Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  I stepped gingerly across the rubble. Thirty yards ahead was the remnant of a house wall, about nine feet high and pretty solid-looking. It would be a useful thing to hide behind when the explosion occurred: the blast itself wouldn’t injure at that range but you could get cut by flying debris. I moved around to the other side of the wall, crouched down and waited for the distinctive crump of the explosion – at which point the entire universe seemed to split apart. The blast wave smashed against the wall and sent the entire structure keeling over and down. One minute I was in daylight, the next in violent darkness, sprawled flat under the weight of a mass of brickwork.

  The wall should have fragmented as it fell, but disintegration was only partial; it pinned me beneath it while the world shook and shuddered as the thunderclap rolled on. Secondary thuds, bangs and crashes rang out because of all the stuff now coming down from the sky. Like some terrible hail, it pummelled the brickwork above me, smashing and splintering and cannoning off. And then silence.

  I managed to struggle out from under the wall, stiff and shaking and wincing at the bruises but otherwise intact. I looked at the brickwork and sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had learned to build things so carefully and so well. Red dust still danced on its surface. Fresh pock-marks made it look as though it had just been machine-gunned.

  I stared at the place where the Panzerfaust had been. The hole was very large, very impressive, and totally bewildering. I reached the rim and looked down, shaking my head again. Had one Panzerfaust really done all this?

  In amongst the debris and the tendrils of smoke that still drifted upwards, other fragments and shapes began to appear – something twisted over there … something cylindrical and split wide-open over there … All over the place, in fact: the remains of launcher tubes … and other bits of wreckage too: the black splintered shards of mud-stained, blast-scorched packing cases, slivers of timber scattered like needles.

  I hadn’t blown up one Panzerfaust. I’d blown up a whole nest of precious munitions hoarded by German soldiers during the battle for Berlin – a cache that had been hidden deep and then left behind, either because those who buried it had been forced to flee or because they had been buried themselves.

  The action of time upon the soil, the shifting of earth by the excavator, a variety of factors had all conspired to bring to the surface a solitary Panzerfaust, the tip of an iceberg unseen and unexpected.

  That night I encountered Karl, going home from the depot. He was his usual self, happy to be going off to his family. ‘A good day?’ he asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You learn more today?’

  ‘I learn a lot today.’ I grinned and waved him on his way. I didn’t feel like going into it just yet. But a lesson had been learned that was not, so far as I could recollect, in any of the textbooks: if you can’t check what’s underneath that which you’re about to blow up, then the steps that you take in connection with disposal must always be bloody great big ones.

  Christmas found me far from the noise and the bustle of Berlin, in an ancient landscape of fields and farms and villages. Walsrode in North Germany – my final National Service posting.

  354 Ammunition Depot was an ex-Wehrmacht complex and, in 1951, although the majority of the ammunition stored there was British, there was also an appreciable stock of Wehrmacht ammunition. This had been retained since much of it contained highly prized elements such as the tungsten-carbide cores of armour-piercing shells. Far too valuable to dump at sea or destroy by demolition, the ammunition was separated into its component parts and the non-explosive material then salvaged.

  Refurbishment and repair work was carried out in a collection of workshops which together comprised the Ammunition Repair Factory. One of them was a hellish place – hot, crowded and noisy, filled from floor to roof with strange devices. It was the place where certain kinds of ammunition, some ex-battlefield and apparently unsalvageable, were repaired and restored. Presiding over the factory’s operations was Captain Scott, a small and dapper white-haired man not renowned for his sense of humour.

  Scott was one of the best engineers in the business. Within his workshops, old munitions found new life. Dangling down from overhead tracking, shell casings moved this way and that, dipping into cleansing, neutralizing and phosphate baths, then swinging out through automatic painting booths where mists of spray turned them factory fresh.

  Scott was among the last of my National Service teachers. He taught me how to handle sausages and I learnt how to handle German girls. Both were to prove a headache, particularly the sausages.

  Nobel’s 808 explosive contains a painfully high percentage of nitroglycerine – painful because nitroglycerine is absorbed through the skin and breathed in from the air. The result is the worst kind of headache imaginable.

  I sat in a separate little workshop, a small enclosed space with a chair, a bench and a sausage machine. It was actually more complicated than that but the principle was the same: you fed stuff in at one end and it came out in chunks at the other. The stuff was Nobel’s 808, in 50-pound lumps. I was supposed to turn it into 4-ounce cartridges: the sausages. At the end of this task I felt like death: NG Head, as it’s called, is something which, once encountered, is never forgotten.

  The girls proved to be a headache of a different kind. Sixty of them were employed in small arms ammunition sorting and repacking. I was put in charge. It was soon obvious to them and to me that I’d had no experience at all of running a female workforce: they giggled, they laughed, they made jokes amongst themselves which more often than not seemed to be about me.

  My understanding of German was inadequate and I was beginning to feel like a schoolboy again. Clearly this couldn’t go on; I had to start exercising my authority. So I began going out with Fräulein Mitzi. Mitzi was neither big nor buxom but slim to the point of angularity. She had dark hair and brown eyes and an aura of self-confidence that marked her out as a natural leader. Short of working my way through all sixty of the girls, making friends with Mitzi seemed the best solution; we would go for evening walks in the countryside or meet at local taverns. To my delight, my tactics worked well. Mitzi not only made things much easier for me in the workshop, she also rapidly improved my knowledge of German.

  Off-duty hours were also spent with Davitt, Fussell, Bennett and Carroll, four others on the Walsrode complement. If we had a favourite pastime, it was tracking down the region’s Schützenfeste, the three-day ‘shooting festivals’ which were so much a part of village life. Ostensibly, the object of the event was to celebrate the village’s traditional shooting skills; more usually it seemed to be a fine excuse for a weekend of beer-drinking on an epic scale. The Germans were superb hosts: warm, welcoming, friendly, filled with good humour even when they weren’t filled with beer.

  During our time at Walsrode we learned about the fortunes that had been built up by soldiers who recognized in the old Wehrmacht ammunition the potential for private enterprise. The scale of such enterprise was not lacking in ambition: one warrant officer was caught shipping out ammunition by the train-load. He turned up for his Court Martial in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

  Unauthorized repatriation of German war matériel was not solely confined to Wehrmacht ammunition nor to any one depot: another warrant officer made the fortuitous discovery that many who spent their time above the snow line were dependent on wooden skis, and that skis needed regular waxing. His depot, by chance, held large stocks of beeswax, formerly used in the manufacture of certain types of munition. The WO organized an entire ammunition workshop to repackage the beeswax into containers for sale to the skiing fraternity.

  While I didn’t necessarily approve, the new postwar mood of greater opportunity was encouraging. If it wasn’t ammunition then it was beeswax. And if it wasn’t beeswax then it was something else – petrol, for instance. Part of the war reserves of petrol were stored in the British Zone in an underground tank, a truly vast subterranean construction guarded by day as well as by
night. Each guard detail spent a week at a time at the location, then handed over to the relief duty. However, before the handover could be completed, the seals on the tank’s filler caps had to be examined by the incoming guard and the level in the tank monitored by a dipping rod. It was a foolproof system, and it worked perfectly for month after month: the petrol, worth a fortune on the black market, was always at the same level. The war reserve was safely intact.

  Until, that is, quality control scientists discovered otherwise: brought in to check the consistency of the contents, they found that the petrol had entirely disappeared. They sampled the petrol through the usual dipping inlet, then went off to a different area of the tank and dipped that. Inexplicably, the first dip showed a full tank whereas the second showed an empty one. Examination of the prime dipping inlet revealed that it wasn’t an inlet at all. Someone had at some time fashioned a tube which fitted precisely into the top of the inlet and extended down to the bottom of the tank. For months the British army had been mounting guard on a tubeful of petrol.

  The culprits were never found. The thousands upon thousands of precious gallons had long since flowed through the European black market. Those involved in the operation would probably not want for money again.

  Awareness of episodes such as this slowly led me towards an appreciation of interesting facets to life in the modem army. What I was interested in was a kind of life where challenges were mental as well as physical. Those early days at Parsons and Badajos had positively discouraged the exercise of intellect and had hammered all individuality out of the new recruit.

  Now though, as I neared the end of National Service, it was becoming clear that the army was anything but the one-dimensional edifice it had once appeared to be. I was being trained to think and act for myself by people like Phil and Sam and Karl – all of them, in their separate ways, professionals. On the athletics track I was winning army medals and army cups; away from work, away from the track, I was enjoying the company of army friends. Setting aside the inexcusable idiocies of induction and basic training, it was clear that I was part of an organization where the living was good and could only get better; where I would meet challenge and satisfaction; where my knowledge and skill could grow. Did I really want to give all this up?

  In June 1952 I signed on as a regular soldier. I returned to the School of Ammunition, Bramley, and sat in on lectures covering subjects which had been omitted from my National Service Ammunition Examiner’s course. However, before I could sit the examination to become a regular army Ammunition Examiner, there occurred an army-wide AE upgrading, another examination open only to those AEs with practical experience. As I had two years’ such experience I was eligible for this exam as well.

  When the time came, I passed both examinations. My records – which were to cause lasting confusion to the army bureaucracy – showed that I became an Ammunition Examiner Class 2 and an Ammunition Examiner Class 1 on the same day.

  3

  Desert Demolitions

  Skeletal rather than thin, weatherbeaten rather than suntanned, with a propensity for being drunk rather than sober, Frank Wiggins was a sergeant to whom the army was both home and family. His age was indeterminable; he looked like a centenarian in the early morning but half that in the early evening. The beer bar was indeed restorative.

  The Medical Officer had made things very plain less than a week earlier: if Wiggins did not confine himself to just two bottles of Allsops lager a day, then Wiggins would be recommended for discharge on medical grounds. The issue was not open to debate.

  ‘It’s bleedin’ well come to somethin’ when a bleedin’ MO don’t know the first bleedin’ thing about anythin’,’ Wiggins confided.

  I squinted against the glare of the Egyptian sun and wished Wiggins would move into the shade where I could see him better. ‘What things, Frank?’

  ‘People. About treatin’ people. Don’t he know the difference between one who ‘as got a Medical Condition an’ one who ’asn’t?’

  ‘He certainly thinks you’ve got a condition all right.’

  ‘Bollocks. He just thinks I drink too much.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘Yeah but … he don’t appreciate why. And he couldn’t care bleedin’ less either. I have to drink on account of dehydration.’ He seemed to savour the word. ‘Dehydration. Is that or is that not a Medical Condition?’

  ‘Perhaps you could try water … ?’

  ‘I’m allergic.’ Wiggins flapped an arm as though to embrace the shimmering scene of tents and huts and high wire fencing. ‘Pox-ridden dump like this, a bloke dies without his liquid intake. It’s bleedin’ obvious.’

  I shrugged. There was no point in saying anything which would extend the conversation. I made to step aside, hoping that Wiggins would get on with whatever he was supposed to be doing. Instead he grabbed my arm. ‘You ever notice, the MO looks just like Rommel?’

  Wiggins walked away, his shorts flapping around matchstick legs. No, I’d never thought the MO looked like Rommel. It took a Desert Rat to come up with an idea like that, not an AE Class 1 who’d landed in Egypt but a few months before.

  9 Base Ammunition Depot, Abu Sultan, Canal Zone, was arguably the biggest British ammunition depot in the world. It held so much stock it took forty-five minutes just to drive around the perimeter. I had arrived here in August after an eight-month posting at 3 BAD, Bracht, BAOR. Prior to that, two years had gone by with No. 1 Independent Ammunition Company, Kevelaer, BAOR. Neither posting had been especially interesting. At Kevelaer, on the German–Dutch border, I had assisted in the setting up of an emergency ammunition sub-depot and thereafter stayed on as Senior Ammunition Examiner. As for Bracht, it had been very much a paper move; I continued to spend a lot of my time in Kevelaer.

  November 1952 found Daphne and me shivering in a church where the vicar almost incinerated himself by standing with his surplice too close to a portable paraffin heater. Afterwards we all trudged out into the snow-covered churchyard and came near to freezing to death while waiting for the wedding photographer. He never arrived and we never got any pictures: we later heard he’d fallen off his motorbike trying to negotiate a snowdrift.

  In the spring of 1953 I and some colleagues worked on in Kevelaer making an atomic bomb – well, one which resembled it: the task actually called for the preparation of a Nuclear Attack Simulator, something which would look impressive without necessarily wiping out a large chunk of Europe. (It worked well, too, once we’d sorted out the recipe: take 60 pounds of plastic explosive, three 50 gallon drums of napalm, bring together and then add 200 white phosphorus grenades. Though the mixture broke every rule in the book, it proved immensely satisfying: a massive bang, vast arcing sprays of white smoke and an enormous mushroom cloud that rolled high above the Hohne ranges.)

  Two more years of working in Germany finally proved enough; it was now 1955 and home was an arid stretch of scrub, sand and soil in a corner of the Middle East, a depot about to be greatly reduced in size prior to handover to the Suez contractors and the departure of the British armed forces from the Canal Zone.

  9 BAD, Abu Sultan, was known as a ‘hard’ posting, a place unsuitable for women, children, or anyone of a nervous disposition. It had an outer perimeter fence of barbed wire three yards high, a median seven-yard-wide sanitized zone, and an inner fence with searchlight and weapon tower every 400 yards. It was guarded by a full company of British Infantry and a battalion of East African troops and was targeted both by nationalist terrorists and local thieves. It had enough munitions to make a hole big enough for another canal and enough hard-living soldiers to make the closure of the beer bar an exercise which the Orderly Sergeant declined to undertake unless accompanied by at least four members of the guard.

  Three days after our encounter Wiggins found a way to treat his dehydration within the terms of the MO’s orders. Amidst the junk that piled up on the bar was an Allsops’ advertising display, a ragged cardboard affair housing a pair of promot
ional bottles at least three times the normal one-litre size. Wiggins seized them with a whoop of triumph, had them filled to the top, drank both then staggered off to bed.

  The wooden huts which housed the senior NCOs’ bunks were set out in the form of an H. Wiggins’ bunk was in the left-hand leg. Stupefied on Allsops, he went to the right-hand leg instead. The right-hand leg housed the RSM. Wiggins burst in. The RSM switched on the light. Seeing the RSM in what he thought was his own bed, Wiggins waved an admonitory finger, saying, ‘Now now, sir. You know I’m not that sort of bloke.’

  We heard the yelling all round the base. Peering out from our own tents and huts, we spotted an almost horizontal Wiggins in the arms of two sergeants being hauled rather than marched to the guardroom, with the RSM in shorts and vest striding furiously alongside screaming, ‘Left, right, left, right,’ as Wiggins’ feet trailed uselessly behind him, bumping and thudding over the sunbaked earth.

  My first task was to inspect the depot’s extensive stocks of Mines Anti-Tank Mk 7. This type of mine contained 20 pounds of high explosive and a fuze which was held in a central cavity in the upper face. Access to the cavity (the fuze well) was via a screw-top cover plate. The mines were perfectly safe to store because the fuze was always held in an inverted position within the fuze well. You could only use the mine after it had been armed: you unscrewed the cover, removed the fuze, turned it the other way around, then placed it back inside the fuze well.

  Though the mine hadn’t been in service very long, reports had soon come in of a malfunction, an assembly fault which trapped a component inside the fuze and made it sensitive to all manner of stimuli. As a result, some fuzes were going off within mines held in storage. The fault was not particular to any one lot or any one manufacturer; it became increasingly obvious that a significant percentage of the army’s total stock could be affected by the ‘trapped needle disc fuze’ phenomenon.