I was Meant to Read THIS Book As Well!

 

When I was a kid, one of my favorite novels was the Rat Patrol Tv tie-in novel published by Whitman as a part of a series of such tie-ins written for kids.

I've known there had been a series of six tie-in novels written for adults, but I never ran across them in used book stores or found them at a reasonable price online. So when I discovered that the fourth of these novels, The Two-Faced Enemy (1967), by David King, was available to check out on the Internet Archives... well, I was once again obviously being called to read it. 

And it was worth reading. The premise is that an Allied-held coastal town in North Africa is being attacked by the Germans. The Rat Patrol is ordered to find its way around the attacking force and raise havoc in its rear. 

This is the sort of thing the Patrol was good at. Learning about a little-known trail from Troy's current girlfriend (a half-Arab, half-French native), they do indeed manage to drive their two jeeps around the Germans to their rear. They soon locate and destroy a fuel depot. The Germans are forced to dispatch a convoy of trucks to anaother fuel depot farther to their rear. The Rat Patrol follows the trucks far enough to get an idea of the direction they are going in, then circle ahead of them, find that fuel dump and blow it up.

Their arch-enemy, Captain Hans Dietrich, begins laying traps for them, but Sgt. Troy's sharp tactical mind keeps the Allied team one step ahead of him. In fact, they manage to briefly capture the long-suffering Captain a couple of times. Dietrich is presented here--as he was in the series--as a Worthy Opponent who is difficult to beat, but he quite definitely gets beaten this time around. 

The action stretches over a couple of days, with Troy finding targets while also snitching enough water and gas from the Germans to keep going. They also capture a high-ranking German officer and gather some very useful intelligence to help out an eventual Allied counter attack.

The action here is consistently exciting and the pacing of the novel is very, very fast. In fact, I stayed up far too late to finish reading it simply because there was never a good stopping point. And, within the context of the less-than-realistic Rat Patrol universe, the action plays out in a logical manner that continues to emphasize Troy's skill at planning or (when necessary) improvising sound tactics.

But where does the title The Two-Faced Enemy come from?  Well, while the real Rat Patrol is blowing up stuff behind German lines, Dietrich has dispatched a fake Rat Patrol into the Allied-held town. They are driving jeeps and are dressed just like the real Patrol, right down to the matchstick that Tully Pettigrew is ubiquitously chewing on. 

By wearing goggles and staying on the run so that no one gets a really good look at them, the fake patrol attacks American targets and even manages to incite some rioting among the Arab population. The American commander is soon in a rage, convinced that the Rat Patrol has turned traitor--determined to hunt them down and destroy them.

I actually like the American commander, a colonel named Wilson. At first, he seems like a martinet and he is too quick to believe the Rat Patrol has indeed turned traitor. But we gradually learn that he has personal courage, tactical skill as a commander and a sense of honor that leads him to immediately acknowledge he was wrong when the German plot is finally uncovered. 

The Two-Faced Enemy shows us once again that mounting machine guns on the back of jeeps and sending them out into the desert to fight Nazis is an idea that never gets old.