by Jana Petken
It took twenty long strides to run up the gentle rise. Max looked down on the bunkers on the other side, some twenty metres from where he was, but then he craned his neck to look up at the sky as the shrieking whistle of a bomb descending from an unseen bomber behind the clouds of smoke grew louder and louder.
Move? Stay? his mind screamed. He made for the lip of the ridge with the throng of men looking for cover and was about to go over the edge when an earth-shattering explosion impacted with the lower ground behind him and took his legs from under him. Max fell with the blast wave and rolled down the hill like an Easter egg.
At the bottom, he was kicked in the face by a man’s boot, then two other soldiers landed on top of him, crushing the air from his lungs and provoking a sharp pain in his side.
Conscious but dazed, the men eventually got off Max. All around him, men were bloodied from numerous gashes and cuts. An outstretched hand grabbed Max’s arm and pulled him to his feet.
“Herr Leutnant, what do we do?” the young Schütze yelled.
Max gazed through blurred eyes at the boy’s red face. The whole world appeared to be lit up in an orange glow reflected off burning vehicles. Blood was still running into the Schütze’s left eye from a gash showing his eyebrow bone, but he was oblivious to it. “Get to your bunker, Schütze. Find your squad and get your eye seen to,” Max said.
The boy started to move off but then fell unconscious at Max’s feet. Overhead, Spitfires were diving towards Max, appearing as though they were personally targeting him. He bent down, gripped the boy under the arms, and then flung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
The low-flying Spitfire was spraying bullets in a straight line about twenty-five metres to Max’s right-hand side. Men, being picked off and falling as they ran towards a bunker further along the line, didn’t stand a chance of evading the flying monster coming in low enough to show the teeth painted on its nose. And above, the sky was no longer black but red, and covered with a blanket of grey smoke clouds enshrouding the moon and stars that had been so bright an hour earlier.
Max, with nowhere to hide except for the closest bunker situated ahead and to his left, stumbled on with the Schütze slung over his shoulder and himself groaning in agony with every step he took. I’ve broken a rib, he thought, as he staggered like a drunken man. At least one.
At last, Max and the unconscious soldier reached the trench leading to the bunker whose roof was about three feet above ground. At the bottom of the crowded narrow channel by the entrance, Max heard a man say, “I’ll take him, Herr Leutnant.” Max couldn’t see the person who’d spoken through the smoke that cloaked the area, and he staggered in a circle as the voice repeated, “I’ve got him, sir.”
“Good. Look after him,” Max said, dropping his burden as gently as he could.
Max, still in pain, but now relieved of the painful weight, pushed his way inside. As he’d suspected by the number of men wearing red crosses on their sleeves, this bunker was a makeshift hospital. He turned and made his way outside again to a world on fire.
Outside, much of the noise had abated, and men were scrambling to organise defensive positions again. The bombs and bullets had stopped falling, but the RAF were probably getting ready for their second pass; the next of many more air attacks to come throughout the night. Max’s body shuddered with relief, and in the respite, he headed to the next bunker along.
The massive underground keep was full of men, weapons, supplies, and crates of ammunition. Soldiers seeking shelter against the back wall ignored him and carried on readying their rifles and machine guns by going through boxes of bullets and filling machine-gun belts. They look as terrified as any sane man would, Max thought, including himself in that analogy.
“Herr Leutnant – Herr Leutnant, are we moving out?” a man with a bandage on his head asked Max, who was looking for their operations centre.
“Wait for your orders, Gefreiter,” Max answered tersely and walked outside.
Max struck gold in the next bunker. It stood to reason as soon as the bombs started falling, the German Command would hold some sort of top-brass briefing, despite the confusion outside. Soldiers were being strafed by aircraft machine gunners and blown up by bombers, their transport and communication lines were probably down already, and staff officers commanding tens of thousands of men would want orders from the top of the chain.
With an officious stride, Max entered a room chock-full with officers and NCOs. He remained unobtrusively behind the pack and near the bunker’s entrance where a wall of sand dust obscured the fires outside. A heated debate, as fiery as the air raid itself, was taking place. At first, the men spoke in raised voices, but then they began shouting at one another as a new wave of bomb attacks shook the walls and ceiling and filled the place with even more clouds of dust, smoke, and falling debris.
A fierce argument broke out between three officers, including the one who seemed to be heading the briefing. Max recognised the commander from MI6 photographs. He was Colonel General von Arnim. If he is here at Mareth, is it probable that Rommel is not?
The debate centred around whether the 1st Army should withdraw immediately to Wadi Akarit or try to hold on for the 15th Panzer Group’s counter-attack, which would give them cover to slip away later. The general was opting for the first option, but the other officers were trying to overrule him.
Max, listening intently under the noise of the new air attack, learnt that a radio communication had gone out to their reserve divisions before the lines had been cut. He also found out where the 15th Panzer Group were positioned, that the 1st Army had little air support left, and that their heavy weapons, along with the bulk of their transport vehicles, had been destroyed. Then, the jewel in Montgomery’s crown came during a yelling match; the crux of the matter was that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was no longer in North Africa and had returned to Germany.
Max checked his wristwatch and exited the bunker. Time was up, and as he’d predicted, he’d learnt nothing he deemed new, apart from the information that Rommel was not in Tunisia. Satisfied that would appease Colonel Jenkins, who would scurry like a rat to Montgomery with the exciting news, Max decided to get the hell out of there.
Chaos, destruction, and pain met Max when he returned to the plain behind the ridge. With careful steps, he made his way through the encampment that had housed thousands of men before the first air attack began. It now looked like a massive vehicle graveyard on fire. Soldiers were valiantly trying to douse the flames with buckets of sand and collecting ammunition crates that hadn’t been blown up. Smoke, looking like giant grey shadows rising from the earth, filled the sky to the north, east, and west of the Mareth Line where the bombers were now targeting. Piles of rocks that had spewed from the ground like geysers littered the area pitted with craters and dead bodies still burning.
Half-blinded by dirty smog that stung his eyes and fighting against excruciating, breath-stealing pain in his chest and side, Max hobbled on in a south-westerly direction towards the rendezvous point. As he zigzagged in and out of the lines of destroyed vehicles and injured men, he was struck by a horrible thought: I hope my Wilmot isn’t here. I feel sorry for the poor bastards.
Max reached the rendezvous location with ten minutes to spare. His crown was bleeding, his jacket sleeve torn and bloodied, and the pain in his side left him gasping for air. At a row of rocks surrounded by ugly shrubs and a couple of sad-looking, stunted trees with barely a leaf between them, he got on one knee, flashed his torch three times, and received two flashes in return. He groaned as he rose to his feet again but found he couldn’t straighten because of the pain in his ribs. Nonetheless, he advanced, stooped over, to the two well-camouflaged vehicles and the LRDG men manning their sub-machine guns.
Scott came forward and helped Max to one of the Jeeps. “How bad are you, Major?” he asked, frowning with concern.
“It’s my ribs … has Sergeant Winkler returned?” Max panted.
“Yes, and he brought a g
ift for you.”
Max went to the second Jeep. Winkler was standing in front of it, rinsing his blackened face with a handful of water from his canteen. A thick line of drying blood stained his left arm, and he had two cuts on his face; one above the eye and the other on his hairline.
“I think I came out of that better than you did,” he said, taking in Max’s pitiful, bent over appearance.
One of Scott’s men was guarding a terrified-looking German Hauptmann with a deep gash on his left shoulder.
Winkler grinned at Max, then he gestured to the prisoner. “I met this Kraut here on my way out. He was running away so bleedin’ fast, the silly sod nearly overtook me. Are you interested?”
Max regarded the German captain in his early twenties and said, “This is your lucky night, Hauptmann. You’re coming with us.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Wilmot Vogel
The Mareth Line, Tunisia
25 March 1943
For days, Wilmot and the 90th Light Division had been running for their lives under cover of 15th Panzer group fire. The tanks had successfully counterattacked the Allied bridgehead west of Zarat, allowing the remnants of the infantry divisions to reach the Mareth Line, a complex of interconnecting defensive fortifications, but there was nowhere left to go from there.
Wilmot lay on his stomach inside one of the Mareth Line bunkers as the enemy’s fifteen-minute-long air attack continued. His rifle peeked out of a hole in the wall, big enough for his head to get through, but too small to be called a window. In front of him lay a landscape of rocky terrain, and to his west, the Matmata Hills, currently being overrun by the Allied forces. He was half-blinded by white flashes and becoming deafened from the ferocity of the attack. The Royal Air Force’s merciless bombing of the German positions was causing rock formations to explode into the air like massive eruptions of yellow-ochre dust. Tracer fire shot down from the heavens like falling stars, and quick flickering lights in the black sky looked like children’s sparklers. Flash after flash afflicted Willie’s dirt-filled, stinging eyes, and booms, detonations, and the piercing, whistling sound of bombs dropping were making his ears bleed.
He and everyone else in his unit had been hopeful at the beginning of March. After months of retreating, it appeared that Field Marshal Rommel was going to attack. Three German armoured divisions, two light divisions, and nine Italian divisions launched Operation Capri, attacking southward in the direction of Medenine, the northernmost British strong point. The attack was repulsed, however, with massed artillery fire that knocked out fifty-five Axis tanks. And with that defeat, all hope was lost, or so he believed.
Wilmot’s belly rumbled. It was either craving food or swirling with the bitter bile of fear. In the last two days, frequent bouts of nausea had made it impossible for him to eat without throwing up. It had been two days since he’d held solids down; four hours since he’d had his last drink of water.
The soldier behind him sat with his back against the wall, battery torch in one hand, a folded map in the other. He was talking to himself, as he did quite often when he was scared. The short stocky man, as bald as a baby’s bottom, was twenty-two years old, but he held the record in the platoon for not one but three bullet wounds from earlier battles. None had been life-threatening, the medics had declared, but Wilmot had fought for him to be sent home. He was suffering from shell shock and a brain injury that doctors had not diagnosed. At times, he rambled like an idiot. He froze when confronted by danger, which was most of the time, and he asked the most stupid of questions; one being: ‘Are we winning, Willie?’
Wilmot blinked as bursts of white hit his retinas again. Earlier, he’d observed his infantrymen lifting, carrying, and passing around boxes of ammunition to the other shelters, but now, apart from men in gun holes surrounding the bunkers, no one was venturing outside; instead, hundreds were pouring in. He retracted his weapon and stood it against the wall. Bloody stupid idea pointing his rifle at … what? If an enemy soldier came within range, it’d be all over before he got his first shot off.
He slipped his hand into his pocket, then hesitated as Egon, the soldier reading the map, looked up expectantly at him.
“We’re not going to be here much longer, Egon,” Wilmot said taking out a pack of cigarettes. Should I give Egon one or not? He had two left with no expectation of getting any more.
“I know, Willie. Are we winning?”
Wilmot, a staff sergeant, had told his men to address him by his Christian name when they were out of earshot of the officers. It didn’t matter to him what he was called nowadays. All he and his unit had done in the past four months was flee westwards, through Libya and into Tunisia like a gang of bungling fugitives being chased by the British and Americans and the rest of the bloody world combined. The men respected him; that was what mattered the most.
“Schütze Gier!” Wilmot shouted to one of his men. “Tell our men to move back from the outer wall. No one goes outside, understood?”
“Ja, Feldwebel,” Gier shouted back.
“Come with me to the back,” Wilmot then told Egon.
When the men huddled near the back of the bunker, Wilmot took out his flask and finally took a sip of water to ease his burning throat. He looked at his men and all the other soldiers he didn’t know and saw his fear reflected in their eyes. Apart from random periods during their chaotic retreats, discipline was still important to the men of Army Group Africa, as it was now called. It had changed names many times since Wilmot had joined the desert war – back in February, it had been re-designated as the Italian 1st Army and put under the command of Italian General Giovanni Messe. Rommel had then been placed in command of a new Army Group Africa, created to control both the Italian 1st Army and the 5th Panzer Army. It was at that time that the remnants of the Afrika Korps and surviving units of the 1st Italian Army retreated into Tunisia.
The rank and file didn’t care what grand new titles the higher ranks came up with for their army; they still called it the Afrika Korps. They were hardened veterans and wouldn’t allow themselves to fall into permanent disarray. He laughed to himself. His term, hardened veterans, wasn’t strictly true, for raw recruits, young and old, including some Poles and Czechs, had been arriving even as the army was on the run in what must be the longest retreat in history. Some of them hadn’t even fired their weapons in combat. Shooting a rifle with one’s back to the enemy was a waste of bullets and not easy to do.
The noise of the British bombs and bullets continued to deafen the men, and it was compounded by Allied ground aircraft flying almost at head height and screaming in every fifteen minutes or so to pick off anything that moved with their machine guns. Wilmot put his helmet on. The Mareth Line was untenable, and any minute now, he’d be called to a briefing where he’d receive orders to withdraw immediately from this position.
Wilmot pushed the horrible thought of retreat to the back of his mind, and instead looked again at the packet of cigarettes clutched in his hand. Nazi Party members were a load of hypocrites. The Reich was anti-tobacco. They condemned its consumption and had limited the cigarette rations issued to troops. They’d banned smoking for the common man on buses, trains and trams while they, the upper echelons of the ruling party, enjoyed smoking big fat cigars and turning the air blue with cigarette smoke in their private clubs and restaurants. Who cared whether tobacco was good or bad for people? It was the only luxury he had, and he was more likely to get blown up than develop an illness because of smoking.
“Will you stop staring at me?” Wilmot finally snapped at Egon. “I’ll give you my last cigarette, all right?”
Egon might be daft in the head, but he’s good at looting and might get hold of some more later, Wilmot thought, lighting Egon’s cigarette for him. He liked to pick the pockets of fallen comrades, claiming that his dead German friends wouldn’t mind sharing what they’d left behind. It was an unsavoury practice, but none of the men thought taking from the dead was a sin, and he, as their staff sergeant,
didn’t either. Why should we leave stuff behind for the enemy?
Egon gave Wilmot a virtually toothless grin. He’d lost four of his front teeth a month earlier when he had fallen and hit his mouth against a rock. “You know I’ll share whatever I pick up in the future, Willie. It won’t be long until we get to Tunis. Do you think they’ll let us sleep in real beds?”
As the withering fire of the British army wore them down, the two men enjoyed their final cigarettes in a moment of relative peace. Both heard the blasts, felt the vibrating bangs that hurt their heads, suffered the dust and bits of debris falling from the ceiling and gushing in through the holes in the bunker’s outer walls, but every now and again they got a jolt of optimism, as German anti-aircraft guns fired into the black sky. The men were calm as they puffed away, as though they were watching a movie unfold outside.
“Have you ever read a book called The Alamo?” Wilmot asked Egon.
“No, what’s that?”
“Not what, where. It was an American fort in Texas. The story goes that a handful of men tried for days to hold out against a massive Mexican army.”
“How did that go for them?”
“They all died, but it was the way they fought to the last bullet that got me. The story reminds of me of what we’re going to finish up like … fighting over the last bullet. It’s a good book. You should read it one day.”
“Hmm, ja, I’ll do that, Willie.”
Wilmot had lost his belief in the Afrika Korps’ infallibility, and his prior faith in victory was now vacuous. The way he saw it, they were no longer seeking victory but forestalling defeat. Not something he would say to anyone else, but they all thought it. He was getting to the stage where he wanted it to end, regardless of the humiliation at the beating they’d taken.
“What are you looking at on the map?” Wilmot asked Egon.
“Where we are.”