Mac wingate 1, p.2
Mac Wingate 1, page 2
For a moment there was absolute silence, then shouts began to fill the valley to his right. He came out of the protection of the bluff and looked back and down. He could hardly believe his luck. The whole face of the hillside had split and a great wet mass of rock and gravel had slid down onto the road below. Two Panzers had got into the pass. The third had been buried completely in the landslide.
He got to his feet and groped his way forward. Fumes from the explosion were reaching him now, making him cough and making his eyes smart. He stayed on the road side of the crest. He’d done what he had set out to do. However hard the Germans worked at clearing that mess, no armor and no transport would get through the pass for hours. It was up to the Corps commander to take advantage of the delay. If it hadn’t been for the mud and the filthy weather, he would have stopped the two tanks that had made it through the pass. He was a perfectionist—but he was also a realist. He’d seen enough of war since he’d come ashore with General Patton’s Western Task Assault Force to know that in battle nothing is ever perfect. You went in fast, you did whatever you could—and you got the hell out again. If you were all in one piece at the end of it, so much the better.
The first of the two tanks opened up with a twin burst of machine gun fire. Wingate checked, crouched and wiped the rain off his eyebrows. He could see the burst of fire from the tank, but it wasn’t shooting at him. It was firing way ahead of him, eight or nine hundred yards at least. He couldn’t even see where the shots were landing. He figured they had spotted the Aussies trying to close the other end of the pass. There was nothing Wingate could do to give them support. It was going to take all his ingenuity to get past those guns himself.
He crawled to the top of the crest and peered down the southern slope. The infantry company had turned directly toward the road now and was scrabbling its way up the steep hillside. They must have been called up by the tank commander the minute he saw the assault on the pass had been checked. They would break the crest of the slope way behind Wingate’s position. If the rain kept coming, he’d be too far ahead for them even to see him.
Once more he put the crest between him and the tanks. He wanted to get clear of the pass before the lead tank had made up its mind what to do. Most likely it wouldn’t advance alone—but it couldn’t stay where it was in case the weather lifted enough for the Army Air Corps B-25 Mitchells to get airborne.
Another burst of automatic fire cracked through the air beyond the rocky crest to his right. At first he figured it was from the lead tank, holding down the Aussies or even engaging some new target. But the sound wasn’t right for that. The Panzer had a couple of 7.92 mm machine guns, and this was a single gun. Then it dawned on him that it was the Bren. Jesus Christ! Somewhere ahead and on the valley side of the crest, those crazy bastards were engaging twenty tons of armor with a single light machine gun! There had to be some damn good reason for inviting trouble the way they were doing.
Another minute and the provocation from the Bren began to produce results. The Panzer had brought its 75 millimeter to bear and the valley reverberated with the boom of heavy gunfire and the slam of high explosive shells. In the veil of mist and driving rain ahead of him, Wingate could make out the spumes of rock and mud being driven high into the sky.
He moved on and gradually the land began to flatten out. He could sense the end of the pass ahead of him, just beyond the point where the landscape blurred into a single gray mass. The crumps of the Panzer shells had shifted their position now, and he figured that the Aussies were on the move. What he couldn’t figure was why they still kept up an intermittent fire from the Bren. They hadn’t a hope in hell against the tank and all they were doing was drawing fire on themselves. They were taking one colossal risk against that gun. One well-placed round of high-explosive would take all three of them, particularly if they were still carrying those Triton blocks with them. It wouldn’t even need a direct hit—a near miss would be sufficient to set up the necessary shock waves to detonate the stuff.
Wingate was in the process of turning every possibility over in his mind when the explosion took place, almost level with him, on the other side of the crest. The ground heaved under his feet and he lost his balance and started to slither on his ass down the slope to his left. A low outcrop of rock checked his slide for a moment but couldn’t hold him. In the end he brought himself to a halt by driving the butt of his M1 into the ground ahead of him and throwing his weight into its base.
He lay there for a moment, then he began to grin. Those crazy bastards had done it! All that machine gun fire he’d heard up ahead had simply been to distract the Germans below. As long as they were slamming off shells at the Bren, the fuse had a chance to burn undisturbed. By the feel of the explosion, those guys had planted the charge exactly right. Even now he could still hear the whoosh of rocks and debris sliding down into the valley on the other side of the crest.
He got to his feet and got clear of the place, resisting the temptation to take a quick look over the ridge to see the extent of the damage. His job was to get out of there as quickly as possible and report what had happened to Field HQ. If he got himself killed now, he was only risking the lives of other guys; they would send out a patrol to check on the state of the pass, or else wait for the weather to lift and then do an aerial reconnaissance.
The firing from the valley had stopped. There was no need for the Aussies to stay any longer. They would be working their way westward the same as he was, taking advantage of whatever cover the rock outcrops and occasional gullies in the hillside provided. They were professionals all right, the kind of guys you prayed for whenever you were in a tight spot. He wondered what chance there was of working with them again.
The rain had eased and he began to see the barren plain ahead of him and the long slope of sand-covered rock running down toward it. He had reached the end of the pass. There wasn’t a sign of any enemy tank. It looked as if the Aussies had done what he’d asked them. The pass was closed at both ends. He turned toward the ridge on his right to make a final check. He crawled on hands and knees to the rim of the valley, lowered himself onto his chest, then dragged himself the last couple of feet using only his elbows and the toes of his boots.
His helmet broke the skyline, then his mud-spattered forehead. Finally he could see the road way below him. It was empty. Over to his right, the road was blocked where the second explosion had sent tons of debris slithering down into the valley. Beyond it, sealed between the two landslides that he and his companions had triggered, the two Panzers stood immobile and impotent. A couple of figures had got out of the lead tank and were standing on the skirting, checking the situation through field glasses.
Wingate turned to his left. He half expected to see the three Aussies jogging in a crouch along the far side of the crest, carrying the Bren and the empty explosive bags with them, making for the plain. There was no sign of them. He concluded they had already got clear of the place. They had been a long way ahead of him. They must be well on their way to the jeep by now, wondering how long they were going to have to wait before he caught up with them.
It was then that he noticed the shell holes where the leading Panzer had slammed its 75 millimeters into the hillside. There were half a dozen of them, clustered in three groups. Beyond the far group lay the Bren. The barrel and the gas return cylinder had been bent at right angles. The butt lay like so much shattered firewood thirty feet away. Three bodies lay in grotesque contortions on the perimeter of the farthest shell hole.
Wingate’s guts sank. He paused, then slid over the top of the ridge and slithered down toward them. They’d been killed instantly, all by the same shell burst. The clothing was scorched, but the bodies were almost unmarked. The shock waves had put such sudden pressure on them that all human functions had ceased. Wingate stared at them for a moment, then dragged them into the cover of the shell hole. There was nothing more he could do. As soon as the weather cleared the buzzards would spot them. After that, they might last a couple of hours.
A burst of machine gun fire from the leading Panzer warned him that he had been seen. The vehicle might be trapped but it was far from harmless. Wingate scrambled out of the hole and slid over the top of the ridge. Twenty minutes later he had reached the jeep and was bouncing along the bottom of a wadi toward Field HQ.
Driving westward in the jeep, Mac Wingate was able to put the war into perspective again. The heat of action always narrowed his vision. He had the ability to shut out everything but the immediate problem. It had been the same when he had hunted the uplands of northern Wisconsin, or seen a trout rise through the clear water of some lake to take his fly when he was a kid. But the sight of the dead Australians who had driven eastward with him only hours earlier, reminded him of the larger issues. He wasn’t touring this godforsaken countryside of North Africa for personal pleasure. He was here out of the conviction that the Nazi system was a blight on the face of Europe, and that unless it was eradicated it would destroy the world that Wingate knew and believed in.
Wingate was twenty-eight when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He could remember the occasion as if it had happened yesterday. He was sitting out a cloudburst in the Brazilian jungle west of Tefe. He had been cut off from the outside world ever since his radio had succumbed to the humidity and the termites in October. His only means of communication was by canoe and it was late in the afternoon of January 4, 1942, that the news reached him. The States had been at war with Japan ever since December 8, and with Germany and Italy since December 11.
He was born Peter Magnussen Wingate on July 30, 1913, the son of a small farmer in Sawyer County, northern Wisconsin. Since childhood, everybody had called him Mac. He was Norwegian-German on his father’s side. Mac and his younger brother and sister had had to learn German and Norwegian as part of their upbringing, and their father had played the folk music of northern Europe on a piano accordion during the long winter evenings.
On his mother’s side he was part Ojibway. His mother told him strange tales about her side of the family that gave him a passionate attachment to the countryside from which he came. It also accounted for much of his appearance. He had the straight, dark hair, dark eyes and sharp features of his mother, rather than his father’s blond hair and blue eyes. It accounted, too, for much of his temperament—his self-reliance and independence, his directness and his wry sense of humor. And it showed in his preference for activities that required individual skill rather than team cooperation. His specialty was track and field—the shot put, the hammer throw and the javelin. Away from school, he was usually alone in the woods with a bow or a rifle, or canoeing on some out-of-the-way stretch of water with a fishing pole beside him.
He tried to figure what would have happened if he had followed his Dad into farming. Would he have been bouncing across Tunisia in a jeep right now? Would he even have seen the desert? It wasn’t likely. He would have gone to his father’s old college and majored in agriculture. He might have found himself a spread of land in Sawyer County and borrowed the deposit for it from his Dad. More likely, he would have joined his father on the home farm and taken some of the load off the old man.
But that wasn’t the way it had worked out. In the late twenties, farming was already feeling the coming Depression. When he and his Dad talked about Mac’s future, it was obvious it required another approach than the land. There was a whole wide world existing outside Sawyer County and he wanted to see it, to experience it and be part of it. Instead of agriculture, he figured his future lay in engineering. He persuaded his father to let him go to the University of Wisconsin at Madison—and it was at Wisconsin that he had met Professor Bernhardt. Everything that had happened to him since, right up to the present moment, dated from that meeting.
He was crossing the open desert rather than keeping to the road. It lay a couple of miles to his north and as he glanced toward it he could see the columns of reinforcements moving east. He wondered how deep the German penetration had been and how determined it was. Montgomery’s 8th Army was less than three hundred miles to the east pushing west, sometimes as much as forty miles a day. How many troops and how much equipment could Rommel spare for a serious counterattack in Tunisia, with that kind of pressure coming at him from the opposite direction?
He hit the first strongpoint a couple of miles farther on. There was a lieutenant and a sergeant and half a dozen GIs. They were edgy, wanting to know how come he was approaching from the direction of the enemy instead of from the allied lines to the west. He felt sick at the memory of the three Australians, still lying in that shell hole, and he snapped at the lieutenant over the rattle of the jeep’s engine, “You any idea what’s going on out there? You think my name’s Rommel? Get the hell out of my way and let me through!”
The lieutenant eyed him suspiciously, cradling a Thompson M1 submachine gun in his arms and standing directly in the jeep’s path with his feet apart. In the end he gave way to Wingate’s direct stare and stood aside, nodding to Wingate to go ahead. Wingate let out the clutch and the jeep lifted on its front springs and shot forward.
Headquarters was in a state of constant movement. Runners were carrying messages from the main Command tent to Signals. The MT Officer was yelling orders to the drivers who were pulling the HQ transport into position. The rain had eased, but it still fell as a fine mist and great pools of cloying mud lay everywhere.
Wingate made for the Command tent and parked outside. The guard at the door gave a perfunctory salute and let him past. He was trying to conceal a burning cigarette in his other hand. Normally Wingate wouldn’t have cared. But an hour’s walk from here lay the best fighting organization the world had ever seen—Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Unless these guys learned some discipline they were going to be massacred the first time they got into action. As he strode past the guard and into the tent, he snapped, “Douse that cigarette, soldier, or I’ll douse you!”
Command looked like so much chaos to Wingate. He stood just inside the tent, watching the scene. Men were stacking documents into empty ammunition boxes, taking down briefing boards and rolling maps. Wingate took hold of a corporal by the elbow and asked, “Colonel Johnson! Where is he?” Johnson was the one who had authorized the raid on the pass and organized the cooperation with the Australians.
The corporal shook his head. “He’s gone forward, sir. He’s checking the situation himself.”
“What’s going on here?” Wingate asked, nodding at the scene of activity all around them.
“We’re pulling back, sir. There’s a counterattack coming this way, hadn’t you heard?”
“Pulling back!” yelled Wingate, removing his helmet and flicking the rain off it onto the dried earth of the tent floor.
He turned, not waiting for a reply. As he did so a voice called from the far side of the tent, “Hey, Mac! You get the message?”
It was Katchinsky. He was G-2 to the outfit—responsible for intelligence. Wingate pushed his way across to him through the flurry of activity that lay between them. “You pulling back!” he repeated, still unable to believe it.
“I know, I know,” said Katchinsky. “But it’s a hell of a confused situation.” His voice was low, confidential, as if he didn’t want any of the others to hear. “It’s not us, I figure it’s Montgomery. He can’t take the pressure they’re laying on him. The British have got themselves bogged down in Libya. They need us to pull Rommel off ...”
Wingate broke in irritably. “Are you serious?” he snapped. “We are retreating in order to attack Rommel? OK, OK. I know I’m not West Point, but just tell me how that works!”
Katchinsky shrugged. “Look, Mac,” he said, “I don’t give the orders. Maybe you can have a word with Ike when you’re up there ...”
Wingate put his hand to his face and rubbed the mud off his eyebrows. “Look,” he said, “I just lost three men to a 75 millimeter. Good guys. Don’t play games with me!”
“I’m not playing games, Mac. Didn’t you see the signal?”
“Signal? What signal?” Wingate asked. “I just got here.”
Katchinsky turned to his desk and picked up a piece of paper. Wingate recognized it at once. It was an official signal form that had been filled out in the usual penciled block letters. It read: “CAPTAIN P.M. WINGATE REPORT GENERAL PATTONS HQ STOP AIRCRAFT AUTHORIZED STOP MOST IMMEDIATE.” It was sent in the name of Colonel Olaf Erikson, Head of Special Operations, Mac Wingate’s immediate superior.
Two
The aircraft waiting to pick up Wingate was a Lysander from the RAF Communications Flight in Algiers. It hugged the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, keeping just below the cloud ceiling all the way to Sidi-bel-Abbes. There it refueled, before taking him the rest of the way to Casablanca. On the way from Algiers it ran into a forward German flak battery and lost a couple of Perspex windows in the cabin. The wind howled through the holes and made speech impossible. The plane flew at a steady 120 miles an hour, except for the one time when it fell out of an air pocket in the high mountains and the airspeed needle touched 135. It took over eight hours to make the trip, and long before the Atlantic Ocean came into sight, Wingate had had time to review the war and the current situation and the whole of his life a dozen times.
It came back to Professor Bernhardt. It always did. It was Bernhardt who had opened Wingate’s eyes. Until he’d studied under Bernhardt, he had had the vision of a simple backwoodsman. But Bernhardt had directed his interests into mining rather than general engineering, and into explosives as the most interesting part of mining. He’d done it deliberately, Wingate could see that now. He had done it because he had read the future accurately. There was going to be a confrontation with this disease called fascism at some point in the future. When that time came, Bernhardt wanted as many young Americans prepared for the fight as possible. He had seen Nazism at first hand, before escaping from Cologne in the early thirties and making his home in the States.
