Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  The call came in late morning. After fairly mundane days of inspection and report logging, the opportunity to tackle a different kind of challenge was welcome. I readied myself for the work to come: an ammunition accident – a tank.

  Two soldiers had begun loading American-manufactured 75mm white phosphorus gun ammunition into the tank. The ammunition consisted of a nose-fuzed shell loosely fixed into a brass cartridge case containing the propellant charge. One man was on the top of the tank, the other inside. The man on the top pulled the shell out of its cardboard storage cylinder and moved to pass it to his companion. The shell fell out of the cartridge case; the soldier tried to catch it but missed. It clanged off the metal surface just inside the hatch and exploded.

  The two soldiers were not killed outright. The small H E charge ruptured the shell and spread the white phosphorus over the tank both inside and outside. This ignited on contact with the air, producing clouds of acrid white smoke and a fierce and terrible burning which penetrated the flesh of both men. Death was agonizing, and too slow coming.

  Theoretically, the accident could never have happened. All British and American ammunition was designed to withstand the rigours of storage, handling and transportation. Safety procedures were built into every stage of the design, manufacturing and assembly process. It was impossible for the shell to detonate – unless there was something seriously wrong with its PD M57 fuze.

  Artillery fuzes vary; in this case, a small brass component called an interrupter should have prevented the fuze from detonating the shell until after the shell had been fired from a gun. With thousands of such shells and fuzes currently in army use, the implications were far-ranging; either the interrupter had malfunctioned or it had never been there at all.

  At the accident site the senior AE took me to one side and spelt it out. The outcome of this investigation depended on finding every last bit of the fuze, and that included the interrupter. Hopefully the interrupter would be found trapped inside the remains of the fuze body but, if not, the search had to continue until it could be stated with certainty that it had not been there.

  ‘It will be like looking for a needle in a very nasty haystack, Gurney. Do your best,’ were the AE’s parting words.

  As he left, a small group of soldiers who had been standing within earshot came over and joined me. They began to express their horror at what it must be like inside the tank. I started to listen but an involuntary distancing effect was taking hold, pulling me back, pushing them away. I became remote, isolated, separate from them – separated even from myself. All my thoughts had to be concentrated on the task in hand.

  I was surprised when people asked me how I could be so remote, so cold-blooded. It was involuntary, instinctive – all to do with getting on with a job which required a matter-of-fact approach. What I was paid to do – and wanted to do – was to investigate and analyse the facts. No more, no less. But I would know, even as I said it, how cold it sounded, how inadequate.

  Later, I was able to understand this mechanism better. It was a kind of invisible switch that was thrown at moments of maximum stress. Though senses were heightened, the switch would act as a control mechanism that filtered out emotions, imagination or memories. Objectivity was essential; anything less and the task would be denied the concentration and professionalism it needed.

  When the switch snapped shut the boundary between logic and emotion was defined. Though there would always be things out there on the periphery, they did not affect me. What I saw, smelled or heard related solely to the clues and puzzles and the facts …

  I clambered up on to the tank, manoeuvred myself inside and began the painstaking search for a tiny brass component less than ¾-inch long and ¼-inch wide: the needle in the haystack.

  The needle was never found. Subsequent breakdown examination of other PD M57 fuzes indicated it was not the search that was at fault: the interrupter was present in the vast majority of fuzes but omitted in a few others. An oversight had occurred in production – a small omission but one with dreadful consequences.

  Berlin, April 1951, and I was at Hackenfelde in the British Sector. A former German aircraft factory now housed the RAOC stores, vehicle and ammunition depots, a great sprawling complex of buildings by one of the main roads into the centre of the divided city. The ammunition facility was extensive; it had a repair workshop which would not have disgraced a base ammunition depot. It also had a senior ammunition examiner, WO1 Wallis, a Berlin veteran who used to spend some of his time on munitions clearance work in and around the city.

  Six years after the end of the war Berlin was rebuilding itself with impressive skill and at impressive speed. Though the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche would remain as a gaunt and poignant memorial, the Kurfürstendamm was back in business again with its shops, hotels and nightclubs; trams, taxis, buses and cars formed a dense tide of traffic from one end of the thoroughfare to the other. Everywhere there were the sights, sounds and smells of construction and reconstruction, giant cranes and soaring scaffolding, welding and hammering, the deep bass thud of round-the-clock pile-drivers, cement dust that clouded up from wagons and building sites and left its gritty aftertaste hanging on the air. But everywhere, too, there were scars and empty spaces where places and people used to be; street corners defined by great swathes of shuttering that fenced off one flattened area from the next; erratic ranks of buildings whose symmetry was broken by hoardings or tarpaulins or punctuated by wide aching gaps.

  The presence of wartime munitions made any renewal project a risky undertaking; the jaws of an excavator could as well turn over shells, bombs and bullets as earth. For six years clearance teams had been harvesting the streets of Berlin. There were times when it seemed the work would still be continuing six years on.

  Munitions clearance and disposal was one of Warrant Officer Wallis’s areas of responsibility. Unfortunately he had contracted some form of dermatitis which was exacerbated by physical contact with ammunition or explosives. Although he had acted principally in a supervisory capacity, it was decided that another AE should share the workload.

  Accordingly I found myself in one of the echoing hangars of Hackenfelde, meeting for the first time the group of civilian operatives hitherto in Wallis’s charge. They had all been in the German armed forces, all were highly experienced, and all obviously wondering what this young, fresh-faced British army NCO was doing in their midst.

  My orders had been unambiguous: as far as these civilians were concerned, these Feuerwerker, I was in charge. As far as I was concerned, however, things were not so clear-cut. I didn’t lack self-confidence – I had been thoroughly trained and I’d been involved with munitions in one way or another since childhood – but these people had racked up the kind of experience I couldn’t hope to match. To simply announce that I was ‘in charge’ would be bloody silly.

  The leader of the group regarded me with a frank, unwavering stare. I had to clarify the position for everyone’s benefit. I raised my voice, hoping it would carry above the background noise of the hammering from the ammunition workshop. ‘I know you’ve all been working with Warrant Officer Wallis. And I know you’ve all done a very good job. Nothing’s going to change just because I’m here. I’m not replacing Mr Wallis. I’m not planning on altering anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m here for one reason only.’

  The group leader smiled. ‘To take charge?’

  ‘To learn.’

  ‘Learn?’

  ‘Yes. I wouldn’t presume to show you what to do. But I’d appreciate it if you’d help me with what I have to do.’ I paused, wondering if the message was getting through. ‘I’ve been trained. I’ve done a fair amount of work already. But I need to know a lot more.’

  Slowly: ‘You wish to … learn?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The German looked from me to the other Feuerwerker and hack again. Finally: ‘My name is Karl.’ He smiled again, more certainly this time, and extended his hand towards me. ‘Welcome to Berlin.�
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  They took me at my word. Day after day we loaded up the Bedford truck or one of the Jeeps and headed out into the city. Though many of the jobs posed no problems there were always one or two that challenged both expertise and ingenuity. The workload was heavy; even with two or more teams operating, there was a permanent backlog of non-emergency tasks.

  The Feuerwerker were always careful, always methodical, operating like skilled professionals. I joined in the discussion, planning and execution, carried out various tasks under Karl’s watchful eye, or stood aside and looked on while new and complex operations were undertaken involving devices I hadn’t previously encountered. Gradually I absorbed the details of every incident, deriving satisfaction, exhilaration and gratitude at the good fortune that had brought me here.

  In the coffeeshop off the Ku-damm Karl finished his plate of Bratkartoffeln (sautéed potatoes) and reached for a slice of the Black Forest Kirschtorte. I’d already eaten mine; it was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. Berlin might be divided, it might still be suffering postwar shortages in certain types of goods, but the street corner pubs and the pastry shops and cafés held within them the kind of delights that would have been incomprehensible across the Channel.

  ‘So,’ said Karl. ‘You learn fast. You like this job?’

  I nodded. ‘I also like Berlin.’

  ‘Ja. It’s a good city. Maybe one day …’ The sentence hung unfinished; you didn’t need to ask what he was thinking. A Berliner by birth, he would have childhood memories of his city before the bombs fell, before the tanks and the troops swept in. He patted his pockets and extracted a pack of cigars. I had to smile to myself. In England I hadn’t come across that many cigar-smokers. Here though, cigars seemed part of the staple diet.

  ‘Anyway,’ Karl said. ‘You are ready. We let you loose on Berlin, eh?’ He grinned. It was a private joke between the two of us; he knew I didn’t need any civilian’s permission to carry out my duties. But this little game gave the Feuerwerker a sense of self-respect and allowed me to learn more than could be gained from any classroom or workshop.

  Karl took another puff on the cigar. ‘You do me a favour though.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Try not to knock down any more of my city.’

  There was another job to go to, non-urgent, non-threatening, one of the dozens still stacked up despite every effort to reduce the total. The problem was that here in Berlin not only were you up against new difficulties every day, you were also up against the clock; some weeks it seemed that for every incident successfully dealt with, two more were demanding response.

  I was acutely conscious of the time that was spent on certain kinds of operation. It seemed to me that we couldn’t go on doing everything by the book: there had to be some incidents where safe short-cuts were appropriate. Blind mortar bombs, for instance. Time after time we were called out to deal with these and on arrival would find that only the tips of the fins were visible. You couldn’t see anything else and you couldn’t get at the damn thing. You had to dig down carefully, scoop out soil and stones, and finally expose the bomb body. After that it was standard procedure: you placed a charge next to the body and detonated it.

  In situ destruction was insisted upon for three very good reasons: First, the relatively small amount of high explosive found in land service munitions meant that it was normally possible to protect surrounding property when destruction occurred. Secondly, projectiles normally suffer some physical damage when fired and vital components such as fuzes become impossible to remove. Third, but by no means least, fuzed projectiles which have been fired but have failed to detonate at the intended time are inherently unstable: they can go off at the slightest movement.

  Artillery fuzes contain safety devices which react to the pressures and forces occurring at and after firing. Those forces are tremendous: the pressure generated in a chamber on firing can be from 1,000 to 6,000 bar; the acceleration of a shell up the barrel can be anything between 10,000g and 35,000g; the shell can be spinning at between 500 and 4,000 revs per minute. Components designed to react to such pressures include detents: under the pressure of acceleration they overcome the resistance of their springs and slide to the rear of the fuze. In so doing, they can clear the way for bolts which, acting under centrifugal force, move to bring detonators and strikers into line.

  By the time a shell arrives at its target, all safety devices should have been rendered inactive. In the case of something designed to explode on impact, when contact is made with a hard surface the striker will be driven into the detonator, which then detonates the main filling.

  But theory is one thing and practice another; projectiles fail to explode on impact for many reasons. But if something travelling at several hundred metres a second has collided with a hard surface and failed to explode, then it is not safe to handle.

  This meant that whatever kind of blind projectile you found, shell or mortar, movement was highly ill-advised and, unless circumstances overwhelmingly ruled against it, in situ destruction was the norm. In the case of a blind mortar, you cleared the earth or any obstruction around the bomb and then fixed the charge.

  Such exertion was acceptable when there was something to show for it. Annoyingly, though, you could spend what seemed an eternity out in the biting wind and rain and, at the end of it all, come up with nothing more than a harmless tail unit, the remains of a bomb which had exploded long ago. Valuable time had been lost for nothing.

  So when the next call about a possible blind mortar bomb came in I threw some extra gear into the Jeep and raced out to the location, ready to put into practice the new Gurney Mk I bomb disposal theory. It was eminently practical, safe, and would substantially reduce incident attendance time.

  The mortar was not much more than a glint in the earth. On all sides the land stretched away in a soggy expanse; no buildings near by, no people, just another of Berlin’s empty acreages. I dusted some dirt off the fin-tip, then walked back to the Jeep, started her up, and navigated a way through the peaks and hollows of the site to a point about fifty yards from the suspected bomb.

  I dug out sufficient soil to expose one of the holes in a fin and unrolled the electric cable I’d brought with me from the depot, tying one end through the hole, and running the rest of it across the ground and fastening it to the back of the Jeep. Both knots were secure; as soon as the Jeep moved off, the cable would take the strain and gradually tug the mortar out by its fin. It beat digging holes any day.

  The engine started and I crunched into first gear, then eased back on the clutch while carefully feathering the accelerator. The Jeep rocked slightly, the vibrations running through its frame. More pedal pressure, and with infinite slowness it began to move forwards. One foot covered … two foot. I turned back in my seat, the better to see the bomb.

  But there was no progress. The cable was now taut but the bomb was still stuck. More gear crunching, more engine clattering; the Jeep edged forward. I looked back again: nothing. This made no sense at all because (a) the bomb’s mass simply couldn’t withstand this kind of pressure, (b) I had already scooped some of the retaining earth out of the way, and (c) the standard army issue El electrical cable was still firmly connected at both ends. Unfortunately it was also possessed of one other characteristic which I hadn’t appreciated: elasticity.

  I pressed the accelerator more firmly and the Jeep moved forward. I clung one-handed to the steering wheel while poised half-turned towards the mortar.

  And then at maximum extent, the electric cable suddenly contracted in on itself, the tension snapping back in a furious recoil that sent it looping high into the air. For a couple of dumbstruck seconds I stared skywards as the cable whipped like a long black lash, its tip hurtling downwards and straight towards the Jeep. Two things registered simultaneously: the cable was still attached to the tail fin; and the tail fin was still attached to the intact and unexploded bomb.

  I threw myself into the well of the jeep, expecting a direct hit
. Pain exploded inside my head amidst the ear-splitting noise of the mortar going off. The Jeep lurched and stalled as mud and other debris rained down from above. The echoes dinned on for a very long time.

  Eventually I clambered out and stood weak-kneed and coughing in the faint fog-like wraiths of smoke still eddying from the blast. The mortar had impacted about thirty yards from the Jeep, as evidenced by a newly created hole in the earth.

  Comprehension slowly dawned as the smoke cleared away. I had not, after all, sustained a direct hit by my own bomb on my own head, though it felt like it. All I’d actually done was brain myself on the dashboard.

  I got back into the Jeep and restarted the stalled engine. The pain had receded now but the headache was obviously going to continue for quite a time; already there was a lump the size of a duck egg. God knew how I was going to explain it away.

  I had another close shave when called upon to deal with a Panzerfaust. This one had been found on a building site within earshot of the clanking of the U-Bahn city railway. The area was strewn with rubble and little remained of the original buildings.

  The Panzerfaust appeared to have been fired because it was without its launcher tube. It lay shining dully in the weak sunshine, a small scree of stones threading in frozen tributary past its flanks. The earth was newly turned; the excavator stood near by, silent, engine switched off. Years of experience of Berlin’s building sites had taught the construction crews all about the risks of working in an environment which had once been an urban battlefield.

  I moved away from the Panzerfaust as carefully as I’d approached it and told the crew leader to move his people as far away as possible. As soon as everyone was out of range I prepared a small explosive charge and carried it back to the bomb, placing it alongside, but not touching, the warhead. I checked that the area was still clear and lit the fuze, then walked to safety – walked, not ran: you never ran because if you tripped and injured your leg or ankle you’d have no chance of getting back to the fuze to extinguish it nor of crawling out of range.