Killing Rommel Read Free Page B

Rommel’s Mark III and Mark IV Panzers advanced in self-covering leap-frogs, backed by crack motorised infantry and screens of lethal 88mm and 50mm anti-tank guns, our Crusaders, Grants and Honeys found themselves again and again on their own, isolated and exposed. Outranged by a thousand yards by the Mark IV’s long-barrelled 75s (and nearly as far by the Mark IIIs), our squadrons had no alternative but to dash from one spot of cover to the next, when and if such sites could be discovered, seeking either to flank the foe or to charge at him head-on, usually across open ground, in a desperate attempt to get within gun range before he or his anti-tank screens turned us into flamers or “brew-ups.” The enemy reckoned this of course and exploited it with feigned retreats, flanking manoeuvres and ambushes into which we blundered time and again.
    The retreat to the Egyptian frontier in summer 1942 culminated for me in a fiasco on a sandy track alongside the Cairo–Mersa Matruh rail line. My troop of four tanks had been reduced to one Crusader and one American Grant, our squadron having lost, over the preceding twenty-one days, no fewer than nineteen others—Valentines, Honeys, A-10 and A-13 Cruisers, even a pair of captured Italian M-13s. Some had been brought up from the repair shops as replacements, others salvaged intact or refitted in the field, along with their crews, who were cycled through so quickly owing to wounds, death or capture that most barely learnt my name and I theirs before their place was taken by the next round fresh from the pool companies. On the twenty-first day I found myself separated from my squadron (who were a mile or two ahead), bottlenecked on the track west of Fuka in a hundred-mile traffic jam, still that distance short of Alexandria, with a hundred more to Cairo. My wife, Rose, was a Navy telegrapher in Alexandria; she was pregnant with our first child. I was desperate to get her evacuated before Rommel and Panzerarmee Afrika overran Egypt all the way to Suez. Suddenly I spotted a break in the column, with clear sailing ahead, cross-country, at least enough to get round the jam and rejoin my squadron. “Driver, hard right,” I commanded. Off we rumbled, steamrolling a wire barrier, directly on to a Mark IV mine.
    No one was hurt, but my right track and front ventilator were blown to scratch. Under favourable conditions, the crew can re-fit a shed track by locking the steering on the unspooled side, railway-tracking spare plates beneath the spooled side, then using the power of the still-shod track to inch forward over this newly cobbled sheath, while the fitters on the ground manhandle the heavy plates into position, replace the blown ones with spares, and re-pin them. That option was out of the question in the middle of a minefield. Meanwhile the mortification grew more excruciating by the moment. Before the unstifled glee of several hundred onlooking officers and other ranks, I baled out with my crew, intending to backtrack on foot out of the minefield, where I would take over my other, still-mobile tank. The humiliation was unalleviated by the spectacle of driver, gunner and wireless operator emerging from our tank, arms laden with tins of apricots, cigarettes and Italian ham, not to mention half a dozen bottles of Boar’s Head gin, all looted on the retreat. Our regimental commander, a colonel with whom I had had a run-in several days earlier in the desert, chose that moment to appear on the shoulder of the track and, standing tall within the turret of his Grant, commanded me and my crew to return to our disabled tank and climb back aboard. He indicated a signboard poking up beside what was left of the wire. “I say, Lieutenant, can you read that posting?”
    I replied that I could.
    â€œWhat does it say?”
    â€œIt says minefield, sir.”
    â€œWhose minefield?”
    â€œOurs, sir.”
    â€œThen what, upon Christ’s twisted