Читать книгу Alamein: The turning point of World War Two - Iain Gale, Iain Gale - Страница 10

The long day wore on. Tom Bird carefully unfolded the letter he had written to his parents two days before and began to draw a picture. It showed two of the men of his unit, both officers, chatting over a boiling stewpot in the style of Jon’s ‘Two Types’ featuring two popular cartoon characters – officers in the desert, one army the other RAF.

In Bird’s picture one of them was wearing a hebron coat, that gloriously non-regulation bit of kit made from cured goatskins, which he himself had not been alone in adopting among the British officers. He was pleased with the drawing. He knew that he had some talent as a draughtsman and had for a while dallied with the idea of art school but architecture was his true métier. He thought that perhaps after the war he might join a good practice or even form his own. A partnership. After the war; that was a good one. Who knew how long it would go on? What Bird knew was that Hitler needed a proper bloody nose. They needed to prove that they weren’t frightened of him, that they could give as good as they got and that was what they were here for. His father had been wounded at Gallipoli in 1915 fighting against Germany’s then ally, Turkey, and had never spoken of his experiences.

Bird took care when he wrote home. He knew that his father must be aware of what he was going through. The extraordinary, bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime experience of war. But he did not want to cause his parents any undue worry. He had good reason. His brother had been killed at Calais in 1940 and the loss was achingly raw. His brother’s death he knew was at least in part why he was here. Not for revenge but from a sense of justice. He felt the need to right a wrong against a foe who must in any case be defeated at all costs. A foe so monstrous that they stood against everything he held dear.

As always, then, he had tried to lighten the tone of the letter, writing with schoolboyish expression about his friends and comrades as if they were all about to take part in some momentous rugby match: ‘Hugo Salmon still my second-in-command and Jack Toms is another great standby. I should hate to be without either of them now…I may not write again for a little bit. Best of love, Tom.’

That was it. His father he knew would see through the last line and know instantly why he would not be able to write ‘for a little bit’. His mother though must suspect nothing. For her to know that her only surviving son was about to be thrown against the might of the German army would kill her or at least drive her mad.

And their enemy was mighty. Of that he had no doubt. Over the past two years they had conquered most of Europe and had run circles around the British army in North Africa. Now though it might just be their turn. The talk in the mess was all about the newly-arrived ordnance. Hundreds of tanks, great war machines that rumbled forward on tracks, unstoppable, able with a single shot to destroy a house. Tanks. That was what this battle, this war, was all about. The Germans had started out with many more, and better. Tanks filled him with dread. He had a secret fear of being crushed beneath a caterpillar track. A fear which he had never told anyone. A fear that had him waking in the night in a cold sweat. Tanks.

Bird wished to God that they had just a few of the new Sherman tanks with them. Instead, they had guns, the new six-pounder guns that they said could take out a tank with ease. He had yet to see it. And now they were under his command. He had been thrilled to get his own company. He had been promoted to major now and had a bar to his MC as well. He’d won that back in July at Gazala. He had been in the south with the Free French in the Bir Hakeim box, fighting the Italian Trieste and Ariete Divisions and the Twenty-First Panzers. He’d taken a column of twenty-five lorries carrying food and ammunition through minefields to reach the beleaguered French in their strongpoint. And once there, the commanding officer of the French garrison, General Koenig, had persuaded him to break out. They’d done it and saved 27,000 men from being taken. On top of that he’d captured fourteen Jerry prisoners and not had a single casualty among his own men.

It was more, far more than he had thought he would achieve when he had joined back in ’40. He knew that it had much to do with Colonel Turner’s opinion of him. People had wondered why he had joined the Rifle Brigade, or the Sixtieth Rifles as the colonel liked to refer to them. For of course they were not a brigade at all but a regiment, one of the finest and proudest in the British army. A regiment that had come out of the colonial war as a response to the American practice of using light infantry skilled with smoothbore rifles. A regiment that had fought with pride against the French in the peninsula.

The colonel was a sound chap. More than that, a father-figure, or as Bird often thought of him, like a kindly housemaster from his old school. The regiment was like that. An extended family. The mess was filled with Etonians and Wykehamists. Sometimes Bird sympathized with the newly-commissioned officers who had to infiltrate this public-school elite. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were not always welcome in the mess. He did not mind them himself, but there were others who did. The lads were good enough though. They’d come through a lot in recent weeks. They were Londoners mostly, Eastenders, most of them conscripted into the ranks. But none the worse for that. And then there were the old sweats, the NCOs. They’d taken to the new men, had spent some time on them and it had worked. Bird felt that now he was in command of an efficient fighting unit. In fact they constituted a formidable little brigade; 2nd Battalion had three motorized infantry companies, a carrier platoon, a machine-gun platoon and most importantly his four platoons of six-pounders, sixteen guns in all. Aside from that the colonel had also been given an attached force of another eleven guns from 239 battery of 76 AT regiment RA.

They were all mounted on ‘portees’, lorries from whose flat-bed top the gun could be slid down and into position. It was not an ideal method of transport, slightly Heath Robinson-ish. But it gave them mobile anti-tank power and that was vital in this war of machines. All day they had been sitting here, keeping watch over the minefields. Static and in support. It was not his way and he was impatient to be in the action. But Bird knew that their time would come and when it did, he knew too that they would acquit themselves with honour, whatever the odds.