Read Online The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey - Free Book Online Page B

way to a more forgiving landscape, with a little more greenery and signs of cultivation. We were emerging from the wilderness into what had once been the granary of the Roman Empire.
    Three Italian fighters dropped out of the sky at a brief rest halt, machine guns blazing. We hit the ground but the scream of propeller engines soon became a distant drone. They hadachieved nothing but someone knew we were here. Given that the dash had been designed to take the Italians by surprise, it was worrying.
    In the early afternoon, about 1400 hours, we reached the road near the derelict village of Beda Fomm. In almost a day and a half we had covered around 160 miles over some of the roughest ground the desert could throw at us. Not only that, we could see nothing coming from the north. We had got there before the Italians but, as it turned out, only just.
    The road ran through sandy ground with low ridges running north–south. The sea and the coastal dunes were two miles to our west. We were working hard to get the guns deployed across both sides of the road. Captain Tom Pearson was in charge and he began to lay a minefield. We barely had time to dig in before the enemy showed up in force.
    The first Italians came into view and imagine how they felt. They thought the nearest enemy was at least a hundred miles away so they were convinced the vehicles ahead of them must be friendly until our artillery opened up. It was a complete shock. They careered off the road, trying to get out of harm’s way, and then the fighting really began. They outnumbered us by a huge margin but luckily they didn’t know that. They launched some wild attacks and we threw them back each time but more and more of them were coming down the road.
    Late in the afternoon, our armour caught up, peeling off to attack to the north of us, halfway down the long Italian column. There were burning Italian vehicles everywhere by the time dusk fell and we had already taken a thousand prisoners but there were more Italians arriving all the time. What we didn’t know then was that ‘Electric Whiskers’ was in the column and he’d been given orders to break out of the trap. He should have been able to, because it wasn’t great territory for such an unbalanced battle, with flat terrain spreading out both sides of our roadblock. Our orders were clear: the Italiansmust not be allowed to break through between the road and the sea.
    Tom Pearson was one our best officers and he knew we had to convince the Italians there were far more of us out there in the darkness or they would drive straight round us. In the evening, he decided to send out a harassing force right along the Italian column.
    Mike Mosley took two platoons including mine, and a small section of artillery to do the job. I was relieved to be going into battle with Mosley. He was a bit of an enigma, a bishop’s only son who had himself been heading for the church until the war came along. A naturally curious man and a brilliant soldier, he didn’t have a fear in his body in battle. Since I had given him a fright in the carrier, I felt the slate had been wiped clean. I trusted him as much as any officer. That night he was to win the Military Cross.
    I locked the side handle on the Bren, checked the curved magazine and climbed into the back of the nearest truck. Mosley clambered up after me, pulled out his revolver, gave a bang on the roof of the cab and we lurched off in the dark.
    It must have been about midnight when the drone of engine exhausts told us another column was approaching from the north. My night vision was starting to kick in and we could make out the outline of trucks, tanks and big guns about 250 yards away in the night. There were 200 vehicles or more, stretching way back along the track. There weren’t nearly enough of us to stop them breaking out, so we began to create an illusion.
    I aimed my Bren low to allow for the recoil which always lifted it up and over the target. You had to force it