Infantry now. They had debussed en masse at last and were advancing behind the metal hulls of the tanks.
‘Incoming!’ someone – Parker perhaps – yelled in English, and Willan heard the distinctive plopping sound of mortar rounds. They must have set their vehicle-mounted mortars up somewhere in the rear. Quick work.
The world exploded, becoming a fountain of muck and earth. The enemy mortarmen walked the rounds up the hill right through the position. Willan wiped dirt from his eyes, spat out mud, and tried to see what was going on.
The SF machine-guns were silent – they had taken a direct hit. The hillside was beginning to resemble a vision of the Somme. Some of the men were running from their trenches in panic, only to be blown apart by a fresh barrage of mortar shells. The tanks were still advancing.
‘Fuck,’ Willan growled. He squeezed the handset, and said, ‘Bravo call-signs, this is Zero. Send sitrep. Over.’
After a moment, he recognized Hill’s voice crackling back through the earpiece. It was almost impossible to hear over the thunderous roar of the battle.
‘Bravo One, we have tanks advancing to our front, maybe one zero zero metres away. We are down to four rounds. Request permission to bug out. Over.’
‘Fuck,’ Willan said again, in a whisper this time. This was where being a CO really sucked.
‘Roger, Bravo One. Permission denied. Hold your ground. I say again, hold your position at all costs. Over.’
‘Roger, out.’
‘Zero, this is Bravo Two. Overheard your last and will comply. Over,’ Gordon’s voice said, over on the right.
‘Roger, out,’ Willan told him. He felt like a murderer.
But he was positive that the momentum of the attack could not be kept up for long. The enemy formation had taken dreadful punishment, and couldn’t know how close its foes were to breaking. If he could only get the battalion to hang on for a little longer, he was sure that he could outbluff the enemy commander. A few more minutes.
He knew that what he was doing was right, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
Colonel Kasese was hoarse with shouting over the tank radio. He wanted to go forward, to find out what was happening, but that would be to invite his own destruction. Instead he was demanding situation reports from his officers at the head of the column, and getting nothing but garbled, panic-stricken shouting in return. All he knew was that the enemy were dug in ahead in unknown strength, with plenty of anti-tank weapons, and that they had already taken out almost a third of his tanks. He had called forward the 120mm vehicle-mounted mortars, but there was little else he could do except order his crews to advance and hope they would overrun whoever was making the stand up ahead.
Inconceivable! That an entire armoured regiment might be brought to a halt and roundly thrashed by a motley bunch of militias scraped up at the last minute. No, there was more to this than met the eye.
But that was for later. For now, he had to destroy the enemy, to drive him back into the river. He kicked his driver’s shoulder and told him to move forward, his impatience and outrage finally getting the better of him. The tank roared towards the inferno of wrecks and explosions and vehicles that was the head of the column.
He could glimpse men running through the flames and the smoke: his own infantry and the surviving tank crews pelting to safety. His tank shuddered with the impact as his driver shunted a wrecked vehicle out of his way, off the road.
Other tanks were retreating. The sighting system on the T-55 was so primitive that the vehicle had to slow to a crawl or halt altogether every time it fired. These tanks were falling back and firing while still at full speed. Kasese thumped his viewfinder in fury. Cowards!
Two troops raced past him in the wrong direction. Many of the tanks had the figures of men clinging to them. Others had sustained minor hits and were leaking clouds of black smoke. He saw one explode as he watched, the main gun blown fifty feet up in the air.
‘Cease retreating!’ he yelled over the radio. ‘All troops will cease retreating at once and resume the advance on the enemy position!’
It was no use; nothing but static came back by way of reply.
The tank rocked with a near miss; the enemy was ranging in on him now – the only vehicle not in retreat.
Kasese kicked out at the back of his driver’s head.
‘Get us out of here!’ he ordered in a voice strangled by shame and fury.
The driver complied gladly, shoving the tank into reverse and then yanking viciously round on the steering sticks so that one track locked and the other spun madly. The heavy vehicle turned 180 degrees almost on its own axis, then roared off at full speed. Kasese cranked the turret round to look back at the receding enemy position. It was pock-marked with craters and overhung with smoke. A battalion position, at least, with anti-tank weapons deployed on the flanks to make a killing-ground of the road his tanks had moved up. The carcasses of his vehicles littered the battlefield. Over a dozen, if not more.
Even as his tank lurched and bounced under him, carrying him out of range, he was making plans for the next attack. They would regroup, reorganize and try again. He would destroy these Tanzanians whatever the cost.
‘They’re pulling back,’ Willan said, squinting through the failing light and the endless rain. ‘I don’t believe it.’
A wave of relief and elation washed over him. They had actually halted an armoured regiment in its tracks and then sent it into headlong retreat. He felt like cheering.
‘Zero, this is Bravo One. Over.’ It was Hill, out on the left with the RPG detachment.
‘Send. Over.’
‘Bravo One. Last enemy vehicle eliminated five zero metres from our location, no ammo left. Trousers all brown. Over.’
Willan chuckled. Hill had made it, thank God.
‘Roger, Bravo One. Fucking good work. Out to you. All call-signs, reorg. I repeat, reorg, and hold your positions. Out.’
There was still some desultory fire from the enemy infantry, but launching another attack seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds. And besides, it was getting dark, and he was almost sure the Ugandan Army had bugger-all in the way of night-sights.
Willan spoke into his mud-slimed handset again. Now that the battle was over for the moment, he felt like an old man, and had begun to realize how filthy, uncomfortable and hungry he was.
‘All Sunrays, this is Zero. Make tracks to my location ASAP. Out.’
It took only a few minutes for the ‘Sunrays’ or unit commanders to rendezvous in Willan’s trench, though it meant displacing Myebe and the two runners. The men looked utterly spent in the light of the brief African twilight, the rain trickling down their filthy faces.
‘All right, lads,’ Willan said quietly. ‘This has to be quick; I want sitreps.’
Geary began.
‘Eleven dead, fourteen wounded. We’re down to three mags per man. No RPG rounds left.’
‘Parker and the SFs?’ Willan asked.
‘He’s dead, Sarge. One of the SF trenches took a direct hit. We’ve maybe five hundred rounds left for the other one.’
There was a silence. Parker had been a good bloke. They had all known him a long time, and knew his wife too.
‘All right,’ Willan said at last. ‘Okello?’
The Ugandan exile squinted at a notebook in the dim light, wiping rain off the pages.
‘Nine dead, seven wounded. About two mags per man – nothing else.’
‘Fraser?’ Willan asked the Scot, who had commanded the reserve company.
‘No casualties, Sarge, but about a dozen of the blokes legged it during the scrap. It was too much for them, I suppose. We’ve still got about five mags per man.’
Willan looked grim, but made no comment. ‘Hill and Gordon?’
Hill spoke up first. ‘Two dead, no wounded. We lost an RPG and we’ve fuck-all ammo left.’
Gordon had an almost identical story to tell. When he had finished, Willan shone a small red penlight down
on to the notebook he had been keeping track in.
‘So we’re down to about three hundred and fifty effectives, we’re critically low on ammo and rations and we have no anti-tank capability worth speaking of.’
‘Apart from that everything’s just hunky-dory,’ Fraser said sardonically.
‘Any idea of how badly we hurt the enemy? Willy?’
Geary smiled. ‘I think it’s fair to say we fucked up his entire day, Sarge. I reckon we took out thirteen tanks and most of their crews, plus a shitload of infantry and a few armoured personnel carriers. I’d say we gave him one hell of a bloody nose.’
‘But will he be back for more? Okello, what do you think?’
Okello’s dark face was almost invisible.
‘The commander of that regiment will have to take this position or he will answer for it with his own head. Yes, they will attack again, though they will do it differently next time, I think.’
‘You think he’ll start feeling for our flanks.’
‘Yes. It is what I would do.’
Willan nodded. ‘That settles it then. We’ve beaten him once, but we can’t do so again. The position has become untenable. We’re pulling out of this location tonight, under cover of darkness. We’ll try and take what equipment we can with us, and the wounded, of course.’
‘It’s over six miles to the Kagera,’ Geary pointed out.
‘I know. So this will have to go smoothly and quietly. Rear units first. Okello, Willy, I want you both to leave two sections apiece until the very end to counter any probes or recces the enemy feel like doing. Hill, take over the remaining SF. Jock, I want you and your men to set up a couple of miles down the road and let everyone else filter through. You’ll be the rearguard once Okello and Willy’s men finally bug out.’
‘There’s still a hell of a lot of Elsies buried to our front,’ Jock Fraser pointed out. ‘Their infantry never advanced far enough to set them off. It’ll slow them down if they try any monkey business during the night.’
‘I know. If he does try anything before dawn, it’ll be with infantry. T-55s are fuck-all use in the dark. We’ll move the wounded first, two men carrying each casualty. Gag them – we can’t afford any unnecessary noise. Next will be the heavier equipment. Hill, you get the remaining SF to Jock’s company and join him in the rearguard. The surviving RPGs will join you too.’
‘Timings?’ Geary asked.
‘I’ll figure them out and send them to you by runner. In the meantime, get your units prepared to move. Willy, Okello, keep a sharp lookout to your front in case they try something silly like a night assault. Any questions?’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ Geary said. ‘What about Morgan and Kigoma and the other two companies?’
‘We should meet them on the road if they’re anywhere near getting here yet. There are three trucks still in Kyaka; we’ll use those to take the wounded south to the hospital at Kemondo.’
‘Where do we take up our next position?’ Okello asked.
‘On the southern bank of the Kagera. We have to cross the Kagera bridge, and then we have to hold it.’
‘For how long?’ Hill asked.
‘For as long as it takes.’
‘I knew it,’ Fraser said with a wry grin. ‘We’re in a John Wayne film. I had my suspicions before, but now I’m sure of it.’
‘All right, lads, let’s get to it,’ said Willan. ‘I’ll forward the timings to you as soon as I can.’
The night passed quietly. A few tanks were still burning, making orange bonfires in the darkness, and from time to time one of the wounded could be heard moaning, but otherwise there was no sound but for the night insects and the occasional roar of a lion, off in the bush. Later in the evening a pack of hyenas prowled the battlefield like a bunch of ghouls, foraging among the corpses. However, a burst of fire from an alert sentry saw them off.
Around midnight it stopped raining and when the men looked up they could see the clouds clearing a little, stars peeping down out of a blue-black sky. By that time the withdrawal was well under way.
It did not go quite to plan. In the darkness it was easy for the men to lose their sense of direction, and those bearing the wounded made agonizingly slow progress. By the early hours the battalion position was empty but for the four holding sections of Okello and Geary, but the line of weary, burdened and wounded men trailed for half a mile to the south with their NCOs and the remaining SBS men constantly redirecting the lost and the exhausted. Some men sat down and slept, so weary were they, and the NCOs had to kick and shove them awake, make them move again. All organization was lost in the confusion of the lightless retreat, and platoons and companies merged into a single trudging crocodile of tired men.
Once they were over the brow of the hill, and in dead ground, the SBS men shone red pencil torches to show the way to go, and the long column tightened up somewhat. But they were losing people all the same. Soldiers who had had enough dropped out to snatch some precious sleep. Men too enervated to go any further abandoned their weapons and equipment to lighten their load and stumbled on unarmed. It was impossible to exert control silently, in darkness, over men who had simply given up.
Finally they were far enough away for Fraser to deploy his company as rearguard. The last of Okello and Geary’s men had left the position and they were a mere four miles from the bridge across the Kagera. But Fraser’s company of green recruits seemed to have melted away into the night. He could muster barely sixty men when he stopped to redeploy around two a.m. There was nothing to do but to keep following the plan. He made his remaining soldiers dig shell-scrapes, though some of the younger men, still teenagers, were almost weeping with tiredness. Then he settled down to wait. Hill stayed with him, manning the last SF gun with a few volunteers. The rest of the battalion continued to trek south towards their objective.
The sun was coming up. Already the sky was light in the east. From his position on a low hill to the west of the road, Willan could see the Kagera glinting in the first rays of the dawn sunlight. A mile away perhaps. The Kyaka road was empty in the morning sun, the bridge over the river deserted.
He looked down into the shallow valley below him. Now that there was light to see, the NCOs were trying to gather together the scattered remnants of the battalion. The withdrawal, Willan thought bitterly, had cost him more men than the actual battle; but that was a fact of military life. Sometimes victory was as disruptive as defeat.
He tried to count numbers on the ground but gave up. There were a lot less than there should be at any rate. Holding the bridge would be no easy task if the enemy were as belligerent as they had proved themselves the day before.
He looked up at the clearing sky. It was a blessed relief, the absence of rain, but it had a dark side too. Now the Ugandan Air Force would be able to take to the air, and at the moment his men were sitting ducks.
He peered south again, to the muddy Kyaka road. Where the hell were Morgan and Kigoma, and the three hundred men who were with them? He needed them now, needed them badly.
Then he heard it. The crump of heavy guns to the north and the sudden rattle of automatic fire. Fraser’s rearguard was under attack.
11
The Ugandan Army advanced as soon as the sun began to rise. Colonel Kasese rested his elbows on the turret hatch of his tank and studied the terrain before him through binoculars. It had taken most of the night to reorganize his forces, look after his wounded and put the finishing touches to his new plan.
While two troops of his tanks stood off less than a mile from the enemy front line and bombarded it with high-explosive shells, his infantry led this fresh attack, debussing from their armoured personel carriers a hundred yards short of the enemy position and then darting forward by fire teams and sections, crouching behind the hulks of tanks, taking advantage of every increment of cover.
At the same time most of his remaining tanks, supported by more infantry, had moved out on either side of the road and were feeling round the flanks of the enemy def
ences. This way the Tanzanians would be assaulted from three sides at once.
The explosions of the tank bombardment ripped the quiet of the early morning apart. Then the infantry moved forward and the bombardment crept up the hill, tearing the ground to shreds for the second time in two days. Kasese thought the enemy had been strangely quiet up until now. He scanned with his binos and saw his infantry hit the ground and fire up the hill. Several of his men were writhing on the ground and there were three smoking craters among them, then other small eruptions of dirt among their ranks as they moved forward. Mortars? No. Mines, of course.
He spoke into his hand mike.
‘Songezi Company, hold your ground. Do not advance further – you are in a minefield. Over.’
He received a brief acknowledgement. The infantry went to ground among the barbed wire of the first enemy positions. A few moments later T-55s were swarming all over the enemy trenches. They had turned the enemy flanks, crashing through the thick brush on either side of the road. But something was not quite right. Kasese studied the battlefield intently, suspicion growing into certainty.
He thumped his fist down on the steel roof of the turret. Of course – the position was empty! The Tanzanians must have withdrawn during the night!
He began giving fresh orders over the radio. They were brief and simple. He watched as the tanks on the hillside acted on them immediately, turning on to the road and heading south. He ordered his infantry to mount up and follow the armour. Then he leapt off the tank and ran through the deep mud towards the communications truck farther back in the column. He needed a long-range radio, one that would reach as far as Entebbe. Allah be praised for the clear weather!
Half an hour after Fraser’s men had heard the sound of the heavy guns in the distance, they saw the lead elements of the Ugandans moving up the road towards them. Jock had precisely eight rounds of ammunition left for the RPGs and was hefting one of the slim anti-tank weapons himself. Every round must count. He knew from Willan that the rest of the battalion were almost at the river but had still not crossed. Every minute that he could delay the enemy advance, therefore, would be a minute gained for the rest of the battalion to use in getting to safety.
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