When the smoke finally cleared Phil looked at the scene and then at Sam. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘have you done to my greenhouse?’
It was February 1951 and, though still on the strength of No. 1 Ammunition Inspectorate, I was now in Detmold with CRAOC 11 Armoured Division. I had a clearly defined role as Ammunition Examiner, one of a team responsible for the maintenance of the division’s ammunition.
The duties appeared routine: unit ammunition inspection, demolition of unserviceable stocks and, should such a misfortune ever occur, investigation of ammunition accidents. If one went by the book, a junior NCO was not authorized to blow up anything unless under the control of a commissioned officer ‘where practical’. NCOs were carefully vetted by the more senior members of the Ammunition Inspectorate. If they were found to be competent and responsible they would be given local authorization to carry out demolitions. Here at Detmold, quartered in palatial ex-Wehrmacht barracks, I had that authority. Even so, my performance was carefully monitored; I understood that I was by no means being left on my own. Still, this was my first operational posting. Lance Corporal Gurney, Ammunition Examiner, was out in the field.
The call came in late morning. After fairly mundane days of inspection and report logging, the opportunity to tackle a different kind of challenge was welcome. I readied myself for the work to come: an ammunition accident – a tank.
Two soldiers had begun loading American-manufactured 75mm white phosphorus gun ammunition into the tank. The ammunition consisted of a nose-fuzed shell loosely fixed into a brass cartridge case containing the propellant charge. One man was on the top of the tank, the other inside. The man on the top pulled the shell out of its cardboard storage cylinder and moved to pass it to his companion. The shell fell out of the cartridge case; the soldier tried to catch it but missed. It clanged off the metal surface just inside the hatch and exploded.
The two soldiers were not killed outright. The small H E charge ruptured the shell and spread the white phosphorus over the tank both inside and outside. This ignited on contact with the air, producing clouds of acrid white smoke and a fierce and terrible burning which penetrated the flesh of both men. Death was agonizing, and too slow coming.
Theoretically, the accident could never have happened. All British and American ammunition was designed to withstand the rigours of storage, handling and transportation. Safety procedures were built into every stage of the design, manufacturing and assembly process. It was impossible for the shell to detonate – unless there was something seriously wrong with its PD M57 fuze.
Artillery fuzes vary; in this case, a small brass component called an interrupter should have prevented the fuze from detonating the shell until after the shell had been fired from a gun. With thousands of such shells and fuzes currently in army use, the implications were far-ranging; either the interrupter had malfunctioned or it had never been there at all.
At the accident site the senior AE took me to one side and spelt it out. The outcome of this investigation depended on finding every last bit of the fuze, and that included the interrupter. Hopefully the interrupter would be found trapped inside the remains of the fuze body but, if not, the search had to continue until it could be stated with certainty that it had not been there.
‘It will be like looking for a needle in a very nasty haystack, Gurney. Do your best,’ were the AE’s parting words.
As he left, a small group of soldiers who had been standing within earshot came over and joined me. They began to express their horror at what it must be like inside the tank. I started to listen but an involuntary distancing effect was taking hold, pulling me back, pushing them away. I became remote, isolated, separate from them – separated even from myself. All my thoughts had to be concentrated on the task in hand.
I was surprised when people asked me how I could be so remote, so cold-blooded. It was involuntary, instinctive – all to do with getting on with a job which required a matter-of-fact approach. What I was paid to do – and wanted to do – was to investigate and analyse the facts. No more, no less. But I would know, even as I said it, how cold it sounded, how inadequate.
Later, I was able to understand this mechanism better. It was a kind of invisible switch that was thrown at moments of maximum stress. Though senses were heightened, the switch would act as a control mechanism that filtered out emotions, imagination or memories. Objectivity was essential; anything less and the task would be denied the concentration and professionalism it needed.
When the switch snapped shut the boundary between logic and emotion was defined. Though there would always be things out there on the periphery, they did not affect me. What I saw, smelled or heard related solely to the clues and puzzles and the facts …
I clambered up on to the tank, manoeuvred myself inside and began the painstaking search for a tiny brass component less than ¾-inch long and ¼-inch wide: the needle in the haystack.
The needle was never found. Subsequent breakdown examination of other PD M57 fuzes indicated it was not the search that was at fault: the interrupter was present in the vast majority of fuzes but omitted in a few others. An oversight had occurred in production – a small omission but one with dreadful consequences.
Berlin, April 1951, and I was at Hackenfelde in the British Sector. A former German aircraft factory now housed the RAOC stores, vehicle and ammunition depots, a great sprawling complex of buildings by one of the main roads into the centre of the divided city. The ammunition facility was extensive; it had a repair workshop which would not have disgraced a base ammunition depot. It also had a senior ammunition examiner, WO1 Wallis, a Berlin veteran who used to spend some of his time on munitions clearance work in and around the city.
Six years after the end of the war Berlin was rebuilding itself with impressive skill and at impressive speed. Though the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche would remain as a gaunt and poignant memorial, the Kurfürstendamm was back in business again with its shops, hotels and nightclubs; trams, taxis, buses and cars formed a dense tide of traffic from one end of the thoroughfare to the other. Everywhere there were the sights, sounds and smells of construction and reconstruction, giant cranes and soaring scaffolding, welding and hammering, the deep bass thud of round-the-clock pile-drivers, cement dust that clouded up from wagons and building sites and left its gritty aftertaste hanging on the air. But everywhere, too, there were scars and empty spaces where places and people used to be; street corners defined by great swathes of shuttering that fenced off one flattened area from the next; erratic ranks of buildings whose symmetry was broken by hoardings or tarpaulins or punctuated by wide aching gaps.
The presence of wartime munitions made any renewal project a risky undertaking; the jaws of an excavator could as well turn over shells, bombs and bullets as earth. For six years clearance teams had been harvesting the streets of Berlin. There were times when it seemed the work would still be continuing six years on.
Munitions clearance and disposal was one of Warrant Officer Wallis’s areas of responsibility. Unfortunately he had contracted some form of dermatitis which was exacerbated by physical contact with ammunition or explosives. Although he had acted principally in a supervisory capacity, it was decided that another AE should share the workload.
Accordingly I found myself in one of the echoing hangars of Hackenfelde, meeting for the first time the group of civilian operatives hitherto in Wallis’s charge. They had all been in the German armed forces, all were highly experienced, and all obviously wondering what this young, fresh-faced British army NCO was doing in their midst.
My orders had been unambiguous: as far as these civilians were concerned, these Feuerwerker, I was in charge. As far as I was concerned, however, things were not so clear-cut. I didn’t lack self-confidence – I had been thoroughly trained and I’d been involved with munitions in one way or another since childhood – but these people had racked up the kind of experience I couldn’t hope to match. To simply announce that I was ‘in charge’ would be bloody silly.
The leader of the group regarded me with a frank, unwavering stare. I had to clarify the position for everyone’s benefit. I raised my voice, hoping it would carry above the background noise