Long before this, Stirling had shown how vulnerable to attack the enemy supply system was. But first he had had to overcome two massive, ancient, faceless obstacles: the Sahara and British Army HQ. Of the two, the army proved harder to beat.
Stirling’s sin was that he was proposing an irregular operation, led by himself; and he was only a second-lieutenant at the time. By instinct the staff at Middle East HQ, Cairo, rejected irregularity of any kind. They had been trained to fight orthodox battles on battlefields: find the enemy and biff him where it hurts, before he can biff you. That’s what it came down to. They didn’t like cocky young subalterns with nil experience who proposed to poach the best men from the best regiments and then swan off up the blue where they could run their own show, all togged up like the chorus from The Desert Song, no doubt. It was flashy and it was fun to go and play cowboys behind enemy lines, but it didn’t win wars. If you allowed one freelance operation, soon everybody would want to do it. “I blame that bugger Lawrence,” a major-general said. “He started this irregular carry-on. Very irregular, according to his version. Personally, if I got deflowered by a fat Turk the last thing I’d do is write a damn great thick book about it . . . Who is this fellow Stirling anyway? What’s his game?”
Stirling won. He went to the top, or as near the top as he could reach. Being six foot five he was never inconspicuous; what’s more he was on crutches, the result of an accident in parachute training which had badly damaged his back and temporarily paralyzed his legs. Nevertheless, he bluffed his way into Middle East HQ without a pass, and before he got caught and thrown out he had managed to talk to General Ritchie, who was deputy to the Commander-in-Chief, General Auchinleck. It says much for Ritchie’s and Auchinleck’s intelligence and imagination that they recognized a good idea even when it was presented by a crippled subaltern. Stirling got permission to recruit sixty-six men and form a detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade, which did not exist but the title might persuade the Germans that it did.
The first SAS raid went in by parachute, at night, and was a disaster. The aircraft met gales and rain, the parachutists fell into a sandstorm, some were killed or injured, some simply vanished. Of sixty men dropped, twenty-two survived. No damage was done to the enemy. The survivors were brought out by a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group.
Parachuting wasn’t the way to deliver the SAS. But if the LRDG could bring them out, Stirling reckoned it could also take them in.
The job of the LRDG was to patrol deep behind enemy lines and collect information. They could take their trucks across five hundred miles of empty sands and arrive within two hundred yards of their planned destination, even if it was just a cross on the map. Which it often was.
In December 1941 the LRDG escorted three small SAS patrols to within walking distance of several German airfields near Benghazi. Some fields were empty but others were not. Twenty-four aircraft were destroyed at Tamit, thirty-seven at Agedabia. The next night, Stirling’s men went back to Tamit, found some replacement aircraft standing there and destroyed those too. Elsewhere, much enemy transport got blown up. The patrols marched back into the desert, rendezvoused with the LRDG, went home to Cairo.
Stirling had found the formula for success: small patrols of very physically fit, highly-trained men, completely self-contained, able to arrive from nowhere, create total havoc in the night and vanish the way they came. The SAS grew rapidly and raided ceaselessly. Eventually it trained its own navigators and became independent of the LRDG. The SAS was more than a thorn in Rommel’s side: it was several thorns. They didn’t always draw blood. Some patrols got badly knocked about, but that was the price of audacity. If, as Lampard’s raid on Barce showed, you could wipe out a fighter squadron at the cost of two lives, in the crude arithmetic of war that was damn good value.
* * *
Lampard found a signals lieutenant called Sandiman and a trooper called Peck to replace Waterman and Harris. There was no shortage of volunteers to join the SAS, and both men had seen a lot of fighting in the desert, but Lampard wanted to be sure they had the strength—physical and moral—to survive the extreme tests that SAS raiding would impose.
He called the patrol together and began training. At first they marched across the desert near Cairo with heavy loads. They covered ten or twelve miles, did some weapons-firing, marched another five miles, made a dummy raid on an imaginary airfield, then five more miles and met the truck that took them back to a shower, a meal, a bed. Soon he extended the daily distance and cut down the water ration. Peck and Sandiman kept up with the others.
“Are they good enough?” Lampard asked Lieutenant Dunn.
They were sitting in cane long-chairs outside Lampard’s tent. It had been a roasting day and Dunn’s aching feet were hugely grateful to be at rest. “They haven’t cracked up, cocked up or thrown up,” he said. “What more d’you want?”
“I want to see them drink their own blood.”
Dunn thought about it. “When they’ve done that,” he said, “should they go on and drink yours too?”
“Yes. Provided they ask permission first. I keep wishing I’d shot that German, you know. That chap Schramm. Shot him before he had a chance to escape.”
Dunn was accustomed to Lampard’s abrupt changes of topic. He leaned back and waited.
“Not dead,” Lampard said. “Too valuable for that. But I should have shot him in the leg, so he couldn’t run.”
“Water under the bridge, Jack. Besides, it’s not as if he got away with any secrets. We didn’t tell him anything.”
“Let’s go back and bump him off.”
“Tonight?”
Lampard looked him straight in the eyes and held the stare until Dunn had to blink. “No, not tonight.” he said.
“Good.” Dunn was pleasantly drowsy. “Not tomorrow night either, if you don’t mind, Jack. I’m taking my popsy to the flicks.” He let his eyes shut. “It’s Snow White. Utterly terrifying. She holds my hand during the worst bits.”
Lampard left him dozing and went off to make some telephone calls. When he got back, Dunn was very awake and talking to Gibbon, the navigator. “Corky’s got a gong!” Dunn announced. “He’s got an MC for . . . What’s it for, Corky?”
“Usual shit,” Gibbon said. “Stealing pencils, not getting caught.” They knew he was pleased because he looked gloomier than ever.
“Maybe Major Schramm put in a word for you,” Lampard said.
“Bugger Schramm! He was only guessing,” Dunn said. “We’re all going to have a drink or seventeen, to celebrate. The whole patrol! You coming?”
“I’ve got to go to a conference first. Hold out your hand.” Lampard scribbled on Dunn’s palm in indelible pencil. “Call me at this number and I’ll join you after, say, 2100 hours.”
An hour later he was being let in to the penthouse flat of Mrs. Joan d’Armytage. This was the third time they had met and he was impressed by her smallness. The previous times they had met at Groppi’s, where she had been seated and it was crowded. Now, in all this spaciousness, she seemed doll-like. And yet she was a very grown-up doll: a lot of womanliness was packed into that little figure. She wore a black dress, sleeveless, simple. They shook hands. Lampard was afraid to squeeze, so he compensated by taking her hand in both of his. She added her other hand to the clasp. Lampard experienced a sudden tightening in his throat.
They went onto the balcony and drank cocktails. “Very Noel Coward,” he said. “What is this drink called?”
“It’s a sidecar. Brandy, Cointreau, lemon juice. Quite drunk-making.”
He looked down at the street. The traffic was fighting its usual civil war. “God, isn’t Cairo loud!” he said.
She nodded, and looked at the early stars.
“You’d think they’d get fed up with shouting at each other,” he said. “Arab mentality, I suppose.”
She said Mmm as she worked on her drink.
“Still, I expect they think we’re pretty peculiar too,” he said.
The sidecars had come from a cocktail shaker. She gave it a flourish, and the ice cubes chattered. “Look,” she said, “we don’t need to go through all that junk again, do we?” It was a statement, not a question, and a pretty brisk statement at that. Lampard said: “Um . . .” She poured more drinks, and did it with a snappy action that suggested impatience. “The first time we met you were kind enough to tell me how Desmond got killed, frightfully brave, trying to save somebody else and so on, and you produced the large masculine handkerchief as required.”
“Never got it back, though.”
“You will. Second time, we talked about Desmond a bit, London a bit more and Cairo a lot. A hell of a lot. Good. I’m not complaining, but we’ve done that. Haven’t we?”
Lampard pressed the chilled glass against his chin.
Thirty miles his patrol had marched since dawn that day, on a bottle of water: a ration which the British Army considered fatal, and yet everyone had survived. Tongues like raffia place-mats, maybe, but they survived. Now he had inside him this thrilling drink, which made him feel as happy as he’d felt since he’d strolled about the hangar at Barce, leaving bombs like clues in a treasure hunt, and here was the startling Mrs. Joan d’Armytage looking at him with one eyebrow cocked and half a smile. It made him feel small, that look of hers. A porcelain doll, yet she made him feel small. Amazing. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Oh, stop being so bloody English. I’m widowed and you might be dead next week. Why apologize? It’s such a waste of energy.” She turned and went inside.
Lampard counted to ten and followed her. She was standing in a dark corner, looking at gramophone records. “Anyway, you’re not a bit sorry,” she said, “so why lie? I hate this tune.” She smashed a record against a table, casually. “Desmond’s favorite,” she said. “Now it’s in as many bits as he is.”
“Don’t get mad at Desmond,” Lampard said. “It’s not his fault he’s dead.”
“I’ll be mad with anyone I want to,” she said calmly. “You really are utterly useless, aren’t you? You can’t be relied upon to do the simplest thing.” She left her gramophone records and walked over to him. She took his hands in each of hers and raised them to her shoulders. She slipped his fingers beneath the straps of her dress. “Up,” she said. She raised her arms as he raised his. The dress came off as easily as shelling peas. Easier. Underneath was nothing but skin. “Well, it’s a hot climate,” he said. “Have you a coat hanger?”
“I do,” she said, “but if you have a cock I think that might fit better.” He looked shocked. She looked pleased. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.
* * *
The water-tanker and its escort failed to meet the rest of the column at the rendezvous.
It was late afternoon before the column arrived at the map reference point, exactly one hundred kilometers south of the Jalo Gap, and found nothing but empty serir. The map had promised vast areas of serir, an Arab word meaning a flat gravel plain, and it was right. To the horizon in any direction no stone was bigger than an egg.
The surface made for fast, accurate driving, and on the way south Major Jakowski had taken the opportunity to hold a couple of training exercises.
“Suppose we were to meet an enemy force, here and now,” he said when they stopped for the midday meal. “What would we do?”
“Depends on its size, sir,” Captain Rinkart said.
“Ten vehicles. No armored cars.”
“So they are almost certainly not going to attack us. I would approach them and find out if they out-gun us.”
Jakowski was disappointed: Rinkart sounded awfully cautious. “Look: you’re strong enough to surround them and hit them from all sides at once,” he said. “While you’re thinking it over, they’re escaping.” He turned to Captain Lessing. “Aren’t they?”
“Yes, if they possibly can. However, if we make them stand and fight they might be carrying light howitzers in their trucks. Say, six shells a minute from up to five or six kilometers. Just imagine, sir.” Lessing shook his head. “They might even hit you.”
“No artillery,” Jakowski ruled.
“Well, there’s still the possibility of heavy-caliber machine guns,” Rinkart said. “I hear they’ve got twin point-five-inch Vickers on their trucks. RAF surplus. The Vickers is a brute of a gun. It can blow a truck to bits at three thousand meters. It’s still lethal at four or five thousand. Six, maybe.”
“That’s that, then,” Jakowski said. “Let’s all turn round and hurry home.”
“No, sir,” Lessing said. “Let’s call in the Stukas.”
Jakowski shook his head. “Radio silence. I made that clear before we left. We’ll never catch the enemy if we keep telling him where we are.”
Lessing thought: But if we’ve found him he knows where we are, you dummy.
“All right,” Jakowski said. “All right. No doubt the options will clarify themselves under the pressure of actual combat. Meanwhile you, Rinkart, take three fast trucks and disappear and make some mock attacks on the main column. Lessing, put a lookout on every truck. The men are dozy. They think because this desert’s empty it’s safe. Well, it’s not empty and it’s extremely dangerous.”
Rinkart cheated. He took six trucks, split them into pairs and came at the column from three different directions, sometimes breaking off and retreating, sometimes running parallel, sometimes racing in and aiming a burst of machine-gun fire high above the column. It enlivened the afternoon and it pleased Major Jakowski. Thus he was not too upset when his navigator told him they had reached the rendezvous and no water-tanker was waiting. “I expect they had a puncture, sir,” one of the lieutenants said. Jakowski ordered a truck to be placed with its headlights aimed at Jalo, as a beacon for the missing drivers. By dawn the truck’s batteries were flat and nobody had arrived. By midday Jakowski was worried, angry and impatient; but mainly impatient. “Can’t wait any longer,” he growled, and left a sergeant and two men with two trucks at the rendezvous. As soon as the water-tanker turned up, they were all to chase after the main column, damn fast. Meanwhile water rations were cut by a third.
* * *
Before the war, Skull was a junior don at Cambridge, teaching the history of the Protestant sects in Tudor England. Often he challenged the accepted version of events. As he said in his lectures, the truth was always the truth, no matter what men preferred to think.
When war came and Skull was rapidly commissioned into the RAF as an intelligence officer, he brought his awkward Cambridge interest in the truth with him. It often upset people. Even in the RAF there were men, quite high-ranking men, who grew quite indignant when foreign journalists questioned the official figures for enemy aircraft destroyed. Skull was present when an air marshal said to some skeptical war correspondents: “If you think so little of our claims, why don’t you go to Berlin and check theirs? The Luftwaffe’s scores are absolutely preposterous!”
“With respect, sir,” Skull said, “what the Luftwaffe claims is beside the point. Proving them wrong doesn’t prove us right.”
“Wait outside, Skelton,” the air marshal said stonily. When the journalists had left, still unconvinced, he recalled the intelligence officer and blasted him for his interfering stupidity. Skull was unmoved. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, sir,” he said. “But if we believe our own lies we deceive ourselves and, by so doing, we aid the enemy. Surely that’s self-evident.”
“Don’t preach to me, flight lieutenant.”
Skull twitched his nose so that his spectacles bounced. “Preaching assumes moral alternatives, sir. War allows us no such choice. We cannot award a fighter pilot his kill just because we feel he deserves it. The truth—”
“Get out,” the air marshal rasped. “Stay out. I never want to see you again.”
That was shortly after Dunkirk. Later, Skull upset more people and got posted out of Fighter Command; made enemies in Bomber Command, and was eventually posted to Egypt. When his Uncle Stanley heard
where he was going he gave Skull his old rowing blazer. “Just the thing for the desert,” he said. “Don’t suppose I shall need it again. Holidays thing of the past for us. Lucky you.”
As it happened the old buffer was right. His blazer was a size too large for Skull, and its stripes of dove gray, pillar-box red and royal blue, with gold piping, had faded to soft pastel shades, but its cool looseness was just the thing for the desert. Skull wore it with a pair of corduroy bags bought in Cairo, and he carried an old golf umbrella that doubled as a shooting-stick, which he’d found in a flea market.
Dressed like this, he was walking around LG 181, examining the Tomahawks one by one. A senior flight sergeant went with him.
The adjutant saw this little parade every time he looked up from his desk in the orderly room. Eventually he gave in to his curiosity. Intelligence officers did not usually go about in the heat of the day, scrutinizing the undersides of airplanes. Kellaway put his cap on.
“This one looks as if it’s been flown through a barbed-wire fence,” Skull said to the flight sergeant. He ran his fingers over a rash of patches that spattered the fighter’s belly. “Several fences . . . Who’s is it?”
“The CO’s, sir.” The flight sergeant pointed at the letters F.B. on the fuselage. It was the squadron commander’s privilege to have his initials on his aircraft.
A Good Clean Fight Page 21