Three Kings (Kirov Series) (11 page)

Cyrenaica
was a vast peninsula extending from Bardia in the east, then curving up through
Derna
, and west to Benghazi before it dipped down
again to
Agadabia
on the Gulf of Sirte. The best road
was along that curving edge of the coast, for inland the ground rose in the
imposing terrain of the Jebel
Akhdar
, the Green
Mountains.

O’Connor
could see that he had one last chance to turn a solid victory into something
truly decisive. If he allowed the remaining Italian troops to escape, he would
only end up having to fight them another day. So he stared at the map looking
for another way west, but found no roads fingering their way into the deserts
beyond Bardia and Tobruk. There were goat trails, thin tracks tracing their way
through the wadis, remnants of secondary roads that were really nothing more
than the tracks of a vehicle that had wandered there, and they were all
shifting with the wind on the sand.

So he
decided. He would make his own road. He would simply get a column together and
point it west, cutting right straight across the wide base of the peninsula,
through the open desert. He Found General Michael
O’Moore
Creagh, commanding 7th Armored, and urged him to move via the thin trail
network through
Mechili
,
Msus
and
Antelat
.

“Get
west,” he said. “Any way you can. I don’t care if you have to cannibalize every
unit you have, but gather any vehicle that has petrol and get them moving!”

Creagh
made the decision to give this job to the intrepid commander of his division
reconnaissance unit, Lieutenant Colonel John Combe of the 7th Hussars.

“Look Johnny,”
he said. “I’m going to cobble together anything that still has petrol and give
you a flying column, about 2000 troops in all. You do the flying. Head
southwest and position yourself defensively to block the Italian retreat to
Tripoli.”

Combe
looked at the map, seeing nothing but blank space along the route Creagh was
pointing out. “Along what road?” he asked the obvious question.

“There
isn’t one,” said Creagh. “At least not anything we would call a road. You’ll
just have to make your own. We’ll follow as best we can with the rest of the
division.”

“Very
well.” Combe smiled. It was a classic cavalry action for his Hussars. He would
dash on ahead through the night, braving the unknown, scouting out the way, and
when he got there he would be facing off the remnant of the entire Italian 10th
Army, perhaps 30,000 men, and he would hold until relieved.

“Got
it,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and “Combe Force” was born. He had
a squadron of his own 11th Hussars in old Morris and Marmon Herington armored
cars, supported by B Squadron of 1st King's Dragoon Guards, with a few Mark VI
Light
tankettes
and another handful of armored cars.
C Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, had a few 25 pounders, and he had some truck
mounted 37mm anti-tank guns from 106th Regiment RHA. The infantry element was
the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, motorized infantry.

And off
they went into the night, with the armored cars leading and Combe squinting at
his map and compass. Just follow a compass heading southwest, he thought, and
it was a fitting end to the operation he had led with his Hussars from the very
first. They navigated around wadis, over cold stony ground, the vehicles
jolting over the rugged terrain, through occasional thickets of desert scrub.
Fuel was always an issue, but he reckoned he had enough to get his force to the
west coast. Getting back was another matter, but that never entered his mind.

The sun
rose on his force half way through that ordeal, and he pushed on, warily
watching the sky for any sign of enemy aircraft. None came. The last Italian
air strike had managed to zero in on a cluster of 8000 prisoners well behind
British lines, where the Italians suffered the ignominious humiliation of being
bombed by their own air force.

By noon
the column had come up on a low ridge overlooking the road to Benghazi to the
north, a place called Beda
Fomm
. Combe was elated to
see that he had beaten the Italians to this place, and he busily set about
arranging his small contingent into a blocking force. His few Bren carriers
were out of petrol, so he left them behind and brought up his infantry.

“Get
the lads dug in along this line,” he said. “We’ll position the artillery and AA
guns behind.” He sent one small group up with a few crates of landmines and had
them lay down a makeshift mine field, but that was the defense. He had a few
mines, a single battalion of British infantry, and the handful of guns and
armored cars against anything the Italians had left.

As it
happened, he had beaten the Italians to this place by a bare two hours, for his
troops soon saw the dust rising from an approaching column. It was led by the
10th
Bersaglieri
, which blundered into the shallow
minefield and stopped with some shock and surprise. They quickly pulled
themselves together, however, and organized a strong attack, determined to open
the road again for the long column behind them.

Combe
opened up on them with his 25 pounders to break up the attack, his gunners
putting down disciplined fire on the enemy as they advanced. The Italians fell
back, and Combe looked at his watch. He had received word that O’Connor had put
together a supporting force of anything else that could move in
Creagh’s
7th Armored division. They had been following the
tracks his own column had made to navigate their way west, and by 4pm the lead
elements arrived from 4th Armored Brigade, just as the Italians were putting in
yet another strong attack.

Nearly
out of fuel, the few cruiser tanks and Bren carriers that could still move
charged boldly forward against what appeared to be an endless column of
Italians. Combe began to open up with his 37mm flak guns, and a 40mm Bofors,
setting several Italian trucks on fire and causing a panic on the jammed
coastal road. Trucks veered away, plowing into heavy sand and bogging down as
they came under fire. There were some 20,000 Italians clogging up the road,
with fighting troops mixed in with support services, airfield crews, and
civilians from Benghazi.

One
British squadron of three cruiser tanks, a Bren carrier and one truck mounted
37mm AA gun took off north, running parallel to the coastal road and blasting
away at the Italian column for all of ten miles. They stopped to fetch ammo
from the supply truck and found out just how far afield they were, a handful of
men stinging the long python that might turn on them at any moment. So they
simply turned around, firing at the enemy all the way south again, until they
had returned to
Combe’s
main lines to report the
column seemed endless.

If the
Italians had massed their fighting troops and made an all or nothing attempt to
break through, they would certainly have prevailed. Had
these
been German troops, or Japanese, they would have brushed the scanty blocking
force aside with no trouble. As it was, the British were determined to stop
them, and the Italians were not as determined to break out, even though they
tried gallantly in several attacks, the last a formation of nearly 100 light
and medium tanks.

On they
came, the tracks rattling, guns barking at the thin lines of the 2nd King’s
Rifle Battalion blocking the way. The British troopers opened up with their
Vickers MGs, but it was the 25 pounder artillery that would have to do the job
if they were to hold. The artillery crews leveled the barrels of their field
pieces and began to pour well disciplined fire on the advancing tanks. Blasting
away at them as they charged bravely forward.

“Where’s
our bloody tanks?” an artilleryman shouted over the din of the firing?”

“Back
there,” the Gunnery Sergeant thumbed over his shoulder. “Out of bloody gas. Now
load and fire,
boyo
, because that barrel is all
that’s between you and those enemy tanks!”

The
British had nipped at a part of the flank of the Italian column, capturing
about 800 prisoners there, mostly service troops. But, as fate would have it,
there were three fuel trucks in the column, and several Tommy’s got them back
to
Creagh’s
4th Armored where the tanks were hastily
filling up with the much needed fuel. That was a fortunate find, for the supply
column on its way from Bardia with more fuel had run into a sand storm and was
now completely lost.

“Nice
of the Italians to make the delivery just when we needed it most,” said a
tanker. It was just another barb in the Italian 10th Army’s side, a force that
was now in the last desperate throes of the most ignominious defeat in the
history of Italian arms.

Twenty
Italian tanks had managed to break into the lines of the Kings Rifles, but they
soon realized that they had no supporting infantry and that the rest of their
brigade had been stopped by the artillery fire, well behind them. One British
Sergeant took out his pistol and leapt atop an enemy M11/39 tank, rapping on
the turret hatch, which, to his surprise, was immediately opened by an ornery
Italian Lieutenant.

“Hello
mate,” he said calmly. “You and your lads might want to give it up now before
those 25 pounders get you bore sighted.”

There
was the Lieutenant, sitting behind 30mm armor, with a 37mm main gun and two 8mm
Breda machine guns bristling from his upper turret, and he was facing a single
British Sergeant with a revolver. He could have slammed his hatch shut, which
he should never have opened in the first place, and gunned his engine to
continue his attack, but instead he just climbed out of his tank and
surrendered. The Sergeant single handedly captured three of the twenty tanks in
the lines with nothing more than his sidearm. Seven others were knocked out by
the artillery, and the rest turned and fled.

The incident
was symbolic of the entire battle, where this vastly superior Italian force
seemed not to have the slightest idea of how it should fight the enemy
tormenting them in the desert. When this attack failed, the Italians decided to
wait for further orders from behind, where Electric Beard
Bergonzoli
was furious that his escape to Tripoli should be blocked by such a small
British force.

Darkness
put a merciful end to the chaos of that day. A few British fuel trucks had
finally made it all the way from Bardia, and the rest of the tanks that had
joined the action were able to refuel. The Division, if it could still be
called that, now could count nineteen tanks in the 2nd RTR, and a division
reserve of 10 cruiser tanks. The men passed a sleepless night, cold, with the
threat of rain on the crisp desert air.

To the
north,
Bergonzoli
was also busy organizing his last
attempt to break through at dawn the following morning. He would execute a
small flanking maneuver, turning east off the road, and charge in with the last
of his tanks, a force some 60 strong. Once they had tied down the British tanks
and guns, his infantry would push on up the road, where he hoped his sheer
numbers would overwhelm the 2nd King’s Rifle Battalion, still dug in and
huddled over tins of Bully Beef and cold water.

The
next morning, Brigadier J.A.L. Caunter would organize the defense, setting out
his 19 tanks to receive the enemy when they discovered what
Bergonzoli
was up to. “Blood” Caunter, as he was called, was a man who never flinched from
a tough job. When he went fishing, it was not for carp or herring, but sharks,
and he would later write a book about angling for the most dangerous sharks he
could find in British waters. Now, however, he was angling to catch
Bergonzoli’s
armor by surprise, and the last tank battle of
the campaign was about to be joined near a small rise, studded with the
blanched white sandstone dome of an old Arab mosque.

The
British called it “the Pimple,” and it would be a landmark for their well
rehearsed battle maneuvers. Blood Caunter had the advantage of experience,
grit, and good radios in his tanks to coordinate his movements. Even though the
enemy outnumbered him three to one, the Italians had no radios, and had to rely
on flag signals from one tank formation to another to coordinate their attack.

But on
they came, flags fluttering as the first wave of thirty tanks led the attack.
Caunter had a bugler take a quick swig from a canteen and sound “stand to,” and
the British crews leapt into their well positioned tanks, waiting for the
enemy. They would get in the all important first shot, trying to even the odds
before the Italians could rush in at close quarters and overwhelm them with
sheer numbers. Eight Italian tanks brewed up in the first wave, whereupon Caunter
executed a smart backward withdrawal, placing his tanks below the line of the
low ridge he had been on.

Thinking
they finally had the enemy on the run, the Italians blundered forward, some
units stopping near the mosque to await further orders by flag as to where they
should go next. Those that saw the signal to move ahead ended up being
sky-lined on the ridge, and
Caunter’s
tanks savaged
them again, sending them reeling back towards the mosque.

At this
Caunter sent in his reserve of ten cruiser tanks. “All stations, tanks left and
attack the pimple. I repeat, tanks left and attack the pimple!”