Death or Glory I: The Last Commando: The Last Commando

by Michael Asher

  Death or Glory: I

  The Last Commando

  Michael Asher has served in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS. With his wife, Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, he made the first west–east crossing of the Sahara on foot with camels – a distance of 4,500 miles – without technology or back-up of any kind. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has won both the Ness Award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for Exploration. He has written many books, most recently The Regiment: The Real Story of the SAS (Penguin 2007).

  Death or Glory

  PART I

  The Last Commando

  MICHAEL ASHER

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2009

  1

  Copyright © Michael Asher, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-92438-0

  To Piggs, Puppi, and Chumo, with love

  ‘The decision of the Axis leaders to allow their African army to cross the Egyptian frontier was in fact the beginning of the end for the Afrika Korps.’

  Ronald Lewin, The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps, 1977

  1

  Lieutenant Rowland Green was bleeding to death. He had been hit by a 9mm dum-dum round that had plunged into his armpit and burst out through his back in a shower of gore. Sergeant Tom Caine tore open his shirt and applied a shell-dressing, but it was like trying to stem a dam-burst with blotting paper. Blood soaked into his khaki drill shorts. ‘You'll be all right, sir,’ Caine said. ‘It's not too bad.’ He pressed the lieutenant's right hand down on the pad and told him to keep it there. ‘Orderly,’ he bellowed. ‘I need morphia – now.’

  Medical orderly Maurice Pickney heard Caine's call, but was focused on another task requiring his full attention. Squatting in a slit-trench a few yards away, he was trying to prize a No. 36 Mills grenade from the frozen fingers of Private ‘Tinkerbell’ Jones, who had been shot in the act of hurling it. Jones had a critical wound in the abdomen, and was blubbering in shock. Pickney spoke reassuringly to him, holding his wrist in a vice-like grip with one hand, forcing his fingers back one by one with the other. If Jones released the grenade suddenly, Pickney knew, both of them would have about five seconds to live. A moment later he was gripping the steel pineapple tight in his palm, wondering what to do with it. He was about to chuck it over the edge, when he found the pin lying in the dust. He picked it up, slid it back carefully into place, and let out a long sigh. ‘We're out of morphia, Sarn't Caine,’ he yelled.

  Caine swore savagely. From further down the line, he could hear Corporal Harry Copeland demanding a casualty and ammunition report from each trench in turn. From Caine's left came the booming voice of Gunner Fred Wallace, a six-foot-seven regular soldier from Leatherhead. Wallace was relating his experiences, his words coming out slurred with thirst, while someone else treated multiple shrapnel wounds on his arms. ‘I seen a Jerry throwing a potato-masher,’ he was saying. ‘I shot him and he went down, but I didn't mark where the grenade landed, and just as I was squeezing the trigger a second time, it went off. I didn't feel a damn' thing. Didn't even know I'd been hit till I saw the blood.’

  The attack had been over no more than a minute, but to Caine it already seemed like a dream. The Germans, Panzer Grenadiers of Rommel's 90th Light Division, had somehow got through the minefield and crawled up a gully, launching the assault from about two hundred yards. Caine's men – No.1 Troop, Middle East Commando – had risen to meet them. Hazily, Caine recalled the ferocious clash of bayonet on bayonet, the thump and crack of grenades, the rat-tat-tat of sub-machine guns fired at point-blank range. The fight couldn't have lasted longer than it took to smoke a cigarette, but time had seemed to stand still. Caine's memories of it were a sequence of disjointed images – putting three .45-calibre rounds through a German soldier's chest – three neat scarlet rosettes blossoming on the khaki drill shirt; Lieutenant Green howling as he shot an enemy with a bullet from his Colt; the Jerry snapping off the dum-dum that brought Green down; Fred Wallace dancing madly like a giant marionette, blasting away with his Bren, scything a swathe through the khaki bodies, bringing out his sawn-off twelve-bore shotgun, flaying off Hun faces; Harry Copeland, the battalion's champion sniper, cool as an ice-pick, drilling shots from his .303 into the melee; men falling, men thrashing, men entwined together so you couldn't tell friend from foe, mutilated men screaming for Mother; surly ex-Redcap Todd Sweeney stabbing an enemy in the stomach with a bayonet; a German grabbing Sweeney from behind and Geoff Hutchins shooting him in the head with his Tommy-gun, so close that half the man's brains spilled out and splashed over them; then Hutchins himself uplifted gracefully on a wave of fire and smoke that whacked his whole body apart.

  The desert sky was an open furnace, pulsating raw heat. The stones around the trenches were so hot they scorched bare flesh: inside, the stifling heat lay on the men like a liquid lead; it was too hot to move, almost too hot to think. The commandos had now been awake more than thirty hours, thanks to the huge doses of Benzedrine they'd swallowed, but the amphetamine haze was wearing thin. Caine felt parched, dazed and exhausted. He pulled the brim of his ‘soup bowl’ helmet down against the lowering sun, then checked that the drum magazine on his Thompson sub-machine gun was still firmly in place. The gunmetal was hot to the touch. He was the only man in the battalion to use this hundred-round mag, which had a tendency to drop off at inopportune moments. Caine had personally modified the locking mechanism on his magazines, making them secure, and giving his own ‘trench-sweeper’ more than four times the fire-power of any other. Some of the lads scoffed at what they called his ‘Al Capone’ shooter, but then few of them had his physique – the powerful shoulders and biceps that were needed to brace the weapon properly.

  Caine wasn't much above average height but seemed top-heavy with muscle, as if his chest and shoulders had developed separately from the rest of him. A veteran at twenty-three, his combat experience was reflected in the grimly determin
ed set of his chin and lips, amplified by the cool steadiness of slate-grey eyes that seemed to have been honed by desert winds. He traversed the Tommy-gun's muzzle across the undulating ground in front of the troop's position – shell-holes, bomb-craters, Jerry dead. All the way along the Box he could see palls of black smoke rising from smouldering vehicles – remnants of a supply column that had tried, in vain, to reach them. There were dark circles like black eyes in the desert where Stuka dive-bombers had crashed and burned, shot down by RAF Kittyhawks and Hurricanes. About four miles to the west he could see dust-clouds kicked up by Panzer Army tanks gathering like crows on the edge of minefields that protected the Box. From the ridge behind him there was the continual snarl and crash of twenty-five-pounder field-guns, manned by men of the Royal Horse Artillery. Caine knew that Jerry's 88mm guns would open up any minute.

  He felt Green's fingers close on his wrist and glanced down at him. The lieutenant's face was ashen. ‘Your fannies, Caine,’ he said weakly. ‘Ditch them. The enemy will use them as an excuse to execute you.’

  The ‘fanny’ was the combination knuckle-duster-dagger issued only to the Middle East Commando, and Caine saw at once what the lieutenant meant. If the next wave of Germans captured them and found their fannies – not to mention the cheesewire and explosive charges some of the lads had – they would execute them as ‘assassins’, or ‘saboteurs’.

  ‘Don't worry, sir,’ Caine said. ‘I'll tell the men to bury them.’ Green didn't answer, and Caine saw at once that he was dead. Harry Copeland pivoted into the trench and crouched there, his face under the battered helmet a mask of dried blood and dust. He was a gawky, good-looking, gangle-legged ex-Service Corps driver, with a stooping shuffle, a long nose and a prominent Adam's apple, whose profile always reminded Caine of some large wading bird. Cope stared, his cobalt-blue eyes popping at Green's corpse, and at his blood pooling in the sand. ‘Poor blighter,’ he said.

  Copeland settled back on his haunches in the sauna-like heat, sweat-runnels grooving tramlines through the mask of filth on his face. He licked lips that were black and cracked with thirst, doffing his tin lid, scratching at a brush of blond hair that grew stiffly vertical like a field of wheat-stubble. Caine watched his Adam's apple working, and thought Cope might throw up. Instead he laid his precious Short Model Lee-Enfield Mk III sniper rifle on his thighs as if it were a baby, careful not to disturb the zeroing of the telescopic sights. ‘You got water?’ he begged Caine, his words distorted by a bloated tongue, white with mucus. Caine unslung a felt-covered water-bottle, offered it to him. ‘Go steady with it,’ he rasped. Cope drank in short gulps, then gave the canteen back. He pulled out two Player's Navy Cut cigarettes and handed one to Caine. ‘Wallace is all right,’ he croaked, his words coming out more clearly now. ‘Hide like a rhino. Took a peppering of grenade fragments, but he's still talking.’

  ‘I heard. To stop that bloke yapping you'd have to run him down with a tank.’

  ‘You all right, Tom?’

  Caine touched his face and realized it was smeared with his troop officer's blood. ‘Yep,’ he nodded, sticking the fag in his mouth. He ejected his last two rounds and swapped drum-magazines on his weapon, snapping the working parts back with unnecessary force. He tilted his head towards Green's body. ‘Twenty years old and straight out of OCTU,’ he said. ‘Hadn't even got his knees brown. Might have made a good soldier – we'll never know. First time in combat and he cops one and lands me with command of the troop.’

  Cope lit his cigarette with a Swan Vesta. ‘Not new to you is it, mate,’ he commented.

  ‘Nope.’

  Copeland was one of the few who was aware that, a while back, Caine had been an officer in the Royal Engineers. The corporal didn't know why he had fallen from grace, though. He had never asked, and Caine had never enlightened him.

  Caine shook his Zippo lighter out of its protective rubber condom, and lit the squashed fag. ‘What's the damage?’ he asked.

  ‘Ammo's down to about ten rounds a man, fifty each for the Brens. With Green, we've got another six men dead and three seriously wounded. Not counting the boys on the outpost, the troop's down to seventeen men. Not what you'd call a viable fighting unit.’

  Caine had almost forgotten the dozen wounded men posted on a ridge a thousand yards to the west. They had all been hit the previous day, and Lieutenant Green had deployed them on the outpost at first light, on the assumption that the wounded were the most expendable. He had also assured them that they wouldn't be abandoned.

  Caine took a glance over the lip of the trench: the sun was like a burnished brass shield, and his eyes narrowed from its brilliance. He couldn't see the men on the outpost, but he could hear the crackle of their Brens and the pop of their .55-calibre Boys anti-tank rifles – proof that they were still holding out. He guessed they were all carrying fannies, and wondered if they would have the gumption to bury them before the enemy overran the ridge.

  An 88mm round fried air, droned over the position. Caine and Copeland ducked. ‘Here they come,’ Cope sighed. The shell burst on the escarpment above them, near enough to shower them with rock fragments that pinged off their tin lids. A moment later another man pitched into the trench and hunkered there, panting and dripping sweat. It was ‘Prissy’ Hogg, a runner from HQ Troop. ‘Where's the boss?’ Hogg grunted, trying in vain to wet his broken lips with a bone-dry tongue.

  Caine gestured at Green's body. ‘I'm the boss.’

  ‘All right, skipper,’ Hogg said. ‘Orders from the OC. You're to withdraw at sunset, 1845 hours. The whole Battle-Group's being pulled out.’ His tongue was so arid and swollen that his speech was a series of small detonations.

  Caine glanced at his watch – there was about an hour of daylight left. ‘What about the wounded lads on the outpost?’ he enquired.

  ‘No instructions,’ Hogg said. ‘Commando practice is to abandon the wounded.’

  Caine jabbed out his cigarette stub, his steady grey eyes glaring at Hogg. ‘Don't tell me about commando practice, Prissy,’ he grunted. ‘Mr Green promised them they wouldn't be ditched.’

  ‘Nothing you can do,’ Hogg said. ‘Leave 'em.’

  ‘I'll be damned if I will. I'm going to pull them out, and I'm coming back with you to get the say-so from the OC.’

  Hogg swigged water from his canteen. ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘We can cover each other.’

  Caine turned to Cope. ‘Stand the men to,’ he said. ‘Don't budge an inch from here till I get back.’

  Copeland's dust-caked features cracked. ‘Where were you expecting us to go exactly? For an afternoon stroll?’

  The squadron command-post lay in a redoubt about two hundred yards along the escarpment. It wasn't far by ordinary standards, but with enemy 88mm guns spewing steel it might have been the other end of the earth. Caine and Hogg zig-zagged along the ridge at a low crouch, taking turns to run and cover. 88mm tracer shells lashed in, splitting in puffs of white and brown all over the hillside. Twenty yards from the redoubt, Caine felt the waft of a bullet against his cheek. The slug that had missed him by a hair's breadth slapped into Hogg, who screamed and sprawled headfirst in the gravel. Caine lifted his weapon and hip-boosted a couple of rounds in the direction he thought the shot had come from. Hogg tried to get up, waving a smashed wrist, pumping arterial blood. Caine was yelling ‘Get down,’ when he heard another bullet hit the runner's chest with a smack like a massive punch – the impact was so powerful that Hogg hurtled three or four yards.

  Feeling sick, Caine crawled over and found Hogg on his back, eyes gaping vacantly at the sky. ‘Bloody hell,’ he grunted. Another round shaved his tin lid and ricocheted off a boulder near by. Caine rolled, leapt up, and dived maniacally for cover behind a slope. Then, keeping below the brow, he crawled towards the HQ sangar, cursing the big ammo-pouches high-slung from his yoke that prevented him from lying flat. It seemed for ever before he made the sangar and lay prone outside.

  A firefight was still going on at the foot o
f the slope to the north as the squadron's other troops fought off attacks. Caine couldn't see the battle, but he could hear the pop and splutter of small-arms, like a distant squabble between madmen. ‘Sarn't Caine, No. 1 Troop,’ he bawled.

  Squadron Sergeant Major Bill Ramsay crept up to the sangar entrance, hessian-covered soup-bowl shadowing bloodshot eyes. ‘I want to see the OC,’ Caine told him.

  The SSM's head was replaced by that of the OC, Major Kenneth Crawford, a chubby man with spectacles, and a furtive look. ‘What's your situation, Sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘We've taken heavy casualties, sir. I don't think we can stand another attack.’

  ‘It'll be sundown soon. Jerry won't be back before first light tomorrow. He doesn't like night-attacks. By that time, God willing, we'll be long gone’

  ‘Very good, sir, but I've got wounded on that ridge to the west.’ Caine gestured in the direction of the outpost. ‘I want your permission to bring them in.’

  Crawford's jaw set. ‘Just leave them, Caine. They'll be accorded the rights of war.’

  ‘No they won't. They're carrying fannies, cheesewire and God knows what else. The Jerries don't like ‘irregulars’. If they find commando weapons, they'll line them up and shoot 'em.’

  The OC didn't seem to be taking in his words. ‘You don't understand, Caine. Rommel has broken through the Gazala Line. The whole Eighth Army is in retreat. What do you think…’

  Caine never found out exactly what Crawford wanted to know, because at that moment the sergeant major's voice shouted, ‘Message from battalion, sir.’ The major ducked inside the trench, and a second later a shell whistled in, striking the redoubt with a direct hit. All Caine remembered later was a dumb-bell on his chest, a mushroom of earth, rocks and smoke, an expanding flash of orange and black, and several burning bodies being flipped into the air.

  He must have passed out, because the next thing he knew he was being shaken by the squadron second-in-command, Captain Robin Sears-Beach, a truculent officer with a gamecock walk, front teeth like tombstones and a disturbing absence of chin. ‘You're all right, Caine,’ Sears-Beach was repeating. ‘Get back to your position.’