Ballantyne had moved his trucks and prisoners away from the hangar and we laid a trail of petrol to the door. One match struck and before we were off the landing ground the hangar was ablaze and the bombs and ammunition exploding. As we moved out of the town a few minutes later I looked back to see the roof collapsing on to the aircraft within. Of the twenty odd Italian prisoners sitting downcast on the edge of the landing ground we kept four of the most intelligent-looking and, for lack of transport space and rations, let the rest go, to the disgust of the French who would happily have cut their throats.
We left the town by the same road. In the ditch lay the postmaster’s bicycle which I picked up and tied to the back of Beech’s truck, thinking it would be useful for riding to the office in Cairo, but though Beech carried it for three weeks it was finally lost to me, burnt with its former owner in the action at Gebel Sherif.
A cold sandstorm was blowing when we buried Hewson and d’Ornano by the roadside just outside the town, with the shivering Italian prisoners standing dejectedly by and wondering, I expect, if graves would soon be dug for them. Their countrymen in Murzuk showed no signs of pursuit and we camped that night at Diem, where the villagers turned out and received ’Abd el Galil with enthusiasm. In the base wireless room in the Citadel in Cairo the faintly-heard dots and dashes of our No. 11 set were giving Bagnold the news, good and bad.
This range—it is a thousand miles from Murzuk to Cairo—taxed the abilities of the signalmen to the uttermost. The No. 11 wireless set which we always used was not designed to cover more than twenty miles reliably, and as we habitually used it over 600, 800 or 1000 our signalmen were in a class apart. The average trained army signalman, on joining L.R.D.G., would be put back to school for a month or two by Tim Heywood (for more than two years our signal officer) before he was good enough to be sent out with a patrol, and in that time had to learn to pick up very weak signals from a background of atmospherics and interference.
He also had to learn L.R.D.G. “procedure.” Procedure is a standardised way of sending signals and, since a good signalman can recognise his distant colleague merely by the way he dots his dashes, in much the same way as we recognise handwriting, the characteristic Army procedure was easy enough to distinguish. There was no harm in using this in places where the enemy would expect it, such as behind the British lines, but an intelligent Italian D.F.2 operator, hearing Army procedure in the direction of Murzuk when the front line was at Tobruk, could reasonably be expected to sit up and take notice. So L.R.D.G. used French commercial procedure, complete with call-signs, indicator-groups, etc.. and thus the watchful Italian, hearing a station calling where no station ought to be, would (or might) assume that he was merely listening to Algiers ordering a dozen of champagne and two barrels of oysters from Tunis.
Murzuk had been the main objective and now we must turn southwards towards the Chad Territory, doing what damage we could en route to the outlying Italian posts and suffering, as we then supposed, the inevitable air attack. The results would depend largely on whether these posts had wireless and could be warned by Murzuk of our coming.
The first post, Traghen, was believed to have none, and this was confirmed by two camel policemen captured while out on patrol on the outskirts. (Two and a half years later I had a friendly reunion with one of them in southern Tripolitania.) We had approached from the west and on the eastern edge of the village the mud fort showed up clearly. So one of the policemen was sent in with a message that they must surrender in ten minutes or be shelled. For ten minutes we waited among the thin palms. A quarter of an hour had almost passed and Sanders, the T patrol gunner, was moving up his Bofors when a confused hum of noise arose on the edge of the village. Was this a garrison of unexpected size massing for a sortie? Then a small crowd left the western gate. Gradually it came nearer across the open ground, an extraordinary procession. With banners flying and drums beating the mudir and his elders were coming out to surrender the village in traditional Fezzan manner. Trailing behind the crowd were a few sheepish-looking Italian carabinieri.
The rest of the great battle of Traghen was a picnic. While ’Abd el Galil held court by the well we went through the fort for arms and papers. I was sorting the contents of the office clipboards when Clayton brought in the Italian N.C.O. to make him open the safe. In it were some thousands of lire and I took enough to buy eggs and dates in the village and left the rest. Clayton went out and the Italian’s eye caught mine. “Pity to leave that for the Government,” it said, “it might come in useful even in a prison camp.”
Traghen had been easy game and after lunch we moved on to Umm el Araneb. The track lay over a bare, stony plain with no cover at all and I wondered if the aircraft would catch us here. It was hot and bumpy in the back of the doctor’s truck where I was travelling to be near ’Abd el Galil who knew the country. Wilson was beside me on a stretcher and his leg was hurting him badly; once he begged us to stop, the only time I heard him complain in his 3500-mile journey which ended in the Scottish General Hospital in Cairo sixteen days later.
At Umm el Araneb things were different. The fort had wireless and the postmaster who had been sent on ahead in one truck to parley with the garrison soon turned back with machine-gun bullets whistling round him. With unarmoured cars and no gun bigger than a 37 mm. Bofors it was useless to hope to take the stone-built fort, well sited above slopes of soft sand, so we turned southwards for Gatrun and Tejerri.
It had been arranged with the French that while we were raiding Murzuk their Camel Corps, Sarazac’s Groupe Nomade de Tibesti, should move up from Tummo and attack Tejerri. On the approach march his Tibbu guides had deliberately led him astray, and during the delay had sent word to warn the Italians, so Sarazac’s night attack failed. The reason for this was that there are many Tibbu living in Tejerri and Gatrun and it was clear that they had no intention of having an invasion on their doorstep. Uninterested, like most Africans, in the futilities of their European overlords, they preferred the status quo.
The patrols had no better luck at Gatrun where the garrison was awake and the Italian Air Force had at last got going, though their bombs fell nowhere near their target. So, on January 14th, Clayton ended his operations and we turned southwards towards Zouar.
As far as Tummo there is a roughly marked track. There we halted for a day with the Groupe Nomade’s reserve section and, during the night, Sarazac returned from Tejerri. At times in L.R.D.G. we used to consider ourselves tough, but the life of those French Méhariste officers made one think again. With nothing more than a roll of bedding to spread on the ground they were away for months on end even from the small comforts of their desert posts. We knew that in a few weeks we would be back in the civilisation of Cairo. But the life of the Groupe Nomade is the life of its camels. Camels must follow the changing grazing and the men must follow them, and Sarazac, having finished his operations, would move at once to the scanty pasturage of the Afafi Hills. Added to this—Pétain and Laval being what they were—these men were outlaws from their own country, lost after years of service in the most desolate area of the Central Sahara, having had no home leave for years and with no prospect of leave for years to come. And, perhaps worst of all, with never a word of news from their families in France. Mail day roused no interest in Tibesti.
At Tummo the doctor’s 15-cwt. broke a half-shaft for the nth time and for lack of spares had to be towed. The Guards did the job and dragged the car 900 miles to Faya, a magnificent piece of driving by Roberts and probably a record feat of salvage over roadless desert. It was a point of honour in L.R.D.G. never to abandon vehicles which could possibly be recovered. (This may seem obvious enough, but after the retreat to ’Alamein enemy prisoners of war reported that about three-quarters of the Axis transport was British, running on the million or so gallons of petrol we had left behind in Tobruk).
As well as salvaging our own cars we made up, in the course of time, a good collection of those which other units had left strewn about the desert. We
had most amusement out of the Commandos’ three-tonner which they abandoned by the trackside on their way to Jaghbub in the spring of 1942. After it had stood there for some weeks Philip Arnold, our most energetic scavenger, collected it and put it into use at Siwa. Some time later, another Commando 3-tonner, going to Solium to fetch supplies for them in company with some L.R.D.G. trucks, was lost in circumstances for which we were partly to blame. As a gesture we gave them back their own unrecognised lorry, but the best of the joke came later when, re-fitting in the Delta, they obtained a replacement from Ordnance and gratefully returned to us their own truck.
To save distance and petrol we left the Bilma track and cut across country from Tummo to Zouar-ké, the mouth of the gorge running up to Zouar. This stretch of the journey led through territory of the Niger Province of French Equatoria which had clung to Vichy when the Chad Province declared for de Gaulle, and when we crossed fresh car tracks there were scornful references from Massu to “le lieutenant de Vichy” who, with a patrol based on Djado, was wandering aimlessly through these barren hills. It was as well, perhaps, that we never met him and so avoided a diplomatic incident. More interesting to me was the finding of an empty iron food container, marked “Riz,” and the date and name of some firm in Marseilles, which had lain there since the French first occupied Tibesti before the Great War.
Three days’ rough travelling over unexplored desert—“terrain chaotique sans ni eau ni pâturage” as the map properly described it—brought us to the magnificent rocks of Dourso which stand sentinel where the western foothills of Tibesti come down to the fringing sands of the Grand Erg de Bilma. In the heat haze to the north was the ten thousand foot cone of Toussidé, the landmark for travellers coming from the west.
I loved this country of castle-like rocks with ril, gazelle and bustard plentiful among the thin acacias and the red-brown gravel underfoot. There are no camp fires in the world like those, smokeless and sweet-smelling, which the desert acacias make. We clambered over the deserted Camel Corps post at Zouar-ké and I found a good neolithic polished axehead for the Museum in Khartoum.
Massu was our generous host at Zouar. He had been wounded in the leg at Murzuk, treated his wound with the end of a lighted cigarette, and said no more of it till days afterwards.
On the 20th Bagnold arrived by air from Faya and the next day he, Wilson and I left for Fort Lamy. Noël was flying us in “le vieux Bloch,” an antiquated bomber which should have been condemned years ago. After each flight Noël refused to take it up again but always did so in the end, and it carried us to Fort Lamy on a hot afternoon, in three and a half hours’ flying at about two hundrejl feet to make the most of the visibility of a mile or less, over a fantastic landscape where barchan dunes gave place to miles of flat acacia scrub, then dom palms, then open forest land with many cattle and then Fort Lamy, orderly rows of grass huts on the banks of the Shari above Lake Chad.
Waiting at Fort Lamy for transport to Cairo and watching every day tens of aircraft passing eastwards on the Takoradi-Khartoum-Cairo route, I realised how great a service our Free French allies had done us in keeping open this vital supply line.
1 I am indebted to Major M. D. D. Crichton-Stuart, M.C., Scots Guards, ior allowing me to read his account of the Murzuk operations which has not yet been published.
2 Radio Direction Finding.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE TAKING OF KUFRA
ON THE WAY south from Zouar to Fort Lamy Bagnold and I stopped for an hour or two at Faya to discuss with Colonel Leclerc the operations against Kufra in which L.R.D.G. was to take part.
I did not see much of d’Ornano before he was killed, but all we heard of him from the French showed that he had been an inspiring leader. After his death Leclerc succeeded him, and it is no insult to d’Ornano’s memory to say that they did not lose by the change.
Modern war does not seem to produce good songs, perhaps because men march so little and it is while marching that songs are born. Nor does it throw up many outstanding leaders, probably because the movement of large mechanised forces is too impersonal an affair. But among the leaders whom the African campaigns did produce Leclerc takes a high place.
He had the career of the normal French regular officer—cadet at St. Cyr; commissioned into the Cavalry; back to St. Cyr as an instructor; a captain at the beginning of the war. In the Battle of France he was wounded and taken prisoner. Before the Germans had moved him to a prison camp he escaped to a neighbouring chateau owned by some of his relations. (The name Leclerc conceals his real name—le Vicomte de Haute Coque.) Walking out of the front door in plain clothes he saw a German soldier riding on his wife’s bicycle and asked the man to let him have it back. The Nazi handed it over and Leclerc rode off towards the coast. Later he reached England and joined de Gaulle who sent him to the Cameroons to organise resistance to the Vichy authorities there. From the Cameroons he passed up to Chad and became military commander of the Province. His own men thought the world of him and we, knowing him less well, had great admiration for his achievements. Youngish, fair, high-coloured, with a deep, rich voice, he was a man to whom the English gave their most insulting and yet most generous compliment, “He might almost be an Englishman.” Now, in January, 1941, he was at Faya planning the advance on Kufra.
To one of Rommel’s generals, von Ravenstein, is ascribed the saying that North Africa is a tactician’s paradise and a quartermaster’s hell. The following table gives an idea of the problem before Leclerc :
“Crow-fly” miles from Kufra.
Kufra, garrison about 400 strong.
95
Bishara Well, filled in.
200
Sarra Well, filled in.
365
Tekro, nearest water to Kufra.
565
Faya, base for expedition.
1015
Fort Lamy, H.Q. Chad Province.
Where, beyond Fort Lamy, his supplies came from I do not know, but Duala in the Cameroons, 700 miles away, seems to be the nearest port on the Atlantic coast.
His native troops were mostly Saras from Fort Archimbault, with French officers and N.C.O.s, all good fighters. The great difficulty was supplies and transport for at that stage in the war the British had little to spare from the Middle East for operations which were of relatively minor importance. Wavell was in the middle of his first advance into Cyrenaica with forces absurdly inferior in numbers to the Italians. So for weeks Leclerc and his transport officers had been combing the scrap-heaps of Chad to equip his force. He took us down to the workshops to show us his portée 75; outside were a row of derelict Lafflys whose wheels had gone to equip the rather less ancient Matfords.
It was agreed that Clayton’s two patrols should be placed under French command for the Kufra operations. They would form the advance guard of the force from Faya and on the way north would reconnoitre ’Uweinat where the Italians had had a post. As events proved, the Italians had added one more to their series of strategical mistakes and evacuated ’Uweinat; a strong raiding force based there and operating against Leclerc’s lines of communication would have been most awkward for him.
The Italians1 certainly knew that an attack on Kufra was coming. Their wireless interception had noted new stations working to the south and their spies also should have warned them, for the French “security” was none too good. For some weeks past in Faya “Vers Koufra” had been the greeting in the streets and the toast in the mess.
On January 26th the L.R.D.G. patrols left Faya, moving northwards in a sandstorm across rough rocky country to Wanyanga Kebir and thence to the frontier post at Tekro.
On January 31st Clayton with T patrol reached Gebel Sherif, sixty miles south of Kufra, the Guards patrol having remained in reserve near Sarra. At half-past three that afternoon he was attacked in a valley in the hills by an Italian motorised patrol.
As far as L.R.D.G. had an “opposite number” in the Saharan Command this was the Italian Auto-Saharan Company. These companies, o
f which the Italians had six or seven, were designed some years previously by Graziani for desert warfare, and in his initial instructions he laid particular stress on the importance of their working in very close co-operation with aircraft. At Gebel Sherif his foresight and training bore fruit.
Clayton had eleven cars and thirty odd men, and the enemy five cars and forty-four men and, to their great advantage, four 20 mm. Breda guns, one of the best weapons the Italian Army has produced. Overhead, with three aircraft directing operations, was Captain Moreschini, one of their Saharan veterans. The enemy entered the valley from the north and opened heavy and accurate fire, and it was not very long before three of our trucks were burning and Beech and two of the Italian prisoners on his truck killed. (I have a copy of an article in an Italian paper2 accusing us of shooting the prisoners, but they died under their own fire.) Beech had gone down fighting. When Mercer Nairne, the Liaison Officer with the French, came to the place ten days later his body was lying by his gun, and it is probable that many of the enemy casualties were to his credit; they had three killed and two wounded by their own admission.
Clayton drew his remaining trucks out of the valley intending to counter-attack from the south, but now Moreschini came in with bombs and machine-gun fire. Clayton was wounded and taken prisoner and the rest of the patrol withdrew towards Sarra.
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