I’m not understating when I say the whole ‘capturing a general’ thing came as a bit of a surprise. What I didn’t estimate was the time and work that went on behind the scenes to get such an undertaking off the ground. This wasn’t a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ job; this was a fully-fledged military operation.
We would be taken behind enemy lines by a unit called the ‘Long Range Desert Group’; they had the General’s route, but no way to get close. We, that is me, Siggy and Berti would be the means to get face-to-face with the man himself, and somehow spirit him away from his entourage.
For that we needed to be as German as Apple Strudel.
And to be convincing, we needed uniforms.
That appeared to be no problem to Major Bagnold. His solution? A German prisoner of war camp. His bribe to get a modicum of cooperation? A truck full of Red-Cross parcels; it sat tantalizingly outside the tall barbed-wire fence.
Siggy took the lead, walking round the camp. We soon found what we needed, sitting together like a bunch of flowers in a garden; four German Panzer officers, none too high in rank, and all looking around our size. We soon had them in the admin hut.
At first they weren’t too happy about telling their story, kept mentioning some rag called the Geneva Convention. That took exactly three minutes to cure.
We’d learned a trick at the camp called the choke-hold. Arms under a man’s neck cut off air to his lungs, thirty seconds you were groggy, after no more than a minute, you were unconscious. If your mate aimed a gun at the unconscious man’s head, and he was allowed to fall, it looked all the world like an execution. Especially if viewed from behind.
Siggy took the main German to the door, the rest watching from inside. I stood with the gun, ‘questioning the subject’ as he slipped into a light coma. Getting no reaction from my subject, I feigned anger, aimed and fired. Siggy let the man fall to the ground. Siggy even made to wipe imaginary specks of blood from his face; bloody marvelous. Needless to say, it worked a treat.
Inside, his friends were irate, citing all kinds of retribution.
However, looking out onto the inanimate body in the sand, they all told their stories. Their regiment, officer’s names, where they got taken, who captured them, their unit name designation. Geneva Convention be damned; they sang like sponsored canaries.
Then we took their uniforms, army-issued underwear and all.
With some captured kit from a storeroom; sand goggles, belts, water bottles and other desert paraphernalia, we soon looked every bit like regular Afrika Corps. After we’d strapped Lugers to our hips, and tossed a bit of sand at our faces, Major Bagnold looked on very convinced.
I must say, the beard growth on my face suited my new look. “We don’t look weathered enough.” Berti said as he looked in the mirror of a nearby truck.
Bagnold grinned. “Oh, you’ll get that soon around here. A week in the desert will have you burning to a nice crisp.”
Getting behind the enemy lines was as difficult as driving in a half circle. Well, a kind of weirds, angular half circle. The war in North Africa was fought mainly in the hundred miles or so of land near the Mediterranean Sea. The desert itself made travel further inland almost impossible, so at any time, the flanks of both armies were easily skirted; that’s where the Long Range Desert Group came in. Experts in desert travel, they could drive to places the German’s didn’t even know existed.
Bagnold told us the Italians had nicknamed them the ghost patrol.
The only real threat was the Luftwaffe, and hopefully the RAF and a few well-placed infiltration teams would be keeping them busy. That’s where the whole Army Operation planning thing came into its own; teamwork.
So, in order to get myself back to Edinburgh, and see my wife and family again, I’d have to go behind enemy lines, capture a German general, and get back in one piece. Bloody marvelous.
On the evening of 18th November, we set off in four Chevrolet 1 ½ ton trucks. Bagnold and a full LRDG crew took the lead, followed by three jeeps of mixed troops. Mine carried an LRDG driver and front gunner sitting behind the huge barrel of the Lewis machine gun with its circular top-mounted magazine. In the back sat me and a little man called Herbie, crammed either side of the mounted Vickers Maxim machine gun.
The trucks seemed like they had pieces of equipment tied everywhere, camouflage sheets, petrol cans, water bottles; fifteen years of driving in the desert made Bagnold the world’s expert on such travel. Operation Ascalon was in good hands.
Herbie was an Aussie from the ‘outback’, whatever that was. As we’d made final adjustments to the truck’s contents, he’d looked at my German uniform with some disgust, then asked me to say something convincing.
I grinned. “Ich traue dir nicht, ich mag dich nicht , du riechst scheisse.”
Herbie laughed. “I caught the last bit.” Seems curse words are common knowledge.
Before we set off, my driver, Mike, looked me over, wiped some slimy oil over my face, then positioned my goggles correctly. The last addition was an oversize paisley pattern handkerchief, halved then swept over my lower face, cowboy style. Herbie told me to tie it behind my head. “It’ll keep insects out of your mouth, and sand, of course. There’s a reason old Baggy likes to drive in pole position. It gets pretty bloody dusty back here sometimes.” He tucked the lower end of the kerchief past my Adam’s apple, under my tunic collar. “If you’re thirsty, drink through it. The fine mesh is a good filter.”
“Thanks for the help,” I nodded, “I appreciate it.”
“Bugger off, and don’t be such a poof.”
That’s Australians for you.
For the first hundred miles or so, we seemed to be following a road of some sorts, but before darkness fell completely, I couldn’t see one part of it left. Soon we were climbing sand dunes and dropping out of sight repeatedly. I had no idea how the drivers kept our little convoy together. When we stopped to get our bearings, I found the stars gave more light than I’d ever seen before.
“The sand seems to shine,” I said, looking around.
“It’s a phosphorescent glow,” Bagnold informed me as he found certain stars, and took readings from a sextant of some kind. With a map spread over the bonnet of his truck, and the aid of a dim torch, he made a few notes, we ate a sandwich, and we were back on our way.
Morning seemed to take a week to arrive, and we drove onwards until just after ten o’clock. Then, in a dip in the sand, we set up what the men called ‘camp’. Basically they staked out small sheets tied to the trucks to shade from the sun, and promptly fell asleep.
I couldn’t. I winced as one ridiculously horrendous insect after another found me, most with pincers the size of my hand, and spent most of the morning either shooing them away, killing them, or being bitten by them.
I’d been in the desert for less than a day, and I already hated it.
And we travelled this way for the next five days, heading for a place called Al-Faraj.
We drove with one eye on the road ahead, and one in the sky, looking for our greatest danger, the Luftwaffe. When we spotted a plane, we halted, and sat still until it disappeared over the horizon; a standing target offering less chance of discovery. Those long minutes as the LRDG readied themselves behind their nasty-looking machine guns were the longest of my life.
We got buzzed just once on the way west. I ran like blazes away from the trucks, and threw myself to the ground as bullets burst into the sand all around. The Messerschmitt ME-109 came back twice more, but when I returned to the convoy, he hadn’t been that accurate with his fire; two bullet holes to mark his passage. We drove on minutes later, the incident long forgotten, replaced by the more urgent problems of an aching backside and a parched throat.
When we arrived at Al-Faraj, I must admit to being a whole bundle underwhelmed; if I’d expected something, it was buildings of some kind, perhaps what I called civilization.
What we’d travelled to was no more than a collection of palm trees circling a small dirty pond, three dark tents, and a bunch of suspicious bearded men who carried long antique rifles.
To my surprise, Bagnold virtually jumped off his jeep to greet them. When they recognized him, their faces split into huge toothy grins. He then disappeared into one of their tents. ‘To have a smoke’, Mike said but didn’t explain further.
I jumped to the sand to stretch my legs and try to rustle up some feeling in my backside, now virtually numb from the punishing buffeting.
While Mike parked our jeep under the palm trees, I got closer to these bearded toothy men. The looks they gave me were quite feral, and I gathered they had no great love for their German conquerors.
When Bagnold returned, he announced that the lines to the north had moved in our week of travel, another German push, and we were now firmly behind enemy lines.
The terrain had changed too; rock ridges and ravines replaced the ever-present sand dunes, and we now made better time, Bagnold obviously knowing the route well.
Our first sign of the war was a burnt out Chevrolet jeep. It looked like it had been there for thirty years, but Herbie convinced me it was more like three months.
A day later, we slowed our progress, now concealing ourselves much more carefully during the day, camouflage netting above the jeeps, patrols out in all directions.
It was on one of these that we spotted our first German.
From a ridge, looking into the next valley, the halftrack was driving slowly east.
“Three men inside,” Herbie said, his eyes never leaving his binocular lenses. “Two up front.” He looked back over their route. “They’ll have cover of some kind, you don’t travel alone in the desert.”
I’d seen the kind of vehicle in Edinburgh, their uncaring tracks tearing up the city’s asphalt, but to see it in the desert was way different.
“Is it our way in?” I asked. I had no idea if we could even get into the next valley, never mind stage an ambush.
“Maybe.” He shuffled down the ridge, lying on his back. “Depends if they take the next right or left.”
They turned left, away from us.
Half an hour later, we stood around Bagnold’s truck, looking at a map on the bonnet and listening to his plan.
“It might mean they’re either heading to Jaifa-Wadi or they’re looking for something… probably us.” He pointed to the road north. “Either way, they’ll stop at Jaifa; they have to, it’s the last water for a hundred miles. That’s where we hit them.”
That night, we followed the tracks, and parked two miles short of the watering hole. An hour later we found both the halftrack and a small radio armored car, sitting at the line of palm trees. A lone guard stood, leaning back on the halftrack’s rear, smoking a cigarette.
Bagnold had broken the scouting group into two. I stood with Berti, Herbie, and two LRDG’s. “We let Baggie make the first move.” One said. I had neither the inclination or need to object.
From our position I saw Berti walking slowly forward. For a while it seemed like he’d walk right into the German sentry, then at last he was challenged. I saw them exchange words, and the guard’s rifle lowered. A second German advanced on the pair from the radio car; an officer. They were so enmeshed in Berti’s conversation, they didn’t see Bagnold’s group approach. The Germans spoke for a minute or so before two dark figures engulfed them. I heard two almost inaudible clicks, and they fell to the ground.
We were waved forward.
By the time we got to the wadi, the Germans were all lying in a line, all dead, all accounted for.
Even in the low light from the stars, Bagnold looked rather pleased with himself. “Take whatever equipment you need from the bodies, it looks like we have your transport in.”