HILL, NORTH OF PIETERMARITZBURG
Town Hill rose nearly nine hundred feet above the Natal lowlands, and more than three hundred feet above Pietermaritzburg’s central business district. For years, the city’s wealthiest families had been building their homes on its slopes, drawn by its spectacular views and easy access to the Durban-Johannesburg highway. And now the same factors made Town
Hill the perfect site for the forward headquarters of the Allied expeditionary force.
In the middle of a street once reserved for Mercedes and other luxury automobiles, four camouflaged command vehicles sat parked back-to-back in a rough circle. Tarpaulins covered the open spaces between them, essentially creating a single large headquarters tent. Staff officers from two countries and all four branches of the armed forces crowded the tent-receiving reports from fighting units scattered all across South
Africa, planning the next day’s operations, and generally getting in each other’s way.
Lt. Gen. Jerry Craig stood outside, ignoring the controlled chaos of his forward HQ. His binoculars were focused on the N3 Motor Route as it wound northwest through a narrow valley. He frowned. Right now the road looked more like a serpentine parking lot than a superhighway.
Long columns of trucks, APCs, and other vehicles were backed up all the way south through the city-evidently brought to a dead stop by more fighting somewhere up ahead. An ambush? More harassing fire from South African heavy guns? A roadblock? Craig shrugged. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was that Vorster’s troops were slowing his advance to a nightmarish crawl.
Just securing Pietermaritzburg had taken a full day, three infantry battalions, air strikes, artillery bombardments, and dozens of casualties.
Since then, his men had been forced to fight for every kilometer they gained on the only main road from Natal to Pretoria.
The pattern was always the same. Units moving along the highway would take sudden fire from enemy troops hidden on a hill, behind a ridge, or in a side canyon. In response, they had to deploy off the road, call in air or artillery to pound suspected Afrikaner positions, and then peel off platoons or companies to drive any survivors back into the mountains.
Craig lowered his binoculars and shook his head in frustration. There were enough trails and dirt roads running through the Drakensberg to support small Afrikaner units operating against his flanks-but not enough to sustain his own, larger force. Getting to Johannesburg and Pretoria with a powerful mechanized army meant driving straight up the
N3.
Two AV-8B Harrier jump jets suddenly howled past at low altitude, heading for a battlefield somewhere farther along the highway. Bombs bulked large beneath their stubby wings.
Craig silently urged the Harrier pilots on. C’mon, boys, give the bastards hell, but give it to them fast.
Time, as always, was an enemy. His intelligence officers claimed that the
Cubans weren’t advancing any faster. But the Cubans were just 160 kilometers away from South Africa’s capita) and its richest minerals complex. His own troops were still more than 500 kilometers away. You didn’t have to be a mathematical genius to realize that was a prescription for a losing race.
The sound of squealing brakes drew his attention away
from his strategic problems. He turned around. A U.S. Army Hummvee had just pulled up in front of his improvised command tent.
The Hummvee’s sole passenger, a dapper, bantamweight general whose gray, crew-cut hair still showed flecks of black, climbed out and headed straight for him. The man’s lean, suntanned face showed signs of intense anger and irritation.
Craig stood his ground, preparing himself to exercise a little-used virtue-patience. Holding a unified command sometimes meant having to coddle and cajole fractious subordinates from all the service branches.
He returned the other man’s rigid salute.
“Sam.”
“General. “
Uh-oh. Formality between near-equals almost always spelled trouble.
“What can I do for you?”
Maj. Gen. Samuel Weber, commander of the 24th Mechanized Infantry
Division, tried valiantly to keep the anger out of his voice. He failed.
“I’d like to know why the ships with my tanks are still sitting off the goddamned port. I’ve got a hundred and fifty MI tanks out there-all set to come ashore and blow the shit out of these frigging Boers. And I’ve got the crews to man ‘em, but they’re just sitting on their butts at Cape
Town waiting to fly in to the airport here. So what gives?”
Craig bit back the first words that came to mind. Treating a two-star
Army general like an unruly Marine second lieutenant probably wouldn’t be the best way to foster interservice cooperation. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“The engineers have only been able to clear enough room to dock one ship at a time, Sam. And right now I need that space to off-load mote essential material.”
“More essential?” Weber nodded toward the stalled columns crowding the highway below.
“Christ, Jerry, you need some heavy armor to break this thing loose and gain some running room. Otherwise we’re still gonna be slogging to Pretoria come the Fourth of July.”
Craig shook his head forcefully.
“Your MIs couldn’t do much for us right now, Sam.” He motioned toward the panorama of rugged, broken ridges and patches of forest spreading west, north, and northeast from Pietermaritzburg.
“We have to push through another hundred klicks like that before we’ll reach anything resembling good tank country.”
“Hell.” Weber scuffed at the pavement with one highly polished combat boot. He looked up.
“I’ll tell you what, Jerry. You and I both know the
Boers don’t have much that can even scratch the paint on one of my tanks.
So bring my MIs ashore, and I’ll go tearing up this goddamned highway so fast we’ll be in Jo’burg before Vorster takes his morning dump.”
Craig chuckled, pleased by the Army general’s aggressive instincts. For a second, he was half-tempted to let the man try his proposed hightech cavalry charge. Then reality stomped back in bearing a few ugly and unfortunate facts.
Weber was only half right. His tanks could probably break past Vorster’s blocking force without much trouble or many losses. But just running the
Afrikaner gauntlet of ambushes and artillery fire with an armored column wouldn’t accomplish much of anything. Tanks had to have infantry support to hold any ground they gained, and they had to have gas to keep moving.
And neither the infantry’s APCs nor convoys of highly flammable fuel trucks could advance until his lead brigades finished doing what they were already doing-securing every hill and ridge overlooking the N3, meter by bloody meter.
Craig shrugged, unable at the moment to see any practical alternative to a prolonged slugging match through the mountains. And given that, the
Allied expeditionary force needed fuel, ammo, artillery, and infantry replacements even more than it needed the 24this main battle tanks.
Weber’s M-Is would only come into their own once his American and British troops broke out onto the flat, open grasslands of the veld.
The sound of distant thunder-heavy artillery–echoed down the highway.
Both officers turned and hurried into the command tent, their argument forgotten and unimportant in the face of yet another Afrikaner attack.
DECEMBER 29-A COMPANY, 3RD BATTALION, THE PARACHUTE REGIMENT, EAST OF
ROSETTA, SOUTH AFRICA
Though the lateafternoon sun seemed to set the far-off slopes of the
Drakensberg Mountains aflame, it left northern Natal’s narrow valleys and treelined hollows cloaked in growing shadow. Ten kilometers south of the
Mooi River, real fires glowed orange in the gathering darkness. Soldiers wearing red berets and green, brown, and tan woodland-pattern camouflage uniforms clustered around the fires sipping scalding hot heavily sugared tea. Men born and reared in London’s crowded East End, the isolated West