Read Online Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield - Free Book Online Page B

against the side of the breech guard of our 2-pounder gun, I wave Corporal Pease in the point tank forward. We’re advancing at about five miles an hour. My binoculars are riveted to my eye sockets. The ride is like a small boat at sea. Petrol and machine oil reek. The surface of the turret is so hot from the sun that it burns my elbows through my shirt. Inside the tank, the temperature is well into triple figures.
    Now I see our “friends,” two armoured cars of 3KDG, 3rd King’s Dragoon Guards, darting back towards us, hollow to hollow, like waterbugs. I can’t see the cars themselves, only their dust, which I recognise. We’re all learning, day by day. I wish I were a seasoned tank commander. I’m not. I’m faking fifty percent of everything. The enemy’s skills are leagues beyond ours, as are his tactics and equipment. We know it and so does he. I’m not frightened; there’s no time for that; too much concentration is required. But I’m keenly aware of my own deficiencies and those of my crew and my guns and my commanders. It is not a reassuring feeling.
    Ahead lies a ridge with a hollow into which a tank can slip without exposing itself on the skyline. I order Pease to take the wing; I advance myself into this pocket. “Driver, halt.” So I can see. A breeze clears the vantage south. External temperature is 110 Fahrenheit. Through the binoculars I can make out two columns of dust, advancing southeast round our flank. The first is tanks; the trailing column, five miles back, is enemy M.T.—motor transport—petrol and ammunition trucks. “Hello JUMA, JUMA Three calling.” I report what I see.
    â€œHello JUMA Three, JUMA answering. Hold where you are. Wait for orders.”
    Up the ridge in front of us scuttles a waterbug, one of our KDG armoured cars. It zips up alongside and stops. On its prow is painted “Tink 21” above an excellent rendering of a bathing beauty straddling a Breda gun. Its driver is a sergeant I don’t recognise. He grins up. “Haven’t got a smoke, have you, guv?” I toss him a pack of four horrible Chelseas from the clutch I keep in the wireless rack. “What’s up front?” I ask. He lights two cigs and passes one overhand to his driver, through the port. “Half the bloody Hun army.” He has had to beat it, he says, from lorried infantry and big German 8-wheelers, armoured cars, coming up at the same time as at least fifty Mark IIIs and IVs. “A sight,” says the sergeant, “to make me piss me bleedin’ pants.”
    Enemy infantry up front means they’re protecting anti-tank guns, which means trouble for us.
    â€œHello, all stations JUMA, JUMA calling. Orders: Wheel south, come on line, and engage enemy supply column. Off.”
    We do. Now the stopped German tanks start rolling forward; they burst through our vacated position before our follow-on elements can advance into place to counter them. South on the flat, the German supply column breaks away long before we reach it, warned by our dust and, no doubt, wireless intercepts. Our attack buckles in the face of a screen of furious anti-tank fire; we are compelled to retreat yet again when the west-leading column of Panzers comes about and threatens to cut us off. I lose Pease’s tank when an HE round turns its right track and suspension into spare parts, and I lose its driver to a broken jaw when a round of solid shot opens up one side of his turret. Darkness approaches. Corporal Ledgard is my Number Three tank commander. As he and I take the crew off and hustle back into the protective perimenter of vehicles and infantry that we call a night leaguer, we can see two Mark IIIs closing in to claim the prize of Pease’s A-13. By midnight German salvage crews will have towed it back to a mobile repair shop. In five days we’ll see it again, with a black cross painted on its flank and an Axis crew