The Luftwaffe opposition lessened all the time; their Me-109s were being saved for elsewhere. Typically, Hawkeye Edwards was the first to in the Wing to encounter a Focke-Wulff 190, and he swooped in on it with the joy of a lepidoperist swinging his net on a rare butterfly. The Luftwaffe was now playing almost entirely a buffer role, so their rare attacks were viewed by us as lèse majesté. I got my comeuppance for discounting the Messerschmitts shortly after we had hopped into Tunisia, and the Germans were digging themselves in at the Mareth Line.
When the first loud noise sounded I was standing on the edge of an airstrip with my back to a large gaggle of aircraft of all types and nationalities. I was staring into the distance trying to distinguish between nothingness and remoteness. I spun around and saw a sheet of flame and a vast amount of black smoke. I was astounded. My first thought was that a plane had crashed. The second was that the Americans had made a mistake. These random thoughts were corrected by the sight of four Me-109s diving. Their bombs were actually visible in the air! People were so little used to this that they were waving rattles, which were only meant for gas attacks. Our ack-ack was shooting back, though it was nowhere near being in position. When some bombs landed a hundred and fifty yards away I began running like hell, hoping for a slit trench or something, left over from a previous campaign.
In fact a small vehicle appeared before me. I plunged beneath it. Unfortunately three other men also plunged, and we all banged in together like creatures in a cartoon. There wasn't room for more than two, so I pulled out and began running for another one. And another bomb landed. The grit and muck and sand from the blast caught me smack in the bottom. It was like being hit with a shotgun from thirty yards. The stuff penetrated and stitched my trousers to my buttocks.
The attack was over in ten minutes, but for me personally there was worse to come. I saw the MO [Medical Officer], who patched me up and said brightly, "Oh, it's a bit of a mess, but we'll soon put that right. Changing your trousers will repair half of the damage straight away." As it transpired, he was wrong about this, but I was standing for the nonce of by a truck wondering if I could ever sit down again when, to my horror, two senior officers came out of it and made straight for me. One was the commander of 239 Wing, Group Captain Billy Burton. With him was the Air Officer Commanding in the Mediterranean, Air Marshal Tedder.
I produced a huge salute. Tedder didn't even bother to acknowledge it. He was one of your more intimidating pygmies.
"What's all that bloody nonsense going on here?" he rapped out. I opened my mouth to speak but he answered his own question. "There's been an aerial attack."
I managed to get out, "Certainly has, sir."
Billy Burton jumped in with "Tell the AOC [Air Officer Commanding] about it, Christopher."
Being called Christopher only made me more tense - I'd never met the Group Captain before. Anyway, I mumbled a report of sorts. Tedder never took his eyes off me. "Then what happened?", he asked.
"Then they turned back, sir", I said, "and went off towards the sea."
"Did they, indeed?" he said in a severe tone. I thought he was about to ask me why I hadn't reached up and pulled them down, but he focused on my role during the earlier part of the action.
"And what were you doing while this was going on?"
I told him I'd tried to take cover.
"Where?", he barked.
"There." I pointed helplessly. I felt that the opening gambits had been made in my court-martial for cowardice.
"Kept them off, did it?" he asked.
"No, sir. I stopped a bit of the blast."
"Oh, where?"
"In my backside, sir."
He laughed. "That was bad luck", he remarked. "Stop you sitting about for a day or two."
He got bored with that and went back to the failure of the ack-ack to shoot any planes down. I found myself laying out a string of lame excuses for them, ending up with the surprise factor. "Surprise factor", he said, and cut me short. "Come on, Billy", he said, dashing for his jeep, "before we get any more deeply involved in the surprise factor."
Afterwards in the mess, Pedro Hanbury commiserated. "Did he make you feel like you were entirely responsible?", he asked.
"I caused the whole war", I said.
"Up to you to win it then", he said.
I advanced towards the enemy's last redoubt in North Africa with my arse on fire.
Source:
Lee, Christopher: Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1997), p. 127ff
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...