Just as Major Sinclair and his men were being brought in, a
salvo of shells landed in the middle of the group of prisoners and in the dust and confusion, he ran for it. He found a sangar and hid under a groundsheet until dark while Germans looted a truck ten yards away. He spent a chilly night under the stars before he made it back. At the end of it all, two officers from ‘A’ Company and forty men were missing. Only twenty made it out safely. ‘A’ Company was no more.
Operation Crusader was in disarray. We were running out of tanks and ammunition. The Sidi Rezegh aerodrome had been recaptured by the enemy, which would have devastating consequences for the men immediately around me. We had watched at a distance, seeing the shell bursts on the aerodrome where ‘A’ company had been pinned down, but now we were at the centre of the battle.
The 4th Armoured Brigade began withdrawing through our position, and carriers on the aerodrome were also being forced slowly backwards.
At that point a bunch of enemy tanks appeared on the ridge to the south of the airfield and not more than half a mile away. The panzers passed thirty yards from one of our platoons but even at that range none of our weapons, the Brens and the useless Boys anti-tank rifle, made any impression on them. The battle between our twenty-five-pounder field guns and their heavily armoured tanks was hopelessly uneven but Garmoyle kept them at it, going from one gun to the next, encouraging the gunners and giving orders. I didn’t see it but there’s a story that a shell fell right by him as he walked calmly around. A rifleman said to his mate, ‘Hey, look, a shell fell right on the Major.’
‘What did he do?’ asked the other.
‘Took a longer stride.’
Those gunners, and Garmoyle’s encouragement, held up the German advance until nightfall but many of our vehicles were captured before they could get back out of range.
That last night of freedom was relatively quiet considering the
chaos all around it. We withdrew well away from the ridge. Other units were leaguered up with us by now. Right through the night, small groups of tanks from the 22nd Armoured Brigade kept turning up. I swapped my desert boots for heavy leather ones and put on my leather jerkin. I expected something bad to happen.
At first light on the morning of 22 November we were right back in it again. Fifty of our surviving tanks held an enemy panzer attack at bay. Then came a false dawn as the light tanks of 4th Armoured Brigade raced up having fought their way north-west. Brigadier Jock Campbell led them into battle, racing along in front in a pick-up, flying his blue scarf as a flag. They rushed straight into combat but the attack was more gallant than effective. They arrived in small groups and were destroyed in small groups.
We were now in a precarious position on the edge of the Sidi Rezegh aerodrome. There was a lot of confused discussion on the wireless because we were using a different set of place names to those issued to the 11th Hussars. It didn’t bode well. We were ordered to follow a bearing of 22 degrees as the most suitable line of attack across a featureless expanse. They told us to beware of enemy tanks, which were prowling around looking for prey.
With two blue flags held stretched out at arm’s length the platoon commander ordered us to advance line abreast. I adjusted my leather jerkin as the carrier engines growled around me. It was hot and sweaty and I had a white handkerchief tied to the steering wheel to wipe my brow. I crunched the carrier into gear and we lurched forward, rocking on the tracks as we picked up speed until we were just a neck ahead of the other four. We had no idea what they had ordered us into.
The ground suddenly dropped away ahead of us and I had to swerve eastward along the edge of an escarpment. Then from nowhere machine guns opened up and the armour plating was soon ringing like hammer blows on an anvil. We were for it now all right.
Les said nothing. ‘Fire, for God’s sake,’ I shouted at the gunner behind me. I heard the metallic bursts of the Bren firing above me. The sound was deafening. I could feel the heat from the Bren’s muzzle. Used cartridges showered down on to my neck and into the driver’s foot-well.
There was a pause behind and a clash of metal as the gunner changed magazines. The bullets were still smacking into us, sending vibrations through the carrier as if a pneumatic drill was at work on the armour plating.
Les was focused on firing the Boys anti-tank rifle alongside me. I had my seat dropped down in its action position and, instead of looking over the top of the armour, I was peering through the glass in the tiny windscreen slit. I was leaning to my right, away from Les, looking through the screen at an angle in case a bullet came through it.
The recoil of each shot kicked him backwards, its echoing blast lost behind the clatter of incoming machine gun fire. Another pause and I could hear the frantic sound of the gunner changing magazines again. The armour plating was zinging with incoming fire. I was struggling to control the carrier and empty cartridges started spitting down on me again, then suddenly that stopped. All around the din continued but the Bren was still. My ears were ringing but the silence from our gunner was awful. I knew instantly he’d copped it. Then they opened up on us from both sides.
We were driving into a narrowing funnel of German gunners. On our left, they were hidden below the lip of the escarpment. On the right, they were level with us. Les, who had been firing and reloading without pause, wanted to take aim at a gun position.
‘Stop!’ he screamed.
‘Not bloody likely! We’ll be a sitting target.’
They were already firing at the tracks and the wheel assemblies. If they knocked those out, they could pick us off at will.
We were bearing down on one of the machine-gun posts in a blizzard of crossfire. With the gunner out of action and Les
struggling with the anti-tank rifle, the only really useful weapons I had to hand were a pile of hand grenades next to the seat, and the carrier itself, which could still do some damage.
‘I’ll get the buggers,’ I shouted to Les, more in defiance than hope, as we ploughed into the machine-gun post. The carrier lurched again on its tracks as we mounted their position to the sound of metal being crushed and twisted below the tracks. I was sure the machine gunners were killed instantly but we were surrounded. It hardly made a difference now.
I grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin with my teeth and lobbed it with my arm arcing above the armour plating. It was impossible to know if the blast had any effect. I couldn’t see. The air was full of flying metal. I threw another grenade and another, hoping desperately that each blast would bring silence. It never came.
It didn’t feel like a bullet that hit me. It was just a smashing blow to my upper body as I stretched up to hurl my last grenade. I had been shot.
I was barely aware of the spud-masher grenade bouncing into the carrier.
I had been knocked down, stunned, into the driver’s well. Then there was an almighty blast. It was like having two heavy steel spikes hammered into my ears. Slowed down, it seemed as if my head was expanding and contracting with the force of accelerating air.
If the grenade had bounced down my side of the carrier, I would have been finished but the transmission casing between me and Les saved me by deflecting the hot metal up and away. I must have been knocked out by the blast and the carrier had plunged thirty feet off the edge of the escarpment.
When I came around the inside of the carrier was red and I was covered in gore, warm and sticky. I had half of poor old Les all over me; blood and God knows what else.
It wasn’t over. A German soldier towered over me silhouetted against the glare. If he chose to shoot me, that would be it. He
was dragging me out of the carrier. He was angry and I didn’t expect special treatment, not here, not after what I’d done. I had just crushed his comrades. It was all the same to me now what happened. And there was dear old Les. A human shape was recognisable but little else. The grenade had exploded right in his lap.
The soldier didn’t shoot. I saw his lips move. He was rifling through the carrier hunting for the ammunition. Through the high-pitched squealing in my ears I could still hear gunfire in the distance. The other carriers were in trouble. Then I saw the gunner, crumpled on the ground. He wasn’t moving and his arm was badly mangled. Another young German came up. He looked at all the bright dents in the sides of the carrier where hundreds of bullets had hit. He ran his fingertips over them, smiling as if pleased with the accuracy of his aim.
Looking down at my leather jerkin with remnants of Les all over it, I knew straight away why I had been spared in those first few seconds of capture. It looked like I’d been blown apart too. They had taken me for dead.
My first reaction on seeing that Les had been blasted to kingdom come was, ‘Thank God it wasn’t me’. Later, much later, people would tell me that everyone wants to survive and that it was a normal response, but was it? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Like I said, in war you make excuses to yourself all the time.
Les was the chap with the twinkling eyes. I had come all the way from Liverpool with him, I’d danced with his sister Marjorie, sat around the kitchen table with his folks, laughed at their jokes and shared their food. It didn’t seem right. It troubles me as much now as it did seventy years ago. But you do what you have to do, to get through. The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls.
Sidi Rezegh would become known to us as the forgotten battle, and to be a footnote within a forgotten battle is something indeed.
T
he gunner was in a terrible state. His arm was all but severed by bullets and he was losing a lot of blood. I didn’t expect him to live. A German soldier applied a tourniquet. He made twisting gestures towards me with his hands and I caught the words, ‘
Jede fünfzehn Minuten
.’ He wanted me to release it regularly but I never had the chance. I was lifted onto a stretcher and taken away, leaving the shot-up carrier and Les behind.
I never found out what they did with his body. His remains were still there, slumped forward in his seat when they took me. His name is on the Alamein memorial. I hope someone gave him a proper burial.
Forgotten battle? It was a bloody disaster. Four of the carriers were lost in that action alone. I had minor wounds to my leg and my head and a more serious one to my upper arm. It would be some time before I learnt that Eddie Richardson, Regimental Eddie, had survived it. His carrier had launched off the escarpment at speed and made a lucky soft landing on a giant pile of jerry cans. He survived both the ambush and the flight and was taken prisoner. I think I saw him in the distance in a transit camp months later but I couldn’t get to him.
Bill Chipperfield, who had shared my cabin on the
Otranto
and had come to South Africa with me, was dead together with twenty lads from 2RB killed in the first two days of the Sidi Rezegh battle. Many more from other units perished; I’d seen their corpses all over the battlefield. 2nd Lieut. Jimmy McGrigor was
killed when a shell hit Hugo Column HQ. He was all right, Jimmy. He talked to us like people, not layabouts.
The siege of Tobruk was lifted but that didn’t stop Rommel. He attacked again, advanced deep into Egypt and wasn’t stopped until the following summer when he reached El Alamein just a day or two’s march from Alexandria. There, the 8th Army, by then under Montgomery, turned the tables for the last time, pushing Rommel out of Egypt once and for all, pressing on through Libya and into Tunisia. Charles Calistan played a heroic part at El Alamein, destroying a score of German tanks almost single-handedly, but by then I was in another world entirely.
The German stretcher-bearers brought me to an advanced dressing station where I was placed on a metal table. They removed my bloodstained jerkin. A
Stabsarzt
came, a surgeon with the rank of major. I felt his hands all over my body as he checked for further injuries. I lay staring at the heavy canvas roof of the bell tent. There was an interruption as they brought in an Italian officer with his foot blown off. To my astonishment, the
Stabsarzt
ordered them sharply out of the tent so he could concentrate on me. It was a strange feeling, given that I was now a helpless prisoner dependent on an enemy doctor. He dug at my wounds to get the filth and shrapnel out of them and I was bandaged up. Thankfully, the bullet had missed the bone. I was mightily relieved.
I wasn’t scared. I remember thinking how the hell had I allowed myself to be caught and that now I would never get to be an officer. I was moved to a bigger tent with boxes of supplies piled in the corner. It was strange being undercover again. You didn’t see many tents in the desert; we always slept al fresco.
‘Would you like to eat something?’ The words took me by surprise. The speaker was a young lad with sun-bleached hair. The Afrika Korps had many educated people in its ranks and quite a lot spoke English. I hadn’t eaten properly for days. The answer was obvious. He came back carrying some bread and jam
or ‘Marmelade’ as he called it. I was astounded. I hadn’t seen bread since South Africa.
It was then I realised I was going to survive this. I was well looked after in a silent and dispassionate sort of way. I assumed good treatment was the order of the day. Later, when I encountered a different sort of German soldier, I realised the Afrika Korps were in a league of their own.
They told me my war was over but I knew it wasn’t. I was still on duty and I would stay on duty until the end. It was a promise I made to myself then and it was to my own detriment later. Still, they had patched me up and probably saved my life so it was an oddly calm interlude. There was no guard inside the tent at night; the medical staff had no fear of me at all, they knew I wasn’t capable of escape. I don’t know how long it was before I was moved but eventually I was loaded, still lying down, into the back of a small vehicle. There was another wounded soldier in there with me but he barely spoke.