SBS, page 10
Harry Martin was a small, wiry Belfast-born accountant with an extraordinary mathematical brain, a truly photographic memory and an unerring eye for detail. Martin had been living in Glasgow on a fast trajectory accounting career and had been a territorial soldier with 3rd Argylls when the balloon had gone up. The army had quickly transferred him to 1st Battalion and made him a quartermaster sergeant and his stores had been the best run in the Western Desert. But on Crete in May ’41, Martin had been one of those men of the Allied rearguard who had saved the day. Low on ammunition, food and water and utterly exhausted, he and his comrades – drawn by chance from units of Aussies, Kiwis, and Indians, as well as Brits – had had to think on their feet as they were hunted down by Kampfgruppe Wittmann’s ruthless mountain troops. They had slipped away from them at Megala and then managed to hold them back at Stilos, Babali Hani and Sin Kares. Finally, south of Imbros, they had fought them for as long as they could. Martin had been one of the lucky few to get in a boat.
It had all been down to the regular NCOs and among them, QSM Martin had shown beyond any doubt what he could do in the field. With rifle ammo exhausted, grenade throwing had quickly become his speciality. He had already been, needless to say, a brilliant fast bowler. It helped. Cricket was a religion to Martin. He could tell you, if asked, exactly how many matches had been won, lost or drawn in England’s international cricket tests between 1925 and 1939. He could also tell you that Wally Hammond had set the record for highest individual test innings at 336. But that it was overtaken by Len Hutton’s 364 against Australia in 1938. And, chillingly, he could also have told you, straight-faced, what the odds had been on his survival the last time he had been on Crete. And he might have added that this time he was going to make damned sure they were better.
All things considered, thought Hunter, they were as diverse a group of soldiers as you would ever have hoped to find in any section of the British Army. And their diversity was matched by their unique individual skills. There was something quite special about every one of them. But there were two things that united them. Firstly, their physique, stamina and discipline were faultless. And secondly, they were all trained killers. Several of them, Russell and Martin in particular, might not have looked capable of hurting anyone, but they had all proved, in training as much as in the action they had seen in the past two years, that when called upon to do so, they looked more than a match in combat for any of Hitler’s men.
Hunter and the driver were in the cab, his section was in the second of four trucks each with a lieutenant and seven to nine men, while in the lead went a jeep containing the two captains: Wilson and Woods.
Taking a single break, the little convoy stopped at Port Said at around 5.30 in the morning and Hunter watched as the modern port came into view, a jumble of flat-topped buildings, minarets and spires against the curve of the coastline. Embarking again just after 6am, they passed Lake Manzala and rattled the next two hundred miles to Alexandria along the slightly better, newer coastal road, which often seemed to have nothing to do with the coast at all.
They appeared to Hunter to be driving across an enormous beach with hardly a soul to be seen and the sea at times unbelievably distant. Despite the bumpy ride, Hunter slept intermittently, waking at one point to see the islands of Lake Burullus, before they touched the edge of the old town of Rosetta, rattling through the narrow streets in the lee of its extraordinary Ottoman buildings.
As they headed south-west and grew closer to Alex, groves of date palms, thick and lush – the trees laden with fruit – lined the road. And beside them lay vast carpets of wild flowers, white, orange and red.
Finally the rooftops of Alex came in sight and Hunter strained to try to pick out something recognisable from the old town. As he did so his driver yelled through to the men from the front, ‘Alex, boys. Here we are, you lucky lot. Welcome to Alexandria.’
Hunter looked at his watch. It was approaching 11.30am. They had been travelling for twelve hours.
Alexandria was a very, very different place to Cairo. Indeed, thought Hunter, it might as well have been in a different country. If Cairo was at its heart still profoundly a city of Islam, then Alex was the very opposite: essentially a metropolitan Mediterranean playground for the rich, set on the coast and facing towards Europe. It had a distinctly Greek character to it, tinged with the heady flavours, scents and smells of the Levant. Its ‘white collar’ workers, clerks, managers, restaurateurs were Greek to a man. Its manual workers, mostly Arab and Egyptian Muslims, were universally consigned to at best a second-class status.
The old city had not suffered too much from enemy action. The German bombers had tended to concentrate their destructive attention on the commercial port, the docks, which lay to the west of the town. A few bombs had landed in the older areas and rubble and clearly un-archaeological ruins testified to the might of the Luftwaffe. But for all its survival, Hunter detected a distinct air of shabbiness that had clearly not been brought on by the war. And where Cairo preserved an air of antiquity and even of grace, Alexandria’s past was hidden beneath the ground. On the surface it was all about show. To the newcomer the city presented a façade of opulence, from the Cecil Hotel to the Royal Alexandria Yacht Club. But after a few days the illusion was dispelled and it became clear that there was no real substance to it. It occurred to Hunter that some sort of deceit, from espionage to the fragile veneer of social climbing, was rampant throughout this godforsaken country, not merely confined to the hallowed halls of GHQ and Rustum Buildings.
Another deceptive thing about Alex was the extreme vulnerability of the place. Despite appearing to possess an air of normality, Alexandria was actually almost the front line. Only in June this year the episode of what had become known as ‘the flap’ had caused widespread panic as Rommel’s panzers had borne down with lightning speed on Alexandria. They had smashed through at Mersa Matruh and before anyone knew it were terrifyingly close.
There was a widespread burning of files in the British offices of the city. The panic had quickly spread to Cairo and they called 1st July Ash Wednesday due to the amount of incinerating of documents that took place. But at the eleventh hour the line had been held and Monty’s 8th Army had stopped the enemy at a little station halt called El Alamein, about a hundred miles west of Alex.
And now it seemed that Monty had turned the tables and was about to push Rommel back.
The big push was coming but defeating Rommel in Egypt and Libya and clearing the Western Desert was only the start.
Hunter and his men were laying the groundwork for the next stage. That was why they were here, bumping uncomfortably through the desert, heading for Alexandria’s old town.
As they entered the same seedy townships that defined any north African town, Hunter looked out from the lorry and saw dozens of British Army trucks in groups around the road. At first he wondered how so many transport vehicles might be there. The thought had just crossed his mind when, as they reached the entrance to the city, the column came to a halt.
He turned to the driver. ‘What now?’
‘Bloody jam, sir. Nothing I can do about it. Just traffic. Never seen the like.’
‘But why so bloody much? Christ, at this rate we’ll be late for the RV.’
‘Sorry, sir. Just my job. Can’t be helped.’
‘Well I’m going to see what the hell’s going on.’
Hunter opened the door and jumped down onto the dirt road. He lit a cigarette and walked a few yards in front of the column. Sure enough there was a traffic jam. Vehicles, military and civilian, were locked in the narrow streets.
He was walking back up the road, towards his truck, when he noticed another group of trucks parked up a little distance away and surrounded by a fence. He walked towards them and, as he grew near, saw the armed sentry. He waited, as he had been trained to do, until the man’s back was turned and hared through the fence. Once inside the perimeter it was easy to hide among the vehicles. Something wasn’t right, he thought. There was something very strange about these trucks. He ducked down and examined the wheels. They seemed to be fine, but on closer inspection he saw that they were fixed in place.
He moved to the rear of one of them and gently lifted the canvas tail flap. What he saw made him gasp. Instead of the inside of a truck he was looking at the rear of a Crusader tank. The whole thing had been carefully camouflaged with a dummy bonnet and windscreen to make it seem from all angles as if it were a truck. The device was brilliantly simple.
It didn’t take long for Hunter to realise that he had stumbled on something much bigger than a few camouflaged tanks. This must be the build-up for Monty’s offensive. There had been rumours of a huge number of tanks and transport being seen entering Egypt. And then nothing more had been heard of them. Here was the answer. He prayed that no enemy spy would have as easy a time as he’d had in getting in.
He waited behind another of the fake trucks, close to the gate, until the sentry paused to light a cigarette and then slipped silently back through the fence and once outside walked casually away in full view, from the vehicle park towards his own trucks. His discovery made him doubt for a moment, quite what in his present life was genuine and what false.
Woods was leaning out of the window of his truck. ‘Christ, Jim, where the hell have you been?’
‘Just having a fag; interesting place this. Full of kit.’
Hunter swung himself back up into the passenger seat of his truck just as the column began to move off, a red-capped British military policeman having uncorked the jam.
Changing gear, the driver smiled at him. ‘You called that a bit close, sir; thought we’d have to leave you behind.’
‘No chance. Did you think I’d miss the party?’
Hunter watched the leafy suburban villas slip by, each one of them a model of ersatz neo-classicism, each one of them with the same manicured lawn and large American car in the wide, gravelled drive.
The denizens of Cairo might still continue to choose to decamp here during the hot summer months, when the air of the capital became stiflingly warm. But the city held no attraction at all for Hunter.
Of course he had been brought up on tales of its past glories. His father had filled his head with tales of its founding by Alexander the Great. It had been the greatest city on earth before being outdone by Rome. The Romans had ruled it, then the Persians, the Ottomans and the French before the British had taken it, not once but twice.
Here Ptolemy had set up his lighthouse and established his great library. Here Queen Cleopatra had entertained Mark Antony and Caesar. In recent years it had proved attractive to other royalty, including the British. But now it looked to Hunter like any other opulently sordid Mediterranean resort, tired and lacking in any redeeming virtue.
They rattled on, through the city towards the western docks. The centre of the city had been blocked off and they were pushed along the coast past the opulent hotels and the apartment blocks.
Many of the inhabitants had moved out at the time of the flap but a few remained and, as the little convoy rolled past the tall blocks, Hunter glimpsed a few of them as they settled down to lunch overlooking the Mediterranean as if the world was just going about its day-to-day business. It all seemed a million miles away from what they were about to do. They were going to go deep into enemy territory and chance their lives in a mission on which might hang the fate of so many and indeed the outcome of the war. But rather than unsettling, he found it strangely calming. Slowly the landscape of the city began to change and after a few more blocks they left the smart apartment blocks and old Levantine houses behind and rattled into the industrial area, which housed the western docks.
Everywhere around them in this part of the city lay the evidence of war. There were the shattered hulks of bombed ships. Beside them the broken and twisted cranes and haulage gear. They drove past a railway, the steel rails of the railway sidings, twisted and ripped from the ground as if some petulant giant child had pulled them from the ground. Craters littered the road and the tumbled bricks of what had been warehouses and factories lay in piles. The port was still operating though and nearing it he could see a number of ships being loaded. There were fishing boats too, tying up as the crew prepared to unload their catch as generations had done before.
There was, of course, no need for silence or subterfuge yet and once the trucks had reached the quayside, the men debussed in good spirits, cracking jokes at each other’s expense and displaying all the cocky bravado of nervous professionals about to go into action.
But as Hunter’s men looked around themselves, taking in the scene of devastation, they were quickly jolted back to the reality of the war.
And, as they moved off towards the two caiques that were to take the raiding party the four hundred miles to Crete, they did so in relative silence.
One by one they moved aboard and instinctively began to stow away their kit below. And Hunter went with them.
Their two craft stood out among all the ramshackle trawlers and battered merchant ships. There was a gleaming motor torpedo boat, which looked ready to go, and further down the quay the blue-grey eminence of a Royal Navy frigate.
The caique on which Wilson’s thirty marines were now embarking was larger than their own and indeed one of the largest caiques Peter Woods had yet seen. About forty-five feet long and weighing he reckoned around twenty tons. It was Woods’s first experience of one of the boats of the newly commissioned, and somewhat grandly named ‘Levant Schooner Flotilla’. He had been told all about it in Cairo, first by Vickery and then briefed about it again at Athilt.
The ‘Flotilla’ was the brainchild of some eccentric young nutcase, named Seligman, the son of a society novelist who had sailed around the world in a fishing boat with a small crew, his teenage wife and a piano for company. Apparently his military service to date had been on minesweepers and piloting Russian merchantmen through the Baltic blockade. He was just the man to find the ships that would be necessary for the sort of covert operations that Fleming, Jellicoe and the others had in mind. So now, typically of the quirks of fortune that this life-changing war brought with it, young Mister Seligman was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy and had under his command an entire flotilla of twelve newly converted gunboats. A regular pirate fleet, two of whose finest men of war had been commandeered for the raid on Crete.
Woods, who had grown up sailing his father’s motor launch on the Norfolk Broads, examined the marines’ caique with interest. AHS 31 Tewfik had just one central mast, with one large, lateen sail and two similar, smaller headsails. She was what the Greeks called a tricanderi, a double-ended gaff-rigged cutter, with canvas bulwarks laced to sheer poles either side down two-thirds of her length. She had no wheelhouse, just a tiller. There was, he noted with approval, a large Oerlikon 20mm anti-tank gun mounted in the bow. There were also two 50-calibre Browning machine guns in her waist and in the stern a pair of Vickers .303 machine guns. She was a formidable vessel indeed and he thought should be able to put up a reasonable fight against a German torpedo boat.
He walked over to his own caique and looked at it in comparison. Though smaller than Wilson’s, AHS23 Rosetta was still of a good size. Like the other boat, she had the same lateen rigged configuration of mast and sails and no wheelhouse, but she was fitted only with a similarly lethal Oerlikon cannon and two .303 Vickers guns, amidships. She would do the job.
He noticed that there were four crewmen on the boat. They were uniformed in blue or white shirts and white shorts and all had heavy beards. A couple of them wore light-blue painted tin hats and one, the captain, an officer’s cap. These were clearly the men who had been recruited by Seligman from the Royal Navy. Volunteers wanting something rather more exciting than working below decks on a destroyer.
Woods caught Hunter’s eye and beckoned him across, then together they walked up to the captain, a lean, bearded, heavily tanned man in his late thirties whose wide smile revealed an appalling set of teeth.
‘Captain Woods. And this is Lieutenant Hunter.’
‘Ah yes. Good morning, gentlemen. Dick Gorringe. I’m in charge of this little beauty. Do make yourselves comfortable. It would seem that we can look forward to three days on the water together.’
7
Once the men had got their personal kitbags loaded Hunter gave them a shout. ‘Right ho, let’s get the rest of this kit on board. All of you lend a hand and then we’ll get some scran.’
They moved to the fourth truck and, flipping up the canvas flap, lowered the tailboard. Inside lay a small arsenal and a pile of wooden packing cases.
Two of the men clambered up into the back of the truck and began to unbuckle the canvas bindings and hand the guns and boxes down to the others. Hunter watched as it began to empty. There were two boxes of provisions, dry and wet, and a case of drink containing beer, bottles of the local wine and retsina, along with a bottle of ouzo. There were also two cases of water, and a small field stove with two canisters of fuel. Then several coils of rope followed by spades and pickaxes and a radio receiver and transmitter. The guns were impressive. Two Bren guns, nine Stens, a bag containing pistols, Webleys and Enfields, and a captured German MG34 and a couple of captured Schmeisser machine-pistols. There were two cases of grenades, unprimed, and their primers. There was also a case marked ‘TNT’. That would be Bill Duffy’s baby. Then there was all the ammo for the various weapons, including – amazingly – an entire case of belts for the MG34 that he had earmarked for Fletcher. Hunter wondered how someone had engineered that.
