Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at Tobruk in Libya had finally fallen to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, with 35,000 Allied troops marching into captivity.

      One of the new officers was Lieutenant Donald Easten, from the leafy town of Chislehurst. Easten was an English countryman, the son of a solicitor, who lived for shooting and fishing whenever he found time away from his work as a clerk in the City of London. After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 a friend of his father’s had asked if he had joined the Territorial Army yet. ‘And when I said no he said: “Why the bloody hell aren’t you?”’ He joined up and was sent to the 4th West Kents in time for the journey east. On the long sea journey he thought often of his bride, Billie, who was serving with an anti-aircraft battery in London. ‘We were all bloody miserable … There was a grim silence. Everybody alone with their memories wondering, am I ever going to see her again?’

      On 24 July 1942, nearly two months after they had set out from England, the 4th West Kents arrived in the Gulf of Suez and disembarked at Port Tewfik, where they prepared to join the allied counter-offensive against Rommel. The German general’s aim was to break through the allied defensive line stretching from El Alamein into the desert and open the way for an assault on Cairo, the last step needed to drive the allies out of North Africa. If he moved quickly enough, and if his enemy stumbled, there was a chance the Desert Fox could steal victory before the continuing build-up of British men and armour would make his task impossible.

      The 4th West Kents spent a fortnight doing ‘toughening up marches’, without water, conducting mock attacks and practising night manoeuvres in the desert. The war diary for this period describes a battalion rapidly preparing itself for action, but the only incident of note was the death of a soldier who was accidentally shot.

      One night Private Ivan Daunt was sitting with a few friends when he heard his name called out. An officer came over carrying a telegram from home. ‘I got down, put a sheet over my head and lit a match and it says: “A son is born.” I wouldn’t see him for another three years.’ In the desert night he felt a combination of joy and unspeakable sadness.

      On 20 August a distinguished visitor arrived at 8th Army headquarters. The prime minister was on his way back from Moscow where he and President Roosevelt had met with Stalin, ‘the old Bear’, as Churchill described him to the welcoming party of officers. Now promoted to captain, Donald Easten was serving as a liaison officer between 132 Brigade, of which the 4th West Kents were part, and 8th Army headquarters. He suddenly found himself called upon to act as scout for the prime minister’s visit to front-line positions, a journey that would involve traversing a minefield. He practised the route several times in advance. ‘I was thinking I was going to meet the General and Churchill and two or three other people in vehicles. I found that I was leading something that looked like an armoured division! There were so many newspaper people, reporters and armoured cars and heaven knows what else.’ Easten led the convoy through the desert, found the gap, and made his way through to the other side. There he handed over to another officer and Churchill waved him goodbye with a shout of thanks. When he got back to the division headquarters he was immediately summoned and given ‘the most tremendous rocket’. He had apparently taken a fifty-yard detour off the safe route without knowing it. ‘However I didn’t blow the old man up,’ he recalled, still with an expression of considerable relief more than fifty years later.

      Orders came down for the 4th West Kents to prepare to move off and mount an operation to interdict Rommel’s supply lines in the area of Alam Halfa. The troops moved out into the darkness at 2300 hours on 3 September, but German planes had spotted them forming up in the early evening and the sound of their vehicles was already attracting enemy mortar fire. Captain John Winstanley moved forward with B company on a ‘wonderful moonlight night’, but from the outset things went wrong. As the New Zealand official history describes it, the 4th West Kents ‘became considerably disorganised, with trucks on the wrong routes and often, in losing the way, becoming stuck in the soft sand or in the minefields … there was a confused mass of men and trucks’. Unbeknown to the battalion one of the few truly effective elements in the Italian army was waiting for them, holding fire in trenches that lay right across the line of advance.

      The Folgore Division was an elite formation of paratroopers who could be depended on to stand and fight. As the advance eventually got under way, Winstanley heard the sound of men moving along on either side of him in silence. And then fury was unleashed. ‘The silence was shattered by a roar of automatic fire, and showers of Italian grenades burst among the forward companies. Many of the men were hit but the leading platoons charged the enemy positions.’ Enemy mortars crashed into the battalion’s vehicles and fires lit the sky, silhouetting the advancing men and making them an easier target for the machine-gunners. John Winstanley was firing his rifle lying flat on the ground when a bullet pierced his arm. He screamed in pain but maintained his position, urging his men to fight while trying to return fire himself.

      Enemy aircraft now appeared and dropped parachute flares to illuminate their targets. Caught in the open desert, the majority of the 4th West Kents could only lie flat on their faces and pray. Most of their entrenching tools were in the burning vehicles and in any case it would have taken hours to dig proper foxholes in the flint-hard ground. The strafing and bombing by Stukas and the mortar and machine-gun fire from the Italians pulverised the battalion. Some men did make it into the Italian trenches and fought hand to hand with the defenders; they even managed to take some prisoners. But the battle was going badly and by 3 a.m. the order was given to withdraw. Carrying the severely wounded with them, the 4th West Kents, including an exhausted John Winstanley, eventually found some cover at a ridge several thousand yards back from the scene of the battle. Winstanley was evacuated to a military hospital, where he spent several weeks recovering from his wound. Private Ivan Daunt reflected bitterly on the experience of Alam Halfa: ‘The intelligence wasn’t thorough … we weren’t there long enough to know.’ The battalion lost 250 men killed, wounded or missing, more than half its strength. It was an agonising reminder of the catastrophe of France in 1940.

      The regimental history recorded that the 4th West Kents were ‘thrown away in a suicidal attempt to cut off the retreat of the enemy’. It was, as twenty-two-year-old Peter Goodwin put it, ‘a complete cock-up. That was when morale reached its lowest point in the war. Everyone knew that it was a wasted effort and we lost a lot of people.’ Ivan Daunt felt changed by the desert, older and wiser, and determined that the war was something he would survive and see through to the end. Twice he had been caught up in disaster. He swore it would not happen again.

      As had happened after France, new men and officers arrived to make up for the losses suffered at Alam Halfa. Among them was Lieutenant Tom Hogg, a transport officer who had grown up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. He had already survived death once by the time he joined the army: a motorcyclist had knocked him down when he was ten and left him with a fractured skull and broken leg. In those days the cost of the operations he needed ran to the price of ‘ten good milk cows by my father’s reckoning, and therefore a considerable loss to him’. At Giggleswick village school he was written off as a plodder and ‘suffered terribly from the impatience of teachers who clearly thought me too dim to be worthy of their time’. On leaving school in 1939 he joined the Territorial Army in Yorkshire, becoming, according to the Daily Mirror, the youngest sergeant in the British army at the outbreak of war. He found his way to the 4th West Kents after escaping from German captivity near Tobruk. To Ivan Daunt, the new members of the battalion like Tom Hogg were a source of strength: ‘A lot of them had been in other battles. They had been elsewhere. They weren’t rookies … And the NCOs … we got hardened ones coming in. And that made a lot of difference. Especially at Kohima.’

      Hogg remembered some of his early experiences with particular distaste. On several occasions the 4th West Kents would see a group of Italians waiting to surrender and approach them. All of a sudden there would be a shout in German and the would-be prisoners would throw themselves down, revealing a German machine-gun crew who would open up on the British. The idea was to capture the transport. ‘This particular trick caused “bad blood” among our men, and I recall seeing one СКАЧАТЬ