The Sharp End

by Phil Ward

  At sunrise, Ranger Patrol would transition from being the hunters to the hunted. The life they led was a dangerous game. The patrol had lost one man killed in CRUSADER so far and had evacuated one wounded. A couple of other men with minor injuries were playing hurt.

  “Time to go,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  2

  A FEW GOOD MEN

  “Rommel ain’t no military genius,” Captain “Geronimo” Joe McKoy said.

  “Desert Fox—that’s a bunch-a’ bunk. Sounds like somethin’ Hawthorne might cook up when he ain’t a-paintin’ squirrels orange.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny,” Captain Hawthorne Merryweather said, “that the Rommel legend is a myth promulgated by Political Warfare Executive for some nefarious reason or not.”

  “Why do you say that, Captain McKoy?” Lieutenant Colonel John Randal asked.

  “Well, John,” Capt. McKoy said, “these desert battles all follow pretty much the same pattern. Afrika Korps attacks and drives to Tobruk. Our side counterattacks, and Rommel falls back to around Benghazi. Then Rommel counterattacks. Our boys are callin’ it the Benghazi Stakes.

  “Ain’t no genius to it. Both sides just run outta steam at about the same place every time. Get the supply lines too strung out—two hundred fifty miles or so—and that’s all she wrote,” Capt. McKoy said. “Dead in the water. Cuts both ways.”

  The group of officers sitting on the deck of Lt. Col. Randal’s apartment at Oasis X were smoking Waldo Treywick’s custom-rolled cigars. No one was enjoying himself much.

  OPERATION CRUSADER had officially ended on 30 December ’42. But it had taken Desert Patrol two weeks longer to get all of its people back to Oasis X from their patrol areas. The fighting along the Via Balbia had turned out to be disastrous for the jeep patrols, just as Lt. Col. Randal had predicted when initially ordered to go after enemy traffic rushing down the highway to the front.

  Eighteen men killed, fifty-three wounded—the equivalent of one entire patrol dead, three whole patrols wounded.

  Lt. Col. Randal was bitter about the losses. An armored car regiment could have carried out the road interdiction mission as easily as Desert Patrol. Might have taken fewer casualties. Desert Patrol was a high-speed, hit-and-run raiding outfit that specialized in hard intelligence and soft targets.

  Raiding Forces had been misused by Middle East Command and paid the price. The losses were irreplaceable—and he could not get equally qualified men to replenish the patrols. A conventional line infantry or tank commander can go to a replacement depot and draw a complement of new troops.

  Not so Lt. Col. Randal.

  It took at least six months on patrol for a Raider to be fully qualified.

  Lieutenant Westcott Huxley was dead, strafed by a pair of RAF Bristol Beaufighters that refused to call off their attack even after the young 10th Lancer stood on the hood of his jeep waving a British flag in an effort to save his men. Major Sir Terry “Zorro” Stone, KBE, DSO, MC, had been seriously wounded, and his cousin was killed while leading his first patrol. Lieutenant Fraser Llewellyn, seconded from the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), died in a firefight with a large convoy of German troops on the Via Balbia.

  The list went on and on.

  Every patrol had seen men killed or wounded with the exception of Lieutenant Roy Kidd’s. His Scout Patrol had racked up an amazing score of enemy trucks of various makes and models, plinking them in ones and twos with his scoped .55 Boys Anti-Tank (AT) rifles from long range. Lt. Kidd had brought all of his troops home—a remarkable achievement.

  He was in line to be decorated.

  “John,” Captain the Lady Jane Seaborn, OBE, RM, called from the door to the apartment’s living area.

  Lt. Col. Randal excused himself and moved inside to where Lady Jane had set up a typewriter on a small table. He paced back and forth, dictating as Lady Jane typed. Tears were streaming down her beautiful face, which did nothing to improve morale.

  Lieutenant Mandy Paige, RM, was sitting on the couch sobbing into a handkerchief. Lieutenant Pamala Plum-Martin, OBE, DFC, RM, pale as a sheet, leaned against a wall and stared at him.

  It took a long time to compose eighteen letters of condolences. Lt. Col. Randal kept them short and simple but included some personal comment in each one, hoping to make a cold-blooded dispatch seem a little less cold. He knew the bereaved families would most likely read and reread that letter for years to come.

  Lt. Col. Randal felt nothing—except an absence of emotion—dead inside. He was not proud of it. Finally, he signed all the letters.

  The word was Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck believed Middle East Command had won a victory. Raiding Forces would have taken exception to that idea.

  • • •

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN RANDAL WAS PUTTING HIS PEN TO THE LAST LETTER WHEN King announced, “Sgt. Rawlston, Chief.”

  Even the Merc sounded subdued.

  “Give me a report on the status of our vehicles,” Lt. Col. Randal ordered.

  “You want the long version, Colonel,” ex-Sergeant Hank W. Rawlston said, “or the short one?”

  “Let’s have both,” Lt. Col. Randal said.

  “We ain’t got enough serviceable gun jeeps to put two full patrols in the field, sir,” ex-Sgt. Rawlston said. “We can repair some of the damage but it’s gonna take shop time. Jeeps is plum wore out—seen hard service. You’re gonna need to requisition some replacement vehicles, sir.”

  Lt. Col. Randal asked, “Would you be better off at Raiding Forces Headquarters, or can you effect repairs here?”

  “I think we ought to try to get ’em back home, Colonel,” ex-Sgt. Rawlston said. “Ain’t gonna be easy. We’re gonna have to tow a bunch-a’ them jeeps.”

  “Be prepared to depart at first light, Sergeant,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “I’ll assign a convoy commander to escort you.”

  “Yes, sir,” ex-Sgt. Rawlston said. “Jeeps with AVG drivers is in the best condition. I don’t think our British boys got much drivin’ time back home before they joined up. Don’t know how to baby ’em. Nothin’ against nobody, sir, just my personal observation as your maintenance chief.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Sergeant Rawlston,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Good report.”

  One of Lady Jane’s Royal Marines appeared, “Priority message, sir,” she said, handing Lt. Col. Randal a flimsy.

  UNDERSTAND RAIDING FORCES IS IN NEED OF A FEW GOOD MEN STOP DISPATCH ONE OF YOUR OFFICERS TO FT. BENNING BY FIRST AVAILABLE AIRCRAFT STOP AUTHORIZATION TO RECRUIT FIFTY AIRBORNE QUALIFIED VOLUNTEERS FOR YOUR COMMAND HAS BEEN FORWARDED TO THE POST COMMANDER STOP THESE TROOPS WILL SERVE IN US ARMY UNIFORM AND ARE NOT PART OF THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER GROUP STOP

  JAMES ROOSEVELT, USMCR

  OFFICE OF COORDINATOR OF INFORMATION

  Lt. Col. Randal stared at the dispatch. He wondered what the implications were. He doubted anyone at Ft. Benning was going to be very happy about losing fifty handpicked paratroopers.

  “That’s enough out of you, Mandy,” Lt. Col. Randal ordered. “Go bring Travis in here.”

  Lady Jane gave him a look, wiping her own tears. He handed her the flimsy.

  “Sorry, John,” Lt. Mandy said. “The casualty list is so heartrending . . .”

  “Heartbreak’s over, ladies,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Is that clear?”

  “Agreed,” Lady Jane said as she handed the flimsy back, “You are absolutely right—‘Keep Calm, Carry On.’”

  “You wanted to see me, sir?” ex-Captain Travis McCloud said as he came in from the deck.

  Lt. Col. Randal handed him the message. “Pack your bags, Travis. You’re going to Benning. Get with Red—work out your travel arrangements most immediate.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Mandy,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “ask Billy Jack in.

  “King, have Desert Patrol fall in at the bottom of the street.”

  “On the way, Chief.”

  �
��Yes, sir?” ex-Lieutenant Billy Jack Jaxx said, walking in from the deck.

  “Jack,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “Sgt. Rawlston wants to take all the gun jeeps back to RFHQ for overhaul. You’re convoy commander. Move out at first light tomorrow.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Let me know if you need any other patrol officers to accompany you,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Otherwise, the rest of us will be flying back to Cairo as soon as Pam is ready to take off.”

  “We can depart any time, John,” Lieutenant Pamala Plum-Martin said. “The Hudson has been serviced—all I need to do is a preflight.”

  “Mandy,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Make sure everyone knows we’re taking off in one hour.”

  “Can do, John.”

  “Lady Jane,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “if you’ll come with me.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “On second thought, Jane,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “take a moment—repair your makeup. We’re not in that big of a hurry.”

  • • •

  THE REMNANTS OF DESERT PATROL WERE WAITING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STREET WHEN Lieutenant Colonel John Randal and Captain the Lady Jane Seaborn arrived. The bearded warriors were in a state of semi-shock. The small group of people present drove home the reality that nearly half their number were dead or wounded.

  How could that have happened?

  Raiding Forces never suffered losses like this. The unit had lost more men in OPERATION CRUSADER than it suffered in all operations combined since its inception at Seaborn House. Lt. Col. Randal and his officers had always been careful with the lives of the men they commanded, and the troops knew it.

  The Raiders did not blame Lt. Col. Randal. They knew he had protested the order to attack the Via Balbia once the battle was full-blown. Nevertheless, this was not a happy crowd.

  Someone called, “ATTENTION!”

  Immediately Lt. Col. Randal ordered, “As you were—gather around, men.”

  For a moment he stood and stared at the group with Lady Jane at his side, looking drop-dead gorgeous, as usual. She gave no sign she had been crying—but she was not smiling.

  “I’m not going to tell you,” Lt. Col. Randal said, “that our people died for King and Empire—we fight for each other in Raiding Forces.

  “Anyone who wants to return to their regiment or transfer to any other outfit, I’ll make that happen—without prejudice. Those of you who choose to stay on—we’ve got our work cut out for us. Desert Patrol has to re-equip and recruit and train new men. Then we’re going to go get some payback.

  “Two weeks’ leave,” Lt. Col. Randal said. “Come back ready to go full speed . . . and I mean hard.

  “That is all.”

  • • •

  RECENTLY-PROMOTED BRIGADIER STEWART MENZIES, DSO, AKA “C”, THE CHIEF OF MI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was in his unofficial office—the billiard room at White’s, the exclusive London club. He spent more time there than he did at Broadway, his headquarters. Some thought his choice odd since White’s rival, Boodles, was known as the club of choice of the intelligence services.

  Commander Ian Fleming, RNVR, was sitting at the table with him in front of the fireplace. The debonair commander served as the personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division. Cmdr. Fleming was NID’s liaison to MI-6 SIS, MI-5 Counter Intelligence, the Inter-Services Security Board (ISSB), Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Cmdr. Fleming was also the admiral’s intermediary with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

  Brigadier Menzies and Cmdr. Fleming were having a meeting before the meeting.

  James “Baldie” Taylor, having flown in from Cairo as requested by “C”, was waiting in the foyer. He was not cleared for the subject of the current conversation, which was that the Kriegsmarine was rumored to be in the process of adding a fourth rotor to their Enigma encoding/decoding machine. The sea war, particularly the battle in the Atlantic, was not going well. However, it had been going a lot better ever since Cmdr. Fleming had begun his GOLDEN FLEECE “pinch” operations to capture Nazi encoding/decoding equipment.

  Great Britain faced a dangerous situation. With Russia and the United States in the war, the Germans could not win. However, England could lose before her two new allies got fully into the fight. U-boats posed the greatest threat. Kriegsmarine submarines were strangling the United Kingdom and were now operating against America and in the process of strangling its sea lanes as well.

  The United States Navy (USN) had a lot to learn. Admiral Ernest King, Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, had spurned the Royal Navy’s advice to institute a convoy system and was suffering appalling losses in merchant ships as a consequence.

  The world’s first computers, called “bombes,” located at the Ultra Secret Bletchley Park, were able to decode sufficient U-boat traffic so that the combined Allied navies were able to intercept enough of the Nazi submarines to keep Lend Lease shipping running from the U.S.—but just barely.

  Without the GOLDEN FLEECE/RED INDIAN missions that targeted codebooks, keys, signal equipment, etc., which gave the bombes at Bletchley Park enough intelligence to break some—but not all—of the Kriegsmarine Enigma messages, it was estimated that it would take one thousand of the best brains in England 1.8 million years to run all the combinations of the current Nazi three-rotor Enigma device.

  Everyone cleared for Ultra, from the Prime Minister down, was terrified to learn the news the Kriegsmarine was planning to add a fourth rotor.

  Adding another rotor made the number of Enigma combinations incalculable.

  So far, Cmdr. Fleming’s GOLDEN FLEECE/RED INDIAN missions had been able to pinch the bare minimum of signals intelligence information to allow the boffins at Bletchley Park to penetrate the German Navy’s Enigma machine. The priceless product—decrypted German messages—was what Prime Minister Churchill called his “golden eggs”.

  If the Nazis added a fourth rotor, Bletchley Park would go dark. The problem was solvable, but only if Cmdr. Fleming’s GOLDEN FLEECE missions were able to deliver quick results. Bletchley Park needed a lot of help from the GOLDEN FLEECE/RED INDIAN raids if it hoped to crack the four-wheeled machine—brains alone were not going to do it.

  To complicate matters, the pinches had to be done discreetly. One of the ironclad rules of intelligence was, “Never let the enemy know what you know or how you know it.”

  The Nazis could never suspect that Cmdr. Fleming was the puppet master pulling the strings when the personnel manning a weather station in the middle of the Great Sand Sea mysteriously disappeared or when a ship equipped with encoding/decoding devices was sunk with the loss of all hands.

  Cmdr. Fleming had a problem when he tasked the Royal Navy with capturing enemy ships. Royal Marines, specialists in boarding operations, were only stationed aboard capital ships. That meant boarding parties organized aboard lesser navy vessels were made up on an ad hoc basis from the sailors onboard.

  He had been horrified to learn that in two recent large-scale Commando raids, staged in Norway as a cover for GOLDEN FLEECE pinches, the sailors assigned to be in the boarding parties had no specialized training. The boarders had been picked at random from the crew and were armed with revolvers, cutlasses and axes—the way it had been done for centuries.

  Those raids led to today’s meeting. In light of the threat that the Germans were planning to add a fourth rotor to their Enigma machine, Cmdr. Fleming was going to have to step up his pinch efforts. He needed professionals for the job. There he had hit a snag.

  His unit of choice for what he called RED INDIAN missions—because the code word GOLDEN FLEECE was classified above Most Secret—was Strategic Raiding Forces. In the past, Lieutenant Colonel John Randal had executed every RED INDIAN mission assigned his command with alacrity.

  Unfortunately, the Raiding Forces detachment at Seaborn House in England had been stripped of Raiders to serve in Desert Patrol and Sea Squadro
n. All that remained on station was a small team of Raiders performing a highly classified deep reconnaissance mission across the Channel, targeted against elements of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat Command that were using communications other than Enigma.

  They were not available for additional assignments.

  Brig. Menzies said, “Imperative your GOLDEN FLEECE operations continue unabated. I understand it is your wish to have a unit dedicated to the task. Admiral Godfrey and I have agreed to authorize you absolute top priority to accomplish exactly that objective.

  “How do you plan to go about it?”

  “My idea, sir,” Cmdr. Fleming said, “is to have Colonel Randal expand the Raiding Forces detachment at Seaborn House so that Raiders can be on call when a RED INDIAN target presents itself in this theatre of operations.”

  “In that case, let us get Baldie in here,” ‘C’ said. “We need to hear his thoughts on how to best accomplish it.”

  Jim was escorted into the room. He listened as Cmdr. Fleming outlined his desire to use Raiding Forces for GOLDEN FLEECE missions in Europe as well as the Middle East.

  “Could be problematic,” Jim said. “Now that America has entered the war, it is entirely possible that Colonel Randal will want to serve in the U.S. Army again. Bonner Fellers, the U.S. Military Attaché in Cairo, has already made inquiries about how to arrange a meeting with him.”

  “Definitely not the news we hoped to hear,” Brig. Menzies said. “We want to keep Randal in command of Raiding Forces.”

  “I understand the U.S. Army Air Force is already actively recruiting American pilots in the Eagle Squadron,” Jim said. “Offer a promotion of at least one grade, two in some cases as an incentive to transfer over. You can expect a similar proffer to be made to Randal.”

  “Possibly we could enlist Lady Jane,” Cmdr. Fleming said, “to encourage Colonel Randal to stay on.”