“Jerries!”
Close by, he heard engines turning over, great belches of black smoke spitting from the other tanks in the formation. He looked that way, saw men disappearing into their tanks, hatches closing. He did not wait for the order from Digby, dropped down to his hard leather seat, pulled the hatch shut, shouted, “Fire ’er up!”
The driver responded, the tank pulsing, a deafening roar that drowned out the ongoing noise from the wireless. He leaned forward, searched through the periscope, felt for his machine gun, shouted again:
“Load ’em! Guns ready!”
The men moved with tight precision, each one doing his job. He looked down, saw the gunner, Moxley, right below and in front of him. He slid forward, put his knees right against the young man’s back. It was the position they had repeated many times, and Moxley never protested, the discomfort of the pressure giving them both leverage as the tank rolled and tossed them about. He reached down, tapped the gunner on the shoulder.
“Wait for my order. Patience. Use the sights. How many rounds?”
“A hundred twenty.”
“They’ll go quick. Don’t want to run out. Not in the mood to be a sitting duck, Private.”
“Me either, sir.”
“Loader!”
“Sir!”
“My Vickers ready?”
“Fit to fire, sir!”
His fingers wrapped around the trigger, and he squeezed, testing, the machine gun coming to life, a brief burst of fire. It was the signal to Simmons to do the same, the driver blessed with two of the Vickers machine guns up front. Simmons let loose a short burst. Well, all right then. We’re ready for you, Jerry. He was breathing heavily, the diesel’s smoke swirling around them, and he focused through the periscope, the dust cloud rolling closer.
“Where the hell are they?”
He punched the button on the crude intercom, wanted to give Simmons the order to move forward. No, wait. Show a little patience yourself. We don’t know what’s out there, not yet. Find a target. He spoke into the intercom now, the only way they could hear him through the roar of the engine.
“Gunner. Anything?”
“Nothing yet. Just dust.”
He stared as they all stared, the fine sand blowing thin clouds against the glass of the periscope, blinding, his eyes watering. He pulled his goggles off the hook beside him, slid them over his head. He hated the goggles, the lenses scratched, blurred, but they kept his eyes dry. He caught a flash of movement, above the dust cloud, coming at them, fast, now right above them. He heard the scream as it passed by and he hunched his shoulders, instinct, shouted, “109s!”
More planes roared past, barely a hundred feet above them, and he tried to ignore them, thought, no sightseeing, you bloody fool. You know what a Messerschmitt looks like. And, we haven’t been blown to hell, so they’re not coming for us. The supply dumps or the support trucks, most likely. Strafe the infantry. Poor bastards. He thought of the antiaircraft gunners, far back, dug into patches of camel thorn brush, lucky to get a brief burst of fire at the low-flying planes. Shoot straight, boys. Knock a few Jerries out of their seats. He stared into the dust cloud again, scanned from side to side. He could still hear the Messerschmitts ripping past, thought, a good-sized flock. If there’s that many 109s, there’s something coming with them. Come on, where the hell are you?
And now he saw them.
On both sides tanks erupted from the dust, rolled right past, the air punched by dull sounds, streaks of white light. He turned in his seat.
“Port! Ninety to port. Move it!”
The tank lurched forward, then spun, pivoting to the left. The dust cloud was everywhere, churned into thick, gray fog by the movement of the big machines. The tank rumbled blindly forward over a carpet of small rocks, and there was a bright flash, a sharp streak of light, thunder on the right side. He jumped in his seat, searched the dust frantically. You missed me! Hah! The gunner spun the turret, and he saw the tank now, black crosses on the sand-yellow armor. The German turret was moving as well, the big gun trying to follow his movement. He shouted to Moxley:
“Ten o’clock! A hundred yards!”
The turret kept moving, painfully slowly, and he watched the barrel of the two-pounder slide into position.
Moxley said, “Got him, sir!”
“Fire when ready!”
The words still hung in the air as the tank rocked from the recoil of the big gun. He fought to see through the smoke and dust, saw the crosses again, said, “Again!”
The two-pounder fired again, and Moxley let out a sound.
“Hit him! Hit him!”
“Fire again!”
They worked in perfect unison, the loader feeding the shells into the breech of the gun, the spent shells ejected automatically into the canvas bag that draped below. He coughed, the cordite smell filling the cabin, and still saw the crosses right in front of him.
“Stop! Watch him!”
They jerked to a halt, and he could see smoke coming from the German tank, waited for the movement, saw it now, the hatch coming open. A thick plume of black smoke poured up from inside the tank, and the men appeared, scrambling out, escaping the burning hulk. His hand gripped the trigger of the machine gun, and he watched four men drop to the ground, staggering, wounded, blinded by the smoke and the shattering blast that had ripped into them. He pulled the trigger, sprayed the machine-gun fire back and forth, all four men going down quickly. He paused, took another breath, fought through the stink of gunpowder, saw movement beyond, more tanks, streaks of light. The fight was all around them, tanks and armored cars, perfect confusion, enemies only yards apart, seeking a target in the dust, firing point-blank.
“Move! Ninety degrees starboard! Forward!”
He searched for another target, all four men rising to the battle, all a part of the chaos, a desperate dance of men and machine.
T hey were a part of the British Seventh Armored Division, and from their earliest days in the fight in North Africa, they had been known as the Desert Rats. They took the name from the greater Egyptian jerboa, a strange and awkward rodent that bore an uncanny resemblance to a tiny kangaroo. The jerboa had made its appearance at every supply depot, every place where man brought something edible to this inhospitable place. They seemed to hate the sunlight and avoided the heat, which seemed more than a little odd for a creature who made his home in the desert. It was a trait the jerboa shared with the men of the British Seventh Armored.
The tank commander’s name was Clyde Atkins, and at twenty-eight he was among the oldest of the noncoms who ran the tanks. Most of the big machines were run by sergeants, men who were inappropriately called “sir” by their crews. No one seemed to care about the breach of protocol. To the Desert Rats, being in charge of a tank earned a man the right to be called sir. There were officers of course, at the head of each squadron, men like the despised Digby, who commanded groups of six or eight of the big machines. But driving a tank in battle was a young man’s game, quick reflexes and a hardiness required to work in conditions that no amount of training could accurately duplicate. In the chaos of a fight in the desert, each tank fought its own war.
Though the Italians had fared well against the first British troops they’d confronted, when the Seventh arrived, the tide had turned. The British had marveled at the gallant men in obscenely outdated vehicles, whose bravery and amazing willingness to die had not slowed the British from sweeping them entirely across Libya. The power of the British tanks was a shocking surprise to the unfortunate Italians, who had been told their own tanks would crush any foe. And no matter how gallant they had been, their commanders had seemed utterly worthless, something the British had observed from their very first confrontations. The lack of respect the British felt for the Italian commanders extended all the way up the chain of command to Mussolini himself. The British quickly understood that the Italian armies were being sacrificed by an arrogantly stupid man whom the men began to call a “small-bore dictator,?
?? a stooge for Hitler. Even now the Italian prisoners brought the stories, how Mussolini had assured them that their conquest of North Africa was only the first chapter in the birth of a new Roman Empire. But the prisoners Atkins had seen cared nothing at all for some glorious legacy and seemed to care little for Mussolini himself. Their officers were a different story. They had marched into the British camps protesting all the way, outraged at being captured, insulted by defeat, oblivious to the catastrophic ineptness that had killed so many of their own good men.
The Seventh Armored had been a major part of the push that had driven the Italians halfway across Libya. Near Benghazi, the Desert Rats had emerged from their tanks with the glow of victory, many speaking of a quick end to the entire war.
Then, Rommel arrived.
The Desert Rats knew little of the new German commander, but in the battles that followed, they learned that he had brought the most modern guns and armor in any theater of the war. The Italians who had survived were now alongside an ally who had known only victory, who had crushed the French, and the British themselves. Sergeant Atkins and the other tank commanders soon understood that their cherished two-pounder was seriously outgunned. If the A9 was to succeed, it had to be at close range and to the side, firing into the thinner, weaker flank of the German armor. Otherwise, it would take a lucky shot beneath the turret to have any effect at all. To many, the bigger guns on the German tanks, combined with the eighty-eights lurking behind their armor, made Rommel seem virtually unstoppable.
The Seventh had suffered as badly as any, but worse for their morale, they had lost their beloved commander. General Jock Campbell had brought fire to the Seventh Armored, but Campbell was dead, not from combat, but by the cruel joke of an auto accident, his car overturning on a dismal stretch of desert road. Campbell had inspired not only his men, but the British high command, and convinced them to understand the value of the massed, carefully coordinated armor strike, the same kind of tactic Hitler’s army had used in France. The Seventh took pride that they were recognized as the very force that would lead this kind of strike, what were now called “Jock columns.” Though the Germans might have the better machines, Campbell had given his Desert Rats the confidence that no army had better men.
D arkness brought the fighting to an end.
They huddled beside the tank, beneath a thin canvas shelter they had unrolled from the rear of the turret. The canvas partially covered the tank itself, an attempt at camouflage, hiding both men and machine. They were filthy and exhausted and slowly fumbled with their ration tins, the first food any of them had eaten all day. Simmons had poured a cup of gasoline into a small, round hole in the dirt, the fire surrounded by a circle of rocks, just wide enough to support a pot of water. At least they would have tea.
No one spoke. Atkins scanned the edges of the canvas tent, reached out and pulled one side away from the tread of the tank. He was careful, no light could leak, nothing to give any gunner a place to aim. Somewhere, on all sides of them, men were doing as they were doing, finding time for food, sleep perhaps, a little tea. The Germans were there too, in all directions, two armies lost in the same span of desert, scattered tanks and armored vehicles, some in small clusters, others alone, all of them knowing that in the darkness, just out there, the enemy was close.
The tank was still warm, but the air was already cool, would get colder, and the men had wrapped themselves in ragged sheepskin coats, pulled from hidden nooks inside the tank.
The routine at the day’s end was to gather the tank squads into camps, canvas sheets draping the tanks, which were parked in uneven rows. In this part of the desert, the British had made good use of any cover they could find, patches of camel thorn that would add to the camouflage of the vehicles. If the Germans sent a patrol to poke around, either side might fire starlight flares, the black desert suddenly bursting with light, tanks silhouetted for a brief moment, enough time for an artillery observer to guide a well-placed shell. But with the profiles of the tanks blending into the brush, there was not enough time for the enemy scouts to choose a target. That was the routine. But today, nothing had been routine. The fights had swept over the entire front, all the way north to the great escarpment that separated the sea from this flat table of desert. And the British had taken the heavier blow, Rommel’s massive surge of armor flowing right through and around the British units. Confusion and fiery destruction had sent many of the British tanks back, panicked drivers blindly seeking the safety of the artillery support to the rear. But many could not get that far, were cut off, chopped to pieces by Rommel’s rapid advance. It was the German’s great genius, avoiding the head-on confrontation, sweeping the flank of the British armor. The tactic was obvious to the men in the tanks, and yet somehow the British command was all too often caught off guard by Rommel’s rapid circular attacks. Today, the blow had been terrifyingly precise, and all across the British position, tank squadrons had been obliterated, some of the wrecked machines visible even now, scattered across the desert, small specks of flame.
Atkins waited for Simmons to pour the boiling water, stared at the cup in his hands, holding the last of his special hoard of tea. He knew that somewhere to the east, the food and water wagons were waiting, anxious men wondering if the tank squads they served had survived the day. Yes, we’re alive, he thought. No bloody idea where we are, or what’s between us and all that hot food. And water. And gasoline.
“How much petrol we have left?”
Simmons looked at him, said, “An hour. Maybe a quarter more. Not enough to play around.”
“How many shells?”
Moxley was holding his tin cup as well, staring at the small, dimming fire. “Maybe…twenty-five. Thirty.”
Atkins nodded, and Batchelor, his loader said, “Four boxes for the Vickers.”
Four boxes. Enough machine-gun fire for what? Maybe an hour of fighting? Then what? Did that bloody Rommel get to our ammo dumps today too? He stirred the water in his cup, knew they were looking to him, would measure their own despair by his response. He nodded, tried to seem as positive as he could.
“That’s enough. Ought to get us out of this mess. We’ve got at least a half dozen tanks to our south. We can team up at first light, drive east.”
He knew they would understand the word: east. Retreat. No, more than retreat. Get the hell out of here. He thought of the big tents, the men with the maps. Hell, you don’t know where we are any more than we do. But you sure better know what kind of whack we took today.
Simmons pushed dirt into his fire hole, killing the last flicker of light. They sat in total darkness, each man’s eyes trying to find some glimpse, something to adjust to.
Simmons said, “Sir, we took a good licking, eh?”
“It wasn’t pretty.”
“I saw Captain Digby brew up. Looked like he got hit by an eighty-eight.”
“You don’t know that.”
Simmons was silent for a moment. “I saw him brew up, sir. Nobody got out.”
Brew up.
Atkins sipped at his tea. Damned strange description of it. He had seen the explosion as well, but there was no time to think about it, beyond the glimpse of Digby’s command flag. Never liked that chap. But…not what I had in mind.
There was a burst of firing, a machine gun, and Atkins pulled back the canvas, saw streaks of tracers arcing toward the north. Now another, a sharp streak of white light, then red, the response. Damned fools. Shooting at ghosts. Just as likely to kill your own.
“Sit tight, chaps. A lot of itchy fingers. Maybe wounded, just shooting to show how pissed they are. No targets until morning.”
Simmons said, “You think they went after Tobruk again, sir?”
“Hell if I know. That’s forty miles from here. I think. Rommel pushed around the south of us. He might have pushed north too. Tobruk’s not our problem.”
There was a long silent moment, and Atkins pushed at the canvas again, tossed it back, the cold air rolling over them. No one prot
ested, the men simply huddling up tighter, tugging at their coats. He slid out from beneath the heavy cloth, could make out the dark shapes of tanks, trucks in the distance, faint silhouettes in the light of a low crescent moon. There were still fires, smaller now, distant, but most of the burned hulks were cold and silent. He looked up, stared at the vast open sky, a million flickering lights, the night perfect and clear. He watched the stars for a long minute, felt the chill inside his coat. He realized now how truly tired he was, how every part of him ached. He looked back into the dark canvas cave, thought, you better get some sleep. Tomorrow, if we’re lucky, we can get the hell out of here, regroup, wait for those damned generals to figure out what we’re supposed to do next. But we weren’t lucky today. Today, Rommel kicked us in the ass.
2. ROMMEL
THE LIBYAN DESERT
MAY 29, 1942
H e had been out front again, his command truck careening in and around the storm of dust and debris. The panzer divisions had staggered the British throughout most of the fight, but it was far from decided.
Rommel’s command vehicle was a British “Mammoth,” a huge, lumbering hulk captured in one of the many fights the preceding year. He rode up on top, high above anyone else, sat on the hard metal with his feet hanging down through an open hatch. The driver knew to push the fat truck right into the dust, that Rommel would not be satisfied until he could see it for himself, tank against tank, and if that meant he must direct the fight from the front lines, then that’s where he would go.
The truck was a communication center, alive with crew and equipment designed to maintain some control of the battle around him. But the radios only brought confusion, coded messages that might require long wasted minutes to translate, or worse, voices speaking “in the clear,” using no code at all, panicked men whose reports were a waste of time, since the enemy could hear them as well. His decisions were based on what he saw, not what he heard, and he would not rely on some bloodied tank officer to guide a fight from the blind hole of one tank. With so many tanks and armored gun carriers swirling around each other, a man whose survival depended on perfect control of one gun had better things to do.