by Thomas Wood
“Get ‘em all Clarkey!” Red’s voice screamed above the din.
I peeked out of the slight hatch that the commander had to peer out of, with only a limited field of view offered to him. What I could see from my restricted viewpoint was astounding. The road that ran north, into Arras, the very road we were about to turn onto, was stuffed full of German vehicles, I had never seen so many before in my life.
There were troop carrying trucks, motorcycles with or without sidecars, a handful of half-tracks, some of them with small artillery pieces attached to the back and even a platoon of soldiers that had been on bicycles.
The explosions that engulfed all of them was utterly incredible, and I watched as man after man was mown down by Clarkey’s indiscriminating machine gun fire. To my left, I watched as a shell landed just in front of a vacated motorcycle with machine gun wielding sidecar, and stared in amusement as it was flung off the road, sent rolling into the ditch to one side. How easy it had been to destroy that motorcycle! I wanted to clap and cheer after it was repeated again and again as truck after truck was engulfed in flames as another round pierced its engine compartment.
The noise was incredible, not just from Alan’s machine gun, but from all the tanks that surrounded us as they poured as much destruction on the convoy as was possible. The heat too, was almost unbearable and I was sure that I felt some of it sear my face as yet another half-track went up in flames.
These had been the sort of targets that we had been trained to shoot at, these were almost identical to the ones we had blown up on the plains of England. It almost seemed too easy to me. Men lay dead and dying all around and smouldering wrecks occasionally exploded into another ball of flames as the fire reached the fuel tank.
This was what war was all about. Destroying the enemy. I felt absolutely nothing that resembled remorse or sadness, I was completely on autopilot. I did not think of the men that had occupied these trucks or motorcycles and I barely noticed their bodies, now being burnt by the remnants of their convoy. They weren’t men to me, they were merely targets. Their trucks had seemed as empty to me then, as they had done while we were training, and I felt my blood chill in my bones as I realised how callous I had become.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Disembark. Weapons ready. Over.”
Clarkey set about reloading his machine gun and checking that it would be all ready to go in a few minutes. I hopped out along with Red, both of us brandishing our revolvers. Some of the others kept Lee-Enfield rifles with them, but more often than not, had them strapped to the outside of their tanks because of a lack of space inside. We kept our revolvers, mainly for using on ourselves if we were completely compromised while on a reconnaissance run. A few of the keener lads took it upon themselves to begin working their way through the wreckages, kicking bits of it here and there and making sure that nothing would be able to move as soon as we turned our backs.
“Good shooting gents,” the Major said as I approached him, “and well done to the recce troop as well. Well done Lieutenant Lewis.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Now we’ve held them back a bit, it should buy us, and our infantry a bit more time. But we need to be alert. Understood?” Everyone nodded.
“Does anyone have any injuries or other issues they need to tell me about?”
No one had any and so it was back to our tanks, ready to move out in the next few minutes. We needed to make ourselves scarce now, such a large enemy convoy meant that more than likely a group of enemy tanks would soon be making their way down the same way, something which we just wouldn’t be able to cope with. Their firepower and equipment was far superior to ours, and I didn’t much fancy our chances if we were to find ourselves up against better tanks and more experienced tank crew.
It was as I mounted back up into my tank that the first elements of grief began to slip through the net of my mind. I had helped to coordinate an attack which had seen a large group of enemy soldiers completely butchered. Some had been struck by brutal machine gun rounds, while others had been blasted in a plethora of directions, while others still were burnt to a cinder as they had screamed.
It was only then that I managed to regain an element of humanness, just a hint of compassion. It had taken me so long to readjust to it, that I began to hate myself for it.
“This is Tango. Engines on please everyone. Fear Naught.”
6
I was elated to be back in the tank, finally able to shut out everything that I had just seen and helped organise, and sink my head back inside the relative safety of my steel box. It felt good to be back inside with Red and Alan, like I was somehow stronger when I was with them, they gave me a boost.
I took my canteen and poured some into the cupped palm of my hand, before splashing it onto my face. I rubbed it in as best I could, trying to get the sweat and grease off, but also trying to wash away the incredible feeling of guilt that was almost paralysing me.
It was my first taste of real battle, and I had just directed the entire regiment into combat, and in the process, had wiped out nearly an entire German convoy. There must have been at least fifty dead, all because of me.
“You alright, Sir?” asked a concerned Alan, as he placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Yes…yes…I’m alright, thank you,” I eventually uttered, opening my eyes as I did so, as if I had just managed to get rid of all the feelings of shame that were crippling me.
“Well done, Sir,” shouted Red, “a brilliant success by all accounts.” Yes, I suppose it was, if you could call fifty dead men lying with blood pouring out of them, some still writhing around in agony, a success.
Alan could clearly see that I was distressed, as he interjected before Red could go any further, “Well, think of all those vehicles they can’t use now, that should hold them up for days.”
Red had always been a little bit more vicious than me, constantly spouting about how much he hated the Germans, and how he wanted to see every single one of them dead by the end of the war. It was a view that I was always wholeheartedly unsure on and so was Alan, although even he had a far more hostile view towards the Germans than I had, which is why his latest remark had surprised me somewhat.
I felt almost pathetic for a moment, I was meant to be the commander in this tank, I was meant to be an officer, and yet I had the most passive views of them all. To me, the Germans were still soldiers, still men, just like us and we had absolutely no way of knowing whether or not they wanted to conquer us all like the newsreels would want us to believe. There was almost a divide, between the lower ranks and the commissioned ones. Us officers, had a more sceptical view of the propaganda that was pumped into us, whereas the lower ranks truly despised the enemy and were convinced they would want to butcher them all upon sight.
“Hello all. Look lively. Let’s get out of here.” The ever-present voice of Major Perkins sparked up in my ear again and brought me back into the present.
Before I could pull myself together anymore, we were thundering back to where we hoped the rest of our forces were waiting for us.
“Tango One, take your troop off ahead will you? Scout the route ahead.”
I didn’t even need to tell Red to put his foot down, he was already pushing the engine a little harder than it was used to as I acknowledged the message from Perkins.
We began bumping our way around and Clarkey and myself had to hold onto the sides of the tank, to make sure we didn’t make a firm contact with the steel with our skulls.
I began to hear a sudden rumbling, and, wondering if it was a malfunctioning headset, I whipped mine off to double check. The rumbling continued, in fact, it grew louder as I had taken it off.
“Engine all okay Red?” I asked him, trying to pinpoint the source of the mysterious rumbling.
“Sweet as a nut, Sir.”
The rumbling seemed to continue to grow and I began to wonder if it was only me who could hear it. I poked my head out of the hatch of the tank and listened. Our engine was growling
as we passed the edge of the forest that Red had made use of earlier on today, but the rumbling superseded the noise of our tank.
All of a sudden, the rumbling stopped. It was almost as if the rumbling, rolling thunder had passed overhead and now I was just waiting for the lightning bolt to leap its way through the sky, towards earth. But no lightning bolt was forthcoming.
Instead, it felt like an even bigger thunder than ever before had rumbled, shaking the very core of my body as it did so.
“Red, stop!” I screamed at the top of my voice, met with a stream of curses from Red, who had been almost deafened by the screaming voice in his ears.
We were some way away from the rest of the tanks now, who had just passed the halfway point of the forest to our left. Alan and I spun round on the platform, as we traversed the turret around, to get a better view of what was going on, Red would stay where he was, our only eyes to what lay in front of us.
A great big cloud of dust was just settling around our tanks, as the rumbling sparked up again in the distance. The trembling thunder continued to roll and the lightning strikes, as artillery shells hit the ground, began to flash in front of me.
I tried to work out where they were coming from, as if we, in our under armoured tank, would somehow be able to put a stop to it all. We had been ambushed, good and proper and it was me who had led the regiment in to face the fall of German shells.
“We’ve got to go back!” screamed Alan, “We can pick some of them up!”
Tanks were already taking direct hits, as they tried their hardest to keep up their pace and move towards us. Rounds began to burst just in front of them as the gunners fired ahead, trying to destroy their targets expertly.
I could see that two tanks were already chucking out great big pillars of black smoke, but I couldn’t quite see what their crews were doing. If they were able to get out, their only real option would be to jump on one of our tanks and hope for the best, the only other alternative involved running across an open field for about half a mile, within full view of the gunners who were so accurately decimating our tanks right now.
I knew Alan was right, “Red turn us around, we need to go back mate.” There was no questioning from Red, no hesitation as he realised that he was heading into the midst of a huge firestorm, just an obliging yank of the levers as he sent us into our first real taste of war.
As we approached the burning wreckages, I hoped that some were still alive and aware that we were there to pick them up, there was no way I wanted to get out and invite them in.
“Lewis! What on earth do you think you’re doing?! Get out of here! Now!” I felt my eardrums bulge as the voice hollered through my headset.
I was about to argue back with him in the most foolish way but, as I poked my head rather stupidly out of my tank, I saw something that made me want to be somewhere very far away indeed. Out of the tree line that we had just passed, came the protruding barrels of German tanks.
They had really done us over brilliantly. They had let us take that convoy and had known that our most likely route back would be the quickest one towards our regimental headquarters. They had set up their artillery just behind the wood and moved their tanks into position just inside the tree line. They knew that their artillery was only accurate to a point so, the tanks would chase us to mop up any of us that had survived the thunder and lightning of their big guns.
“Panzers to our rear.” I called out over the radio.
“That’s all we need,” came the strained voice of Major Perkins.
“Red, we’ve got to abandon this mate, turn us around.”
As long as the artillery was still raining down on us, it meant that the Panzers wouldn’t risk getting too close yet, so I needn’t worry about them for now. At least with the Panzers, you could semi-predict where their rounds would land, judging by their speed and the direction that the whacking great gun was pointing. But with artillery, it’s so much harder to tell.
As the thought ran through my mind, I felt like we had managed to get airborne for a brief moment and I took a look to see what had caused it. Just in front of us and to our right, a Matilda was now engulfed in flames, a plume of black smoke churning its way out of her thicker than any factory chimney that I had ever seen before.
As we approached it I watched helplessly as a figure slowly pulled himself out onto the top of the tank, his clothes engulfed in the same flames that were embracing the Matilda. The figure did not scream or shout, he just calmly pulled his revolver up to his temple at the side of his head and squeezed the trigger.
His body fell from the tank and I was certain that I heard his body thump into the ground as it connected with the earth, louder than the impact of any artillery shell.
“The boss just took one, Sir!” I yanked my gaze away from the burning tank and tried to pinpoint exactly where the Major’s tank was.
My senses were completely overloaded, the heat was now attacking my face more than ever, with great beads of sweat rolling into my eyes and stinging them beyond belief. The noise of battle as rounds continued to smash into the earth and screams as they bellowed down my headset, began to get too much for my brain and the pain of a headache began to stretch itself across the width of my head.
It was what I was seeing however, that caused me the biggest distress. I had clocked the Major’s tank, and as we approached it I could see that it wasn’t moving anymore. There were no flames or clouds of smoke bellowing from his tank and from behind it hadn’t seemed to have been damaged at all.
As Red slowed us down to take a better look, it was clear that all the occupants would be dead. The front of the tank was a mix of twisted metal belonging to the tank and the remnants of the round that had hit them. The front had practically become the back of the tank as it had all been caved in. I felt nothing for the death of the Major and his crew. He had been a soldier long enough to know that his odds were getting smaller and smaller the longer he remained in, he’d had more than enough chances to back out of this frontline malarkey.
I remained calm as I realised that, now that the Major was lying crushed in his Matilda, no longer breathing and Captain Reynolds’ tank now billowing large flames from it, that I was now in control of the rest of the regiment. I looked around me at what was now my kingdom. From around forty tanks that we had started with, I could now only count around fifteen that seemed to still be moving, limping back towards our garrison.
The artillery rounds began to slow as we moved out of the sight of the gunners, and I could almost feel the engine revs of the Panzers begin to pick up as they closed in on us. The Panzers weren’t faster than us in our Light Tanks, but they would be in effective range of the remainders of our Matildas in no time at all.
I could almost hear the taunting shrieks of the Panzer’s tracks as they grew ever closer to us, chasing us down like a pack of wolves.
We were in an incredibly desperate situation right now, we were outgunned, outmanned and to stand and fight would be pure suicide. I wondered what we should do, the ticking clock echoing in my mind almost as vibrantly as the squealing tank tracks.
“Sir? What are we doing, Sir? Do we have a plan?” The petrified voice of Red only clarified how little time I actually had to make a decision, one that would seal all of our fates.
“Hello all. This is Tango One. Disperse. Disperse. Disperse. They can’t chase us all. Good luck boys. See you soon, over.” I almost wanted to stop and cry as soon as I had made the order, the first order without the Major had been one of cowardice, one of desperation.
As we all began to split up across the field in search of some sort of safe haven, I could not shake the immense weight of doom that was crushing my chest as we carried on. I began to struggle to breathe, like a child does when in the middle of a bout of sobbing.
We had our backs to the enemy, an enemy who was quicker than us, better trained than us and had better weapons than us. They would show no remorse in retaliation for the bloodbath we had inflicted upon the
ir comrades by Arras, they would show no mercy.
As a round whistled past our tank, I could not help but feel like the weight of doom would soon get the better of me and crush me. I was totally helpless now, Clarkey and I had to put all of our trust in Red and his abilities as a driver.
7
The regiment was all but destroyed. I thought it unlikely that we would be fighting as a complete regiment again for quite some time. We had been completely decimated in the space of a few minutes. As the fifteen or so of our tanks began to limp back towards any kind of safety, I prayed that all of them would make it back somehow. Now that the Major was dead, I was technically in charge of those boys still, and I wanted all of them alive if I could help it.
I found it difficult to take, especially at the apparent elation that I should have been experiencing after we had shot up the convoy. I retraced my footsteps and my thoughts over the last few hours; had I missed something that would have given away the German’s intentions? I supposed that the obvious lack of any armour or defence for the convoy should have been a giveaway.
Who puts that much kit and equipment in the field, without so much as an anti-tank gun to be able to fire back with?
I thought of the soldiers that we had cut down in those few short moments. I wondered whether or not that they knew of the plan that their officers had put in place, or whether they were genuinely surprised at our appearance on top of the bank. Either way, I felt desperately sorry for them all of a sudden; they had been used as bait, as a sacrifice.
I doubted that even Red would be unmoved by the thought that those men were there to be brutally killed.
I wondered whether or not the Major had noticed something, that meant that some of the blame would shift from my shoulders. Surely, with all his experience and know-how, he must have known that the unguarded convoy was so out of the ordinary that something would happen later on.
