Throughout the first days of training, the battle that would come to be called Alamein I rages along the coast. Rommel is hurling everything he’s got against Montgomery’s dug-in tanks and artillery. Each night while my new mates are glued to the BBC for news of this clash, I’m in Jake’s office reading. The books are about Rommel. Jake has numbered them in order of priority. First is the Field Marshal’s best-seller, Infantrie Greift An (“Infantry in the Attack”), a serious, almost scholarly account of his exploits as a lieutenant during the Great War. I am astonished at the number of actions Rommel has participated in under fire, well over a hundred, and at the extent of his audacity and fearlessness. In the Carpathian campaign he and a handful of troopers ford an icy river under shellfire, taking almost a thousand prisoners. Rommel breaks through defensive lines, captures fortified peaks, single-handedly turns battles. It’s all true and written not with ego or grandiosity but in the spirit only of a teacher seeking to share his experience with the next generation of infantry officers. On the cover of the book is an illustration of Germany’s highest decoration for valour, the Pour le Mérite, of which Rommel is his country’s youngest recipient. In addition to this book, I read Most Secret wireless intercepts of communications between Rommel and Kesselring, his immediate superior, and between him and Hitler. I study the operations report of a British commando raid, mounted last year on Rommel’s rear headquarters at Beda Littoria. The raiders burst at night into what they thought was the general’s living quarters, machine-gunning rooms on the first floor before being shot up themselves and driven out by defending troops. In the end, intelligence on the house proved faulty; the site was not Rommel’s quarters and he himself had been nowhere near it for a fortnight. I study articles and war college lectures by and about Rommel, as well as tracts on tank tactics by General Heinz Guderian, his boss during the blitzkrieg of France, and essays on the employment of armour by our own countrymen J.F.C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart. I read Mein Kampf.
Still no word on our mission, its date or objective.
All day I drill with the SAS commandos. We train among sand hills near the Pyramids. Our instructors are Willets and Enders, Kiwi NCOs with more than forty LRDG patrols between them. They school us in explosives and demolitions. We learn about fuses, primers, “sticky bombs” (a mixture of plastic explosive, motor oil and incendiary thermite, used to blow up parked aircraft), “time pencils” (a type of detonator, the size of a test tube, which is activated by snapping its glass shell in two, thus releasing an acid that then eats through a copper electrical wire), igniters and “daisy chains” (for multiple, simultaneous or sequential explosions). This stuff is old hat to the SAS but brand-new to me. Together we learn desert driving skills; techniques of extrication from sand; formations for travel; defence against aircraft; vehicle maintenance and repair; land navigation using the sun compass and the theodolite. Two hours each day are spent in weapons training, with particular stress on keeping the guns free of sand and grit. Each truck in an LRDG patrol has at least two machine guns—.50-calibre aircraft Brownings and twin .303 Vickers Ks. One truck in each patrol is a weapons vehicle, packing a 20mm Italian Breda gun that can blow down the wall of a house. We study first aid, wireless and code. Physical conditioning is restricted to the predawn hours, because of the heat and because the SAS men are already as fit as greyhounds.
For the driving work we’re overseen by Corporal Hank Lincoln, another New Zealander, who has become something of a celebrity for his twenty-nine-day walking escape from a POW cage at Agedabia, his account of which has been published to considerable acclaim. He’s a cheery sort, who calls everyone Bub or Topper, and is enormously knowledgeable in gunnery and navigation as well as in driving. He teaches us sand-motoring technique: how to mount and descend hummocks and razorback dunes; how to properly inflate tyres; how to recognise salt marshes and quicksand. He schools us down to the actual grains of sand which, we learn, are coarser at the crests of minor dunes but finer at the peaks of big ones. What this means is you have to drive differently up the great three-hundred-foot Sand Sea combers. In these the individual grains have settled over centuries into a geometric configuration whose surface is as fragile as the skin on a pot of rice pudding. One assaults these giant dunes head-on, Lincoln tutors us, bringing all the speed one can carry. We’re rolling at forty with the gearbox howling, topped out in second, when the front tyres strike the “apron” and the nose of the truck tilts upwards. “Steady throttle!” Lincoln roars. Punch too hard and the spin of the wheels ruptures the membrane of surface tension; you plunge through and sink to your axles. Too slow and you belly-out. You can’t change gear or you lose traction. Meanwhile the glaring, featureless face of the dune masks all sensation of motion; your engine’s screaming but you feel as if you’re sitting still. Suddenly: the crest. “Hard ninety!” cries Lincoln, meaning turn left or right, deliberately bogging down on top of the razorback. If you let the front tyres nose over by so much as eighteen inches, the truck will plunge and flip.
Dearest Rose,
Still in the dark about our mission. We train and eat, train and sleep. The men’s conversations are composed entirely of speculation. “Where are we going? When? With what orders?”
The clashes at Alamein continue. What none of our fellows can work out is what the brass hats have in mind for an outfit as tiny as ours. What can our few trucks and machine guns accomplish when every Allied tank and gun is already engaged in the battle that will decide the fate of Egypt, the Persian and Arabian oilfields, and perhaps the war itself?
Days pass. Though the mission’s objective remains unspecified, its composition begins to become more clear. Two additional units have arrived. First is LRDG’s “T1” patrol of five trucks and sixteen men, freshly returned from a raid on the Axis airfield at Barce. T1 is commanded by Captain Nick Wilder, a New Zealander. Wilder himself is straight out of hospital, having been shot through both legs during the raid, in addition to suffering a concussion from ramming his truck into two Italian L3 tanks which had blocked his patrol’s single lane of escape. The raid destroyed twenty German aircraft on the ground and blew up a number of warehouses and repair shops; Wilder has been awarded a DSO for his actions under fire. He gimps about with a cane now but is getting nimbler every day.
The second addition is Major Vladimir Peniakoff, called Popski after the cartoon character. Popski’s outfit consists of an indeterminate number of Arabs, Commonwealth officers and NCOs of obscure provenance, and a white dog named Bella. The formation is referred to in official documentation as PPA, Popski’s Private Army. Popski himself is a Belgian national of White Russian extraction, a businessman in Egypt before the war who, I am told, speaks innumerable Arab dialects and loves England more than Milton, Shakespeare and Churchill combined. He’s about fifty, podgy as a doughnut, with a dome as innocent of hair as an ostrich egg. Three demolition-toting Senussi tribesmen accompany him at all times (one is reputed to be a sheikh), speaking to him alone and refusing to sleep indoors.
As for our SAS contingent, they, it seems, are all champion boozers and rugby players. One night in the mess their commander, Major Mayne, takes up a post empty-handed in the centre of the hall and challenges any four men to tackle him and take him down. Ten strapping blokes take turns for half an hour. Mayne remains upright, grinning the while.
Without question the leader of the outfit is Jake Easonsmith. I have met no officer like him. He commands by example alone, or more accurately by a kind of focus and gravity that elevates each act he performs and inspires all beneath him to emulation. One would sooner cut off one’s hand than disappoint Jake, though no one I have questioned can state exactly why. In the special forces, I’m beginning to understand, an officer rarely issues orders. The men are ahead of him. Whatever the task, they set about it before their superiors can command them and have it half done before the officer even knows they’ve plunged in. Discipline is not externally imposed, as in the Armoured Division. Here it’s self-discipline.
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“A good desert hand,” declares Jake, instructing the SAS men and me on a training patrol, “needs a bit of the ascetic. He must enjoy deprivation and thrive on hardship.”
Jake is a rangy chap in his early thirties with a mane of dense unruly brush that seems permanently nested with dust and sand. He’s not a military type; he was a wine merchant in Bristol in civilian life. I have heard Bach’s cantatas coming from his room. He rules with the lightest of touches, appearing during training at ghost hours and staying only moments, yet every man including Mayne and Popski jumps to please him. The solitary personal exchange I have shared with him, one evening on a practice patrol, concerned the subject of the imagination. I had muttered something about the desert being a place where a man’s mind could wander.
“It’d better not, Chapman. The desert demands one’s focus at every moment.”
Jake has assigned me to prepare a document on Rommel and on the defensive dispositions employed by the Afrika Korps in the field. At the same time, other papers are being prepared by other officers. On the morning of their distribution, Jake shuts down the LRDG sector of the base. Corporal Arnem-Butler of the orderly office passes the word: all officers and senior NCOs of patrols R1, T1 and T3 including navigators and medical personnel will assemble for a briefing at 1300 hours. “Is this it?” I ask the corporal.
He just grins and says nothing.
9
THE BRIEFING TAKES place in the Motor Repair Shop of the Heavy Section, that branch of the LRDG whose role is to supply petrol, ammunition and rations to the fighting patrols. The shop is the only space that has windproof walls (to keep dust out of the newly machined engines) and is big enough and cool enough for comfort. It is called “the barn.” Three officers preside: Major Easonsmith, commanding the operation as a whole; Captain Bill Kennedy Shaw, LRDG Intelligence Officer; and Major Mayne, commanding the SAS.
Present are all LRDG patrol officers and their senior NCOs: Captain Wilder commanding T1 patrol, Lieutenant Warren commanding T3 (Jake himself will take R1). T2, under Second Lieutenant Tinker, is absent on another operation. Major Peniakoff—Popski—takes a seat on a bench alongside his second-in-command, Lieutenant Yunnie. I find a place on the side. At the front are the patrols’ medical officer, Captain Dick Lawson, and the RAF adjunct, Flight-Lieutenant Higge-Evert, who will accompany Wilder’s patrol as adviser and air liaison. Near Major Mayne sit his three NCO mainstays, Reg Seekings, Johnny Cooper and Mike Sadler, the navigator, along with Mayne’s single fellow officer, Captain Alexander “Sandy” Scratchley. The feel of the briefing is extremely casual. There are no chairs, so the fellows perch on test stands or benches or simply camp on the floor with their knees up and their arms round their bare legs. The uniform is shorts and shirts, with chaplies, the box-toed sandals that the men favour over boots because they’re cooler in the heat and because scorpions and spiders can’t hide inside them.
A sergeant named Collier closes the big sliding shop doors. At the front, Kennedy Shaw pins a blow-up photo to a presentation stand. The photo is of Rommel.
I glance round to see whether any of the officers appear surprised. If they are, they don’t show it. Sergeant Collier comes back and takes the seat beside me on a wooden crate of .303 ball ammunition.
“The Desert Fox,” says Kennedy Shaw, indicating the photo. “For nearly two years every man in this room has burned to get a crack at him. Well,” he says, “soon you shall.”
Briefly Kennedy Shaw goes over Rommel’s early career—his spectacular success as an infantry officer in the Great War, his winning of the Pour le Mérite, the triumph of his book Infantry in the Attack. Kennedy Shaw is trying to give us a sense of the man. “Rommel’s physical courage is beyond question. The hallmark of his fighting style is audacity and aggressiveness.”
In the invasion of France in 1940, Rommel commands the crack 7th Panzer Division. This formation spearheads the blitzkrieg breakthrough of the Ardennes, the blow that breaks France’s back. Rommel’s reward is command of DAK, the Deutsches Afrika Korps, and all German troops and armour in Tunisia and Libya.
Now elevated to lieutenant-general, Rommel lands at Tripoli in February 1941. In his first campaign, before half his men and tanks have arrived from Europe, he chases Western Desert Force out of Cyrenaica, driving our armoured divisions back nearly a thousand miles to the Egyptian frontier. The British press in effect knight him by bestowing the title “Desert Fox.” Churchill himself declares:
We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.
“No one has to tell this to the British soldier,” says Kennedy Shaw. So powerful is Rommel’s hold over our Tommies’ imagination that General Auchinleck, C-in-C of Eighth Army, felt it necessary last spring to issue the following directive:
There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman and it is highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers….We must refer to “the Germans” or “the Axis powers”…and not always keep harping on Rommel. Please impress upon all commanders that, from a psychological point of view, this is a matter of the highest importance.
“What makes the Rommel myth even thornier to contend with,” Kennedy Shaw continues, “is the fact that he fits neither the stereotype of the rapacious Hun nor that of the brutish, doctrinaire Nazi. He is not a member of the party and never has been. His code of soldierly honour was shaped by the era of Prussian arms before the rise of National Socialism. He is, we are told, a warrior from a bygone era, an old-fashioned knight for whom the virtues of chivalry and respect for the foe are indivisible from the passion for victory. In other words,” says Kennedy Shaw, “you can’t even hate the bastard!”
Rommel’s men worship him, Kennedy Shaw declares. He is unique, essential, indispensable. No German general can replace him. This is the strength of the Rommel phenomenon, and its weakness.
“Eliminate this one man,” says Kennedy Shaw, “and you drive a stake through the Axis’ heart in North Africa.”
He indicates the photo of the Desert Fox.
“That, my friends, is where you come in.”
Kennedy Shaw turns the briefing over to Major Easonsmith. Jake thanks him and comes forward, with a sly look towards his audience. “Do I have your attention, gentlemen?”
For the first time, laughter breaks up the concentration.
“I know what you’re thinking,” says Jake. “The job can’t be done. And we’re just the fellows to do it.”
More laughter. A coffee flask is passed round. Cigarettes are lit. Next to me, Sergeant Collier tamps his Sherlock Holmes pipe and re-fires it.
Jake begins, describing Rommel’s style of command. Rommel leads from the front. “He’s got guts, give him that. He doesn’t manage the battle by telephone.” As Jake speaks, he distributes a number of Afrika Korps propaganda photos depicting Rommel in various front-line environments—in staff cars, on Mark IV Panzers and so forth. Rommel’s aggressive instincts, Jake says, have made him thrust himself again and again into the thick of the fight.
“In other words, gentlemen, the single most important enemy personage, upon whom the outcome of the entire North African war depends, will not be sitting safely hundreds of miles behind the lines, where we have no hope of getting at him, but will in all probability be placing himself deliberately out in front, in broad daylight, protected by nothing stouter than an open command car. All we have to do is find him.”
The men are given photos of the vehicles that comprise Rommel’s mobile headquarters, his Gefechtsstaffel, whose identifying characteristics we are to study and commit to memory. A field marshal’s command post, Jake reminds the men, will stand out amidst acres of other vehicles by virtue of its concentration of wireless aerials, the steady traffic of couriers funnelling to it, and the beefed-up security round about. These factors, too, will enl
arge our chances of success.
This produces the briefing’s second laugh. A sergeant pipes up: “What are we supposed to do, sir, go swanning about the desert hoping to run into the bastard?”
“Sigint has learnt,” Jake responds (meaning Signals Intelligence, our radio intercept fellows), “that each night when circumstances prevent Rommel from returning to his proper HQ in the rear, his wireless operator sends a single coded signal at a specific hour, different each night, informing his headquarters staff of their commander-in-chief’s whereabouts.”
Our spies, Jakes says, have acquired this schedule. He indicates the words “Desert Fox” on the chalkboard.
“What this means is that the DF can be DF’ed.” Meaning located by radio Directional Finding. “By no means does this warrant that Rommel will stay put. Where he sets down at 1900 may not be where he remains at 1930. That’s where you fellows come in. Major Mayne, will you take over?”
Paddy Mayne steps forward. To those of his era, no introduction would be necessary, but for later readers let me say only that Mayne had been a rugby star before the war on a par with the great champions of any age; he is a Cambridge man and a solicitor; by war’s end he will become Britain’s most highly decorated soldier and, with the exception only of his commanding officer in the SAS, David Stirling, the most celebrated British commando of the North African war.
“What does this mean, sir?” A voice addresses the major. “That we pinhole Rommel and go in with all guns blazing?”
Mayne smiles. “I wish it did, lads. But it looks as if the RAF will be getting all the glory.”
The first groan ascends.
Our ground party’s assignment, Mayne explains, is to penetrate the enemy’s defences, getting close enough to the target either to fix its bearings or, if possible, to mark Rommel’s location with red smoke. Fighter planes of the Royal Air Force will take care of the kill. Our role is to clean up anything left over, then get the hell out.