Читать книгу Braver Men Walk Away - Peter Gurney - Страница 8
ОглавлениеAn ammunition examiner’s job calls for the exercise of specialist knowledge, an ability to act calmly and responsibly under pressure, and a facility for matters mechanical. Challenges are many and varied. Tasks are often of considerable complexity and require the display of initiative and ingenuity. So the selection board at Parsons Barracks, Aldershot, gave me a dismantled bicycle pump and asked me to put it back together again.
Each preceding test had shown the same sophistication of selection process: intelligence – a set of puzzles from 1949 Eleven-plus exam papers; psychological – a couple of pages of ink blots. And now, the bicycle pump.
It made me realize how lucky I was to have got this far, for the army’s idea of sensible selection had a logic all of its own: a friend who had been one of London’s best bricklayers was made a driver; another, a genius with car engines, wound up as a clerk. Yet none of this was surprising because, after my first two weeks of National Service, it was obvious that the army moved in curious ways.
Parsons Barracks comprised a series of wooden huts dotted around a grassed area and interspersed with the occasional tree. Each hut provided accommodation for thirty men in the main dormitory area; a small bedroom at one end was reserved for the permanent Staff Corporal. His job was to encourage us through our training. Accordingly, he bellowed everything at the top of his voice, rendering every command well-nigh incomprehensible.
The intake at Parsons was drawn from a wide social spectrum; it included a talkative Welshman, a taciturn Scot, an East End barrow-boy and a couple of chaps of ‘quaite refained’ upbringing. From Reveille to Lights Out every moment was taken up with training. After the evening meal at 1700 hours there was something called ‘Interior Economy’. This involved the cleaning and preparation of one’s kit for the following day: Blanco all webbing, clean all brass, press uniform, prepare bed space for inspection and ‘bull’ boots (bull being a verb for the act of polishing with one’s finger).
In those brief exhausted moments after Lights Out there was little time to ponder on the army’s strange terminology or tasks like whitewashing coal, grading pebbles – and shaving blankets. All bedding had to be folded and boxed for morning inspection. But this being the army, boxed did not mean boxed; it meant sandwiching one’s neatly folded sheets between one’s neatly folded blankets and then wrapping another blanket around the assembled fabric to make an aesthetically appealing pile. The exposed faces of the folded blankets were required to be free from fluff. To ensure that, these needed to be shaved.
Once you began to understand the thinking that informed this kind of duty, the task of arranging pebbles by shape and size or applying whitewash with a toothbrush to lumps of coal was of little consequence. The apparent aim was to mentally and physically exhaust every recruit to the point where every order, no matter how stupid, would be obeyed without question, which explained why the British army was the world’s best army and why those who ran it were very probably certifiable.
After two weeks’ inductions and trade aptitude selection, after seemingly endless days of saluting and marching and being treated as though one were deaf as well as retarded, we were sent to Badajos, a barracks a couple of miles away. No one had seen it but everyone had heard ominous rumours. On a warm bright morning we marched towards the place which, for the next six weeks, we would call home. Spirits were high: we’d done two weeks, we were veterans already. Things were looking up.
Unfortunately Badajos turned out to be exactly as advertised. It reared up stark and gaunt, a three-storey, brick-built Victorian edifice decked with full-length cast-iron balconies that reminded one of the interior of some US state penitentiary. The march halted. Spirits sank. Jokes petered out. We were standing and wondering and waiting when a body flew through the air and smashed hard into the gutter.
It was, the army later said, an accident. A despairing young soldier had not decided to end it all by throwing himself off the topmost balcony. He had fallen, that was all.
We slept fitfully, that first night. The next day we absorbed our new surroundings. Each barrack room housed thirty men, with a small bunk room – as at Parsons – for the permanent Staff Corporal. Beds were separated by about a yard. Communal washing and lavatory facilities were provided on each floor but, as the basins were devoid of plugs, ablutions were performed with difficulty. The shortage of plugs was matched by a shortage of lavatory doors. The lack of personal privacy worried us less than the army’s lack of organization: if they couldn’t organize some sink plugs and a few lavatory doors, then God help them if they had to organize another war.
Indeed it was daily growing more clear that the army couldn’t organize anything. On one occasion, after being instructed on how to form three parade ranks, our Training Battalion was told by an NCO that our resulting formation was ‘one behind the other twice’. Soon afterwards I and another soldier were given the order: ‘You two form three ranks and stand still while I go and ’ave a look for another one.’
Permanent staff NCOs tended to give orders with greater clarity, but they took about as much interest in us as a Ford assembly-line worker takes in the bits of motor car that pass before him. We had to be of the right shape, we had to fit, and we all had to move as one when slotted together. If you were bemused or bewildered there was no chance of asking, nor much point.
By now the squad had been broken up into various groups. Grouping depended on which army trade had been deemed appropriate for each individual. For some reason most of my intake had been categorized as storemen, so they moved into Salamanca, a neigbouring barracks. I was the only one to be selected as a likely ammunition examiner and thus, for the remainder of my stay at Badajos, I trained with four potential officers – individuals whom the army clearly believed to be of superior stock.
The drill sergeant stood with feet planted firmly apart, hands clenched behind his back and an expression of fury on his face. All around, the drumming of marching feet and the brisk echo of commands eddied on the air. Everywhere else, men were being turned into soldiers. Here though, we were being turned to stone by a sergeant with a basilisk stare.
Finally his anger found voice. ‘A dis-ah-star! An utter bleedin’ dis-ah-star! Call yourselves soldiers? You are not fit to be in the Army! You are not fit to wear the King’s uniform! You are a bigger bleedin’ shambles than Passchendaele, what are you?’
It seemed best to hope the question was rhetorical. If I had to say anything now, anything at all, the words would spill out on a tide of laughter. I kept my eyes on Sergeant Crabb. It meant I didn’t have to cope with the expressions on the faces of my companions: Henderson, Taylor, Williams and Clarkson.
Certainly it had been a shambles but that was hardly our fault. The problem was obvious. For company drill to take place, first you have to have a company: a company consists of three squads, and a squad consists of thirty men. Our squad, however, consisted of only four potential officers and one potential ammunition examiner. Quite how you get five men to simulate what happens when ninety men are on parade, how you school them in all the necessary manoeuvres, was beyond me.
But not to Sergeant Crabb. He had brought to the drill square five lengths of rope. One was issued to each of his five charges. He smiled in triumph as we gazed in bewilderment and even let pass unremarked Henderson’s question about the flute that was supposed to play while you did the Indian Rope Trick. I hadn’t said anything, inwardly debating whether this was to be some new form of torture or the Army’s idea of teaching us how to knit.
But no. The ropes, Sergeant Crabb said, were not ropes at all.
The ropes were soldiers.
Ah.
The ropes would take the place of the men what would ’ave been stood standin’ be’ind us ’ad there been anyone stood standin’ be’ind us.
Well, of course, Taylor whispered in my ear. Why hadn’t we thought of this before?
Then Sergeant Crabb interrupted: ‘You say something, Taylor?’
‘Yes, sir. I said, er, I said we’re learning the ropes, sir.’
After that, disaster was inevitable. With the ropes trailing back behind us, we endeavoured to perform steps and movements consistent with the robotic efficiency of a well-drilled parade. Unfortunately my rope tangled with Clarkson’s, Williams got his wrapped around Taylor’s legs and Henderson fell over his. Repeated attempts to restore order only made things worse; ropes snaked and zigzagged in all directions and mine finally developed such an affinity for Clarkson’s that they welded together in a knot. Had the ropes actually represented eighty-five men, half the parade would have been hospitalized and the other half charged with indecency.
Now we were being held responsible for the manifest impracticality of Sergeant Crabb’s theory. What, we wondered, would happen next?
We found out a couple of days later. Sergeant Crabb happened to mention our behaviour to a friend of his, a Guards regimental sergeant major who occasionally called into the RAOC Sergeants’ Mess for a lunchtime pint. Crabb’s friend offered to get us into shape. This was bad enough but worse was to come: the friend turned out to be none other than RSM Brittain, the most senior, most feared RSM of them all, a man whose reputation was known throughout the army and Civvy Street alike.
Brittain didn’t so much drill us as seek to test us to destruction. We doubled this way and that, jumped to every order, winced at the wound of his staccato commands. Within a short time we were gasping for breath and perspiring freely; by contrast, he stood ramrod straight, every inch a guardsman, uniform immaculate, his pace-stick grafted to his side.
He confronted Taylor. ‘You are sweating, soldier! Why are you sweating?’
‘It’s … it’s hot, sir.’
‘Hot? You call this hot? This isn’t hot. I’ve just come from a place where it is one hundred and five in the shade!’
Behind me Henderson muttered: ‘Centigrade or Fahrenheit?’ It was supposed to be a whisper. The RSM’s smile showed that it was not.
‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘we’d better do it all over again …’
By the time that afternoon ended I was half a stone lighter. But at least I knew I could cope with anything now.
When the six weeks of basic training were over I was sent to 28 Battalion Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) Bramley, School of Ammunition. The army was at last ready to let me get on with learning how to be an ammunition examiner.
Bramley village was a small and sleepy community midway between Basingstoke and Reading; the camp lay on the village outskirts. It was dominated by Central Ammunition Depot (CAD) Bramley, a complex which contained so great a stock of ammunition that it extended out from the camp over an area of several square miles.
Between the camp accommodation quarters and CAD was the School of Ammunition, where ammunition examiners were taught their craft. If I succeeded in my chosen vocation, my duties would encompass all technical matters concerning munitions and explosives held and used by the British army. This included the safe storage, inspection, maintenance and, where necessary, the modification and repair of munitions and explosives. Also included was the proofing, either by firing or chemical testing, as well as the investigation of accidents and malfunctions.
There was another important area of activity: with a few exceptions, the clearance of all stray munitions and the disposal of unserviceable stocks, either by breaking down, dumping at sea or destruction with explosives.
Bramley was a turning-point in my life. It opened up fresh vistas, it brought a new and wider understanding of the science and technology of munitions and explosives, and it showed me that my childhood hobby was, in adulthood, going to be even more fascinating.
Bramley was also civilized: an expanse of lawn separated the huts – single-storey cement-rendered buildings providing fairly spacious accommodation for twenty men. All that summer the scent of newly mown grass wafted in through the open windows.
Weekends away nearly always took in the delights of London. Occasionally, though, I would return to Salisbury and visit friends. Nearing the end of my time at Bramley, I made such a journey and found myself in the company of another visitor. Her name was Daphne. Two years later she was to become my wife.
I was now a member of a genuine squad, one of a group of thirty or so trainees from throughout the UK. However, it didn’t take long to discover that though the classroom was in the hands of professionals who wished only to teach their skills, the parade ground was in the charge of the same moulders of men I had had to endure at Badajos. Although the majority of the intake’s time was spent in the classrooms or ammunition repair workshops, the Company Sergeant Major daily exerted his baleful presence at the morning muster parade preceding our march to the classrooms. Presumably the point of this was to remind us that we were soldiers first and foremost. Morning parade was very much an inconvenient observance of ceremony and tradition while our heads were full of thoughts about the day’s studies and the practical work to come.
There were times, however, when some fun was called for, and Hewitt seemed the ideal target. His high intellect was exceeded only by his pomposity. Looking at Hewitt, you saw someone aged eighteen going on eighty.
Being a person of regular habits and a likely future major general, Hewitt’s evening schedule unfolded with military precision. First he carefully folded his copy of The Times. Then he carried it with him to the latrine block. Then he entered the cubicle and closed the door. It was always the same procedure and it was always the same cubicle.
I don’t know who had the original idea of bringing some excitement to Hewitt’s dull life. A few moments before Hewitt arrived at his cubicle, a small pyrotechnic charge was concealed behind the overhead water cistern. By applying to the task all that we had so far learned at Bramley, a firing system was conceived whereby the pulling of the chain would cause the charge to go off.
Hewitt arrived and as soon as his door closed myself and others in the plot crept into the adjoining cubicles and waited. Eventually Hewitt ceased his perusal of the Stock Market report and pulled the chain.
The noise of the blast racketed around the block. I leapt up and grabbed the top of the partition, conscious not only of the rolling echoes of the explosion but also the inexplicable sound of a river rushing at full bore. Blown clear of its wallmountings, the cistern was nodding up and down on its pipe while its contents emptied over the trouserless victim and his copy of The Times.
Urgent repairwork was now called for, but try as we might, nothing in the Bramley syllabus had prepared us for the task of mending lavatories which have sustained direct hits. Stoppages of pay for ‘Barracks Room Damage’ were particularly severe that week.
My first trip abroad: special troop train from London to Harwich, ferry to the Hook of Holland, then British military train eastwards across the Continent. It was December 1950. I had come second in my course at Bramley and was now on my first overseas posting, to No. 1 Ammunition Inspectorate, Headquarters British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), Bad Oeynhausen, West Germany.
Bad Oeynhausen was a spa town of stylish architecture with an atmosphere of discreet wealth. It seemed at first sight a place out of time, genteel, serene, a vision of the Europe of a different age. The hotels and many of the private houses had been requisitioned by the army to house BAOR HQ. The Ordnance Directorate, to which I was posted, was in one such former hotel, a place of high-ceilinged rooms and gilded lobby. Half a mile away my family had a requisitioned four-bedroomed house; I was given permission to live with them. With Christmas 1950 only a few days away it was a perfect time and a perfect place for a reunion.
Major Phil Froude and Warrant Officer First Class Sam Birt were highly experienced ammunition-trained officers and close friends. Phil was tall, medium build and in his mid forties. Ten years younger, Sam was avuncular in bearing and attitude, round, jolly, a cricketing fan who was much sought after as an umpire. He could do The Times crossword in his head and is the only person I’ve ever met who regularly completed the awesome Sunday Times Ximenes crossword.
As I settled into life in postwar Germany my perceptions of the army began to change. Here there was none of the crass stupidity which had seemed to be ingrained in military life. Instead there was a quiet professionalism. I was a part of this – watching, learning, being guided in the craft of the explosives man: conventional munitions disposal (CMD), unit ammunition inspection work, assisting with demolitions. I had a smart new uniform, with my AE’s badge proudly worn on the right forearm sleeve. Although I was the most junior AE in the whole of BAOR, neither Phil nor Sam ever treated me as anything other than a colleague to be welcomed and shown consideration.
Despite their great experience and seniority, Phil and Sam were not without their sense of fun. One day shortly before Christmas, the Major called me into his office and announced, ‘Mr Birt has rung up with some story about his gooseberries being tied up with detonating cord. He suggested I might like to go round and have a look and bring you along with me. It sounds suspiciously like an excuse for a Christmas drink.’
Later that afternoon we stood at the bottom of Sam’s back garden, glasses of beer in hand, contemplating his gooseberries. Much to my surprise, Sam had not been joking – the bushes really were tied up with detonating cord. The cord, which looks similar to plastic-covered washing-line, had obviously been in place for several years and was now hopelessly entangled with the overgrown bushes. This, however, was no problem since, in itself, the cord is safe to handle. It is only when set off by a detonator that it explodes with frightening force and speed, about 9,000 yards a second.
Having proudly shown us the gooseberry bushes, Sam seemed content to let matters rest. Not so Phil. He finished his beer and said, ‘Right, young Gurney. We can’t leave Mr Birt’s garden in such a dangerous condition. Get me the demolition kit.’
I watched in amazement as he connected up new detonating cord to the old and taped a detonator to it. I carried the demolition box back to the house where Sam was watching.
‘Is he really going to blow up your gooseberries, sir?’ I asked. Before Sam could answer, a searing flash and a gout of flame ensued and the bushes went up in smoke. The acrid fog danced and swirled; charred pieces of twig cracked and blazed all around.
Phil looked pleased. Sam looked baffled and turned to Phil. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘have you done to my gooseberries?’
I was still thinking about this strange episode the following week when Sam materialized at my side. ‘Our Leader hath been on. Seems there’s a problem with his garden now.’
‘Gooseberries?’
‘No. Not gooseberries. A Panzerfaust.’
‘You’re kidding, sir.’
‘I kid you not.’ Sam shook his head. ‘I dunno, who’d be a gardener in Germany, eh?’
We arrived at the Major’s quarters and made our way past lawn, shrubbery and greenhouse. The Panzerfaust lay a short distance away, half exposed in the frost-veined earth.
A shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon, produced near the end of the Second World War when German resources were diminishing and German desperation was increasing, the bomb was devoid of such luxuries as foolproof safety mechanisms. The mechanism it did have was basic: you could arm the thing merely by dropping it a yard or so on to a hard surface. The Panzerfaust contained 3 pounds of explosive; once armed, it was extremely sensitive and therefore extremely dangerous.
Sam and Phil briefly conferred. Neither of them stayed too close to the bomb. The Panzerfaust was not to be trifled with – and, in this case, certainly not to be moved. That left only one alternative: Sam would have to blow it up.
The earth erupted like a mini volcano, dirt and smoke and debris soaring skywards on a crest of bright flame. The aftershock pummelled; noise blasted in a thundercrack cacophony which drummed at ground and sky alike and then finally receded in a tinkling glissando of breaking glass.
When the smoke finally cleared Phil looked at the scene and then at Sam. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘have you done to my greenhouse?’
It was February 1951 and, though still on the strength of No. 1 Ammunition Inspectorate, I was now in Detmold with CRAOC 11 Armoured Division. I had a clearly defined role as Ammunition Examiner, one of a team responsible for the maintenance of the division’s ammunition.
The duties appeared routine: unit ammunition inspection, demolition of unserviceable stocks and, should such a misfortune ever occur, investigation of ammunition accidents. If one went by the book, a junior NCO was not authorized to blow up anything unless under the control of a commissioned officer ‘where practical’. NCOs were carefully vetted by the more senior members of the Ammunition Inspectorate. If they were found to be competent and responsible they would be given local authorization to carry out demolitions. Here at Detmold, quartered in palatial ex-Wehrmacht barracks, I had that authority. Even so, my performance was carefully monitored; I understood that I was by no means being left on my own. Still, this was my first operational posting. Lance Corporal Gurney, Ammunition Examiner, was out in the field.
The call came in late morning. After fairly mundane days of inspection and report logging, the opportunity to tackle a different kind of challenge was welcome. I readied myself for the work to come: an ammunition accident – a tank.
Two soldiers had begun loading American-manufactured 75mm white phosphorus gun ammunition into the tank. The ammunition consisted of a nose-fuzed shell loosely fixed into a brass cartridge case containing the propellant charge. One man was on the top of the tank, the other inside. The man on the top pulled the shell out of its cardboard storage cylinder and moved to pass it to his companion. The shell fell out of the cartridge case; the soldier tried to catch it but missed. It clanged off the metal surface just inside the hatch and exploded.
The two soldiers were not killed outright. The small H E charge ruptured the shell and spread the white phosphorus over the tank both inside and outside. This ignited on contact with the air, producing clouds of acrid white smoke and a fierce and terrible burning which penetrated the flesh of both men. Death was agonizing, and too slow coming.
Theoretically, the accident could never have happened. All British and American ammunition was designed to withstand the rigours of storage, handling and transportation. Safety procedures were built into every stage of the design, manufacturing and assembly process. It was impossible for the shell to detonate – unless there was something seriously wrong with its PD M57 fuze.
Artillery fuzes vary; in this case, a small brass component called an interrupter should have prevented the fuze from detonating the shell until after the shell had been fired from a gun. With thousands of such shells and fuzes currently in army use, the implications were far-ranging; either the interrupter had malfunctioned or it had never been there at all.
At the accident site the senior AE took me to one side and spelt it out. The outcome of this investigation depended on finding every last bit of the fuze, and that included the interrupter. Hopefully the interrupter would be found trapped inside the remains of the fuze body but, if not, the search had to continue until it could be stated with certainty that it had not been there.
‘It will be like looking for a needle in a very nasty haystack, Gurney. Do your best,’ were the AE’s parting words.
As he left, a small group of soldiers who had been standing within earshot came over and joined me. They began to express their horror at what it must be like inside the tank. I started to listen but an involuntary distancing effect was taking hold, pulling me back, pushing them away. I became remote, isolated, separate from them – separated even from myself. All my thoughts had to be concentrated on the task in hand.
I was surprised when people asked me how I could be so remote, so cold-blooded. It was involuntary, instinctive – all to do with getting on with a job which required a matter-of-fact approach. What I was paid to do – and wanted to do – was to investigate and analyse the facts. No more, no less. But I would know, even as I said it, how cold it sounded, how inadequate.
Later, I was able to understand this mechanism better. It was a kind of invisible switch that was thrown at moments of maximum stress. Though senses were heightened, the switch would act as a control mechanism that filtered out emotions, imagination or memories. Objectivity was essential; anything less and the task would be denied the concentration and professionalism it needed.
When the switch snapped shut the boundary between logic and emotion was defined. Though there would always be things out there on the periphery, they did not affect me. What I saw, smelled or heard related solely to the clues and puzzles and the facts …
I clambered up on to the tank, manoeuvred myself inside and began the painstaking search for a tiny brass component less than ¾-inch long and ¼-inch wide: the needle in the haystack.
The needle was never found. Subsequent breakdown examination of other PD M57 fuzes indicated it was not the search that was at fault: the interrupter was present in the vast majority of fuzes but omitted in a few others. An oversight had occurred in production – a small omission but one with dreadful consequences.
Berlin, April 1951, and I was at Hackenfelde in the British Sector. A former German aircraft factory now housed the RAOC stores, vehicle and ammunition depots, a great sprawling complex of buildings by one of the main roads into the centre of the divided city. The ammunition facility was extensive; it had a repair workshop which would not have disgraced a base ammunition depot. It also had a senior ammunition examiner, WO1 Wallis, a Berlin veteran who used to spend some of his time on munitions clearance work in and around the city.
Six years after the end of the war Berlin was rebuilding itself with impressive skill and at impressive speed. Though the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche would remain as a gaunt and poignant memorial, the Kurfürstendamm was back in business again with its shops, hotels and nightclubs; trams, taxis, buses and cars formed a dense tide of traffic from one end of the thoroughfare to the other. Everywhere there were the sights, sounds and smells of construction and reconstruction, giant cranes and soaring scaffolding, welding and hammering, the deep bass thud of round-the-clock pile-drivers, cement dust that clouded up from wagons and building sites and left its gritty aftertaste hanging on the air. But everywhere, too, there were scars and empty spaces where places and people used to be; street corners defined by great swathes of shuttering that fenced off one flattened area from the next; erratic ranks of buildings whose symmetry was broken by hoardings or tarpaulins or punctuated by wide aching gaps.
The presence of wartime munitions made any renewal project a risky undertaking; the jaws of an excavator could as well turn over shells, bombs and bullets as earth. For six years clearance teams had been harvesting the streets of Berlin. There were times when it seemed the work would still be continuing six years on.
Munitions clearance and disposal was one of Warrant Officer Wallis’s areas of responsibility. Unfortunately he had contracted some form of dermatitis which was exacerbated by physical contact with ammunition or explosives. Although he had acted principally in a supervisory capacity, it was decided that another AE should share the workload.
Accordingly I found myself in one of the echoing hangars of Hackenfelde, meeting for the first time the group of civilian operatives hitherto in Wallis’s charge. They had all been in the German armed forces, all were highly experienced, and all obviously wondering what this young, fresh-faced British army NCO was doing in their midst.
My orders had been unambiguous: as far as these civilians were concerned, these Feuerwerker, I was in charge. As far as I was concerned, however, things were not so clear-cut. I didn’t lack self-confidence – I had been thoroughly trained and I’d been involved with munitions in one way or another since childhood – but these people had racked up the kind of experience I couldn’t hope to match. To simply announce that I was ‘in charge’ would be bloody silly.
The leader of the group regarded me with a frank, unwavering stare. I had to clarify the position for everyone’s benefit. I raised my voice, hoping it would carry above the background noise of the hammering from the ammunition workshop. ‘I know you’ve all been working with Warrant Officer Wallis. And I know you’ve all done a very good job. Nothing’s going to change just because I’m here. I’m not replacing Mr Wallis. I’m not planning on altering anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m here for one reason only.’
The group leader smiled. ‘To take charge?’
‘To learn.’
‘Learn?’
‘Yes. I wouldn’t presume to show you what to do. But I’d appreciate it if you’d help me with what I have to do.’ I paused, wondering if the message was getting through. ‘I’ve been trained. I’ve done a fair amount of work already. But I need to know a lot more.’
Slowly: ‘You wish to … learn?’
‘Yes.’
The German looked from me to the other Feuerwerker and hack again. Finally: ‘My name is Karl.’ He smiled again, more certainly this time, and extended his hand towards me. ‘Welcome to Berlin.’
They took me at my word. Day after day we loaded up the Bedford truck or one of the Jeeps and headed out into the city. Though many of the jobs posed no problems there were always one or two that challenged both expertise and ingenuity. The workload was heavy; even with two or more teams operating, there was a permanent backlog of non-emergency tasks.
The Feuerwerker were always careful, always methodical, operating like skilled professionals. I joined in the discussion, planning and execution, carried out various tasks under Karl’s watchful eye, or stood aside and looked on while new and complex operations were undertaken involving devices I hadn’t previously encountered. Gradually I absorbed the details of every incident, deriving satisfaction, exhilaration and gratitude at the good fortune that had brought me here.
In the coffeeshop off the Ku-damm Karl finished his plate of Bratkartoffeln (sautéed potatoes) and reached for a slice of the Black Forest Kirschtorte. I’d already eaten mine; it was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. Berlin might be divided, it might still be suffering postwar shortages in certain types of goods, but the street corner pubs and the pastry shops and cafés held within them the kind of delights that would have been incomprehensible across the Channel.
‘So,’ said Karl. ‘You learn fast. You like this job?’
I nodded. ‘I also like Berlin.’
‘Ja. It’s a good city. Maybe one day …’ The sentence hung unfinished; you didn’t need to ask what he was thinking. A Berliner by birth, he would have childhood memories of his city before the bombs fell, before the tanks and the troops swept in. He patted his pockets and extracted a pack of cigars. I had to smile to myself. In England I hadn’t come across that many cigar-smokers. Here though, cigars seemed part of the staple diet.
‘Anyway,’ Karl said. ‘You are ready. We let you loose on Berlin, eh?’ He grinned. It was a private joke between the two of us; he knew I didn’t need any civilian’s permission to carry out my duties. But this little game gave the Feuerwerker a sense of self-respect and allowed me to learn more than could be gained from any classroom or workshop.
Karl took another puff on the cigar. ‘You do me a favour though.’
‘What is it?’
‘Try not to knock down any more of my city.’
There was another job to go to, non-urgent, non-threatening, one of the dozens still stacked up despite every effort to reduce the total. The problem was that here in Berlin not only were you up against new difficulties every day, you were also up against the clock; some weeks it seemed that for every incident successfully dealt with, two more were demanding response.
I was acutely conscious of the time that was spent on certain kinds of operation. It seemed to me that we couldn’t go on doing everything by the book: there had to be some incidents where safe short-cuts were appropriate. Blind mortar bombs, for instance. Time after time we were called out to deal with these and on arrival would find that only the tips of the fins were visible. You couldn’t see anything else and you couldn’t get at the damn thing. You had to dig down carefully, scoop out soil and stones, and finally expose the bomb body. After that it was standard procedure: you placed a charge next to the body and detonated it.
In situ destruction was insisted upon for three very good reasons: First, the relatively small amount of high explosive found in land service munitions meant that it was normally possible to protect surrounding property when destruction occurred. Secondly, projectiles normally suffer some physical damage when fired and vital components such as fuzes become impossible to remove. Third, but by no means least, fuzed projectiles which have been fired but have failed to detonate at the intended time are inherently unstable: they can go off at the slightest movement.
Artillery fuzes contain safety devices which react to the pressures and forces occurring at and after firing. Those forces are tremendous: the pressure generated in a chamber on firing can be from 1,000 to 6,000 bar; the acceleration of a shell up the barrel can be anything between 10,000g and 35,000g; the shell can be spinning at between 500 and 4,000 revs per minute. Components designed to react to such pressures include detents: under the pressure of acceleration they overcome the resistance of their springs and slide to the rear of the fuze. In so doing, they can clear the way for bolts which, acting under centrifugal force, move to bring detonators and strikers into line.
By the time a shell arrives at its target, all safety devices should have been rendered inactive. In the case of something designed to explode on impact, when contact is made with a hard surface the striker will be driven into the detonator, which then detonates the main filling.
But theory is one thing and practice another; projectiles fail to explode on impact for many reasons. But if something travelling at several hundred metres a second has collided with a hard surface and failed to explode, then it is not safe to handle.
This meant that whatever kind of blind projectile you found, shell or mortar, movement was highly ill-advised and, unless circumstances overwhelmingly ruled against it, in situ destruction was the norm. In the case of a blind mortar, you cleared the earth or any obstruction around the bomb and then fixed the charge.
Such exertion was acceptable when there was something to show for it. Annoyingly, though, you could spend what seemed an eternity out in the biting wind and rain and, at the end of it all, come up with nothing more than a harmless tail unit, the remains of a bomb which had exploded long ago. Valuable time had been lost for nothing.
So when the next call about a possible blind mortar bomb came in I threw some extra gear into the Jeep and raced out to the location, ready to put into practice the new Gurney Mk I bomb disposal theory. It was eminently practical, safe, and would substantially reduce incident attendance time.
The mortar was not much more than a glint in the earth. On all sides the land stretched away in a soggy expanse; no buildings near by, no people, just another of Berlin’s empty acreages. I dusted some dirt off the fin-tip, then walked back to the Jeep, started her up, and navigated a way through the peaks and hollows of the site to a point about fifty yards from the suspected bomb.
I dug out sufficient soil to expose one of the holes in a fin and unrolled the electric cable I’d brought with me from the depot, tying one end through the hole, and running the rest of it across the ground and fastening it to the back of the Jeep. Both knots were secure; as soon as the Jeep moved off, the cable would take the strain and gradually tug the mortar out by its fin. It beat digging holes any day.
The engine started and I crunched into first gear, then eased back on the clutch while carefully feathering the accelerator. The Jeep rocked slightly, the vibrations running through its frame. More pedal pressure, and with infinite slowness it began to move forwards. One foot covered … two foot. I turned back in my seat, the better to see the bomb.
But there was no progress. The cable was now taut but the bomb was still stuck. More gear crunching, more engine clattering; the Jeep edged forward. I looked back again: nothing. This made no sense at all because (a) the bomb’s mass simply couldn’t withstand this kind of pressure, (b) I had already scooped some of the retaining earth out of the way, and (c) the standard army issue El electrical cable was still firmly connected at both ends. Unfortunately it was also possessed of one other characteristic which I hadn’t appreciated: elasticity.
I pressed the accelerator more firmly and the Jeep moved forward. I clung one-handed to the steering wheel while poised half-turned towards the mortar.
And then at maximum extent, the electric cable suddenly contracted in on itself, the tension snapping back in a furious recoil that sent it looping high into the air. For a couple of dumbstruck seconds I stared skywards as the cable whipped like a long black lash, its tip hurtling downwards and straight towards the Jeep. Two things registered simultaneously: the cable was still attached to the tail fin; and the tail fin was still attached to the intact and unexploded bomb.
I threw myself into the well of the jeep, expecting a direct hit. Pain exploded inside my head amidst the ear-splitting noise of the mortar going off. The Jeep lurched and stalled as mud and other debris rained down from above. The echoes dinned on for a very long time.
Eventually I clambered out and stood weak-kneed and coughing in the faint fog-like wraiths of smoke still eddying from the blast. The mortar had impacted about thirty yards from the Jeep, as evidenced by a newly created hole in the earth.
Comprehension slowly dawned as the smoke cleared away. I had not, after all, sustained a direct hit by my own bomb on my own head, though it felt like it. All I’d actually done was brain myself on the dashboard.
I got back into the Jeep and restarted the stalled engine. The pain had receded now but the headache was obviously going to continue for quite a time; already there was a lump the size of a duck egg. God knew how I was going to explain it away.
I had another close shave when called upon to deal with a Panzerfaust. This one had been found on a building site within earshot of the clanking of the U-Bahn city railway. The area was strewn with rubble and little remained of the original buildings.
The Panzerfaust appeared to have been fired because it was without its launcher tube. It lay shining dully in the weak sunshine, a small scree of stones threading in frozen tributary past its flanks. The earth was newly turned; the excavator stood near by, silent, engine switched off. Years of experience of Berlin’s building sites had taught the construction crews all about the risks of working in an environment which had once been an urban battlefield.
I moved away from the Panzerfaust as carefully as I’d approached it and told the crew leader to move his people as far away as possible. As soon as everyone was out of range I prepared a small explosive charge and carried it back to the bomb, placing it alongside, but not touching, the warhead. I checked that the area was still clear and lit the fuze, then walked to safety – walked, not ran: you never ran because if you tripped and injured your leg or ankle you’d have no chance of getting back to the fuze to extinguish it nor of crawling out of range.
I stepped gingerly across the rubble. Thirty yards ahead was the remnant of a house wall, about nine feet high and pretty solid-looking. It would be a useful thing to hide behind when the explosion occurred: the blast itself wouldn’t injure at that range but you could get cut by flying debris. I moved around to the other side of the wall, crouched down and waited for the distinctive crump of the explosion – at which point the entire universe seemed to split apart. The blast wave smashed against the wall and sent the entire structure keeling over and down. One minute I was in daylight, the next in violent darkness, sprawled flat under the weight of a mass of brickwork.
The wall should have fragmented as it fell, but disintegration was only partial; it pinned me beneath it while the world shook and shuddered as the thunderclap rolled on. Secondary thuds, bangs and crashes rang out because of all the stuff now coming down from the sky. Like some terrible hail, it pummelled the brickwork above me, smashing and splintering and cannoning off. And then silence.
I managed to struggle out from under the wall, stiff and shaking and wincing at the bruises but otherwise intact. I looked at the brickwork and sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had learned to build things so carefully and so well. Red dust still danced on its surface. Fresh pock-marks made it look as though it had just been machine-gunned.
I stared at the place where the Panzerfaust had been. The hole was very large, very impressive, and totally bewildering. I reached the rim and looked down, shaking my head again. Had one Panzerfaust really done all this?
In amongst the debris and the tendrils of smoke that still drifted upwards, other fragments and shapes began to appear – something twisted over there … something cylindrical and split wide-open over there … All over the place, in fact: the remains of launcher tubes … and other bits of wreckage too: the black splintered shards of mud-stained, blast-scorched packing cases, slivers of timber scattered like needles.
I hadn’t blown up one Panzerfaust. I’d blown up a whole nest of precious munitions hoarded by German soldiers during the battle for Berlin – a cache that had been hidden deep and then left behind, either because those who buried it had been forced to flee or because they had been buried themselves.
The action of time upon the soil, the shifting of earth by the excavator, a variety of factors had all conspired to bring to the surface a solitary Panzerfaust, the tip of an iceberg unseen and unexpected.
That night I encountered Karl, going home from the depot. He was his usual self, happy to be going off to his family. ‘A good day?’ he asked.
‘Sort of.’
‘You learn more today?’
‘I learn a lot today.’ I grinned and waved him on his way. I didn’t feel like going into it just yet. But a lesson had been learned that was not, so far as I could recollect, in any of the textbooks: if you can’t check what’s underneath that which you’re about to blow up, then the steps that you take in connection with disposal must always be bloody great big ones.
Christmas found me far from the noise and the bustle of Berlin, in an ancient landscape of fields and farms and villages. Walsrode in North Germany – my final National Service posting.
354 Ammunition Depot was an ex-Wehrmacht complex and, in 1951, although the majority of the ammunition stored there was British, there was also an appreciable stock of Wehrmacht ammunition. This had been retained since much of it contained highly prized elements such as the tungsten-carbide cores of armour-piercing shells. Far too valuable to dump at sea or destroy by demolition, the ammunition was separated into its component parts and the non-explosive material then salvaged.
Refurbishment and repair work was carried out in a collection of workshops which together comprised the Ammunition Repair Factory. One of them was a hellish place – hot, crowded and noisy, filled from floor to roof with strange devices. It was the place where certain kinds of ammunition, some ex-battlefield and apparently unsalvageable, were repaired and restored. Presiding over the factory’s operations was Captain Scott, a small and dapper white-haired man not renowned for his sense of humour.
Scott was one of the best engineers in the business. Within his workshops, old munitions found new life. Dangling down from overhead tracking, shell casings moved this way and that, dipping into cleansing, neutralizing and phosphate baths, then swinging out through automatic painting booths where mists of spray turned them factory fresh.
Scott was among the last of my National Service teachers. He taught me how to handle sausages and I learnt how to handle German girls. Both were to prove a headache, particularly the sausages.
Nobel’s 808 explosive contains a painfully high percentage of nitroglycerine – painful because nitroglycerine is absorbed through the skin and breathed in from the air. The result is the worst kind of headache imaginable.
I sat in a separate little workshop, a small enclosed space with a chair, a bench and a sausage machine. It was actually more complicated than that but the principle was the same: you fed stuff in at one end and it came out in chunks at the other. The stuff was Nobel’s 808, in 50-pound lumps. I was supposed to turn it into 4-ounce cartridges: the sausages. At the end of this task I felt like death: NG Head, as it’s called, is something which, once encountered, is never forgotten.
The girls proved to be a headache of a different kind. Sixty of them were employed in small arms ammunition sorting and repacking. I was put in charge. It was soon obvious to them and to me that I’d had no experience at all of running a female workforce: they giggled, they laughed, they made jokes amongst themselves which more often than not seemed to be about me.
My understanding of German was inadequate and I was beginning to feel like a schoolboy again. Clearly this couldn’t go on; I had to start exercising my authority. So I began going out with Fräulein Mitzi. Mitzi was neither big nor buxom but slim to the point of angularity. She had dark hair and brown eyes and an aura of self-confidence that marked her out as a natural leader. Short of working my way through all sixty of the girls, making friends with Mitzi seemed the best solution; we would go for evening walks in the countryside or meet at local taverns. To my delight, my tactics worked well. Mitzi not only made things much easier for me in the workshop, she also rapidly improved my knowledge of German.
Off-duty hours were also spent with Davitt, Fussell, Bennett and Carroll, four others on the Walsrode complement. If we had a favourite pastime, it was tracking down the region’s Schützenfeste, the three-day ‘shooting festivals’ which were so much a part of village life. Ostensibly, the object of the event was to celebrate the village’s traditional shooting skills; more usually it seemed to be a fine excuse for a weekend of beer-drinking on an epic scale. The Germans were superb hosts: warm, welcoming, friendly, filled with good humour even when they weren’t filled with beer.
During our time at Walsrode we learned about the fortunes that had been built up by soldiers who recognized in the old Wehrmacht ammunition the potential for private enterprise. The scale of such enterprise was not lacking in ambition: one warrant officer was caught shipping out ammunition by the train-load. He turned up for his Court Martial in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.
Unauthorized repatriation of German war matériel was not solely confined to Wehrmacht ammunition nor to any one depot: another warrant officer made the fortuitous discovery that many who spent their time above the snow line were dependent on wooden skis, and that skis needed regular waxing. His depot, by chance, held large stocks of beeswax, formerly used in the manufacture of certain types of munition. The WO organized an entire ammunition workshop to repackage the beeswax into containers for sale to the skiing fraternity.
While I didn’t necessarily approve, the new postwar mood of greater opportunity was encouraging. If it wasn’t ammunition then it was beeswax. And if it wasn’t beeswax then it was something else – petrol, for instance. Part of the war reserves of petrol were stored in the British Zone in an underground tank, a truly vast subterranean construction guarded by day as well as by night. Each guard detail spent a week at a time at the location, then handed over to the relief duty. However, before the handover could be completed, the seals on the tank’s filler caps had to be examined by the incoming guard and the level in the tank monitored by a dipping rod. It was a foolproof system, and it worked perfectly for month after month: the petrol, worth a fortune on the black market, was always at the same level. The war reserve was safely intact.
Until, that is, quality control scientists discovered otherwise: brought in to check the consistency of the contents, they found that the petrol had entirely disappeared. They sampled the petrol through the usual dipping inlet, then went off to a different area of the tank and dipped that. Inexplicably, the first dip showed a full tank whereas the second showed an empty one. Examination of the prime dipping inlet revealed that it wasn’t an inlet at all. Someone had at some time fashioned a tube which fitted precisely into the top of the inlet and extended down to the bottom of the tank. For months the British army had been mounting guard on a tubeful of petrol.
The culprits were never found. The thousands upon thousands of precious gallons had long since flowed through the European black market. Those involved in the operation would probably not want for money again.
Awareness of episodes such as this slowly led me towards an appreciation of interesting facets to life in the modem army. What I was interested in was a kind of life where challenges were mental as well as physical. Those early days at Parsons and Badajos had positively discouraged the exercise of intellect and had hammered all individuality out of the new recruit.
