Soldier G: The Desert Raiders

by Shaun Clarke

  Spitting in the sand, Wheeler stomped off to supervise the activities of his men. Greaves and Reynolds did the same with their own men before taking cover behind their jeep. They had barely done so when German infantry broke through the wire a mere hundred yards away and surged forward through the moonlit darkness.

  ‘JERRY!’ someone yelled again.

  A British lieutenant with a corporal and five troopers rushed out to meet the Germans, charging against heavy machine-gun fire. Two of the troopers went down, convulsing as the bullets struck them, but the others managed to reach the first of the advancing Germans, killing some with their bayonets before succumbing themselves to bayonet and bullet. The rest of the Germans then rushed through the gap, ghostlike in the smoke-filled darkness, followed by the tanks, which headed straight for the British gun positions, located three miles inside the perimeter.

  About forty tanks managed to get through before the Tommies could bring up enough men to engage the enemy infantry and gunners who were trying to bring their guns through the gap. The Tommies shot up their crews before they could get into action and the Aussies, fierce fighters as always, did the same along the barbed-wire perimeter.

  One German was trapped on the wire, bent belly-down over it, screaming in agony. ‘Put that bastard out of his misery!’ one of the Aussies shouted and another, not hesitating, rammed his bayonet down through the soldier’s spine, slamming him deeper into the barbed wire so that he kicked convulsively before he was silenced for all time. The Aussie withdrew his bayonet with a jerk, then dropped to his knees, raised his rifle to his shoulder and started firing again at the advancing Germans, ignoring the bloody, twisted corpse on the wire beside him.

  ‘Those Aussies are impressive,’ Greaves said. ‘I’m glad they’re on our side.’

  ‘Damn right,’ Reynolds replied.

  After the tanks went through, the gap was closed and no German guns or infantry got past the Tommies or Aussies.

  ‘Let’s get back to the defensive line,’ Reynolds said. ‘Leave the men to mop up here.’

  While the medics raced out to the closed gap to tend to the dead and wounded, Greaves followed the major to his jeep, climbed in beside him, and was driven away from the perimeter, following the three-mile route taken by the Panzers. As the tanks could only travel at thirty miles per hour, the jeep soon caught up with them and Reynolds raced boldly between them, determined to reach the British defensive line before the Germans. He had just driven up over the crest of a low hill, giving a clear view of the British six- and 26-pounders, when the tanks behind him opened fire and one of the first shells came whining down to explode with a mighty roar.

  Greaves heard the roar of the explosion, felt the blast hammering at him, then was picked up and spun in the air, before falling through a great silence. He smashed into the ground, bounced up and rolled over it, then blacked out.

  Regaining consciousness, he found himself on a stretcher, being carried back through more explosions, geysering soil, sand and gravel, to where the big guns were belching fire and smoke. Laid down on the ground beside Reynolds, who was on a stretcher and covered in blood, Greaves, whose lower half was numb, was forced to watch the ongoing battle without being able to take part in it.

  While he had been unconscious the Panzers had continued their advance, firing their 55mm and 75mm guns, with the tracers illuminating the darkness like neon lights. When the tanks were about 700 yards from the British gun positions, the gunners fired on them with their 25-pounders and anti-tank guns, about 100 rounds per gun, which temporarily stopped them again. Then the British tanks moved out to engage them and, with luck, push them back a second time.

  Two of the heavy enemy tanks tried to get around the British flank. One was hit by a 25-pounder shell and exploded, breaking down as it tried to struggle back. The other fired and hit the British 25-pounder and its crew, causing dreadful carnage before making its escape with the other tanks.

  After knocking out seven of the Panzers with their 25-pounders, the gunners eventually turned them back for good. Escaping through the gap they had created when they broke into the perimeter, the German tanks left pursued by a hail of shells and bullets from the Tommies who had taken command of the gap.

  A sudden, startling silence reigned until, as if only slowly realizing that they had won, the gun crews clapped and cheered.

  Still stretched out on his stretcher and not able to move, Greaves felt a spasm of panic, then groping carefully, discovered that he had broken his left leg and badly bruised the other, but was otherwise not seriously hurt or permanently injured. Glancing sideways at Reynolds, he saw that although covered in blood, he seemed fairly perky.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Lots of blood from shrapnel wounds in the thigh,’ Reynolds replied with a cheerful grin. ‘Looks much worse than it is, old chap.’

  ‘Well, we certainly appear to have given Jerry a good hiding,’ Greaves said, wanting to sound as cheerful as Reynolds looked.

  ‘We did,’ the major replied, ‘but I wouldn’t call it a victory. Tobruk is now surrounded by the Germans and in a state of siege. This could last for months.’

  Greaves tried to sit up but passed out from the pain. He dreamt that he was relaxing on the deck of a ship with a cool breeze blowing across the open deck and cooling the sweat on his fevered brow.

  Regaining consciousness a few hours later, he found himself lying on a stretcher on the open deck of a British destroyer heading from Tobruk to Alexandria. Glancing sideways, he saw Reynolds, now swathed in clean bandages and still relatively lively.

  ‘Rommel,’ Major Reynolds murmured as if continuing a conversation with himself. ‘He’s a formidable enemy.’

  ‘We can beat him,’ Greaves said quietly.

  1

  ‘I agree,’ 24-year-old Lieutenant David Stirling said, packing his rucksack on his cluttered bed in the Scottish Military Hospital in Alexandria. ‘Rommel’s a brilliant general, a man to respect, but he can be beaten.’

  ‘And doubtless you know how to do it,’ Lieutenant Greaves replied sardonically, knowing that Stirling was a man who loved soldiering and was full of ideas. Born in Scotland of aristocratic lineage – his father was General Archibald Stirling of Keir – young Stirling was a bit of an adventurer, passionately fond of hunting, shooting and mountaineering, as well as being devoted to the Army.

  ‘Of course,’ Stirling replied with enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been studying the subject for weeks. Saved me from going mad in this bloody place and kept the marbles …’ He pointed to his head with his index finger. ‘… well polished. Know what I mean, Dirk?’

  ‘Yes,’ Greaves said, also packing his rucksack, for he, too, was finally leaving the hospital. ‘If a man spends too much time in bed, his brain tends to rot.’

  ‘Too right.’

  Having been in hospital for over six weeks, Greaves understood the dangers of chronic boredom. He had managed to get through his own first few weeks by dwelling on how he came to be there, although it was rather like reliving a bad dream.

  After being knocked unconscious by the explosion, he had regained his senses as he was carried on a stretcher through a series of explosions to the Regimental Aid Post a few hundred yards away. Placed on the ground in a large tent between men worse off than himself, including those classified as Dead On Arrival, he had to wait his turn while the harassed doctors and medics assessed the injuries of those being brought in, carried out emergency surgery, including amputations, and passed the casualties along the line.

  Reaching Greaves and Reynolds, they found that the former had broken his left leg and the latter had suffered serious perforations of the stomach from shell fragments. Greaves’s leg was put in a temporary splint, Reynolds’s stomach was temporarily bandaged, then both were placed with other wounded men in an ambulance and driven to the Main Dressing Station in a white-painted stone building in an area being torn apart by the shells of enemy tanks and dive-bombing Stukas.

&nbs
p; Lying on a real bed in a large, barn-like room converted into a makeshift hospital ward, receiving warm smiles from the RAMC nurses, Greaves nevertheless could not shut out what was going on around him: essential first-aid and medical treatment, including blood transfusions, the removal of shell splinters from bloody limbs, and even more complicated amputations and other operations. It was a grim sight, made worse by the moaning and screaming of men in terrible pain.

  Greaves’s broken leg was reset and encased in a proper plaster, then, even as Reynolds was being wheeled into the surgery for an operation, Greaves was picked off his bed, placed on a stretcher and carried out of the building, into another ambulance. He was then driven to the harbour of Tobruk where, under cover of darkness, he was casevacked – casualty evacuated – in a small boat to one of the four destroyers anchored in the harbour. Those swift vessels, he knew, were the lifeline to Tobruk, running the gauntlet of Stukas under cover of darkness to bring food, ammunition, letters, and reinforcements to the besieged harbour town, as well as shipping out the casualties.

  While crates of supplies were being lowered on slings down one side of the destroyer, Greaves and the other wounded men were hoisted up the other and carried down on their stretchers to the sick bay located deep in the crowded, noisy hold. There they had remained until the ship reached Alexandria, when they were transferred from the ship to the present hospital. After a minor operation to fix his broken leg, Greaves had been transferred to the recuperation ward where he had been given a bed right beside his fellow lieutenant, David Stirling, who was recovering from a bad parachute drop.

  The hospital was pleasant enough, surrounded by green lawns bordered by fig and palm trees where the men could breathe the fresh air while gazing at the white walls and bougainvillaea of Alexandria, as well as the blue Mediterranean stretching out beyond a harbour filled with Allied destroyers. Yet a hospital it remained, with all the boredom that entailed, and Greaves and Stirling had passed the time by swapping stories about their experiences, the former in Tobruk, the latter along the Cyrenaican coast, and speculating on the outcome of the war and how best it might be won. Stirling was a man who liked conversation and was brimful of energy. Greaves liked him a lot.

  ‘The problem with Rommel,’ Stirling said, taking up a favourite theme, ‘is not that he’s invincible, but that we’re going about him the wrong way.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, for instance, take those raids we made with Laycock along the coast of Cyrenaica. Bloody disasters, practically all of them! Why?’

  Greaves thought he knew the answer. He and the energetic former Scots Guards officer had been members of 8 Commando, posted to General Wavell’s Middle Eastern Army with other commandos on attachment to ‘Layforce’, the special unit formed by Colonel Robert Laycock to mount raids against the Axis forces in Rhodes, Crete, Syria, around Tobruk, and all along the coast of Cyrenaica. However, after a series of disasters which were blamed on a chronic shortage of manpower and equipment, Layforce was disbanded and the men and ships used for other, presumably more fruitful, missions.

  ‘Bad weather,’ Greaves began, echoing his own thoughts. ‘Shortage of manpower and …’

  ‘No! That’s damned nonsense cooked up by MEHQ to save face. The raids were disasters because we took too many men, inserted by orthodox means – in other words, by sea – and so couldn’t keep ourselves hidden; usually being observed well in advance of the raids by Axis reconnaissance planes. The Krauts or Eyeties on the ground were therefore waiting for us to arrive, all set to cut us to pieces and send what was left of us packing. The very idea of using up to 2000 men for raiding parties landing by boat is ridiculous. Impossible to keep such an op secret. Just begging for trouble.’

  ‘We’re back to your idea of hitting the enemy with small groups of men rather than whole regiments.’ Greaves said, completing his packing, tightening the ropes of his rucksack, and glancing along the ward, his eyes settling on a pretty RAMC nurse, Frances Beamish, whom he hoped to get to know better once he was on convalescent leave in Cairo. ‘It’s become an obsession.’

  Stirling laughed. ‘What’s a man without an obsession? How do you think I ended up in this hospital? By trying to prove a point! You don’t use large groups of men, which are bound to attract attention. You use small groups of no more than four or five and insert them as invisibly as possible. If you land them well away from the target area, letting them hike the rest of the way, they can really take the enemy by surprise. That’s the point I was trying to prove – and that’s how I ended up in this damned hospital, wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, as stiff as a board.’

  Greaves had heard the story before. Learning that another former Layforce officer, Captain ‘Jock’ Lewes, Welsh Guards, had acquired fifty static-line parachutes offloaded in Alexandria, Egypt, for shipment to India, Stirling had charmed the taciturn but adventurous Welshman into joining him in experimental jumps with the chutes. Unfortunately, he and Lewes made two of the first jumps from a Valentia, an aircraft quite unsuitable for this purpose. To make matters worse, both men lacked the experience required for the task. After tying his static line to the legs of a passenger seat, because the Valentia did not have the proper overhead suspension for the static lines, Stirling jumped out the wrong way, snagged and tore his ’chute on the tailplane, dropped like a stone and practically crashed to the ground. He was lucky to be alive. In the event, he had been knocked unconscious by the fall and came to in the Scottish Military Hospital, badly bruised and with two damaged legs. Now, after weeks of treatment and exercise, he was, like Greaves, about to leave for a period of convalescence.

  ‘Look,’ he said, lifting a clipboard off his still opened rucksack and waving it dramatically in the air, ‘I even wrote some notes on the subject. Want to hear them?’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  Stirling grinned. ‘The Germans and Italians,’ he read, ‘are vulnerable to attacks on their transports, vehicle parks and aerodromes along the coast. However, plans to land the 200 men of a commando for such raids against a single target inevitably destroy the element of surprise when their ship has to be escorted along the coast – a high risk in itself for the Navy.’

  ‘I agree with that,’ Greaves interjected, recalling many of his own doomed ventures with 8 Commando along the coast around Tobruk, when the boats had been attacked by Stukas or Italian fighters.

  Stirling nodded, then continued reading. ‘On the other hand, landing five-man teams with the element of surprise could destroy about fifty aircraft on an airfield which a commando would have to fight like blazes to reach. Such a team could be inserted by parachute, submarine or even a disguised fishing boat. They would then approach the enemy by crossing the Great Sand Sea, south of the Jalo and Siwa oases, which Jerry doesn’t have under surveillance. By making the approach from that unwatched flank, moving overland under cover of darkness, the element of surprise would be total.’

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ Greaves said, ‘except for one problem. The Great Sand Sea presents enormous difficulties of navigation and survival. I don’t think we could cross it.’

  Grinning like a schoolboy, Stirling held his forefinger up in the air, calling for silence. ‘Ah, yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘But that problem’s already solved. I’ve been hearing stories about a little-known unit called the Long Range Desert Group, composed mostly of old hands from Major Ralph Bagnold’s desert expeditions of the 1920s and 30s. It’s now being used as a reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering unit that operates in the desert with the aid of ten open-topped Chevrolet lorries. Those men know the desert like the back of their hands and could be used as a taxi service for us. We parachute in, make our raid against the enemy, then rendezvous with the LRDG at a preselected RV and get driven back to base by them. I think it would work.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough,’ Greaves said. ‘The only problem remaining is to keep your newly formed group under your own command. I think it should be separate from the main body of the Army and
devise its own methods of training.’

  ‘I don’t think the top brass would wear that,’ Stirling said, placing the clipboard on top of the other gear in his rucksack and tightening the rope to close it up.

  ‘Well,’ Greaves said, smiling automatically when he saw Nurse Beamish coming along the ward towards him, ‘tell them you want the raiding force to come under the Commander-in-Chief Middle East. In real terms that doesn’t mean a damned thing – the raiding party would soon get conveniently lost in that command and you’d have virtual autonomy over your own men.’ He grinned at Stirling. ‘Naturally that presents you with another problem: how on earth do you persuade them to let you do it?’

  ‘Oh, I think I can manage,’ Stirling replied deadpan. ‘I’ve already written a detailed memorandum on the subject for the attention of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces. Once he’s read it, I’m sure he’ll agree.’

  While recognizing Stirling’s boldness, Greaves was struck by his naïvety. ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No,’ Stirling replied. ‘Why would I joke about it?’

  ‘If you submit that memo through normal channels, it will almost certainly get buried by a staff officer and never be seen again.’

  ‘Which is why I’m going to deliver it personally,’ Stirling said with a big, cocky grin.

  Greaves was opening his mouth to reply when Nurse Beamish, petite, with black hair and green eyes, stopped between him and Stirling, smiling warmly at each in turn but giving most of her attention to Greaves, who had flirted relentlessly with her during his stay here.

  ‘So you two are ready to leave,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ answered Stirling.

  ‘Corporal,’ Nurse Beamish corrected him.

  ‘Yes, dear Corporal,’ Stirling replied.

  ‘Where do you plan to stay in Cairo?’ Nurse Beamish asked of Greaves.