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wasn’t even 100mm. An 88 could knock out a Crusader with one shot at a mile and a half. The killing range of the guns on our Honey and Crusader tanks was closer to five hundred yards. The 88s and Paks advanced and dug in, using ridges and folds in the ground for cover. Only then did you see the Panzers.
    We new troops had been prepared for this; we had been trained to appreciate such tactics and to recognise them in action. But it took the real thing to make you a believer. Two days after El Adem, in rolling featureless country west of Bir el Gubi, my recce troop of four tanks was out in front of the battalion, mounting the reverse slope of a ridge, to peep over the brow, when our leftmost Crusader—Pease’s A-13—spotted two German Mark IIIs withdrawing at speed directly in front of us. A tank’s most vulnerable part is its rear end; we couldn’t pass up such a target. Up and over we went, hounds after the fox. Before we had dropped a hundred feet down the slope, two of our four tanks had been hit and stopped in their tracks, the crews of both baling out madly (a third, my own, though holed, remained driveable), while tungsten-steel armour-piercing rounds slammed into the stationary hulls. We never even saw the 88s. As we reversed flat-out, leaving one Crusader and a Honey smoking on the sand and my Crusader hobbling for the repair shop, I could see the German commander in the turret of his Mark III, giving us a wave.
    For the next five days our troops and squadrons waged what historians would later call the battles of El Adem and Knightsbridge but what to us felt like a succession of isolated and maddeningly inconclusive skirmishes. We are ordered by brigade to take up a position in anticipation of being immediately attacked. We scurry to the trig point and set up. No enemy appear. For hours we squat, broiling in the sun, hull-down along a ridgeline with our sister squadrons on either flank and HQ and “B” vehicles echeloned back for miles to the rear. Suddenly headphones blare with a report of German columns advancing round our flank. We decamp in a mad scramble, only to dash again into vacant waste.
    A typical action, Day Four, reconstructed from my diary:
    The skipper’s voice crackles over the wireless. “Hello, all stations JUMA, JUMA calling. Friends [meaning our forward screen of armoured cars] report enemy tanks, figures four zero, approaching from southwest, at range figures three zero zero zero. Orders: Three [meaning Troop Three, i.e., us], take a look but do not engage until all units come on line. Others conform to my movements. We will advance and hold for orders. Off.”
    Forward goes my troop of four, reconstituted from the repair shops. It’s noon and the heat haze reduces visibility to a thousand yards. We rattle over one ridgeline, spread out at a three-hundred-yard interval, one tank in the point, two on the wings. Trailing us by five hundred yards, McCaughey brings up the other troops of our squadron; he’s in the centre rear. Through my earphones I hear him deploying his other tanks and reporting to regiment on what the armoured cars are seeing up front. We don’t know this then, but the enemy are tuned in too. The Germans have Signal Intercept trucks, manned by operators who speak English better than we do and whose detection skills are so keen that they can recognise the voices of our individual commanders down to squadron and even troop level. Already they’re reporting our movements and formation numbers to the column of Panzers advancing behind them. Now comes report from battalion that the enemy have stopped.
    â€œJUMA Three, JUMA calling. Keep going. Report what you see. Off to you.”
    That’s us. In my bucking, heaving turret, pressing the small of my back into the rim of the hatch with one knee braced against the rack that holds my Mills bombs, my spare glasses and the four books I’m reading, and the other wedged