by Hall, Ian
But by standing in front of her, leaning over to supposedly look at the appointment book, both Siggy and Berti had gotten inside the first door.
I stood on the 36th floor of the Rockefeller Building in New York, and even Stephenson didn’t know we were here. I walked to the elevator, rode it down just one flight, then sent it to the ground floor.
The 35th floor was the proper British Passport Office, and I knew there was a duffle bag in the gent’s toilet, thanks to Siggy. Once I’d changed into a telephone engineer’s overall, I slipped back up the stairs.
I looked at my watch, counted down the seconds to the five minute mark. Click, the door opened and I slipped inside. I soon located the telephone exchange, introduced myself to the main lady, Charlotte, and sat making friends for ten minutes.
I looked at my watch again. Two-fifty. Coffee break.
Charlotte organized the switchboard ladies like clockwork. She sent two to get their staple doughnuts and coffee, the others filled in their places, sitting between positions, doubling up.
Then I heard the name I was interested in.
A girl took the call, quickly inserting her phone jack in the socket. “Ken Howard’s office, how can I direct your call?”
I stepped forward, placed my hand on the microphone slung around her neck. “I’ll take this one. Put him through.”
The girl looked nervously at Charlotte, who nodded consent.
I took the headset from her and listened in, holding the small speaker to my ear. The call bored me in seconds, but their technical jargon of paperwork lasted a minute, no more. “Averice,” the caller said, switching to German.
“When?” Howard’s English reply.
“Two days ago.”
“The cream got a little thicker.”
“So it could be a turkey-shoot?”
“I’m afraid so.”
I dropped the headset and walked to the door. The twenty feet along the corridor took me a second, then out into an open office floor, lots of heads bobbing, taking calls of their own. I recognized Ken Howard from the photographs we’d been given, standing over one, replacing it in the cradle. He turned to the woman next to him. “I’m not feeling that well, Sylvia, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I could see Berti approaching from his rear. Poor Ken never saw the piece of rubber descend towards his head. I looked around… not one person except poor Sylvia had seen the exchange.
Satisfied that Berti had Ken under control, I slipped back to the coffee room. Just one telephone lady. “Where’s Katie?”
“The restroom,”
I cursed myself for being complacent, checked the nearest ladies which caused a bunch of squeals, and caught ‘Katie’ grabbing her coat from the cloakroom next door. I disabused her of her small 32 pistol, and frog-marched her to Stephenson’s office.
Inside Ken lay sprawled on the floor, Berti standing over him.
Stephenson looked at us all with his ‘grace under pressure’ expression. “So you have evidence?”
I shook my head. “My word, Charlotte’s, nothing more.”
“We could have waited longer.”
I shook my head. “Not with the political side shifting as quickly as it is. We needed to hit it quickly, break up the contacts.”
He nodded, obviously considering my words. “And what will we do with this miscreant?” Stephenson didn’t even rise from his desk, just lit a cigarette, which he held with some disdain.
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
Considering I’d just told him to organize a murder, Stephenson just nodded. “Are you chaps sure there’s only two involved?”
I nodded. “We’ve been here in various guises over the last few days. We’ve got a man on the door just in case. We think maybe Sylvia, but again, our man on the door will catch her if she tries anything.”
And we’d done our job for the camp too; we’d traced our leak to Stephenson’s office, from one division of the SOE to another.
I wasn’t absolutely sure what Stephenson was up to with his Passport Office below and his army of telephone callers on this floor; it sure as heck didn’t have much to do with actual British passports.
“So you chaps are finished?”
We both nodded.
Stevenson pulled a drawer open. “I have an envelope for you.”
I sighed. We’d done our training, and done our job afterwards; it was time to go home to Edinburgh and put it all into practice. I opened the envelope to see a telegram type message, the small tickertape stuck to the page.
Dover US Air Force base. NJ. Ask for Major Donald Phelps.
I gave a grin. Any air force base was a good start.
We shook hands, collected my clothes from the trashcan inside the gents, Siggy from the door, and left the building.
We were used to turning up without paperwork, but without ID’s made even me a little nervous. I had the clothes on my back, two pair of clean underpants in my pockets, nothing more. I was stripped to the basics for a long trip across the ocean, and little that the boys could say shook my resolve.
“We’re here to see Major Phelps.” Siggy said to the guard at the gate. They’d watched us approach, and looked pretty nervous. I noticed the man behind had his hand on his hip, clutching his automatic. “Major Donald Phelps.”
The guard relaxed visibly. The one I the booth picked up the phone. “Major Phelps? We’ve got three guys out here want to see you.” He poked his head out of the window. “Names?”
“Siggy, Berti, and Eric.”
He looked at us askance, and repeated the names into the phone. “Yes, sir.”
To our complete surprise, he raced outside the guardhouse and saluted, prompting the two others to do the same. “Des, take these, eh gennelmen, to the officer’s mess.”
I don’t know what Major Phelps had said, but the guards sure changed their opinion bloody quickly.
It was the start of a ‘off the bus… on the bus’ trip that I would rather have forgotten.
First, we were bumped to an air force base I never even got the name of, then onto Florida. At Camp X we’d learned to catch as much sleep where we could, but by the time we got on the flying boat, I was still exhausted. I never saw one iota of the flight to Puerto Rico.
We stayed there a whole day, sweltering in the heat, drinking some sweet drink that we couldn’t pronounce in a bar on the airfield. Thank goodness we didn’t have to pay the bill.
A flight in almost total darkness followed. When we landed, we were told we were in Guyana. I had no idea where that even was, and I only found out later it wasn’t one of the islands.
Our final stop on the west side of the Atlantic was a wonderful place I’d have stayed the whole war if they’d brought my family to me.
Fortaleza was a coastal town in Brazil, where we were treated as conquering heroes.
Red cliffs ran down to wide sandy beaches, luscious palm trees covering every piece of land not built on. It was the closest to a true paradise I’d ever seen.
Flights across the Atlantic’s shortest route to Sierra Leone in Africa were not every day, so we had to wait until we had enough ‘cargo’ to warrant a flight. Not that I considered my time in Fortaleza to be just ‘waiting’. I enjoyed every minute of it, the thoughts of my next voyage forgotten in days of relaxing sunshine.
So we crossed the Atlantic Ocean sat on top of cargo for fourteen hours in a flying boat. What a come-down from paradise.
When we flew on to Lagos, Nigeria, then east to the Sudan, I should have twigged that something wasn’t right, that we were flying away from Britain again. But my travel-battered brain was finding sleep difficult, so thinking and reasoning took second place.
It was only when we landed in Egypt, and got driven off the air base that we started to suspect things were amiss. Half an hour later we were back in an Army base, dressed in civvies, feeling like three lemons on an apple stall.
“You three took your time.” We stood in front of an army cap
tain, dusty, his badges almost worn thin on his desert tunic.
Having just woken up from a seven day hike across a quarter of the planet; we weren’t up to any crap. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, looking around for somewhere to sit.
“Stand at attention when you address an officer.” He barked.
Siggy and Berti looked at each other wondering what to do; they were both ex-military, and even six weeks ignoring army red-tape can be cut in seconds. However, we now all had fully-grown beards, and had no outward appearance of any military affiliation. I gave the captain a dirty look and moved to sit on the corner of his desk. “Listen mate, I don’t know what you think you have here,” I motioned to my friends, “But we’re not playing your game.”
I thought he’d burst a blood vessel, he fumed so red. I even considered knocking him out just for fun, when the door opened; a major this time. He looked inside, summed up the situation in micro-seconds. “Dismissed, Reeves.”
The man left even redder than before.
Once the captain had gone, the major rounded the desk, and sat down in his place. “My name is Bagnold. I’ve been told I can borrow you chaps for a couple of days. Is that alright?”
“And who told you that?” It seemed in the presence of military types I had been elected the cocky don’t-care spokesman.
To my surprise, he smiled. “Ah, so you’re not in the mob, ah well.” He rummaged in his pocket and produced a folded piece of paper, well used.
It was a personal note from General Auchinleck instructing anyone to accede to the demands of the bearer of the note; instantly and without question.
“What do you think?” I asked the others, switching to German.
“It looks legitimate.” Siggy agreed. Berti nodded.
“And let me guess,” I said, my voice heavy with sarcasm. “We have to do this favor for you before we get home?” I asked in English.
“I can furnish transport back to Blighty,” Bagnold waved the document. “Or I can find things very difficult to organize…”
The ultimatum was crystal clear. “Okay,” I sighed. “What do we have to do?”
It seemed we were late, expected three days before, and the ‘task force’ was waiting on our arrival to discuss the important matter in hand.
Major Bagnold drove his own jeep, a real converted Chevrolet; and he was proud of it. He said he’d done the alterations himself, and after a few minutes in his company, I believed him. By now, in mid-morning, the heat was quite oppressive, and the first thing he said he’d ‘have’ to do, was kit us out. I mean, the gear we’d worn from New York, wasn’t fit for the either the job or climate.
We soon learned Major Bagnold didn’t exactly do things by the book.
He drove us into an army base, and asked for directions to the laundry. Inside he held the protesters back while we raided the bags of ‘outgoing’ uniforms.
“Pick officers uniforms,” I said immediately. “We need to have some rank, or no-one will pay us any attention.”
So, in the middle of the desert, just outside Cairo, James Baird, Scotsman Reporter became Captain James Baird, 2nd New Zealand Division.
“You’ll pass muster in our mob.” Bagnold said as he looked us up and down. “Most of the chaps are colonists. Seems Aussies and Kiwis are pretty good with engines, and that kind of experience can’t be taught quickly.”
It was then we had another shock; meeting General Auchinleck himself.
“They hardly look much.” He said, walking round us.
“They’re straight out of training,” Bagnold smiled. “But they come highly recommended.”
“And are you certain they can do the job?”
“How about it, chaps? Are you up to it?”
“Up to what, sir?” I asked. Both Siggy and Berti had chosen lieutenant’s uniforms; weanies.
Auchinleck grinned. “They don’t know?”
Bagnold joined the joke. “No, sir.”
The general picked a folder from a drawer in his desk, flipped it open on the desktop.
A picture of a German senior officer, I couldn’t see rank, but assumed it extreme because of the pose, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, round his neck.
“This is General Ludwig Crüwell. He’s Rommel’s number two in Libya.” He flipped the picture over, showed another of the general, this time next to Rommel himself. “Operation Ascalon is the assassination or capture of this man.”
My instincts drove to the front. This was a big mission, and I mean huge big. “And just how are we going to do that, General?”
“We know he’s doing a morale tour along the front.” Auchinleck grinned. “It’s your job to drive into the German camp, capture him, and bring him back to us. How you do it is your job, not mine.”
“And if we can’t take him alive?”
“Then send him to his maker, entourage and all; he’ll have some pretty powerful men with him.”
Operation Ascalon; Capturing a General
I’m not understating when I say the whole ‘capturing a general’ thing came as a bit of a surprise. What I didn’t estimate was the time and work that went on behind the scenes to get such an undertaking off the ground. This wasn’t a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ job; this was a fully-fledged military operation.
We would be taken behind enemy lines by a unit called the ‘Long Range Desert Group’; they had the General’s route, but no way to get close. We, that is me, Siggy and Berti would be the means to get face-to-face with the man himself, and somehow spirit him away from his entourage.
For that we needed to be as German as Apple Strudel.
And to be convincing, we needed uniforms.
That appeared to be no problem to Major Bagnold. His solution? A German prisoner of war camp. His bribe to get a modicum of cooperation? A truck full of Red-Cross parcels; it sat tantalizingly outside the tall barbed-wire fence.
Siggy took the lead, walking round the camp. We soon found what we needed, sitting together like a bunch of flowers in a garden; four German Panzer officers, none too high in rank, and all looking around our size. We soon had them in the admin hut.
At first they weren’t too happy about telling their story, kept mentioning some rag called the Geneva Convention. That took exactly three minutes to cure.
We’d learned a trick at the camp called the choke-hold. Arms under a man’s neck cut off air to his lungs, thirty seconds you were groggy, after no more than a minute, you were unconscious. If your mate aimed a gun at the unconscious man’s head, and he was allowed to fall, it looked all the world like an execution. Especially if viewed from behind.
Siggy took the main German to the door, the rest watching from inside. I stood with the gun, ‘questioning the subject’ as he slipped into a light coma. Getting no reaction from my subject, I feigned anger, aimed and fired. Siggy let the man fall to the ground. Siggy even made to wipe imaginary specks of blood from his face; bloody marvelous. Needless to say, it worked a treat.
Inside, his friends were irate, citing all kinds of retribution.
However, looking out onto the inanimate body in the sand, they all told their stories. Their regiment, officer’s names, where they got taken, who captured them, their unit name designation. Geneva Convention be damned; they sang like sponsored canaries.
Then we took their uniforms, army-issued underwear and all.
With some captured kit from a storeroom; sand goggles, belts, water bottles and other desert paraphernalia, we soon looked every bit like regular Afrika Corps. After we’d strapped Lugers to our hips, and tossed a bit of sand at our faces, Major Bagnold looked on very convinced.
I must say, the beard growth on my face suited my new look. “We don’t look weathered enough.” Berti said as he looked in the mirror of a nearby truck.
Bagnold grinned. “Oh, you’ll get that soon around here. A week in the desert will have you burning to a nice crisp.”
Getting behind the enemy lines was as dif
ficult as driving in a half circle. Well, a kind of weirds, angular half circle. The war in North Africa was fought mainly in the hundred miles or so of land near the Mediterranean Sea. The desert itself made travel further inland almost impossible, so at any time, the flanks of both armies were easily skirted; that’s where the Long Range Desert Group came in. Experts in desert travel, they could drive to places the German’s didn’t even know existed.
Bagnold told us the Italians had nicknamed them the ghost patrol.
The only real threat was the Luftwaffe, and hopefully the RAF and a few well-placed infiltration teams would be keeping them busy. That’s where the whole Army Operation planning thing came into its own; teamwork.
So, in order to get myself back to Edinburgh, and see my wife and family again, I’d have to go behind enemy lines, capture a German general, and get back in one piece. Bloody marvelous.
On the evening of 18th November, we set off in four Chevrolet 1 ½ ton trucks. Bagnold and a full LRDG crew took the lead, followed by three jeeps of mixed troops. Mine carried an LRDG driver and front gunner sitting behind the huge barrel of the Lewis machine gun with its circular top-mounted magazine. In the back sat me and a little man called Herbie, crammed either side of the mounted Vickers Maxim machine gun.
The trucks seemed like they had pieces of equipment tied everywhere, camouflage sheets, petrol cans, water bottles; fifteen years of driving in the desert made Bagnold the world’s expert on such travel. Operation Ascalon was in good hands.
Herbie was an Aussie from the ‘outback’, whatever that was. As we’d made final adjustments to the truck’s contents, he’d looked at my German uniform with some disgust, then asked me to say something convincing.
I grinned. “Ich traue dir nicht, ich mag dich nicht , du riechst scheisse.”
Herbie laughed. “I caught the last bit.” Seems curse words are common knowledge.
Before we set off, my driver, Mike, looked me over, wiped some slimy oil over my face, then positioned my goggles correctly. The last addition was an oversize paisley pattern handkerchief, halved then swept over my lower face, cowboy style. Herbie told me to tie it behind my head. “It’ll keep insects out of your mouth, and sand, of course. There’s a reason old Baggy likes to drive in pole position. It gets pretty bloody dusty back here sometimes.” He tucked the lower end of the kerchief past my Adam’s apple, under my tunic collar. “If you’re thirsty, drink through it. The fine mesh is a good filter.”
