Alamein

by Iain Gale

  Nothing. The password went unheeded. Oh Christ, he thought. It was British. He stared at the towering metal wall and at the perforated black cylinder of the machine-gun mounted beneath the turret and now pointed directly at his head. In one second, he thought, perhaps he would be…He shouted one more time: ‘Naples!’

  The hatch flipped open and clanked against the top of the tank. ‘Vesuvius. Good to see you, Lieutenant. Are you from the 104th?’

  Ringler sighed with relief then straightened up and saluted the panzer major who now addressed him: ‘Sir. Lieutenant Ringler. Reporting to point one-one-five, I presume, Herr Major.’

  ‘You assume correctly, Lieutenant. Welcome. You met with no misfortune?’

  ‘We lost one vehicle and one man. My company sergeant-major.’

  It sounded so prosaic, so matter of fact.

  ‘Ah, too bad. Still, you’re here now. Lieutenant Bauer is over there with his team. He’ll fill you in as to what’s to be done.’

  Ringler gave a salute and the tank commander disappeared back down into his armoured cocoon. The oppressive darkness seemed to encroach upon Ringler’s soul. He could not get Monier’s pleading eyes out of his head. He said nothing more but walked across to where Bauer and his men were sitting at their assault gun.

  ‘We are here right at the end of the minefield. Over there, directly to the east, are the English. There is supposed to be a screen of Italian tanks down there too. But don’t rely upon it, old chap.’

  Ringler peered through the darkness and saw the vague outline of another strongpoint which appeared to be abandoned.

  Bauer was continuing to talk, but Ringler hadn’t really been listening. ‘…can’t say I shall be unhappy to get out of here, old chap. A few days in the rear they’ve promised us. Well I’ll believe it when I see it. But I suppose it’s a few days nearer to old Vienna, eh?’

  ‘You’re Viennese?’

  ‘I should say so. Family have always been in the army. Ten generations. Maria Theresa’s bodyguard, old chap. Happier on the parade ground really than here, if you understand me. Not that we’re not fighters. Warrior caste, that’s us. Just never saw myself in desert gear if you know what I mean, old chap. Well, good luck.’

  And with that Lieutenant Bauer was off, leaving Ringler alone in the post. He paused for a moment and wondered about Bauer and his family. How they had been swallowed up in the mass of humanity that made up the Third Reich. How the country of Maria Theresa was now a vassal of Prussia yet Bauer was happy to fight for his erstwhile enemy. And he saw quite clearly for once, how all nations had their greatness and their disaster. How war flowed through history bringing a river of misery to Europe’s nations as it directed their future. A shout from the rear brought him back to the present. ‘Sir, what shall we do now? Shall we unlimber?’

  ‘Yes, Spengler. That’s it. At once unlimber the guns. Four and Five Platoon get up here, start to move the sandbags around and see if you can’t scrounge some more and whatever else you can find from that old abandoned position down there. It’s Italian. Never know what you might find.’ He thought for a moment: ‘No, wait. I’ll come down with you.’

  Gingerly, still nervous of mines, he made his way down the gentle slope for some three hundred metres until he was among a system of foxholes and trenches. Half of them at least seemed to have been filled in and others were now only slight depressions in the ground less than fifty centimetres deep. There were traces of the previous occupants, the occasional Italian helmet and pieces of equipment. The place stank of urine. He looked at his watch; one o’clock and the rain had started to fall again, in torrents. They would need to work fast to make the position on the hill secure. He climbed back up the slope and found the men unlimbering the guns: the two 5cm anti-tank cannon, three heavy machine-guns and a grenade-thrower. That, he contemplated, was his sole armament with which to match the might of the British army. Ringler walked around the men as they worked. He knew that what they did now must be perfect. There would be no chance to improve it during the coming days, or hours, whatever time they had left until they were overrun. For somewhere deep inside he could not believe that he would hold out. All that they could do would be to cause the maximum damage and casualties in the time they had and then hope for the best.

  He called over the two platoon commanders and their section leaders: Strauss, Hancke, Wulfenbuttel, Heckel and the others: ‘Make sure the position is secure. We won’t get a second chance. We need sentries every five yards, dug in. Place your men back from them in zig-zag trenches. Cut more if you have to. The anti-tank guns need to go halfway down the slope, one per platoon. Three hundred yards between platoons. Make sure they’re dug into the sand and then pile up the sandbags and whatever else you can find to their front. You all know the drill, I think. I want a machine-gun with each of the cannon at the same level but a hundred yards apart. Platoon command in the centre, with rifle sections on the flanks. The third MG I’ll keep with me at HQ, and the grenade-thrower. The medics with me too. Got it?’

  The men nodded and went off to supervise their commands. Ringler walked back three hundred yards behind the area he had designated for the forward platoons and found a small slit trench and a foxhole, partly buried in the sand. He signalled to two of the men: ‘Here, you two. Get this dug out clean.’ That would be his HQ trench. It was not such a bad position, he thought. But he wondered in what state the minefields were directly to his front and whether they would really stop advancing armour. It was already getting light in the east and there was still much to do. The men would have to have their rations and ammunition. They would have to lay what wood they could find over the tops of the trenches and foxholes to protect them against the sun as they lay there waiting for the British.

  He felt suddenly utterly exhausted, as if he could have slept for a week. He sat down on a rock, took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Tiredness seemed to be crushing his head like a ring of iron. He felt himself falling into unconsciousness.

  He had no idea of how long he had been asleep. It must though, he thought, have been only a few minutes as the sun had not yet crawled up and over the horizon. He was rubbing his eyes when with no warning a salvo of shells fell behind the position, thirty, perhaps forty metres away. Eight explosions rocked the morning and then stopped. He thought it bizarre that they hadn’t tried again. If the forward OP had spotted them digging in then why didn’t the British gunners simply zero in and blast them all to hell? Were they perhaps merely playing with him and his men? As he was thinking the sun rose over the horizon and the sky became a brilliant blue. A true desert day, majestic and inhuman. And then it began. Another eight shells came crashing in. They had zeroed in now.

  ‘Take cover. Get down.’

  Ringler hit the ground and pressed himself into it as far as he could. He raised his binoculars and pointed them towards where the shells were coming from. But the sun was too low and all he saw was glare. That was the worst thing about this type of warfare, he thought. The fact that your enemy was invisible. Yet he had you completely pinned down and could watch your every action, giving him the ability to fire each salvo carefully aimed and corrected. You knew that at some point one of those shells would get you, the one they said had your name on it. Ringler lost his patience. He wriggled over the sand towards Number Two Section. The section leader, Strauss, who was also the anti-tank gun commander was lying comfortably in a large foxhole covered with a tarpaulin. Ringler lifted the side and slipped underneath. Six faces looked at him in the half-light and from their smiles he realized that they were ecstatic to see him. Someone still cared about them.

  The gun-layer, Unteroffizier Hancke asked: ‘What are we going to do, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Watch out that the British tanks don’t come too near to us.’

  It sounded pathetic and he half-regretted saying it. But it was the best he could manage. He tried desperately to think of more advice. ‘Sleep alternately, but always keep a watch on the perimeter
.’ Ringler looked around the foxhole. It had been well dug and well fitted-out in a matter of less than an hour. ‘Who organized this position?’

  Hancke replied: ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Well done, Hancke. It’s excellent work.’

  Hancke, a taciturn Saxon, looked pleased with himself. Ringler smiled too. Thank God, he thought. I said something right at least. Turning he slipped out of the position and waited for another salvo. As it finished he ran across the sand towards Company HQ before heading for Number Two Section but halfway across he heard yet another shell whistle in. A ninth. He hit the ground running, grazing his knees and cursed. But just as he did the shell struck and a torrent of sand and stones fell on to him. He was still lying in the sand when he heard the shouts.

  ‘They’re hit! Over here, quickly. Medic!’

  Ringler stood up and brushed the debris from his body. He looked behind and saw the position he had just left. The tarpaulin, so neatly laid by Hancke, was ripped in two and the sand around it had turned a sickening shade of dark red. He ran back towards it. Inside the foxhole four of the section had been badly wounded by flying shrapnel. One of them had a leg almost severed at the calf, another had injuries to the arm and face. Hancke was dead. Ringler stared at his lifeless eyes and at the huge, still smoking shrapnel splinter protruding from his head. The company medic, Unteroffizier Feuerkogel, was with the wounded now. Ringler had not paid him much attention before. Small, squat and dark-haired, he was a quiet, somewhat melancholic Rhinelander who had always seemed to be unobtrusively efficient and did his job without any fuss. Now it was clear to Ringler that Feuerkogel was in fact just the sort of man who appeared when you needed him. The perfect man for the task he now had in hand.

  But what, he wondered, could they do, apart from bind up the gashes and lacerations. Mahnke had a terrible wound in his arm and Feuerkogel succeeded in stopping the bleeding with a makeshift tourniquet. Within a few minutes they had re-stretched the tarpaulin over the position. The blood had dried quickly in the early sun but the smell of cordite and burning flesh remained. Hancke they had taken away for burial and Ringler positioned a small casualty collecting point close by the foxhole. Well, he reasoned with a soldier’s faith in fate, lightning never struck twice in the same place, did it?

  There was another noise above him and a further group of shells exploded close to One Section. Ringler looked from where Feuerkogel was just finishing with the wounded of Two Section and saw two men crawling towards him with blood pouring from arm and leg wounds. He felt a blind fury rising up inside him. It was all very well for them to stand here and be slowly smashed to pieces by this unseen enemy, but he was damned if he was not going to find out where the fire was coming from. That was the least he could do, wasn’t it? But how?

  The early-morning desert glow of violet-yellow had now passed into the more usual brown-yellow of the day and the sun was starting to burn down with its remorseless heat and Ringler found that he was sweating profusely through the bleached green canvas uniform. He thought over his orders again. Hold the position. That was all very well, but how?

  They were just being slaughtered in turn. If Tommy went on like this even for a few more hours half his men would be dead and the rest would be nothing more than physical and emotional wrecks. He looked up into the sky and realized that the sun of course had shifted position. Grabbing his binoculars, Ringler looked again into the desert towards the direction of the enemy shelling and saw, behind a sand dune, a flash. That was where they were then. He felt strangely reassured. They were no longer being pulverized just by a noise. Now their enemy could be seen in a flash of flame and a cloud of smoke. There was merely a heartbeat between the shell being fired and it landing among them.

  He made his way to Two Platoon where the wooden planks with which they had covered the position were being replaced after the shellburst. Ringler saw that they were spattered with dried blood.

  ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that we now know where those bloody guns are. They’re just behind that large dune over there. If you look carefully you’ll see the blast.’

  The men smiled at him. Good, he thought, that improved their state of mind. Morale was all-important at a time like this. He walked across to the number one gun and made the same announcement. Again the men smiled. He dropped down into the shallow command trench, a foxhole no more than half a metre deep which they had lined with sandbags and around which the men had built a parapet. His runner, Burckhardt, was lying in one half, the other being reserved for Feuerkogel. He began to think. If only they could hold on till nightfall then he would send a runner back to Battalion. That could not of course possibly be done in daylight. Any runner would face certain death. But if they could make it till then, surely Battalion could send up more food and drink. And then perhaps they could send the wounded back as well. The transports of course had been driven away with Regimental Sergeant-Major Wiel after the guns had been unlimbered and were waiting for them on the west side of the minefield. At least, that was the theory.

  He was still lying there when Feuerkogel crawled up with a casualty situation report and crouched at the corner of the foxhole. ‘Lieutenant. It’s not good. A third of the company are casualties. Three of the men have sunstroke and are running high fevers. All the others who haven’t been hit are exhausted.’

  It was not good. Not good at all. But as Feuerkogel spoke, Ringler looked at his watch. Two minutes between salvoes. That meant that they were due for another…True to form the flash came from behind the dunes and feeling the air being sucked away by the shells, Ringler tried to drag Feuerkogel to the floor of the foxhole. There was a short sharp bang directly above them and then dust and rock everywhere. For a moment amidst the stench of cordite and rock dust and the smoke, Ringler froze. No. He was still alive. He crawled out from beneath the pile of rubble that had landed on top of him and found the medic. Through the dust cloud it was hard to see him but he was saying something. ‘Lieutenant, I’ve bought it, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Nonsense, man. Where are you hit?’

  But there was no need to ask, for as the dust cloud cleared Ringler caught sight of Feuerkogel. Blood was flowing out of his neck and he was staring helplessly at Ringler. The lieutenant grabbed the medic’s bag and rummaged around, desperately looking for a dressing. He found a bandage and unravelling it wrapped it around the wounded man’s neck but the blood just continued to seep through the gauze until his hands were sticky with it. Christ, he thought, even the medic’s hit and I know nothing of first aid. Perhaps, he hoped against hope, the splinter is not so deep. Maybe the wound isn’t fatal after all. He was tying the bandage and realized that Feuerkogel was closing his eyes when he heard another explosion. They had given up on the two minutes’ pause. This, he thought, could only mean one thing. He gently laid the medic down on the sand and rushed to the nearest of the anti-tank guns, screaming ‘Where is Feldwebel Fiedler?’ But Fiedler, the gun-layer was there at the gun, pressed up hard against the gunsight.

  ‘Lieutenant. Thank God. They’re coming, sir. I saw movement behind the dunes.’

  Ringler looked around: ‘Where are your gunners?’

  ‘I’ve only one left, sir.’

  ‘Right, hurry up, Fiedler, get them in your sights. I’ll load and, Knapp, you hand us the ammunition.’

  ‘Here they come, sir.’

  Ringler looked over the top of the gunshield and saw them. Perhaps two thousand metres distant. He counted under his breath: two, three, four, five, six, wait, seven, eight tanks. They were deployed in a wedge formation. Ringler wondered how clever the tank commanders had been. Had they worked out the range of the company and the probable range of their guns? They could not possibly know, he reasoned, that one of their guns was out of action because the entire crew was dead or wounded and the gunsight mangled. He turned to Fiedler: ‘Let them come on. It’s our only chance. We don’t open fire until they’re four hundred metres away, or less.’

  The tanks were a thousand me
tres away now and the enemy artillery had stopped firing. Ringler felt himself breaking out into a cold sweat of fear. Where, he wondered, where might be the fabled Italian tanks that Lieutenant Bauer had told him of? It suddenly occurred to him that the tanks he was looking at might themselves be the Italians.

  He put the binoculars to his eyes and strained in an attempt to identify the tanks. It was damn near impossible in the haze of the midday sun. Fiedler moved the sights to ensure that the enemy were clearly in line of aim and range. How, Ringler wondered, could the man be so sure that they were a hostile unit? In an instant he decided that they must be Italian tanks. He was about to say as much to Fiedler when it occurred to him that the gun barrels of the tanks were pointed directly at him and his men and that it didn’t really matter now which side they were on. He turned to Fiedler: ‘Fire!’ The shell flew from the little anti-tank gun and exploded on the lead tank at four hundred metres. A jet of flame shot up from the turret and soon it was flaming. Then, as Ringler watched in horror, shapes began to jump from the tank and crawl and run away from the fire. Those who could began to climb on to the hull of the following tank, the one which Fiedler now had in his sights. ‘Fire!’ The shell hit the second tank just as the men were reaching the turret. It exploded like the first and the second tank began to burn. The crew of the first jumped down again, some of them engulfed in flames. Those who could were now running over to the third tank leaving their comrades writhing on the ground between. The other six tanks had pulled up and seemed uncertain what to do. One of them fired off an armour-piercing shell which thumped into the ground close to Ringler. ‘Fire!’ Fiedler’s third shot hit the third tank head-on. ‘Three out of three, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Well done, Fiedler. Good shooting.’

  But inside he was thinking, if they saw us, if they managed to make out our position through the smoke, then we’re done for. His thoughts were borne out as a shell came in, fired by the end tank at their gun. Thankfully it missed the position but Ringler was taking no chances now: ‘Away from the gun now, Fiedler. Take cover.’