Holden, hearing this. “We’ve been bloody lucky so far.”
34
LUCK RUNS OUT two days later. A signal from HQ reports that Tinker and Popski’s base camp at a hill called Qaret Ali has been attacked by Luftwaffe fighters and shot up badly. Every vehicle has been destroyed. Tinker and Popski are missing.
Report of this calamity comes from a third patrol, Lieutenant Henry’s S2, fresh out from Hon, which has stumbled on the burnt-out site while recce-ing their own sector west of the Matmata Hills. Two other patrols, Lazarus’ and Spicer’s, are on their way now from Hon to scout other quadrants north of Wilder’s Gap. They could be in this area within days, even hours.
Our orders are changed back to topographical reconnaissance. We’re despatched north to that sector—the Tebaga Gap and the Gabès–Kebile road—which Tinker and Popski had been assigned to reconnoitre. Under no circumstances are we to venture near Tinker’s camp or attempt to pick up his or Popski’s men. Axis air and ground patrols will be saturating the area. HQ fears Tinker and Popski are goners; we and the other patrols are to take over their sector and finish the job they started.
I call a sit-down and walk the men over the map for the hundredth time. “Have you noticed,” Collie observes wryly, “how the tone of HQ’s signals has changed?”
Indeed it has. We’re getting no more “exercise caution” or “proceed with care.” Now it’s “A route will be found” and “You will complete your report within twenty-four hours.”
Tinker and Popski are on their own.
So are we.
I spread the maps on the jeep’s bonnet. Due north about thirty miles, the plain, which runs north and south where we are now, turns east towards the coast. Along its southern flank lie the hills of the Jebel Melab, on its northern the Jebel Tebaga.
In the middle runs the Tebaga Gap.
That’s the one we want.
The Tebaga Gap cuts through to the sea behind the Mareth Line.
“Counting our patrol and Henry’s, Lazarus’ and Spicer’s,” I say, “we’ve got about twenty vehicles recce-ing the same sector. Eighth Army only needs one of us to succeed and get the word back to Monty.”
I don’t need to add that all others are expendable.
My idea is to descend at once to the plain. But when we scout the approach on the freezing morning of 29 January, we find fresh tracks of German patrols criss-crossing everywhere.
We’re forced back into the foothills into the most infernal country yet—a sea of granulated-sugar hummocks, each no greater than two truck-lengths across. Even the jeep mires in these. We sand-channel all day, logging barely two miles. Striking a passable trail near sunset, we hold a quick council and decide to take our chances in the dark on the flat. The trucks descend into sandhills, which every man would have called hellish if he weren’t coming out of even worse. The hold-up now is dense brush, which catches beneath the vehicles’ undercarriages and balls up into axle-binding masses that have to be cleared by hand every hundred yards. I probe ahead in the jeep with Punch and th
e Bren gun. Past one in the morning we strike a track that seems to lead down on to the plain. No time for grub or a brew; we descend, lights-out, hoping to strike the Tebaga Gap by sunup and find a place to nest.
Now the big-end bearing on the wireless truck packs up; we halt to replace it only to find that our only spare is missing. There’s nothing for it but, as Punch says, to tow the bitch. We slog on till four, freezing and famished. Suddenly the track dead-ends. We’re in a blind wash, butted into the wall of a wadi. I’m afraid if we stop for a kip we’ll never get going again. So we make a virtue of necessity, call this site our rear base and leave the disabled wireless truck with three troopers of the Grenadiers and the Bren gun. I backtrack with the jeep and the other two trucks, Collie commanding one and Punch the other.
Dawn finds us camouflaged in the cut bank of a dry watercourse, overlooking a track that snakes down on to the plain. Jenkins prepares a petrol-tin fire for tea but waits to light it till daybreak permits. Suddenly from the flat below comes machine-gun fire. We can hear it, tinny and distant, and see a bright stream of tracers arcing away from us across the lightening sky.
Collie, Punch and I scamper on foot to the shoulder of a ridge that looks over the plain.
Another burst. Another rainbow.
“Toffee apples,” says Collie, meaning tracer fire deliberately let off to signal the location of the shooters.
“Somebody needs help,” says Punch. “But who? Us or them?”
Collie points north. A mile out on the plain, two squarish lumps can be seen straddling the track from Gabès. I thumb the focus wheel of my binoculars. Into clarity comes an Afrika Korps half-track, on its side in a ditch, apparently having run off the trail in the dark. An eight-wheeled armoured car protects it.