Take or Destroy!

by John Harris

  With Hockold already using his Sten, the fire from the troublesome machine-gun slackened and more men crossed. Watching from among the sheds where he crouched, Taffy Jones found he couldn’t make himself follow. He desperately wanted to display the sort of courage the others were showing and had made the first rush down the mole in a blind panic, forced onward by the still greater fear of what his friends would think if he stopped. But now, since the first terrifying crashes of shells had started around them and the shuddering stutter of machine-guns had knocked men over alongside him, nothing he could do would produce any further response from a body frozen by terror. This wasn’t at all what he’d expected. From the day he’d volunteered for the commandos, he’d been living in mute and unspoken fear of what battle would be like. But, though he had all along imagined something terrible, he had never foreseen anything as terrible as this.

  Sergeant Freelove noticed the expression on his face and, used to the momentary panic of soldiers in the first shock of a fight, he gave him a shove. ‘Get on, man!’ he shouted.

  But Taffy was even stricken dumb in the paralysis of fear, and Freelove literally dragged him to his feet so that, exposed to the firing, he had no option but to run, panting, his equipment clanking, to leap the wire and fling himself, breathless, his tongue stuck dry and tacky to the roof of his mouth, down again among the others.

  A lorry was moving nearby, heading away from the buildings. Someone threw a grenade at it and the petrol tank exploded and it went up in flames. A man jumped out and started to run, and Taffy saw that he, too, was burning brightly.

  The obscurity of the smoke gave them a moment’s grace, and the men around him jumped up again and began to run across the road and through the trees by the mosque to gather round a group of small mud-brick buildings nearer the arch. Trying to keep up with them, Sugarwhite saw a few fleeting figures in the dark and was just going to shoot when in the nick of time he recognized them as Arabs. A couple of lurching shapes appeared - camels which, sleeping among the trees by the mosque, had stumbled to their feet in alarm at the din and were bolting with hobbled legs. As he ran, one of them blundered into him and he went over, stunned, while the camel appeared to trample all over him before a stray bullet caught it and it collapsed, blowing blood through its nostrils, it’s bound feet threshing the dust.

  Perspiration streaming down his heavy handsome face, Taffy watched Sugarwhite go down. Then Sergeant Freelove gave him another kick so that he leapt up in alarm and went after the others, running with clattering equipment for the mud buildings at the side of the mosque. The raking stutter of a Bren was answered by a rippling crackle which, even through his panic, he knew came from a Spandau, and he flung himself down again. Wriggling under a hand-cart containing half a dozen drums of petrol and a water-skin used by Arab labourers, he hunched tensely against the wheel, frantic unintelligible words coming between his lips in the anguished whine of a bullied child.

  The men around him glanced at him but made no comment. Knowing they hadn’t finished by a long way yet, they sat with their backs to the mud walls, panting, to rest their heavy packs. Willow dragged the water-skin off the cart and they passed it round. Then, surrounded by Eva and the snipers who were holding down the fire of the Germans trying to hit him, Hockold tried to peer through the smoke. As he lifted his head, Docwra gestured at a palm tree further along the road. ‘Keep your ‘ead doon, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s a felly wi’ a gun up yonder.’

  ‘Where be the mucky toad?’ Eva asked. ‘Among they trees?’

  ‘Fourth one on the right. Tak’ a dekko, Tinner!’

  ‘Mun’ be bloody thin,’ Eva commented. ‘Just ‘ang on a tick.’

  He found a place alongside the cart where Taffy Jones cowered, and crouched down. Though aware of the terrified man alongside him, it never occurred to him to question his fear and, cradling his rifle against his cheek, he wriggled himself to comfort.

  ‘I see ‘un.’ The rifle cracked and he lifted his head. ‘That’s served ‘urr wi’ ‘is chips,’ he said.

  Docwra shook his head, peering with narrow eyes through the smoke. ‘Na,’ he said. ‘You missed, hinny!’

  Eva smiled. ‘Just ‘ee wait.’

  As they watched, a body wavered behind the tree and fell forward into the road, still grasping a rifle in one clenched fist.

  Docwra grinned. ‘I’m bloody glad ye’re on oor side,’ he said.

  There was still a lot of firing coming from the buildings by the Roman arch and the direction of the Boujaffar. Hockold knew exactly where he wanted to be. Just ahead was a second-floor office with an outside iron stair, from which he could cover the hotel and the buildings nearby. But there was a brick-built hut that looked like a storehouse in the way, and in the darkness beyond its wide-open doorway a machine-gun had been set up and was firing spasmodically towards them.

  ‘Get that building, Sergeant,’ he said to Sidebottom who went off at once between the trees with half a dozen men. As the machine-gun stopped for a moment, two of them tried a dash across the road, but it opened up again and they staggered away, one shot in the face, the other in the ankle.

  Crouching among the trees, Sidebottom studied the doorway for a moment or two. ‘Stanna shwaya,’ he said and ran back to where Hockold crouched. Indifferently, he kicked Taffy Jones from under his feet, snatched the water-skin from the hands of Eva who was drinking from it, and emptied its contents into the dust.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Sarge, ‘tes water, that!’

  ‘Mallesh!’ Sidebottom’s crazy eyes gleamed in his blackened face. ‘ ‘T’ain’t the pawny I want, it’s a buckshee skin.’

  As the last drops of water splashed into the dust, Sidebottom turned to the hand-cart and drove a hole in the top of one of the drums.

  ‘Yon’s bloody petrol, Sarge!’ Docwra shouted in alarm.

  ‘Taro!’ Sidebottom was holding the open mouth of the water-skin under the spouting liquid. ‘It’ll soon drain down!’

  Filling the skin, he ran back to where his party were bent over the two wounded men.

  ‘Sidi’s gone spare,’ Docwra said.

  There was nothing spare about Sidebottom, however. Watching from the mud huts, they saw him pat his two wounded men on their backs as though comforting them. Then he jumped up and made a dash across the road, the water-skin spraying the earth round his boots with petrol, to fling himself down alongside the storehouse. Crawling to the door, he rose and stood with his back against the wall, then he swung the goatskin and tossed it with all his strength inside. As it landed, splashing wildly, he wrenched the pin from a grenade and rolled it in after it. There was a scream from the darkness as it exploded, a belching flare of flame, and the whole interior began to burn like a torch. Plunging inside, Sidebottom saw the gleam of an iron cross and yelled the only German he knew. ‘Achtung, Schpitfeuer!’ he roared as he pulled the trigger of his Sten.

  With the machine-gun silenced, the firing had slackened a lot and Rabbitt came pounding up to crouch alongside Hockold. ‘Mr Murdoch’s away, sir,’ he reported. ‘I saw his party go.’

  ‘Right!’ Hockold gestured at the iron stairway and, carrying Brens and captured German Schmeissers, they pounded towards it past the burning storehouse. Cook-Corporal Rogers found a crowbar and began to knock a hole in the wall so that Rabbitt could set up the Spandau he had dragged with him from the end of the mole. Alongside him, Sergeant Curtiss opened contact with Umberto on his radio.

  ‘In position,’ he said. ‘In position.’

  Amos grinned. ‘I think we’ve made it,’ he said.

  It seemed so, too, to the men in Hochstatter’s office. They had seen the first two searchlights go out and the clusters of hanging lamps round the harbour shot away one by one, but they could still see the grey-yellow smoke drifting from the harbour wall, obscuring everything beyond from the very men who needed to know. On the beach below Mas el Bub the landing craft was burning fiercely, lighting the ceiling with its flames, the smoke rolling
out to sea picking up the glare on its billows so that they looked like clouds at sunset. It was clear that the British had reached the end of the mole and the beach. A few had probably even got into the town, but they had no idea where the rest of them were. Then the 75 above the Borgo Nero had fallen silent together with the 47 at the landward end of the mole, and Nietzsche crawled on hands and knees beneath the bullets that were tearing Hochstatter’s office to shreds, to summon what was left of the pioneers from the POW compound where he’d placed them as a reserve.

  ‘I want them down here at once!’ he screamed into the telephone.

  A heavy machine-gun on Umberto was still hammering steadily at the windows. The shutters were already in splinters and the bullets were gouging great holes in the plaster at the opposite side of the room. Hochstatter was a fastidious man and one of the jobs of his orderlies had been to keep the place presentable. Even a few vases of flowers had found their way in, and the machine-gun was chopping the heads off the blooms and demolishing the vases, along with the books, the glasses, the bottles, the files, the dancing tattered map on the wall, the very wall itself.

  It was while they were all crouched under the window, ducking and wincing at the crashes and covered with white plaster and fragments of stone, that the telephone rang.

  Wutka snatched at it. It was a call from the airfield.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the man at the other end said cheerfully. ‘It’s a false alarm. They weren’t parachutists. They were dummies.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Wutka roared. ‘Ours aren’t. They’re coming straight up the street with Tommy guns!’

  As Rabbitt got the Spandau going, the two men he had detailed to run the captured German machine-gunners down the mole towards the ships found themselves face to face with the rest of the shore parties. With the disappearance of the guns and the searchlight at Mas el Bub, it was now possible for the men crouching below the wall on Horambeb, to get on to the mole and they were already beginning to move towards the town.

  ‘Come on, chaps!’ Swann was standing among the drifting swirls of smoke, magnificently exposed to the flying bullets as he gathered his men around him.

  ‘Get going, you silly bugger!’ It was the job of the survivors of Brandison’s party to join Swann as he passed and, as he stared back at the officer nagging his men into a group in the smoke, it seemed to Sergeant Jacka that it would have been much wiser to go like the clappers for a bit of shelter and let the rest follow as they could. For Christ’s sake, he thought, they weren’t on bloody parade!

  But Swann was doing it his own way. He’d been told ‘No panic’ and he intended there should be none. ‘Let’s go,’ he said at last, and began to pound down the mole and across the bridge Jacka had captured.

  ‘Come on, Sergeant,’ he encouraged cheerfully.

  Jacka muttered his opinion of Swann as he and his men scrambled to their feet and tagged on behind. As they burst from the drifting smoke, they saw Meinertz’s wrecked Honey and Hockold with his men now established among the buildings at the Bab el Gawla.

  As they flopped into shelter by the trees outside the mosque, a machine-gun in one of the houses near the Boujaffar opened up on them and Swann’s RAF demolition expert grunted and folded up. Jacka snatched up the bag of plastic explosive and, slinging it over his shoulder, ran after Swann and crouched down alongside him among the trees, waiting for an opportunity to get up the main street. After Murdoch’s dash, however, the Germans had recovered and were pinning them down firmly again. As the bullets whined over their heads, chipping splinters from the trees, Swann’s determination not to get worked up grew a little frayed and he became excited to the point of exultation.

  A Spandau opened up, its intimidating rate of fire making it easily distinguishable, and a group of Germans started to run towards them. Jacka fired and they all fell to the ground, except one man who dashed for shelter. Jacka shot him within ten yards of safety.

  Swann nodded, sternly approving. ‘We have to get up that street there,’ he said.

  ‘I should wait a bit, sir,’ Jacka advised. ‘We’ve plenty of time.’ Swann frowned. ‘I think we’d better go now,’ he insisted, but as he stood up a bullet whanged in a glancing blow against the curve of his steel helmet and spun him round to sit down heavily alongside Jacka, his head ringing, his brain addled, his eyes rolling in his head like marbles in a cup.

  Far beyond Swann, and already well clear of the smoky centre of the town, the fuel dump party were running as hard as they could go. Murdoch was way ahead of them and waiting by the lorry compound, with the brake parked among a group of trees. With him were Corporal Gobbe, Captain Cadish, one of the RAF demolition experts, and Hank Broecker who, being an American, had decided riding was always better than running and had snatched open the rear doors and piled inside with the others.

  The German guards were standing in shallow trenches by the gate of the compound, staring towards the town, wondering what was happening, and the first man to appear was Honorary Aircraftman Uri Rouat, Devenish’s Palestinian. He was leading the rest of the party by yards and, as he came up, running like a stag, he ignored all the warnings he’d been given and went pounding on at full speed. One of the German gunners spotted him as he emerged from the darkness and immediately started to swing his gun. He was too late by seconds and the Palestinian jumped clean over the barrel to land with both his size eleven boots in the German’s chest. As the German went down, Rouat swung his Sten by the barrel to knock the gunner’s mate’s teeth down his throat and, before the loader could collect his senses, he found himself being strangled by a pair of great brown fists.

  The sheer speed of the attack threw the Germans into a confusion from which they had not recovered when Murdoch’s party, led by Cobbe, arrived. As a German head appeared, Cobbe jammed his Sten straight at it and pulled the trigger so that it seemed to burst apart like a ripe melon, then, flinging himself down, he sent a blast of fire to clear the running figures in the compound.

  Rouat dropped the dead German and looked round. ‘We are winning, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Cadish!’ Murdoch appeared with a swing of his kilt and indicated the bungalows near the lorry park where the German maintenance staff, drivers and guards lived. ‘Use your chaps to kill the park, but save a dozen lorries in case we need ‘em to take us into the desert. And we’ll have yon buildings winkled out and fortified in case we have to make a stand for Hockold to come out. Grab any weapons, food and water you can find! Corporal Cobbe’ll help. He kens a fair bit about this sort of thing.’

  As Murdoch signalled Cadish forward, the drivers inside the compound were trying to get the lorries away. The leading one was already heading for the road when a burst from Hank Broecker shattered the windscreen, blinded the driver, and sent it swinging off at an angle. It ran into the rear of another lorry, puncturing the petrol tank and pushing it into a third. Broecker immediately saw the possibilities and tossed a grenade towards them as men started to jump down with their weapons at the ready.

  They went down like ninepins as Broecker fired, then the grenade went off and all three lorries went up in flames.

  ‘Not bad!’ The British habit of understatement appealed to Cadish. ‘Not bad, Broecker!’

  Murdoch nodded approvingly. ‘We’ll be away,’ he said. ‘Yon bastards at the petrol dump will be wide awake by this time.’

  The Americans watched the brake head further out of town, trailing a cloud of dust and with the rest of the party trotting after it, bowed down under their heavy packs. Then Cadish swung round to his own group. ‘Right, you guys,’ he said. ‘Fingers out! Get stuck into these goddamned lorries!’

  At the other end of the town, also out of the smoke, Second-Lieutenant Sotheby was finding things a little more difficult than he’d expected. Out of what was to have been a party of sixty men, there were only nineteen left; and he was the only officer, with Berringer as his only sergeant. A lot seemed to depend on him.

  He had climbed the low c
liffs and crossed the road and was now crouching on the slope below the POW compound where Captain Veledetti was watching nervously from the window of his command post, wondering if it were best to surrender or put up a token resistance to satisfy honour. A gun was firing over the compound and it worried Sotheby because it hadn’t been shown on the plan of the town he’d seen. What was more, it seemed to be a damned sight bigger than the 47s he’d been expecting. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to do something about it but, lacking Gollier’s experience, he wasn’t sure what. The firing was only sporadic, however, because now that Umberto and Horambeb were behind the mole and sheltered by the supply ships there was nowhere the gun could shoot with safety. Sotheby decided thankfully that it could wait for the time being.

  Firing started round the Roman arch in the centre of the town and he assumed Hockold and his party had managed to establish themselves there. The 47 behind the Mantazeh Palace seemed to be unsighted because it wasn’t worrying them, though he could hear the clatter of machine-guns from that direction. Then the gun on the cliff above him fired again and he saw the shell burst among the Arab boats in the harbour. As feluccas disintegrated in a cloud of flying splinters and whirring planks it dawned on him that the gun-crew had managed to bring it to bear towards Hockold’s party and that before long it could be smashing to ruins the houses where they sheltered.

  He became aware of Berringer watching him, and then that all the eyes in the other blackened features round him were on his face. He was horrified by the responsibility that had been thrown on him and his adam’s apple jerked as he swallowed with difficulty. Conscious of his nervousness and lack of skill as a soldier, he bent to check the magazine on his Sten but managed instead to wrench it free. Blushing under his blacking, he sighed and shoved it back into place. He looked like a hesitant sixth-former.