Where the Hell Have You Been?

by Tom Carver

  To Katty

  and the next generation: Felix, Maya, Jude & Poppy with much love.

  “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

  Graham Greene, The Power & The Glory

  North Africa, 1942

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  SHORTLY AFTER 3PM on 7th August 1942, a Bristol Bombay transport plane took off from the desert airfield of Burg-el-Arab, the tented headquarters of the British Eighth Army in North Africa. It was heading across the desert to the Heliopolis military hospital on the banks of the Nile.

  At the controls was “Jimmy” James, a nineteen-year-old pilot from a coal-mining village in South Wales. The summer heat of the Sahara had turned James’s cockpit, a bubble of thin Perspex, into an oven. James was relieved to be airborne: his main concern at that moment was to get out of the battle zone as quickly as possible. For although the Bristol Bombay was held in considerable affection among the troops of the Eighth Army, who dubbed her the “mother duck” because she was the chief deliverer of the troops’ mail, she was an antiquated plane that had been withdrawn from service in Europe, and her fixed undercarriage and slow speed made her an easy target for enemy fighters.

  On that hot summer’s day Jimmy James was making the journey back to Heliopolis later than usual. He had only arrived at the front line at about 2.30 pm and had then been further delayed when, waiting on the runway for the mailsacks to be offloaded, and the wounded soldiers to be ferried onto the plane on their stretchers, he had suddenly been told to wait.

  “Switch off your engines!” a voice had yelled at him from the hut. “There’s an important passenger on his way you’re to take with you.”

  Just then two staff cars pulled up. Out of one of them emerged “Strafer” Gott. James recognised the tall bear-like figure immediately; Gott was one of the most popular generals in the desert, a large, rugby-playing, former infantry battalion commander with a loud voice and pugnacious spirit. What James didn’t know was that Churchill had just appointed him commander of the entire Eighth Army.

  After being told of his promotion, Gott had asked Churchill for a few days of leave in Cairo before taking up his new command. Rather than demand his own plane, he had insisted on hitching a ride on the first troop carrier he could find.

  “Are you the captain?” the general had asked James.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the coal miner’s son. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, I don’t have a hat so I can’t salute you.”

  “My boy, don’t worry about that,” Gott smiled. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  With relief, James had showed the general to his seat in the back among the stretchers swinging from the hooks in the ceiling, and apologised for the lack of space and comfort. Again, Gott reassured him: “Don’t worry about me, I’ll sit anywhere.”

  *

  That August, Hitler and the Third Reich were invincible. In the space of three short years, all of western Europe with the exception of Britain had fallen under their control, and it seemed only a matter of time before Britain too would be forced to bow before Berlin. Morale within the British army was very low. Having been driven out of Europe at Dunkirk two years earlier, there was now only one place on earth that the British army was actually engaging German forces, and that was in the desert of North Africa.

  Yet here, too, defeat piled upon defeat.

  The German commander in North Africa, Erwin Rommel, and his Afrika Korps had attained an almost mythic status among German and British troops alike. In little more than seven months they had pushed the mighty British Empire back a thousand miles, from Tripoli through Libya and Egypt, right to the gates of Cairo. Beyond that lay Palestine and the rich oil fields of Iraq and Iran; if Germany could secure access to the oil of the Middle East it would have enough fuel to run its armies indefinitely and the Allies would be crippled.

  Churchill was acutely embarrassed by the performance of his desert forces. Twomonths earlier, in June 1942, Rommel had captured the key city of Tobruk in a single day, taking 35,000 British soldiers prisoner. “Defeat is one thing: disgrace is another,” Churchill later wrote in his memoirs. When the Germans then crossed into Egypt, the Middle East Command drew up plans to evacuate into Palestine. In the streets of Cairo, Egyptians jeered the British imperialists, chanting “Advance Rommel”.

  Desperate to prove to his American allies that Britain could stand up against the Germans, Churchill bombarded his generals with telegrams, ordering them to stop retreating and to go on the offensive.

  In an attempt to salvage the situation, General Claude Auchinleck, the commander of the Eighth Army, ordered a defensive line to be built at the tiny village of El Alamein; it was a well -chosen spot with the sea on one flank and the vast salt marsh of the Qattarah Depression, which was impenetrable to all vehicles, on the other.

  By August, Auchinleck had forced the Afrika Korps to a standstill. Rommel’s huge advance had taken him far from his supplies and his troops were beginning to suffer; he lacked petrol for his tanks, and some days the German soldiers were having to survive in the desert heat on half a cup of water a day. The Germans still had the momentum, however, and among the British troops there was a mood of defeatism; Auchinleck was so in awe of Rommel’s reputation that he banned all mention of his name around his headquarters.

  Exasperated and impatient for results, Churchill flew out to Cairo on 3rd August 1942, intending to instil some backbone into the British forces. He was looking for a larger-than-life figure to replace Auchinleck, someone with swagger and self-confidence, who believed he could beat Rommel and drive a dagger through the bogey of retreat. He settled on General William Gott.

  *

  Behind the Perspex canopy in the “mother duck”, James sweated even more than normal; he had never flown a VIP before. But he barely had time to focus on the implications. As he lifted off the desert floor, the temperature gauge showed that his engines were overheating. He needed to climb quickly up to the cooler air, but until he was out of enemy range he was forced to fly at 50 feet to avoid detection. The Bristol Bombay was not only flying alone, it was virtually unarmed. The Royal Air Force was so short of weapons that they had replaced the two Vickers guns in the tail turret with wooden dummies. Its normal complement of two gunners had been replaced by a single medical orderly.

  James had been airborne only three or four minutes when two Messerschmitts appeared from behind. He heard a loud bang and looked out to see the starboard engine stuttering. Then came cannon tracers ripping through the wing. Flames sucked out of the engine, filling the cockpit with oily black smoke.

  James began searching frantically for somewhere to land and at the same time yelling at the second pilot to get the medical orderly from the back. There was another bang and the propeller on the port side started to slow. The plane was now gliding without power. James pulled back the controls to gain as much height as he could while he still had speed.

  He saw the pair of Messerschmitt 109s hurtle past once more; this time they punctured his main
fuel tanks and fuel began pouring into the stricken aircraft between the cockpit and the passenger area. As he looked back he could see that his wireless operator had been badly injured in the arm.

  “Get all the wounded off the stretcher hooks and lie them on the floor,” James yelled.

  Ahead, the desert sloped away in a long descent. James glided the plane down and with flying skill well beyond his years. gently touched the front wheels onto the desert floor. But the crosswind held up the tail, preventing the rear wheels from landing. He dared not use his brakes in case the plane flipped.

  Struggling to see through the smoke in the cockpit, he tried to swerve between the rocks strewn over the sand, kicking his rudders one way and then the other. It felt as if he was driving a ten-ton truck. He could see his charred hands on the control stick but the pain seemed far away. Slowly the tail came down; he began to apply the brakes. There was no response. The brake cables had been shot away. All he could do was keep the plane upright and wait for the soft sand to slow it’s momentum.

  Gradually his speed dropped: 70, 60, 50 miles an hour. When the dial reached 40, James told the second pilot to warn the passengers to stand by to evacuate.

  “Get the back door off and when I give the word drop them onto the sand.”

  Smoke choked his lungs. The Messerschmitts were returning for a third run.

  “Stand by! Open the hatch on the cockpit floor,” James yelled at the medical orderly. The “mother duck” hit a patch of soft sand and the speed dropped sharply. Peering back through the smoke, James thought he saw someone in the back giving a thumbs up.

  “Now!” he shouted.

  The wireless operator, medical orderly and second pilot disappeared through the hatch in the floor and suddenly James was alone. Hoping he’d done everything he could, he slid off his seat and crawled towards the hole in the floor as cannon fire ripped open the Perspex canopy above his head.

  The plane groaned to a halt and he sank onto the desert floor. He was surprised to find that, instead of making a six-foot fall, he hit the sand only a foot away – the Bombay’s landing gear had finally buckled. It had bumped along the desert floor for over eight miles. He scrambled out of the smoke into the searing afternoon sun, expecting to find twenty people scattered behind, but there were just four: the wounded wireless operator, the second pilot, a wounded soldier and the medical orderly.

  “The passengers – where are they?” he asked incredulously.

  They pointed at the burning plane, which was beginning to change shape, twisting and buckling in the heat.

  “The rear door is jammed.”

  James stared at the door, watching as the camouflage paintwork blistered. Flames billowed furiously in the wind. When he tried to approach, he was blown back. The new commander of the Eighth Army was being incinerated.

  Telling the medical orderly to look after the others, James set out across the desert to try to find help. His shoes and socks were burned, his shorts frayed, his shirt in shreds. He could see that one of his boots was full of blood. Alternating between walking and jogging, he covered about three miles, before passing out on top of a sand ridge.

  Several hours later, passing Tuareg tribesmen spotted the figure. Picking him up, they laid him across one of their camels and brought him to a nearby army post.

  From there a rescue party was sent out, guided by the column of smoke on the horizon, but by the time they reached the plane, it was a charred shell.

  *

  News of Gott’s death reached the prime minister as he was on his way to bed in the British embassy in Cairo. One of his staff officers stopped him on the stairs.

  “It may be a blessing in disguise,” said the officer, but Churchill scowled at him. It didn’t feel like one. Those around Churchill had had deep reservations about Gott. The chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Alan Brooke, considered Gott exhausted and out of his depth, but Churchill had brushed aside Brooke’s warning. Now however, he had run out of generals in the field; the Eighth Army had been through four commanders in nine months. Someone would have to be summoned from the Home Front.

  Brooke urged Churchill to call up Lt General Bernard Montgomery, who was was then in charge of the South-Eastern Army in southern England. As a young infantry captain during the First World War, Montgomery had earned a reputation for leadership and bravery. He had won a DSO during the first Battle of Ypres. By the start of the Second World War, he was a junior general in charge of a division. At Dunkirk he had shown an ability to remain calm under the intense pressure of retreat when many, including his own superiors like John Gort, the head of the British army, seemed paralysed by indecision. He had withdrawn his troops to the coast with minimal casualties and in the midst of the chaos he had been promoted to commander of Second Corps.

  Yet Montgomery wasn’t considered one of Britain’s “top drawer” generals. Ever since Dunkirk he had been passed over repeatedly for command in the field and had been languishing in Britain. Command of the South-Eastern Army was considered almost a Home Guard post. At the age of 55, many felt he had risen as far as he was going to go.

  Churchill demurred at Brooke’s suggestion. The prime minister regarded Montgomery as not completely “reliable”, slightly unhinged even. Montgomery’s obsession with training in peacetime had verged on zealotry and he had a reputation – even in an institution not known for its humility – for being arrogant in the extreme and sometimes vicious towards his peers. He did not hide his disdain of fellow officers and those superiors whom he considered “not up to the task”. Montgomery clearly needed careful handling. Being so mercurial himself, Churchill preferred his generals to be more straightforward.

  Churchill initially asked Brooke to take over the command, a sign of his desperation. When Brooke refused, Churchill then suggested “Jumbo” Wilson, a solid unspectacular general then in command of the British forces in Syria and a personal favourite of the prime minister’s. Churchill argued that he was a safe pair of hands with desert experience, whereas Montgomery was an enormous gamble for such a critical mission – he had never served in the Middle East and no one knew if he possessed the strategic vision to beat a general as gifted as Rommel. This was the last throw of the dice; if the next commander failed like all the others, then the British would be pushed out of the Middle East completely.

  Brooke persisted. He had studied Montgomery closely during those heart-stopping few days in Dunkirk and he believed that Montgomery had both a steeliness and a careful methodical approach to campaigning that had been lacking so far in the desert generals. He badgered his boss to put his personal antipathy about Monty’s character to one side and to take a chance with him.

  Shortly after midnight, Churchill finally relented. With some trepidation, he ordered a telegram to be sent to the War Office requiring Montgomery’s services.

  Montgomery received the phone call from the War Office as he was shaving the next morning at his house in Portsmouth. As far as he was concerned, he had spent his whole life preparing for just such an event. He knew immediately that he’d been handed an opportunity he would not get again; The unpleasant death of Gott – a man ten years younger than him – was the pivotal moment that would turn the 55-year-old unknown Bernard Law Montgomery into “Monty”: Field Marshal Montgomery of El Alamein and the most famous English general since Wellington. Soon Brooke was calling that crash in the desert an intervention by God.

  1.

  MY FATHER, RICHARD CARVER, was Monty’s stepson. At the time of these events, he was a 28-year-old officer in the Royal Engineers, studying the art of war at the new British Army Staff College, at Haifa in Palestine. He greeted the news of Monty’s promotion with mild surprise. Like everyone else, he assumed that Monty had already reached the top of his career. He would never have guessed the impact his stepfather was about to have on the course of the Second World War.

  My father and Monty were very different characters. Through the power of his personality and his own
iron conviction in himself, Monty asserted his authority over every room he entered. He had the quality of a flint stone: rough, angular, hard-headed and quick to spark. He was in perpetual impatient movement, probing, demanding, boasting, joking, harassing, criticising, raging. But his physical appearance, with his short stature and bristly nature, was more like that of a sergeant major than a general.

  My father, on the other hand, had been given all the looks and bearing of a military leader. Slightly over six foot, he towered over his stepfather. He had light-blue eyes, well-defined cheek bones and a strong jawline. His black hair was parted to one side and slicked down in the manner of an Allan Quartermain or Richard Hannay, or one of the other imaginary heroes of the books that my mother loved to read to me. But the appearance was deceptive, for he had none of Monty’s braggadocio swagger and confidence; he possessed instead the slightly reserved manner of a country doctor.

  *

  When I was growing up in the 1960s, I knew very little about my father. Like so many men of his generation, who had experienced the frequent prospect of dying, he kept his feelings hidden. Schooled to put duty to country before all else, he seemed to fear that too much emotion, like too much drink, might weaken his resolve. Talking about himself he considered boastful, even sinful. All I knew was that he had fought in the war and that he was now a teacher. This was not a profession that scored highly among English schoolboys, and so I barely mentioned him. And anyway, I had Monty to brag about, a bona fide war hero, whom no one could compete with. As Monty’s step-grandson, I did not carry his name but I still won the playground competition for who had the most famous relative.

  At seven and a half, I was sent away to a prep school among the damp ferns and oaks of the Dorset countryside, called Dumpton. It was aptly named – a dumping-ground for the offspring of army officers and colonial civil servants. There we played endless games of “Germans and English” in the bushes down by the cricket pitch, crawling through the undergrowth imagining we were part of some elite band of special forces. At night after lights out, we swapped Commando “trash mags” in our dormitories, reading them by torchlight under our covers.