Another visit with the Rat Patrol

 

The first of six paperback tie-in novels with the 1966-68 TV series, The Rat Patrol (1966) was written by Norman Daniels. Of the six novels, this is arguably the best. (Though The Two-Faced Enemy (1967), by Tom King, would be a close second.)

An Allied attack against Rommel's Africa Korps fails and several thousand Americans are captured.

 

Fortunately, the Rat Patrol has a plan. The four regular members are reinforced with four more men (who might just as well have been issued Star Fleet Red Shirts--their fates are predicatable from the moment they enter the story). The team will then add six trucks to their regular two jeeps and travel around Rommel's flank. The trucks are stuffed full of weapons and ammo--the idea is to spring the 2000 prisoners captured by the Germans, then use them to raise havok behind German lines while another attack is launched.

 

It's an unlikely plot--but that is typical for a Rat Patrol novel. The action moves along non-stop from start to finish and the novel is a lot of fun. Battle scenes include dodging Stuka dive bombers; using bazookas to ambush a pair of tanks; the mass POW break-out and ensuing battle; desperately taking cover behind an upended jeep while the enemy is charging them; and attacking a caravan of "Arabs" who are really disguised Germans deploying a secret weapon. Along the way, the Rat Patrol also has to deal with a beautiful belly dancer who is probably a German informer.

 

It's all over-the-top, but the author keeps the pace fast and has us believing that maybe the Rat Patrol COULD pull all this off. And, heck, maybe some of it is more plausible than non-combat-veteran me thinks. Does anyone know, for instance, if a German Mark III Panzer could be taken out by a .50 caliber machine gun firing armor-piercing rounds? It's an early model tank with much thinner armor than later Panthers and Tigers, so maybe I was wrong in shaking my head a little when I read that scene.

 

The Rat Patrol, like the TV series on which it is based, is a fun romp that concentrates more on continuous action than on realism.