“Straight ahead and below, in the middle distance, lay the square, clean pattern of a desert airfield, its boundaries marked by neat lines of wrecked German and Italian fighter planes, its center littered with shattered tanks from some of which the smoke was rising black into the blue sky.
“On my left the desert stretched away covered with thin-skinned vehicles, but strangely empty of human movement. On my right, and between our two tanks and landing ground, the slope and bottom of the escarpment was crawling with the limp dark figures of men digging slit trenches, putting down mines, clustered around anti-tank and field guns or, unbelievably, cooking a meal. On the other side of the depression the opposite escarpment was full of men, less active than those below, and every now and again I saw a flash of gunfire.
“Neither Tom [the other Honey commander] nor I could tell whether any of the men, vehicles or guns were enemy or friendly. The only positive identification we had were the tanks on the airfield … all the burning ones were British Crusaders.”
Bob Crisp, on the airfield at Sidi Rezegh during Operation Crusader.
Crisp would later hide his tank among other, knocked out Stuarts, to scout the enemy position at length. The Germans eventually realised there was an additional tank among the silhouettes that hadn't been there before, and Crisp would have to retreat as they turned every gun they had on him. Other highlights of that extremely short campaign (before he was hospitalised) included going to a lone German panzer, armed with nothing but a revolver, and ordering its crew to surrender (which they did), taking over a command tank whose crew had never fired their gun before, and leading a charge of outgunned and outnumbered light tanks that stymied a massed panzer attack. His admitted lowlight was ordering his gunner to fire on and knock out an unidentified tank silhouetted against the horizon, only to discover later that it was a British tank.
Poll