I pressed the accelerator more firmly and the Jeep moved forward. I clung one-handed to the steering wheel while poised half-turned towards the mortar.
And then at maximum extent, the electric cable suddenly contracted in on itself, the tension snapping back in a furious recoil that sent it looping high into the air. For a couple of dumbstruck seconds I stared skywards as the cable whipped like a long black lash, its tip hurtling downwards and straight towards the Jeep. Two things registered simultaneously: the cable was still attached to the tail fin; and the tail fin was still attached to the intact and unexploded bomb.
I threw myself into the well of the jeep, expecting a direct hit. Pain exploded inside my head amidst the ear-splitting noise of the mortar going off. The Jeep lurched and stalled as mud and other debris rained down from above. The echoes dinned on for a very long time.
Eventually I clambered out and stood weak-kneed and coughing in the faint fog-like wraiths of smoke still eddying from the blast. The mortar had impacted about thirty yards from the Jeep, as evidenced by a newly created hole in the earth.
Comprehension slowly dawned as the smoke cleared away. I had not, after all, sustained a direct hit by my own bomb on my own head, though it felt like it. All I’d actually done was brain myself on the dashboard.
I got back into the Jeep and restarted the stalled engine. The pain had receded now but the headache was obviously going to continue for quite a time; already there was a lump the size of a duck egg. God knew how I was going to explain it away.
I had another close shave when called upon to deal with a Panzerfaust. This one had been found on a building site within earshot of the clanking of the U-Bahn city railway. The area was strewn with rubble and little remained of the original buildings.
The Panzerfaust appeared to have been fired because it was without its launcher tube. It lay shining dully in the weak sunshine, a small scree of stones threading in frozen tributary past its flanks. The earth was newly turned; the excavator stood near by, silent, engine switched off. Years of experience of Berlin’s building sites had taught the construction crews all about the risks of working in an environment which had once been an urban battlefield.
I moved away from the Panzerfaust as carefully as I’d approached it and told the crew leader to move his people as far away as possible. As soon as everyone was out of range I prepared a small explosive charge and carried it back to the bomb, placing it alongside, but not touching, the warhead. I checked that the area was still clear and lit the fuze, then walked to safety – walked, not ran: you never ran because if you tripped and injured your leg or ankle you’d have no chance of getting back to the fuze to extinguish it nor of crawling out of range.
I stepped gingerly across the rubble. Thirty yards ahead was the remnant of a house wall, about nine feet high and pretty solid-looking. It would be a useful thing to hide behind when the explosion occurred: the blast itself wouldn’t injure at that range but you could get cut by flying debris. I moved around to the other side of the wall, crouched down and waited for the distinctive crump of the explosion – at which point the entire universe seemed to split apart. The blast wave smashed against the wall and sent the entire structure keeling over and down. One minute I was in daylight, the next in violent darkness, sprawled flat under the weight of a mass of brickwork.
The wall should have fragmented as it fell, but disintegration was only partial; it pinned me beneath it while the world shook and shuddered as the thunderclap rolled on. Secondary thuds, bangs and crashes rang out because of all the stuff now coming down from the sky. Like some terrible hail, it pummelled the brickwork above me, smashing and splintering and cannoning off. And then silence.
I managed to struggle out from under the wall, stiff and shaking and wincing at the bruises but otherwise intact. I looked at the brickwork and sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had learned to build things so carefully and so well. Red dust still danced on its surface. Fresh pock-marks made it look as though it had just been machine-gunned.
I stared at the place where the Panzerfaust had been. The hole was very large, very impressive, and totally bewildering. I reached the rim and looked down, shaking my head again. Had one Panzerfaust really done all this?
In amongst the debris and the tendrils of smoke that still drifted upwards, other fragments and shapes began to appear – something twisted over there … something cylindrical and split wide-open over there … All over the place, in fact: the remains of launcher tubes … and other bits of wreckage too: the black splintered shards of mud-stained, blast-scorched packing cases, slivers of timber scattered like needles.
I hadn’t blown up one Panzerfaust. I’d blown up a whole nest of precious munitions hoarded by German soldiers during the battle for Berlin – a cache that had been hidden deep and then left behind, either because those who buried it had been forced to flee or because they had been buried themselves.
The action of time upon the soil, the shifting of earth by the excavator, a variety of factors had all conspired to bring to the surface a solitary Panzerfaust, the tip of an iceberg unseen and unexpected.
That night I encountered Karl, going home from the depot. He was his usual self, happy to be going off to his family. ‘A good day?’ he asked.
‘Sort of.’
‘You learn more today?’
‘I learn a lot today.’ I grinned and waved him on his way. I didn’t feel like going into it just yet. But a lesson had been learned that was not, so far as I could recollect, in any of the textbooks: if you can’t check what’s underneath that which you’re about to blow up, then the steps that you take in connection with disposal must always be bloody great big ones.
Christmas found me far from the noise and the bustle of Berlin, in an ancient landscape of fields and farms and villages. Walsrode in North Germany – my final National Service posting.
354 Ammunition Depot was an ex-Wehrmacht complex and, in 1951, although the majority of the ammunition stored there was British, there was also an appreciable stock of Wehrmacht ammunition. This had been retained since much of it contained highly prized elements such as the tungsten-carbide cores of armour-piercing shells. Far too valuable to dump at sea or destroy by demolition, the ammunition was separated into its component parts and the non-explosive material then salvaged.
Refurbishment and repair work was carried out in a collection of workshops which together comprised the Ammunition Repair Factory. One of them was a hellish place – hot, crowded and noisy, filled from floor to roof with strange devices. It was the place where certain kinds of ammunition, some ex-battlefield and apparently unsalvageable, were repaired and restored. Presiding over the factory’s operations was Captain Scott, a small and dapper white-haired man not renowned for his sense of humour.
Scott was one of the best engineers in the business. Within his workshops, old munitions found new life. Dangling down from overhead tracking, shell casings moved this way and that, dipping into cleansing, neutralizing and phosphate baths, then swinging out through automatic painting booths where mists of spray turned them factory fresh.
Scott was among the last of my National Service teachers. He taught me how to handle sausages and I learnt how to handle German girls. Both were to prove a headache, particularly the sausages.
Nobel’s 808 explosive contains a painfully high percentage of nitroglycerine – painful because nitroglycerine is absorbed through the skin and breathed in from the air. The result is the worst kind of headache imaginable.
I sat in a separate little workshop, a small enclosed space with a chair, a bench and a sausage machine. It was actually more complicated than that but the principle was the same: you fed stuff in at one end and it came out in chunks at the other. The stuff was Nobel’s 808, in 50-pound lumps. I was supposed to turn it into 4-ounce cartridges: the sausages. At the end of this task I felt like death: NG Head, as it’s called, is something which, once encountered, is never forgotten.
The girls proved