LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

immediate strategic objective was northern Tunisia, and the plan was to cut the line of retreat of the Axis troops, who were fleeing from the advancing British Eighth Army in the Western Desert. With Axis power decimated along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the way would be open to invade Europe through Sicily and Italy.

      The remainder of the 3rd Battalion were delayed for two days by fog but eventually flew from RAF St Eval in Cornwall to Gibraltar in the early hours of 10 November. Almost as soon as they arrived they were on alert to move out for a parachute assault on the vital airfield at Bône, an operation that was to be launched from an airfield at Maison Blanche, near Algiers. By then the bulk of the Allied beach landings had forged ahead, with some hefty losses of manpower and machinery on both sides. The Vichy French commander, with 120,000 troops spread across the region who had put up a token defence, was already seeking ceasefire terms. The Germans, meanwhile, were sending in reinforcements from Europe.

      The 3rd Battalion’s assault party took off from Maison Blanche at 04.30 hours on 12 November and were over their target at Bône at 08.30. Unbeknown to them, the Germans had the same idea, and a battalion of Fallschirmjäger arrived in their Ju 52s just as the Paras were making their drop. The Germans abandoned their own operation and were redirected elsewhere. The 3rd took their target with little trouble, and more casualties were caused by landing on hard ground than by enemy fire. One man accidentally killed himself with fire from his own Sten gun during the drop and several sustained broken legs. The heaviest enemy fire came from marauding Stukas but the Paras held their position until they were joined by No. 6 Commando, with overhead support from a squadron of Spitfires. The mission successfully completed, the 3rd Battalion pulled out after three days and travelled west to its new position, the village of St Charles, where it was reunited with A Company and the rest of the unit, which had travelled by sea.

      Meanwhile the 1st Battalion had made successful drops near the airfield at Souk el Arba and was now given orders to move north to take the town of Beja, 90 miles west of Tunis. There was a dash to prepare for the move. The battalion’s stores, which had come with it by ship, were slow to be unloaded and then had to be broken down and repacked into containers, and parachutes had to be inspected and ammunition sorted. Nor was there much in the way of transport vehicles because ship space had been at a premium owing to the amount of personnel and stores. Even so, as Harold ‘Vic’ Coxen, then a young officer, 2iC (second in command, and later Brigadier) of the 1st Battalion’s T Company, remembers:

      

      The operation was fairly straightforward. If there was a problem, it was that we had no great knowledge of the ground and the only maps available were for tourists travelling by road. The commanding officer rode in the cockpit of the aircraft in front, searching for a flat piece of ground. We had a fairly good drop [there was one fatality: a soldier strangled by rigging that snagged the Dakota’s tail]. We commandeered motor cars and trucks and began our move up to the border between Tunisia and Algeria.

      As they reached a strategic crossroads towards Beja, which was the first of their objectives, the battalion was confronted by 3000 French troops heavily dug in around the main approaches and for a while there was an uncomfortable stand-off. ‘We hadn’t taken the French completely by surprise,’ said Coxen, ‘but they had not really decided whose side they were on and were holding a line there largely with their colonial troops.’ Delicate negotiations were pursued and it was clear that the French had been threatened with reprisals by their German-controlled masters if they allowed the Allies to get past them and enter Beja. Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigade Commander) James Hill lied and told the French commander that they were the advance party for armoured divisions advancing towards them at pace. The French stood aside. ‘We stuck ourselves in the middle of them,’ Coxen recalls:

      and every time the Germans came close we attacked and the Germans attacked the French and so eventually they put their helmets on and joined us, although a good many of them were somewhat reluctant. We were dropped 400 miles ahead of our ground forces. The objective of our company was to move to confront the Germans, to be a thorn in their side. We were coming in on the flank of them behind their lines; we were there to be a nuisance, which we were in spite of a fairly light weaponry. Our heaviest weapons were three-inch mortars, Vickers machine-guns and Bren guns. The mortars and the machine-guns were difficult inasmuch as that we could only carry a certain amount of ammunition and we had to get resupplied very quickly otherwise we were in trouble.

      The first of their operations came in the first 24 hours, when Hill discovered that a German convoy was coming through, as it did most evenings, on its way to Bizerta on the coast. The battalion’s S Company laid a classic ambush and knocked out the entire convoy, killing many of the German soldiers and capturing the rest. Several similar disruptive operations followed against both German and Italian parties, although one of them did not go quite according to plan. Hill had moved the battalion towards a position north-east of Sidi N’Sir, in hilly country beyond Medjez al Bab, where a force of around 350 Italians with a few tanks had been located. Hill’s second in command, Major Alastair Pearson, was to organize a blast of heavy fire from the three-inch mortars while the rest of the battalion and a company of French and Senegalese troops advanced towards the Italian position. Meanwhile a detachment of 27 sappers from the 1st Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers, accompanying Hill’s unit, were to move around and mine the exit roads with No. 75 Hawkins grenades. As the sappers were about to mine the road, there were three explosions – one of the grenades, which were being carried in sandbags, had accidentally detonated, setting off the others in a chain reaction. All but two of the sappers were killed.

      The blast also alerted the enemy troops to the advancing British battalion, and what turned out to be a mixed force of Germans and Italians were engaged on a hillside position. Meanwhile Lieutenant Colonel Hill took a small group of men towards the tanks – there were just three – below the main battle position. Leading the section himself, he crept alongside the first tank and stuck the barrel of his revolver into the observation slit and immediately the Italian crew surrendered. He repeated the procedure with the second tank, this time rapping on the turret with the walking stick he always carried and shouting, ‘Come out with your hands up’, which they did. At the third tank, three Germans jumped out, guns blazing, and shot him four times. His adjutant, Captain Whitelock, was also wounded, hit by shrapnel from grenades thrown by the escaping Germans, who were shot or captured. Hill and Whitelock were immediately dispatched to the medics in Beja by a motorcycle and sidecar driven by a team from the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance along a rail track leading to the town. Later, recovered from the wounds, Hill returned to the fray.

      Alastair Pearson took over as battalion commander and pursued an equally aggressive policy of assault patrols on enemy positions throughout the regions before they were relieved by the main force and sent back to base to rest and stand by for further orders. Meanwhile the 2nd Battalion under Johnny Frost – now a lieutenant colonel – along with other recent heroes of Bruneval, had been given a much more difficult sector. Whereas the 1st Battalion was moving mostly in hilly terrain, Frost’s group was in open country that was alive with German tanks and a fair amount of heavy artillery. After several false starts he was finally given orders to gather up his battalion, a troop of 1st Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers and a section from the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance, and drop into action, close to a German airfield 40 miles south of Tunis, and blow up any aircraft on the ground.

      They were then to advance to Depienne and perform a similar operation, and finally move to a third airstrip at Oudna. Just as they were about to board the 44 USAAF Dakotas revving up on the runway at Maison Blanche, Frost was told that two of the target airfields had just been abandoned by the Germans. The new orders were to drop at Depienne and to destroy enemy aircraft on the ground at Oudna. Then the battalion was to march to a location 30 miles north, towards Tunis, to link up with the 1st Army. Because there had been no time to perform a new recce for a DZ, Frost flew in the cockpit of the lead Dakota with the rookie American pilots, many of whom had never flown on military missions before, to select a new location. He chose a decent site near Depienne and the battalion came down unopposed, though scattered over a couple of miles, and suffered only seven casualties, one of which was fatal.

      Frost sounded his hunting horn – a familiar sound to all who travelled with him – to

Скачать книгу