Killing Rommel (5 page)

5

THE TRAINING DEPOT of the Royal Armoured Corps, as it was then coming to be called, was at Bovington Camp in Dorset. The place was packed with enlistees and conscripts; by the time the contingent I was with arrived, there was no room for us in barracks. We were housed instead in twelve-man tents with plank floors and one three-hole latrine for every four tents. After initial “square-bashing,” the driver's course was sixteen weeks. We practised first on light 15-hundredweight trucks, then 30-hundredweights, then 3-tonners, learning to operate on paved roads, cross country and over obstacle courses. After six weeks we graduated to tracked vehicles: first Bren carriers, then light tanks. We learnt to ford streams, surmount stone walls; we drilled at binding fascines (great bundles of timber or pipe) and using them to cross anti-tank ditches. When it came time to train on full-sized tanks, the depot had so few that we had to use dummies fabricated from original Holt Caterpillar farm tractors, the old DCMs from the Great War. A shell of wood and canvas was mounted over the steering station so that the learning driver could not see ahead. Above and behind him sat a second recruit, the “tank commander,” who possessed a view over the top of the cab. The commander shouted directions—“Driver, advance! Driver, hard left!”—while the poor bugger in the blind-box heaved against the steering levers and wrestled the massive clutch, simultaneously working the two throttles and clanging through the gears of the unsynchronised double-clutch crashbox. You turn a tank not with a wheel but by levers and pedals, retarding one track while advancing the other. This is not easy. Turn too tight and you snap the track pins; the track comes spooling off its sprockets like toilet tissue from a thrown roll. When this happens, the crew have to sort the mess out themselves.

Dearest Rose,

I should not be enjoying myself as much as I am, I know, given the desperate state of affairs in Europe and the world. Still I am having fun! The commanding officer of our training battalion has called me out for officer training, as the army has every man with even ten minutes at university, but he says I must learn to drive a tank in any event, so I might as well stay and finish the course.

The training got easier when we moved to Lulworth to practise on A-9s and 10s—real tanks—and the new A-13s, the first of that series to be called Crusaders. If you were a driver/operator, as all of us were, you learnt to work the wireless as well. We had to master every skill in the tank, so that a loader could stand in for a driver or wireless operator and all at a pinch could take over as commander. In addition we were required to learn maintenance. The instructors, most of whom were fitters drafted out of civilian garages, taught us by deliberately putting vehicles out of action—disabling cooling systems, clogging fuel lines and so forth. We were supposed to diagnose the problem and come up with the fix, while our teachers ranted in our ears, “What's the hold-up, cock? Set the bleeder right, can't you?” Physical training consisted of three-mile and five-mile trots with steel helmets, laden rucksacks, and rifles at port arms. One morning on a hill south of Fordingbridge my legs gave out beneath me. An ambulance took me to hospital, where an Indian major who spoke the most flawless English I had ever heard examined me sole to crown. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You've got polio.”

In those days, a diagnosis of infantile paralysis was the most frightful finding a patient could hear. The disease was virulent, infectious and incurable. Paralysis started in the legs, then worked up into the torso, eventually reaching the lungs, so that the victim could not even breathe without the aid of a monstrous mechanical contraption called an iron lung, in which he was imprisoned, immobile and flat on his back. Yet, terrified as I was by the medical side of the calamity, the thought of dropping out of training was even worse. Why was this so important to me? I can't say, even today. I doubt that many of my contemporaries could either. We were simply driven to get into the fight or, perhaps more to the point, to
not be left out.
Absurd as it sounds, for me the dread of spending the rest of my life as an invalid paled alongside the agony of being shunted to the sidelines unable to aid England while she stood in mortal peril.

The army quarantined me and shipped me off-depot to a civilian polio ward. Rose came on the run. She refused to accept the diagnosis. She got into a table-banging row with my second or third doctor, I forget which; he would not discharge me for fear of infection in the community, while Rose would not hear of my staying on the ward, where I would almost certainly be stricken if I wasn't already. At the same time she began her own independent research of medical journals, physicians' articles and case histories; she made herself an expert on all forms of viral disorder, particularly those which attack the sheaths of the nerve canals. In the end I was passed through six wards in three hospitals, each time receiving a different diagnosis. By now I had lost motor function below the waist and was running a fever of 103. My battalion commander, a decent sort, visited me in hospital to congratulate me on my acceptance to OCTU. The course started in ten days. “We'll hold a place for you, Chapman,” he said with a look that communicated that he never expected to see me again.

I was placed on convalescent leave. Rose took me home to her sister's family's farm at Golspie. We were married from there, at Dornoch Cathedral, with me in a wheelchair and my two weeks' army pay packet—one pound six shillings—in my pocket. I shall never forget the faith and kindness of Rose's family, particularly her sister Evelyn and brother-in-law Angus, whose cottage we lived in all that winter, spring and summer. They took me in as if I were their own blood. There was a disease similar to polio, Rose had learnt, called transverse myelitis. The doctors confirmed this. It was sometimes called “false polio.”

With Rose's aid, I struggled to walk. I hobbled first on crutches, in leg braces, just the fifty yards out to the farm steading. Later we struck for the post box, about a hundred and fifty yards. The day I could climb the hill to the house—a full furlong—we all got gloriously drunk.

The town golf course at Golspie runs along Dornoch Firth; I began walking there morning and evening with Rose and a local hound named Jack who had adopted us and met us without fail at the first tee. Till then I had known nothing about golf. I thought it an old man's game. But as Rose and I trekked back and forth day after day, the brusque great-heartedness of the local players, mostly old sweats of Great War vintage, touched me and made me appreciate the dour beauty of the game. I still could not swing a club. I would come home from walking three or four holes, so exhausted that I could not mount the steps to the house. Inside, I collapsed into a chair as if dead.

Throughout this period, letters came from Stein in North Africa. He had been wounded in Operation Battleaxe, promoted to first lieutenant and mentioned in despatches. He was a hero. Jock had been in France and barely got out at Dunkirk. I envied them desperately, as I did every man who could stand and walk and do his bit. On the farm, all chores revolved round supplying the troops. The barley crop, which before the war had gone for Scotch whisky distilled locally at Glenmorangie, was now contracted to the Office of Procurement for cereal, soup and fodder. Spitfire pilots were training at Nairn; we'd see them practising “touch-and-goes” from the fairways there and at Royal Dornoch. A coast watch was on night and day; ammunition bunkers were going in at Brora and every twenty miles along the road to John o'Groats.

By midsummer I could walk thirty-six holes. The Royal Armoured Corps would not take me back till I had passed the PHT, the Physical Hardiness Test, a sort of obstacle course that all applicants for Officer Cadet Training Unit must complete in under a certain time. By luck, the scorer assigned to my group was Sergeant-Major Streeter, the same man who had recruited me at his pavement table at Kensington. My tally was 47 out of a possible 50. I was in. Years later, I ran into Streeter on a platform at Waterloo Station; he confessed that my real score had been 27, failure. “My pencil slipped, I reckon.”

In the end my diagnosis was confirmed as false polio. It retreated the way it had come, from trunk to thighs to calves and, at last, entirely.

France fell while I was recuperating; the Battle of Britain raged; Hitler was preparing his invasion of Russia. By spring 1941, when I had at last completed OCTU, Rommel had arrived in Tunisia with the Afrika Korps. His first onslaught had caught our Western Desert Force off-guard and driven it east nearly to Alexandria; later Rommel himself fell back before Auchinleck's counter-thrust of Operation Crusader. (Western Desert Force had by then become Eighth Army.) When I arrived in Palestine at the turn of the year, Rommel was building up to his next attack out of his bastion at El Agheila.

My regiment, as I said, was a Yeomanry formation, meaning horse cavalry mechanised and converted to tanks. I was a second lieutenant, healthy again and dead keen to get into the fight. “The Regiment” (as it, and all others of the army, referred to itself) was in no such hurry. The officers' mess was a two-tiered affair, comprising the Old Boys, who had either been with the formation in its equestrian days (or whose fathers and grandfathers had been) and the New Sods like me, who cared nothing for such humbug and burned simply to get on with it. When it became clear that no action was coming for at least six months, I put in for No. 11 Scottish Commando, several of whose officers I knew from Golspie and Dornoch. Surely, I reasoned, the regiment could take no exception to an officer eager to serve. Indeed it could. When our commanding officer, Colonel L., learnt of my application, he called me on the mat and gave me a blistering rocket. Apparently such attempted defection reflected poorly on the regiment. He ordered me to recall my papers. I refused. From that hour I became in L.'s mind a bomb-throwing Bolshevik.

I hated Palestine. We trained and trained and went nowhere. In all that country, the only thing that lifted my spirits was Jerusalem. Every weekend that I could get away, I caught the No. 11 Qama bus, a multi-hued, tassel-bedecked Citroën crammed with chickens and squalling Arab urchins, often riding on the roof or clinging, standing, to the rear rails. I spent my days at the Jewish bookstore across from the King David Hotel or walking the stones that Jesus and the prophets had trodden. I felt like a Jew myself, an outcast who fitted in nowhere. These excursions, of course, only alienated me further from my brother officers, who thought me antisocial and unclubbable, and particularly from Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, “someone who reads books”—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.

Rose meanwhile had followed me to the Middle East. She came out to Egypt by ship, in a convoy loaded with army troops and their stores, crossing the Atlantic from Glasgow to Rio de Janeiro, then back again, round the Cape to Durban and up the east coast of Africa, twelve thousand miles in six weeks. She landed at Tewfiq, the port of Suez, riding from there down to Cairo (“down” meaning north in Nile lexicon) in the back of a post van with six other girls who had pulled the same stunt for the same reason. When I think of this now, the daring seems beyond belief. The young are mad. Nor, as I said, was Rose alone. Scores of other young wives and fiancées made such jaunts, and thousands more would have done so if they could.

How did Rose engineer this adventure? Her sister Jemima was chums with Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister. Through him Rose secured an interview with a general of Royal Signals. “My child,” declared this officer in kindness, “I would no more despatch you to Egypt than put you on a rocket to the moon.” Before dismissing her, however, he mentioned in passing the Navy's shortage of civilian telegraphers. Rose went straight to the Admiralty. Within five weeks she had mastered civilian and naval code and had passed the telegrapher's test. Nineteen weeks later she was in Alexandria, working sixty hours a week for Naval Intelligence at Raz-el-Tin and drawing both overseas and danger money.

I was still in Palestine. I still hadn't seen her. The month was March 1942. Spring floods had temporarily stalled operations in the desert, but everyone knew that action would resume soon. Either Rommel would attack us or we would attack him. Other formations kept getting called, but never ours. A sheet had been posted in our orderly room called the Sugar List; it was for individual officers to volunteer as pool replacements for other units. My name stood on top every week. No call came. I continued applying for special forces. I volunteered for Advance “A” Force and for SOE, Special Operations Executive. I got as far as clearance for parachute training with “L” Detachment, SAS, before a notice from Division scratched this, declaring tank officers too critical to be spared. Despite this, I secured an interview with Jake Easonsmith, then a captain, of the Long Range Desert Group. I flew from Lydda in Palestine to Heliopolis at Cairo, catching a lift in a Bombay bomber, only to find that duties had called Captain Easonsmith away. I left a letter, in truth a plea, then couldn't find a friendly flight out; I wound up riding back two days by bus, missing pay parade and being declared delinquent. My punishment, with another luckless subaltern, was to be made cinema officer. We ran the nightly screenings of American westerns and pre-war gangster films. The men called us the Warner Brothers.

In April the regiment was called forward to Egypt. Finally we were going “up the Blue,” meaning into the Western Desert, whose vast featureless surface and flat cloudless skies rendered the experience of being upon it more like being at sea than on land. Our formation became part of 22nd Armoured Brigade, which had been under 7th Armoured Division but was now under 1st. As for the tactical situation, it was this: Rommel had struck from El Agheila in January, driving Eighth Army all the way back to Gazala. There, a line of defensive positions held the Desert Fox for the moment. But everyone knew that the Afrika Korps would launch an assault again—and soon.