Hacheim was a water vendor, a trade inherited from his father. Omar had sold his father’s camels, and by dint of hard work now owned four tanker trucks, supplying water to whichever line he found himself behind. He also sold information.
Two days after S-Day, Omar and his drivers were in the German-held town of Derna on the north coast of Libya, a hundred miles east of the British line at El Gazala. Hacheim kept his notes in a tin under the dashboard of his lead truck. Lately few pages had been filled.
He was encamped near the north end of the sand airstrip at Derna. The sun was high, and Hacheim and his workers were idling. They heard the soft drone of a small plane. When it drew nearer, Hacheim recognized it as a Fieseler Storch, a scout plane. It landed lightly. Heat waves rising from the oiled runway seemed to twist the wings and fuselage. When a Mammut command car drove to the edge of the runway, the water vendor lifted his binoculars from the truck seat. Few Germans rated a Mammut.
The plane taxied to the command car. Hacheim squinted into the glasses. Out of the plane climbed a stout, thick-necked officer who moved quickly from under the wing toward the car.
Rommel, Hacheim knew at once. It must be. But Rommel had left Libya and was commanding an army in northern Europe, or so Hacheim had heard. The heat waves cleared momentarily, blown back by prop wash. Hacheim could see clearly as the German officer withdrew a pair of Perspex goggles from his bag. Rommel’s trademark. The general had returned to the desert, back to the red sand and shrieking ghibi.
Hacheim reached into the cab for his notebook, changed his mind and left it hidden. He would remember Rommel without notes. The British in Alexandria had given him a wireless he kept under the truck seat. They would pay well for this intelligence.
After the war Omar Hacheim complained bitterly to me that he had been cheated out of his reward for information about Rommel reappearing in Africa. By the time he sent it, Rommel’s return to Africa was old news and worthless to the British.
The disastrous sum of these and a hundred other parts was that the German Army Group C, that battle-hardened Wehrmacht and Waffen SS army ready to pounce on England from across the North Sea, was a Schatten army, a shadow army.
The deception had been built nail by nail and plank by plank. The XXX and XXIV Corps and the XII Waffen SS Corps were decoys, intricately crafted chimeras. The supporting Luftwaffe squadrons were paper formations. Unknown to the Allies, the German navy had virtually abandoned the North Sea by S-Day.
The shadow army existed only in our minds. There it waited, in ominous detail and with fearsome purpose, until the dreadful revelations of S-Day.
15
Biographers of brilliant men suffer for their subjects’ brilliance. Genius is mysterious to those of us without it. Twists and turns of a facile mind may be invisible to the writer. Nuances are lost. So I fear it is with my record of General Clay. Put bluntly, he was smarter than I was. I missed a lot.
My chronicle has been of Clay’s travels, his close calls, and his histrionics. The mechanics of his command were more complex than I have so far been able to relay.
Only five percent of a commander’s responsibility involves devising and issuing orders. The remainder is spent insuring those orders are carried out. But that five percent wins or loses the battle. One hour of Clay’s command, examined closely, gives an idea of the general at work.
At ten o’clock of S-Day morning we walked into Bilswell Manor near Storrington, where Clay had met his commanders the night before. On Clay’s orders AEFHQ had been moved there while we were in London. The planes with HQ personnel and equipment were still landing. Bilswell was also I Corps headquarters. The location was ten miles inland from the channel town of Worthing.
Here is the one hour. At 10:05, Clay conferred with Lieutenant General Alex Hargrave, who reported that the enemy units that had landed between Brighton and Beachy Head (we learned later it was the Wehrmacht’s VIII Corps) were off the beach and were pressing across the South Downs toward Lewes. Initial reports indicated they were wheeling west behind Brighton. Toward us, I might add.
At 10:09, Clay put a call through to General Franks of the 1st Armored, which was between Portsmouth and Worthing. Franks told him that his beach units were not engaged, and nothing was on the channel horizon. While Franks waited on the telephone, Clay consulted with Hargrave, then said into the phone, “Roger, we think the German has staked out his beaches and that his second wave will hit exactly behind the first. Any beach not hit by now won’t be.”
Franks must have agreed, since Clay then said, “We’ll need support along a line from Horsham to Worthing. Tell me what you can do.”
After a moment and a nod from Hargrave, Clay said, “Do it immediately.”
Clay turned to a stenographer. “I have approved the movement of the 13th Armored Regiment east toward Horsham and the 1st Armored Regiment east along the South Downs in the direction of Brighton. They are directed to form a perimeter roughly between Worthing and Horsham.”
He waited until the stenographer looked up again, then ordered, “Read it back to me.”
The stenographer complied.
Clay said, “I want you to have Franks’ steno repeat it when you’re done, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir.” The stenographer hurried to the signal station.
Headquarters personnel from Eastwell filtered into the room. Clay moved toward the fireplace and turned his back to it as if to warm himself. He rose on his toes several times, his arms behind his back. There was no fire. I joined him.
He said, “You know why I always have them repeat it?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” I replied.
“History is replete with appalling tragedies due to misinterpreted orders. During the Crimean War, Lord Raglan’s order to Lord Lucan, bungled somewhere in the transmittal, resulted in the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, and ‘All that was left of them, left of six hundred.’”
“Yes, sir.” I add here that Clay maintained a running dialogue with me throughout S-Day and the days that followed. He gave his own play by play, just like a radio broadcast of a baseball game. Most of the time he cared not at all whether I heard or understood him. He needed to fill the brief silences with the sound of his own voice.
“At Colenso during the Boer War, General Buller upped the time of attack by forty-eight hours, but forgot to send the order to General White, which resulted in a debacle.”
“Yes, sir.”
I thought I was in for a long siege, but at 10:14 General Clay was called over to the dining room table where David Lorenzo had spread out his ever-present maps. Alex Hargrave followed us. Signalmen were working swiftly, pulling lines through a window and unpacking more communications equipment. A TWX was already clicking.
Lorenzo never fully trusted technology and was always accompanied by cages of London messenger pigeons, but wire was the first significant technological advance in military communication in the millenia, and the G2 took full advantage of it. He already had a telephone at each ear. His dark brows were knitted together, and he dictated positions to subordinates, who marked them with colored stickers on a map of Kent and Sussex.
Lorenzo handed the phones to a signalman. He pointed at a map and said to Clay, “Those sporadic reports of German commandoes from Selindge and Stanford, behind Hythe, now indicate a full-scale airborne operation there.”
His finger traced an eight-mile arc behind Hythe, a town on the channel. “They’ve landed on this stretch, three, four, and five miles inland from the town. We think as many as two or three brigades, maybe as much as a division, have dropped.”